The Spy Who Never Was

by Tom Savage

  “No.” Julie shook her head and smiled. “The men at the clinic are good, but I’m better, and Hall and Lars have never handled anything worse than a bar fight. If we send them up against Amanda and her friend, some of them will be hurt—or worse. I won’t have that. I need you to help me with the setup, but I don’t want you confronting these people, either. This is my op.”

  Nora capitulated. She should have known better than to mention it. She thought about Jeff: She knew her husband better than anyone, and she could see some of his traits in his colleagues. This was only her third experience in her husband’s world, but she was aware of their peculiar code of honor.

  As the car climbed the hill, the headlights illuminated a tall figure in a poncho jogging along the edge of the road in the same direction. The whistling hiker, Nora thought, tramping through a rainy night. They passed him and headed for the tunnel.

  “I can’t believe that hiker is out in this weather,” she said.

  “Not a hiker,” Julie said. “A marathoner, getting in shape for a race. They come up here to train on the steep mountain roads, and a little rain isn’t going to throw them off their schedule. I admire their determination.”

  Yes, Nora thought, you would. “Should we tell him to turn around? He’s running right into—”

  “He’ll be okay,” Julie said. “It should all be over by the time he gets there. Here we go.”

  The tunnel entrance arrived to swallow the car, and Julie switched off the headlights. Nora stared at the yellow lights whizzing by, bracing herself. Three smoke bombs: one left, one center, one right. Keep them dry, light the fuses, and run…

  Julie slowed the car to a crawl. “Stay near the rock wall going up and coming down, but don’t get too close to it. Keep the sheer rock face about twenty feet on your right, go up about a hundred feet, and then you should be able to see the ranger station through the trees on your left. Stay in the trees. You know what to do. Then get back over toward the wall and make your way down, but be careful. It’s incredibly steep, and there’s a ten-foot-wide drop-off right at the wall that’s basically a sheer cliff—a forty-foot drop to the road below. Watch out for it. Meet me at the car.”

  “Where will the car be?” Nora asked, checking once more to be sure that the toy gun and the three firecrackers were in her coat pockets. She’d have to trust this woman’s judgment about these silly-looking devices.

  Julie smiled. “The car will be stopped right in front of the entrance gates to the clinic, with the engine running.”

  Nora was just about to question the wisdom of that when Julie braked. They were roughly ten yards from the tunnel exit. Julie/Chris/Rose turned to look at Nora.

  “I know how brave you are, Nora Baron, and I suspect you’re a very good actor. Just play your part tonight, no matter what happens. And if I don’t get a chance to say it later, thank you for everything you’ve done for Yuri and me. Even if we never meet again, I’ll always remember you. Now, go!”

  Nora nodded and got out. She eased the door shut so as not to make a sound, then slipped over to the tunnel wall. The car’s headlights came on again as it glided forward, out of the tunnel into the rain. Nora arrived at the exit and waited, leaning against the wall, watching the car’s taillights.

  Julie had told Nora precisely what to do in the next fifteen minutes, but she hadn’t offered a single clue as to what she herself would be doing. As Nora watched, Julie turned left, crossed the oncoming lane, and pulled to a stop at the iron gates. Leaving the lights on and the engine running, she got out of the car, walked straight into the center of the road, and looked up the mountain toward the ranger station, the rain pouring down on her. She raised her right arm and waved to Amanda and Luc, then twisted her hand around and made a rude gesture with her middle finger.

  Nora’s first impulse was to laugh, or applaud; she didn’t know which. The impulse dissolved in the next instant as the rear window of the car directly behind Julie shattered. The glass remained where it was, but it was now white instead of clear, with a small hole in the center. Julie didn’t turn to look. She didn’t even flinch. She merely walked forward across the road to the base of the hill and strode into the trees.

  Nora stared over at the car, at the frosty spiderweb that had just been the rear window, listening to the tinkling clatter of stray shards as they fell. Julie had vanished, apparently heading straight up the hill toward the ranger station. Nora heard another sound from the tunnel behind her: the faraway echo of footsteps. The hiker or marathoner, or whatever he was, had entered the other end of the tunnel and was coming this way.

  Concentrating on what she was supposed to do, Nora moved. She stepped out of the tunnel into the rain, walked twenty feet along the verge, turned in under the dripping pines, and began her ascent.

  Chapter 44

  She wasn’t prepared for the angle. When Julie had said the hill was steep, Nora had thought of the hill in the woods at summer camp that the kids used to run up and down for exercise. It had seemed daunting, insurmountable, when she was twelve years old, but it had been a mild angle compared with what she now faced. This hill was close to sixty degrees, and worse in some spots—she had to crawl sideways from tree to tree at certain points to avoid sudden, sheer cliffs in her path.

  And it was wet. Nora had spent some time in forests, even after summer camp, and she’d enjoyed the occasional hikes, once with three girlfriends and twice with Jeff early in their relationship. But she’d never tried going uphill in a forest in the pounding rain. This particular wood wasn’t merely made up of pines; there was a substantial number of deciduous trees in here, their wide, waxy leaves mingling with the fallen needles to form a slick carpet under her boots. She was in constant danger of sliding and tumbling back down to the road below.

  She grasped another slippery pine trunk and pulled herself up, reaching for the next one above her, glancing over to her right to be sure she was in sight of the rock wall. Yes, there it was, the sheer side of the jutting outcrop that housed the tunnel. From this angle, looking over at the wall of rock, the forest resembled a diorama in the Museum of Natural History.

  Her left boot slipped on something wet, and she fell forward onto her face, grasping the nearest tree to stop her descent before she slid all the way back down to the bottom. I’m an actor, she thought, a wife and mother of a grown child. In three months I will be fifty years old. What on earth am I doing on this mountain, in the rain, in the dead of night? I must be insane.

  Then she thought of Julie—a pregnant forty-two-year-old assassin who wanted a new life. She thought of Julie’s hero uncle, Daniel Fenwick, floating in a cold French river. She thought of poor, naïve Ben Dysart, who might or might not be alive. Most of all, she thought of the countless, nameless human beings who dreamed of escaping oppressive regimes in their homelands for new opportunities in Europe and America, only to be caught in the trap of never-ending debt and servitude to ruthless, greedy, rich white men. Men like Edgar Cole, with his paintings and his pool and his Lamborghini—and his expensive girlfriend, who waited at the top of this hill. When Nora thought of all these victims, the mountain didn’t seem so difficult.

  The ground suddenly leveled off beneath her, and she could see the sky between the branches. She looked to her left, peering through the rain and the darkness, and there it was. The little log cabin in the clearing was about thirty feet away. No lights, of course, but they were inside. She could feel their presence.

  She would have to be extremely cautious from here on. She dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl toward the clearing, aiming for the back of the cabin and the steep slope behind it. Julie had said to get as close as possible without being detected, and that was her goal now. Moving silently from tree to tree, she arrived directly behind the building. She flattened herself against the wet ground, slithering the final few yards on her stomach. Now she was ten feet behind the back wall of the station.

  She pulled the wax canisters from her pocket, protecting
the wicks with her body. There was a row of pines here, with relatively dry spots at their bases under the branches. She placed a stick under a tree at the left, then the center, then the right.

  Before she continued, Nora paused to listen. There was no door or window on the back wall of the log structure, but she could hear the faint sound of voices, a woman and a man. They were still in there, and they were probably deciding what to do about the crazy assassin who had just flipped them the bird and marched into the forest to confront them. But where was Julie? Nora couldn’t hear any sounds beyond the rain and the muffled voices from the cabin.

  Okay, she told herself, Julie can take care of herself. Just do it and get the hell out of here. She rose to a standing position, wincing at the throbbing ache in her knees from all the crawling. Forty-nine-year-old college drama teachers do not crawl around on mountainsides, she reminded herself, and this was why. Ignoring the pain, she moved silently over to the first canister. Keeping her body between the cabin and the flame, she flicked the lighter and lit the first fuse. Then the second one. Then the third.

  Then she ran. She took off toward the sheer rock wall, grasping a tree trunk as she began to descend the slope she’d just surmounted. Within three steps, she realized that going down was even trickier than coming up. She slipped and fell, sprawling in a pile of wet leaves and sliding some ten feet before colliding with the solid trunk of a particularly big pine. The rustling sound she made as she slid and rolled seemed amplified in her ears. Now she would have to pick herself up. If she could only make it to—

  Bang! The first of the canisters detonated with a sharp crack. Bang! There went the second one. The flashes of light from behind the building looked like lightning striking the forest. Then she saw the smoke, lots of it, gunmetal gray, billowing up from two points among the trees, blowing straight forward to surround the ranger station. Nora waited for the third explosion, but it never came; the rain must have put out the fuse.

  As it turned out, two were enough. She was now downhill from the cabin, so she saw when the front door burst open and the two occupants came running out into the clearing, guns raised, shouting their heads off. Amanda Morris wore a chic black raincoat and matching rain hat and boots, but she didn’t look too poised at the moment, and the words she shouted weren’t in the débutante handbook. She was furious, but even through the rain Nora could see that she was also frightened. Her voice was unnaturally high and shrill. Nora couldn’t see her well in the dark from this distance, but she knew the sound of fear.

  The big man with her was another matter. He was on the alert, peering around through the trees, and he was moving toward the back of the cabin, directly toward the disturbance. He wasn’t afraid of anything. The sight of his coiled body stalking around the side of the building not ten yards away from where she crouched behind a tree made Nora reach down into her pocket for the miniature gun.

  Her pocket was empty. The little weapon had slid out and fallen somewhere, probably when she fell and collided with the tree. She felt around in the mud, but no luck. She was alone and weaponless in this isolated spot with two people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill her. And Julie Campbell was nowhere in sight. What was she doing? Nora decided not to stick around to find out.

  “Find her!” Amanda shouted to her henchman, and then she stalked off down the hill, fairly running toward the spot where Julie had told Nora the van was parked. Nora watched her go, realizing that the woman was more scared than she’d thought. Amanda Morris was clearing out, heading for the getaway car, abandoning her assistant to hunt down and face Chris Waverly alone. The woman was a coward.

  Nora turned to go. She would move over toward the rock face and make her way down to the road as quickly as possible. She let go of the tree and took a step back the way she’d come. It was as far as she got; with another sickening lurch, her feet came out from under her and she was falling, tumbling, rolling down the hill. She cried out and grabbed at a protruding root, which stopped her fall. She lay on the wet ground, gasping, trying to will herself to rise.

  “Te voilà!”

  The deep male shout was right above her, or so it seemed. Nora rose to her knees, looking up toward the sound. Luc stood at the edge of the clearing a few yards above her, staring down at her. He seemed puzzled for a moment, but then he raised his gun and pointed it directly at her. She struggled to her feet and ran.

  Chapter 45

  Nora made her way awkwardly from tree to tree, grasping anything that would steady her in her flight. The crashing sounds behind her told her that Luc was in pursuit. He shouted again, something in French, and she focused on the rock wall in the distance. She was hurling herself west toward the wall and down toward the road simultaneously, hoping that she could outrun the man.

  Pffft. The unmistakable sound ripped through the forest behind her: a gas-suppressed gunshot. She heard a distant thump ahead of her as the bullet struck a tree, but she didn’t stop. Over, down, over, down, over, down. She repeated the words in her head as she made her crablike way down the steep slope.

  Pffft. The ground beside her right foot erupted, sending mud and pine needles flying off in all directions. The rain fell harder, disorienting her, blinding her as she ran, but she didn’t stop. The rock wall, the rock wall, where the hell was the rock wall?

  The answer arrived in front of her face. She ran straight into the rock, raising her hands to soften the collision. The man behind her shouted again, but she didn’t turn around. Leaning against the rock for support, she moved down in the direction of the road. One step, two, three—and then nothing. Her foot came down on empty space. With a cry of surprise, she leaned back, pressing herself against the rock to maintain her balance. Then she looked down to see that she’d found the cliff Julie had warned her about.

  The rock wall dug into her back. To her right was the steep slope up the mountain. Six inches to her left was a sheer drop to the road forty feet below. And directly in front of her, blocking any escape, was the approaching figure of Luc, scowling, the pistol in his hand.

  Nora turned her head to look down at the road. The car was there, idling at the gates far below, the headlights glinting on the iron bars. Through the rain she caught a brief glimpse of two figures beside the driver’s side of the car, identically dressed, locked in what looked like a violent embrace. One of the figures pushed the other away, sending it sprawling back across the trunk by the shattered rear window. Faintly, she heard a woman scream. Julie!

  Luc was thirty feet away now, crashing down the slope through the trees, breathing heavily as he closed in for the kill. And it was definitely that—Nora had no illusions that she could talk her way out of this, and her protective vest would be useless against his high-caliber weapon at this close range. She had exactly three choices: She could leap to certain death; she could turn right and scramble up the hill for perhaps twenty feet before the first bullet slammed into her back and she fell forward to die facedown in the mud; or she could hold her ground. She could stand right here, facing him, forcing the man to look into her eyes when he shot her. That was her choice, hands down.

  “Dana,” she whispered, and then she cried, “Jeff!”

  Nora Baron shut her eyes, listening to the sounds around her, the last sounds she would ever hear. The commotion from the car below, the rain in the trees above her, the approaching footsteps of her assassin—and another sound, one she couldn’t immediately place. She opened her eyes to stare at Luc as he arrived before her. He smiled and raised the gun; she arranged her features in an expression of utter contempt. Then she saw the blur of movement behind him, over his shoulder, the looming figure that had arrived as if by magic from nowhere at all. This was the new sound she’d heard: an enormous, dripping-wet figure in a black poncho.

  Nora screamed and dropped to the ground, flattening herself in the mud at Luc’s feet. Pffft. The round struck the rock wall where she’d just been standing. She rolled over onto her back and looked up just in time to see the dark figure
behind her killer raise its arms and shove Luc hard in the center of his back. Luc was propelled forward, and his boot struck Nora in the ribs. He stumbled against her, and then he was lurching forward, across her body, out into the void and down, down, down. Nora shut her eyes, but she heard the long scream that was abruptly cut off by the wet impact as the assassin smashed into the road at the mouth of the tunnel. Then there was only the sound of the rain.

  She lay on her back, gasping from the sharp pain in her rib cage, feeling the rain on her face and the wet gravel and pine needles that clung to her coat and soaked her hair. She was lying on a ledge above a sheer drop in a mountain forest, and she was alive.

  Nora opened her eyes and gazed up at the angel kneeling beside her. It was the jogger or marathoner, she reasoned, the whistling young man she’d seen several times today. But what on earth was he doing here? His smiling face was a wet blur, but then she blinked and he came into sudden focus. Nora gasped, staring up at the handsome face she’d thought she’d never see again. The dark hair was all wrong, but otherwise he was immediately familiar.

  “Ben!”

  She sprang up from the wet ground, sobbing, and threw her arms around Ben Dysart.

  Chapter 46

  “Hello there!” Ben Dysart said.

  He was smiling, but he was staring at the road below. His eyes were wide and his face was unnaturally pale. Nora didn’t look down there. She took his hand and moved them both away from the ledge, up into the trees. She felt a bit unsteady on her feet, and no wonder, but she knew that her rescuer was feeling considerably worse. He’d just killed a man, and he’d probably never done that before. Nora remembered her own first time—hers had been in a rainy forest, too, in a remote part of England. She remembered her first reaction to her ordeal, and Ben’s smile and jocular tone didn’t fool her for a minute. When they arrived at a familiar-looking downward slope, she paused and turned to him, placing her hands on his arms.