“In the past ten minutes a green Opel cargo van has passed us three times. Now it’s parked down the street and across from that Starbucks. No one’s gotten out.”
To his credit, Effrem resisted the urge to turn around and look. He asked, “Can you see anyone inside?”
“Just one behind the wheel, but the sun’s on the windshield. I can’t see his face.” Jack wondered how many men could fit in the back of the van.
“What do we do?”
“Drink our coffee and wait.”
Their shadow belonged to either Rostock or Bossard, but how had Jack and the others been tracked here? While their foray to Zurich wasn’t unpredictable, the city was sizable and the bad guys had picked up their trail in record time.
Belinda. Jack dialed her cell phone, this one a burner she had no choice but to use, and waited through four rings before she answered. “Just checking in,” Jack said. “Everything okay?”
“Yes. Why? When are you coming back?”
“Soon as we can. Just make sure the door is locked. Don’t answer it for anyone but us.”
Jack disconnected. What now? He wasn’t about to lead this van back to the motel. The trick would be to either turn the tables on their shadow or shake him in such a way that it appeared unintentional. Once again here was a task where many hands would make short work, but Jack had limited hands, only one vehicle, and too little time for an elaborate plan.
He said to Effrem, “Get on your phone. I need a place that’s remote, but within fifteen or twenty minutes of here. Preferably somewhere with dead ends.”
“I doubt I’ll find it on Yelp, but I’ll have a look,” Effrem replied. He browsed for a few minutes then said, “There are a lot of little villages in the mountains west of here. The roads up there look pretty snaky.”
“That’ll do.”
They took their time finishing their coffee, then paid the bill and walked back to the Citroën. “Don’t look for him,” Jack warned Effrem as they climbed in and Jack started the engine.
With Effrem navigating again, Jack crossed the Quay Bridge, merged onto Bederstrasse with the rest of the lunch traffic, and headed west toward the foothills.
“He’s with us,” Jack said, glancing in his side mirror. “Four cars back, lane one.”
“Anyone in the passenger seat?”
“No.”
For the next ten minutes Jack kept heading west until finally they left the city behind and began climbing into the mountains. Almost immediately the van began losing ground. It pulled onto the shoulder, waited for a line of cars to go by, then did a U-turn and headed back toward Zurich.
“He’s not playing,” Jack announced.
“Or he wasn’t following us,” Effrem replied.
“Maybe.”
27
At nine p.m. they left the hotel and retraced their southerly route along Lake Zurich to Wädenswil. Here, just fifteen miles outside Zurich proper, its night skyline appeared as a hazy dome of light on the horizon. Although it frequently passed through villages — there were fifteen on the left, or western, shoreline — the road south was dark and lightly traveled. Lake Zurich was more impressive than Jack had realized, reaching some twenty-five miles from Zurich in the north to Schmerikon in the south and, according to the fishing brochure at the hotel, more than five hundred feet deep in several spots.
As seemed to be par for the course, Jack had in his mind only a vaguely outlined plan. From their earlier reconnoiter, Jack knew getting over the villa’s wall would present no problem, but the house itself was an unknown. Google Earth’s overhead view had shown little of the structure beyond a hip-and-valley roof that was barely visible through the canopy, a lush lawn, and an acre-size English-style garden on the property’s western edge. For all Jack knew, the grounds were actively patrolled by a cadre of guards similar to the one Effrem had seen in Bossard’s office building. If so, Jack would probably be scrambling back over the wall before the lawn had a chance to moisten his shoes.
Jack pulled into the Jachtklub Wädenswil parking lot and doused the headlights but left the engine running. The villa’s outer wall was a quarter-mile south through a cluster of trees.
“Questions?” Jack asked.
“No, sir,” Effrem replied with a mock salute. “Orbit a half-mile route between Horgen and Wädenswil and then wait until I hear from you. If you text ‘evac,’ I get back here at best speed. If I don’t hear from you within ninety minutes, I pick up Belinda, move to the secondary hotel, wait another day, then leave, head to Brussels, and contact the U.S. embassy there.”
“Right.” This last bit of instruction would likely prove worthless if Jack’s penetration of the villa went bad; more than anything else, it was designed to get Effrem and Belinda back to relatively safe territory. It would also have the added benefit of ruining Effrem’s investigation. If there was no story left to pursue, he might live to see thirty.
“Why the Brussels embassy?” Effrem asked. “Why not the one in Bern?”
“They know my name in Brussels. You’ll get more immediate action.”
Though Jack had a hard time saying this with a straight face, the explanation seemed to satisfy Effrem. “Consider it done,” he said. “Good hunting.”
As Effrem pulled the Citroën out of the lot and back onto the road, Jack walked into the trees, where he paused to let his eyes adjust to the darkness before continuing on until the villa’s stone wall came into view. The trees were thicker here and probably hadn’t been trimmed for years; branches crisscrossed the top of the wall and jutted over the property. While the overgrowth lessened the likelihood of any surveillance cameras picking him up, it also surrounded him in almost complete darkness. Now he regretted his decision to not replace the night-vision goggles he’d lost in Munich.
Deal with it, Jack.
He turned right and followed the wall to its western corner. Here was the most likely place for a camera; corner-positioned cameras offered the most bang for the buck, but they also had built-in blind spots. Jack saw no camera.
Now came the less-than-glamorous part of being a special operator — the waiting and watching. Stealth was as much about stillness as it was about skulking. If his approach had attracted attention, he’d be getting visitors soon enough.
He sat cross-legged on the ground, his back against a tree trunk, and donned his portable radio’s headset. He keyed the talk button. “Effrem, you there?”
“I’m here. Making the turn back north. I’ll be driving past the gate again in about two minutes.”
Ten minutes passed. Aside from some faint boat engine sounds coming from the direction of the lake, all was quiet. A rabbit hopped into view along the wall, spotted Jack, then sprinted away.
Long enough. He was anxious to get in and get out.
He approached the wall, grabbed its top with both hands, and hop-vaulted so his chin was level with the capstone. On the other side was a mulched planting bed interspersed with white tulips and cedar bushes.
Jack pulled himself up, flipped his leg over the wall’s crest, then rolled over and dropped to the ground behind one of the bushes. Ahead he could see the curved black edge of the asphalt driveway. The main gate was somewhere to his right. He headed that way until the wrought-iron gate came into view, then crossed the driveway and ducked behind a hedgerow.
Jack continued like this for another fifteen minutes, partly to hunt for any patrolling guards, partly to get a better look at the villa itself, a two-story structure done in French farmhouse style. Switzerland was a country of four official languages — German, French, Italian, and a bit of Romansh — and the architecture and culture reflected this. The more expensive homes along Lake Zurich seemed to be a mixture of design styles, from old-world Tuscan to German neo-modern.