The Gryphon Heist

by James R. Hannibal

  Chapter

  fifty-

  three

  CHATEAU TICINO

  CAMPIONE D’ITALIA, SWITZERLAND

  THE INCIDENT WITH MAC cast a pall over the meal. The Scotsman, humiliated, retreated upstairs, although he took an extra helping of prime rib with him.

  Tyler’s reaction to the near betrayal had reminded all the thieves of who was in charge and why. For Talia, though, his actions brought troubling questions to the forefront of her mind. Perhaps Tyler had channeled the dormant assassin within to keep the Lukon illusion alive. Or perhaps his actions had revealed he and Lukon were one and the same.

  The thought sent a chill down Talia’s spine. And that made her jumpy.

  Talia thought she heard murmuring from the walls as she picked up a black Lycra top. She wrote it off, but once she had the shirt halfway on, one arm in a sleeve and the neckline caught beneath the bridge of her nose, she heard the definite jiggling of a door lever—her door lever.

  Someone was coming in.

  Perfect timing.

  Talia yanked the shirt on and spun out through the bathroom door.

  When the intruder came through, he found himself nose-to-barrel with her Glock. Talia scrunched up her features. “Eddie?”

  The geek, clutching a tablet to his chest, closed the door with a foot and used one finger to press his glasses into place. “Um . . . Hi.”

  “Ever try knocking?”

  “I didn’t want the others to hear.” Eddie took himself out of the line of fire, walking deeper into the room. “I have new info. I whispered at the door, but you didn’t answer.”

  “So you picked the lock.”

  “It seemed like the right move at the time.”

  “Ugh!” Talia hooked his arm and sat him down in her desk chair, taking the edge of the bed for herself. “What info, Eddie? Did Franklin get back to you?”

  “Yes. He did.” Eddie turned the tablet around.

  The CIA’s Hispanic double-amputee tech guru waved from the screen. “Hola, chica.”

  Talia gave him a lift of her chin. “Hey, Franklin. What’ve you got for me?”

  “I completed the trace on Lukon’s Dark Web posts. They all originated from the same location.” Franklin disappeared and a global satellite map came up on the screen, zooming in on the mountains of Romania. “The IP address indicates a coffeehouse Wi-Fi hub in a village called Bran, at the heart of the Transylvanian Alps.”

  “Transylvania.” Talia let out a huff. “Fitting. Any cameras?”

  “Lukon is too smart for the café cameras to matter.” The map went away. Franklin returned to the tablet screen. “Chances are, he linked to the hub from the street outside.”

  “So we’re still no closer to finding out who he is.”

  “Correct.” Eddie gave Talia a questioning look, and she nodded. He came over to sit beside her on the bed so they could both see the screen, although he kept one foot on the floor. “But you’re missing the point. Franklin’s trace tells us who Lukon isn’t.” He moved Franklin’s window to one side and brought up another with several lines of text. “The traces identify the origin of each post in both space and time. Look at the time/date stamps.”

  Talia read the numbers. “That’s three days ago.”

  “When you were in Venice. With Tyler.”

  “It’s not him.”

  “Your guy is legit,” Franklin said from his tablet window. “And with all the coin Mr. Tyler has laid out for this op, I think he deserves a medal, not your suspicion. Just sayin’.”

  Talia had to agree. She owed Tyler an apology. She sighed as Eddie made Franklin’s window fill the screen again. “Anything else, Franklin?”

  “Yeah. Maybe you should sit down.”

  “I am sitting down.”

  Eddie tilted the screen to show him Talia’s knees.

  “Oh. I’ll go ahead, then.” He had turned serious. All the playful crazy-uncle-ness had vanished. What remained was a Marine, the kind who had seen comrades ripped apart and lived to tell their families. That frightened Talia. So did his words. “This part is about your dad.”

  Now she knew why he had wanted her to sit down.

  Franklin sent a document to the screen, an old mailer advertising discount exterminator services, the sort of junk mail usually addressed to Current Resident. Between the lines of text, however, were handwritten phrases. Talia recognized the format, an old-school message coded within the text of an annoying mailer anyone but the intended recipient would throw away.

  “I won’t insult your intelligence with a summary,” Franklin said from behind the image. “You can read it for yourself.”

  She already had. And her whole body had gone numb.

  Contract for Lukon via Archangel

  Fee: Standard

  Timing: ASAP

  Target: Nicolai Inger

  “Dad.” Talia could barely get the word out. Her throat felt as if it were closing. Pain swelled in her side and she doubled over.

  “Talia!” Eddie took her hand.

  “I’m all right. I just need a minute, okay? My old pain. It flares up when I’m stressed.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Talia breathed in and out. As if from a distance, she heard Eddie and Franklin still talking.

  “I’ll take it from here. Thanks for the help.”

  “You got it, mano. Make sure to tell her the rest. Comprende?”

  The rest? What more could there be?

  The names. There had been two code names in the letter. Lukon. Archangel. Talia pulled her hand from Eddie’s and pushed herself up again. “Lukon was there, at the accident.” Her eyes darkened. “At my father’s murder. But in the memory, I saw Tyler.”

  “Maybe not.” Eddie gave her his hear me out face. “I think your mind was filling in a gap. Memory insertion. I mentioned it before, but you shut me down.”

  They had learned about memory insertion at the Farm, a key pitfall in intelligence gathering and interrogation. The mind routinely fills memory gaps with whatever spackle it finds lying around the subconscious. With the right phrase, a good spy can make a subject remember her presence at an event she never attended, or replace a mental image of her with the image of someone else.

  One caring instructor had taken Talia aside to warn her that those with eidetic memories were just as susceptible to memory insertion as everyone else. Had her mind blotted out her only image of her father’s killer and replaced it with Tyler? Was life really so cruel? In Talia’s experience, it was. She grunted against the pain in her side.

  Eddie touched her knee. “Don’t worry. Franklin can’t let go of a mystery. He’ll run down Lukon and Archangel. We’ll find them.”

  “But why?” Talia held her voice steady, but she couldn’t stop the tears from welling in her eyes. She wiped them away. “Why would these people come after Dad?”

  “He was an Army Ranger, right?”

  “The army gave him his citizenship. They recruited him through a program in Eastern Europe.”

  “Maybe there was more to it. Think about the time period. The wall had fallen. New opportunities were opening in the intelligence arena.”

  Talia could feel Eddie leading her toward a conclusion, and before she could ask another question, she saw it. “That’s why he moved to Washington. It wasn’t because of Mom’s death.”

  Talia’s mother had died in childbirth, and shortly after, her father had been assigned to a liaison job in the nation’s capital. She had always thought they sent him there to recover from his grief, but in the next seven years, he had never been reassigned to the main Ranger battalions. Grief or not, no army posting ever lasted that long. How had Talia missed it?

  Nicolai Inger had been CIA. Just like his daughter.

  Chapter

  fifty-

  four

  CHATEAU TICINO HANGAR

  CAMPIONE D’ITALIA, SWITZERLAND

  TALIA AND EDDIE ARRIVED at the hangar to find Mac and Darcy covering the sides of
a box truck with black tarps. The artwork they were hiding was a black-and-gold Formula One racer with luciano grand premio painted beneath. Tyler and Finn were loading the last of several portable fuel tanks into the back, also bearing Luciano’s logo.

  “With these, we can avoid stopping at gas stations along the way,” Finn said as he and Tyler slid the last tank into place. “No pesky cameras.”

  Talia peeked around the two men, counting the tanks. “Looks like you packed a lot more than we’ll need.”

  “Better safe than sorry.” Tyler closed the rolling door, cutting off her view.

  Mac drove GROND, while Tyler took command of the box truck. Finn attempted to climb into the box truck cab, but Talia yanked him down by the belt. “Nope.” She pointed at GROND. “You’re in the van. This seat’s taken.”

  Finn stared her down, and the two did a joint pirouette as Talia maneuvered herself between him and the cab. “All right,” he said, backing off. “I guess I can put up with Mac’s smell for a couple of hours.” Finn snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “But you owe me.”

  The hangar door swung open to the night and Tyler kicked the truck into gear. “Suddenly I feel like the popular kid.”

  “Don’t read too much into it.” Talia clicked her seat belt into place and settled in for the ride.

  The long drive time had more to do with winding roads and slow climbs through alpine passes than distance. Talia passed the first hour in thought, only partially aware of the occasional flash of brake lights from the van ahead or the glinting of the moon on a stream beside the road. The constant throbbing in her side deepened the mental haze. Her old pain no longer stabbed at her, but it had not gone away after the conversation with Franklin.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Tyler asked as they emerged from one mountain tunnel only to be swallowed by the next. When Talia didn’t answer, he raised his bid. “Okay. How about a nickel?”

  “Always the businessman,” she said, watching the van ahead cut through the darkness.

  “Always.”

  Talia didn’t want to be forced into talking about her dad’s murder just because Tyler was bored. She chose a different topic. “I read up on Saul of Tarsus, the man who became Paul.”

  “Oh? I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be.” She glanced at him across the cracked vinyl of the old bench seat. “Help me understand. You discovered God through a man you killed, and you believe God then redeemed you, the way he redeemed Paul.”

  “Through the sacrifice of Christ, his Son.” Tyler downshifted for the descent into another valley.

  Talia didn’t get the correlation. “I went to Sunday school. Paul was a missionary. He sacrificed everything to serve God after his conversion. But you . . . what? Stopped killing people?” She waved her hands in the air in mock celebration. “Yay, you. This supposed conversion didn’t stop you from spending all that blood money.”

  Tyler went quiet for a long time, and Talia thought she had him. She at least expected him to justify his actions. Instead, he threw them aside completely. “My redemption, and Paul’s, are not about what we did. Redemption is about what Christ did. Paul’s actions are an outgrowth of his newfound faith. He served out of love and gratefulness.”

  “And you show your gratefulness by spending dirty money.”

  “No. For the record, when I quit the Agency, they booted me out of my home. I hung on to the money for a while, but I couldn’t spend it. It sat in a couple of offshore accounts until, bit by bit, it all went to charity.”

  “Yet, somehow, you live like Bruce Wayne.”

  “What can I say? I have some useful skillsets and a knack for negotiation.” The tires bumped in steady rhythm over the steel joiners of a suspension bridge. Tyler waited until they were across to continue. “It started with odd jobs for allied governments. Legal work, meeting a niche demand. I became known for organizing diverse groups to accomplish unique objectives. My first big break came while working for Hungary, I brought down a crime syndicate with several large caches of weapons. The Hungarians wanted nothing to do with the guns.”

  “So you sold them?”

  “Stripped and melted them, actually—all by hand in a low-rent warehouse on the outskirts of Budapest. You’d be surprised at the volume of preprocessed, high-value materials you can get from a bunch of weapons and ammunition.”

  “Import . . . export.” Talia let out a quiet chuckle.

  “Now you’re catching on. A great many countries are looking to rid themselves of old weapons, and they’ll sell cheap when the buyer is not a cartel. Some can be repurposed into nonlethals.”

  All his money was legitimate. Talia shook her head.

  “Something else on your mind?”

  “No.” She touched her side, hoping he wouldn’t notice. “Not really.”

  They parked the vehicles on a ridge road that looked down into the Lauterbrunnen Valley, a four-mile-long topographic wonder with sheer sides reaching as high as 3,500 feet above the pristine sheep pastures of its floor.

  Finn led them to a drop-off called an exit point. “Come closer,” he said, reaching back for Talia. “You can’t beat the view.”

  “Yeah . . .” She took a step back. “No thanks. I’m good.”

  “Don’t be a baby.” Finn finished his work and caught her hand, pulling her to the edge. A few pebbles spilled over. Talia expected to hear them clicking against the cliffside, but she never did. Her knees weakened. She threw an arm around his waist and held on.

  “You don’t have to squeeze so hard.” Finn gave her a wink. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  He wasn’t wrong about the view. Finn pointed out a pair of pencil-thin waterfalls descending from the opposite wall, dropping so far and so straight they evaporated into mist before reaching the bottom. “There are seventy-two waterfalls along the valley. I’ve flown through all of them. This is my Jerusalem, my Mecca, the true nirvana.”

  “Wow.” Eddie snorted as the two left their perch. “How many religions can you offend with one statement?”

  Talia could see he was trying to fit in with the Aussie by ribbing him—the geek trying to be cool with the jock. It didn’t work. Finn looked back with a scowl. “What do you know, eh?”

  “But he is correct, no?” Darcy leaned against GROND’s open panel door. “My grandfather immigrated to France from Kenya, where he says Ngai resides on Mount Kirinyaga. In his stories, it is the creator’s presence that makes the mountain holy. You want to make this one holy by climbing up, only to jump off and climb up again.” She made a pbbt sound and gestured at the view. “It is pretty, yes? But your mountain is empty.”

  Finn stared at her for a moment, then shook his head and ducked into the van.

  “Thanks for standing up for me.” Eddie touched her arm. “Here and back in Milan.”

  The chemist gave him a smile. “Of course. You and I, we are in different fields. But those fields have some common math, yes?”

  “Uh. Yeah. They do.”

  Talia thought she saw him blush.

  “Also you are very small, no? You need the help.”

  Eddie turned and walked away.

  No less than sixteen parachute rigging and tour companies occupied the long stretch of pastureland a mile south of Lauterbrunnen’s village, most in ugly prefab buildings. “The daredevils and townspeople don’t mix,” Finn said. “To be fair, the wingsuits make a buzzing noise that scares the sheep, and the schoolchildren here have seen more violent death than some combat veterans.”

  Tyler squinted at the burglar across the moonlit road. “And you think Darcy’s crazy?”

  Thanks to the BASE jumpers’ love for self-aggrandizing videos, the valley was filled with high-definition webcams. Eddie hacked the various feeds from the van’s control center, and looking at the buildings, it was clear XPC were the kings of Lauterbrunnen. Their fenced-in compound sat on a grassy outcropping, high above the competition, complete with a helipad, an
equipment shed, and a log-cabin dormitory for tour groups of trust-fund thrill seekers.

  Finn tapped the live image of the shed. “They’ll keep the rig here. Three hundred thousand euros’ worth of record-breaking engineering protected by nothing but a two-thousand-euro aluminum shed.” He let out a disbelieving laugh. “Some people just don’t get it.”

  “Yeah.” Talia looked sideways at the thief criticizing the law-abiding citizens he was about to rob. “Some people.”

  An hour of patient surveillance told them XPC and their clients had retired to the dormitory for the night. Eddie stayed with GROND on the ridge to keep a bird’s-eye view of the operation, and the others rode down into the valley. Mac idled the box truck at the base of XPC’s outcropping while the others piled out of the back and climbed the hillside on foot. At the top, Finn handed Tyler a set of heavy wire-cutters.

  “For cutting through the fence?” Talia asked.

  Finn gave her a smug chuckle. “I cut through windows on skyscrapers. I never cut through fences.” He turned and sprinted toward the back corner of the fence line, where it ran closest to the valley wall. Without breaking stride, he ran diagonally up the cliff face and did a twisting layout over the barbed wire, landing in a somersault that brought him back to his feet.

  Tyler heaved the cutters over the fence.

  Finn caught them with one hand and pointed them at Talia. “You’re impressed. Don’t try to hide it. I can see it on your face. That flip was—”

  “Do you mind?” Tyler glanced at his watch. “We’re on a schedule. Go let Darcy in.”

  The lights on the perimeter dimmed one by one a heartbeat before Finn passed beneath them, courtesy of a gadget he wore on his wrist. With barely a clink of the cutters, he clipped the padlock on the gate’s control box and motored it open for Darcy and her duffel full of surprises. The two ran crouching toward the dorm. They had preparations to make, leaving Talia and Tyler to watch and wait.

  Tyler offered one of his nonlethal submachine guns to Talia. She winced as she pulled the sling over her head.

  “You okay?” He checked his magazine, seeming only half interested in the question.