White Peak

by Ronan Frost

  “Excellent,” Rask said.

  Vic was already taking a laptop out of his only piece of luggage. It wasn’t a regular Best Buy kind of laptop, either. It was a rugged, shielded, military machine with satellite linkup. He held out a hand for the drive. Rye passed it to him as he powered up the machine. The thing was fast. The satellite linkup was active in less than twenty seconds. “It’s all yours, Jerm.”

  “Cover me, I’m going in,” the speaker—Jeremiah Byrne, Rask’s space archaeologist—said gleefully.

  “Can I say something?” Rye asked, not sure he felt entirely comfortable speaking up.

  “Of course, you are among friends now, Mr. McKenna. Speak your mind,” Rask told him.

  “Okay, it might be different in your world, but in mine you don’t kill someone lightly. So, whatever we’ve got here, it’s important enough for someone to kill for. Which means the minute they know we’ve got it they’re going to come after it. Meaning they’re going to come after us.”

  “Indeed they are,” Rask agreed. “Things are about to get interesting.”

  “I’m not sure I like your definition of interesting,” Rye said.

  “Don’t be silly, Mr. McKenna. Of course you do. We’re not so different, you and me. We like it when things get messy. It makes life fun.”

  “You’re a very strange man.”

  “New man, whatever your name is, I need you to do something for me. Have you got a knife? Something sharp?”

  “Not on me, no.”

  “Find one.”

  “I have a razor, will that work?” Vic offered.

  “Perfect. I need you to pick a spot on the canvas and scrape away the oil paint.”

  The big man reached into his bag again, and after a couple of seconds had stripped the blade from his cheap disposable razor. He carefully worked the blade across the rough surface, scratching away the top layer.

  “What do you see?”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “I see something, I think,” Rye said, leaning closer. “Can you scratch away a little more?”

  “Carefully,” Rask said, down the open line. “You don’t want to destroy the painting.”

  “I’ve got a feeling it won’t matter,” Rye said.

  “What do you mean?” Rask asked as Vic peeled away another small patch of paint, no more than a thumbnail in size, but it was enough. Beneath it, Rye could see a faint grayscale shadow, as though the image above had somehow burned into the canvas. He’d need to see more of it to be sure, but it looked as though a photographic-quality copy of the hallucinatory painting had been transferred onto the canvas for someone to paint over. It was crude, like kids who used grease-proof paper for tracing, but effective in terms of creating a passable replica.

  “It’s a forgery,” Rye said.

  SIXTEEN

  “What made you suspect it was a fake?” Rye asked Jeremiah Byrne.

  “Bookkeeping,” Rask’s tech guru explained. “There’s a directory that’s mainly invoices. Seems Christoffer has been a very naughty boy.”

  “How so?”

  “He liked to sell the same thing to several buyers at once.”

  “Naughty, naughty.”

  “Very naughty. Excluding us, he had three buyers lined up for our piece.”

  “Which rather suggests none of us were buying the original,” Rask concluded. “I don’t suppose his appointment calendar is there?”

  “No, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get into. Everything’s backed up to the cloud. Just need to know where to look.”

  “It would be helpful to know if one of those buyers had a meeting set up with him today,” Rask said.

  “Find the bomber, find the painting,” Rye agreed, following his train of thought.

  “It’s somewhere to start,” Byrne said.

  And then Rye remembered the camera. “There was a surveillance camera hidden in the climbing plants on the front of the building.”

  “Was there indeed? Well then, let’s see how our luck holds shall we?” Byrne set to work on the other end of the line; the ghost echo of key taps the only sound for a moment as everyone in both rooms held their breath. “You, my new friend, are a legend.” He could hear the grin in Byrne’s voice. “There was indeed a camera, an IP camera, that’s essentially a webcam that streams the signal wirelessly over the network to any backup drive you want, and you only went and stole the right drive. It’s all here. I’m going to need to scrub through it, but there’s a good chance our bomber’s face is on here somewhere. You did good. We’ve got our break.”

  “Assuming he looks up at the camera.”

  “Why did you have to go and ruin my good mood?”

  “Okay,” Rask said, more to himself than anyone else. “I’m going to send the others over there to meet you. Rye, it seems like an opportune time to ask if you’re in or out?”

  He thought about it for a moment and realized the last few hours was the longest single span of time he’d gone without thinking about Hannah or trying—not particularly well—to hide his grief. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “Technically I haven’t finished collecting the painting,” he said, which was no kind of answer at all.

  “Is that your way of saying you’re in?”

  “No. Just stating a fact.”

  “Hate to interrupt the negotiations,” Byrne cut across them. “But check your phones. I’m sending you the face of our bomber.”

  SEVENTEEN

  True to his word, Jeremiah Byrne sent the image through moments later.

  It wasn’t a great shot, with half of the man’s face obscured, but it was better than nothing.

  A lot better than nothing.

  A second image followed it. “One good thing about the location is that it’s basically on Embassy Row. There are dozens and dozens of security and traffic cams up and down the street and looking over the marina along the opposite side of the road. While you boys were flirting I scrubbed the traffic cams and came back with a hit. A black sedan bearing French diplomatic plates entered the street thirteen minutes before you. It didn’t leave until thirty seconds after you pulled up.”

  “He was watching us?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “So why not wait the extra few seconds for us to get across the road and make sure we were taken out in the blast?” Rye wondered.

  “Ever think you’re not that important?” Byrne said helpfully. “Sometimes the world doesn’t revolve around us, no matter how special mommy says we are. The good news is that thanks to the wonders of technology I managed to track the car through the traffic cams across the city. The bad news is that Stockholm isn’t exactly wired with all those paranoid Big Brother cams like London and Paris, so I lost it again. But I can tell you it wasn’t headed back to the French embassy. It’s difficult to project a destination, but I took a gamble and ran a root search that isolated camera feeds at major and minor transport hubs in a fifty-mile radius of the city. The car turned up in a hospital parking lot fifteen minutes from the dealer’s.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Heliport. One of only six in the city. I checked with LFV, Swedish air traffic control. Less than an hour ago an unscheduled takeoff from that hospital registered a flight path all the way through to Paris. Now, it may be a case of two and two making me Patsy Paranoid, but French diplomatic plates combined with a long-range private-charter helicopter capable of making the nearly thousand-mile flight to Paris, I’d say our bomber has serious resources and is long gone.”

  “Guuleed?” Rask said.

  “Sir?”

  “Your first course of action is to find that car, understood?”

  “Sir.”

  “If there’s anything that links it back to the bomber in any meaningful way, I want to know. There are sixty people working at the diplomatic mission in the city, and any number of visitors claiming diplomatic immunity. The embassy also runs a military service. There’s no telling how many people use that car r
egularly, but anything we can do to winnow the numbers down enough to put a name to the half face we’ve got here, I want done.”

  “Understood,” the big man said.

  “I’m running the image through facial recognition,” Byrne told them. “But there’s no guarantee we’ll get any sort of match. It’s a low-quality image, bad angle, and only a partial, but if we can get enough hits on the few points of similarity we might get lucky. I’m taking a run at the law enforcement data center. The gendarmerie run a monolithic Linux kernel called GendBuntu; it’s all open source, running from a centralized location in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just south of Paris. If he’s known to any of the sub directorates, organized crime, counterterrorism, border police, or diplomatic protection, we’ll find him.”

  “And if he isn’t?” Rye asked.

  “You really are determined to piss on my cornflakes today, aren’t you, Sunshine? If he’s not in there, you better hope you turn up something at your end. That’s why they call it teamwork. I’ll hold up my end, you worry about yours.”

  “Good man,” Rask said approvingly. “Guuleed, when you are done at the hospital I want you and Ryerson to rendezvous with the others in Paris, assuming Jeremiah is correct and that is where the trail leads. I want that painting.”

  “Sir.”

  It felt like a lot of effort for a so-so piece of art, but then it wasn’t about the art, was it? It was all about the hidden map and whatever it led to. And that was wrapped up in Rask’s desperate search for a cure for whatever was killing him.

  But what Rye couldn’t fathom was what sort of map could lead to a miracle?

  EIGHTEEN

  They took a taxi from the hotel to the hospital.

  There were more than a hundred cars still in the visitor’s lot, most bathed in early morning sun as the night had already given up being dark, bringing tomorrow with it much quicker than it would back home. Rye walked the line of cars, looking for one displaying diplomatic plates. It didn’t take him long to find it. He reached out to try the door handle.

  “Don’t touch,” Vic said. “When people wipe down surfaces for prints they often forget the most obvious areas—inside the handles.” He proceeded to use tape on the inside of the handle to lift any prints it held.

  “Nice,” Rye said appreciatively, as Vic adhered it to a contrast paper.

  “One partial,” he said, as he pocketed it. “Not going to help much.” He tried the handle. It didn’t open. “Keep watch.”

  Vic didn’t mess around; he took off his jacket, wrapped it around his fist, and punched out the tinted glass. He reached inside to open the door and clambered into the driver’s seat. He slung the pack from his shoulder and dumped it on the passenger seat, then rooted around inside the glove box for anything that might have been left behind. There was a medallion for the embassy’s parking garage, and the usual manuals and the service log book, but nothing particularly useful in terms of identifying the last driver. He reached under the seats, fumbling blindly, but came up empty-handed.

  The car was clean.

  He reached into the pack for a black light, and ran the beam across the dash, wheel, and other obvious places the driver might have touched. Even without the luminol it was obvious they’d all been wiped down.

  He repeated the tape trick on the inside of the silver handle, this time coming out with a better print, which on a quick visual comparison seemed to be a match for the partial he’d taken from the door. It would need Jeremiah Byrne’s computers to piece it together and see if it turned up a hit on Europol or elsewhere.

  Across the parking lot the hospital’s automatic doors slid open as a woman wearing black combat fatigues walked out into the night.

  “We’ve got company,” Rye told him.

  Vic stuffed his equipment back into the pack, shouldered the bag, and got out of the car.

  Wishing it was darker, the two of them hurried off to disappear within the anonymity of the parking lot, moving from car to car as the security guard headed across the blacktop to check out the diplomatic vehicle dumped by the bomber. Give it an hour or so and that car would be the center of some serious attention, assuming Swedish law enforcement were on the ball, but for now they were still ahead of the game.

  “We need to get back to the airport.”

  “An Uber, an Uber, my kingdom for an Uber,” Rye said, as they moved their way back toward the highway, looking to flag down a ride.

  NINETEEN

  It was midafternoon by the time they touched down in Paris.

  Byrne had a name for them: Sébastien Guérin.

  That in itself wasn’t particularly helpful, given the fact the man was as good as a ghost.

  “He’s rich,” Byrne explained. They were still on the hardstand, waiting for clearance to disembark. “I mean seriously, properly, chateaux-in-the-mountains rich. But beyond that, well, you need to see for yourselves.”

  “What do you mean?” Rye asked.

  “I’m sending you through some stuff I found, tell me what you think.”

  A couple of seconds later his phone pinged. He opened the message to see a series of newspaper cuttings featuring photographs of Sébastien Guérin. The first couple were the usual sort of rich and famous hobnobbing with the man lurking in the background, caught by the camera in the company of an actress or an heiress, usually accompanied by the same question: Who is the mystery beau? Most of the bold and the beautiful were in their prime, and that would date the photograph around the fifties.

  The third was interesting for who else was in it, as it appeared to be considerably older than the first paparazzi shots.

  The four other men in the photograph wore the unmistakable uniforms of the Third Reich.

  He didn’t immediately recognize any of their faces, so it could conceivably have been some costume party in poor taste rather than a meeting of the Führer’s inner circle.

  “The man in the middle is Bruno Beger, he was a German racial anthropologist who was part of the Nazi expedition into Tibet, beside him is Ernst Schäfer, who headed that expedition. The man on the right is more immediately recognizable, Rudolf Hess, who at the time of the photo was deputy führer, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. The fourth man is Edmund Kiss, an archaeologist who wrote a substantial body of work relating to the occult and ancient mysticism. All four men were guests of the Thule Society, and members of the SS Ahnenerbe, the occult division of the SS. Indeed, the trip to Tibet, if you believe the more fanciful stories around it, was a front for Himmler’s search for the Holy Grail.”

  The fourth photograph was different again, and all the more chilling for it. It was a grainy image of a prison chamber containing a guillotine, and a prisoner on his knees waiting for the blade to fall. Sébastien Guérin appeared to be his executioner. It could have been taken anywhere between the fifties and seventies, it was impossible to tell, but it was unmistakably Guérin, and he didn’t appear to have aged a day since the previous photo and this one. He wasn’t named in either of them.

  “Who the hell is this guy?”

  A rich man playing executioner?

  Unsurprisingly, the article was in French. Rye could only pick out a few words here and there, but it seemed to be about the man escaping execution, and in the process claiming the life of a warder and the nurse who was due to deliver a mercy injection to calm his nerves before the guillotine took off his head.

  “He was only the third man to escape La Santé Prison in over one hundred and fifty years. La Santé has housed some impressive inmates: Carlos the Jackal; Gorguloff, who assassinated their president; Bastien-Thiry, the assassin who came within inches of killing de Gaulle; Manuel Noriega. It’s one of those places where you go in and you don’t get out again.”

  The final photograph was every bit as shocking as the last.

  It was considerably more modern than the others and appeared to be a newspaper cutting. It was a crowd scene, panic written on the face of those fleeing the scene of the Paris terror att
ack at the Bataclan a couple of years ago, and there, in the background, with blood on his face, was Sébastien Guérin, not a day older than the first photograph despite the years in between. “Facial recognition picked the image up. There’s nothing to say it’s really him, but if it is…”

  “He’s aging really well.”

  “To say the least. The guy in that photograph should be over a hundred years old.”

  TWENTY

  Early evening, and they were still several hours ahead of the rest of Rask’s team.

  They had an address for Guérin, a chateau an hour or so to the south of the city.

  “What do you want to do?” Rye asked Vic.

  The big man looked toward the rental car desk. “You up for a bit of sightseeing?”

  They hired a big Volvo SUV. There was a saying he’d heard somewhere: back home a hundred years was a long time, over here a hundred miles was a long way. That couldn’t have been more evident in a single journey if the route planner had deliberately attempted to bury them in an avalanche of history. Buildings on either side were older than his country, some five hundred, even six hundred years old, their white stone façades polished and shining in the early evening sun as it slowly lowered toward the horizon. Across six lanes of traffic he saw the huge rising spires of the ancient cathedral on the banks of the Seine and the iconic iron tower that rose protectively over its city.

  So many other landmarks were lost behind row upon row of cramped and crowded streets overflowing with life.

  The Autoroute du Soliel avoided congestion with the promise of the sun. They drove without music, the GPS’s voice occasionally prompting them to change lane or take an exit as they negotiated the journey from the airport to Sébastien Guérin’s estate.

  They left the crowded roads behind for an avenue of yew trees whose branches grew together over the road to create a leafy tunnel that stretched on for more than a mile. The deeper into the tunnel they drove the more the atmosphere around them seemed to change and the temperature drop until it felt decidedly chilly inside the car. The grass along the roadside was high and unkempt. Branches, weighed down heavily by their leaves, dragged almost low enough to scrape the roof of the SUV in places.