“Ghost, I think,” said Alice, taking Charlie’s hand in hers.
“Because of the beret?”
“Yeah.”
“Over-the-top for a pro, right?”
“One would hope.”
The question became: Who was he calling?
Not someone who followed them to the car. At least as far as Charlie or Alice could tell.
Letting Alice ride shotgun-in point of fact, 9mm pistol-Charlie drove away from the village, managing the winding mountain road up to a secluded cream-colored chalet. In the dwindling sunlight, the structure blended in with the towering pines.
With a stern gaze at a field blanketed with a fresh snowfall, Alice said, “Hit teams love snow. With a few thermal-insulated, arctic-terrain ghillie suits and rifle wraps, you can turn a clearing like this into an excellent ambush site.”
“Great.”
“A euro says we’re home free, though.” She cracked a smile.
“I love you” almost slipped from his lips for perhaps the twentieth time that day, but all he said was, “You’re on. And good luck.”
Just tell her, he urged himself. Why the hell not? As soon as they parked.
He pulled onto the mountainside ledge they called the parking deck. From here it was a two-minute walk through woods up to the chalet. While she climbed out of the car, he ratcheted the parking brake and turned off the engine. He heard and felt stuttering thuds from above the trees. A white medevac helicopter, common enough in winter resort areas.
The helicopter slowed to a hover directly overhead, plunging the clearing around the BMW into darkness.
Charlie felt an all-too-familiar icy terror.
“Blast,” Alice said. “I owe you a euro.”
4
Snow and twigs and pine needles swirled in the rotors’ wash. In the general ruckus, it was useless for Charlie to shout to Alice.
Not that there was anything she needed to be told. Letting the takeout containers fall to the snow, she shot a hand toward the Sig Sauer tucked into the rear waistband of her jeans.
Doors on both sides of the helicopter’s cabin slid open. The waning sun showed four men in silhouette, bracing themselves on taut ropes anchored within the helicopter. Gaining a foothold on the craft’s skids, the men let their rope ends drop to the ground, giving the helicopter the appearance of a giant mosquito. In unison, the men jumped, arcing outward and rappelling down, ropes screaming through the carabiners on their harnesses. They wore thick white jumpsuits with red crosses, as a team of paramedics might, along with ski masks. All were built like they’d spent plenty of time in the weight room.
They converged on Alice so quickly that she barely had a chance to raise her gun. On his way down, the first man dealt her a swift, steel-toed boot to the cheekbone, costing her her hold on the Sig. The next two, still attached to their ropes, tackled her, driving her into deep snow on the passenger side of the BMW.
Charlie flung himself onto the car’s hood, intent on recovering Alice’s gun.
She wriggled free, regained her feet, and spun two hundred degrees, gaining force and leverage and delivering a kick to the nearest jaw. The man sagged, dangling from his rope.
For better or for worse, Alice Rutherford’s nature was to fight. She would have taken on ten such men. She had her hands full with two now, one corralling her from behind, the other spraying her in the face with a tiny aerosol can. She went limp, falling into the first man’s arms.
As Charlie slid off the passenger side of the BMW’s hood, he caught sight of a pistol capped by a silencer, pointed at him by the fourth man, who shouted something. The chop of the rotors made it impossible to hear what. Charlie guessed, “Freeze!”
And what choice did he have?
Alice and the first three men-including the one she’d KO’d-rose into the air, as if levitating. Arms extended from the helicopter’s cabin, hauling them in. The door snapped shut and the ship appeared to fall upward into the sky.
Like that, she was gone, with only a faint whir as evidence that the helicopter had been present. And then it was just the breeze whispering through the bare branches.
When Charlie looked down, the remaining man was unclicking his harness. “Back up, against the car,” he said, waving his gun. His accent was unmistakably American. “Put your hands where I can see ’em.”
Charlie took two steps and hit the bumper.
“Now shrug off your jacket, one sleeve at a time, then toss it toward me.” The gunman’s rasp had a touch of cowboy. He looked the part too, with the build and bearing of a broncobuster. And when he pulled up his mask-revealing a combative leer, a pointed chin, and long blond locks-anyone would have been reminded of Jesse James.
Charlie shook at his parka until it fell to the ground. Having submitted to the same inspection before, he wasn’t surprised when Jesse James advanced, patted him down-everywhere-and took his car keys.
“I’m guessing this isn’t a carjacking,” Charlie said.
“It’s a rendition.”
“A rendition of what?”
“In layman’s terms, a kidnapping.”
“You’ve kidnapped Wendy? Why?” Charlie feigned the shock of an ignorant vacationer, less of a stretch than he would have liked.
“It’d be a tragedy if we’ve kidnapped someone named Wendy,” said the cowboy. “See, we’re after Alice Ann Rutherford.”
“Alice Ann Rutherford?” Charlie repeated as if bewildered.
“If it helps, she was born in New Britain, Connecticut, on October 17, 1980, she’s currently absent without leave from the National Security Agency, and she lives with you.”
An icy gust slashed through Charlie’s sweater, stinging his chest. He resisted the urge to wrap his arms around himself, afraid the movement might spur the kidnapper to precipitous use of his trigger. “Okay, okay. So what do you want?”
“An ADM. You know what that is, right?”
Charlie knew atomic demolition munitions only too well. They were portable Soviet-made bombs with a ten-kiloton yield. Under the auspices of the CIA, his father had founded the Cavalry with the objective of putting malfunctioning ADMs into the hands of terrorists who believed they were purchasing working weapons of mass destruction. The ultra-classified operation had succeeded for the better part of three decades. When Drummond fell prey to Alzheimer’s, his own men decided it best to sacrifice him in order to maintain the secret and safeguard the identities of their operatives. Charlie had learned the secret just two weeks ago, while trying to figure out why assassins were preventing him from putting his father in a nursing home. Before that, he’d known the old man only by his cover as a stern and straitlaced appliance salesman.
“You can’t exactly get ADMs on eBay,” Charlie said.
Jesse James grinned. “So why don’t you ask your dad?”
Charlie eyed his shoe tops. “There’s a problem with that.”
“Isn’t your father Drummond Clark, Central Intelligence Agency operations officer, born in New York, New York, on July 14, 1945?”
“He was. He passed away twelve days ago.”
5
If Charlie’s father-who in fact was still alive-held to form this evening, he had heard the helicopter and momentarily would appear, as if out of thin air, with a gun to Jesse James’s head. Alzheimer’s had acted like a wrecking ball on Drummond Clark’s memory retrieval mechanism and had ravaged his ability to process the present. As with most people suffering from the disease, he still experienced random episodes of lucidity, however. And danger tended to jolt him into clarity. So Charlie’s plan was simply to buy time.
“Why don’t we sit in the car, where it’s not freezing?” Jesse James pointed at the passenger seat with his gun, making the question rhetorical.
As soon as they were inside, he turned on the ignition, sending hot air from the vents and a delicate piano concerto from the speakers. The BMW was certainly more pleasant than the bitter outdoors, but it would complicate Drummond’s assault.
If he were to appear out of thin air now, Jesse James could just drive away. And the car’s tinted glass might veil Charlie’s execution.
“I’m sure you’d like Interpol to believe your father’s dead, but I don’t,” the cowboy said, fishing a satellite phone from inside his jumpsuit. “Not unless you can convince me that this is his twin brother.”
He punched a few keys. The phone’s display filled with a shaky, greenish-gray video of the chalet taken through one of the leaded glass windows. Drummond sat at the dining table, reading a newspaper.
“I can have the mosquito drone zoom in on the newspaper’s date if you have any doubt this is live feed, but it might take me a while,” Jesse James said.
Charlie felt a measure of relief. “So you actually do just want an ADM?”
“Yeah. Remember the to-do with the helicopter and Alice?”
Charlie could share the secret that the ADMs were duds, but Jesse James might not believe it. And even if he did, the consequences would be grave. If Cavalry customers got wind of the fact that their vaunted arsenals couldn’t blow up a balloon, the identities of countless American operatives and their foreign agents would be compromised. In any event, it was doubtful that Jesse James’s principals would just let Alice walk away.
“What makes you think my father can get an ADM?” Charlie asked.
“A few months ago he delivered one to Nick Fielding, an illegal arms dealer, in Martinique. A couple of weeks ago, my employers met with Fielding there. They negotiated the purchase of the ADM, pending an inspection at its hiding place, but the trip to the hiding place never happened because Fielding got himself killed in New York City the same night. Fortunately, your dad knows where the thing’s hidden. My employers need it, along with a working detonation code, no later than the thirteenth of January, which is four days from today.”
Jesse James, whoever he was, had excellent intelligence, except for the fact that Nick Fielding had been a Cavalry man who trafficked fake ADMs. “All things considered, I’d happily make the trade,” Charlie said. “My father probably did know where the bomb is hidden.”
The cowboy’s eyes narrowed. “Did?”
“Once, yeah. That’s the rub. You need to understand that when he finishes brushing his teeth at night, he has to hunt for the toothpaste cap, even though it’s always right beside the soap dish.”
Jesse James scoffed. “I do shit like that too.”
“But he has Alzheimer’s.”
“Alzheimer’s?”
“Midstage. We’re here because there’s a clinic with an experimental treatment-”
The cowboy’s groan cut Charlie off. “The word I got was you’d trot out some spiel like this. Let’s save ourselves some time, okay? Just last week, on at least three separate occasions, your daddy shut out the New York Yankees of death squads. The reason I’m talking to you is word had it that if I went to talk to him, it’d probably be the last conversation I ever had.”
“He has his moments.”
“Well, if you want Miss Alice to keep on being alive four days from now, he better have one more of those moments.” Jesse James tapped the steering wheel. “I’ll leave your Beemer in the Hauptstrasse train station parking lot, keys under your seat. Meet me outside the general aviation terminal at the Zweisimmen airport at thirteen hundred tomorrow. I’ll have a jet waiting to take us to the ADM. I know a professional like your father wouldn’t be stupid enough to try any tricks, like telling anyone about this, but you might. And if you do, your sweetheart gets your name written across her face with a box cutter.”
6
Although enveloped by toasty air, Charlie felt no comfort as he stepped into the chalet’s spacious living room. Usually on entry he savored the blond wooden beams and old-fashioned Alpine-style furniture. Before coming to Gstaad, he’d never given a thought to upholstery-probably never even uttered the word upholstery. But he’d been taken by the sofa and chairs here, embroidered with white dots that matched those on the lace curtains, which in turn afforded privacy without sacrificing a view of the skyrocketing mountains. Now he felt as if an avalanche were carrying the chalet away.
Drummond still sat at the farmhouse dining table. Of average height and weight, he’d always fostered a nondescript appearance, which served him well as a professional cipher. He was a young sixty-four, though two weeks ago it had been easy to see the senior citizen version of him waiting around the corner: His white hair had begun to thin, gravity was winning the battle with his spine, and wrinkles and spots massed as if readying to invade his taut skin’s otherwise healthy glow. In Gstaad, those trends had seemed to reverse somewhat. He sat ruler-straight now. He exuded vitality. His hair even seemed a healthier shade of white.
It was too soon into the course of the treatment to detect an effect on his mind, but the medication could have been responsible for his general improvement. More likely, the upturn resulted from their strenuous hikes and the invigorating Alpine air. Or possibly Drummond benefited from the comforts of the chalet: When forced to go on the lam together, the previously estranged father and son managed not only to get along, against odds no bettor in his right mind would have accepted, but they also actually learned from each other, creating a force that exceeded the sum of its parts. As a result, they had survived. Once in Gstaad, Charlie savored the nascent affection, a nice change from his father’s serial sermon about wasting one’s life at the track.
“Where’s Alice?” Drummond asked.
Sliding one of the heavy pine chairs out from the table, Charlie sat across from him. “She was kidnapped,” he said. It came out matter-of-factly; if he weren’t so numb, he might have shrieked it.
“Kidnapped! Are you certain?”
“I guess, technically, she was rendered. Or renditioned.”
“What happened?”
Charlie filled him in.
“Well, that certainly is a problem.” Making a steeple out of his fingers, Drummond gazed out at the dark shapes of the mountains, seemingly contemplating a solution. After a few moments, he asked, with uncharacteristic alarm, “What are we going to do about dinner?”
7
Charlie spent most of the night gazing at the empty space on the other side of the mattress. The closest he found to a diversion was watching the digits change on the clock radio.
At 5:14 Drummond banged on the door.
“You okay?” Charlie asked.
“I woke up this morning feeling as well as I have in quite some time. And I’m almost certain that Alice was kidnapped.”
“Well … yeah.” Last night Charlie had detailed the rendition five or six times in hopes of sparking Drummond’s memory of the ADM. To no avail.
Drummond made a beeline for the clock radio, snapping on Alpine folk music and turning up the volume. “I mean it was a straight kidnapping, as in an operation offering the safe return of the captive in exchange for something.”
That sounded pretty lucid. Charlie strained to hear over the accordions.
Seeing Charlie look at the radio, Drummond said, “In case of eavesdroppers. And in case of eavesdroppers who might have been able to filter out the music, I raised the heat-I hope you’re not uncomfortable.”
Noting the hot air whining through the registers, Charlie shook his head. “Enough about me. Do you remember all the plot points: Jesse James from the helicopter? Hidden ADM?”
Drummond sat at the foot of the bed. His eyes glowed with much more than just the moonlight spraying through the gap in the drapes.
Hallelujah, thought Charlie. Lucidity.
“If he were smart, what Jesse James told you is-”
“Lies.” Charlie had already concluded as much. “No, fifty percent lies, but you wouldn’t have any way of knowing which was which. I just need to catch up on a few things.”
“Shoot.”
“Had Alice been in touch with anyone?”
“Yes.” During the night, this had become Charlie’s leading theory as to the genesis of the rendition. “
The other day she took, like, eighty-seven trains and buses to Zurich, went to a public library, and sent one of those supposedly untraceable Hushmails to the personal account of an NSA inspector general she trusts.”
“What did she write?”
“Basically, that she wasn’t dead, and that your old Cavalry pals had framed us for Hattemer’s murder in order to get the finding.” A presidential finding had waived Executive Orders 11905 and 12333 banning assassinations by U.S. government organizations, thereby enabling the Cavalry to off the Clarks with impunity. “She was hoping to open a dialogue, maybe get us off the Whack-on-Sight list. She asked the guy to reply using Hushmail.”
Drummond looked at the ceiling, pondering the matter.
Or so Charlie hoped. Drummond’s episodes of lucidity lasted forty minutes on average, but sometimes they were as brief as two minutes.
“I think the rendition is coincidence,” Drummond said.
“So you believe in coincidences too?”
“There are coincidences and there are unbelievable coincidences. It’s possible that someone ‘made’ her while she was in Zurich or en route, but given the extensive planning and practice a helicopter rendition of this nature requires, it seems more likely that the kidnappers were already well into preproduction. Also it’s possible that Alice orchestrated the kidnapping herself. She could sell the ADM for a king’s ransom-she doesn’t know it’s a fake, right?”
Charlie waved his dismissal. “I kept the secret from her not because I don’t trust her, but because there was no reason to burden her with it.”
“Jesse James leveraged your feelings for her,” Drummond said. “How could he or whoever he’s working for have known that you’d developed feelings for her?”
“Using a mosquito drone …” Charlie left it at that, averse to telling his sometime-puritanical father exactly what the miniature camera might have recorded.
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