At the booth, the two men sat down on plastic chairs, adjusting their ear mufflers, their padded jackets.
“The woman in that Renault was so fat, she reminded me of your wife,” one said to the other in French. He spoke loudly so he could be heard over the wind and through the other’s ear mufflers.
The other scowled in mock outrage. “My wife, or your mother?”
It was the kind of japery, however monotonous and uninventive, that sufficed to fill the long days of boredom. Now the killer from Marseilles emerged from the customhouse and looked around. Follow the eyes.
Ambler traced his line of sight: the man was peering at a rocky outcropping on the far side of the road. Another member of the unit was surely stationed there. There had to be a third member, too. One dispatched as an observer, to be a participant only in extremis.
The specialist walked over to the lamppost and then to the lower parking lot, where he disappeared behind a low brick structure—the kind of place where maintenance equipment was stored. Was he conferring with someone?
There was no time to analyze the options; Ambler had to act. The growing daylight would only help his enemies. We have come this far by faith. He could get to the gray rocky outcropping along a diagonal, zigzagging path. Danger was often lessened by proximity. Now he scuttled from the spruce-tree copse to a distance several hundred yards up the road and stowed his bag under another copse, covering it with a mound of snow. He then clambered onto a narrow ridge, which the wind had denuded of snow. With long strides, he loped along the upward-sloping ridge. Then he grabbed hold of a bough from a stunted tree to pull himself up to a higher level and thus to another ridge that would serve him as a footpath. With a loud snap, the tree bough broke under his weight, and Ambler tumbled backward, stopping himself from sliding farther downward with his outstretched arms. He tried to scramble to his feet, but plush layers of fresh, fluffy snow defeated the grooves and cleats of his soles. Simply finding traction was a struggle. With one wrong footfall, he knew, he could easily tumble fifty feet down the hill, even farther. He used the stunted trees like a balustrade, leaped over rocks, forced his legs to pump harder when a frictionless snowdrift threatened his stride. He would not be shot here like a rabbit in the countryside. He remembered Laurel’s heartfelt parting words, and they gave him strength. Take care of yourself, she had said. For me.
Caleb Norris never had troubled dreams; under pressure he seemed to sleep more deeply and peacefully, if anything. An hour before the plane made its landing at Zurich, he awoke and made his way to the airplane lavatory, where he splashed water on his face and brushed his teeth. When he disembarked and made his way into the bright expanses of the airport, he looked no more rumpled than he did on any other day.
Ironically, his weapon actually made luggage retrieval faster than it would have been otherwise. He reported to a special Swiss Air office that handled just such matters and marveled, not for the first time, at Swiss efficiency. He affixed his signature to two sheets and was given both his firearm and his overnight bag. A few other government types had also assembled in the office: a few Secret Service types, someone he vaguely recognized from joint conferences with FBI counterterrorism. From behind, he recognized a man—dressed in a dark gray striped suit but with a distinctive mop of hair dyed a shade that verged, implausibly, on orange. The man turned around and smiled at Norris, too cool to acknowledge surprise. Stanley Grafton was his name, and he was a member of the National Security Council. Norris remembered him from various security briefings he’d attended at the White House. Grafton was a better listener than most of the Council members, though Norris suspected he also had more to say.
“Caleb,” Grafton said, extending a hand. “I didn’t see your name on the agenda.”
“And I didn’t see yours,” Norris replied smoothly.
“Last-minute substitution,” Grafton said. “Ora Suleiman broke something.” Suleiman was the current chairman of the Council and had a weakness for ponderous statements, as if she were always imagining herself as a character in a made-for-TV “historical reenactment.”
“Couldn’t be her funny bone. She hasn’t got one of those.”
Grafton smiled involuntarily. “So, anyway, they wheeled out the understudy.”
“Same here,” Norris said. “Last-minute cancellations, last-minute substitutions. What can you do? We’ve all come to mouth sonorous nothings.”
“It’s what we do best, right?” Laughter crinkled Grafton’s eyes. “Hey, you want to hitch a ride with me?”
“Sure. You got a limo?”
The other man emitted a dismissive puff. “A copter, baby. A whirlybird. I’m NSC, we gotta travel in style.”
“Glad to see our tax dollars at work,” Norris jested. “Lead the way, Stan.” He hefted his briefcase as he followed the NSC man. It actually felt better balanced with the long-barreled 9mm pistol back inside it.
“Got to hand it to you, Cal. For someone who’s just stepped off a plane, you look fresh as a daisy. Or, anyway, as fresh as you ever look.”
“Hey, like the poet says, I got miles to go before I sleep.” Norris shrugged. “Not to mention promises to keep.”
When Ambler reached a perch that gave him a good view of the checkpoint, he took a minute to peer through snowy branches and take inventory. The specialist from Marseilles had stationed himself in the middle of the road, scanning the road for traffic, the adjacent terrain for any sign of activity. The guards in the booth were still looking bored, their fellow officers in the customhouse less so; since the camion was being serviced, its driver was still around to regale them with stories.
The way down was easier than the way up. Where the terrain was too steep, he would slide or roll, controlling the rate of speed with his hands and feet but enlisting gravity to propel his descent. Finally, he returned to the low copse of spruce trees.
From a position only a few yards away he heard a man’s low voice. “This is Beta Lambda Epsilon. Have you located the subject?” He was an American, spoke with a Texan accent. “Because, for Chrissakes, I didn’t get out of bed to freeze my goddamned johnson off.”
The response was inaudible, no doubt piped through earbuds. He was speaking on an electronic communicator, then, some sort of walkie-talkie. The Texan yawned and started to pace on the shoulder of the road, not for any purpose save to keep his feet from getting cold.
There were sounds of shouting—but from farther away, from the checkpoint itself. Ambler looked out at the car idling before the orange security barrier. An irate passenger—bald, pink faced, expensively dressed—had been ordered to step out of a chauffeured Town Car while the vehicle was inspected. “Bureaucratic madness,” the rich man charged. It was a trip he made daily, and he had never been subject to such harassment before.
The guards were apologetic but firm. There had been reports. They were required to take special precautions today. He could take it up with the customs authorities—in fact, there was a visiting supervisor today. The man could take it up with him.
The pink-faced businessman turned toward the uniformed supervisor and felt the stony eyes of indifference and disdain. He sighed, his protests subsiding into a general air of peevishness. Moments later, the orange barrier angled down and the engine growled as the luxury car went on its way, wounded dignity almost sketched across its grille.
Yet the man’s noisy protests had provided Ambler with cover.
Though he could not change the odds to favor him, he could lessen the odds against him. He crept along a path toward the road, until he spied a burly man with an expensive wristwatch, its gold band gleaming as the early-morning sun emerged from a cloud. The Texan in the flesh. The watch was inappropriate garb for such a posting; it suggesting an overprivileged agent with a loosely monitored expense account, someone whose field days were long behind him and who had been conscripted into a last-minute operation because of sheer proximity. Stepping from behind a bank of snow, Ambler sprang toward him, encircled his neck w
ith his right arm, and hooked his hands together on the man’s left shoulder. Then he squeezed the man’s neck just below the jaw between his bicep and forearm, clamping down the man’s carotid arteries and inducing a swift loss of consciousness. The man—doubtless posted as an agent of record—coughed once and went limp. Swiftly, Ambler patted the man down, looking for his communicator.
He found it in the lower pocket of the man’s black leather coat—an expensive garment, with its fur lining, but hardly suited to an extended outdoor vigil in an Alpine winter. If the garment was a bad match with the assignment, it was a good match with the gold-banded Audemars Piguet on his wrist. The communicator, on the other hand, had clearly been assigned to him when he was tasked this morning; it was a small model, in a hard black plastic shell, with a limited range but a powerful signal. Ambler placed the tiny earbuds into his own ears, took a deep breath, and called to mind the way the agent of record had spoken. Then he pressed SPEAK, and, in a plausible Texan drawl, he said, “This is Beta Lambda Epsilon, reporting in—”
A thickly accented voice—the harsh French of the Savoyard province—cut him off. “We told you to cease communications. You jeopardize operational security. We are not dealing with an amateur here! Or if we are, the only amateur is you.”
The voice was not that of the Marseilles assassin. It had to have been another man—a man who seemed to be running the operation.
“Shut the fuck up and listen,” Ambler drawled angrily. The microcom equipment provided a crisp, tinny rendering of voices, putting a premium on audibility but erasing the differences of timbre between one voice and another. “I seen the bastard. On the other side of the road. Saw him dart across the parking lot like a goddamn red fox. The pisser’s taunting us.”
There was silence on the other end. Then, cautiously, urgently, the voice returned: “Precisely where is he at this moment?”
What should he say now? Ambler had not thought this through and momentarily drew a blank. “He crawled inside the Jeep,” he blurted. “Yanked up the canvas and crawled inside.”
“And he’s still there?”
“I’d have seen him if he wasn’t.”
“OK.” There was a pause. “Good work.”
If Ambler’s cheeks weren’t numbed with cold, he would have smiled. The members of the killing team were in his trade; they’d think of anything he would think of. Ambler could only outmaneuver them by not thinking—by proceeding on blind instinct, moment-to-moment improvisation. Nothing ever goes according to plan. Revise and improvise.
The killer from Marseilles strode from the booth toward the lower parking lot, where the canvas-topped personnel carrier was stationed. A powerful-looking, silenced firearm was in his hand. Another howling gust of wind swept down the ravines and roadway, slamming against Ambler’s back.
What now? The assassin would be in a state of hyperawareness, of hair-trigger consciousness. Ambler had to take advantage of it, had to trigger an overreaction. He looked around for a rock, for something he could throw hard, something that would arc up and land on the other side of the road. Yet an icy glaze had cemented everything loose to the ground: pebbles, gravel, rocks. Ambler retrieved the Texan’s Magnum pistol and removed a heavy lead bullet from the firing chamber. Now he whipped it high into the air. The gust of wind propelled it farther and, as the gust subsided, the bullet fell to earth, landing upon the vehicle’s canvas top. The sound it made was disappointingly faint, nothing more ominous than a tap, yet the specialist’s reaction was extreme. Without warning, the man dropped to his knees and, supporting his right arm with his left, fired repeatedly into the truck, perforating the canvas, the cushions, with a fusillade of silenced, high-energy bullets.
Ambler watched through his field glasses as the flurry of violence was visited upon the empty vehicle. Yet where was the other man—the Savoyard? Of him there was no sign. The mechanic, sheltered from the wind by the raised hood of the camion, continued his feckless wrenchings, doubtless knowing that his fee increased the more time elapsed. In the outdoor booth, the Swiss guard and his French counterpart sat glowering on their plastic chairs, sipping coffee and exchanging insults with the practiced ennui of two old men playing checkers.
Ambler swallowed hard. Everything came down to timing. For a few seconds he would be able to cross the road without being glimpsed, and, impetuously, Ambler decided to do so. The Marseilles killer was ruthless, remorseless, relentless: if his quarry managed to escape the gauntlet, he would hunt him with renewed doggedness. Pride of ownership was at stake; it was the specialist, Ambler realized, who had devised the ambush for him.
Ambler would return the favor.
He rushed behind the low brick storage building and then approached the parking lot. The specialist had reduced the canvas tarp to tatters, had ascertained that nobody was in it after all. He was now backing away from the vehicle, swiveling his head, and turning around, toward Ambler. Ambler had the man in the sights of the .44 he’d taken off the Texan but, knowing that the loud report of the gun would rouse the others, hesitated. Instead of squeezing off a round, he would use the gun as a threat.
“Don’t make a move,” Ambler said.
“Whatever you say,” the specialist lied in passable English.
Shoot him now: Ambler’s instincts were practically crying out to him.
“You’re in charge now,” the specialist said soothingly. Yet Ambler knew he was lying, would have known it even if he had not simultaneously been raising his gun arm in a fluid motion.
“What the hell is going on here?” A booming voice came from behind them. One of the Swiss border guards had wandered over to the parking lot, perhaps having heard the slapping sound made by the impact of the bullets on the Jeep. The specialist turned around, almost out of curiosity.
“What the hell is this?” the Swiss guard demanded in French.
A small circle of red suddenly bloomed on the guard’s forehead like a bindi, and he crumpled to the ground.
An instant later—an instant too late—Ambler squeezed the trigger . . .
And nothing happened. He remembered the bullet he had thrown, remembered too late that the firing chamber had been left empty. By then the specialist had swiveled back to Ambler, his long-barreled pistol held perfectly level, perfectly still, and aimed at his target’s face. It was a shot a novice could have made, and the specialist from Marseilles was nothing if not a professional.
THIRTY
Ambler’s nerves shrieked at him, now in reproach rather than in warning. Had he only listened to his instincts, the Swiss guard would not have been dead and Ambler would not be staring death in the face. He shuttered his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, he forced himself to see, with what felt like the physical exertion of a clean-and-jerk. He would see; he would speak. His mien—his voice, his gaze—would be his weapon. These were the crucial seconds.
“How much are they paying you?” Ambler demanded.
“Enough,” the specialist replied impassively.
“Wrong,” Ambler said. “They’re playing you for a fool, un con.”
Ambler tossed the heavy .44 pistol to the ground—did so before he was even aware of having decided to. Ironically, he felt much safer now. The fact that he was unarmed would lessen the pressure for an immediate kill. Sometimes you make best use of a weapon by giving it up.
“Don’t talk,” the specialist said. But he was vain about his financial savvy, Ambler knew; the taunt had bought him another few moments of life.
“Because after you kill me, they’re going to kill you. This operation—it’s an SCO. You understand what this means?”
The specialist took a step toward him, his reptilian eyes unblinking, displaying all the warmth of a cobra toward a rodent.
“A self-cleaning oven,” Ambler said. “That’s when we design an operation so that all the operational participants kill each other off. It’s just a precaution, an SCO—a sort of auto-erase feature.”
The killer from Marseilles st
ared dully, betraying only a modicum of interest.
Ambler let out a short, bark-like laugh. “That’s why you’re perfect—for their purposes. Cunning enough to kill. Too stupid to live. Ideal casting for an SCO.”
“You bore me with your lies.” Yet he would hear Ambler out, impressed by his victim’s very effrontery.
“Trust me, I’ve helped design enough of ’em. I remember the time we sent a specialist like you to take out a mullah in one of the Malaysian islands—guy had been doing money laundering for some of the jihadis, but he had a cult following among the locals, so we couldn’t afford to leave a trail. Sent another guy, a munitions tech, to put a Semtex pack on the little Cessna turboprop that the specialist was set to use for exfiltration, a Semtex pack with an altitude trigger. Then the specialist got instructions to terminate the munitions tech. Which he did, just before he took off in the Cessna. Three minus three equals zero. The math worked out beautifully. Always does. Same equation here. And you’ll never see the minus sign until it’s too late.”
“You would say anything,” the specialist said, testing him. “Men in your position always do.”
“Men facing death? That describes both of us, my friend—and I can prove it.” The look Ambler gave the assassin was disdainful rather than fearful.
A microflicker of confusion and interest: “How?”
“First, let me show you a copy of the Sigma A23-44D transmission. I’ve got a copy in my inside jacket pocket.”
“Don’t make a move.” The specialist’s deep-set eyes turned into slits, his knife-thin mouth into a sneer. “You must think I’m an amateur. You’ll do nothing at all.”
Ambler shrugged and held his hands up, at shoulder level. “Take it out of my pocket yourself, then,” Ambler said evenly. “It’s in the top right inside pocket—yank down the zipper. I’ll keep my hands in view. Point is, you don’t have to take my word for any of this. But if you want to keep your miserable goddamn life, you’re going to need my help.”
The Ambler Warning Page 41