JURA MOUNTAINS, SWITZERLAND
A hundred kilometers outside Bern, on his way to Zurich, Hans was still obsessing about Elizabeth. To ease the ache, or at least to give it a more pleasing shape, he put on a CD of Kind of Blue, the Miles Davis session from the late 1950s, with Coltrane and Bill Evans and a handful of other players who got it so right it never failed to improve his mood. Elizabeth had introduced him to the album, sweetly asking his permission one Saturday to play it while they were making love. At the time, he had rudely assumed that she was trying to take charge of their lovemaking. Only now was he coming to realize that she was searching, perhaps unconsciously, for some way to distract him from his own selfish pleasure and thereby prolong hers. God, he thought, she’s put up with so much crap from me. And she’s good for you. Wasn’t that what this music was telling Him? Every riff brought back sensations of touch and smell and texture, small shimmering reminders of their afternoon delights. He turned it up loud and rolled back the sunroof. It occurred to him that perhaps he’d fallen in love. Instantly a part of him railed against the thought. Let’s not get carried away. Then think of a better word, he countered to that voice. And there was silence. No way am I going to ditch this woman, he thought fiercely On the contrary, we’re going to see more of each other. Nights as well as days, weekdays as well as weekends, and Yvette’s suspicions be damned. We’re meant to tough this out-fated to, and they both knew it. He had a sudden impulse to simply find Elizabeth and keep driving, change his name, grow a beard and disappear with her to Bora Bora. He pressed down on the accelerator. The big twelve-cylinder engine responded effortlessly and the car shot up into one of the winding passes of the Juras. He was filled with love even for these mountains. He realized that as far back as grade school, geology had been one of his passions, and he’d found no place better to indulge that love than in these dark namesakes of the Jurassic, an awesome labyrinth of stone, firs and cascades seldom driven at this early hour. Roaring now through the ancient cuts, he drifted back in time to the shallow seas and emerging life-forms that had lent their remains to these heights. I should have become a paleontologist, he thought. Anything but what I did. He looked out through the window, and once again felt calm, suspended in a prehistoric vastness that dwarfed his petty concerns. He could feel the ancient oceans roiling as tectonic up thrusts buckled them skyward into the peaks now soaring about him. I should drive this road sometime with Elizabeth, he mused. She probably loves these mountains, too. Those times I took her flying- those were some of the best moments we ever spent together-banking over snow-capped peaks, wondering at the majesty Jesus, were there any bad moments? Right now he couldn’t recall a single one. Call her, you coldhearted idiot. Tell her how you feel before you forget how to feel. He racked his brain for her number. As soon as he’d had the sense he was being followed-that Yvette had hired PIshe’d taken Elizabeth’s number off all his speed dials. He called two wrong numbers before remembering the right one, and then the mountains bedeviled the connection. Static, dead line. He kept trying, time after time. He was about to give up when he heard her voice, faint and forlorn and hopeful. “Hello? Hello?”
“Elizabeth? It’s me.
“Hans? You’re breaking up. Where are you?” “On my way to Zurich. It’s the mountains, I keep losing you, I’m going to talk fast, okay? I want us to be together. Did you hear that?” Static. Then, “Yes. Yes, I heard it.”
“You don’t believe it. I know. It’s true. I want to find a way to make it work, and the hell with Yvette and everything else, okay? Elizabeth?” “I don’t know what to say”
“Say yes. Say you want to be with me, and then we’re unstoppable. Do you? Please.” An agonizing pause. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“I know I’ve been a complete asshole-”
“Nobody’s perfect. Hans, I’ve been so afraid-” “Of what?”
“Of what? Of what you told me-people listening in-what if someone s listening in right now-they could be-” Hans didn’t hear the rest. He’d just topped a curving rise and a huge black van loomed in his windshield, stopped sideways across the bulk of the narrow road, its hood raised. “Christ!”
“Hans?”
He braked hard and the BMW dug in, but he was too late. He was going to ram right in front of it for good measure. The man, who’d been peering into the motor, jerked up in horror as Hans swore and wrenched the wheel toward the precipice-an act he never would have considered before-but Jesus, it was the only way to avoid killing the poor bastard. The 750 hit the galvanized steel of the guardrail hard, careening off and across the roadway in a shrieking spin Going downhill now, it struck the mountain face like a thunderbolt, glass shattering and chrome flying in crazy arcs. All his airbags deployed in a blast of rubber, gunpowder and cornstarch desiccant. Temporarily deafened, he thought he was safe now. Then a split second later the wind tore the bag away and the car was heading straight back for the rail. This time he struck dead-on and the guardrail ruptured, leaving only the yawning chasm below. But it had taken the last of his momentum, and it was there that Hans’s battered BMW came to rest, teetering on the brink of the road’s cut with fifteen hundred feet of thin Alpine air falling away beneath him. Only a shift in weight stood between him and two and a half kilometers of Jurassic stone two thousand feet below. He was too dazed, too shaken to understand his peril, and he moved, feeling his head to see if it was still there. Then he heard the shout. “Don’t move! Christ!”
The cry cleared his mind just enough for him to realize he was literally on a vehicular seesaw. The man from the van was running toward him. Hans leaned back in the seat and felt the rear wheels of the car settle back onto the road. He tried to open his door, but it was jammed solid. “What the hell were you doing across the road like that?” he roared, furious. The man from the van raised his hands in a calming gesture. just take it easy, buddy-easy’!”
He realized that the car was tipping back toward the abyss. Hans froze, staring through the windshield as the view tilted chillingly down. Then there was a thump and the car settled back, horizontal once more. Hans glanced over his shoulder and saw that a second man had leapt onto the trunk of his car, and a third was racing to join him. The van driver was at his window, urging him out. just come right out the window-it’s all right now, fellah!” American accent. He should have known-the bloody tourists and their goddamn van. He practically dove through the window-with the van driver helping to pull him out and onto his feet. Hans swiveled to confront him and felt a sharp sting in his arm. He jerked back in confusion, thinking for a moment he had caught his arm on a jagged piece of steel. But he was clear of the car. It had come from something the man was holding in his hand-a small dark device with a trigger and a needle. “What the hell you think you’re doing?” cried Hans, intending to scream at them but hearing his voice come out as a slurred grunt instead. Then everything went black.
The three men moved swiftly, an experienced, well-rehearsed team. “Close one,” the van driver grunted as he lifted Hans’s feet, eyeing the car at the edge of the abyss. One of the others nodded as he grabbed Hans’s shoulders. “Who knew he’d be going so fucking fast? Jesus!” Within a minute they had him in the back of the van, stripped of his clothes, while a fourth man, naked and handcuffed, watched in stark terror. He was roughly Hans’s age, the same height and sandy hair, though his pallor suggested he had done considerable time in prison. He was praying to himself in Russian. The other men freed him from the cuffs, ordering him at gunpoint to put on Hans’s clothes. The Russian was shaking, obviously not knowing what the hell was going on but smart enough to know it was not good. Like Hans, his body was in fine youthful shape. But his face. with its absence of teeth that had been knocked out by an Israeli hammer, looked oddly senile. As soon as the men had dressed him in Hans’s clothing, matters became simple. They bludgeoned him to the ground, carried him to the car and threw him through the side window into the driver’s seat. One of the men emptied five gallons of highoctane gasoline over the unconscious Russian and the car’s interior, then threw a match. There was a guttural orange explosion, and the two other men jumped off the rear bumper. Gravity did the rest. The car tipped forward, then slid off the brink and fell, turning slowly for nearly five seconds before it struck an outcropping. At the impact, the gas tank exploded, and the vehicle became a comet of fire and twisted steel. By the time it came to rest far, far below, the van had vanished from the road above. Within two hours, Hans Brinkman, now on an IV drip to induce coma, was aboard a specially outfitted gray C-20, the military version of the Gulf stream III executive jet. With a maximum speed of 576 miles per hour and a range of over four thousand nautical miles, the craft was ideally suited to this mission. It was registered to Air West, a front corporation owned by the National Security Agency. The requisition came through such a filter of organizations within the secret hierarchy of American intelligence that the flight was rendered effectively nonexistent. Hans was monitored by Dr. Emilio Barrola, sixty-five, a specialist in neurosurgery handpicked by Frederick Wolfe. Barrola was six foot two, with green eyes and flaring nostrils, dark flowing hair and the powerful hands and long graceful fingers of a concert pianist. He wore thin, wire-rimmed glasses, a tailored pin-striped shirt, and was as ambitious as he was accomplished. He was perfectly aware that his participation in this project could easily land him in prison if it were ever brought to public light. He also knew he could be vaulted into the upper reaches of scientific achievement if he and his colleagues pulled off what he was convinced they were about to, and his heart pounded against his ribs despite his outward calm. As aide and muscle for Barrola, there was thirtytwo-year-old Lieutenant Lance Russell, also handpicked, in this instance by Colonel Oscar Henderson. Russell was over six feet of muscle and bone with a mind as simple and honed as a trench knife. His hair was buzz-cut, the scalp beneath revealing a deep indentation across his left temporal lobe, a remnant of shrapnel from a Baghdad search-and-kill mission. His eye’s were a startling pale blue, almost white. Russell’s instructions were to guard Hans’s body with his life and to kill anyone who threatened its well-being. As a multiple black belt, expert in unconventional warfare and unhampered by anything resembling a conscience, Russell was superbly equipped for the assignment. The flight was passed namelessly by NATO air traffic controllers, from one military sector to another, until it was well out over the North Atlantic. One hundred miles off Long Island it was met and refueled by a New Jersey Air National Guard Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker, operating on sealed orders and flown by senior officers only. From there the Gulf stream jet was acquired by the NORAD radar net in Colorado Springs. It slipped down the East Coast of the United States, monitored by watchful eyes three thousand feet beneath a granite mountain, a tiny blip among tens of thousands representing not only every aircraft in the air, but each satellite and piece of space junk larger than a basketball. It was designated F52308, priority one. Other than that, it was absolutely anonymous. Over the Florida peninsula it turned ten degrees ESE, passing over Grand Bahama Island, Nassau and a string of lesser islands and cays strewn across a turquoise sea, until Cuba was visible. The aircraft avoided Cuban airspace, but came close enough to pass its flight control over the Marine air traffic crew at Guantanamo. It flew on past Haiti and the Dominican Republic, then began dropping flaps over Puerto Rico, dumping altitude. The fortress in San Juan harbor slipped by just at sunset, so low that the flight crew could see the tourists below. Then a tiny dot hove into view, just off the eastern end of Puerto Rico. Vieques Island,