White Death: An Alex Hawke Novella

by Ted Bell

  “Fascinating, Blinky. And which type is Alex?”

  “Both. He focuses on victory first and foremost, but he loves every step of the way up. It’s a joy, because he’s made the climb in his mind a hundred times before. Now he is living it and—hello, Alex!”

  Hawke pulled out his chair and said, “You two weren’t talking about me, were you?”

  “Why the hell would we do that, Alex? Blinky was just telling me about how easily men who are newly in love can be made to do what they’re told. It was fascinating.”

  Hawke took a sip of his beer and said, “It’s looking quite pleasant up there at the top. Changing weather patterns, a warm front on the way. Push the cold one out of the way. It’s time for me to get serious.”

  Sigrid placed her hand on top of his and said, “Surely you’re not going now?”

  Hawke smiled. “Oh, no. There’s a tremendous amount of work to be done before that. Luc Bresson has arranged a small base camp for us up at the fifteen-thousand-foot elevation. It’s called the ‘Bivouac.’ He’s going up with me. Get me accustomed to the altitude. Do some down-and-dirty practice runs. He says he’s going to psyche me up until I’m ready to shoot up that bitch like a high-velocity projectile.”

  “When will you two go up?” Blinky asked.

  “One week from today. At dawn.”

  “That gives us a whole week together before you leave,” Sigrid said. “Let’s make the best of it, Alex, can we? You will be back by Christmas Eve, won’t you?”

  “Of course I will. And you have no idea what a time we’ll have!” he replied, smiling at her.

  And what a time he hoped they would have.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  While Alex Hawke was high on an ice field atop some Alp, breathing all that heroic and rarefied air (and hopefully not getting himself killed), Ambrose and Sigrid found ways to keep themselves from thinking about him. It hadn’t happened by chance. To no one’s surprise, Ambrose had a finger in that pie.

  He had arranged a secret supper alone with Blinky. A quiet corner table at Der Kronenhalle on the night before Alex and Luc went up to the base camp. The two conspirators both agreed that Sigrid was slipping into a rather fragile state, consumed with fear and worry for her lover’s safety. Blinky believed that the only solution was to find a way to bring smiles to her face. To not let her find time to worry.

  “And how do you propose to do that?” Ambrose asked him over brandy and coffee.

  “I don’t, my friend. I propose that you do it. When she fell in love with him, she got you in the bargain. And I must say she was lucky on both counts.”

  “She’s very glamourous and gay. You don’t think she’d be frightfully bored hanging around with a stuffy old Scotland Yard man twice her age?”

  “I do not.”

  “Well, then, I suppose I’ve had far less attractive assignments, haven’t I?”

  Zurich’s new odd couple were soon spending their evenings hobnobbing around town. In the evening, they hit the high and low alike, the opera, restaurants, bars, and smoky nightclubs. They danced, drank, and sang karaoke till dawn some nights. And, on the cold, blustery nights, they curled up by a fire with pizza and The Philadelphia Story or Brief Encounter, two of Sigrid’s favorite black-and-white films.

  Ambrose had just one rule: he would not leave her apartment until he saw a happy smile on her face and she kissed his cheek good-night.

  Mornings were spent working the case. Baron von Stuka had privately told Sigrid that they desperately needed a break; they were fast running out of time as the Sorcerer mounted more virulent attacks. Attacks were up dramatically, so she and the chief inspector redoubled their efforts, running down every possible lead they found.

  And then things started breaking in their favor. That afternoon, Sigrid came up with a name. And the next morning, they found themselves on the trail of the killer. They were walking in a section known as the Altstadt, Zurich’s oldest medieval neighborhood. Zurich had its own version of Chinatown, called Suddchina. The pea-soup fog was even thicker in these winding streets, swirling in dense clouds up every street and around every corner. The two trench-coated investigators were trudging slowly up street after street, getting confused by the street names. Finally, they found the winding cobblestone street they’d been looking for, a steep incline that was becoming more and more of a narrow back alley to nowhere.

  It was hard work gaining traction, or even staying on one’s feet on the worn, wet stones. Melting, slushy black rainwater from the top of the hill kept pouring down the steep incline, swirling around their ankles. The fact that it was hard to see beyond their noses didn’t help either. Only the pale yellow lights from the up here in Chinatown.

  “Now I think we’re really lost,” Sigrid said, smiling. This was her first taste of real detective work and she found it thrilling. “Let’s stop and get our bearings, shall we?”

  They paused beneath a dim streetlamp at the mouth of a dark land, partially protected by an awning from the rain. Sigrid shook the moisture out of her frizzy hair. “What’s that address again?” she said. She was digging around in her handbag for the map he’d given her.

  “What?” Ambrose said.

  He was staring in disbelief at his ruined shoes; they were his favorite, and he’d been squishing dirty water with every step up the cobblestones. “Pity to ruin a pair of good brogues,” he told her sadly.

  “Inspector, this is serious business. Pay attention. We’re on a case, remember? Where is that map?”

  He reached into the pocket of his coat and said, “Here it is, what’s left of it.”

  She studied the torn and soggy hotel map under the dim orange light from the lamppost as they huddled together, trying to make sense of the thing.

  They were looking for the shop of some chap Sigrid had tipped Ambrose to in a midnight call last night.

  The night before, the telephone in Congreve’s hotel room had rung shortly after midnight. He’d looked at his watch, cursed, and rolled over to answer the damn thing.

  “Hello? Whom shall I say is calling?” He always answered the phone like that late at night. A lifelong habit that had stood him in good stead.

  “It’s me!”

  “I don’t know anyone named ‘me.’ Good-night . . .”

  “Wait! I’ve got something!” Sigrid had said as he’d been hanging up. “Just had a call from my friend, Jon Levin, head of the bank’s cryptology section here in Zurich. Jon says they’re cranking it all night up there. You won’t believe what they’ve stumbled upon!”

  Ambrose, hearing the breathless excitement in her voice, had held the receiver to his paisley robe and taken three deep breaths. He’d known this could finally be the break they’d all been waiting for.

  “All right. Calm down, Sigrid. Speak slowly and tell me what you’ve got,” Ambrose had said with the inflection favored by Job and the Dalai Lama.

  “Okay, Chief, here’s what I know so far. One hour ago, diving deep into the deepness, Jon came up with a game changer. He found the e-mail address of a formerly high-level forensic accountant, someone he used to work with in Beijing. The two of them worked together as forensic accountants at Credit Suisse before they both moved to Zurich four years ago. Jon got the top job, and now his former boss was working for him. Apparently, he was not a very good loser. Sounds like a motive, sir.”

  “This is good. Have you got a name?”

  “Sure do. His name is Ding Wong. He left the bank a year or two later under a dark cloud of suspicion. There were some serious ‘errors’ under his watch. Gold, cash, and securities, all in large amounts, had suddenly gone missing.”

  “Was this man ever charged?”

  “Negative. A Stadtspolizei investigation of Ding Wong’s online client ledgers revealed suspicious serial hacking from the outside, but nothing the cops could pin on him. Nor could the bank�
��s own chief of cybersecurity, my friend Jon, nail him for it.”

  Sigrid had said she had admitted during the investigation that she had always found Ding to be hypersecretive and thoroughly unpleasant, two traits she’d always associated with a man who had something to hide. She’d told Jon back then that she still thought the guy was guilty. So what? he’d said. And he’d been right; there had been nothing he could do about it. Until now. Now they were in search of an address at No. 11, Vierstrasse.

  The two of them kept prowling the streets, up and down the Vierstrasse, looking for a shop named Military Curios. The rain had turned to sleet, and neither of them had eaten breakfast. Ambrose already had his mobile out and was trying to find an Uber car roving somewhere in this unlikeliest of Uber neighborhoods.

  “Good luck,” Sigrid told him cheerfully. She kept walking up the hill, peering into one grungy shop after another. The street was chockablock with curio shops, tiny noodle houses, laundries, magic shops, and homeopathic medicine purveyors.

  Finally, she got lucky.

  “Found it, Chief! Number Eleven Vierstrasse!” she cried out, looking around for Ambrose. He wasn’t there. In a mild panic, she ran back down to the bottom of the street where she’d left him, trying to make his Uber app work.

  “Ambrose!” she called out, tripping down the cobblestones in fog mixed with snow, “Ambrose, where are you?”

  She saw him.

  He was way at the bottom of the hill, about to climb into the rear seat of a shiny black Range Rover with blacked-out windows. She waved, and he saw her. “Hullo!” he cried out. “Stay right there, I’ll come pick you up!”

  He climbed inside and shut the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “There it is!” she said, leaning forward and putting her hand on the Uber driver’s shoulder. “Stop, please, this is number eleven on the right.”

  The Range Rover coasted to a stop outside a dingy row of indistinguishable shops. They all seemed to be falling down, yet they were crowded together cheek by jowl.

  “We found it,” Sigrid said. “Can you believe it?”

  “Hmm,” Ambrose said. He had his nose pressed against the foggy rear window, and he was trying to determine which one was the tiny emporium. He could barely make out MILITARY CURIOSITIES on the window in peeling gold leaf. The place looked abandoned. His spirits sank as he reached for the door handle to exit the Range Rover.

  “Let’s go,” his new partner said, opening her door. “Have you got your gun?”

  “Gun? I hardly think that will be necessary, dear.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got it, that’s the main thing.”

  Ambrose ducked out of the snow and tried the front door. Locked, of course. He knocked hard, three times, with no response. “I can’t see a bloody thing in there. Can you see anything?” he asked Sigrid.

  “Junk,” she said, shading her eyes with her hands, her nose to the grimy glass. “Wait! Someone’s back there! Coming from the rear of the shop. It’s an old woman. Here she is.”

  They stepped back as the old crone pulled the door open a crack.

  “What you want?” she said in a low growl, angry and not hiding it well.

  She could not have been four feet tall, and she weighed less than ninety pounds. She had a shawl over her head, which partially obscured her sharp-featured face.

  Congreve bowed gallantly from the waist and said, “Guns, madame. We are looking for guns.” He then pulled out his solid gold pocket watch and dangled it for a moment before looking at it.

  She immediately stepped forward and peered up at this giant of a man. “What kind of guns?”

  “My wife and I are collectors. We collect historic pistols from the World War II era, madame. Curiosities, one-offs, things of that nature, as a matter of fact. May we step inside?”

  She hesitated a moment, nodded, and stepped back, making room for them to enter. Sigrid let the chief inspector go on charming the proprietress while she had a quick look around. A single dim lightbulb dangled by its cord. The light it cast was negligible, but just enough to see her way around the shop.

  There were sagging shelves loaded with antique weapons of every description. Swords, battle axes, knives, pistols, and rifles. All stacked on top of each other in a random jumble. A pile of defunct (one hoped) hand grenades. Artillery shells stacked like dusty soda bottles. She grabbed the first handgun she saw and held it up for the boss’s inspection.

  “Look, darling, over here!” she said. “I think this is just what we’re looking for!”

  Congreve excused himself and made his way through the clutter toward her.

  “Yes!” he exclaimed. “That’s the one, all right!”

  Sensing the first sale in years, the owner rushed over and took the pistol from Sigrid’s hand a bit too aggressively.

  “This one you like?” she said, as if she rather doubted it.

  “We do,” Congreve said. “What kind of gun is it?”

  “Don’t know. Not my business.”

  “Ah. Whose business is it?”

  “My son, his business, not mine.”

  “May I speak with him?”

  “He not here today.”

  “Too bad,” Ambrose said, pulling his billfold out and placing a thick wad of Swiss francs wrapped in a rubber band on the glass counter. “I’m very interested in buying this exotic treasure.”

  “How much you got?”

  “Count it. I think that’s ten thousand francs, madame.”

  “Be right back. You wait here.”

  She glided away on tiny feet into the darkness at the rear.

  “Good work, that gun thing,” the chief inspector said.

  “Thanks. You, too.”

  “Shhh! How good is your hearing?” he whispered.

  “Twenty-twenty.”

  “Be quiet. Listen. What do you hear, Sigrid?”

  “Some kind of whooshing sound.”

  “Hydraulic door. What else?”

  “Some kind of deep humming. I can almost feel it.”

  “Air-conditioning. There’s a sweatshop hidden back there.”

  “But how do you—”

  “Silence, here they come.”

  “They? How do you know?”

  “Shhh.”

  Two shadows materialized from the gloom.

  “Ambrose, I think it’s him,” she whispered in his ear. “That’s the man, I’m sure of it.”

  Sigrid froze, her fingers digging painfully into Ambrose’s forearm. Surely the man would recognize her. It hadn’t been that long since he’d last seen her and —

  “How may I help you?” the thin, black-haired man said, walking behind the counter and glancing at the money. He had a skimpy black goatee that needed a trim. His mother stood behind him. She was watching their every move, dark eyes moving back and forth.

  Congreve smiled and placed the automatic pistol on the counter beside the money. “My wife wants to buy this one.”

  “She has very good taste,” the man said, looking carefully at Sigrid. “How do you come by such knowledge?” he asked her, squinting in the low light.

  Congreve slipped seamlessly in front of her before she could reply. “So sorry. My wife is deaf and dumb. I’m Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve, Scotland Yard. I’m the one with all the money.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Ding Wong,” he said, casting a side glance at his mother.

  “Pleasure, Ding. So. What kind of gun is this? It looks very valuable.”

  “Excellent eye, Chief Inspector. Extremely valuable, sir. Quite old.” Visible money always did the trick.

  “Quite rare, is it?” Ambrose said.

  “Chinese manufacture, sir, 1920s, maybe 1930s. Very limited production, maybe even handmade
, home manufacture. Very popular 1911 to 1949, prewar era. Used by Chinese Communist soldiers. Exposed trigger, so later model. In use because of the arms embargo imposed on us before the war. Five-digit serial number on barrel, but maybe not mass production. Chambered for Mauser 7.63mm.”

  “Very impressive,” Congreve said, hefting the weapon in his hand.

  Ding turned his attention back to Sigrid. “This is gun you were looking for, yes?”

  Sigrid nodded yes.

  “Sold,” the tall man said, sweeping the cash from the counter and into his cash drawer. “Thank you. Have to go now.”

  He turned and nodded to his mother, who took his place at the counter. Then he headed for the rear.

  “Hold on a second, Ding,” Congreve said. “There’s another pistol that I’m very interested in.”

  “Another pistol, sir?” He stopped and turned around. “Which one?”

  “This one.”

  Congreve already had the Ruger 9mm automatic aimed at Ding’s head.

  “Huge stopping power, ball rounds,” Ambrose said. “Take your arm off. No manual safety, striker fired, short, light, and crisp trigger pull, magazine loaded with seven rounds, hollow points. Care to see how it shoots, Ding?”

  “You get out of here. Now. Wife, too. I call police!”

  “Good luck with that. Detective Kissl is now going to check you and your mother for weapons. If you even think of resisting, I’ll blow your bloody head off. Same goes for Mommy dearest over there in the shadows. Understand me? Because I will do it.”

  Ding Wong’s black eyes flared defiantly, but he nodded his head yes.

  “Pat them both down, Detective,” Ambrose said to Sigrid.

  She moved quickly behind the counter, saying, “Hands in the air. Both of you. Now! Spread your legs. Wide. Did you not hear me? I said now! And keep your fucking hands up where I can see them.”

  Ambrose could not help himself.

  He smiled at his new pupil.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO