White Death: An Alex Hawke Novella

by Ted Bell

  He had been climbing downward for about a half hour when he crested a broad slab of ice. He saw something that caused him to think he really was losing his mind. He blinked his eyes, sure he was still delusional from the panic attack and the fall. Because what he saw atop a mound of snow a few feet below his feet defied all logic.

  It was a head. Not a skull but a decapitated human head. With a pair of horn-rimmed sunglasses buried in the snow a few feet away.

  The head was perched almost playfully atop a large snowdrift. There was a thin crust of ice on the head’s face. Christian knelt down on one knee and studied his find more carefully. He clawed some crusty ice away, trying to free the head from the ice beneath the jaw. But it had frozen. The dead man’s head was cemented in place.

  He could see it was a male; the features were still discernible. Caucasian. The nose misshapen from a fall. Dark blond hair matted with dark black blood. Not an old guy, maybe early forties. The mouth, too, was frozen, opened in a permanent rictus of scream. The teeth were all shattered or missing. The blue eyes had also locked up in the open position.

  The most bizarre thing of all? There was a total absence of tracks in the snow around the head. No signs of foul play, nor any footprints anywhere near the vicinity. A freak snowfall?

  Yet now there was this human head, sitting on the snow. And a pair of eyeglasses.

  Impossible.

  But that was exactly what he saw.

  The following is the missing persons report Lieutenant Hartz filed with Swiss Army Military Police at Zurich HQ immediately upon his return from his failed rescue attempt in the southern Alps:

  Male, Caucasian, approximately forty years of age, close-cropped blond hair, light blue eyes, two-inch scar on the left cheek. Teeth broken or missing. Massive contusion inside the hairline at the right temple. Left ear missing. No further evidence or descriptions possible at this time.

  (Signed) Lieutenant Christian Hartz 10th Mountain Div., Swiss Army

  CHAPTER FOUR

  London

  “God how I hate these bloody things,” Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve said. He was struggling to keep both his putter and his spindly golf umbrella under control in an unexpected blizzard. Nearly white-out conditions were not ideal for his golf score.

  Lord Alexander Hawke, who much preferred the name Alex, smiled at his old golf partner and even older friend, a currently snow-coated former Scotland Yard chief inspector. “Would you mind putting, Constable? I mean, while we’re still young?”

  “I can’t bloody see the bloody hole, can I?” Congreve shouted with a trace of frustration.

  “So what? You can’t get it in even when you can see the bloody hole. So, putt!”

  It was December, a Saturday. A day on which no sane man in England would venture out onto a golf course. But Ambrose Congreve and Alex Hawke made no claims regarding their sanity. Only their passion for the grand old game of golf dictated their actions.

  A coating of light snow and frost had painted the trees and the fairways a fairy-tale white. The sudden sight of nasty weather had made one of them inexplicably cheery. And the other rather not.

  The two sportsmen were on the treacherous fifth green at Hawke’s beloved Sunningdale Golf Club just north of London—a difficult par four, and the bane of Inspector Congreve’s existence, most especially on this particularly insalubrious Saturday morning.

  Congreve, who carried his weight around his circumference, was attempting to squat down and line up his putt, somewhat in the manner of Tiger Woods. The new Tiger, not the old Tiger. Suffice it to say, it was not a pretty sight.

  And that sudden wind had come, howling up and down the wide fairway. And the icy particles. And the blinding snow. Hawke, who’d always nursed a secret love of foul weather, was stoic, braving the gale-force winds, standing rooted to the snowy green, his frozen putter in his hand and a smile frozen on his face. He was watching Ambrose struggle with his wild umbrella, trying to keep his footing on the treacherous ice. “Perhaps the hurricane will simply loft you and your errant brolly up and away, into the heavens, just like Mary Poppins in the Disney film of the same name,” he said.

  Ambrose shouted above the wind, “And hopefully I’ll be dropped off somewhere near the bloody clubhouse! Hopefully in the middle of the men’s grill room. There’s a crackling fire blazing in the hearth right now, you know, Alex. Warmth, whisky, and not a wife in sight.”

  “Shut up and putt, Ambrose.”

  “Then get out of the way, will you, you’re standing directly in my line!” Congreve cried above the wind, waving putter and umbrella around in a rage of frustration.

  Hawke said, “How am I supposed to know where your line is when it’s covered with snow!”

  They were the only twosome either brave enough, or foolish enough, to be out on the links this frightfully wintry morning. Fiendishly icy winds and wet snow were terrorizing the few souls who’d not retreated to the grill.

  Congreve’s putt was well wide of the mark. It slid thirty feet past the cup, gathered speed on a sheet of black ice, narrowly missed a frozen water hazard, then trickled down into the snow-filled sand trap. He would now be hitting an eight.

  “May I?” Hawke said, standing over his nearly invisible ball, which lay three. He was looking at Congreve deferentially, but with just a tinge of schadenfreude.

  “Just putt.”

  Lord Hawke promptly sank a smashing fifteen-footer, even though he couldn’t see it disappear into a slight depression that had marked the cup’s location.

  “Four! That’s a par!” Hawke said, pumping his fist in the air as he bent down to pluck his ball from the hole.

  “Par?” Ambrose snorted. “Surely you did not say the par word, Alex. Hardly a par, my dear boy. Bogie or double bogie at the very best.”

  Hawke was indignant. “Count them. Drive into the middle of the fairway, lying one. No mulligan. Two into the fairway trap. Three, chipped onto the green. Four, sank the putt. Par.”

  “Not four, Alex, not even close. Let me think about it. Six. Yes. Take at least a six on the card while I consider the sequence of salient events for a moment.”

  Hawke could hear the wheels spinning as Congreve cogitated beneath his umbrella. He could never fathom how the world-famous criminalist could work his brain so fast and deep that no other man in the country could touch him.

  Whenever anyone inquired about the contents of his cranium, the man would lift his great head and say, “It’s not my brain at all, it’s the lower nerve center. That’s the base of operations.”

  Whatever that meant.

  “I was right,” the rotund detective said. “Bogie. Take a five. Even though it was arguably a six or seven.”

  “I certainly will not take a five, I am not about to let you . . . hold on a tick. My mobile’s humming.”

  “You can’t take a call on the course, Alex. There’s a loo up on top of that hill. Go up there before you get us thrown off this hallowed ground!” Hawke ascended the hill.

  “What took you so long? I’m bloody freezing,” Ambrose said when Hawke came trudging back down through knee-deep snow.

  “The telephone call, you mean? Oh, Sir David calling from the office, on a secure line. You won’t like it one bit.”

  “Try me.”

  “Another last-minute summons from my esteemed employer at MI6. Of course, while we’re out enjoying a fine Saturday morning on the links, he’s helming the great ship of state from his desk by the Thames, hell-bent on making the rest of us poor serfs feel guilty.”

  “I don’t feel guilty in the slightest. And I would opine that the chief of British Secret Services takes great delight in toying with you, Alex. Playing you like his star fiddle.”

  “Not even remotely true.”

  “What’s the old man on about this time?”

  “Something about a murder
in Zurich. Impacts state security, that’s all. Very hush-hush about the whole affair, as befits his station. Wants us, yes, you too, to meet him for cocktails in London at his club, Boodle’s, at five.”

  “Fine. Wonderful. Why in God’s name do I have to come? He’s your boss, not mine, thank heavens. I’ve other things to do, frankly. My wife expects me home at two to help her can peaches.”

  “Sad, no? Sir David said he might well be in need of that monumental brain and those legendary detective skills before whatever nasty business that awaits us is over. What it’s really all about, he neglected to say—what time is it? We’d better get on the road. As you know, he abhors tardiness.”

  They headed for the car park and Alex’s steel-grey 1957 Bentley Continental. A mammoth beast he called “the Locomotive.”

  “If we’re late,” Congreve said, “just use that lethal smile of yours to charm the birds out of his trees.”

  “Tried it many times. His birds have all flown the coop.”

  Lord Hawke had charm to spare. He stood well north of six feet. He had a full head of unruly black hair and crystalline blue eyes that some London gossip queen had once referred to in print as “pools of frozen arctic rain.” People of every stripe and gender found him attractive. As was often said of him, “Men wanted to stand him a drink, while women much preferred him horizontal.”

  For a gentleman in his midthirties, he was in splendid shape. His nearby country estate, five miles from the Sunningdale links, was called Hawkesmoor. He had a stable of race cars, a boxing ring where he sparred, a shooting range where he shot, and a hall where he fenced. He swam six miles in open ocean whenever he got the chance and did laps in the indoor pool at home when he did not.

  But it was his easygoing manner, matched with fierce determination, a keen moral sense, and courage under fire that made him the most valued and successful counterterror officer in the entire British Secret Service.

  Many had, over the years, underestimated Alex Hawke, this gentleman spy, at their peril, and many had paid full measure for that mistake. He was, when all was said and done, a dashing and aristocratic English nobleman, of noble principles, who could kill you using only one of his bare hands.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Ah, there you are, Sir David!” Hawke said, feigning overwhelming joy at the sight of the man he worked for, a stern-looking gentleman in a blue worsted suit who awaited them on a curving red leather banquette. He was in his usual spot, nursing a light whisky soda in a quiet corner of the Men’s Grille at the London gentlemen’s club in St. James known as Boodle’s.

  “Oh, hullo. You look bloody awful,” C said to Hawke, inspecting him up and down.

  “We try.”

  “You should never again be seen in public wearing those tartan golfing slacks again. Tartan! Painful. It reflects badly upon me and on the entire Secret Service.”

  “With all due respect, I’d intended to spend the day at the golf course, not in a London gentlemen’s club, sir.”

  Trulove waved the excuse away.

  “Time is wasting,” he said. “Sit down, both of you, and have a drink. You both look like you could use one. A pair of drowned rats, soaked to the skin!”

  “Rats?” Congreve whispered out of the corner of his mouth, certain he’d misunderstood the word.

  “What can I offer you, Inspector Congreve?” C said. “I caught you looking rather longingly at the barman over there.”

  “Oh. Was I really?”

  “Name your poison, Chief Inspector.”

  “Macallan’s single malt, if you have it, if not, Dewar’s, please,” Ambrose smiled. “It never varies, you know. Believe me, I speak from vast experience.”

  “And for you, Alex?”

  “Rum, please. A tot of Gosling’s Black Seal if you don’t mind. The 151 proof.”

  Sir David repeated their requests to the club steward and added a glass of Margaux for himself. When the drinks were in hand, he raised his glass and said, “Slange var! A Gaelic toast meaning ‘Get it to the hole!’ ”

  “Slange var!” his guests said, raising their glasses and sipping.

  C crossed his legs and said, “Despite your appalling taste in haberdashery, you are looking fit, Alex. Two weeks at your Teakettle Cottage in Bermuda seems to have agreed with you.”

  “Thank you, sir. But despite my much younger age and condition, I still can’t beat this wily sportsman over here at the game of golf.”

  Trulove chuckled and gazed up at a grand painting of Admiral Lord Nelson’s Victory at Trafalgar.

  “Now, Alex, let me get to the reason I called you both down to London on a Saturday. There’s been a bizarre murder in Zurich, according to our chief of station there. A crime that is of great interest, not only to MI6, as you’ll soon understand, but to the Crown as well. Spent much time in Switzerland, have you?”

  Hawke thought about it. “Well. Let me see. Went to school there briefly, Le Rosey, before transferring to Dartmouth Naval College, sir. Later on, the odd business trips to Zurich, ski holidays in St. Moritz or Gstaad, that sort of thing. Done a bit of mountain climbing there in my younger days, as you may remember. The tragedy on Der Nadel was the beginning of the end of all that foolishness.”

  “Yes, a tragic event, Alex, tragic. But you did have another go, correct? One more? You almost conquered that mountain a few years ago, as I recall. That’s quite a conquest for a semiprofessional climber coming out of retirement.”

  “Thank you, sir. I won’t claim it wasn’t a bit daunting in the doing. A bit creaky for that sort of thing now. Oh, and I fell.”

  “Ambrose? How about you?”

  “Mountain climbing? Me? Good Lord, no!”

  “He doesn’t even ski,” Hawke put in, quite unnecessarily.

  “I refer only to Switzerland, Chief Inspector. Spent much time there?”

  “Ah. Yes, a good bit, actually. The usual thing. Mostly business in Zurich, but in Geneva and Bern as well. You know the drill, sir. Intricate financial cases involving British clients and old Swiss banks, neither of whom want their names in the papers. Private family matters . . . the odd murder. Investigated a crime involving a lesser-known British royal recently. Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle, one of Her Majesty’s lesser nephews. A kidnapping, just last year. A horse, as a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Horse?” Trulove said. “Extraordinary!”

  “Long story, sir.”

  “Well. At least you’ve both been there enough to know your way around. Good contacts, I would say. Knowledge of the history and customs and so on.”

  “We’re going to Switzerland, I take it,” Congreve said.

  “You are indeed. Something has come up.”

  Hawke and Ambrose eyed each other across the table. That phrase “Something has come up!” was C-speak for “the poop has hit the poopdeck again.”

  “Pray tell, Sir David,” Congreve said. “What exactly has come up?”

  “Well. It won’t come as any great surprise for you to learn that the case involves financial misdeeds as well as a grisly murder. The large private bank accounts of a select group in the House of Lords have recently been subjected to very sophisticate hacking attacks. There were substantial losses prior to discovery of the incursion. Not to mention some losses in a number of accounts belonging to Her Royal Highness, the Queen herself.”

  “The Queen?”

  “Yes, the Queen. One of Her Majesty’s many charitable accounts in Zurich has been systematically looted over the last six months into near nonexistence. That discovery triggered the investigation. And that, we think, led to the murder of a very prominent Swiss banker.

  “And that, gentlemen, is why I asked you here. I hesitate to add that one of the British accounts burgled was held by you, Alex. Your account with Credit Suisse was recently attacked. However, in the main, your cybersecurity bulwarks held
fast, Lord Hawke.”

  “Attacks on my accounts? Really? Hard to believe. I’ve not heard a word about it from my bankers there.”

  “Nor will you, except from me. The ongoing criminal investigations are taking place under a blanket of total security so as not to alert the hackers. As of yet, our MI6 lads in Zurich have been unable to trace these attempts back to the primary source. But MI6 Cyber Warfare here in London has been able to verify the origin of one of these attacks as being China. And, more recently, our Russian friends.”

  “Christ,” Hawke said, “here we go again. I’ve gotten to the point with Putin and the Russians that I much prefer the Chinese.”

  “I believe we all have, Alex. Behold Putin unchained.”

  “Hmm. Vlad the Impaler. How did you learn of all this financial skullduggery, sir?” Congreve asked.

  “Sheer luck. One of our Zurich station’s MI6’s techies had his home laptop freeze up while looking at something strange going on. Very strange, indeed. He was simply running a cursory check on the Swiss government’s Cybertech Division’s UK accounts monitoring that morning when something very disturbing popped up. That was a week ago.

  “Our man had somehow tapped into a peek inside the books of all the major Swiss banks with British accounts. He suddenly saw things he’d never seen before. Wild swings in overnight balances. He happened on it while at home, rebuilding his MacBook Air, if you can imagine. He immediately got on to our MI6 station chief in Zurich to alert him to what was going on. And thus the call I received.”

  “Schultz, was it?”

  “Yes. Herr Fritz Schultz. Called ‘Blinky’ by many of his MI6 colleagues. Something or other to do with his eyes. He called me late last night. His message was that a prominent banker named Leo Hermann had been found dead by a Swiss Army alpinist near the base of a mountain just south of Zurich. Hermann handled Her Majesty’s private accounts at Credit Suisse. Top man. We need to run this thing to ground immediately lest it go any further. And shut down whoever was behind not only the hacking but this very odd murder as well.”