"That's if Renwick hasn't already beaten us to it," said Tom. "He's had almost two days' head start, minus however long it took him to decode the painting."
"Well, we're here now," Dominique chimed, ever enthusiastic. "I say we go and take a look, at least."
Tom zipped his coat up and opened the door, the snow billowing in through the crack like a fine spray. The air was crisp and cold, especially compared to the soporific blast of the car's heating. He stepped out of the car and walked toward Viktor, who was at the back of her car, leaning over the open trunk with her three men — Grigory, Piotr, and Yuri — clustered around her. "Viktor?" Tom called.
She turned, a snub-nosed Beretta pointing straight at him. Tom froze.
"Here—" She threw it toward him. Tom snatched it out of the air. "You might need that," she explained. "I don't like guns. Never have."
"I don't like them either," she said. "But I'd prefer to have one and not need to use it, than not have one and need it."
As if to emphasize her point, she reached into the trunk again and took out an AK-47 rifle, its polished wooden stock and under-barrel grip dark and shiny. She held it with an immediate familiarity that suggested a long and intimate relationship, the feel of it seeming to ease the tension in her shoulders.
Tom knew she was right. From what Turnbull had told him about Kristall Blade, he knew that Hecht and his men, assuming they were still with Renwick, would be armed and would have no qualms about opening fire on whoever got in their way.
"Argento!" An unfamiliar voice echoed through the air. Viktor dropped the rifle back into the trunk and slammed it shut. Tom stuffed the Beretta into his pocket before turning to see who was there.
An old man, a dog leash looped in one hand like a lasso, had appeared at the doorway of one of the chalets and was calling to a large German shepherd who was studiously ignoring him, alternating instead between chasing his tail and trying to bite the snowflakes as they drifted past his nose, both activities accompanied by a series of excited barks and yelps.
"Argento!" the man called again, before shutting the door behind him and trying to grab the dog's collar as it pranced around his feet. The dog, however, caught sight of Tom and the others and broke free, sprinting out onto the track. Tom knelt, grasped the dog's thick leather collar as it came toward him, and held on as the dog licked his face furiously.
"Danke," the old man said gratefully as he walked up to Tom and clipped the leash to the collar. "Argento always gets very excited when we go for a walk."
"You're welcome," replied Tom in German. "He seems quite a handful."
"Oh, he is. Keeps me young." The man looked down and patted the dog's head lovingly as it lunged at the snow, then peered at Tom quizzically, his eyes almost lost under the brim of his hat. "Are you with the others?"
"The others?" Tom frowned.
"The men who came a couple of days ago. They said some others might come, so I assumed…"
"Oh right, yes." Tom nodded. "We're with them. I wonder, can you show us where they've gone? My phone doesn't seem to work out here and I can't get in touch."
He unfolded the map from his pocket and opened it for the man. After a few seconds of trying to find their current location with his gloved index finger, the old man pointed to a spot on the map.
"That's it."
Tom frowned. It wasn't the spot indicated by the coordinates decoded from the painting. "What's there?"
"The old copper mine, of course. I told your colleague that he was wasting his time, but he had the right paperwork so I had to let him through."
"Paperwork?"
"To open the mine up. Diggers too. Big yellow things. He's been at it nonstop. In this weather — can you believe it? But he's wasting his time. There's nothing there."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because I used to play in it," the man said simply. "Of course that was a long time ago now, before the war, but it had long since dried up, even then. We used to play hide and seek. I remember my mother was always terrified it would collapse and kill us all." He gave a wistful smile.
"And it got blocked up?"
"There was an explosion one night toward the end of the war. A stray bomb or something. The whole thing just collapsed."
"So what's here?" Tom pointed at the spot indicated by the painting.
The man squinted closely at the map, then looked up with a shrug. "Nothing, as far as I know. Unless…" He looked at the map again. "Unless… yes, it must be…"
"Must be what?"
"The other entrance."
"There are two entrances?"
"Oh yes. You see, there used to be two mines until they were joined up. That one was the smaller of the two, slightly lower down and around the side of the mountain a bit from the main one. It's right next to a ruined cottage. But the entrance has been filled in too."
"Okay, thanks." Tom shook his hand. "By the way," he asked as he turned away, "when did the others get here exactly?"
"Hmmm. Let me see. About three days ago."
"Three days ago?" Tom frowned. "Are you sure?"
"Yes… Yes, I'm sure." The man nodded solemnly. "Because it was a Wednesday, and I always take Argento to town on a Wednesday." The dog's ears pricked up at the sound of his name.
"Okay." Tom smiled gratefully. "Thanks for your help. Enjoy your walk."
"We will. Come on, Argento." The man clicked his tongue and they both set off, the leash snapping taut as the dog strained to run ahead.
Tom turned to face Archie, Dominique, and Viktor's expectant eyes.
"There's an old copper mine here," he explained. "Apparently the main entrance was sealed toward the end of the war. Three days ago some men turned up here with mechanical diggers and made their way up there. The painting, though, points to another, smaller entrance to the mine."
"Three days ago?" Dominique frowned. "That's not possible. Renwick only got hold of the painting two days ago. He couldn't have known about this place until then."
"Exactly," said Tom. "Put that together with the hit men in St. Petersburg that we know Renwick didn't send, and the murder of Maria Lammers, and it all starts to add up."
"It does?" Viktor asked.
"What to?" Archie added.
"It tells us Renwick isn't the only one who's been trying to stop us finding this. Whoever these people are, they got here three days ago. And they didn't need the painting to find it."
"Who?" asked Viktor.
"If I had to guess…" said Tom, "the same people who hid it here in the first place."
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
Tom was armed with a compass, but it soon proved superfluous. The route up to the mine was easily identifiable even in the fading light, a narrow path that hugged the side of the mountain on a shallow rise, the ground plunging away sharply to their left. Even so, Tom checked their progress every so often, his CIA field training from what seemed like two lifetimes ago filtering back into his memory.
Although not steep, the path was hard going, the snow icy in some places where it had been melted by the sun and then frozen by the moon. Elsewhere it was soft and deep, and their ankles disappeared into the powder that had long since swallowed up any tracks that might have been made by the diggers that had preceded them up the mountain.
They walked on in silence, the only sound the crunch of their feet and the wind whistling past their ears, its pitch growing in intensity as the altitude increased. Occasionally, a particularly vicious gust would spray loose snow up into the air, and then it would ghost around them, spiraling and skipping along the path, until the wind dropped and it would faint gracefully back to the ground.