Jack laid Belinda on the kitchen counter, dug his knuckles into her sternum, then flicked her eyeballs with his fingers. She winced, then let out a groan.
“Belinda! Do you hear me? Belinda, it’s Jack!”
“Jack,” she murmured.
“Is there a root cellar?” he asked. He wasn’t going into the basement, where the propane would be the thickest, without knowing there was an escape route. Jack kept rubbing his knuckles against her chest bone. “Belinda! Root cellar! Is there a root cellar?”
Her eyelids fluttered open and focused on Jack. “Root cellar?”
“In the basement! Is there one?”
She nodded feebly. “Behind water heater.”
The phone beeped. Two minutes, the text said.
Jack didn’t reply. They weren’t bluffing.
He threw Belinda over his shoulder, walked to the nearest window, spent thirty seconds inhaling fresh air, then clamped the penlight in his teeth and headed down the stairs, the beam dancing wildly over the walls. At the bottom was a narrow brown-brick passage. Now the stench of propane was almost acidic, like a chunk of manila rope being snaked through his sinuses. Jack turned right. Belinda’s head bumped against the bricks. She let out a yelp. A good sign.
The passage opened into a twenty-by-twenty-foot rectangular space with a dirt floor. Sitting against the left-hand wall was a long propane tank. Jack headed that way, playing his flashlight over the piping until he found a cluster of gauges. Zip-tied to one of the pipes was a pencil detonator bundled to a cell phone with duct tape. Simple and effective. The number of wraps on the duct tape made getting to the phone’s battery time-consuming. More important, the accelerometer that was likely built into this phone could also serve as an ideal anti-tamper switch.
Forget it, move on.
Belinda’s body, draped limply over his shoulder, started convulsing. She retched. Jack felt the gush of warm vomit on his neck. He turned his head, shining the beam over the space. Ahead, sitting beside a line of wall-mounted wooden shelves, was the cylindrical water heater. Jack headed that way. Nausea washed over him and his stomach heaved. He kept putting one foot in front of the other.
The cell phone beeped again. He didn’t need to look at it. One-minute warning.
He reached the water heater and followed its curve to the rear wall. His knee bumped against something hard, but not brick. Wood. He looked down and his flashlight illuminated a waist-high hatch.
He dropped to his knees, grabbed the handle, and jerked. The hatch swung open. He bent at the waist and let Belinda slip off his shoulders, then wriggled past her into the tunnel. He reached back, grabbed her wrist, dragged her toward him. On hands and knees, he repeated the process until the tunnel opened into an alcove. Set into its opposite wall were four wooden steps that ended at a set of angled swinging doors; down their center Jack could see a slice of faint light. He crawled up the steps, put his back against the doors, and pressed until he was certain they weren’t locked.
He crawled back to Belinda, dragged her up the steps, her head thumping against each of them in turn. Jack removed the penlight from his mouth and clicked it off, then drew the HK. On his phone he texted, Okay, coming out. Don’t shoot.
He didn’t wait for a reply but instead slowly pushed the doors, keeping his body as close to the ground as possible. If they were seen now and the alarm was raised they’d start taking fire. Death by bullet or death by explosion, it didn’t matter.
Once he got Belinda onto level ground he started his crawl-drag routine again, aiming toward a cluster of trees ahead. Ten feet to go.
He rasped, “Belinda, help me, crawl!”
She muttered something incomprehensible, but his words must have registered. She started clawing at the ground and churning her legs.
Five feet.
Jack’s cell phone beeped. He glanced at the screen:
Time’s up.
He heard a whoosh. The air around him flashed orange.
And then heat.
—
A voice shouting in German filtered into Jack’s subconscious. He forced open his eyes but remained still. His brain was playing catch-up, assembling imagery and sound into something tangible, familiar.
Cabin, he thought. Explosion. The air was thick with the smell of burning wood and the sound of crackling flames. A few inches from his eyes a leaf was smoldering, its edges glowing orange. His scalp felt hot.
Jack heard a rustling. It was feet crunching through undergrowth, he decided. Don’t move. There were no friendlies out here, he reminded himself. Only hostiles. He squeezed his right hand and felt the solidity of the HK’s grip.
The crunching came closer, somewhere to his front and left.
He tracked his eyes back along the ground until an arm came into view; this he followed back to a head of short brown hair. Belinda.
“Etwas?” a voice called in the distance. Anything?
“Nein.”
The reply came from very close.
Very slowly Jack lifted his head, rotated it, and pressed it back to the earth. Eight feet away, a man illuminated by the flames crept from behind a tree trunk. His eyes scanned the ground ahead and to his sides. He held a compact assault rifle—similar to the FAMAS models carried by the men at Kultfabrik, Jack guessed—across his chest.
Belinda groaned, then stirred, rustling the leaves.
The man froze, then slowly pivoted toward the sound.
Slowly Jack rolled right, sweeping his gun arm under his body as he went until it was fully extended along the ground. He lifted the HK slightly and laid the front sight on the man’s chest. He fired. The man went down. Jack rolled back onto his belly, then wriggled sideways until he was facing the ruined cabin. All that remained of the structure was a burning heap of debris sitting atop the foundation-turned-crater. The heat from the flames stung Jack’s face.
He suspected the propane’s heavier-than-air density had worked in their favor. Most of the gas had settled on the first floor and in the basement, and Jack’s opening of the windows had dissipated some of the former. Sitting as far belowground as it did, the basement had funneled most of the blast vertically. In fact, the ground nearest the house was almost pristine. Farther out, the terrain was littered with smoldering chunks of wood and wreckage, some as big as Jack himself.
Lucky or good? Which was better? In this case, luck.
He reached out, found Belinda’s hand, and pinched and twisted the soft skin of her wrist. She jerked her hand away. Jack whispered, “Belinda, if you can hear me, don’t speak. Flex your fingers.”
She did so.
“We’re in trouble. Can you crawl?”
Belinda lifted her head and looked at him. The hair encircling her face was singed and crinkled. “I can crawl,” she whispered.
Jack took it slowly until he’d put a screen of tree trunks between them and the cabin. He rose to his knees and helped Belinda do the same and held her steady as she got her bearings. She looked back at the cabin. Her eyes glittered in the flames.
“Bastards,” she whispered. “Rotten bastards.”
“Payback comes later,” Jack replied. “Right now we need to keep moving.”
Jürgen Rostock had declared war on them. Jack wanted to be far away by the time Rostock realized he’d missed his targets yet again.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND
As far as Jack was concerned, Munich was a closed door to them, and he wanted to spend as little time in Zurich as possible. They were prey, and their only advantage right now was mobility.
Jack wanted to accomplish two things in Zurich: one, investigate the villa to which Effrem had tracked Eric Schrader; and two, do some digging into Alexander Bossard, the owner of the plane that had rescued Stephan Möller from the airstrip in Vermont. For Jack the question wasn’t so much whether Bossard was connected to Jürgen Rostock,
but how exactly.
It was an hour before dawn, and ahead Jack could see the glow of Zurich’s skyline on the horizon. They’d made the two-hundred-mile trip from Munich in just over two hours; Jack had been on the autobahn before, but never at night. He’d found the experience at once exhilarating and exhausting.
After escaping the cabin and reaching the car, Jack had driven south to Munich, where he’d picked up Effrem and their luggage; they’d then gotten on the autobahn and headed west at top speed. Belinda, still suffering the effects of either the propane exposure or the shock of the incident or both, lay curled up in the Citroën’s backseat, a sweater tucked under her chin. Here and there, singed hairs jutted from her head like bent electrical wires.
Effrem was also asleep, his head resting against the passenger-seat window.
Jack hit a bump in the road and Effrem bolted forward, hands reaching for the dashboard. He blinked rapidly and looked around.
Jack said, “You’re okay. We’re a few miles outside Zurich.”
“Thank Cronkite,” Effrem said.
“Pardon?”
“Something I picked up from my mother. She’s an atheist. Walter Cronkite is as close to a God as she allowed in her life.”
“Were you dreaming about Möller?” Jack asked.
Effrem nodded. “I was still in the SUV. It was on its side and Möller was pouring gas through the sunroof.”
Jack decided to use this as a segue. “We need to talk about what happened at Kultfabrik.”
“About what?”
“I told you not to get out of the car. You got out of the car.”
“So? I was trying to help, Jack. I wasn’t about to let Möller—”
“What you did was hand yourself to him, and now we’ll be damned lucky if the Munich police aren’t hunting for us. If Möller had gotten you alone—”
“But he didn’t, did he? Things turned out okay.”
Jack felt a knot of anger forming in his belly. “That’s not the point, damn it. The point is I had a reason for telling you to stay put.”
“Which was?”
“One, to keep you out of the line of fire; two, to have you as another pair of eyes; three, as backup in case I needed someone followed.”
Effrem took a few seconds to answer. “I hadn’t thought about two and three.”
The irony of this conversation wasn’t lost on Jack. Change the words and the setting and it could have easily been an exchange between him and John Clark or Gerry Hendley. Plenty of times Jack had acted on well-intentioned impulse, but in tight spots good intentions didn’t make either you or those around you bulletproof. The difference between “Things turning out okay” and catastrophe often sat balanced on a knife’s edge waiting for that Guatemalan butterfly to flap its wings.
Now, suddenly seeing himself from the outside looking in, Jack felt his stomach churn. My God, how many times had he come close to getting someone killed without realizing it? Or almost blown an operation because he refused to pause, take a breath, and listen to someone else? Effrem was young and eager, and perhaps only now was he realizing the deadly seriousness of what they were doing. Jack had no such excuses. He’d had years to outgrow his impulsivity and yet he hadn’t. Why?
In fact, wasn’t this one of those times he should be pausing to reassess the situation? They were flying by the seat of their pants and Jack was at the stick. Was it time to make a call to Clark or Hendley? he wondered. And tell them what, exactly? The truth was, beyond being able to make a marginal case that Stephan Möller was a murderer, he had nothing but hunches and an ever-growing list of questions.
And now it was too late to call a halt. He had two lives in his hands. If he went home, Effrem and Belinda were as good as dead. The only help Gerry Hendley would—and could—offer was an escort to get them back to the United States safely, and a few well-placed phone calls to a higher authority. And then what? he thought. Hope someone else solved the problem? No. They were in the thick of it now. They had to keep moving and keep digging until Jack found a way to end it.
He realized he was gripping the Citroën’s wheel so tightly his hands were shaking. He was one of those idiot swimmers who paddle into the ocean only to realize they’ve gotten caught in a riptide.
Jack said, “Listen, Effrem, a lot of this is my fault. You shouldn’t be here. Back in Alexandria, I should have said no.”
“It wouldn’t have stopped me.”
“Maybe not.” Jack shrugged. “Either way, you need to hear what I’m saying: These people have tried to kill both of us, and they’re going to keep trying. We either stop now and call for help or we get our shit together and do this right.”
“I vote for that, the shit-together option.”
“Fine, but that means listening to me and doing what I tell you. If there’s time to explain, I will. Otherwise, just do it.”
Effrem nodded, then grinned. “So, when you say ‘Jump,’ I ask ‘How high?’”
“When I say ‘Jump,’ you do it, then ask when you can come back down.”
From the backseat Belinda called groggily, “What stinks in here?”
“Your hair,” Effrem replied.
“Right. And who are you again?”
“Effrem.” He jerked a thumb toward Jack. “I’m with him.”
—
Jack drove around the northern outskirts of Zurich until he found a suitable hotel, mid-priced and transient-friendly near the airport, then booked a room and put Belinda inside with a stash of food and water.
Her facial expression told Jack she wasn’t happy about the sequestration, but neither did she argue. Belinda Hahn had taken some body blows recently: her father murdered, a stranger arriving on her doorstep to suggest her own boss may be involved, and her cabin blown out from under her. Whether she herself recognized it, Jack knew she was still in shock. Sleep was the best thing for her right now.
Once satisfied with her promise to stay in the room, Jack drove the Citroën into downtown Zurich, where he picked up Alfred Escher Strasse and followed it to Lake Zurich. The sun was fully up and the lake’s flat surface acted as a mirror. Jack pivoted the Citroën’s visor to block the glare coming through his side window. In the hills surrounding the city, the pine trees were sprinkled with snow, and the lake ice had melted, save for a few car-size bergs.
The villa to which Effrem had tracked Eric Schrader sat on a stub of land jutting into the lake about halfway down its western shore and was sandwiched between two gated yacht clubs. With the exception of the latter, the location vaguely reminded Jack of his condo in Alexandria. That, and a price difference of five or six million, he estimated.
At Effrem’s direction, Jack turned right on Seestrasse, or Lake Road, then followed its meandering tree-lined course south until they reached the outskirts of the village of Wädenswil. Two more turns brought them to a frontage road not twenty feet from the shoreline.
“Out your window,” Effrem said. “See the stone pillars and the black wrought-iron gate?”
Jack did, but just barely. The villa’s driveway was obscured by tall, tightly packed hedgerows and overhanging pine boughs. Without slowing the Citroën, Jack scanned the entrance for signs of security but saw only a card reader mounted on a stone pillar. No cameras, no post for an attendant, and the ivy-covered wall on either side of the entrance was barely six feet tall, its crest made of smooth stone. Nor did Jack see any address placard. Ten feet through the gate, the driveway curved out of view.
Jack kept driving and the villa’s entrance disappeared in his side mirror. “And this is where Schrader stayed?” he asked.
“Like he owned the place,” Effrem replied. “Used the card reader to get in.”
“Have you done anything to find out who it belongs to?”
“Tried. When it comes to places like this, the Swiss treat property ownership the same way
they treat their banking—with rigid privacy standards.”
“Unless I missed seeing something, the perimeter is a piece of cake. Whether there’s a security system on the house itself is another question.”
“I can’t believe I’m the voice of reason on this one, but what would we gain from breaking into the place? I’m guessing our hunch is right and it belongs to Alexander Bossard. What would we hope to find inside?”
It was a good question, and Jack didn’t have an answer to it. They were unlikely to find a cardboard box labeled “Clues” in one of the villa’s closets, but they had few leads, and only two in Zurich: this villa and Alexander Bossard. He wasn’t going to brush aside either of them without some due diligence first.
That reminded Jack of something: “Have we heard back from Hacker Mitch yet on his hunt for Gerhard Klugmann?”
“Hold on,” Effrem replied. He pulled out his cell phone and sent a text. The reply was immediate. He read it, then said, “He’s getting close. Today or tomorrow, he hopes.”
“Push him a little bit.”
After Zurich, unless they decided to knock on the front door of Rostock Security Group’s headquarters and ask to see Jürgen himself, they were out of leads. Getting to Klugmann was the kind of break they needed.
—
To kill time before nightfall Jack drove into Zurich’s Altstadt, or Old Town, to put eyes on Bossard’s office building. The Altstadt, also known as District 1, was a collection of perfectly restored medieval buildings, Romanesque churches, postage-stamp parks, and boutique shops and restaurants all contained within a maze of alleys and streets sitting astride the Limmat River. The place reminded Jack of a real-life Santa’s village. Jack saw few cars, but the sidewalks were crowded with what looked like locals and tourists alike, the former hurrying about their business, the latter stopping every few feet to take pictures or gape at their surroundings.
They found Bossard’s building near the Grossmünster—Great Minster—church, one of the city’s oldest and most recognizable landmarks.