The Ambler Warning

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “Believe me, I don’t give a shit whether you live or die. It’s just that the only way I can save my ass is by saving yours.”

  “More nonsense.”

  “Fine,” Ambler replied. “You know what an American president used to say: ‘Trust, but verify.’ Let’s try a variant: Distrust, but verify. Or are you afraid to find out the truth?”

  “You fucking move and I blow your brains out,” the specialist barked as he grimly approached, holding up the gun in his right hand, reaching for the zipper puller with his left. The metal pull tag lay concealed within the zipper placket, just under the collar of Ambler’s micro fleece-lined winter jacket. It took two tries before the slider moved down the zipper chain. Now the man stepped closer to Ambler, groping around inside his jacket, feeling for the inside pocket. The flesh of the man’s face seemed to cover his skull like a coating of hard rubber. Ambler could smell the man’s meaty, slightly sour breath. His seemingly lidless eyes were colder than the mountain air.

  Timing was everything. Ambler composed himself into a state of willed serenity, a state of pure waiting. To make his move too early or too late would be easy, and fatal. Rational thought would provide no reliable guide. He had to be mindful while banishing reflection, cognition, calculation—the encumbering leg irons of conscious thought. The world was gone now: the mountains, the air, the ground beneath his feet, and the sky above his head had vanished. Reality consisted of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of hands. Reality consisted of anything that moved.

  Now the specialist had discovered that the inner pocket was itself zippered, horizontally, and the assassin’s left hand was insufficiently dexterous to move the slider; when he tugged at the pull tag, it tugged the fabric tape into which it was sewn, impeding the slider’s movement. As he fumbled, Ambler bent his knees slightly, an exhausted man diminishing himself further.

  Then he closed his eyes, with the slow resignation of a migraine sufferer. The specialist was dealing with someone who had not only shed his pistol but was no longer even watching him. Sometimes you make best use of a weapon by giving it up. There was reassurance there, at once profound and subliminal—a mammalian gesture of surrender, like a dog exposing its throat to mollify a more aggressive dog.

  Timing—frustrated, the specialist removed his hand, his awkward left hand. Ambler, bending his knees farther, lowered himself a little more. Timing—the specialist would have no choice but to shift his gun from his right hand to his left, an operation that would take no longer than a second. Even with his eyes shut, Ambler felt and heard the assassin start to make the quick switch. Time was metered out in milliseconds. The gun was being passed to the man’s left hand; his left index finger would be extending toward the trigger guard, feeling for the curved apostrophe of steel within it, even while Ambler was bending his knees just a little farther, hanging his head down, like a bashful child. He was no longer thinking, just giving himself over to instinct altogether, and—now now now now—

  Ambler surged forward, forward and upward, the coiled strength in his legs immense, his lowered head ramming into the other man’s jaw. He felt and heard the man’s teeth slamming together, the bone-jarring vibration traveling upward through his cranium, and then, moments later, the neck snapping back, the startled reflex causing the man’s hand to spring open. Ambler heard the sound of a gun clattering to the pavement, and—now now now now—

  Ambler’s head smashed downward in a powerful reverse arc, the top of his forehead shattering the specialist’s nose.

  The man from Marseilles collapsed to the pavement, a rictus of shock on his face giving way to the slackness of insentience. Ambler collected the silenced gun, snaked his way through the woods behind the customhouse, with snow-muffled steps, and then crept back to the shoulder of the road. Technically, he supposed, he had just crossed the border between France and Switzerland. Along the paved shoulder, the assortment of engine parts by the food-service truck was even larger than it had been. But the bigbellied, thickset mechanic was no longer bent over the engine. He was some distance away from it, one finger pressed to his ear, walking calmly toward Ambler, his paunch straining at his grease-smudged overalls.

  The man’s face was jowly and unshaven, his expression the familiar mixture of boredom and resentment found among the French hommes à tout faire. He was whistling a Serge Gainsbourg tune, off-key. He looked up, as if he had just noticed Ambler, and gave him a wry nod.

  A wave of dread swept over Ambler. In situations of extremity, he found himself acting, time and again, before he had consciously decided to act; this was one of those times. He yanked the silenced pistol from his jacket and leveled it . . . even as he found himself staring into the bore end of a large-caliber gun that—with the legerdemain of a magician finding nickels in thin air—had materialized in the other man’s beefy hand.

  “Salut,” the man in the garagiste overalls said. He spoke with the slightly Teutonic vowels of Savoyard French.

  “Salut,” Ambler replied as—now now now now—he kicked out his legs from under himself and, in free fall, squeezed the trigger not once but three times, the quiet, spitting sound of each round accompanied by an incongruously forceful recoil. With near simultaneity, the Savoyard’s long-barreled Magnum blasted away exactly where Ambler’s head had been an instant before he had dropped himself to the ground.

  Ambler landed rockily, but with more grace than the gunman in overalls. As blood gouted from the man’s chest, wisps of steam formed in the cold air above it. After a few spastic coughs, the man fell still.

  Now Ambler detached the Savoyard’s key ring from his belt and found the key to his van. It had been parked thirty yards to the east of the checkpoint, decorated with a logo in both French and German: GARAGISTE/AUTOMECHANIKER. Seconds later, Ambler headed down the road into Switzerland, toward the town of St. Martin, stopping only briefly to retrieve his travel bag from beneath a roadside mound of snow. The checkpoint—France itself—had soon vanished from his rearview mirror.

  The van was, he discovered, surprisingly powerful—its original engine must have been modified or replaced with one of greater horsepower. If he knew how these professionals worked, the mechanics firm existed in name only; the plates would be innocuously registered, while the markings on the vehicle would ensure that it could appear anywhere and at any time without prompting suspicion. Wherever there were automobiles, there could be an automotive breakdown. Nor would the police be inclined to stop such a vehicle for breaking speed limits. Though it was not exactly an ambulance, such repair vans were typically dispatched for automotive emergencies, including crashes. The vehicle’s guise was well chosen.

  He would be safe in this vehicle, at least for a while. As he tore through the countryside, time was a blooming montage of sunlight and shadow, of streets filled with people and roads filled with motorists. Veering one way and then another, he navigated around small, officious cars and big, pavement-rumbling tractor-trailers. Everything seemed a conspiracy to impede his progress—or, rather, his consciousness registered little except for such impediments. Meanwhile, the van itself gulped down the steepest grades with ease, its snow tires and four-wheel drive gripping the pavement with assurance. The gears never strained, no matter how hard he stressed them; the engine never whined, no matter how hard he pushed the limits of its capacity.

  There were moments when he dimly recognized the dazzling beauty of his surroundings—the towering pines ahead of him that winter had turned into a castle of snow, a Neuschwanstein built from branches; the mountain peaks that punctuated the horizon like the sails of distant ships; the roadside freshets, fed by mountain streams, that continued to gush even while all around them was frozen. Yet his mind was consumed with the imperative of motion—of speed. He had decided that he could safely drive this vehicle for two hours, and in those two hours he had to consume as much of the distance between him and his destination as he possibly could. At the end of the line, there was dange
r—dangers to be confronted, dangers to be averted—but there was hope as well.

  And there was Laurel. She was there, would have arrived already. His heart swelled and ached as he thought of her, his Ariadne. Oh God, he loved her so. Laurel, the woman who had saved first his life and then his soul. It did not matter how beautiful the landscape was; anything that separated him from Laurel was, simply by virtue of this, detestable.

  He looked at his watch, as he had been doing obsessively since he had entered Switzerland. Time was running out. Another steep ascent of the Alpine road, followed by a shallower descent. He kept the accelerator pedal at or near the floor, grazed the brake pedal only when absolutely necessary. So close and yet so far: so many gulfs behind, so many gulfs ahead.

  THIRTY-ONE

  DAVOS

  Few places on earth were at once so vast in the popular imagination and so diminutive in physical scale—essentially a mile or so of houses and buildings clustered mostly along a single road. Hulking snow-laden conifers surrounded it like frosted sentries. Geographers knew it as the highest-altitude resort town in Europe, but this was not merely a truth about its physical elevation. For a few days every year, it represented the pinnacle of financial and political power as well. Indeed, the town had become synonymous with the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum—a gathering of the world’s global elite that took place there in the last week of January, when the seasonal gloom ensured that the visiting illuminati would sparkle and shine even more brightly. Although the forum was dedicated to the free movement of capital and labor and ideas, it was itself a heavily guarded encampment. Surrounding a sprawling compound of semi-spheres and blocks—the Congress Center, where the conference was actually held—were hundreds of Swiss military policemen; temporary steel fences blocked off all points of informal entrance.

  Now he left the van in a parking lot behind an old, bleak church with a steeple like a witch’s hat and trudged up a narrow street, Reginaweg, to the town’s main street, the Promenade. The sidewalks had been carefully cleared of snow, the result of ceaseless efforts; wind continually swept in snow from the slopes even when none was falling from the skies. The Promenade was an arcade of sorts, with one shop after another, interrupted only by the occasional hotel and restaurant. Nor was there anything quaint about the storefronts. Here were upscale outlets of international brands like Bally, Chopard, Rolex, Paul & Shark, Prada. He passed a store selling linens called Bette und Besser and a tall modern building that displayed three flags as if it were a consulate; in fact, it was a UBS branch office, displaying the flags of the state, the canton, and the company. Ambler had no doubt which of those commanded the bank’s true fealty. Only the hotels—the Posthotel, with an iconic horn above its giant block letters, or the Morosani Schweizerhof, with a green and black image of traditional Alpine boots above its marquee—suggested any local character.

  Davos might have been one of the most remote places in the world, but the world was here, in full metallic plumage. Cars with well-studded tires and headlights on high beam—he saw a dark blue Honda, a silvery Mercedes, a boxy Opal SUV, a Ford minivan—drove through the streets at ridiculously fast speeds. Otherwise, the battery of storefronts put him in mind of a Hollywood set, a back-lot Dodge City: one was continually reminded of how narrow the town was, because the enfolding vastness of mountain slopes was nearly always visible, a frozen cataract of trees spilling from an unseen summit. The folds of the earth itself—a looming, incomprehensible pattern of ridges, whorls, and arches like God’s own fingerprints—made everything else appear inauthentic, impermanent. The oldest building he passed was a sparely elegant stone structure marked KANTONSPOLIZEI, an office of the regional police. But its residents, too, were only guests, policing what could not be policed—the immovable snow-clad mountains, the ungovernable human soul.

  And what of his own soul? Ambler was exhausted, that was the truth, deluged by information that might mean anything or nothing. His spirits were as dim and chilled as the day was. He felt insignificant, impotent, isolated. The man who wasn’t there. Not even to himself. Soft, sardonic voices began to clamor within his skull, berating and questioning. Here he was, near the top of a mountain, and he had never felt so at sea.

  The ground beneath his feet seemed to rock and sway, gently but perceptibly. What was happening to him? Hypoxia, surely—mountain sickness—the effects of high altitude on those unacclimated to it, which could sometimes diminish blood oxygenation and cause mental confusion. He took deep breaths of the thin mountain air, tried to orient himself to the world around him. As he craned his head and took in the wall-like mountain peaks that seemed to rise up inches away from him, claustrophobia overtook him, casting him back to the rubber-coated enclosures of Parrish Island; and suddenly eddying through his mind was that stream of jargon to which he had been subjected: dissociative identity disorder, personality fragmentation, paranoia, abreactive ego dystonia. It was madness—theirs, not his—and he would overcome it, had overcome it, for his search for himself was what had led him here.

  Unless that odyssey itself was the madness.

  Joining the shadows that surrounded him were the shadows he had tried too hard to banish from his mind.

  A booming, exultant voice of a burly industrialist: You’re the Man Who Wasn’t There. . . . You officially don’t exist!

  The gingerly tones of the brilliant, blind Osiris: It’s Occam’s razor: What’s the simplest explanation? It’s easier to alter the contents of your head than it is to change the whole world. . . . You know about . . . all those behavioral-science programs from the fifties, right? . . . The program names changed, but the research never was discontinued.

  The psychiatrist with the rectangular, black-framed glasses, the long brown forelock, the felt-tipped pens—and the words that burned like an electrocautery. The question I’m putting to you is the question you need to put to yourself: Who are you?

  Ambler staggered into an alleyway and then behind a Dumpster, leaning against the wall and trying, with a low groan, to drive away the clamoring, overlapping voices, the hellish din. He could not fail. He would not fail. He filled his lungs with another deep breath and another and squeezed his eyes shut, telling himself that it was the stinging wind that was making them water. In the brief interval of blackness he would pull himself together. Except that his mind now filled with the image of a computer screen—no, a whole series of screens, impossible to bring into focus except for a blinking cursor in the center of each one, a cursor pulsing like a warning beacon at the end of a single, short line:

  HARRISON AMBLER NOT FOUND.

  He doubled over and retched, the first wave followed by a second, even more powerful. Now he stood, bent, almost crouching, his hands on his knees, oblivious to the cold, to everything, panting like a dog in August. Another voice, another face, entered his mind, and it was as if the sun itself had appeared, burning away the dankness of his misery and despair. I believe in you, Laurel Holland was saying, pulling him close. I believe. You need to believe, too.

  Moments later, the sickness passed. Ambler straightened up and felt his strength and resolve returning. He had swum free from the inky depths of his own psyche and shot to the surface—had emerged from a nightmare that was peculiarly his own.

  Now he had to enter another nightmare, knowing that if he failed, the world itself would be entering it and might never emerge.

  Checking his watch to verify that he remained on schedule, Ambler made his way toward the largest of the Davos hotels, the Steigenberger Hotel Belvedere, on Promenade 89, catty-corner from the main entrance to the Congresszentrum. The giant structure was a former sanitorium, built in 1875. Its pink exterior was fenestrated with narrow, arching windows, mimicking the embrasures of the battle-ready castles of the feudal era. But the only visible clashes, in the week of the forum’s annual conference, were between corporate sponsorships. KPMG had a large blue and white banner mounted over the hotel’s porte cochere, jostling for attention with a nearby
sign for shuttle services that was emblazoned with the four interlocked rings of the Audi logo. His pulse quickened as he approached the entrance; lining the hotel’s circular drive, alongside the usual luxury cars, were military transport vehicles and a large-tired SUV with a blue rectangular police light on top and a Day-Glo red band along the side, against which the words MILITÄR POLIZEI were lettered in white. Across the street, the sidewalk was barricaded with a ten-foot-tall steel grating topped with sharpened points; laced through the grate was a candy-striped banner printed with a firm advisory to KEEP OUT in the three major Swiss languages: SPERRZONE, ZONE INTERDICTE, ZONA SBARRATA.

  Caston, he knew from a voice mail he’d listened to en route, had succeeded in joining the conference center officially: he had used his pull as a senior CIA officer to have himself added to the roster of guests. For Ambler, however, that would not be possible; and Caston had so far learned nothing. The task, after all, required perception, not ratiocination.

  Or perhaps it required a miracle.

  Inside the Belvedere’s vestibule was a large sisal entrance mat for stamping out the snow from one’s feet; beyond the double doors, sisal gave way to elegant Wilton-style carpeting in a subtle floral pattern. A brisk walk-through revealed several parlors that flowed one into another, as well as a dining area roped off with red velvet ropes and stanchions topped with ornamental brass pineapples. Ambler returned to a parlor not far from the hotel’s front desk, where, from a discreet angle, he could watch people entering the hotel, and took a seat on a tufted leather chair; above mahogany dadoes, the walls were covered in black and burgundy striped silk and decorated with arcading. He glanced at himself in a mirror across the wall, satisfied that, dressed as he now was in an expensive-looking charcoal-gray nailhead suit, he looked the part he was playing. He would be taken for one of the many businessmen who, not so illustrious as the “participants,” had paid very significant amounts to attend—those, that is, whose applications were accepted in the first place. In the rarefied realm of the World Economic Forum, the paying guest was regarded with the sort of condescension a penniless scholarship boy would have met with at an exclusive boardingschool. At home, such men, heads of local businesses or mayors of midsized cities, could imagine themselves to be masters of the universe; at Davos, they were its minions.