Everywhere I looked, Swiss cops and soldiers stood with high-intensity LED flashlights, shining them on the faces of passersby, lining up eyewitnesses against the wall, asking for ID.
I turned and slunk up the other way, down an alley, and disappeared into the darkness.
I took the wad of euros that Gobi had given me out of my pocket and counted them with only slightly shaking hands. There was a few hundred here, along with the fake ID that she’d given me back in Italy, a picture snapped at a train station photo booth, a face I barely recognized as mine. I could get on another train, if I had the slightest idea where to go.
Or I could just give up. Wave the white flag. Sweet surrender. It had never been more tempting. Even if I could get my family back again, what would life back in America be like? Was “normal and ordinary” still any kind of option? Had it ever been?
A clumsy, scraping splash rang down from the far end of the alley. I heard a muffled curse and a series of slowly approaching footsteps.
Halfway down the alley, the man switched on a flashlight, and I saw his face.
The beard.
The sneer.
The camera.
There was no mistaking that combination-Swierczynski.
He was wearing a long, shabby coat with tails that practically dragged the ground behind him so that they picked up little scraps of debris along the way, which was probably his idea of going undercover. I could tell by the way he was moving that he hadn’t seen me yet.
I felt a surge of adrenaline-it felt good to be mad about something I could do something about right away. I might not know the first thing about fighting, but at this point, I didn’t care what happened to me, and that alone gave me the advantage.
Edging back into the shadows, I put my back to the wall and waited, hearing his boots shuffle closer, waiting until he was right in front of me. I remembered back in Venice when he’d tried to grab Gobi’s shotgun. He hadn’t been particularly quick about it-without the element of surprise, he had no advantage at all.
I reached out, grabbed the camera by the strap, and twisted.
He grunted and went down, already on his back by the time my knee landed on his chest.
“Still trying to tail Gobi?” I got right into his face, close enough that I could smell the pickles and sour vodka on his breath. Whatever Kaya was paying this guy, it was too much. “I might be able to help you with that.”
“Where is she?”
I climbed off his chest. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“On your feet,” I said. “We’re going to see Kaya.”
He blinked at me, not understanding.
“Right now,” I said. “It’s time to visit your boss.”
A quick, dismissive head shake. “Is not possible.”
“Oh, is possible.” I gave him a cold smile that had nothing to do with any of the ordinary reasons that people smile-happiness, humor, hope. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my tour of Europe, it’s that as human beings, we’re all a whole lot more flexible than we might think.”
“But I cannot-”
“I want to talk to Kaya. You have a contact number, an e-mail… You tell him I want a meeting right now, tonight.”
“I cannot make promises.” He was sounding more Slavic by the moment. “Is not my decision to make.”
“Ask yourself how pissed off Kaya’s going to be when he finds out that you lost Gobi,” I told him. “She was working for him, right? And you’re supposed to be her babysitter. In other words, you had one job and you screwed it up. How much of your ass do you think he’s going to chew off for losing her in Switzerland?” I waited, silently counting to ten before adding, almost off-handedly, “Especially when I can tell him where to find her?”
He recrossed his arms and glared at me even harder, then muttered something in Russian.
Twenty minutes later, we were on a train.
35. “This Is Not America” — David Bowie
There was a car waiting for us at the Lausanne train station, a gunmetal blue Peugeot 306. Its driver never said a word as he drove us out of the lot and into the Alpine night. Through tinted glass, I watched snowcapped peaks and summits slide past us in a darkly winding blur of ear-popping dips and hairpin turns, the driver hardly slowing, barely steering, as if the car knew the way by itself. Slouched in the back beside me, Swierczynski brooded in morose eastern European silence, breathing audibly through his beard and doing everything in his power to make the expensive leather upholstery smell like a Ukrainian deli. I would have been okay with opening one of the windows, except that the wind was really howling outside and it felt like it was getting colder by the minute.
I stared out at the dark mountains.
I thought about my family.
I thought about Gobi.
Of course, my bluff about being able to tell him where she was had been exactly that, a bluff. But I’d gotten out of tighter spots with guys more dangerous than him, and in the end, he couldn’t afford to be wrong about me, even if it was a long shot.
After an hour of driving we came down into a small Swiss village with narrow cobblestone streets and tall church steeples rising up on either side. It was almost midnight, and the whole town seemed asleep or deserted. This place, whatever it was called, made Zermatt look like Manhattan by comparison. The Peugeot stopped in front of a little corner tavern with a few lights burning inside, and Swierczynski got out and gestured for me to follow him.
Halfway through the doorway, I stopped him.
“If this is a setup,” I said, “you’ll never see her again. You know that, right?”
He grunted like he didn’t particularly care about that part anymore and held the door, ushering me the rest of the way inside.
The tavern was sawdusty and desolate, a drafty old-world beer hall with deer and mountain goat heads stuffed and mounted on the walls above a dartboard that no one was using. At the far end of the room, long wooden tables sat in front of a roaring fire. The bartender glanced up at me for the briefest of seconds, then ducked behind a row of taps to finish polishing the stein in front of him with the determined air of a proprietor who knew when to mind his own business.
I looked across the room to where a man in a suit was sitting by himself in front of the fire with a glass of wine. For a second we just looked at each other. Usually when you describe someone, you say he was in his forties, or had silver hair or a pointed nose or whatever. But the thing about this guy was, the longer I looked at him, the less sure I was about any defining physical feature. He could have been twenty-nine or forty-six. In the firelight, his hair might have been gray, or light blond, or even silver-streaked black. The only things that really stood out were the cold indifference radiating from his eyes, and that sense of anonymity that, in itself, was deeply chilling.
“Kaya,” I said.
He snorted. A smile that wasn’t a smile twisted like a thin wire at the corner of his mouth, and he took a business card out of his pocket and handed it to me. It read:
William J. Nolan
Support Integrations Officer
Central Intelligence Agency
“Kaya,” I said, and looked back down at the card. “CIA. Nice touch.”
“Believe it or not,” Nolan said, “it started out as a speech-enabled text error. Hard C, then I, A. The original program didn’t recognize acronyms. In the end, we kept it that way. Kind of a if-it’s-not-broke-why-fix-it sort of deal.”
I don’t know why I was surprised. “So the CIA are the ones running Gobi?”