by Nick Carter
"Two hours. I don't know. Maybe a little longer."
Roberta broke in sympathetically. "You must be frozen clear through."
Carter and Roberta each gave her an arm and helped her up the ladder and into the engine room. While Cynthia warmed herself and got Roberta to tell her all that had happened while she'd been unconscious. Carter rummaged through the train, looking for anything he might be able to use in his pursuit of Kobelev. Within ten minutes he was back, his arms full.
"A gold mine," he muttered as he dropped it all with a clatter on the engine room floor. "Apparently, avalanches are fairly common along this section of track, and the train carries ample equipment in case the crew has to hike out of here."
On the floor were several pairs of snowshoes, three pickaxes, tents, an emergency stove, a bundle of flares, more coats and mittens, and two heavy-duty flashlights.
"There was even a shortwave radio," he said.
"Working?" asked Roberta hopefully.
Carter shook his head. "Sabotaged. Probably the first thing Kobelev did when he got on board. Oh — I found one other thing." He produced a large folded piece of paper from his back pocket. "A map," he said, spreading it on the floor. "According to this, there's a town about twelve miles down the line. Doesn't look very big, though."
"It's got a phone no doubt, or a radio," said Roberta.
"You think that's where he's headed?"
Roberta nodded. "If I were him, I'd want to get out of here the quickest way I could."
"He said something about a town," put in Cynthia. "Alba… something."
"Alba Iulia," finished Carter. "That's it, then. I'd better get going. He's got a two-hour head start."
"Nick," Cynthia said, "take me with you."
Carter shook his head. "This is going to be very unpleasant work. And if you miss a cue, you'll get more than just a groan from the audience."
"I'm an experienced mountain climber, Nick. I spent most of my teen-age years in Colorado scaling rocks like Diamond Head and the north face of Long's Peak. I know what I'm doing."
"We're going to kill a man. Think you have the stomach for it?"
"That man, yes," she said resolutely.
"Well…" said Carter, starting to give in, but Roberta interrupted.
"May I speak with you alone?" she asked.
They descended the narrow steps out into the snow. When they were well out of Cynthia's earshot, Roberta confronted him. "You're thinking of taking her, aren't you?"
"I'd be a fool to go out there with only one good arm. I may need her."
"But she's an actress. She doesn't know the first thing about intelligence work."
"I'm certainly not going to leave the two of you here by yourselves. Kobelev may double back and make a try for the train. Now that I've got her back, I'm not going to leave her unprotected."
"But it's all right to leave me. Is that it?"
"You were trained for this sort of thing, Commander. She's an actress, remember?"
"And a damn good one."
"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Carter.
"I'm beginning to like you, Carter. I don't want to lose you."
Carter stepped closer, bent down, and their lips met. She lasted good. Cold, yet warm, almost burning in the center. For a moment Carter didn't want to let her go. When he finally stepped back, his heart was pounding. "Let's go back," he said, the words thick in his throat. "There are some things I want to check out with you before we go."
For the next half hour Carter conducted a crash course in train engineering, based on what little knowledge he had. He told her to keep the boiler pressure at the maximum in case she had to leave suddenly, and he showed her how to blow off steam to keep it from building too high. Then he pointed out the forward and reverse gears, and explained that in order to get through the avalanche she would have to back up to give herself some running room. With the melting during the day and the digging that was done, it would probably be possible to bust out, but only in an emergency.
He left her the machine gun and an extra clip of ammunition, then he and Cynthia dressed and went outside. They threw the snowshoes down beside the track and strapped them on. Roberta watched from the cab, looking like some sort of Tibetan guerrilla with her machine gun strapped over her filthy, snow-and-coal-encrusted parka and her smudged face. She waved when they left, and Carter continued to glance back over his shoulder to check on her until the train was out of sight.
Kobelev and his entourage had left a wide trail in the snow, and with the snowshoes and brilliant moonlight. Carter had high hopes of catching them. Cynthia turned out to be every inch the mountain woman she'd claimed to be. She plodded along beside him, matching him step for step, showing remarkable endurance for a creature of such slight build. And all this after her ordeal in the snow.
* * *
They found the first corpse about two hours later. They probably would have mistaken it for an exposed chunk of rock or a shrub if the evidence of the murder weren't so plainly visible in the snow.
The tracks indicated the group of them had been walking — Carter figured Kobelev, Tatiana, the two guards, the fireman, and the engineer — spread out, only loosely held together, and judging from the grooves extending from the toes of some prints, some staggering from exhaustion. They must have stopped to rest. Snow had been knocked off stones, and there were body prints on the ground. Carter was able to pick out Kobelev's footprints and Tatiana's, the smaller accompanying the larger wherever they went. They discussed something, briefly, for the prints were relatively few. Then one veered off from the others, long paces heading for a face of sheer rock, running with no place to run.
It was in following this set of footprints that they found him, face down in the snow with two bullets in his back, blood soaking his thick engineer's jacket, his hands outstretched, still wearing the long, cuffed gloves of his trade.
Cynthia was the first to reach him. 'Nick! Look here!" she shouted, hopping over to it on her huge, tennis-racket shoes.
When Carter got there, he turned the body over. Blood had run from the nose and mouth and turned black against the abnormal whiteness of the face.
"God! Why did they shoot him?" she demanded, starting to whimper.
"Excess baggage maybe. I don't know."
Carter stared down at the body, trying to figure just why they had killed him. There was no evidence that one was falling behind the others. If anything, it was rather remarkable how well they'd hung together over such a long distance and such rough terrain. So why shoot him?
Carter told Cynthia to pull herself together. There was nothing they could do for this man now, and besides, she'd see plenty of this kind of thing soon, and she was going to have to be ready for it. She dried her eyes on her mittens, sniffed, and in a few minutes they were striding along much as before.
The silver disk of moon hung overhead, never moving or changing, and in time (he path they were following and the hushed hills on cither side seemed to become a place unto itself, without beginning or end, and even the memory of the engineer's death-mask face faded behind them. Then, half an hour after they'd found the first body, they came upon the second, sprawled in the middle of the trail, a bullet hole in his forehead.
The fireman." Carter said to Cynthia who had turned away. "Must have been a small bore. I'd say he's been out here about an hour, maybe less. It's hard to tell in this cold."
"Nick," she said weakly, "I don't know if I can go on."
"Don t flake out on me now, sugar. Come on, they've run out of people to kill." He grabbed her by the hand, and soon they were tramping through the snow at twice the rate they had before.
It was a remarkable feat for the two of them: the man who had had little or no sleep the previous night and who had sustained serious injuries only recently; and the woman who herself had been through an extended ordeal. Yet they ran like two people possessed, as though they were being chased rather than chasing, as though the wooded hills themse
lves had suddenly become haunted. Carter, for one, sensed he was running from rather than to, and that his pursuer was as intangible as an idea that nagged at the back of his mind. Two murders for no clear motive suggested something wrong, terribly wrong, but he did not want to stop to consider what that something might be. Better to run and keep on running until at last, after thirty minutes and covering almost two miles, most of it uphill, he fell into the snow exhausted, panting like a winded dog.
Cynthia stood over him, blowing out huge clouds of vapor into the night air. "You all right?" she breathed.
"We're almost to the top. I've got a feeling we'll be able to see them from there."
Cynthia looked up. "Stay and rest. I'll go up for a look." She turned and plodded up the hill. He had just unstrapped his snowshoes when she shouted something and frantically gestured for him. He grabbed the snowshoes and scrambled up to her.
When he reached the top, he saw what she was screaming about. A hundred yards down the trail another body sat in the snow leaning against a rock. In the shadow it might have been mistaken for just another part of the rock except for the reflection of moonlight off the pure whiteness of its shaved head.
"Oh, my God," he muttered as he limped closer, for he sensed the nagging realization that what he'd just spent the last half hour eluding was about to thrust itself upon him, the implications of which were going to be very painful when sorted out.
"Nick! Nick!" Cynthia shouted. She covered her face with her mittens.
He took her in his arms and held her close for several moments. "It's all right, Cynthia," he said soothingly.
She stopped calling his name but continued to cry quietly into her mittens.
There was something definitely very wrong here. He could feel it thick in the chill air. He began to pace furiously, finally pulling up short, and it was a measure of his agitation that it had taken him this long to notice the obvious. "He committed suicide!"
It was true. The corpse still held the means of its destruction in its hand, a.22-caliber handgun that had put a small hole in the right temple and a slightly larger hole in the left side near the crown, creating two continents of blood on a globe of otherwise perfectly blank sea.
"What does it mean?" Cynthia asked weakly.
"I'm not sure," said Carter, slumping onto the rock opposite the corpse. "Hold it!" he shouted suddenly. He jumped up and began running up and down in the snow. "Where are they? I don't see them."
"What? What are you looking for?"
"The footprints! Tatiana's and Kobelev's! I don't see them! I haven't seen them since… since that first body. We veered off the trail there, and when we came back, they were gone. A diversion! Leading us on from corpse to corpse while he makes his escape. The train!"
He came wearily back to the rock and sat down. Cynthia plopped down into the snow. She'd stopped crying. She merely looked at him now with a strange steadfastness.
Moments passed while Carter stared into the snow at his feet and sighed. But Cynthia never moved. She leveled her gaze on his face with an absorbing interest.
Finally she began to get on his nerves. "What are you staring at?" he asked shortly. "My defeat? Is that what fascinates you so much? Did you think I was above that sort of thing? Well, I'm not. I can't beat him! I've tried and I can't do it."
"I've waited a long time to hear you say that," said Cynthia, only it wasn't Cynthia's voice. It was a good deal deeper, throatier, with a hard edge to it that told the listener its owner could just as easily kill a man as love him.
"Tatiana!" he said, scarcely daring to breathe the word.
"Correct." She smiled a little, producing a pearl-handled revolver from her mitten. The handle glinted in the moonlight.
Sixteen
"You and your father must have planned this little surprise right from the beginning," said Carter with a forced laugh. A chill sweat glistened on his forehead in spite of the cold. He had to think, to assess the situation. Kobelev had an hour's head start on a two-hour trip back to the train. Carter would have to make an all-out push to beat him there, but first he was going to have to get the gun away from Tatiana.
"Actually, it was my idea," she said. "Papa wanted to take the train back by force, but when I saw that that girl looked just like me, had my exact face, same eyes, teeth, hair — everything the same — I persuaded him to help me create this little ruse to get you out here alone."
"Vengeance means a great deal to you, doesn't it?"
"I've wanted you dead for a long time, Carter. Ever since…"
"Ever since that night we slept together in your father's dacha?" Carter said, finishing her thought. "Don't give yourself away any too easily, do you, Tatiana? See a man you like, feel some attraction for, and you're threatened down to the soles of your shoes, isn't that so?"
"I never really liked you, Carter. I hated you on sight."
"Really? As I remember, I didn't come to you that night, you came to me. And don't try to tell me your father put you up to it, because you almost bollixed his plans by doing it. No, you wanted me all right, and you still want me, and because you think you can never have me, you want to kill me. Isn't that true?"
"No," she said firmly. "I hate you."
"A dying man has a right to find out the truth before he meets his end, doesn't he? If I'm to be killed by an insanely jealous woman, I have a right to know it, haven't I?"
"I am not jealous!" she shouted, rising to her feet. "You… you are trying to provoke me, to get me to make a mistake. You see? I know all your tricks."
"I'm not tricking you," Carter said calmly. "If there's no truth to what I'm saying, why are you so angry?"
"I am not angry!" she snapped.
"Let's face it, Tatiana, you've been in love with me right from the start. You haven't been able to think of anything else. And you hate me because you think I could never return those feelings. You think I laugh at you behind your back."
She stopped pacing and scrutinized him closely. "You do laugh at me. I know it. But very soon you will not laugh anymore."
"You are wrong, Tatiana. I don't laugh. Not at all. I rather enjoyed that night we spent together. I've thought about it often."
"You are lying!" she shouted.
"What reason would I have to lie now? I'm a dead man, remember? You misjudge yourself. You are far more beautiful than you imagine. Although I can understand how you might not know it. With a father as powerful as yours, how could you be sure any man would tell you the truth?"
This last sentence had an almost physical effect. Her head rose slightly, and her expression sobered. "At least there are some things you understand," she said.
Carter sensed she'd taken the bait. The trick now was to keep the line taut and let her reel herself in. "Where is Cynthia now?" he asked, changing the subject. "Still with your father?"
"Yes. I think she amuses him. She looks exactly like me, you know." There was a pause, then she asked: "Did you ever make love to her, Carter?"
"Yes, several times."
"And did you notice she looked like me?"
"The thought crossed my mind."
"And did it stimulate you?"
"You mean, did I find it erotic that she reminded me of you? I don't think you have any right to ask that."
"No right? I have the gun, you forget. I have all the right in the world. Now answer the question."
"All right," said Carter after a short pause, "it was stimulating. I remembered the night we were together, the things you liked to do, the way you are…" He gestured vaguely, implying this was too vast to describe.
"And what way is that?"
"Oh," he said, looking off down the mountain as though written there somewhere were a way to describe her wondrousness but noticing, as he did so, that she'd come several steps closer, "one has the feeling that there is much untapped in you, Tatiana. A volcano just below the surface. One wonders what might happen if that fire were ever unleashed."
"And did it drive you to
new heights of passion?" she asked, staring down at him, breathing heavily.
"Yes." He said the word softly as though she had torn it from his heart, so softly, in fact, she couldn't hear it.
"What?" she asked, leaning closer.
He saw his chance and he took it. Grabbing his snowshoe by its edge, he swung hard, aiming for her head. She pulled back, but he made contact with the pistol and knocked it aside. It went off, burying a bullet in the trunk of a nearby tree.
She fell back and he fell on top of her, desperately trying to grab the gun before she could point it at him again. Unfortunately, she was right-handed, and his right was the only hand Carter had. He was forced to reach across her, which left her left hand open to scratch and pull and hit.
He managed to finally get a hold of her wrist, but she was a good deal stronger than he supposed. Although he could prevent her from twisting it toward him, he couldn't get her to drop it, no matter how much pressure he applied. She suddenly wrenched her leg away and brought it back sharply.
A flood of nauseating pain welled up from his bowels, the world spun, and his stomach turned inside out. The strength drained from his arms, and he felt the gun slip from his grasp.
In desperation he realized he had only one option. He settled on top of her, praying she was more interested in killing him with the gun than trying to kick his balls off again.
She made muffled shouts against his parka. He still fumbled for the gun even though he'd lost track of it. Then he found it, pressed against his chest, just as it discharged with a muted pop between them.
He lay there wondering if he were hit and if so, how bad. How would he know with waves of agony coursing up his spine and out to every finger and toe? Then he realized Tatiana wasn't moving, hadn't moved, and wasn't breathing either.
He roiled off her. The pearl-handled gun lay across her chest, and a growing stain of blood seeped from her coat. He guessed the bullet had gone straight into her heart, she'd died so fast.
He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet, leaned back on the stone where he'd been sitting, and put his head between his knees to try to keep from being sick.
