by Ted Bell
“Yes.”
“How many . . . uh, sorry . . . how many didn’t make it?”
“Two of the twenty-five children aboard the Silver Arrow gondola died of their injuries en route to the trauma center.”
“I see. How unspeakably sad.”
“Indeed.”
“And . . . have the parents been notified of the loss of their children?”
“I cannot provide that information, Lord Hawke. I’m very sorry.”
“Please tell me that my son was not one of the fatalities. Please tell me that. You’ve got to do that for me. I’m going insane . . .”
“I’ll see what I can do. I need a word with the head of admissions. She’s just down the hall. Can you excuse me for a few minutes?”
“Thank you,” Hawke said. “Thank you very much indeed.”
“May I have your son’s passport? His picture could be helpful.”
“Yes. Yes, of course you can.”
He handed it to her as she got up from the chair. He knew he was on the verge of tears and fought them back.
Suddenly she was back at her desk, speaking to him in a soft voice. “Lord Hawke? Are you listening?”
“What?”
“Do I have your full attention?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
“I was saying that, unfortunately, I am forbidden by hospital policy from giving you any information regarding the disposition of parent notifications of the deceased or seriously injured. I’m sorry.”
Hawke lowered his head. “I understand.”
“Lord Hawke, if I may speak to you in the strictest confidence, there is one thing I can tell you that may help . . .”
“Yes?”
“Lord Hawke, the two deceased children were both little girls. Twins, as a matter of fact. Age six.”
“My god.”
“There’s something else, sir. I’m afraid we can find no record of an Alexei Alexandrovich Hawke being admitted to this hospital.”
“Of course he was admitted!” Hawke leaned forward, aware that he was raising his voice.
“You say there were twenty-five children aboard your gondola? The Silver Arrow?”
“That’s correct. Twenty-five. The instructor made each of them count off after the doors closed. I heard them! I heard my son’s voice call out ‘Nine!’ I heard him. ‘Nine, sir!’ he cried out!”
“I’m terribly sorry, Lord Hawke. But only twenty-four children disembarked from the rescue helicopter up on the roof. And only twenty-four children were admitted. We have no record at all of your son.”
“But he has to be here! For god’s sake, look at his picture! He’s here!”
“I showed his picture to all of the admitting staff, sir. No one recalls seeing this boy or taking his information. I’m very, very sorry. I don’t know what more we can do—”
“There’s got to be some mistake. I’m going to walk through the pediatric ward, look for him there and—”
“No one save staff is allowed to do that.”
“I pity the man who tries to stop me.”
“Besides, there are some children in intensive care and some still undergoing surgery. There is no Alexei Hawke in either place. I don’t know what more we can do.”
“Where is he, then? Maybe he wandered off after getting off the helicopter. Maybe he was dazed and just wandered off, a concussion perhaps . . . Isn’t that a possibility?”
“Lord Hawke, I understand how difficult this must be for you. I will make an exception. You are free to search the other floors and the grounds of the hospital. That’s really all I can offer. I have to tend to my patients. I wish you all the luck in the world. I’m sure you’ll find him. He’s got to be somewhere. It was rather chaotic up on that helipad. Perhaps he really did just wander off into the streets . . .”
“No. My son is gone, do you understand me?” Hawke said. “Someone has taken him.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Cotswolds
After a quiet supper with his wife, Lady Diana Mars, Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve repaired to his small study. Up on the second floor, his refuge was located in the oldest wing of Brixden House, the great manor house above the Thames that once belonged to the Astors.
On a chill night like tonight, during these frigid wintry months, there was always a cheerful fire, dry pinewood crackling in the low stone fireplace. The book-lined room was redolent of beeswax and old leather books, spilt whiskey on ancient woolen carpets, and whiffs of woodsmoke from fires long gone cold.
“The smell of pine—god, how I do love it!” the chief inspector said to himself, sniffing the air. Deeply satisfied, he settled blissfully down into the worn leather armchair situated behind the walnut desk. His dear friend Pelham, a man not given to polysyllabic turns of phrase, had once surprised him by saying of the room that he “admired the catholicity” of his library. Meaning, of course, its breadth and general inclusiveness, not its religions orientation.
He got the old churchwarden briar pipe going, expelling great plumes of blue smoke, and dove back into his beloved Holmes. This small room was the favorite of the passionate Sherlockian, an eminent student of all things Holmes. His library housed, among its many treasures, not only his leather-bound collections of Dickens, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Dorothy L. Sayers, Zane Gray, Rex Stout, and C. S. Forester, but the first complete collection of Conan Doyle bound in red leather! And a considerable collection of Sherlockian memorabilia.
Tonight, Congreve was diving once more into Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, turning its pages for what was perhaps the eleventh time. A rare Morocco-bound edition, it was one of his priceless treasures . . . let’s see, where were we? Oh, yes, here we are . . .
That merciless fiend, Sir Hugo Baskerville, was pursuing the beautiful country lass he’d captured and imprisoned at his estate, chasing her across the boggy moors. It was a night so foggy that not even a scintilla of light could escape from the mist, and now the fiend had her in his clutches—
A noisome jangle pierced his reveries.
The bloody telephone again! Who on god’s green earth could be calling at this ungodly hour? Good heavens, it was nearly nine o’clock in the evening! What manner of man would dare disturb him at this late hour?
“Hullo?” he said into the receiver, stifling the urge to say what he really wanted to say, which was “This better be good.”
“Ambrose.”
“Yes? Alex? Is that you? You sound awful.”
“Very perceptive. I am awful.”
“Where are you, boy?”
“Hoosegow.”
“What?”
“It would appear I’m an overnight guest of the St. Moritz constabulary.”
“What? Seriously. Tell me where you are, Alex?”
“I am bloody well serious. I’ve been thrown in jail. I’m allowed only one or two phone calls. Lucky you.”
“Jail? That’s ridiculous. On what charge?”
“Trespassing, apparently. Breaking and entering. Aggravated assault.”
“Tell me what’s happened. I’ll make some phone calls and get you released forthwith.”
“Alexei has been taken.”
“Taken?”
“Kidnapped. Lost. I don’t know. He’s disappeared. There was an accident with the gondola this morning. We were all picked up by Swiss Air-Rescue choppers. Alexei boarded with the rest of the children and hasn’t been seen since.”
“No! My god, I’m so sorry, Alex! I’ll be on the next flight to Zurich. I shall come immediately. Tell me exactly what happened.”
“We were on the aerial tramway up near the summit of Mount Corviglia. The rear support cable failed, some kind of malfunction—hell, I don’t know. The car upended vertically. Utter chaos and panic. Alexei and the other children in the rear suffered the worst of it. They were at the bottom of the heap. Two girls died, six-year old twins, many were injured. All were evacuated by a helicopter rescue mi
ssion and flown to a clinic.”
“Was Alexei hurt, Alex?”
“I have no idea. I was at the front of the bus. He was in the back with his Royal Protection officer when it happened. Tristan, you know him. Badly wounded and still unconscious when the children were off-loaded, no idea of my son’s condition. He and I were taken to a separate hospital from the children. When I finally got to Alexei’s clinic, he was nowhere to be found. They said he was not among those who’d been admitted.”
“Good heavens, man. And how did you end up in the hoosegow?”
“I was in a blind rage leaving the hospital. I searched every floor, every ward. I walked the grounds outside and the surrounding streets for hours. Thinking maybe Alexei had suffered a concussion. That he’d somehow gotten separated from the other children disembarking on the helipad. Wandered off unseen. It was my only hope as I searched. Exhausted, I went to a neighborhood pub and had a scotch or two to calm my nerves. Once I had time to think, I knew then exactly what I had to do.”
“Find the man in charge of the rescue mission helicopter and you’ll find your son.”
“Bravo. You’ve not lost your much-vaunted powers of deduction, Chief Inspector. Yes, all I wanted to do was find the pilot of that rescue chopper. There were twenty-five children aboard that tram. And twenty-five children were transferred to hospital in that helo. But only twenty-four arrived at the clinic.”
“That’s not possible.”
“No, it isn’t possible. Not even remotely so. I drove out to the airfield where the Swiss Air-Rescue has its operations center. I demanded to see the pilot who’d flown the children to the clinic. The duty officer was no help at all. Drunk. I’d had a few, but he’d had a dozen. He told me I was crazy, which I suppose I was.”
“Two scotches, Alex?”
“Right. Two. More or less. I told him what had happened. The accident, the children’s rescue by his number four chopper. At any rate, Waldo Pfeffer, this trumped-up air rescue chief of staff, said he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. That none of his helicopters had participated in the rescue. He said I was in the wrong place and get the hell out of his sight before he called the police.”
“Good lord. What then?”
“That’s when I broke his jaw.”
“Always a sound strategy.”
“Right. At any rate, I ran out into the night. Drove round and around the field until I located the Swiss Air-Rescue crew’s dormitory. Door was locked and I kicked it in. The pilots and crews were watching news of the accident in the lounge. I walked in and demanded to see the pilot who’d flown the Corviglia gondola rescue mission. When they too said I was crazy, that they didn’t know what I was talking about, I started swinging and—woke up in a jail cell. You know, Ambrose, losing that boy will kill me, and I just cannot imagine how he—”
“Alex, stop. You need to calm down. We will find him and we will bring him home. Do you understand me? No matter where he is, no matter who has done this terrible thing. We will find him. All right? Are you with me?”
“Of course. How soon can you be here?”
“I’ll catch the first flight out of Heathrow.”
“No, you won’t do anything of the sort. I’m sending my plane for you. My pilots will be waiting for you at the Banbury Airfield at first light. I’ll book a room for you here at Badrutt’s Palace. Anyone else I should call?”
“Yes. You need to call your friend Stokely Jones in Miami and get him up to speed. I will call Scotland Yard and alert them. I’ll also ring up your pal Brick Kelly at CIA and tell him everything. Something tells me we’re going to need a lot of help before this thing is over.”
“Yes, I agree completely. Anything else?”
“Hmm. I’ve been thinking. Is there more than one Swiss rescue operation? Not civil, a military one, perhaps? In addition to a national one? Or even a privately owned and operated service?”
“I have no idea. The chopper that carried Alexei away had a bright red fuselage and white markings. The colors of the Swiss Air-Rescue teams, as far as I know. There was a big white number painted on the sides. Four. That was the number I recall.”
“Righto, that’s the number you said earlier. All right, Alex, that’s good, we’ll start there.”
“We’ve got to locate that helicopter.”
“And that’s just what we’re going to do. Now get some sleep, damn you. I’ll come straightaway after landing to the police headquarters and get you out of the hoosegow as you call it. Then we’ll go find your son and get him to safety.”
“What would I do without you, you old dickens?”
“I wouldn’t even hazard a guess, Alex. See you tomorrow. As soon as we ring off, I’ll put in calls to both Scotland Yard and Langley to spring you from jail first thing in the morning. Now. Try to get some sleep, and for god’s sake, try not to break any more jaws.”
“You’re right. Thanks. G’night.”
Chapter Fourteen
Key Biscayne, Florida
“Get in the damn pool, big boy!” Stoke’s wife, Fancha, cried out. Wearing an emerald-green bikini that did little to camouflage her spectacular figure, she was sitting at the business end of the diving board, sunning herself and wiggling her toes in the sun-sparkled turquoise water. “Water only hurts you if you’re made of sugar!”
Stoke looked over at the beautiful café au lait redhead and laughed. He was watching his pal and colleague Sharkey Gonzales-Gonzales doing lightning one-armed push-ups beside the pool. So named after an encounter with a big bull shark down in the Keys, the Sharkman had yet to break a sweat. Already had fifty under his belt and gone to get himself a cold one when Stoke said, “Uh-huh, which I clearly am and which you clearly are not. Sugar.”
She laughed, her white teeth gleaming, and dove for the bottom, surfacing moments later at the shallow end.
“I love the shallow end!” she cried out, laughing. “It reminds me so much of you, darling, you and all of your little friends!”
“Wait!” Sharkey said, returning with a Bud tallboy. “She include me in that? She calling me shallow? Shallow? Hell, I don’t even know what that means, shallow.” The man, like Stoke himself, was wearing a bathing suit and a big floppy red Santa cap. He was a wiry little guy, not quite five and a half feet, but tough and sinewy as old cowhide.
“Uh-huh,” Stoke said. “Me either, Shark. That’s because your ass needs to be deep to understand why you’re shallow. But, according to that woman over there, we so damn shallow, we will never understand. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“What?”
To call Stokely Jones Jr. shallow may or may not have been entirely accurate. But his wife’s calling him big was the grossest form of understatement. This man mountain—this ex-U.S. Navy SEAL, ex–New York Jet linebacker, ex-NYPD detective—was huge. His best friend, his comrade-in-arms, Alex Hawke, always joked that Stoke was “about the size of your average armoire.” To call Sharkey anything at all was to risk getting your ass handed to you. As Hawke once said, “He’s only got one arm but one arm is all he needs.”
A decade ago, the little Cuban fishing guide had taken the George W. Bush family bonefishing out of Cheeca Lodge on Islamorada. Diving into the water in hot pursuit of the president’s dropped Ray-Bans, the man so nice they named him twice lost his left arm to a bull shark off Ramrod Key. The shark was having a run at a big swordfish the president had just caught for lunch, snacking on chunks of it as the fish surfed and bounced and rolled in the boat’s foaming wake, trailing at the end of the starboard outrigger.
Sharkey, tired and cross at the end of a long day of too few bonefish, slowed the old bucket to stop, dove off the transom, and went after that shark with his machete. It was not an epic struggle.
The shark won.
Sharkman still lived in his “office,” a battered old Hatteras fifty-foot Yacht Fisherman he’d named Maria for his estranged wife.
Sharkey, a legend among the fishing classes in the Keys, was up in Miam
i a lot. He often did part-time work for Tactics International, Stoke’s soldier-of-fortune outfit based in Coconut Grove across the bay over in Miami. The two men did freelance counterterror operations around the globe, working for CIA on an as-needed basis, which lately had turned out to be very frequently. And profitable. All of which made Alex Hawke, who’d put up the capital for Tactics’s formation, very happy.
The two warriors weren’t working today. It was Christmas Day, after all. And also Shark’s wife, Maria, had left him a month ago, on Thanksgiving Day. That morning she’d gotten a call from a friend that her husband had been seen around town with a six-foot-tall three-hundred-pound Seminole woman named Florence Lawrence. Apparently, Florence Lawrence was a checkout queen at the local Publix supermarket.
Also, to add insult to injury, it turned out that Sharkey had met the Indian princess just one week earlier, while he was at Publix buying their Thanksgiving turkey, a big bird Maria had just put in the fucking oven when she got the heads-up call from her neighbor! Shark discovered the half-baked bird full of stuffing under the covers at the foot of his bed when he climbed into the sack that night.
Shark screamed, remembering that they had watched “The Godfather” two nights earlier. Since the suddenly single Sharkey had no children and no other family of any note, Stoke had invited him up to spend the holiday at Casa Que Canta. This was the luxurious waterfront estate compound of Mr. and Mrs. Jones on Key Biscayne in Miami.
“You looking good, brother man,” Sharkey said, watching Stoke now keeping up his own rapid-fire push-ups poolside. The big man was still a little banged up from his last mission. He and Hawke had gone to Cuba, sailing right into the harbor at Isla de Pinos. There, Stoke, Hawke, Harry Brock, and a combined force of CIA, plus British and American forces, had assaulted a Cuban KGB compound, reducing it to rubble.
It was here, at the site of the Russian’s Cold War spy compound, that the Russians had stored WMDs, weapons of mass destruction and other explosive devices. These with the intent of attacks on America’s southeastern coastline should the current détente between Moscow and Washington turn into a real-life shooting war.