by Trevor Scott
One song flowed into the next, sounding almost the same, and the blonde shoved aside the bald man and strutted up to Jake. She pushed another smaller woman away from him, picked up the drink, her back against the bar, and downed half of it. Then she took her hand and guided his palm to her firm buttocks. He wasn’t in any position to complain about that.
She yelled into his ear, “Let’s go.”
He couldn’t complain about that either. They left the deafening beat and walked out onto a back street in the part of Innsbruck that tourists would never see. She had her hand on his butt as they swaggered down the cobblestones.
Jake’s new apartment was only four blocks from the techno bar. He opened the door, flicked on the lights, and headed straight for the kitchen area, which was open to the living room and separated only by a counter.
“May I use your bathroom,” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. He rummaged through the refrigerator, found a few beers, and popped the tops.
As he turned, the woman was leaning against the doorframe completely naked. Jake had visualized her through her revealing clothes, and his thoughts had been pretty damn accurate.
“Why don’t you bring those with you to the bedroom,” she said, turning and strolling toward the back room.
The phone rang in the dark room. Jake swiped his hand around seeking it out, finally bringing the handset to his ear. “Hello.”
There was no answer for a moment, and Jake wondered if he had actually heard it ring. It was the first time it had rung in the few days he’d been there. The blonde next to him rolled over, her bare breasts pushing against his back. Her perfume still lingered in the air.
“Hello,” he said again.
He was about to hang up when a voice came out saying, “Is this Jake Adams?”
“Yeah, who the hell is this?” He checked the red glow of the clock radio; it read three-fifteen.
“Never mind. I’ve got a job for you.”
The voice was deep and resonant with a strained English accent, as if he had learned the language from a horrible actor. “I’m not ready to take on anything yet.” Especially with those nice breasts rubbing against his back. She had a hand on him now, stroking him to life.
The man on the phone relented. “It has to do with a woman you know in the Agency.” There was silence for a moment. “I don’t think I need to name names. You know who I mean. Meet me behind the Kublatz Restaurant in an hour.”
The man hung up and Jake set the phone down gently.
“I hope that wasn’t anything important,” she said, sliding even closer to him. “You have time to put that big boy someplace?”
He checked the clock again and then rolled onto her.
Forty-five minutes later, Jake stepped lightly down the edge of the dark alley. Shards of dense snowfall bit at the back of his exposed neck like tiny needles.
He crept forward, thinking about pulling his gun from inside his jacket, and dismissing the thought as paranoia.
Suddenly, there were two flashes in the darkness. Jake dove behind a metal dumpster. He was right where the man on the phone had told him to go; the alley behind the Kublatz Restaurant. His mind clouded with obscure ignorance as he tried to understand the flashes that had surely come from a silenced handgun, and wondered why in the hell he had come there at four in the morning.
●
Quinn laughed to himself, gazing through the night vision goggles at the dumpster that Adams had just scurried behind like a frightened rat. His shots had gone way over the man’s head, but then Jake had no way of knowing that. It was perfect. When he had first heard that the man who had ruined his life would be in the same city as him, he couldn’t believe his good fortune. When he had actually seen the man, he knew that his luck was changing for the better. He had thought long and hard in prison, projecting a scenario for this very meeting. The city didn’t matter. Circumstances like this couldn’t be ignored. He had Adams just where he wanted him.
●
Jake peeked around the dumpster for a better view of what lay in the murky corner of the alley, but he could see only ten feet out, if that. He had his gun out now but wasn’t sure why, since it would be crazy to shoot into the black abyss, unsure of his target. Maybe the two flashes were simply his eyes playing tricks on him. An aberration of some totally explainable phenomenon. Like a flashlight. No. He had been fired on in the dark with silenced guns before, and he knew what it looked like. Even in his current state of near-inebriation, he knew a muzzle blast when he saw it.
Another flash.
He ducked quickly and scrunched his brawny frame deep into the corner of the dumpster and wall. He scratched at his normal three-day growth of beard, wondering how to get out of this situation. Wondering even more how he had allowed himself to get into it.
Maybe he should just retreat the way he came, he thought. No. He’d have to travel nearly a block of open alleyway with no protection. And retreating, although appropriate at the right moment, was never a trait Jake liked to associate with himself. He thought about the voice on the phone earlier. It had sounded somewhat familiar.
A chill came over him, making him shiver and his teeth rattle. He had hastily thrown on blue jeans, black T-shirt, and leather jacket on the way out the door. When he had gotten outside, he realized the temperature had dropped significantly since he had dragged himself home from the bar, and the snow that was supposed to have been light across Austria, was dense and heavy, with four inches on the ground already. Jake found his basketball shoes woefully inadequate.
Taking in a deep whiff, Jake relished the freshness in the air at first and then the noxious odor of rotting pork from the dumpster tweaked his nostrils, nearly making him puke. He could have been back in his warm bed with whatever her name was, sniffing her sweet aroma.
He had to make a move. Think. Finally he settled on the direct method. “What in the hell are you shooting at?” Jake yelled.
No response.
Since nobody had heard shots, he guessed he was on his own. But why was somebody shooting at him in the first place? He had only been in Innsbruck for a few days. Had not even started working his first case. Hell, he was still on vacation.
Shifting his eyes over the dumpster, Jake knew he’d have to shoot back. There was no other way. Maybe someone would hear his shots and call the polizei.
He craned his neck around the dumpster again, and immediately there was a flash. He flipped his gun around and shot twice, the sound echoing back and forth from one brick building to the next. There was a moan off in the darkness. Had he hit the shooter? Impossible. He had aimed high into the brick walls.
Following his shots, a light came on in a second floor window, and a little dog started yapping. Then Jake could see the silhouette of a large man looking down on the alley.
“Why are you doing this?” Jake yelled to the shooter.
There was silence.
The man up above hollered down in German, “I have called the polizei.”
Jake thought for a moment. Then he shouted to the man in the window, “Someone was shooting at me.”
The man disappeared. Moments later, a narrow blinding light came on in the alley and a door creaked open across from him. The robust man looked out at Jake, wearing gray slacks and a white undershirt, and holding a metal pipe in his thick right paw.
“Go back inside,” Jake said. He was on his feet now, trying to maintain his footing in the rising snowfall. He had his gun at his side but ready.
The man saw the gun and shut the door slightly.
With the new light in the alley, Jake looked off to where the shots had been fired, and where he had haphazardly aimed. He could just make out a figure on the pavement, lying away from another dumpster. He crept forward toward the body, his gun out in front. The light was behind him, over his shoulder. Snow falling across his face fluttered at his eye lashes, blurring his view further. When he was within a few feet, he reached one foot out and tapped the lump of a body.
It didn’t move. The body lay face down in the snow with a pile of the white stuff collecting on his back.
Jake rolled the body over. It was a man in his mid-thirties with dark hair, thick brows, and a thinly trimmed moustache. Something was familiar about him. Jake was certain he knew him, but wasn’t sure how.
Oozing out into the deep snow beneath the man’s chest was a large patch of blood that appeared almost black in the strange lighting. Perhaps even frozen.
Slowly Jake reached down to check the man’s pulse. As he grasped the man’s wrist, he was clubbed across the back of the head, and collapsed onto the dead man. The last thing he remembered was a feeling of drifting through snowy darkness.
●
Quinn looked at the two men on the ground. He raised his gun, leveling the sight on the back of Jake’s head.
“No, this is too easy,” he said softly. “I’m not done with you yet, Jake Adams. If I had to suffer, then so shall you.”
He gazed around the snowy scene, ensuring everything was just as he had planned. When he was satisfied, he slid his gun inside his jacket and backtracked through the maze of alleyways.
3
Passo di Villa was at the end of a road that went nowhere. The village sat at the base of the Dolomite Range of the Alps in northern Italy, with a sheer limestone massif encircling the town in a half moon. Water flowed from the high rocks on two sides, cascading over a hundred meters in majestic falls. The two water sources came together a kilometer north of town, up at the end of the Valley Misterioso, to form the Sano River.
It was six a.m. and Leonhard Aldo was scurrying around the house searching for anything he might need for the next week at his real home in Austria. There were papers scattered across the coffee table, magazines stacked high on both end tables, and even the dining room table was cluttered with journals and old papers that had meant something once, but now he could not remember what purpose they had served.
He looked out the window to the east to catch the sun trying to poke over a crest of the sharp Dolomite peaks, obscured somewhat by a blue hue in the scattered clouds. There was a fresh dusting of snow that Aldo knew would melt as soon as the sun’s rays beat down on it. Only the shadows would spare the snow and ice for any length of time in late March.
Aldo hurried toward the second bedroom, which he had turned into an office, and shuffled through the papers in his open briefcase. He had to be sure everything was there. He couldn’t afford to get all the way to Innsbruck and find he had left some vital data back in Italy that he needed for the presentation. It wasn’t only that problem with proximity. Deep down he wanted all of his findings with him. It was that important.
He started for the door and stopped abruptly, looking down at himself. He had forgotten his pants again. He laughed to himself as he went to the bedroom, removed his brown Oxfords and then slipped on a pair of wool slacks. He checked his appearance in the mirror once more, as if silver-backed glass could show him something his naked eyes had failed to. His dark hair had grown too long and he had not been able to find a comb, so it poked up comically on one side. At fifty, he thought he looked his age. His beard, which had also gotten long and scraggly, had streaks of gray in it. He didn’t have time for his own appearance. Time was something that was finite in man’s life, he knew, constantly ticking backwards until death. And only God knew when that would be, so accomplishment had to be swift.
He headed back to the office, started to close his briefcase, and suddenly remembered the computer disks. He made room in the case for the box of disks and then closed and locked the aluminum case. He thought back to his graduate school days in Vienna when he had lost an entire years’ worth of work after the pipes had burst in the second floor bathroom. That’s when he had bought the waterproof case. From then on, he locked his most vital work in the case each night, and always carried it with him wherever he went. Some of his colleagues in Innsbruck had called the silver case a tumor growing from his right arm. Yet he had never lost another piece of work, and he didn’t intend to.
Scanning the house one last time, Aldo left and walked down the stone steps to his yellow Fiat.
●
A few kilometers south of Passo di Villa, an older BMW pulled to the side of the road. The driver was a man in his early forties, dark hair slicked back, and a leather coat slung open, revealing the butt of a 9mm automatic under his left arm. He gazed at his partner in the passenger seat, a man ten years his junior, who had taken his lead in fashion. Together they looked like brothers from a disharmonious family.
The younger man chambered a round in his 9mm Beretta. “Are you sure he’s going to Innsbruck this morning?” he asked.
The older man’s left eye shifted sideways uncontrollably, and he said, “That’s the word. Scala will fly to meet him this evening, and they go to Tirol Genetics to brief them tomorrow morning.”
“It’s a shame they won’t make it,” the younger man said, smiling.
Lazy eye saw a car coming from town. A yellow Fiat. “That’s him. Let’s do it.”
He turned the car sideways in the road, blocking the Fiat’s path.
●
Sixteen kilometers down the mountain from Leonhard Aldo’s village, Toni Contardo pushed her arms against the side of her Alfa Romeo, tightening her calf muscles as if preparing for a jog. Then she stretched her arms back behind her head and tightened her hard muscles. She swiveled her neck in a circle trying to loosen the kinks. At thirty-four, she was an extremely attractive woman with long, black curly hair. She wore a black leather coat well below her knees, tight dark jeans, and Italian leather pumps. For her the day had started over an hour ago, as she awoke from a short nap following a vigilant watch of the scientist’s house. Then she drove down the mountain to this spot.
She got back into her car and tried to make herself comfortable in the leather bucket seat, but it was useless. In the past week, she had sat in her car more than she had ever hoped to, almost becoming a part of it. She needed her usual morning jog. But she couldn’t take it. She knew the scientist’s car would come down out of the tiny mountain road that wound up through the canyon to Passo di Villa any moment now, and she had to be ready. While sitting in a booth behind the two scientists two nights ago, she had found out that Aldo would drive to Innsbruck and present his findings to his employer in twenty-four hours. Scala would first go to the University of Milan and then fly up to meet Aldo the next day. Tonight.
Toni had a perfect view of the road where she sat. She had pulled her car off to the mountain side of the road in the early morning darkness, waiting for Aldo’s beat up Fiat to appear. She could have simply gone to Innsbruck and waited for the scientist at his house, but she didn’t want to let Aldo out of her sight for that long.
She powered the windows down to let in some cool fresh air, took in a deep breath, and then slowly exhaled. Maybe she could get used to the mountains after all. She had lived in Rome for so many years—working first for the old CIA and then the new Agency—she knew it would be difficult to call any other place home. New York seemed so far away, both in distance and in memory.
She thought back on the last week. It seemed so long ago when the Agency’s Vienna office had called her boss in Rome asking for her by name. She had flown to Vienna for a quick briefing, flown back to Rome to pack her things, and then driven north to the Dolomites and the tiny village of Passo di Villa. Having taken the small room in the only pension in town, Toni had passed herself off as a mountain climber. The area was normally infested with climbers, but she was pushing the season by a few months. Her days had been spent taking short hikes, and nights she had watched the scientists from a distance, trying to confirm how close they had come to finding the secret of the region.
She was used to working alone, but smiled thinking how nice it would have been if Jake Adams had been with her this past week. He loved the mountains.
Toni’s reverie was broken by the sound of tires squealing and a tiny engine stroking to red line
. It was coming down the mountain canyon at high speed, but she wouldn’t be able to see it for a moment, she realized.
Her wait wasn’t long. She started her engine when she saw the first flash of a car streaking toward the mountain highway. The little yellow Fiat braked hard, tires burning and engine churning, and it barely made the corner, not even hesitating at the stop sign. It was the Austrian scientist. But what was the hurry?
Toni’s answer came in seconds, as a second car, an older BMW completed the same maneuver and picked up the pace toward the Austrian’s car.
Toni pulled out after them.
●
Tires screeched as the Fiat cornered sharply around the switchback. The front tires seemed to leap and hop as they dug into the dry pavement, hit the streaks of snow run off, and then the dry again, squealing as it lurched around the tight curves.
When the car pointed toward the straightaway, Leonhard Aldo looked into the rearview mirror. The old BMW was still there and closing fast.
He had barely left Passo di Villa when he came across the BMW turned sideways on the road. He had stopped abruptly and then sped off around the car through the ditch when the two masked men had drawn their weapons. He had heard the guns fire, but had not felt any bullets hit his car. Why were they after him? He was only a scientist. Were they merely thieves looking for money? If that had been the case, which Leonhard didn’t believe for a minute, then they had chosen the wrong man. For he was not rich by any measure.
The BMW was closing in. But Aldo knew the Dolomite Road to Bolzano quite well, since he traveled it often from his native Austria, and there was a turn up ahead. A sharp turn.
He jammed the brakes and his tail slid outward, almost to the edge of the road. He downshifted, gave it gas, and pulled out of the spin. He tried not to look down. It was nearly a straight drop of a hundred meters to the Avisio River below. It was another hundred meters up to his right. And that was also a concern, with rocks falling and recent snow melting and freezing across the road. He had almost lost control coming down the canyon road where the ice had formed a black sheen, unnoticeable on the pavement.