by Rob Jones
Baupin turned his head and looked back. “What am I looking at?”
Two men were racing across the slope and entering the ice gorges. “Those two guys in black. They don’t look like powder hounds to me.”
Baupin turned his mouth down as he considered the status of the men. “Maybe.”
Ahead, Michel’s killer crouched down as he leaped over a shallow crevasse. “Something tells me they’re with that guy.”
“I think you’re right – they’re armed.”
The first bullet traced past Harry’s head and vanished in the bright, blue sky ahead of them. Harry ducked and weaved, zooming down the glacier, gripping a pole in each hand as he turned hard to the right and carved two neat grooves into the ice. Looking over his shoulder he saw the men were still on their tail, and then they fired again.
Another bullet, this time closer. He felt it blow past his ear and then watched as it smacked into the gorge wall beside him, shattering the blue ice and lodging deep inside it.
He looked ahead at Baupin and tracked his movements, copying what he did exactly. Skiing at over one hundred miles per hour inside a crevasse maze was not something he had any experience of but the Frenchman had told him he’d skied on these mountains since he was a child. Now, Baupin was turning to his right and skiing up along the side of the gorge wall, almost tipping forty-five degrees.
Harry copied the move and a second later he saw a large crevasse in the gorge floor and realized why Baupin had manoeuvred away from it. He copied the move just as a round of bullets drilled into the ice to his left.
Ahead, the fleeing assassin was extending his lead, but Baupin tucked a ski pole under his arm and pulled Perec’s pistol from his belt for the third time. He fired a couple of shots while maintaining his speed and accuracy inside the gorge, but both bullets went low, thudding into the powder behind the killer.
The sound of the shots had alerted the assassin, who now began an elaborate zig-zagging and skiing up the side of the gorge to avoid being shot as he made his way further down the glacier.
Baupin’s only response was cool and measured, tracking the fleeing man’s erratic path in the sights of his weapon while continuing his pursuit of him down the slope. Harry was impressed when the Frenchman fired a third shot and this time brought the man down. The round ploughed into his back and he went down like a lead weight, tumbling over awkwardly in the snow, leaving a trail of scarlet-red blood scraped along the surface of the snow and ice in his wake.
“Great job,” Harry said.
“Let’s get off the glacier,” Baupin called out. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”
They each turned the noses of their skis inwards and pushed into a wide snow plough to take a lethal turn ahead of them, skidding hard to the right and ripping onto another narrow path which wound its way away out of the gorge and down a steep tree-lined slope. Harry’s heart was racing as the trunks of the pines flashed past him on either side. His reactions were fast, but they had to be faster than ever in here or he would end up smashing into a gnarled tree trunk at high speed.
Baupin was still in front, and Harry watched him duck at lighting speed to avoid a thick branch that was blocking their path at head-height. “Down!” he yelled.
Harry had a second to react, and crouched down on his haunches with no time to spare as he raced beneath the branch and shot through the other side. The freezing air burned into his lungs as he stood back up on the skis.
He looked behind him only to see the first man duck down in the same way, and then the other followed suit. They were both through and still on his tail, and by the way they had handled the branch obstructing the path it looked like they had spent considerably longer on the slopes than he had.
“What’s the fastest way down?”
“Follow me…”
Harry watched as Baupin made a sharp right turn and screeched across the ice toward what looked like another massive gorge in the side of the glacier. A moment later he saw something he could hardly believe – they were now racing toward a gaping black hole at the end of the ski run.
“What the hell?”
“A glacier tunnel!” Baupin called back.
They flew into the dark ice-blue void with the hope that their pursuers would give up but they both raced in after them, guns raised.
“Looks like this is our last chance,” Harry said. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“If you can keep up with me, you will find out.”
*
The young woman tied her hair back and sighed as she loaded the reblochon cheese casserole onto the serving trolley and wheeled it carefully out of the kitchens. Also on board was a bottle of Moët & Chandon Champagne in an ice bucket and two chilled Champagne flutes.
Not to mention a special surprise for the guests in Room 37.
She pushed the trolley into the elevator and after an awkward greeting with an elderly lady who was holding a dyed-pink Bichon Frise in her arms, she hit the button for the third floor and slowly the elevator began its journey upwards.
The bell pinged and she pushed the trolley out into the corridor. She didn’t have to look which way to go – she knew exactly where her destination was, and exactly what to do when she got there. She had done this more times than she cared to remember.
At least it was quiet, she considered. It was so much more stressful when there were people hanging around and blundering in and out of their rooms, dropping their keys and losing their way to the elevators.
She tapped on the door and waited for a reply.
“But we never ordered any of this,” the man said. His French was good, but he spoke with a Swiss-German accent. A few moments after his protests, a stunningly beautiful woman walked into view, casually holding a miniature bottle of gin in her hand. She had dark brown hair and she spoke with an American accent. She said, “What the hell’s going on, Nikky?”
“Apparently one of us ordered this cheese casserole.”
“Well, don’t look at me, Kiki,” she said. “If I ate that I’d put on about two hundred pounds.”
“Perhaps I made a mistake,” the young woman said. “Perhaps you ordered this instead?” As she spoke, she whipped out a matte black automatic pistol and aimed it in the center of the Swiss man’s face. “Hands up.”
“Holy Crap,” Zoey said.
THIRTY-THREE
The incredible ice tunnel swallowed Harry Bane and he was sucked down into a new dangerous world he had never imagined before. He thought that between his years in the Pathfinders and MI6 he had seen everything, but as he raced through the tunnel deep inside the glacier he realized he had been wrong. He had never seen anything like it before – it was beautiful, awesome and lethal all at the same time.
He had seen a short film once of people skiing through the Sölden Tunnel in Austria but that was purposely carved into the glacier, reinforced and lit with electric lights, whereas this was an enormous tunnel in the glacier ice, hewn by nature countless millennia ago.
Up ahead, Baupin leaped over a deep crevasse in the tunnel floor and a second later Harry followed him, glancing down to see the deep, black crack twisting down in the ice below him. It looked like it led to Hades itself.
Following Baupin, he prepared to take a sharp right bend deep inside the ancient ice. His skis scratched hard in the ice as he took the corner, going up against the ice wall on his left for a few seconds as the killers raced up behind them.
Without warning, Baupin spun around and fired over Harry’s head at the pursuers, striking one in the chest and killing him instantly. He dropped to the glacier tunnel floor and smashed into ice as hard as concrete. With the second man now dead, that left only one to go, but he was gaining fast, and as relentless as the devil in his pursuit of them.
“What next?” Harry called out, his voice echoing off the cold, blue walls of the glacier tunnel.
“The exit is just ahead of us,” Baupin yelled back. “When we get out there is a small area o
f woodland. We can try and lose him in the trees.”
Great, Harry thought – skiing at over a hundred miles per hour through an alpine forest, but before he had time to worry about if his skiing skills were enough to handle it, they burst out of the glacier tunnel.
He squinted hard as they raced from the subdued blues of the ice’s interior and out once again into the bright sun and snow of the slopes. The cold air stung his cheeks as he zoomed down the slope, speeding ever closer to the bottom of the valley.
He heard the crack of a gun, and turned to see that the final assassin had opened fire on him once again. Another bullet traced past his head and buried itself in the trunk of a pine tree less than a foot to his right. The impact sent an explosion of snow and wood chips bursting into the air in front of him.
He cursed as the shower of snow and splinters sprayed all over his face, but thankfully was kept out of his eyes by the ski goggles. It wasn’t so long ago that something like getting shot at on a ski slope was part of his daily life, but that was then and this was now. Now he wanted a quieter life. His idea of excitement these days was beating the house and settling down in a leather chair with a glass of whisky and a crackling fire.
Not this. This was exhausting, uncomfortable and worst of all dangerous. The armed man a few hundred yards behind him only had to get lucky once and he’d have a bullet hole in his head. He’d drop off the path like a downed caribou and come to rest in a snowy unmarked grave.
And he didn’t even know if he could trust any of these people. Who was Andrej Liška? Who were Alain Baupin, Niko Weber and Zoey Conway? All of them strangers – even Lucia.
And yet there was something about the thrill of the chase that he couldn’t resist. Something about the way the Spanish woman had looked at him when she’d asked for his help. Helping people in danger was part of his nature, and he knew no matter how many doubts he had, he could never turn his back on someone who needed his help.
Ahead of him, Baupin made another heroic turn in the run, and skiing backwards at high-speed, he raised the SIG into the aim, right at Harry’s head and screamed for him to duck.
Wide-eyed with surprise and still skiing at speed along the narrow forest path, the Englishman brought his ski poles up into his body and crouched down on his haunches, enabling Baupin to get a clear shot of the final assassin.
The gun cracked in the freezing, alpine air and echoed off a thousand pine trunks all dusted with fresh snow, and Baupin turned around without a word and continued down the narrow path.
Harry glanced over his shoulder to see the third assassin silently clutching his throat in terror. Baupin’s shot had been good again, and now the man lost control and skidded off the path before slamming into the trunk of a pine tree at high speed. There was a deep thudding noise and a cracking sound as his ribs shattered and then he spun wildly off into the gloom of the forest.
“Good job,” Harry yelled, but Baupin was too far ahead to hear.
He was getting tired now, and the hard work of skiing at speed was taking its toll. He tried to increase his speed one final time for the final run to the bottom of the valley when he heard a gunshot and saw Baupin spin around like a ragdoll and leave the path at high speed. For a second, Harry thought the Frenchman was going to share the same fate as the final assassin and slam into one of the trees, but instead he tumbled into a small clearing, coming to a stop at the far edge.
There was obviously a fourth man hunting them.
Harry glanced over his shoulder but saw no sign of the sniper. He launched himself off the path between the same two pine trees the Frenchman had gone through and skied down toward him on the narrow slope as fast as he could. He stood up at the last minute and rotated his feet to the right before cutting down into the slope and stopping.
Without saying a word he turned the Frenchman over and saw blood blooming over the right shoulder of his ski jacket. Pulling the jacket open he saw the wound – obviously the sniper had used a round with some pretty chunky mass and a serious muzzle velocity. Luckily, it looked like the bullet had torn through the muscle above the clavicle, narrowly missing his brachial plexus. An inch lower would have meant serious nerve damage and maybe the loss of his arm, but as it was, Harry was confident the wound was not fatal, even though Baupin was still unconscious from the tumble.
Harry began to pull him out of the snow bank and heave him into the forest for cover, but it was too late. Before he had made two yards a bullet slammed into the trunk of a tree a few inches from his head. He ducked down and spun around at the same time, expecting to see nothing but trees, but instead he saw the fourth man skiing gently down the slope toward him. In his hands he was holding a heavy-duty sniper rifle and aiming it directly at Harry’s head.
“Hands up where I can see them.”
Harry stepped away from Baupin and raised his hands in the air. He lowered his head and breathed a sigh of frustration, his breath condensing in the chilled alpine forest almost as thick as smoke. Beside him, Alain Baupin began to come to, groaning and rubbing the wound on his shoulder.
The man pulled up a safe distance from his prisoners and holding the gun with one hand he pulled a phone from his pocket and made a call. “Perec is dead and I have the others.” He put the phone away, pulled up his goggles and took a deep breath to steady himself after the case.
“Steiner…” Harry said.
“You will pay for Perec,” Baupin mumbled, barely coherent.
“I doubt that,” Steiner said. “Now get up. We’re going to meet the boss.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Zalan Szabo rose from his desk with the courtly grandeur of a medieval king and moved across to the window. They were standing in the penthouse suite at the top of the Hotel Ciel. The Hungarian watched the snow fall for a few moments, nodding his head at some unspoken thought and then sighed before turning back to face Harry.
“Such beauty, the snow…” As he spoke, a blonde woman entered the room and moved gracefully toward him. They conversed in hushed French for a few moments and then she walked past Harry to the drinks cabinet. She was very tall – almost as tall as Harry, and had a swimmer’s build and long blonde hair and bronzed skin. He found it hard to ignore the cobalt blue eyes.
“I am Zalan Szabo, Mr Bane. I doubt you’ve heard of me.”
Harry spied a thin man sitting in a chair in an adjoining room, but then Aleksi Karhu shut the door. “I seem to have avoided the pleasure,” Harry said, returning his attention to Szabo.
“Allow me to introduce Elsa,” the Hungarian said. “She’s my personal protection officer. She trained as a bodyguard for many years in her homeland of Sweden and as you can see, she makes most athletes look like common slobs.”
“Where is Lucia?” Harry asked, ignoring Szabo completely.
“Ah – the Spanish girl, yes… she was very hot-blooded. By the time we arrived back at the house her temper had grown considerably worse. I sent her somewhere to cool off.”
The blonde woman laughed and took another drink of Absolut before returning the empty glass to the silver tray.
“What have you done with her?” Harry asked. “And what about the others?”
“If you mean the smart-mouth American and the rotund Zürcher, they were picked up by one of my people at their hotel. Now they are enjoying our own economy package – with Serrano, in fact.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Harry said.
“You will know soon enough.”
“And where’s Professor Liška?”
“The traitor is elsewhere.”
“You better not have harmed any of them, Szabo.”
“You coward!” Baupin said, blood still trickling from the wound on his shoulder.
Szabo suppressed a chuckle and moved closer to Elsa. “You are hardly in a position to make threats, Mr Bane, or you Monsieur Baupin. Allow me to extend the same hospitality to you both right away.” He turned to Steiner and Aleksi. “See to it that our new guests are offered some of my c
aviar at once.”
The Austrian nodded curtly and raised his gun. “Move.”
With Baupin’s shoulder wound, Harry knew it was down to him, so he seized the moment and swung his fist around, smashing Steiner in the jaw and knocking him back for a second. His next target was Szabo himself, but before he could turn Aleksi lunged forward. The last thing Harry saw was the Finn’s enormous shadow as he raised a chair and brought it crashing down on the back of his head.
*
When Harry regained consciousness it was courtesy of a bucket of ice-cold water thrown in his face by Hans Steiner. He looked around and saw they were in some kind of basement – presumably still inside the Hotel Ciel. It was a large, empty space with gray breeze block walls covered in insulated heating pipes and fans. On the far side of the room he saw an industrial freezer filled with food for the hotel kitchens. He was horrified to see Lucia also trapped inside it. She was shivering and trying to warm herself by rubbing her arms.
Then his analysis of the room was ended by a hard punch in the face delivered courtesy of Steiner’s right hand.
He knew how to take the hard stuff, but that didn’t mean he wanted any more of it, and now his attention was focussed on survival as the Austrian bodyguard threw the bucket at him, hard and heavy, and turned his attention to Zoey and Niko.
“Leave them alone, you bastard!” Harry yelled.
Steiner’s response was a high-velocity backhand slap that nearly knocked Harry out of the chair. “Shut your mouth.”
Harry spat a wad of blood onto the concrete floor and tried to slow his breathing as his head swam with the violence of the blow.
Steiner stepped over to Zoey and gently stroked her face with his hand. She struggled in her chair and spat at him. It was all she could do, but all it did was enrage him and she was the next victim of another of his heavy slaps. Her face glowed red and her head lolled backwards. Harry thought Steiner had knocked her out but then her eyes rolled back down and she came back to earth, dribbling a mouthful of blood down her top.