No Way Out

by David Kessler

  He did two ventilations and then went back to the compressions again, repeating the entire process three more times. He felt exhausted, and defeated. There was still no sign of life. He straightened up, remembering how he had grabbed the throat of fourteen year old Andi when she tried to scream. But this time, when he reached for her throat it was to check if there was a pulse. As he touched her, he saw a slight movement of Andi’s chest and felt the pulse that he had been praying for. The heart was beating and she had resumed breathing. Through his tears, Claymore smiled a bitter smile and sighed heavily with relief.

  Then he staggered to his feet, turned away and wept into his open hands.

  Wednesday, 2 September 2009 – 19:55

  Martine stood there clinging onto Alex as he encircled her waist with his arms. But there were no tears in her eyes, just a kind of heavy gasping as if she were trying to recover her strength.

  “Where’s Manning?” he asked, urgently. “And Gene.”

  “Inside,” said Martine, her voice rasping from shortage of breath.

  He looked over at the door nervously and tried to edge Martine away from it, to get her out of harms way. But she resisted his efforts.

  “We have to help her,” she said, releasing her grip on Alex and half turning towards the door.

  He nodded, unsure of what he meant, or what danger lay behind that door. She turned her back on him, opened the door and walked into the room. He followed and saw Gene in a kneeling position, cradling Louis Manning’s bleeding head in her arms, rocking backward and forward gently as if holding a baby and trying to soothe it gently to sleep.

  There was no movement from Manning. His eyes were open but unblinking. And the only sound in the room was a feint murmur from Gene’s throat as she sang the lullaby from Robert Munch’s Love You Forever.

  Martine turned to Alex, and this time a couple of tears were forming in her eyes.

  “He was the salmon,” she said softly.

  “The salmon.”

  “Swimming up stream, to the waters where he was born. Only he never made it.”

  For some reason, that he couldn’t fathom himself, Alex took out his wallet and looked at a picture of a young man. He had found the picture in the glove compartment of the car belonging to his former legal intern, Nat Anderson, after Nat had been killed in that fatal crash. He felt overwhelmed by the emotions it brought on – the same emotions he had felt when he first saw the picture and recognized the face.

  Wednesday, 2 September 2009 – 22:00

  It was later that night when Claymore stood dry-eyed on the Golden Gate Bridge looking out at the waters below. He had gone with Andi in the ambulance and was still with her at the hospital when Gene had arrived with Alex and Martine. Andi had been slipping in and out of consciousness, but she seemed to respond to Gene, at one point even squeezing her hand. Alex and Martine had left shortly after that, and Claymore realized that he too was in danger of outstaying his welcome.

  So now, with no one else about, he stood here looking east towards the city where he had been judged not guilty by the system. But it was not so easy to escape the judgment of his own conscience.

  It would be so much simpler to end it here. He had given Andi back her life, but he could not restore her youth joy of living that he had robbed her of forever. Neither could he banish her pain. Like all human beings he could do limited good but unlimited evil.

  His moral account was overdrawn.

  And yet… that didn’t make him morally bankrupt. The words “temporarily insolvent” came into his head, bringing a wry smile top his lips. He still had a few good years left, and if he chose to use them wisely he could repay at least part of his debt. But he could never give back to Andi what he had taken away from her.

  To do away with himself now – as a means of paying for his sins – was as tempting as any temptation life had thrown at him. But it was tempting for all the wrong reasons. It would be like the trick that those smarmy, crooked business corporations sometimes play: filing for Chapter 11 to duck their obligations towards workers, creditors and shareholders.

  He knew that he had a duty to pay back what he had taken away from his victims. If he couldn’t pay it back to Andi, he could pay it back to others – helping some future potential victim before it was too late. He had thought, for many years, that he had repaid the debt already by standing up for “American values.” But paying tribute to American values – whatever that meant – didn’t expiate his sins or purge him of the guilt that he still carried. Whatever those ill-defined values were, they weren’t a model of perfection any more than those other political and religious systems that he had experimented with and that had left him so thoroughly disillusioned.

  “American values” was just a convenient package deal that he had accepted wholesale to get back into the fold of public popularity.

  All we can do, is go on striving for perfection, even if we can never reach it.

  Some poet had said it before. And another had said that you can’t even dream if you’re dead.

  But it was Gene who had really hit the nail on the head.

  “We have a duty to ourselves go on living.”

  To ourselves if we’re the victims.

  And to others if we’re the victimizers.

  He was both.

  He turned away from the water and began walking slowly towards the flickering lights in the distance.

  THE END

  Afterword

  If you liked this book, please go to Amazon and share your opinions with others by giving it a good review and clicking on the LIKE button. If you’ve got time, you can also give it some relevant subject tags or agree with other people’s tags about the subject matter, to spread the word and get it out there.

  Oh and also don’t forget to tell all your friends how good it was and spread the word on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc. And if you’re a member of Goodreads, Library Thing, Shelfari or any of those reader sites, don’t forget to give it a good review there too.

  And don’t forget to check out the other Alex Sedaka thrillers (You think you know me pretty well and Hello darkness my old friend) as well as these other titles by me under my various pen-names:

  Thrillers

  A Fool for a Client

  The Other Victim

  Tarnished Heroes (coming soon)

  Dov Shamir Adventures

  Hidden Menace

  Checkmate at the Beauty Pageant

  Millennium Plague (coming soon)

  Daniel Klein thrillers (as Adam Palmer)

  The Moses Legacy

  The Boudicca Map (coming soon)

  The Phaistos Disk (coming soon)

  Thrillers for children and young adults (as Dan Ryan)

  Ethan and The Devious Doctor

  Ethan and The Cryptic Clues

  Science Fiction (as Nigel Farringdon)

  Spirit of Icarus

  The Year of Compulsory Childbirth

  Chick-lit (as Karen Dee)

  The Luddite Girls

  Extract from Hello darkness my old friend

  Copyright © 2012 David Kessler

  Prologue

  “Last man down’s a sissy!” said Ginger as he swung open the gate of the huge panoramic veranda that led onto the slope.

  A puerile challenge – yet it was to have devastating consequences.

  He stepped out onto the fresh powder of Devil’s Run and cast a backward glance at his lithe, olive-skinned friend. “Catch me if you can Hash!”

  And with that, the supremely fit 26-year-old launched himself onto the steep slope, to the chagrin of his minders, who had just taken off their skis. On the other side of the veranda, the man known as “Hash” looked over at his minders, almost as if asking for their permission, or at least their tacit approval. They too had removed their skis, and the look on the face of his Chief of Security announced that he was filled with dread at the prospect of Hash going off unguarded. But Ginger’s minders were now frantically strapping on the
ir skis and Hash realized that it would seem unmanly if he didn’t pick up the gauntlet that his British friend had thrown down.

  So he stepped through the open gate and took off in hot pursuit.

  Behind him, there was a flurry of activity at the luxurious ski-in, ski-out chalet. One of Hash’s minders was frantically saying something into a microphone clipped to his ski jacket. Others were struggling to put on their skis in haste. Meanwhile, the women – a 26-year-old Bulawayo-born blonde beauty and a Norwegian girl two years younger – were exchanging looks of mild frustration at this latest exercise in macho horseplay. They too had enjoyed spending a pleasant afternoon on the slopes. But the men had promised that the previous run would be the final one before après-ski tea. After that it was supposed to be a short rest – and possibly even a touch of “afternoon delight” – before a lively evening at the Interlaken Casino. However, now the men had not only taken off again, but on the mountain’s most dangerous ski run, with which Ginger was completely unfamiliar.

  To be fair, Ginger and Hash were both experienced skiers and they moved with graceful precision, controlling their speed and navigating the dangerous ridges and trees with smoothly-carved rounded turns – none of that beginners’ awkwardness of wedge turns and stem christies. When these two turned, they kept their skis parallel and leaned their bodies into the curve like banking aircraft, while their outer leg bore the weight of their bodies on the downhill ski as the inside edges of the skis cut into the snow.

  Devil’s Run was classified as a Black or “expert” slope. In North America they would probably have had to invent a triple black diamond category for it. “Suicidal” was how some local skiers had described it. But Hash had taken it many times before. His father owned the entire mountain and this was the only slope that he found even mildly challenging.

  For Ginger it was another story. Experienced as he was, he had been unable to take up the challenge, because although he was up to the task, his minders were not. They were competent skiers, but not experts. He shouldn’t, in fact, have issued such a reckless schoolboy challenge. But now, after he had taken off at a moment’s notice, he presented those minders with a major dilemma: letting him face the danger of going out unprotected or risking their own lives on a slope that was well beyond their capacity.

  In the end duty prevailed over self-preservation – and their duty was to protect Ginger, even at the risk of their own lives. They were mostly ex-army, rather than Royal Navy, but the spirit of Admiral Nelson hovered over them.

  England expects that every man will do his duty.

  As they hurtled down the slope, at death-defying velocity, Ginger looked back at Hash with a taunting smile, mocking him for his moment of indecision and gloating over the distance that had opened up between them. Hash shook his head, as if to warn his friend against hubris in the face of the hazardous trees that, together with the steep gradient, gave Devil’s Run both its ominous name and its awesome reputation.

  He also took it as an opportunity to close the gap, as Ginger slowed down in recognition of his unfamiliarity with the terrain.

  Well behind them, in the distance, the minders had lost sight of their charges and were skiing with a renewed sense of urgency, tempered only by the awareness of the dangers that awaited them. The broad-shouldered leader of the British minders looked over at his diminutive, swarthy counterpart as if to ask if they should go any faster. But the other man shook his head and raised his eyes forward, reminding the bull-shouldered man of the hazards that had kept them off this slope until now.

  Meanwhile, Ginger again looked back tauntingly at Hash, but this time he saw that the gap between them had narrowed considerably. When he turned to face forwards again, he noticed a huge fir tree looming up ahead of him.

  * *

  About half a mile away, a small, mousy man in his fifties, in a white ski suit, was standing next to a tripod. White wasn’t usually the most practical color for a ski suit. If one is injured and needs help, the white doesn’t show up well against the snow. But white ski suits were available commercially for the young and trendy and he had bought one for occasions such as this. In his line of work, not being spotted was the name of the game.

  He wasn’t worried about accidents anyway – not because he was a good skier, but because he kept his skiing activity to the minimum and never tried to set any speed records. For this man, skiing wasn’t a hobby or even an occupation. It was merely a means to an end.

  He had found out about Hash and Ginger coming here from an inside tip that a bottle blonde chalet girl had given him. She wasn’t your usual sort of chalet girl from a high-class finishing school. In fact, she was a bit of a “ladette” who was apparently appearing in some reality show on British television. Part of the show involved the girl and her fellow ladettes working for a week as chalet girls. And this particular ladette had a bit of a drinking problem, as well as something of a loose tongue to go with it.

  So when he heard her parroting a piece of society gossip that she in turn had overheard from some one else, he realized that he was onto a good thing. His interest had principally been in Ginger not Hash. Ginger, and others of his family, usually spent their skiing holidays at Klosters. Consequently, the place was perpetually crawling with paparazzi.

  But what this man had heard made him realize that Ginger would be in the Jungfrau region this year. So here he was at the foot of a mountain near Interlaken, looking out into the distance at the most dangerous slope on a privately owned alp that belonged to a wealthy oil Sheikh.

  Unfortunately most of the day had been wasted.

  The man in the white ski suit had initially assumed that they would be making full use of Devil’s Run. But instead they had stayed away from it, favoring the safer ski runs on the other sides of the mountain. He could have repositioned himself accordingly. But he knew that packing up his gear and moving to a new perch would take time and he was sure that sooner or later, the temptations of Devil’s Run would prove irresistible.

  So he had stayed here, patiently biding his time, at first hopefully – but with increasing doubts that anything would come of it. As the afternoon rolled on, his mood changed from “anytime now” to “there’s always tomorrow.” He was just about to call it a day when he detected activity on the slope and he knew that his big opportunity had materialized at last.

  * *

  Ginger had been in some dangerous situations before, so it was no more than a mild stab of fear that he felt in his gut as his brain took in the giant fir tree directly ahead of him. Only years of skiing experience enabled him to execute the very tight, last-second turn necessary to avoid slamming into it at breakneck speed. And by the time he recovered his sense of balance, he noticed – out of the corner of his eye – the smug figure of Hash creeping up on him and then gliding smoothly into the lead, if only by a nose.

  For a few seconds they were more or less neck-and-neck, like two brothers in friendly competition, the muscled but not over-muscular redhead and the lithe, olive-skinned figure who had caught up with him. Then, slowly but surely, Hash began to edge ahead, his knowledge of the optimum line telling, as it had when he had closed in on Ginger.

  As the lead stretched, Ginger struggled frantically to stay in contention. And then – quite abruptly and unexpectedly – Hash turned round to see how far Ginger had fallen behind. Sensing an opportunity, Ginger redoubled his efforts to retake the lead.

  Meanwhile the bodyguards were still languishing behind. It took them a frantic effort, and a modicum of courage, to pick up their speed. But finally as they rounded a row of trees, they regained visual contact – and what they saw horrified them. For at the foot of the slope, a man lay unmoving, as the other man knelt by him, as if hesitant to move him. And as they stared, the British guards breathed a sigh of relief, whilst terror engulfed their foreign counterparts. Because, although they were too far away to see the faces, they could tell from the colors of the ski outfits that it was Hash who lay supine.

&n
bsp; “What happened?” the head of the British minders called out as he skidded to a hockey stop a few yards away from Ginger and the fallen Hash.

  “He hit a tree!” Ginger shouted back, almost crying. “He skied straight into a god-damn, fucking tree!”

  Ginger was barely able to contain his emotions. But even that didn’t match the demeanor of Hash’s minders as they wailed out aloud in expression of the pain they felt in their hearts. For unlike Ginger’s minders who were strictly professional, dedicated to their jobs and mindful of their duties, Hash’s guards truly loved the man whose life they were sworn to protect – and would have given their own lives to save him. They were also well aware of the consequences of failure. It could cost them a lot more than their careers.

  It took two frantic calls to summon the air ambulance and when it arrived – ten minutes later – the crew moved swiftly into action, clamping an oxygen mask over Hash’s face, while a doctor, put a stethoscope to his heart and tried to test his reflexes. For almost a minute, they all held their breath waiting for the doctor to speak, but even before he opened his mouth, the look on his face said it all. When he finally did stand up it was just to shake his head and say two words: “broken neck.”

  For the next few seconds, the heads of the two groups of bodyguards stood eyeball to eyeball, their sense of hostility unvoiced, but clearly hanging in the air in a tense moment of silent recriminations.

  * *

  Half a mile a way, the man who had been watching them was almost catatonic with shock. As the two men had come tearing down the mountain, with the bodyguards in hot pursuit, he had been busily snapping away with his Olympus E-520 camera. Taking full advantage of its Opteka 650-2600mm high definition telephoto lens, he felt as close as if he were within touching distance of his subjects.