White Peak

by Ronan Frost

  “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “You don’t ask, you don’t receive.”

  “Sadly, I’m fresh out of miracles. Your only way out is straight through the middle of them.”

  “Ah, well, thanks for nothing.”

  Carter was grinning. That was more alarming by far than the sight of the three unarmed men on the landing above them.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of doing something stupid,” Rye said.

  “Depends on your definition of stupid,” the thief said, reaching into his pack. “Cover your ears.”

  “What?”

  Rather than answer, he threw something up the stairs, and ducked, covering his ears and closing his eyes even as the flashbang went off. The blinding flash of light blazed pure white across the monks’ eyes as it burned out the photoreceptors and rendered them temporarily blind even as the concussive blast bowled them off their feet.

  Smoke streamed out of the stun grenade, choking the stairwell.

  It was impossible to see.

  The smoke stung Rye’s eyes.

  The bang of the detonation was worse, though. It was so loud, even with his hands cupped over his ears, that the shrill whistle carried on long after they had negotiated the tangle of bodies at the top of the stairs and were running for the door.

  Coughing, Rye reached the glass doors a couple steps behind the thief.

  Carter rattled at the locked door, not seeming to understand why it wouldn’t open for him.

  On the other side of the door, Iskra Zima wasn’t messing about.

  She wasted no time at all with the niceties of breaking and entering, and they stood aside as she put three bullets into the glass, shattering the door.

  Rye followed Carter Vickers out into the fresh air of the French night.

  The first thing he saw as the fresh air hit him was Olivia on one knee laying down covering fire as he and Carter staggered out of the smoking building.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Carter said.

  They raced across the blacktop to the SUVs.

  Eyes still watering, Rye thought he caught a glimpse of the silver Mercedes in the distance, but when he finally managed to focus there was nothing to see.

  He clambered into the front passenger seat, tossed the tube with the forgery into the back, and belted up.

  Beside him, Vic got in behind the wheel.

  Olivia got in the back.

  Carter and Iskra got into the second car.

  “We’ve got the painting,” Vic said. For a moment Rye thought he was talking to him and was about to say he wasn’t stupid, as he patted the original pressed close to his chest, but then the big man said, “We’re sixty minutes from the airstrip,” and he realized he was on the comms with Rask.

  “Make sure the plane’s ready to take off as soon as we roll up. I don’t want to stick around any longer than necessary.”

  Vic checked the mirror before gunning the engine.

  As soon as the car peeled away from the lot, the security lights came on, flooding the rearview mirror with light.

  Vic didn’t slow down.

  They drove quickly along the Esplanade of Religions, the second car behind them. Vic didn’t ask what had happened in there, so Rye didn’t tell him, but he could see that Olivia was itching to ask. Vic took them through a series of turns, then pressed the earbud and said, “Carter, you guys go ahead, we’ll meet you at the landing strip.”

  “Problem?” Rye heard the other man’s reply.

  “Nah, just low on gas. I saw a gas station near the cloverleaf where we came off for the city.”

  “Gotcha.”

  The second SUV maneuvered around them and accelerated toward the main autoroute back into Paris.

  Rye checked the mirror.

  There was no one else on the road.

  They turned into the Total France forecourt and drew up alongside the pumps.

  Rye got out to stretch his legs while Vic filled the tank. He walked across the parking lot to the grass embankment and looked down at the lights rushing by on the freeway like some living time-lapse photograph. The engine roars dopplered away from him as he stood there.

  He had a decision to make. His deal with Rask had been to collect the painting, and as soon as he turned it over to him, that was that. Job done. All he had to do was put it in his hands and he could go back to real life and all it entailed. But did he want to do that? Right now, there was an air of unreality to everything that staved off the grief and gave him something else to focus on. He knew he was running away from it, but what happened when he stood still for a moment and allowed it to catch up with him?

  Rye didn’t want to think about it for too long, even in the glorious not-quite Parisian night.

  A semi pulled up beside the diesel pumps.

  It wasn’t carrying a trailer.

  He saw Vic standing beside the car waiting for him to return, and Olivia walking across to join him on the embankment, so rather than hurry back, he lingered, savoring the fresh air.

  “So, thinking about calling it quits?” the woman asked.

  “I’m not sure this is me,” Rye admitted. “You know what I mean?”

  “I do,” she said, like she was accepting the weirdest proposal. “All too well. Very little of this is me, either. I’m more at home with my head stuck in some dusty old books wrestling with Olmec, Akkadian, and other dead languages. You said you took some photographs?”

  Rye nodded. “Yeah, a few. Mainly for National Geographic. You know the sort, spectacular landscapes, incredible creatures.”

  “And none of this is very National Geographic.”

  Rye smiled at that. “Understatement of the year.”

  He turned back to look at Vic, and over his left shoulder saw the unmistakable lines of a silver Mercedes sports car parked on the side of the road. Rye started walking toward it, but even before he was halfway it was obvious there was no one in the driver’s seat.

  He turned back to scan the forecourt, but there was no sign of Dawa.

  He was jumping at shadows.

  The semi gunned its huge engine and pulled away from the pump.

  Shrugging to himself, Rye wandered back to the SUV where Olivia had joined Vic.

  “Everything okay?” Vic asked.

  He nodded and clambered back into the SUV. “Come on, then. Let’s go give the boss the precious.”

  THIRTY

  They drove around the edge of the cloverleaf, merging with the main stream of traffic heading back toward the big city, and followed the autoroute for twenty miles before leaving it for more suburban streets. Traffic lights went from green to red, red to green, as they drove in the long shadow of the great iron tower. It was a city of contradictions, of old and new, with wonderful old apartment blocks, with their iron balconies like something out of a Truffaut movie, side by side with the hard lines of newer functionalist cubes. Wide boulevards ran in rings around the narrow alleyways with their cobbled stones and enchanting names.

  They drove through the arrondissements, each with their own unique personalities.

  Vic slowed, bringing the SUV to a standstill at a wide crossroads and yet another set of lights.

  Rye looked out of the window. He’d always meant to visit Paris with Hannah. It was one of those bucket list places. Enjoy the sunset at Butte Bergeyre, have a lazy breakfast at La Palette, share a lovers’ picnic at Canal Saint-Martin, stroll along the banks of the Seine to Les Bouquinistes, and do everything else that lovers did in this City of Light.

  His mind wandered toward the life he’d never get to live now, and to Hannah, and it was hard to imagine what came next. But, for a few hours more at least, he didn’t have to worry about it.

  The lights seemed to take an age to change, but when they finally did, Vic pulled out.

  Olivia leaned forward in the seat, her hands on the shoulders of the two front seats as she started to say something she never got to finish.

  The SUV made it as
far as the middle of the intersection when the world around them exploded in fear and fury. And so much noise it sounded like the earth was being ripped to shreds. It was brutal. And so incredibly fast. The impact was horrific, the side of the car concertinaed inward as the huge cab of the semi crunched into the side of the SUV. Momentum spun them as the airbags deployed. The world rushed past, everything beyond the glass a blur. Steel screeched, rubber burned on the blacktop, and above it all, the screaming. The stench of scorched talcum powder, corn-starch, and explosives filled the SUV as the airbag slammed Vic and Rye back in their seats.

  Paris spun and spun endlessly around them.

  And then it stopped.

  The SUV toppled onto its side, metal screaming as it slid across the road, spinning in a graceless ballet with the semi as the momentum carried them across the intersection. They finally stopped spinning, blocking off the route south.

  Metal dug into Rye’s side.

  He couldn’t move his legs.

  But there was no pain—which terrified him.

  He tried to call out to the others, to check they were okay, but couldn’t hear the words if he actually managed to say them.

  It was impossible to focus. Tears stung his eyes. He wanted desperately to reach out, take hold of Olivia’s hand, and just let her know it was going to be okay, but the airbag wouldn’t let him. He was pinned in place. He twisted his head, which he prayed to a god he didn’t believe in meant his neck or his spine weren’t broken, and saw that Olivia was unconscious and bleeding. The entire right side of his face was lacerated with broken glass, and he could see angry-looking burns from the airbag around his hands and neck. But he was alive.

  Olivia Meyer’s body lay in an impossibly twisted sprawl, bones at angles they were never meant to bend into. There was surprisingly little blood compared with Vic, but Rye saw the spur of metal from the trunk that had pierced the back seat and pinned her through the kidneys. Olivia’s eyes were dead. She wasn’t in there.

  Rye felt his grip on consciousness slipping.

  Then he heard rescuers pulling at the door, trying to get to them.

  The pain arrived in slurs as he tried to beg for help but couldn’t form the words.

  The last thing he saw before blackness took him was Tenzin Dawa reaching over Olivia for the tube with the rolled-up painting.

  “You should have killed me properly,” he told Rye, but Rye was already lost to the world.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Rye came around in a strange room.

  Vic sat at the side of the bed, a brown paper bag with a picked-clean bunch of red grapes in his hand. The right side of his face was a mess of cuts and bruises, and his eye was bloodshot, but he wasn’t wearing a hospital gown, which meant they must have discharged him.

  “Olivia?” He already knew the answer but needed to ask anyway.

  Vic shook his head. “She didn’t make it.”

  Rye couldn’t look at him, not with so many emotions swelling around inside him. It brought it all crashing back: Hannah, the shooting. “Is there someone?” Meaning did she have someone? Was there a Rye to her Hannah?

  Vic nodded. “We’ve told her family.”

  “Good. Good. Shit … Did you see him? Dawa. It was him, wasn’t it? I wasn’t imagining it.”

  Again, the big man nodded. “I saw him.”

  “How is it even possible? We killed him. He was dead. You saw that, didn’t you? I’m not just imagining it. He was dead.”

  “He was dead,” Vic agreed. “But he was dead in that chair and in those photographs, too.”

  It was hard to argue with, but how could a man die three deaths and still keep haunting them?

  “I’m struggling, Vic. How does a dead man run us off the road in a stolen semi? What the fuck is he, some sort of zombie?”

  “Rask has a few theories. Unfortunately, we lost the painting.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Rye said. “It wasn’t in the tube. That was the forgery.”

  Vic looked at him.

  “What did you do with the original?”

  “I had it on me.”

  “So, when they cut your clothes off, they destroyed it. It’s still gone.”

  “They didn’t destroy it,” a voice said from the doorway. It was Carter Vickers. The thief had the rolled-up painting in his hand. He tapped it against his cheek. “We need to get this to Byrne so he can get to work unraveling its secrets. I’m beginning to think you might just have a future with us, Ryerson McKenna.”

  “Not if Dawa knows he’s been played,” Vic said. “Then he’s coming back here to make sure that’s exactly what you don’t have.”

  “Aren’t you just the glass-half-empty soul this morning,” Carter said, taking up the room’s spare seat. “So, what’s the prognosis? You look like shit.”

  “Funny, I feel fan-fucking-tastic,” Rye said. “But he’s right, Dawa’s coming back.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Carter told him.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Rye said. It hurt to smile.

  “Smart man. Okay, here’s the deal, I figure we dangle you in front of him like a tasty morsel we know he won’t be able to resist, and when he comes, we take him down. No muss, no fuss.”

  “You make it sound simple.”

  “The best plans are. Shit only gets complicated when you make it complicated. Get the guy in this room, he doesn’t walk out of it. Even Jesus didn’t come back from the dead twice.”

  Rye laughed. He really shouldn’t have. It was a short snort of a laugh that sent a sharp runner of pain from his ribs to his brain, every pain receptor firing along the way.

  “I don’t like it,” Vic said.

  “You don’t have to like it,” Carter told him. “The boss agrees with me. Dawa needs to be taken out.”

  “That is murder,” Vic objected. “I will have no party to it.”

  “It isn’t,” Rye said, surprising both of his visitors. “It’s retribution. We’re not doing this because of some stupid painting. We’re doing it for Olivia. She was part of your family. That, right now, makes her part of my family. So, I’m in. What do you need me to do?”

  THIRTY-TWO

  A slice of silver moonlight ghosted across the hospital room.

  It came through a chink in the blinds, creating a nighttime landscape of shadows and strange contours conjured from the familiar furniture and not-so-familiar medical apparatus. The door was closed. The only sound in the darkness was the regular beep of the monitor reading Rye’s heart rate. He lay absolutely still, listening for the slightest noise out of place, just as he had for the last three nights.

  And still the assassin didn’t come.

  He’d started to think that Dawa never would.

  The ward was quiet.

  It would be another hour before the night nurse did her rounds, bringing medication to those in need. It was the perfect time for the assassin to make his move, assuming Dawa had been watching the place.

  Somewhere beyond the door he heard a faint murmur of voices. It was just the nurses at the station, Rye knew. His would-be killer wouldn’t waste time talking. Even so, his heart rate monitor picked up the slight increase in his pulse.

  He closed his eyes.

  And kept them closed even though he heard the faint click of the latch disengaging and the door opening ever so carefully.

  The footsteps were so soft he didn’t hear a sound until Dawa stood over the bed, looking down at him just as he had in the SUV four days earlier.

  It was only as his hand closed over Rye’s mouth that he opened his eyes.

  “Where is it?” Dawa whispered. The words were strange on his lips. English wasn’t a language Dawa was comfortable with, that much was obvious from those three little words.

  Rye struggled against his hand, bucking beneath him. He needed his eyes on Dawa and only Dawa, so it had to be convincing. Real. And that meant selling the fear, whic
h was no great stretch as he was absolutely terrified looking up into the assassin’s dead eyes.

  Rye yelled into Dawa’s hand. The assassin’s cupped palm stifled the sound, but that didn’t stop Rye from bellowing like his life depended upon it.

  The assassin waited for him to run out of strength, pinning him to the mattress until he stopped fighting before he repeated the question. “The Blavatsky painting, where is it?”

  “Not here,” Iskra Zima said from the shadows.

  The Russian didn’t waste time with niceties.

  She didn’t give him a chance.

  As Dawa turned toward her hiding place, she pulled the trigger, putting the bullet through the middle of his face.

  The weapon was silenced, so the shot sounded more like a whump of rushing air than any gunshot Rye had heard on TV.

  The blood spatter sprayed across his cheek, leaving a smear as the dead man’s hand fell away from Rye’s mouth. The impact twisted Dawa away from the side of the bed, and for a moment he stood there, frozen impossibly in place, before he stumbled back into the heart monitor which flatlined in sympathy as his fall dislodged one of the many trailing wires.

  The Russian wasn’t taking any chances; not after all the talk of how Dawa had come back from the dead at the chateau. She crossed the room and, standing over him, put a triangle of bullets into his face with ruthless efficiency. There was nothing left where his mouth and nose had been.

  “It is over,” she said, talking to the rest of the team via the earbud. “And before you ask, he won’t be getting up again, believe me. I don’t care how miraculous you think he is, when I kill someone they stay dead.” She looked at Rye. “We need to get out of here.” Iskra twisted the silencer off her weapon and stowed it in the holster at the base of her spine, pulling her black sweater over it so that the weapon wouldn’t be accidentally visible to anyone they passed on the way out.

  “Thank you,” Rye said, swinging his legs out from beneath the white sheets. He was fully dressed, just as he had been for the last three nights.