Going for the Gold

by Emma Lathen

  At first all went well. Brad was in full view and, as always, ready to oblige. Then came the hitch.

  “But, John,” Withers finally managed to break in, “this is the end of the slalom, not the beginning. This is only the Mid Station. The starting gate is up there.” His hand nonchalantly encompassed empyrean heights. “The other chair lift goes all the way up. The contestants change here, depending on whether they’re going to the downhill runs or the slalom runs and . . .”

  His voice trailed off as he realized that his vice-president was battering his way back to the lift area. Doggedly Withers plowed after him. The trouble with John, he thought, was that he wouldn’t stand still long enough for anything to be explained.

  “But, John,” he began, catching at a swinging arm.

  “No, Brad, not now. I’ve got to get to the starting gate.”

  Withers was magnificently confident. “Well, you can’t go in those clothes.”

  “Good God, this isn’t a social occasion!”

  “How are you planning to ski?”

  It was enough to halt Thatcher in his tracks. “Ski?” he repeated dully.

  “That’s right.” Withers was always willing to share his information about Olympic procedures. “I’ve been trying to tell you. The lift goes to the top. The starting gate is halfway down. So the competitors have to ski down to the beginning of the course.”

  Thatcher froze, the unwelcome news slowly sinking in. As his gaze became openly hostile, Withers, in his turn, grew irritated. “Didn’t you notice anything at all the last time you were here, John?” he demanded.

  It was a good question. Thatcher cursed himself. Why hadn’t he familiarized himself with the geography of Whiteface when he had the chance? He could have had a steward show him over the whole mountain. Thatcher cursed the stewards. Instead he had allowed himself to be led about blindly by young Noyes. Thatcher cursed Noyes.

  In midstream, he halted. The arriving lift was just depositing another latecomer. The last object of his anathemas pushed the bar aside and clambered upright. Dick Noyes was wearing full ski gear.

  He was, however, none too pleased to be spotted. “I had a good mind not to come,” he announced sulkily, still smarting from his last encounter with Tilly. “If it wasn’t for—”

  “Shut up!” Thatcher ordered. “There’s a good chance that the sniper who killed Yves Bisson is waiting for Tilly to come down the slalom run. Can you get up there and stop her?”

  Dick was better with action than with words. His face was still in disarray from the shock of Thatcher’s greeting, but he was already crossing over to the other chair lift.

  The attendant had his own ideas. “Nobody except authorized personnel to the top,” he intoned, refusing to step aside.

  Brad Withers, three strides to the rear, arrived in time to confirm this policy. “This young man can’t go up. I tell you what you should do, you should talk to that State Police captain, the one who—here! John!”

  In one swift movement, Thatcher had transferred the official IOC badge from Withers’ chest to Noyes’ wind-breaker.

  “Go!” he said, allowing himself to be detained by his volubly indignant superior.

  As a torrent of reproach broke over his head, he had the satisfaction of seeing Dick Noyes airborne. He felt as if he had slipped the leash of a willing but untested wolfhound. Dick, he was sure, would break every bone in his body in the effort to save Tilly. How he would fare with obstructive officialdom and confusing topography was less certain.

  “I don’t see what it is about that girl,” complained Brad Withers, who had not stopped talking for a second. “Yesterday they were ready to blow up Whiteface so that she could race. Today everybody’s going crazy trying to talk to her. First there’s that policeman friend of yours, then you start acting up, now that boy is going to the top with my badge and what the starters are going to say about that, I don’t like to think . . .”

  My God, thought Thatcher, who had not finished castigating himself. Now it was going to turn out that he should always listen to what Brad had to say.

  “What about that policeman friend of mine?” he asked aloud. “Do you mean that Captain Ormsby is here?”

  “He’s in the office at the Mid Station Lodge,” Withers answered before continuing petulantly. “And that’s another thing. If people want to sit around indoors, I suppose that’s their business. But why come to an alpine event to do it?”

  “I expect he has his reasons,” said Thatcher, getting ready to shoulder his way across the Mid Station once again.

  * * *

  When Tilly Lowengard, head down and muscles braced, shoved her sticks into the snow and thrust herself past the electronic timer, loudspeakers blared the news of her official entry into competition.

  At the Base Station Everett Gabler, posted beside a police cruiser, uncharacteristically crossed his fingers. He had succeeded in dispatching two officers, complete with skis, up to the Mid Station. But that, he had learned, was the end of the run, and Tilly’s fate would have been determined before she ever reached them.

  Captain Ormsby did not hear the announcement because he was inside a phone booth. When he emerged his face was drawn and he shook his head at Thatcher.

  “She’s already started,” he reported, “and they claim she’d never even hear a recall on the PA system.”

  “So Noyes didn’t get to her in time,” Thatcher said slowly. “All we can do is hope I’m wrong about the murderer being up there.”

  But a scant 100 meters from the end of the course the killer was cradling a rifle, waiting for Tilly. Almost invisible in a white anorak with the hood pulled up, he was pleased she had not been the first runner. The slalom was not his event, and he had needed those trial beads to be sure, absolutely sure.

  Highest of all on Whiteface, Dick Noyes had already taken the gamble of his life. He had encountered none of the problems foreseen by Thatcher at the top of the lift. His badge was an Open Sesame and, in the motley crowd of workmen generated by trail grooming and television coverage, one more anonymous man had passed without notice. It had even been easy to steal a pair of skis from the rack outside a maintenance building and set off on the slalom approach trail. The difficulty was not officialdom and not geographic confusion; it was snow. The blizzard had left drifts of unbelievable height, and the heroic efforts to open the area had cast up further embankments. Every trail was almost a tunnel, lined by white walls of six, eight and even ten feet.

  Dick, who knew far more about Olympic procedure than Thatcher, than Captain Ormsby or, for that matter, than Brad Withers, had realized all along that storming the starting building would be a protracted, self-defeating business. He had assumed that he could bypass the official corral and catch Tilly’s attention as she poised for her takeoff. That was now out of the question. Bypasses today would require crampons and an ice axe.

  As his skis squeaked along the churned-up approach, he considered alternatives. Days of accompanying Tilly to her practice sessions had left Dick with a built-in map of all three slalom trails. The glimmering of an idea began to emerge. The trails were widely separated at their commencement, angling together so that they converged before the Mid Station Lodge for a joint run-out area. But while one was totally independent, the two others were not. Midway along their length they kinked together and ran parallel, so closely parallel that snow could not possibly be piled between them without narrowing the trails to noncompetition standards. That area would necessarily be clear, and a skier on Mountain Run would have a clear view of Wilderness.

  “Lord!”

  In one heart-stopping moment the tide of realization poured over Dick Noyes. These were precisely the requirements of any hidden sniper. He, too, could not break through the ring of stewards. He, too, could not go mountaineering. He, too, had to have an unobstructed view of Tilly.

  And final confirmation lay just ahead where the path forked three ways. To the left there was a virgin stretch of whiteness. Dead center t
here was nothing but a trampled mess where competitors, timers, judges and stewards had passed on their lawful business. But on the right, as clear as writing on a blackboard, one set of skis had carved telltale tracks.

  He did not hesitate for an instant. Getting to Tilly might be impossible, but getting to the killer was not. With something very close to murder in his own heart, Dick Noyes streaked rightward.

  At the Lodge Thatcher cast vainly about for some form of reassurance. “They announce the halfway times,” he said. “At least we’ll know how she is there.”

  “Hell, we’ll be able to see for ourselves by then,” growled Ormsby. “We could see her right now, if it wasn’t for all that snow.”

  They were standing at the top of the steps, craning their necks to see over the crowd. Flanking them were Everett’s reinforcements.

  “And there’s not a goddam thing we can do,” said one of them.

  The clearing was exactly as Dick had expected. The first thing he saw was Tilly shooting around a curve with beautifully controlled precision. Then the giveaway marks led his eye to an almost invisible white mound, a white mound holding a dark metal tube.

  “Tilly!” Dick yelled despairingly, but it was a useless reflex and he knew it. The distance, the crackling loudspeakers, the concentration of the competitor were all against him. Neither Tilly nor the murderer had heard his voice or his rapidly nearing approach. But the figure in white had tensed slightly, shifting the rifle for some microscopic adjustment.

  Without thinking Dick lofted a ski pole, twirled it javelinlike, and let fly. In the same second the pole landed, a shot rang out and Tilly awoke to her peril. All three of them responded with razor-sharp reflexes of fear, rage, and frustration.

  Tilly, looking neither right nor left, hunched into the tightest tuck that Dick had ever seen, increased her speed to flat-out downhill velocity and still managed to flash around the next flag without an inch to spare.

  It was Dick’s last sight of her. The white mound exploded into action even as his adversary glided to a halt. The rifle came up in a two-handed grip and clubbed into Dick’s face before being flung aside as the murderer snatched up poles and fled down the trail.

  But Dick, even with one pole and a throbbing head, was in his element. Finishing 35th in a field of 36 still left him ahead of almost everybody else in the world. Blinding down the course, he closed the gap in seconds and then, with every atavistic instinct at full stretch, he abandoned his remaining pole and hurled himself forward. The result was partly tackle, partly assault, and mostly simple collision. Hampered by skis and snow, the two men lay full length on the ground, clutching each other in a loverlike embrace.

  And, from a distance of six inches, Dick found himself staring into the distorted features of Roger Hathaway!

  At the moment every uncertainty, every resentment, every anguish of the last week boiled up in Dick Noyes for a single jubilant catharsis as his fist plowed into Hathaway’s face. Then Hathaway’s hands were on his throat and he was fighting for his life.

  True to Captain Ormsby’s prediction, the last half of Tilly’s run was visible to the spectators at the Mid Station. And they got a good deal more than they bargained for. Even her first appearance, alone, was exciting. She came flashing down the course at a do-or-die pace, flipping around the posts in a series of linked arcs that were so smooth they seemed almost absentminded.

  But before the first appreciative gasps died away they were transformed into cries of surprise. Down a parallel trail, where nobody should have been, came first one skier, then a second. Hell-bent on reaching the bottom, they bashed their way forward, barely taking the turns, knocking down posts and flags, and finally colliding with each other.

  “That’s no way to come down a slalom run,” said a disapproving voice that Thatcher recognized as Brad Withers’.

  Captain Ormsby was swifter to recognize the significance of what he was seeing. “Loomis! Kantovski! Get over there!” he yelled a second before his voice would have been drowned by the cheers for Tilly’s finishing time.

  Dick Noyes, his eyes dimming, his ears filled with a great roaring, had been heaving and straining for a lifetime. Now, very slowly, his dazed senses were signaling a change in circumstances. He was no longer being strangled. Roger Hathaway had been pulled aside. Somebody was hanging on to him and saying the same thing, again and again.

  “It’s all over, kid. We’ve got him. You can relax now.”

  Gratefully Dick ceased his struggles. The heaving and the straining and the fighting for breath stopped. But the roaring did not.

  “What’s that noise? What’s going on?”

  “Didn’t you hear the PA?” The trooper looked at him curiously. “Your girlfriend just won the gold and broke the world record doing it. C’mon, I’ll help you up.”

  But Dick Noyes had fallen back on the snow, chuckling weakly, his face wreathed in a beatific smile.

  Chapter 22

  If Winter Comes...?

  THE arrest of Roger Hathaway and the recovery of his ill-gotten gains necessarily preoccupied Thatcher and Gabler for the remainder of the afternoon. They had to sign countless documents, arrange for an interim bank manager, break the bad news to a sadly disappointed Brad Withers, and disband Milliken’s operation. Nonetheless they were constantly distracted by the upheavals accompanying the final hours of the Winter Games. Mountains of sports equipment trundled by on trucks while crews maneuvered to dismantle judges’ stands and electronic gear. Every conceivable facility was jammed with crowds still celebrating the U.S. hockey team’s impossible dream. Commercial establishments simultaneously urged their staffs to prodigies of effort and prepared to pay them off. The kitchens of Olympic Village labored to produce a memorable farewell dinner. Suitcases began piling up in the lobbies of dormitories, motels and rented quarters. But nobody was actually leaving, not with the final gold medal awards and the formal closing ceremonies still to come that evening.

  No, not even the men of the Sloan were able to tear themselves away.

  “But my God, Everett, Hathaway’s scheme would have been perfect if the timing had held.”

  The exclamation was torn from Thatcher as he stood with his party on the shores of Mirror Lake, watching the fireworks.

  Everett knew exactly what he meant but regarded such remarks as antisocial. The other three were not particularly interested. In fact Gunther Euler, arriving late, had been more impressed with Tilly’s accomplishments at Whiteface than anybody else’s.

  “What was so wonderful about Hathaway’s scheme?” he now asked lazily. “One of us could have organized a gang to pass counterfeit just as well.”

  “You’ve missed the point. There never was any gang. Hathaway simply carried the counterfeit into the Sloan that evening, and effected the substitution right at the vaults.” Thatcher was beginning to feel that he had been repeating these same sentences all day.

  But his attempt at clarification merely bewildered the German. “If it’s that easy,” Euler objected, “why doesn’t everybody at your bank do it?”

  Everett could not resist the opportunity for a homily. “Because not everyone, young man, gives way to unbridled rapacity.”

  His shaft went wide of the mark. Gunther grinned down at him good-naturedly and Thatcher, reflecting on Gabler’s unresting ingenuity at dreaming up new internal controls for the Sloan, intervened.

  “That, of course, is one reason,” he agreed diplomatically. “The other is, for a barefaced theft like that, detection is almost as simple as execution. Probably the temptation does idly cross the minds of some of our employees. Then they realize that they’re bound to be caught and dismiss the idea. Unfortunately Roger Hathaway chose another route. He set to work devising ways to obscure the issue. That’s why he needed Yves Bisson.”

  At last he had captured the attention of his other two companions. Tilly, who had been moving in a quiet cloud of fulfillment ever since standing to attention for the Swiss national anthem, said, “What
an unlikely combination! It never occurred to me that they knew each other.”

  Dick, who had been resting from the emotional buffets of the day by clasping Tilly’s hand and thinking of absolutely nothing, returned to reality.

  “You could have knocked me down with a feather when I realized the guy I was tangling with was Roger,” he admitted.

  Rarely had a figure of speech been less appropriate. Dick Noyes had been knocked down all right, but a bulldozer was closer to the operative agent. And Roger Hathaway now looked even worse. After the police had pried them apart, the first stop had been the Medical Center, followed in Hathaway’s case by an emergency visit to the dentist.

  “They went at each other like a pair of wildcats,” Ormsby had reported to Thatcher. “My boys tell me they never saw anything like it. Those two could barely move, being down in the snow with their skis still on, but that didn’t stop them from trying to kill each other.”

  It was not surprising that the damage had been to extremities. Hathaway was missing two front teeth, while Dick Noyes’ black eye covered one side of his face and his right hand was stiff with bandages. But for Dick, at least, the catharsis had been effective. He sounded almost detached as he began to pelt Thatcher with questions.

  “Why did he need somebody like Yves? Roger was the one who knew about banking.”

  “True enough. But Hathaway’s whole objective was to make the crime look as if it had been committed by someone outside the banking system, and long before any Eurochecks reached the Sloan tellers. He was performing a conjuring act, the most important element of which was misdirection. You must remember he chose a European instrument to forge and an international event at which to pass the counterfeit. To add further substance to the illusion, he wanted some innocent foreigners caught in the act of cashing fakes. In short, Hathaway intended to bathe the entire theft in such an overseas atmosphere that the authorities would start on the wrong foot immediately.”