Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “Ben,” Molly began, but I gave her a fierce look that shut her up at once.

  “Not now,” I said under my breath.

  When we came to Barengasse I turned right, and Molly followed. The plate-glass storefronts provided a good reflecting surface for me to study who was following us, but no one seemed conspicuous. They were professionals. It was likely that since the moment I’d spotted him as we entered the bank, the blond man was determined not to be seen. Others, confederates, were now in play.

  I would have to flush them out.

  Molly let out a long, quavering sigh. “This is crazy, Ben. This is just fucking dangerous!” Her voice grew softer. “Look, I really hated seeing you hold a gun to that guy’s head. I hated seeing what it did to him. Those things are so vile.”

  We walked along Barengasse. I was keenly aware of pedestrians on either side of us, but wasn’t yet able to get a fix on anyone.

  “Guns?” I said “They’ve saved my life on more than one occasion.”

  She heaved a heavy sigh. “Dad always said that, too. He taught me to shoot a gun.”

  “A shotgun or something?”

  “Handguns. A .38 and a .45. Actually, I was pretty good at it. An ace, if you must know. Once I was able to hit the bull’s-eye on one of those police silhouette target things at a hundred feet, I put down my dad’s gun and never fired it again. I also told him never to keep one in the house again.”

  “But if you ever have to use a gun to protect yourself or me—”

  “Of course I’d do it. But don’t ever make me.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “Thanks. But was all that necessary with Eisler?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid it was. I have a name now. A name and an account that will likely tell us where the gold disappeared to.”

  “What about the Banque de Raspail in Paris?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what that note’s supposed to mean. Whoever was meant to see it.”

  “But why would my father have left that note there?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “But if there’s a safe-deposit box, there has to be a key, right?”

  “Generally, yes.”

  “So where is it?”

  I shook my head again. “We don’t have it. But there must be a way of getting into the box. But first, Munich. If there’s any way of intercepting Truslow before anything happens to him, I’ll find it.”

  Had we eluded them?

  Doubtful.

  “What about Toby?” Molly asked. “Shouldn’t you notify him?”

  “We can’t risk contacting him. Or anyone at CIA now.”

  “But we could use his help.”

  “I don’t trust his help.”

  “How about trying to reach Truslow now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He may be on his way to Germany. But if I can stop him—”

  “What?”

  In mid-sentence I swiveled around toward a public telephone on the street. It was far, far too risky to place a call to Truslow’s office in the CIA, of course. There were other ways, however. Even on short notice; even improvised on the spot. There were ways.

  Standing on the street, Molly next to me, I kept a close watch on my surroundings. No one—yet.

  With the assistance of an international operator I called a private communications facility in Brussels, whose number I, of course, was able to recite easily. Once connected, I entered a sequence of numbers, which shifted the call to a rather complicated telephone switch-back system, a dead-end loop. The next call I direct-dialed would appear, in a trace, to originate in Brussels.

  Truslow’s executive assistant took my call. I gave him a name that Truslow would immediately recognize as signaling me, and asked him to pass it on to the director.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the assistant said. “At this moment the director is aboard a military aircraft somewhere over Europe.”

  “But he’s accessible by satellite link,” I insisted.

  “Sir, I’m not permitted—”

  “This is an emergency!” I half shouted at the assistant. Truslow had to be reached, to be warned against entering Germany.

  “I’m sorry, sir—” he replied.

  And I hung up. It was too late.

  And then I heard my name.

  I turned toward Molly, but she hadn’t said anything.

  At least I thought I heard my name.

  Quite an odd sensation. Yes, definitely my name. I glanced around the street.

  There it was again, thought, not spoken, unquestionably.

  But there was no man anywhere near us who could possibly—

  Yes. It wasn’t a man at all, but a woman. My pursuers were equal-opportunity employers. Very politically correct.

  It was the lone woman, standing at a newsstand a few feet away, seemingly absorbed in a copy of Le Canard Enchainé, a French satirical newspaper.

  She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, with short reddish hair, wearing a no-nonsense olive business suit. Powerfully built, from what I could tell. No doubt she was very good at her job, which I suspected was to do more than simply follow.

  But if she was a follower, that was about as much as I could deduce. A follower employed by whom? By those in the CIA Truslow had warned of, the so-called Wise Men? Or by people associated with Vladimir Orlov—who knew of the existence of the gold and knew that I was on its trail?

  They—her employers—knew I’d gone into the Bank of Zurich. Knew I’d emerged empty-handed …

  Empty-handed, yes, but with a solid morsel of knowledge now. The name of a German in Munich who had been the recipient of some five billion dollars.

  Now it was my turn.

  “Mol,” I said as quietly as I could. “You have to get out of here.”

  “What—”

  “Keep your voice down. Act as if nothing’s wrong.” I smiled, as if at some witticism. “We have company. I want you to leave.”

  “But where?” she asked, frightened.

  “Go grab our bags from the left-luggage claim near the main train station,” I whispered, and thought for a second. “Then go to the Baur-au-Lac, on Talstrasse. Every cabbie in Switzerland knows where it is. There’s a restaurant there called the Grillroom. I’ll meet you there.” I handed my leather portfolio to her. “Take this with you.”

  “But what if—”

  “Move!”

  Frantically, she whispered in reply: “You’re in no shape to handle anything dangerous, Ben. Your hands—your dexterity—”

  “Go!”

  She glared at me, then without warning turned and stormed down the street. It was a clever piece of playacting; an observer would think we had had a tiff, so natural was Molly’s reaction.

  The redhead looked up sharply from her newspaper, her eyes following Molly, turning to me, then returning to the paper. Clearly she had decided to stay with me, her chief quarry.

  Good.

  Suddenly I spun around and vaulted down the street. In my peripheral vision I could see that the red-haired woman had dropped her newspaper and, abandoning all subtlety and pretense, was running after me.

  Just up ahead was a narrow, alleylike service street, into which I abruptly turned. From Barengasse behind me I heard shouts, and the woman’s footsteps. I flattened myself against a brick wall, saw the red-headed woman in the olive suit lunge into the alley after me, saw her draw a gun, and I pulled out my Glock and fired off a round at the woman.

  There was a groan, an exhalation. The woman grimaced, spun awkwardly forward, then regained her balance. I had shot her somewhere in the upper leg, the thigh perhaps, and now without a moment’s pause I leapt forward, firing away at her, no, not directly at her, really, but around her, circumscribing her head and shoulders, and momentarily thrown off balance, she contorted her body, twisting left and right, then, regaining her center of gravity, she leveled her gun at me, aiming for just an instant too long, and—

  —her hand snapped open as a rou
nd from my gun sank into her wrist, and her gun clattered to the floor, and then, in one headlong rush I was upon her, slamming her to the pavement, my elbow smashing into her throat, pinning her down with my left hand.

  For a moment she was still.

  She had been wounded, in her thigh and her wrist, and the blood had soaked darkly through the olive silk fabric in several places.

  But she was immensely strong, for all that, and of wiry build, and she reared up with a sudden surge of strength, almost knocking me off balance, until my right elbow cracked once against the cartilage in her throat.

  The woman was actually younger than she had earlier appeared, perhaps in her early twenties, and she was a woman of extraordinary strength.

  With one swift, sure motion, I grabbed her gun—it was a small Walther—and stuck it in the breast pocket of my suit.

  Thus disarmed, and obviously in great pain, the would-be assassin moaned, a low, guttural animal sound, and I turned my pistol toward her, aiming precisely between her eyes.

  “This gun holds sixteen rounds,” I said very quietly to her. “I fired off five. That leaves eleven.”

  Her eyes widened, but in fiery defiance, not fear.

  “I will not hesitate to kill you,” I said. “I assume you believe me, but if you don’t, it’s of no serious concern. I will kill you because I have to, to protect myself and others. But for the moment I would rather not.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly, as if conceding.

  I could hear sirens now, growing louder, almost here. Did she think the arrival of the Swiss police would provide her with the opportunity to escape?

  But I remained poised to fire, knowing that this woman was a professional and was probably possessed of a homicidal courage, and was surely being paid an enormous amount of money for her valor besides.

  She would do almost anything. But she would, I calculated, rather not die if she did not have to. It is a human instinct, and even this killer had human instincts.

  I had to move her as far away from the street as possible, so that neither of us could be seen. “Now,” I said, “I want you to get slowly to your feet. Then I want you to turn around and walk slowly. I will direct you. If you make the mistake of doing anything I haven’t instructed you to do, I will not hesitate to fire.”

  I pulled back, lifted my elbow from her now-bruised throat, and, the Glock aimed steadily at the center of her forehead, watched as she very slowly, and in obvious pain, struggled to stand.

  Then she spoke her first word to me. “Don’t,” she said in an accent of indeterminate European origin.

  “Turn,” I replied.

  She turned around slowly, and I did a quick body search with my free hand. I found nothing, no second gun or even a knife.

  “Now, move,” I said, shoving the gun against the back of her head, prodding her to move faster.

  When we had come to a dark, deserted alcove toward the end of the block, I shoved her suddenly into it, keeping the Glock trained on the back of her head. Then I said, “Face me.”

  She turned slowly. Her face was set in a look of dour recalcitrance. Up close, it was a square, even mannish face, but not unattractive. She took pains with her appearance, whether out of vanity or out of concern for her cover. She wore eyeliner of deep blue and eye shadow of a very pale blue mixed with a barely detectable glitter. Her round, pouting lips had been carefully painted with crimson lipstick.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She said nothing. There was a slight twitch below her left eye, but apart from that, her face remained frozen.

  “You’re in no position to hold out,” I said.

  Her left cheek twitched, but her eyes regarded me with boredom.

  “Who hired you?” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Ah, a genuine professional,” I said. “They’re so scarce these days. You must have been paid a great deal.”

  A twitch; silence.

  “Who’s the blond man?” I persisted. “The pale one.”

  More silence.

  She glanced at me, as if about to speak, then off into the distance. She was quite good, really, at concealing her fear.

  For a moment I considered threatening her again, and then I remembered that there were other ways to learn what I wanted to learn. Other resources; other talents. I had forgotten the very thing that had brought me here.

  The gun pointed steadily between her eyes, I moved closer.

  I was at once greeted by that flow of indistinct sound I’d grown to recognize, that jumble of syllables and noises, but it was, strangely, what I now know to be the “audible” thoughts of someone who was not in fear. And in a language I did not recognize.

  Her left cheek was twitching out of tension, but not out of fear, an emotion we experience quite differently. This woman had been shoved into a dark alcove with a semiautomatic weapon pointed directly at her, and yet she was not afraid.

  There were various drugs the clandestine people administer their agents to keep them calm and collected, a veritable pharmacopoeia of beta-blockers and anxiolytics and such that over the years had been found to keep field agents calm yet focused. Perhaps this woman was under the influence of something like that. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was preternaturally calm, one of those peculiar human specimens, sociopaths or whatever they are, who do not experience fear the way the rest of us do, and who are therefore eminently suitable for their strange line of work. She had capitulated to me not out of fear, but out of a very rational calculus. She planned, I would bet, to surprise me at a moment when my defenses were relaxed.

  But no one is entirely without fear.

  Without fear we are not human. We all experience some degree of fear. Fear keeps us alive.

  “His name,” I whispered.

  I squeezed my finger against the blue metal trigger ever so slightly, but obviously, and told myself that if it came to it, I would without a doubt have to kill this woman.

  Max.

  I heard, quite distinctly, in that crystalline timbre, one very clear syllable. Max. A name, I assumed. A name that was understandable in any language.

  “Max,” I said aloud. “Max what?”

  Her eyes met mine, with insouciance, not fear or surprise.

  “They told me you could do this,” she said, speaking at last. Her accent was European. Not French, but—Scandinavian? Finnish, or Norwegian…? She shrugged. “I know very little. That was why I was hired.”

  I recognized her accent now. Dutch, or perhaps Flemish.

  “You know very little,” I agreed, “but you can’t possibly know nothing. Otherwise you’d be of no use. You have been given instructions, code names, and so on. What is Max’s last name?”

  I heard, again, Max.

  “Try me,” she said with a hint of impertinence.

  “What is his last name?”

  She replied, pursing her lips slightly, “I don’t know. I’m sure Max isn’t his real name anyway.”

  I nodded. “I’m sure you’re right. But who is he with?”

  Another shrug.

  “Who hired you?”

  “You mean, what company name is on my weekly paycheck?” she came back with a smirk.

  I leaned closer, until I could feel her breath hot against my face, the Glock still pointed at her, my left hand pressing her against the brick wall.

  “What is your name?” I asked. “That I assume you know.”

  Her facial expression was unchanged.

  Zanna Huygens, she thought.

  “Where are you from, Zanna?”

  Back off, motherfucker, I heard. English.

  Back off.

  She spoke English, German, Flemish. Probably one of the Flemish hired killers that the world’s espionage agencies like to employ as freelance talent. The CIA used the Dutch and the Flemish, not just because they were good, but because they had a natural facility in many languages, which made it easy for them to blend in anywhere in the world, to submerge their true identitie
s.

  Something else I didn’t understand. A floating phrase, repeated several times: the name the name the name the name

  the name motherfucker the name give me the name

  the name give me the name

  “I don’t know anything,” she spat out at me, tiny gobbets of saliva stinging my face.

  “You’ve been told to get a name out of me, is that it?”

  A twitch of her left cheek; a sere pucker of her perfect crimson lips. Then, having considered for a moment, she spoke.

  “I know you’re some kind of freak,” she said. Without warning her words began to gush forth, in a prim, singsong Flemish accent. “I know you were trained by the CIA. I know that somehow you have this weird thing, this thing where sometimes you can hear the voices inside the heads of other people, inside the minds of people who are afraid, I don’t know exactly how, or why, or where this thing came from, or whether you were born with it…”

  She was yammering, jabbering away almost mindlessly, and suddenly I knew what she was doing.

  She was talking nonstop, filling her brain’s speech center with word after word that was probably rehearsed, because if you keep talking, your brain is too busy producing the thoughts that lead to vocalized speech, too busy to be intruded upon, to be read.

  “… or why you’re here,” she blathered on, “but I know that you’re supposed to be ruthless, bloodthirsty, and I know that you’re not going to return to the U.S. alive, but I can probably be of some help to you, and please, please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, I was doing a job, and I didn’t fire directly at you, you’ll notice, please—”

  Was she really pleading? I momentarily wondered. Was that fear in her eyes? Had the anxiolytic worn off, or had the stress and terror finally sunk in, and as I inhaled, thought how to respond, she abruptly jammed her hands in my face, her sharp nails grasping at my eye sockets, screaming shrilly, deafeningly, and slammed her knee upward into my groin, all of this happening in one bewildering, frightening instant, and I reacted, a little late, but not entirely too late, by steadying the gun, my bandaged, clumsy finger poised on the trigger, and the would-be assassin jolted my hand, certainly trying to dislodge the gun, but it didn’t dislodge the gun at all; instead, it caused me to pull back instinctively, thus giving the trigger the slightest squeeze, and the woman’s head exploded, and with a liquid sound the air was expelled from her lungs and she sank to the ground.