“My friend?” Jonathan shook his head. Spinning, he cocked his arm and threw the flash drive over the cliff.
“Merde!” Simone jumped toward the cliff. Furious, she looked at Jonathan, then at the man named Ricardo. “He’s yours.”
Jonathan gazed into the sky and took a deep breath. The air was marvelously crisp.
Just then, there was a thudding noise, like a hand slapping a bare back. Jonathan flinched, expecting to feel something sharp and final. He drew a breath. Nothing had struck him.
The assassin collapsed to his knees. A red stain blossomed on his chest. He gasped, and as he fell forward onto the snow, blood poured from his mouth.
Simone spun to look behind her, searching the rugged terrain above them. A figure detached itself from a shelf of rock. A person dressed in black and gray, with a knit cap tight on their head and eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses. A hand pulled off the knit cap and a spray of amber hair tumbled free. When she was a few feet away, she took off her sunglasses.
“You,” said Simone. “But how…”
Emma Ransom raised her pistol and fired a bullet into Simone Noiret’s forehead. Simone tottered and retreated a step, stunned and uncomprehending. Emma kicked her savagely in the chest. Simone plummeted off the precipice.
Emma stepped to the edge and watched her fall.
75
She stood ten feet away cradling a strange-looking gun in her arms, some kind of pistol with a silencer and a folding stock. There was no sign of a broken leg. Nor were there any visible injuries sustained from a three-hundred-foot fall. She looked at him as if he were a stranger, offering no indication that she desired to hug or kiss him, or that she was happy to see him at all.
“But I saw you,” he said. “In the crevasse.”
“You thought you saw me.”
“The blood…the trail in the snow…your leg was broken. I saw the fracture.”
“It wasn’t my bone. It was all incredibly sloppy. I had to work fast. When I found out-.”
“Emma,” he said.
“-that it was set for this weekend, I began to-.”
“Emma!” he shouted. “Is that even your name?”
Without answering, she turned and began jogging down the hill. Rooted to the spot, Jonathan was filled with a flux of emotions: wonderment, anger, elation, and bitterness, all of them warring with one another. It took him a second or two to sort his feelings out. Still stunned, he followed her down the road to where she’d left her car two switchbacks below. It was a VW Golf that had seen a lot of wear. He made for the driver’s side, but she was already there, opening the door and dipping her head inside the cabin. By the time he climbed into the passenger seat, the engine was running, the car in gear and beginning to move.
“I talked to the hospital,” he said. “The nurse there told me that the Emma Everett Rose who was born there died in a car accident two weeks after her birth.”
“Later,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything later.”
“I don’t want everything. I only want the truth.”
“The truth, even,” she said. “Right now, I need you to tell me something. Jinn’s flash drive. You’ve still got it, right? I mean, you didn’t really throw it over the cliff?”
Jonathan dug the second flash drive out of his pocket. “No,” he said. “I tossed yours.”
She snatched it out of his hand. “I’ll forgive you,” she said. “This time.”
Emma attacked the hill as if it were a racetrack, punching it on the straights, braking into the turns, downshifting crisply. Emma who couldn’t manage a stick to save her life.
Until now, he’d kept her identities separate. There was Emma Ransom, his wife, and there was Eva Kruger, the operative. He’d convinced himself that Emma was the true side of her-the authentic side-and that Eva was the cover. Watching her drive, he knew he’d been wrong. For the first time, he was seeing the real Emma, the woman she’d never allowed him to see. It came to him then that he didn’t know this woman.
“I didn’t expect you to be so good at this,” she said, when they reached the valley floor and turned west toward Davos and Zurich.
“What did you expect?”
“I was afraid you might chuck it all and disappear into the mountains for a few years. Pull the lone explorer bit.”
“I might have, if I hadn’t gotten the baggage claims. Everything went haywire when I picked up the bags. After I killed the policemen, I had to keep going. It was the only way to clear myself. Simone tried to convince me to leave the country, but when I saw what was inside the bag, I couldn’t run away. I had to know.”
“Of all the days for the train not to deliver the mail,” she said with a dismissive shake of the head. “I guess I was wrong about you going into the mountains.”
“I’ll forgive you,” he said. “This time.”
She laughed at this, but it was a concession and it rang hollow.
“And so,” he said. “Your turn. I’ll make it easy for you. Start with the mountain. What exactly did I see?”
A shadow fell across her features. Her change in mood was like a sharp drop in temperature. “Your patrolman’s jacket, of course. A wig. Ski pants. Stage blood.”
“How did you get down into the crevasse by yourself? It was way too dangerous to go solo.”
“I didn’t.”
“What do you mean you didn’t?” he snapped.
“I walked into it from below. You showed me the route once the summer after we were married.”
Jonathan closed his eyes as it came back to him. They’d come to Davos for a weekend to do some hiking and had spent an afternoon exploring the warren of caves and couloirs that honeycombed the glacier. “But those caves are only accessible during the summer. You can’t get in during winter, let alone during a blizzard.”
Emma tilted her head, which was her way of saying he was mistaken. “I didn’t go to that meeting in Amsterdam last Friday. I came here instead to see if my plan was actionable.”
“‘Actionable’? Is that spyspeak or what?”
Emma ignored the remark. “It turns out that if you can find your way to the right spot at the base of the glacier, you can get into the caves. I programmed a handheld GPS unit, then route-marked the way up and back so I wouldn’t get lost if it snowed.”
“Which is why you insisted that we come to Arosa instead of Zermatt,” he said, feeling somehow complicit.
“I had good reason. It was our anniversary. We made our first climb here eight years ago.”
“‘Our anniversary.’ Right.” He knew then that she’d also lied about the weather report and sabotaged his two-way radio. “How did you know we wouldn’t go down and get you?”
“I didn’t really,” she admitted. “I gambled on the fact that Steiner and his team would be coming up the mountain to rescue a woman with a broken leg, not haul her out of a one-hundred-meter crevasse. Rope is heavy. I didn’t see them bringing more than was necessary. I was surprised they even had two lengths.”
“Steiner…you know his name.” He looked out the window. The hits just kept on coming.
“I had to hang around Davos to make sure things went as planned. I listened to his phone calls and radio transmissions. Don’t look so surprised. It’s a piece of cake to pull a cellular call out of the air.”
“And then? Didn’t you know that I would check on the baggage claims?”
“I hoped you wouldn’t get them. I wanted to retrieve the bags in Landquart myself, but it was too much of a risk. Once I was dead, I had to stay dead.”
Jonathan spun in his seat. “You were there? You saw what happened at the train station with the police? You watched what they did to me?”
Emma nodded. “I’m sorry, Jonathan. I wanted to help.”
He sank back, at a loss for words.