“In Europe, the pistes were carved by villagers first and by ski corporations only after World War II. Look at the concentration of houses. It seems random, but it’s uncannily scientific. If you watch a tidal wave of snow churn down the mountain for centuries on end, you build where the wave never passes.”
She gazed out from their perch—a small plateau perhaps twelve feet square in the granite face. From this distance, the map of the Trois Vallées was a storybook illustration—hamlets of stone and sloping roofs tucked into the clefts between the hills; deep forests of fir with heavy mantles of white; and the power cables of ski lifts soaring from ground to air.
“The closest you could come to flying,” she mused. “A kid airborne on a pair of skis. Did your father ever see you race?”
“No,” he said curtly, his eyes fixed on the landscape.
She spared little breath for conversation after that. She was too intent upon following Max’s footsteps. It was important to pay attention to every toehold and outcrop that could be grasped with gloved fingers. She did not ask him where they were going; he had pointed upward to a rocky cornice three hundred feet above a glade. Higher still, there soared an open granite head-wall flush with old hard-pack and new powder.
“Switzerland,” he explained, “if you climb far enough.”
She supposed that when they had skied down through the thick growth of trees that marched toward the valley below, they would turn around and repeat the exhausting climb. It hardly mattered. For now it was enough to track the man in front of her.
“Do you do this often?” she asked when at last they stood on the cornice edge.
“I’ve been up here three times this winter.” He pulled his skis from the harness on his back. “Let me go first, and pick your own line later.”
She was just clicking her boot into the bindings of her new T3s when the crack of a gun ricocheted off the head-wall. The sound echoed, gathering force.
“What’s that?”
Max’s head was craned backward, his eyes fixed on the snow above them.
A second crack. Stefani heard, quite clearly, the bullet singing over their heads.
“Go. Go, go, go!” Max shouted, and pushed off the cornice as though a starting gate had sprung.
She dove after him, unable to look at the mass of white shuddering behind, the grip of fear suddenly at her throat. The silence before the roar of the snowslide was like an instant suspended, as she soared out into the air twenty feet before landing on the slope below, the sound of her own breath hideous in her ears. Max never looked backward, never spared so much as a glance for the massive sheet of snow peeling off the headwall; every nerve in his body seemed trained on the tree line below, on the heavy glade that might shelter them and impede for a few precious seconds the onslaught of the avalanche. She was incapable of thought or decision; she merely thrust herself forward, the technique instinctual, willing herself not to catch an edge and tumble headlong to her death. Willing herself to survive.
The snow’s roar was deafening, now, and she could not help casting a hasty glance behind—the cornice, the chute down which they had raced, the headwall above: all blotted out in a screaming mass of white three stories high. She almost stopped dead from sheer terror but a faint shout from Max pulled her head around. He had halted near the edge of the glade some sixty feet away. Waiting for her.
She hurled herself forward through air dense with sound, her body wired for the moment when the avalanche would gather her up in its jaws and crush her. Max had moved farther into the trees and she reached them a mere instant before the wave of snow. She had once seen the path an avalanche could slice through a forest: trunks lying like spilled matchsticks on either side of the brutal swathe. But those had been aspen trees, frail wispy things with no roots to speak of—now she cut sharply around the massive bole of a fir and felt the earth shudder beneath her feet. The snow slide gobbled up the glade.
With a sound that might have been a whimper she forced herself deeper down into the trees, her eyes locked on Max’s back. The firs behind her were groaning now like martyrs on the rack, bent unnaturally under the snow’s weight, trunks snapping like twigs. There was no trail in front of her, nothing to follow down the mountainside but Max’s flitting form, his turns powerful and unquestioning. I’ve been up here three times this winter—
A branch whipped across her shoulder and her skis slid out from under her. She fell, screaming.
Max careened around, poles stabbing for purchase. “Get up! Get up, God damn you!”
She forced her poles into the loose snow and heaved upward. His face was gray beneath the tan, his eyes fixed on something behind her. She hurled herself downward and saw that he was still rigid in the same spot. The roar made words impossible. In an instant she would be seized and bent double, spine snapping like the trees-Max dropped his poles and caught her as she tore past. Her feet nearly slid out from beneath her again, but for the vise of his arm. His mouth was pressed to her ear. “That’s the worst of it.”
Only then did she allow herself to look behind. Twenty-five feet up the mountainside, the snow had come to a shuddering halt against the bulwark of the firs. A broad door had been punched through the glade, and a road half a football field wide spilled from it. Firs that had seen two hundred winters had been felled in a matter of seconds.
Max was still holding her. She began to tremble, so violently that she slipped through his arms and sat down on her skis. The massive weight of snow suspended against the sky, caught in the net of branches, was creaking eerily, like sails in high wind.
“We should get down while we can,” he said urgently. “Can you make it?”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide, her face pale. “Hell, yes. That was the best goddamn run I’ve ever had in my life.” A wild elation flooded her heart.
They emerged from the trees at the base of a valley, on the cusp of high alpine pasture. They shouldered their skis and began to walk down the hard-packed road that led to a small village, and forty-five minutes later stopped at the first tavern they could find. There was a fire and a few free tables amid the crowd of local patrons. In a heavy Savoyard accent a young woman offered them fresh bread and cheese and sausages; they drank Swiss beer and toasted the bread and cheese over the fire with long-handled tongs. Stefani was in tearing high spirits, she was giddy from cheating death; she flirted and charmed and had never looked more glorious. Max knew how a near-death experience could take some people and he waited for the after-effects of adrenaline to wane. He restrained the impulse to grasp her shoulders and pull her close. It was only after the pastry was offered and refused, and she had tossed back a brandy, that she voiced the obvious question.
“Who fired the gun?”
She said it quietly, so that the others who spoke English in the tavern would not hear. The others—had one of them hiked down from his perch in the hillside, after leveling his gun and firing two shots? Had the bullets been meant to kill them outright? Or merely to crack the headwall’s face?
“Anyone who carries a gun and fires it during spring ski season is a fool,” he told her. “You can be prosecuted for triggering an avalanche.”
“If you’re caught.” She pushed her brandy glass aside; she was somber and thinking, now. “I’d like to believe it was an accident. Teenagers—a prank. Or that sport nobody really does except in the Olympics—the biathlon. Skiing and firing at little targets in the snow.”
“There’s a course for that,” Max replied tersely, “and it’s not at the altitude we skied today.”
“Jeff’s right, you know. You’re a target.”
“A Thai gunman in the woods?” he mocked. “I don’t think they ski.”
“—Or one of their assigns, as Oliver Krane would put it. Yes. I think the firing of a gun while Max Roderick stood in the direct line of a backcountry chute will never be coincidence. That was a planned attack, Max. It very nearly succeeded.”
“But we escaped.”
; “So what?” Her voice rose slightly and he saw her check her next words and regroup before continuing. “This time the hit was supposed to look like an accident. Next time, it’ll be focused and deadly. You should leave Courchevel.”
“I don’t run away from problems.”
“Why do men always consider a tactical retreat to be running away? And even if it is running away—what’s wrong with survival?”
“I’ve been surviving since I was eight years old. I’m not willing to settle for that anymore.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What the hell do you mean?”
“Do you know what it’s like to be the last man standing?—The one who’s left behind when the others disappear or fall out of the sky or die without a word to the people they love? It means you can never be too safe. You can never lose control. You’ve got to beat the odds that wiped out your forebears. You’ve got to rewrite history, prove it wrong. You’ve got to be immortal.” He spat the word.
“You really believe that?”
“I’ve had it thrust upon me,” he said bitterly. “I never had a choice. It didn’t matter that my family was gone and that at the age of ten I was a free agent. The day I stood over my mother’s grave I understood what the rest of my life was for. If the Roderick clan was to have a happy ending, it was up to me to find it. I’ve spent my life testing death every day. I study the odds, I perfect my skills, I hone my strength. And then one day, Stefani, I fail. I fail. I fuck up the time trials for Nagano and I get sent home for good behavior. And as I look at the life I’ve made for myself—all this space, all this surviving I don’t know what to do with—I say: what is it for?”
She stared at him wordlessly.
“Have I been running from the past for thirty years? Have I avoided the truth—about Dad, about Jack—because it might just be too painful? Is it better to pretend that history means nothing?”
He glanced away, unconsciously searching the faces surrounding them for one that looked out of place, for a detail that betrayed a taste for murder. “I shouldn’t place you at risk. I’m sorry.”
“You aren’t. Oliver Krane is—with my permission.”
“Then you should understand that I’m not running anymore. I want to know the worst of what happened. I want explanations that have been too long denied me. I want retribution and truth telling and I want somebody to pay. God damn it—I want the house.”
“You’ve got a perfectly nice one,” she observed.
He laughed despairingly. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. To understand, you’d have to have seen the house on the khlong. You’d have to walk in your bare feet across the polished wood floors, stare up into the heart of those soaring rooms, and touch the face of the Buddha as it stares out over the garden. You’d have to feel the presence of ghosts—as I felt them last year. He’s still there, Stefani. Jack is there. And he belongs to me. Not to the crowds that shuffle through his palace in their dirty jeans every day. To me.”
She nodded slowly, the expression in her dark eyes at once cool and compassionate. “So what are you going to do?”
“Fly to Bangkok on Monday. Come with me?”
To his surprise, she flushed. “Of course. Isn’t that my job?”
He couldn’t help smiling at her. “You skied your pants off today, you know.”
“You wish, Roderick.”
Flirting again, despite the knowledge of being watched, despite the gun. God, she had a brutal courage. And yet she looked so frail. He watched her stroke crimson lipstick over her mouth as coolly as though she were in an elevator in Manhattan.
“You saved my life,” she observed around the lipstick. “Now I owe you. So fuck the apologies, okay?”
There was just enough challenge in her eyes. He leaned in and kissed her, hard, so that the careful application of red paint was pointless, a scrawl across both their mouths, now.
8
They made it back to Courchevel six minutes late for their drink at Le Bateau Ivre. Jeff Knetsch sat waiting for them at a table in the back corner, his ski jacket off and his restless fingers wrapped around a beer. He seemed engrossed in conversation with a woman slouched indolently in one of the chairs, her boots propped on the restaurant’s blazing hearth. She had waist-length orange hair drawn up high on the crown of her head; her skin was tanned; her makeup perfect. She could not possibly have skied that day, Stefani decided.
“Oh, God,” Max muttered in her ear. “Brace yourself.”
At the sight of Max, Jeff’s beer slipped from his hand and sloshed over the table.
“Darling!” The woman’s legs dropped to the floor with a crash. She thrust herself out of the chair and hurried toward them. Brown eyes, almond shaped, with Asia in her bones. The accent, however, was pure Sloane Ranger.
“Ankana,” Max murmured, leaning down to peck her cheek. “What a pleasure to see you in Courchevel.”
“The most brilliant coincidence! Absolutely fabulous! I was standing in line for the tram—Saulire’s smashing today, darling, you should have been there—and suddenly I was almost run over by poor Jeff! I was screeching obscenities at him before I realized who he was, of course. And then I simply roared with laughter! Too bloody rich, isn’t it? Running into each other this way? And all the while I thought he was in New York!”
She seized Max’s hand and dragged him back to the table like a prize marlin.
“Ankana,” Max said, “may I introduce a very old friend? Stefani Fogg, Ankana Lee-Harris.”
“Charmed,” the woman said patly, and fixed her rich sloe eyes on Stefani’s face for a fraction of a second before dropping back into her chair. “How’re tricks, darling? How’s the divine stone house? Cleaned the hot tub since I was in it last? Got any more of your yummy Bordeaux?”
Max smiled tightly. “Have you been waiting long?”
“Two hours,” Jeff told him. “I quit early. Leg’s not what it used to be. Sit down.”
Stefani felt Max’s hand tighten on her arm. He pulled out a chair. “Just one drink, I’m afraid. We’re both pretty trashed.”
“Skied yourself to death, I suppose?” Ankana smiled. “Jeff tells me you abandoned him for the backcountry. Shabby treatment, Max—for shame.”
“He was well out of it.” Max scanned the room for a waitress.
“Heavy powder?”
“Mix of old crud and new corn. Demanding. Are you here long?”
“Just the weekend. Bobbie—my husband—is so vicious these days I had to flee. Desperate for a bit of fun. I’ll be back in the trenches Monday morning, worse luck.”
“How do you all know each other?” Stefani asked. Max had obviously decided to say nothing about the avalanche, and so she followed his lead.
“Oh, it’s been years” Ankana declared tragically. “I was a World Cup groupie in my babyhood, and knew all the boys like the back of my hand.” Bedroom eyes at Max. “But I lost touch once I moved to London. Then Jeff and I met by chance two years ago at the Met—I’m in public relations, darling, in the art world, and Jeff’s on the Metropolitan Board. I couldn’t believe it! So of course we’ve kept in touch.”
“You live in London now?”
“Hampstead Heath. I spend every waking minute plotting methods of escape. And you?”
“New York.”
“Jeff’s backyard! Know Shelley and the kids, then?”
“Only by reputation.”
“How in the world did you fetch up here?” The tilted eyes betrayed no suggestion of the intense interest Stefani detected in every line of the other woman’s body.
“I’m spending my ex-husband’s money,” she replied coolly. “It seemed like the best revenge.”
“How brilliant of you!” Ankana shrieked. “Then let’s stiff you for the bill!”
“Jeff, I’m too tired to fight for a drink,” Max interposed firmly. “I think I’ll head home.”
“I’ll drop by later.” The lawyer’s face was pinched and white with exhaustion; his leg must be hurt
ing him more than he admitted. “There are some things we need to discuss.”
“Business? How boring,” Ankana burst out. “Can’t I snag some time in the tub while you two are nattering on? Max, you owe me an invitation. Admit it. It’s been years since I’ve seen the inside of your place.”
He stared at her, then shrugged slightly. “As long as Jeff pays for the damage.”
“He always does!”
Another shriek of laughter, and they fled for the door.
“Explain,” Stefani demanded under her breath as they picked up their skis. The frigid rush of air, smelling of new snow, was like a cleansing bath on her upturned face. “Who is she?”
“A leech,” he said flatly. “A nightmare. No morals, no money and no mercy. Jeff’s up to his neck for the rest of his stay.”
“Is he having an affair with her?”
“I suppose they could have arranged to meet in Courchevel. But I doubt it. Jeff’s family means a lot to him. Ankana’s vice is usually more casual.”
“You despise her.”
“I don’t trust her. She’s changed her skin so many times in the past, I don’t know who she really is.”
“Asian?”
“By way of Heathrow. She’s native Thai, married to an English peer with more money than sense.”
“The public relations bit is bogus?”
“Oh, she has a job. At a museum in London—the Hughes Museum of Asian Art—but nobody’s quite sure how she stays employed.”
“Max”—Stefani stopped short at the parting of their ways, her piste leading down to Le Praz, his toward the house—“be careful tonight. A Thai woman appears two hours after you’re nearly killed. I don’t like the coincidence.”
“Come with me and watch her yourself.”
“I’ve got a phone call to make.”
“Mr. Krane?”
She nodded. “I want his opinion on avalanches.”
The Secret Agent Page 9