Still, it took five months before the German police talked to a woman in a small Bavarian village.
She was angry, she said, because a friend worked as a housekeeper for a rich American man up at that house in the mountains and he paid her too much money. She was nothing but a showoff, throwing that money in everybody’s face with her new clothes and the new car. Nobody else could make that kind of money as housekeepers, and it was unfair. A police visit to the friend’s place turned up a few hundred-dollar bills with sequential serial numbers.
Technology then came into play, with the isolated house, a large cabin that was perfect for withstanding a winter in the Alps, targeted by satellites and drones. The German intelligence service contacted Switzerland, where this suspect had made such an imprint, and asked Commander Stefan Glamer for any ideas.
Glamer gave them one. He knew a man admirably equipped to handle the situation, he said, a specialist, the best there was at this sort of thing, and it would be kept quiet. The Germans liked the idea. Glamer placed a call to General Brad Middleton in Washington.
FOUR NIGHTS LATER, IN cold and frigid darkness, Kyle Swanson was dropped off by helicopter in a touch-and-go two miles from the cabin. He humped in overnight, nearly invisible in his winter white combat gear, using a GPS system that led him right to a ridge from which he could see the house. He came to a stop in a tree line five hundred yards from the cabin. New snow veiled the rocks and underbrush.
Jim Hall obviously knew that Kyle would be coming after him, sooner or later, but the months had passed quietly since Bern, and the harsh winter had clamped onto the Alps, providing an extra barrier of protection.
Kyle studied the place through his binos from the tall trees that shadowed him from the bright starlight illuminating a cloudless sky. There were no lights in the windows. After so much secure time, Hall had let his guard slip. Hell, Kyle thought, the guy can’t stay up and alert all night, every night. He edged closer, into a thicket only about three hundred yards away.
A little dark shape darted nearby, a curious fox that smelled the strange scent but did not follow it. Kyle was glad to see him. Abundant wildlife meant that motion detection sensors would have been useless as a defense mechanism. This time, his binos showed cameras perched at all four corners of the cabin, but he believed the harsh weather had likely corrupted their lenses over the past few months. The dustings of snow and ice would blur his image anyway.
Using a laser rangefinder, he studied the cabin from all sides, charting it with precision in his notebook. A driveway was clogged with snow all the way to the garage, and a snowmobile bulged beneath a blue tarp next to the front deck. Beside one wall were twin white tanks of propane gas for indoor heating. No smoke came from the brick chimney, telling him that the fireplace had been doused for the night and not yet relit. A small covered porch ended at one edge with an adjacent shed that was empty, indicating that the nearest supply of dry cut logs had been used. These days, Hall would have to trek out about ten yards from the steps to the secondary, larger stack. Kyle estimated that more than a cord of split wood was left. A path had been worn in the snow with the routine of bringing the logs inside. Everything seemed in place, and matched precisely with the information that the cleaning woman had provided the police.
As a precaution, Swanson slowly turned and scanned in a circle all about him, comfortable that he was invisible and alone, but checking nonetheless. This was an omnidirectional target, so there should be no one scouting behind him. The silence of the mountain was almost tangible. Kyle continued forward, ever more cautiously, and closed to within a hundred yards, then followed a snow ridge into a swell created by the blowing snow, only seventy yards from the house. That would do it.
He crawled forward to come in directly behind the two-foot-high mound, then quietly began to tunnel into the back side, out of sight of the windows and cameras. The new snow was soft and gave way easily to the small entrenching tool and his busy hands and feet. Kyle constantly estimated the depth of his burrowing, and finally his fingers punched through the outer crust and he stopped. He could see the front porch through the hole, which he carefully widened to become a small window at the front of his snow cave. He pulled a square of white cloth from his pack and secured it across the mouth of the hole, with a little space left at the top. It resembled the veil of a burka worn by a Muslim woman, covering everything but for the eyes.
Kyle squirmed backward. He would leave the rifle in its drag bag to protect it from the weather for now, but when it came time to work, he would be able to sight over the top edge of the cloth and fire through the sheer white material. He had become part of the landscape, and the only possibly visible element was the scope, which was also cammed out. In addition, the rising sun would be at his back and shining into the eyes of anyone on the porch. It would be impossible to spot his hide site.
Out of the wind and the weather, comfortable in the insulated suit and secure in his small igloo, he broke out some rations and calmly munched a bar of chocolate and drank some water. For Kyle, time simply stopped. He could stay there as long as need be, and the only mild concern was whether his trapped body heat might melt the tunnel.
Forty-eight hours ago he had been with Lauren at a hospital run by the CIA. She had survived the attack in Bern, but barely. The major artery in her leg had only been nicked, and skilled Swiss doctors managed to suture it before she bled to death. The bullet in the back had chipped the collarbone and sent fragments tearing deep into her, perforating a lung. The doctors had to cut deeper than they wanted, leaving behind a heavy lacework of scars that were requiring plastic surgery. The flawless beauty of her face remained intact, which only amplified the torn places in her back and leg. She was visited each afternoon by a Company psychiatrist.
Kyle did not care how she looked; she was alive, and he would be her guide back to full health. Lauren was strong and was getting through the process as well as could be expected. He knew she would.
She had burst into tears unexpectedly when he told her he had to leave for a little while. One more mission. He would make it quick, then come right back. She asked, How many more missions would there be? Having come so close to death herself, she looked at life differently now. When he could not answer the question, Lauren closed her eyes in disappointment and kept them closed. He did not know what that meant. Kyle kissed her softly, then left the room.
He pushed those thoughts aside because he could not dwell on that now, or any other things in the past, or future. This moment, this instant in time, was sucking up all of his concentration until the only thing he was thinking about was the shot to come. All of his senses were alive and vibrant. It would have to be exact, because he did not want to kill Jim Hall immediately, only to incapacitate him.
In fact, it was so important not to kill him with the first shot that Kyle had chosen a little rifle that fired a small.22 caliber long bullet for the job. He had finished the computations, figured the angle of the dangle, as his pals called the mathematics of the sniper’s job, and was listing the likely damage that would be caused by such a gut shot when lights began coming on in the windows. Swanson readied the rifle and peered through the scope over the veil. Wisps of smoke came from the chimney. The door of the house opened.