Agata resettled the pack with an impatient hitch. “Well, at least we’re not driving it.” A six-foot wide road was plenty big enough for two hikers. “Let’s go.”
They tramped through the crisp snow along the narrow route, passing signs screaming in French that the route was one-way only, that larger vehicles should not attempt the route, that caution was advised. There were line drawings showing cars driving off cliffs, cliffs crumbling away without warning, avalanches, head-on collisions.
Agata shivered as she read each one.
“It’s too early in the season to worry about avalanches, at least,” Cain observed.
They came to an intersection where an even narrower route veered off to the right. The route they were on continued in an easterly direction, only there was a new sign planted on temporary sawhorses, barring the way.
The French was clear and strenuous.
Road closed to all traffic. Use alternative route!
Cain stared at the tin sign. Two yellow warning lights flanked it and illuminated the red script.
“Why would it be closed?” Agata asked, her heart sinking.
“Heavy snow, usually.” His tone was distant. He was thinking.
“Not because the road gave way somewhere?” Her breath clouded the air in front of her face. The night air was completely still. The lights of Cognin-les-Gorges, behind them, and the road sign with its dire warning, were the only evidence of civilization.
“The road has been there for more than a hundred years. It’s not even December. It wouldn’t just give away,” Cain told her.
Agata recalled one of the warning signs they’d passed, showing a cliff giving way beneath a car’s wheels. She stayed silent.
Cain pulled the phone out of his pocket. “Down to fifteen percent,” he added, as he thumbed through it. Then he gave a grunt of satisfaction. “There. Thought so.” He looked up from the screen and held the phone out to her. “The snow which fell in Paris was the trailing edge of a storm which came through here, before sweeping north, two days ago. The road is knee-deep in snow and the plows can’t get up there. That’s why it’s closed.”
Knee-deep snow could be navigated by foot, while a car would get bogged. She glanced at the news items and the weather report. “It’ll be cold, up there,” she guessed.
Cain took the phone back and shoved it in his pocket. He turned his head, scanning the landscape. He lowered the pack to the ground, so it leaned against the leg of the sawhorse. “Give me your keys.”
She dug them out of the other big pocket in her coat. “What do you want keys for?”
“I want the little saw in that tool thing, not keys.” He lifted his chin, pointing with it, as he opened the all-purpose tool on the key ring and extracted the saw.
She looked. The moonlight silhouetted a copse of spindly trees, all which grew at this elevation.
“Firewood,” she breathed.
“A stash each, on the top of our packs, tied with your paracord. We only use the wood if we have to, but it’s better to have it than not.”
“Now you think my tools are useful…” she muttered.
“Never said they weren’t, Kelsey.” Cain moved off the road, onto the land which would be tilled fields in summer, heading for the little bunch of trees. “It’s just cute that you think you need ‘em when you can tear a man to shreds with just your mouth.”
“Don’t forget my icy stare!” she threw after him, as she lowered the pack.
“Nah, that delivers frostbite,” he tossed back.
She followed him into the dark, to help collect firewood. Thirty minutes later, they shouldered their packs once more, this time with a hefty bundle of branches each, tied on top with the paracord.
“Good thing we’re not doing Mach ten. The wind resistance would knock us out of the slipstream,” Agata observed, looking at the towering height of Cain’s pack, with the unwieldy width of the wood on top. Hers would look the same to him.
Cain waved toward the sign. “Shall we?”
She moved around the sign and continued into the dark.
[17]
Jerusalem, Israel.
A twelve-instrument band played in the square below, its evocative Eastern influenced music wafting through the open window of the rooming house. Ren half-listened to the exotic sound, while she read Scott’s decoded email one more time.
She wore nothing, for it was a sluggishly warm, still night in the old city. Despite the late hour, there were still hundreds of pedestrians and tourists milling in the square, their shuffling steps and murmurs mingling with the music.
The other reason she wore nothing sprawled on the low, wide bed in the far corner. Peter was asleep, lying on his stomach on top of the multi-colored cotton rug covering the bed. His abandoned posture gave Ren a fantastic view of his rear and the curve of his back.
She pulled her attention back to the email.
Obviously, can’t ask L to investigate. You’re up.
Below the single line of text was the symbol for an attached file.
And below the symbol, one more line of text from Scott.
Did Leela really send this? S.
Did she? It was a frightening thought.
Ren was good with computers because she had absorbed most of Peter’s skills over the years. He was sought-after by Silicon Valley even though he had repeatedly refused to move out of Washington, because Ren couldn’t. She had the skills to dive beneath the metadata and see what had been manipulated and what was untouched code…she hoped.
Peter shifted, with a soft sigh, drawing Ren’s attention back to the bed.
She composed a secure email and didn’t bother coding it. The message would be indecipherable without context.
12 hours. R.
It would give her ten hours to deconstruct the email down to the last pixel. She closed everything down, secured the laptop, and happily returned to bed.
Gorges du Nan, Vercors National Park, Rhone-Alpes, France.
The road between Cognin-les-Gorges and Malleval-en-Vercors was only five and a half miles long. To Agata’s numbed senses, it felt as though they would never reach an end, that it would go on forever.
As soon as they were amongst the sheer walls of rock, the wind sprang up, whipping the snow around. The cold flakes blatted in her face. They paused to don hats and mitts and scarves, and wrap the scarves about their faces, before going on.
Quickly, she learned how a balcony road differed from the average mountain road, apart from being narrower and far more curvy.
The road was carved out of the mountainside. Carved into it, so the mountain hung overhead like a roof, with paving constructed upon the shelf created beneath. The road was almost a tunnel in the cliff, except no wall existed on the right. Instead, a narrow concrete railing clung to the edge, then nothing for a long way down. In the dark, the drop looked endless.
The open side of the tunnel meant the wind and snow battered them, every step they took.
The road itself had snow piled up against the back wall, and drifting across the bitumen, as the wind pushed it here and there in gusty blasts.
When Cain took her hand, Agata was pathetically grateful. The noise of the wind made talking impossible, making her feel isolated and alone. She felt little of his hand through the thick material of her mitten, yet it was comforting just to feel the heft and pull on her hand as they walked.
The average person walked at just over three miles an hour. They were making very average speed. It would take two hours to traverse the length of the road, if they didn’t stop.
Only, Agata did want to stop. She was colder than she should be, for despite the snow it was not super cold, even at this elevation. In Cognin-les-Gorges, the ambient had been minus five Celsius. They hadn’t climbed much higher. Only, the wind made her feel cold. Her bones ached with it.
Even though she was a shower person, the idea of soaking in a hot bath, or better still, a hot spring, with its healing waters, made her almost gid
dy.
Had Cain known how bad this would be? No wonder the road was closed to all traffic. It would be impossible to navigate this road in a car, in the dark. As it was, the wind tried to pluck them from the road and fling them to the bottom of the gorge.
They had passed through half-a-dozen actual tunnels, where the mountain closed over the road, which arrowed through the rock. She hated the tunnels even more. Even though the wind dropped to nothing and no snow drifted there, the wind made moaning sounds at either end, while the tunnel itself was utterly dark. They inched forward, their hands out and their gazes upon the drifting and spitting snow at the other end of the tunnel.
In the tunnels, the air ate at her flesh like acid. It was colder than out in the wind.
Yet she still winced when they moved out into the wind.
Several years and a small ice age passed, while the road went on and on. She braced herself as they approached another tunnel. This one was shorter, although it bent around an outcropping of rock. The other end of the tunnel wasn’t visible. The only thing she could see was the black maw.
She shuddered.
Cain pulled out the phone and switched on the flashlight function. He played the light inside the tunnel. Bare rock and flat road.
He turned off the phone.
Agata blinked, her night vision destroyed.
Cain picked up her hand and tugged her toward the tunnel. Reluctantly, she followed him inside, until the wind dropped.
He turned and pulled down his scarf to speak. His eyelashes had snow attached to them. “I don’t know about you, but I can’t go another step. I’m so cold I could scream. I’m guessing we’re just over halfway through. I don’t want to waste the battery by checking the phone, though.”
“That’s all?” She shuddered. There was just as much of this misery ahead as what laid behind.
He nodded. “Let’s use the wood. A fire, hot chocolate, and that disgusting jerky of yours. Then we push on.”
“Heat would be wonderful,” she admitted, her teeth chattering in reaction.
They moved into the middle of the tunnel, where they could see the other end. Moving by touch alone in the near-darkness, they untied the wood and piled it high, right in the middle of the road. Cain lit the fire and fed it into a blaze while Agata filled the aluminum pot with water from the water bottles Cain carried. She let the water boil for several long minutes, to counter the lower boiling point at altitude. Then she carefully poured it into the collapsible mugs, over the hot chocolate powder.
Cain didn’t hesitate to drink the stuff, even though it was mostly chemicals. “I need the sugar as well as the heat,” he told her, when she watched him drink the first mouthful.
She finished her cup in record time and made them both a second cup, without asking.
Cain drank that, too, although he grimaced before reaching the end. “I guess heat alone isn’t enough.” He poured the dregs onto the road and collapsed the cup.
By then, the warmth of the flames had drawn the chill from their bones. The crackle of the fire and the leaping, warm yellow light beat back the wind and the cold.
Agata sighed, letting her hands warm over the coals.
“It seems a shame to leave the wood behind,” she said, as Cain spread the coals and the remnants of the wood.
“We can’t stay here,” he told her. “We can’t be on this road when daylight arrives. It’s too much of a bottleneck. If Zima makes any wild guesses about where we are, he could block both ends of the road and trap us here. Take his time hunting us down.”
“As we can’t go off the road to get away from him. There is no off-road.” She shuddered and resettled her scarf and hat and put her gloves back on.
Cain watched her, his black eyes the only thing visible above the thick charcoal gray wool of his scarf.
“What?” Agata demanded.
He shook his head. “Nothing.” His voice was muffled. “Ready to do this?”
“Not at all,” she admitted. “Only, there’s no going back, so…”
He held out his mittened hand. “I’m astonished how much it helps,” he said. “It could be a lump of wood I’m holding, only…”
“It makes a difference,” she finished.
His gaze met hers.
She took his hand. They walked to the end of the tunnel and out into the howling wind.
The small town at the end of the balcony road, Malleval, was just waking up when Agata and Cain walked stiffly along the very civilized footpath beside the main road.
The wind had dropped and the sun was out. It was a perfectly normal early December morning. The snow was an even blanket, still and crisp.
“God, I’m starving!” Agata breathed, as she caught a whiff of coffee and pastries, ahead.
The French liked their bread and coffee, and even tiny towns often had a tiny bakery, providing fresh bread every day, baked with traditional ingredients. The government had mandated the making of bread the old way, to preserve the tradition. Agata approved heartily. French croissants, made in traditional French bakeries, were completely different from GMO wheat-and-calcium enhanced seven grain monster bread, back home.
“Let me go in alone. You’re too memorable,” Cain said, as they drew closer to the bakery.
“I thought you said I should distract people from noticing us?”
“I thought it would work. I was wrong.” He took off his thick mittens. “Or maybe it’s just me who can’t get you out of my mind.”
Instead of searching for a response, Agata dug in the pocket of her pack for the money. She didn’t know if he was joking.
“It’s cute when you blush that way,” Cain added. “Right up to your hairline. Don’t ever play poker, Kelsey.” He took the wad of euros and put them in his pocket. “We can sit in the park and eat. Why don’t you wait for me there?”
A little park laid across the road from the bakery, with trees, and a thick blanket of snow. Under the trees were park benches, arranged on four sides of invisible squares. The flat space between the benches would be for bocce players.
Cain lowered his pack and rested it against the wall of the bakery shop. Then he moved toward the bakery door, removing his cap as he walked.
Agata angled across the road to the park. No cars moved, although there were several cars parked around the edges of the square, each with a layer of snow on their hoods and roofs. The snow was still drifting down, a flake at a time. The sky was low, with thick, gray clouds which promised more snow.
Around the edges of the park were several shops and businesses, with a few tiny houses between. This was the heart of the town, then.
Agata brushed off the mattress of snow on the nearest bench, rested her pack against the curved iron arm, and settled on the bench to wait for Cain. He didn’t take long. He carried two polystyrene cups in one hand, hefted his pack back onto one shoulder with the other and hurried over to the bench where she sat. He dropped the pack beside hers and held a cup out to her. Steam rose from the pin-prick hole in the lid.
Agata took the cup, as Cain pulled a brown paper bag from his pocket and settled beside her. The scent of hot, fresh bread made her mouth water. As he opened the bag, she took the lid off the cup and sipped the scalding coffee. It had cream and a touch of sugar, just the way she liked it. She hadn’t told him her preference.
Cain held out a croissant wrapped in a paper napkin.
Eagerly, she took it and ate the entire thing in four big bites, her stomach rumbling, while Cain tore his apart and ate with far more control than she.
“Please tell me there is another in the bag?” she asked.
Cain held the bag out to her. “Four more. We can save a couple for later.
Happily, she extracted another one. “I’m surprised you’re not having an embolism, drinking from a polystyrene cup.”
“No choice,” Cain said, his tone distant.
“And coffee, too,” she observed, for the liquid shadowing the underside of the plastic lid was to
o dark for tea.
“I’d say you’re corrupting me,” he replied in the same remote voice, “except that ship sailed a long time ago.”
“Where are you?” Agata demanded. “You’re not here. Not mentally.”
“Thinking something through. Give me a moment, huh?”
Agata shrugged and returned to her croissant and coffee. When the croissant was done, which was far too quickly to suit her, she settled back. With the coffee in one hand, she pulled out the current burner phone and checked statuses and feeds. As long as she didn’t respond to anything, her ping off a cell tower would be anonymous.
There actually was a cell tower somewhere nearby, for all five bars showed.
Brian Cook’s email was at the top of her inbox. Agata’s heart hurried a little faster as she opened the email.
Sorry, A. I just don’t think this is going to happen…
Agata turned off the phone and shoved it in her pocket with a violent movement and sat back. Unhappiness swirled in her chest.
“You look as though your cat died, Kelsey,” Cain said.
She turned her head away from him. She didn’t want him to see how upset she was. Even she was surprised by how badly she was taking the news. “Brian says the NASA job won’t happen for me.” Her voice was wooden.
Silence.
Cain stirred, his boots crunching the snow, compacting it. “I’d say sorry and too bad and all that…only, you know the job was never going to happen, don’t you?”
Astonishment rippled through her, pulling her head around to look at him. “What the hell does that mean?”
Cain had turned on the bench to look at her squarely. His chin dropped. He lifted his black brows and looked under them at her with a wise expression. “He was stringing you along, Agata. He had no intention of lifting a finger to help you get the job.”
Agata caught her breath. “You don’t know that. How could you?”
“I can read between the lines,” Cain said. His tone was calm. Even a little warm. “You’ve been haranguing him for…what? A week or more?”
“Ten days,” she admitted.
Inside Man Page 17