Avalanche

by James Patterson

  It’s the North Koreans.

  Robert remembers Ken saying something about them trying to get the USBs. He’s unsure what to do, but decides heading back to Eugenio’s Porsche is a good place to start.

  When he returns to the Porsche’s parking spot near the Olden Hotel, a metal-flake gold Mercedes Geländewagen is parked where Eugenio’s Porsche once sat. Robert walks into the hotel and tells the receptionist, “I’m afraid my car has been towed. Could you give me directions to the tow yard?”

  “They are closed until morning, sir. Would you like us to have someone retrieve your car first thing tomorrow?” asks the receptionist.

  “I can retrieve it. Could you draw me a map?”

  “But of course!”

  With the map in hand, Robert wanders through the village. He stops on a quiet back street and looks around, overcome by the feeling that he is not alone. But there isn’t a sound. The snow has made every fresh footstep silent. It’s just some gut feeling or paranoia seeping into his mind, he knows.

  He finds the tow lot surrounded by a wooden fence on a back street. He hops it easily, hearing a German shepherd begin to bark inside a small shack. He sees Eugenio’s Porsche right away, with the hood popped and all the doors open. The battery cables are hanging out the front, clearly cut and split at the end like a snake’s tongue. He moves quietly over to the car, peers into the backseat, and sees the long legs and metallic tights of Carola, on all fours digging between the seats. “Looking for something?” Robert asks.

  She swings around and points her can of mace at Robert. She squeezes the trigger, but the can does nothing but gurgle, creating a bubble at the valve. Realizing its failure, she squirms away, but Robert grabs her ankle and pulls. She kicks him with her other leg, her heel landing squarely on his jaw. Startled for a second, he loosens his grip.

  “Why don’t you just help me instead of running from me?”

  She wriggles out the other door. Robert dives and misses, sliding out after her.

  She’s looking over her shoulder at Robert, smiling wildly, running away, when she crashes into a tall Korean man in a black suit. He grabs her by the shoulders. From the shadows steps a beautiful Korean woman in a black leather duster. She says, “The infamous Yøta. We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “Fuck you!” yells Carola.

  The Korean man pulls a gun and holds it to her head. Carola gets very still. She whispers, “If I had the fucking sickness, I’d fucking give it to you.”

  “Oh, we’ve got the sickness.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We had a deal. Eugenio sold the sickness to the Iranians and the cure to my supreme leader. Pretty clever—until the Iranians found out. He’s going to have a hard time spending all their money now that he’s dead. So you need to finish your partner’s business.”

  “Look, I don’t know anything about this. I just work on the code. Eugenio deals with the assholes like you.”

  “Hey, this is who you guys are looking for,” says Robert to the woman. “So can you let my wife, Ali, go now?”

  “Thanks a lot, jerk!” Carola yells at Robert.

  “You’re not exactly good at making friends,” Robert retorts.

  The tall man moves over to Robert, holds the gun under Robert’s chin, and leads him over to Carola.

  “Here’s how this is going to work,” says the Korean woman. “You take us to get the cure, the USB drive, right now—or we kill you both very, very slowly.”

  “Where are you keeping my wife?” asks Robert.

  His question is met with blank stares.

  “Did you kill Ken?” asks Robert.

  The beautiful woman smiles deviously. “A CIA mule is no match for our trained assassins.”

  Robert looks at the man who holds the gun under his chin. “You fucker!”

  The tall man sneers at Robert.

  Two shots ring out in the night, almost simultaneously. The top of the tall Korean man’s head is cracked open, and he falls to his knees.

  “Give us what is ours,” a voice in the dark says.

  The Korean woman pulls out a gun and starts firing indiscriminately into the darkness, until three sniper shots sever her arm and it falls in the snow. Carola flings the woman onto the ground and searches her pockets, pulls out the USB drive, and puts it in her pocket.

  Robert takes the gun from the dead Korean man and aims it at the nearby streetlights. He manages to hit the nearest three, a small mercy. Total darkness.

  Robert kicks the door to the small shack open, and the German shepherd charges out into the night, straight for whoever had joined them.

  Robert grabs Carola by the hand. Together they leap the fence and run down the street, away from the sounds of a man and dog locked in combat.

  More gunshots ring out in the night.

  Chapter 35

  Robert gasps for air and demands of Carola, who jogs by his side, “Quit lying to me! Quit running from me! Let’s work together, or we’ll both be dead.”

  Carola stops, puts her hands on her knees, and tries to catch her breath. She extends her hand to Robert. “Okay,” she says, “we shake on it.”

  “Let’s try Eugenio’s apartment. Maybe he left something there. A laptop. The USB.”

  Carola nods. “Let’s find the cure; then we hold all the cards. I get my money. You get your wife, and we get the fuck out of Switzerland.”

  “Agreed,” says Robert. “Give me the USB.”

  “That trust thing, it didn’t last long. I thought we were on the same side.”

  “Okay. I got this. You got the USB.” Robert displays the Korean’s gun.

  Carola leads Robert to a three-story chalet. “He was renting the penthouse.”

  “How do we get in?”

  “There’s a balcony on the back side, and the snow is very high. We climb in.”

  The snow is high, they find, but there is a gap between the snowbank and the top balcony. “How do we get across that?” asks Robert. “It’s three stories down.”

  “Jump.”

  “No. Look over there.” Robert points to an old toboggan leaning against the wall. “That’s an eight footer. That thing will make it.”

  They climb to the top of the snowbank, pulling up the sled. Robert lowers the toboggan like a drawbridge over the gap. Carola tiptoes across while Robert holds it steady. She pulls on the sliding glass door. It opens and she enters.

  “Hey! Come back here and hold for me.” But she’s already inside. Robert crawls across the toboggan gingerly, lunging onto the balcony as the toboggan starts to slide and tip.

  Robert walks inside. “Thanks for your help out there.”

  “What? You made it.”

  Inside it’s a large and airy modern apartment, the ceiling angled above wooden crossbeams. There are signs of a struggle, a search, or a party; it’s hard to tell the difference. Eugenio’s clothes are thrown all over. All the cabinets and drawers are open. Three wigs rest in a row, nesting on a shelf. They make their way, searching, not finding.

  Carola walks over to a pile of clothes and lifts out a gold pair of metallic tights.

  “You and Eugenio were a couple?” Robert asks.

  She shrugs her shoulders and walks toward the spacious bathroom. She starts to close the door.

  “What are you doing?” Robert asks.

  “I’m going to change. I’ve been wearing the same clothes for two days. Maybe I’ll even take a shower first.”

  “Change here.”

  “Okay.” She turns coquette. “You starting to like me? Don’t want me out of your sight?” She stares at Robert and pulls her shirt off. She reaches behind and unstraps her bra. “Why don’t we shower? Together.”

  Turning away, Robert looks at a glass-topped coffee table.

  “Now my feelings are hurt. You don’t want to even look at me, do you?” She fondles her breasts. “Do I make you uncomfortable now? Wait till I have to take a shit. This is going to get interesting.” She
starts to slowly pull down her tights. “Don’t you want to see?”

  “Fine! Get in the bathroom. But don’t lock the door and don’t take a long time. And leave the USB out here.”

  Robert looks out the window at the starry sky. “Why is the world so exceedingly vibrant in some moments and drained of life in others?” he asks.

  “To see the beauty, you have to look.”

  “That’s what I tell my students.”

  “Robert?”

  He turns and meets her eyes. “Yes?” he asks.

  “Do you want me?” she asks, seeking his eyes.

  He shakes his head. “It’s about getting my wife back, remember?”

  Suddenly she’s sullen. She steps into the bathroom and shuts the door. Robert hears the water run in the shower and relaxes for just a second. Then he hears the lock slowly click over. He looks for the USB, but it is nowhere to be found.

  He turns the handle. “Open up, Carola!”

  “In a second,” she calls.

  Robert runs over to the fireplace and grabs a heavy andiron. He hammers at the lock once, twice, and the third time, the wood splits. He bursts in, not surprised to see no one in the shower stall. Carola is nowhere. He feels a cold breeze, looks up, and sees that the skylight is open. “Damn it, Carola!”

  Robert crawls up the towel rack to the top of the shower stall and precariously leaps for the opening. His fingers grab hold, and he labors to pull himself up and through to the steep roof.

  The sun is now up in the distance, and the large chunks of snow are melting. Carola scampers off toward the other side. She turns to look back at Robert, all smiles—then she slips and disappears.

  On all fours, Robert scurries across the roof. He finds Carola hanging on by her fingernails to the rain gutter, the USB drive clenched in her teeth. Her eyes cry out for help.

  Chapter 36

  Hervé stands in the tow yard. He turns from the mangled door of the little wooden shack to the deconstructed Porsche. He looks down in the snow by his feet, where the wolf-like carcass of the German shepherd lies in silhouette, its mouth open, its teeth covered in blood.

  A nearly headless man’s corpse is slumped in the snow.

  A delicate woman’s arm rests on a pillow of white snow, as if it were a display in some very twisted jeweler’s window.

  “This was the dead Italian’s car, non?” he asks one of his officers.

  “Oui.”

  “I am willing to wager that the blood on this canine’s teeth is that of a human being. I order DNA testing, vite, vite. This will lead us to our murderer.”

  The officer looks at the arm lying in the snow and asks, “She could not have gone far. The hospitals report no armless woman requiring surgery.”

  “Do we have surveillance video?”

  “Oui. But it must be decoded.”

  Chapter 37

  Carola is dangling, kicking her feet.

  Robert lies down on his stomach and reaches for the USB drive between her teeth. He can’t get it. Carola’s eyes tear up. The slippery moss-covered roof tiles won’t hold. He extends his hand. “Grab hold of me!”

  She shakes her head.

  Robert edges his body farther toward the ledge and just barely gets his hand around her thin wrist. He pulls with all the strength he can muster. She swings her leg up onto the copper gutter. He pulls the rest of her up and rolls over on top of her. She hugs him and wraps her legs around him.

  “C’mon,” he says. “You’re safe now.”

  This time, Carola really takes a hot shower. Robert sits on the bathroom countertop and studies the USB drive in his cut-up hands. “You warmed up yet?”

  Carola turns off the water and reaches out of the stall.

  Robert hands her a towel. “Why did you run?”

  “Grazie,” she says, stepping out of the shower and using the towel to dry her legs. “I’m scared. I never got into this thing to see people killed.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I didn’t think about it all the way through. I was just sick of writing code in a cubicle.”

  “What does Yøta mean?”

  She cracks a demure smile. “None of you assholes know how to even say it right—it’s Y-not-T-A. It’s a handle. I’m a hacker. I write malicious code, other shit. No one uses their real names.”

  “Can’t you just make another one of these USB drives? What makes this one so valuable?”

  “Part of the hacker code. It’s like walking in the snow—we cover our tracks. Secure delete everything after we’re done. It’s the only way to keep this shit from going global.”

  “We’re running out of time to save Ali. If they call, I’m giving them this thing.”

  “But they wanted the sickness and the cure,” says Carola.

  “If Eugenio made a deal with the North Koreans but never completed it, maybe the cure doesn’t exist.”

  “Eugenio decided that he wouldn’t give the sickness to the Iranians unless he designed a cure first. We’re anarchists, not fucking nihilists. We don’t want to destroy the world. We just want to get paid and have some fun.”

  “You got a weird idea of fun. Let’s retrace Eugenio’s steps. Did he do drugs?”

  “Of course. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “No.”

  “I mean everybody…cool.” She wraps the towel around her middle and lights a cigarette.

  Robert wonders out loud, “Would he have left the USB at a drug dealer’s house?”

  “Ever heard of room service?” asks Carola. “This is fucking Gstaad. You throw a Snapchat, they bring you whatever you want.”

  “Snapchat?”

  She laughs. “Snapchat. Not just for teenagers.”

  “Did he go to brothels?” Robert asks.

  Carola laughs. “That’s a funny question.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you kidding? Look at me.” She drops the towel, holds out her hands and turns slowly, dressed in nothing but the sunlight.

  “You never know,” Robert says, averting his eyes.

  “Why won’t you look at me?” Carola asks.

  “Why do you want me to look at you?”

  “It’s fun. Sort of like a magic trick. Sleight of hand. If I want you to look away, I touch my tits.”

  “Remember, I’m married.”

  “Then why did she go with Eugenio? Tell me.”

  “I’ve been asking myself that.” Robert thinks of the scrawl on the hotel mirror. “I think she wanted a divorce.”

  “And you’re risking your life to save her?”

  “Of course.”

  “Wow. Well, women love a man on a horse. You come rescue her, she’ll fuck your brains out,” Carola says. “Or if she won’t, I will.”

  Robert carries on. “Why are you so obsessed with Eugenio’s car?”

  “He kept a fake key in his car.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “He had a USB drive that was shaped exactly like a Porsche key—he fucking loved it. It was like, the two things he loved in life the most. His fucking car and his fucking malicious code.”

  “Holy shit!” Robert jumps as if he’s been electrocuted.

  “What?” Carola yells back.

  “He gave me his keys, that first night. Maybe it’s on the key ring!”

  “Holy shit! Where?”

  “Back at the Gstaad Palace. In our room!”

  “Let’s go,” Carola says, pulling up her tights.

  Chapter 38

  The valets have seen it all before. Despite the refined clientele, it’s not uncommon to see stragglers pulling into the Gstaad Palace in the early morning hours after a long night of hard partying. This couple fits the bill.

  Robert is unshaven, and his Tom Ford jacket has a rip under the arm where it caught on the skylight while he was crawling back into Eugenio’s apartment. But at least it helps to hide the large bulge under his shirt at the waistline, where he hides the Korean’s gun.

  Beneath Car
ola’s short rabbit jacket, the gold gleams in her pierced belly button. Her skirt is too high, her Moon Boots too big, and her golden metallic tights sparkle a little too much. An older man waiting outside the hotel, dressed in his one-piece ski outfit with a giant embroidered eagle on the back, grabs Robert by the shoulder and asks in a low voice, “Where’d ya get her?”

  “What?” Robert says.

  “Is she one of the madam’s girls?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Haha! Sure you don’t. I’m like you—I like ’em wild,” says the old man.

  “No you don’t, Carl!” says the tan woman beside him, probably in her fifties, with bright coral lipstick. She turns to Robert. “He’s all talk. A threesome for us is a dinner date. He’ll drop a little extra drool in his soup and call it a night.”

  “She lies. I’m a tiger. Grrrrrrowl!” The old man paws the air at Carola. “Tomorrow night, you’re mine!”

  Robert pulls her under his arm and moves for the elevator.

  At the door to his room, he pauses. Carola looks up at him with her big almond-shaped eyes. “What?” she asks.

  “Seriously, if you take the USB thing and run, I’ll hunt you across the globe and I’ll fucking kill you.”

  “I’ve changed. I promise,” she says with a wink.

  “So have I.” Robert slides the card in the door and opens it slowly—to find Hervé sitting in a wingback chair.

  “Bonjour. I arrived, waiting to meet my grieving widower, yet instead I find you pulling into port in the early morning hours with a—”

  “Watch it, asshole,” says Carola.

  “With a charming young lady,” says Hervé.

  “Hello, Hervé. What are you doing in my room?”

  “What are you doing NOT in your room? That is the question.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Everything is my business,” says Hervé.

  “We met in a bar. He was lonely. He gave me three hundred euros. We drank and fucked all night,” says Carola. “We were going to fuck some more. You mind?”