There had been only one awkward moment since she had arrived on the mountain half an hour ago. She had sat out on the terrace and ordered a salad and a vodka martini, when a stout young man with yellow hair, whom she had taken to be a German, had tried to talk to her. He had been unusually persistent, while her practised technique of defence and counterattack had not been wholly successful, and she had had to change tables.
At 3.40 the cable car rumbled into the shed just below the restaurant. But no skiers appeared: instead, a column of bulkily dressed men dispersed among the terrace tables and were ignored by the waiters.
Two minutes later the cable car started down again. Sarah glanced around her. The slopes were very bright and bare, with hollows of dark shadow. She noticed that one of the men on the terrace was looking up at her, lifting a pair of binoculars as though inspecting the view.
She stretched back on the bench and pretended to doze.
Packer had a light lunch in Davos, bought yesterday’s English newspapers, and a dozen postcards with stamps for abroad, then took the funicular railway, the Parsennbahn, up to the Weissfluhjoch, the last station below the Weissfluhgipfel, the highest peak in the area.
The morning rush of skiers had cleared, and the sloping car was half empty. He was able to lay the ‘Top-Ski’ bag on the seat beside him without attracting attention. He kept a constant but unobtrusive lookout for Chamaz, or his companion from the Chesa bar the night before, but he noticed neither of them.
By the time he reached the Weissfluhjoch he was fairly certain he was ‘clean’. If his reckoning had so far been reasonably correct, the Ruler had set two traps for today and would be content to wait and see which sprang first: either Packer acted on Pol’s instructions and shot Ryderbeit, or Packer and the Rhodesian blew themselves to pieces with the Hartmann sticks. (But both sets of skis, with the deadly sticks, were now safely deposited in the left-luggage office at the railway station, and the ticket had been burned.)
Packer’s nerves were calm; and it was more in a mood of resigned anticipation, rather than anxiety, that he stepped into the diamond-white glare outside the Weissfluhjoch station.
There was a hut with a bar and cafeteria, and a few benches out in the sun. It was perfect skiing weather, and the slopes were sprinkled with streaking zigzagging figures. Packer was leaving himself plenty of time. He was already more than thirty minutes ahead of schedule. He drank a couple of cups of black coffee, then went out and began to write postcards on one of the benches.
The day had so far been uneventful, except for an orchestrated tantrum by Sarah on discovering the condition of the rest of her clothes — an offence which she prepared to attribute to him rather than to Ryderbeit. Her fury had lasted the whole journey back to Klosters, where they had dropped her at the Hotel Vereina, a safe distance from the Chesa.
It was only after they had left her that Packer remembered to check that the radios, still in their pristine packings, had batteries. But however scared Pol might have been the night before, he was not a man to neglect details.
With fifteen minutes still to spare, Packer had a last coffee, fitted the ‘Top-Ski’ bag to the straps under his rucksack, which contained his binoculars, chocolate, and an extra sweater; clipped on his real skis and set off at a careful pace down the two miles of fairly gentle run to the Parsenn Hut.
Here he had eight minutes in hand. As usual, the hut was crowded with boisterous groups of skiers taking a late lunch and drinking on the terrace. Without unstrapping the Top-Skis’, he sauntered between the tables, giving himself plenty of time to pick out any of the Ruler’s henchmen. Again he saw no one suspicious. By the time he was outside again, he had four minutes in hand. Eighteen minutes to go.
He fitted his skis back on and started off down the last lap towards the Mähderlift.
Ryderbeit had ridden up on the Parsennbahn an hour before Packer, while the funicular was still busy, on the loose assumption that his appearance would be less conspicuous in a crowd. He was again wearing his blue pixie cap, but on Packer’s orders he had discarded his combat tunic for a quilted blue anorak, and he was to wear his goggles at all times. Packer knew that it would be useless to forbid him to drink.
When they had parted, in the main street of Davos, Ryderbeit had been oddly silent. Packer was not surprised: Pol had ordered him to kill Ryderbeit, so that while Packer had assured the Rhodesian once again that this was not part of his contract, Ryderbeit’s experience of life had not left him with a trusting disposition.
At the Weissfluhjoch station he had fortified himself with a couple of large Steinhaegers, chased down with a mug of beer; then joined the queue for the short steep Gipfelbahn to the summit of the Weissfluh. Like Packer he was leaving himself plenty of time, ostensibly in case of hold-ups, but in fact to allow himself decent pauses in which to refresh himself. For unlike Packer, Ryderbeit drew a natural satisfaction from taking risks, both calculated and fortuitous — a satisfaction which increased in proportion to the perils involved.
Another of Packer’s strictures upon him that morning was that he must, under all circumstances, avoid creating a scene. At the Gipfel Hut the first thing Ryderbeit did was to come close to a fight with two beefy young men, one of whom he accused of taking his chair while he was having a pee. They spoke French, but Ryderbeit recognized their accent as Belgian, and said something to them in a patois he had picked up in the Congo, which made them flinch, then slink away. But they would remember him.
In the hut he consumed three more Steinhaegers and three more beers, until he had left himself less than eight minutes to cover the five miles to his position on that treacherous bend overlooking the T-bar.
The first leg was an easy run. The snow was excellent and Ryderbeit used his skills to the full. He was the kind of skier who is hated both by professionals and amateurs. He broke every rule of the slopes: racing up behind slower skiers and swerving past them without warning, cutting across them on bends and using his sticks as menacing weapons when someone either failed to notice him or move out of his way in time.
Just above the Parsenn Hut he rounded a bend and came up behind a girl who was wobbling precariously. He made no attempt to slow down, merely swerved a fraction to the side and passed so close to her that his stick caught her a neat cut across her hips and his nearside ski came within an inch of slicing into her ankle. He heard her yelp, and with a glance back, saw her tumble into a crooked sprawl. He grinned and raced on down towards the hut. The thought that she would remember him, too, did not worry him.
At the hut he had to waste two valuable minutes taking off his skis and walking across the flat snow to the head of the Gruobenalp run, where he could calculate on reaching speeds of up to sixty miles an hour. But here again, like a gambler on a winning streak, he could not resist the compulsion to take unnecessary risks.
The run was relatively clear, and his speed soon brought an exhilaration that blinded him to thought. He was 200 yards past the bend before he realized. He pulled up with a Christie that almost threw him on his back; then looked at his watch. He had less than a minute to go. Without panic, he took off his skis and started back up the icy glistening piste, keeping to the soft shoulder where the snow gave him more grip, and where he was less likely to meet skiers coming down.
He reached the bend overlooking the T-bar exactly thirty-two seconds behind schedule.
At exactly 3.49 by her watch, Sarah heard the rumble of the cable car, then a pause as it bumped along the ramp inside the shed below the Gotschnagrat restaurant. At the same moment, from behind her, came a loud clattering noise that reminded her of a London taxi. She looked up and saw the long shadow of a helicopter rippling across the snow above her. The side door of the cockpit was open and a man was leaning forward, scanning the ground through binoculars.
When she looked away she saw one of the men from the terrace tables below walking up towards her. She had prepared herself for this, and picked up her camera. Her movements were unhurried, although
her hands had begun to shake inside their fur mittens, as she went through the motions of winding the film. She peered through the viewfinder just as the man reached her.
He was thin and high-shouldered, with deep eyes in a dry, grainy, ageless face. He stopped a few feet in front of her and smiled with a mouthful of metal teeth. ‘Excuse me, mademoiselle, I regret to intrude —’ he spoke French with a strong accent — ‘but I am obliged to supervise all strangers during the presence of His Imperial Highness.’ He gave a short bow.
The effect of her smile was muted by her dark glasses, but it was enough to make the man lower his eyes. Behind and below him, Sarah saw a group of about half a dozen men walking up from the cable car hut to the restaurant.
‘I hope I am permitted to take a photograph of His Majesty?’ she replied, in her immaculate finishing-school French.
The man gave another bow. ‘Of course it is permitted. His Imperial Highness has absolutely no desire to interfere with visitors here. But unfortunately —’ his eyes flickered sideways to the Gucci bag on the bench beside her — ‘His Imperial Highness is a very important man, and mademoiselle will appreciate that certain precautions must be taken to ensure his safety.’ He held out his hand. ‘May I look inside your bag, mademoiselle?’
‘Certainly.’ She opened it and held it out to him. He stepped forward and took it, and with the discreet efficiency of an experienced customs official, he ran his hands swiftly through the contents and lifted out the Hitachi R/T set.
‘This is your radio, yes?’ He stood looking down at her with a professional stare. She gave a sharp laugh which sounded very loud in the Alpine stillness. The helicopter had moved away, and she could hear the clink of glasses on the terrace.
‘You do not think I stole it, do you?’
The man’s face stiffened at the sarcasm; he looked down at the tiny radio in her hand. ‘It is very small for a radio,’ he said. ‘I have never seen one so small before.’
‘No — my fiancé bought it for me in Hong Kong. They are the very latest models. I have never seen one like it before either.’ As she spoke, she reached out for the bag.
The man hesitated for perhaps three seconds; then, with a delicate, almost feminine movement, he replaced the radio in the bag and handed it back to her, again with his little bow. ‘Merci, mademoiselle. Bonne journée.’
He turned, and Sarah noticed a movement among the terrace tables. The Imperial party had disappeared inside the restaurant, and she guessed that the few remaining guests were also being supervised. The man was crunching down the slope, when she called after him, ‘How do I recognize His Majesty?’
The man turned and looked back at her. ‘You have never seen photographs of him?’
She smiled innocently. ‘Oh, I know what he looks like. But how do I recognize him when he goes skiing?’
He paused, then took a step back towards her. She realized her mistake even before he had begun speaking. ‘With your permission, mademoiselle, I will indicate His Imperial Highness as soon as he appears.’
She watched helplessly as he came back towards her.
‘You will permit me to sit down, mademoiselle?’
It took Packer one minute and forty seconds, from the moment he unstrapped the ‘Top-Ski’ bag until he had the sights screwed into the stock of the Armalite and the sling adjusted to a snug comfortable fit. The last thing he did was clip the glare shield on to the sight and test it against the slanting sun; then he propped the gun against a pine tree, hidden from the piste.
He leaned against the tree, with the radio tucked into the side pocket of his anorak, its short aerial pulled out, the receiver button pushed down. His watch — synchronized with Ryderbeit’s and Sarah’s before they parted — showed a few seconds after 3.59. He waited for a couple of skiers to pass, then swept his binoculars across the horizon. The T-bar was empty, the wooden hoists swinging slightly in the wind as they climbed over the slope.
He turned the binoculars down, to the bend which Ryderbeit had chosen for himself, beyond a ridge of snow and a deep gully. Ryderbeit was not there. Packer knew that the man was no coward, but in the tangle of mistrust, treachery and expedience which had ensnared them since Packer’s meeting with Pol the night before, Ryderbeit might well have decided to take his £25,000 and run for it.
Packer did not recognize him at first. He had been watching the ski run above the bend, when he happened to move the binoculars down slightly and saw the lean loping figure carrying his skis on his shoulder, moving up through the soft snow below the bend. Every now and again he broke into a run, his arms spread for balance, scrabbling his way up the last slope, as the second hand on Packer’s watch crept round to 4.00.
‘You are here alone?’ the man said. He had dropped the ‘mademoiselle’, and his voice had a nudging intimacy which repelled her. It also frightened her. Her eyes, hidden behind the dark glasses, kept glancing down for some movement from the restaurant. She was surprised that the Ruler preferred to delay indoors, rather than out on the terrace. Was he afraid of being so exposed? Or maybe he was just bored with the sun?
She said, with cold politeness, ‘I prefer to be alone. That is why I came up here.’
‘You told me you came up to photograph His Imperial Highness,’ the men replied, and she felt his sleeve touch hers. She shivered.
‘Yes, if I have the chance. It’s not important.’
In the silence that followed, she shifted slightly away from him, but still felt the subtle pressure of his arm against hers. ‘When I asked if you were alone,’ he said, ‘I intended to enquire whether you were alone in Klosters. But that is a foolish question, n’est-ce pas? For such a pretty girl to be alone in a place like this would be impossible! Ah, but I forgot — you have a fiancé, of course. He gave you that radio.’ He looked pointedly down at the Gucci bag which she had gathered on to her knee.
This time she shifted a deliberate six inches away from him. ‘Monsieur, my fiancé does not like me talking to strangers.’
The man’s face cracked into a metallic grin. ‘I think your fiancé is very strict,’ he said, his voice rising as the helicopter returned. At the same time Sarah saw a group of six men emerging from the door of the restaurant. Two more followed, carrying bundles of skis.
She said briskly, ‘Which one is His Majesty?’
The man beside her looked down and saw the Royal party for the first time. They were already fitting on their skis. ‘He is the one in the middle, wearing the red and blue jacket.’
She saw a slim erect figure with grey hair and black goggles. Beside him was a blond man in a bright yellow anorak. They dug in their sticks and pushed off together across the flat snow, slightly ahead of the others.
Sarah had already snapped her camera several times, at random, her mind working frenetically, fighting down the panic. She was only half aware of the man talking to her against the ear-shattering roar of the helicopter, which was now making a low sweep over the restaurant. She saw the Ruler and his party reach the end of the flat stretch, and, with a thrust of their sticks, begin to move down the shallow 400-metre run towards the foot of the T-bar.
She turned to the man beside her and shouted above the noise, ‘Please, I told you, I want to be alone!’
He replied with a smile and did not move. In desperation she opened the bag on her lap and, pretending to fumble for some make-up, she pushed the transmitting button on the R/T set. Then she remembered the aerial. She pulled it out to its full eighteen inches, and at the same moment, with her index finger, snapped on to ‘Receive’. There was a crackle of static, just audible above the helicopter, which was tacking away down the valley. The Royal party disappeared over the ridge of snow.
She turned to the man and said irritably, ‘It’s no good — it’s the mountains. I can’t get anything —’ and with a deft two-finger movement she switched the set back on to ‘Transmit’. ‘It’s getting cold,’ she added, ‘I’m going home.’ She switched the radio off, pushed down the aerial, c
losed the bag and stood up. ‘Thank you, monsieur. Au revoir.’ She began walking at a brisk but unhurried pace down towards the cable car hut; and she knew by his shadow that he was following her. He caught up with her when they were a few yards from the restaurant.
‘Mademoiselle, perhaps you would allow me the honour of offering you a little refreshment before you leave?’
‘Thank you, I must go,’ she replied, quickening her pace round the foot of the terrace, where two men in long overcoats stood watching her with a weary indifference.
It was only when she was inside the hut that she found she was at last alone. The little platform was deserted, vibrating with the high-pitched hum of the cable running over the enormous traction wheel.
Then she realized how cold she was. She looked up anxiously for the red light to come on above the door into the attendant’s office. Below, the cables hung empty as far as the first stanchion, then dropped out of sight. At any moment she expected her solicitous companion to reappear, and perhaps ask to take a closer look at the radio. She considered for a moment trying to hide it somewhere — burying it out in the snow — but reasoned that if he did come, and she no longer had it, his suspicions would be confirmed.
A bell had begun ringing. The red light came on. The uniformed attendant appeared and asked to see her ticket. Below, the car had just appeared over the ridge. It seemed to come on very slowly, crept up into the hut, finally stopped. The attendant slid the door open for her. Inside she was still alone. She stumbled to the front of the car and sat down on one of the flap-seats and began to shake. She opened her bag, swallowed a couple of Valium, and exchanged her fur hat for the headscarf.
The car began to move. As it lurched over the stanchion and dropped down above the sheer wall of the Wang, she leaned her forehead against the icy window and thought she was going to be sick.
Ryderbeit scrambled backwards up the icy slope, using his sticks and heels for leverage. The position he finally selected left him standing almost vertically, his weight balanced precariously against the ice. It was not a good position for any activity, let alone shooting a high-velocity rifle accurately at 800 metres’ range.
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