There was obviously a fourth man hunting them.
Harry glanced over his shoulder but saw no sign of the sniper. He launched himself off the path between the same two pine trees the Frenchman had gone through and skied down toward him on the narrow slope as fast as he could. He stood up at the last minute and rotated his feet to the right before cutting down into the slope and stopping.
Without saying a word he turned the Frenchman over and saw blood blooming over the right shoulder of his ski jacket. Pulling the jacket open he saw the wound — obviously the sniper had used a round with some pretty chunky mass and a serious muzzle velocity. Luckily, it looked like the bullet had torn through the muscle above the clavicle, narrowly missing his brachial plexus. An inch lower would have meant serious nerve damage and maybe the loss of his arm, but as it was, Harry was confident the wound was not fatal, even though Baupin was still unconscious from the tumble.
Harry began to pull him out of the snow bank and heave him into the forest for cover, but it was too late. Before he had made two yards a bullet slammed into the trunk of a tree a few inches from his head. He ducked down and spun around at the same time, expecting to see nothing but trees, but instead he saw the fourth man skiing gently down the slope toward him. In his hands he was holding a heavy-duty sniper rifle and aiming it directly at Harry’s head.
“Hands up where I can see them.”
Harry stepped away from Baupin and raised his hands in the air. He lowered his head and breathed a sigh of frustration, his breath condensing in the chilled alpine forest almost as thick as smoke. Beside him, Alain Baupin began to come to, groaning and rubbing the wound on his shoulder.
The man pulled up a safe distance from his prisoners and holding the gun with one hand he pulled a phone from his pocket and made a call. “Perec is dead and I have the others.” He put the phone away, pulled up his goggles and took a deep breath to steady himself after the case.
“Steiner…” Harry said.
“You will pay for Perec,” Baupin mumbled, barely coherent.
“I doubt that,” Steiner said. “Now get up. We’re going to meet the boss.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Zalan Szabo rose from his desk with the courtly grandeur of a medieval king and moved across to the window. They were standing in the penthouse suite at the top of the Hotel Ciel. The Hungarian watched the snow fall for a few moments, nodding his head at some unspoken thought and then sighed before turning back to face Harry.
“Such beauty, the snow…” As he spoke, a blonde woman entered the room and moved gracefully toward him. They conversed in hushed French for a few moments and then she walked past Harry to the drinks cabinet. She was very tall — almost as tall as Harry, and had a swimmer’s build and long blonde hair and bronzed skin. He found it hard to ignore the cobalt blue eyes.
“I am Zalan Szabo, Mr Bane. I doubt you’ve heard of me.”
Harry spied a thin man sitting in a chair in an adjoining room, but then Aleksi Karhu shut the door. “I seem to have avoided the pleasure,” Harry said, returning his attention to Szabo.
“Allow me to introduce Elsa,” the Hungarian said. “She’s my personal protection officer. She trained as a bodyguard for many years in her homeland of Sweden and as you can see, she makes most athletes look like common slobs.”
“Where is Lucia?” Harry asked, ignoring Szabo completely.
“Ah — the Spanish girl, yes… she was very hot-blooded. By the time we arrived back at the house her temper had grown considerably worse. I sent her somewhere to cool off.”
The blonde woman laughed and took another drink of Absolut before returning the empty glass to the silver tray.
“What have you done with her?” Harry asked. “And what about the others?”
“If you mean the smart-mouth American and the rotund Zürcher, they were picked up by one of my people at their hotel. Now they are enjoying our own economy package — with Serrano, in fact.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Harry said.
“You will know soon enough.”
“And where’s Professor Liška?”
“The traitor is elsewhere.”
“You better not have harmed any of them, Szabo.”
“You coward!” Baupin said, blood still trickling from the wound on his shoulder.
Szabo suppressed a chuckle and moved closer to Elsa. “You are hardly in a position to make threats, Mr Bane, or you Monsieur Baupin. Allow me to extend the same hospitality to you both right away.” He turned to Steiner and Aleksi. “See to it that our new guests are offered some of my caviar at once.”
The Austrian nodded curtly and raised his gun. “Move.”
With Baupin’s shoulder wound, Harry knew it was down to him, so he seized the moment and swung his fist around, smashing Steiner in the jaw and knocking him back for a second. His next target was Szabo himself, but before he could turn Aleksi lunged forward. The last thing Harry saw was the Finn’s enormous shadow as he raised a chair and brought it crashing down on the back of his head.
When Harry regained consciousness it was courtesy of a bucket of ice-cold water thrown in his face by Hans Steiner. He looked around and saw they were in some kind of basement — presumably still inside the Hotel Ciel. It was a large, empty space with gray breeze block walls covered in insulated heating pipes and fans. On the far side of the room he saw an industrial freezer filled with food for the hotel kitchens. He was horrified to see Lucia also trapped inside it. She was shivering and trying to warm herself by rubbing her arms.
Then his analysis of the room was ended by a hard punch in the face delivered courtesy of Steiner’s right hand.
He knew how to take the hard stuff, but that didn’t mean he wanted any more of it, and now his attention was focussed on survival as the Austrian bodyguard threw the bucket at him, hard and heavy, and turned his attention to Zoey and Niko.
“Leave them alone, you bastard!” Harry yelled.
Steiner’s response was a high-velocity backhand slap that nearly knocked Harry out of the chair. “Shut your mouth.”
Harry spat a wad of blood onto the concrete floor and tried to slow his breathing as his head swam with the violence of the blow.
Steiner stepped over to Zoey and gently stroked her face with his hand. She struggled in her chair and spat at him. It was all she could do, but all it did was enrage him and she was the next victim of another of his heavy slaps. Her face glowed red and her head lolled backwards. Harry thought Steiner had knocked her out but then her eyes rolled back down and she came back to earth, dribbling a mouthful of blood down her top.
Niko saw what had happened to his old friend and unleashed a long tirade in German to the thug, but Steiner was unmoved. He punched Niko hard in the face — no slap this time — and put him out like a light.
“Who would think a handful of mismatched, undisciplined scumbags like you could bring so much chaos to the Ministry’s good works,” he said.
“You murdered Pablo!” Lucia screamed from inside the freezer.
“No… the traitor Ramirez unfortunately had a heart attack during a conversation with Mr Karhu here.”
Aleksi gave a grin and nodded as if owning up to a good deed.
“I saw the body, Szabo,” Harry said. “His throat was cut.”
“A necessary response to his treachery,” Szabo said. “That was my order to Mr Karhu once he had extracted the information I needed. You see the man’s loyalty — he cut his throat even though the traitor was already dead.”