by James Becker
“You two stay here,” he said. “Jacob and I will go down and check it out. If one of us is not back in thirty minutes, radio the pilot and update him on the situation, and then one of you—and only one—is to follow us down.”
The two men removed powerful flashlights from their rucksacks, checked that their SIG P226 pistols were loaded and cocked, with the safety catches on, and then made their way cautiously down into the almost circular hole and from there began descending the stone staircase.
They were both back at the surface less than twenty minutes later. As soon as they’d climbed out of the hole, the leader used his short-range transceiver to summon the helicopter, and ten minutes after that the chopper rose high enough into the air to allow reliable mobile phone communication, and he called a mobile number that he had been given during the briefing.
“Yes?”
“It’s Erich Weiss,” he began. “We’ve located the entrance to the cave and two of us have been down to investigate it. As you instructed, we’ve taken a large number of photographs.”
“And?”
“It’s a fairly small cavern, more like a tunnel, really. The walls and end are solid rock, and the other part of it is completely blocked by a huge rockfall. Getting into it was easy because whoever built it—you said it might have been a Templar construction—cut a stone staircase into the roof of the tunnel that led all the way up. The rockfall itself provided access to the bottom of the staircase, which meant that—”
“Never mind that. Was there anything in the cavern? Anybody or anything?”
“Nothing at all, though clearly somebody had been there, because we saw the end of a new climbing rope sticking out from underneath the rocks.”
“That’s all we need to know. You can return to base and stand down, but stay at five minutes’ notice. Draw assault rifles and ammunition. I’ve detailed a sniper team to join you, so expect them to reach you within the hour. We may need you to stop a vehicle leaving the country.”
For a couple of seconds, Weiss didn’t realize that the other man had ended the call. He removed the earphones—essential for making a telephone call in the noisy confines of the helicopter—and put the phone in his pocket. Then he moved the boom mike on his headset in front of his mouth, switched on the intercom, and told the pilot what he wanted him to do.
“Back to base,” he instructed. “Make sure the aircraft is fully fueled, and stand down to alert five. We may need to get airborne again at really short notice, and I’ve been told to draw more weapons. And we’ll have a couple of passengers as well. A sniper team will be flying with us as a precaution.”
“As a precaution against what?” Jacob asked.
“Right now I don’t really know.”
* * *
When Silvio Vitale rang Toscanelli’s mobile about three hours later, he had no concrete news to impart.
“Basically,” he said, “they seem to have dropped off the radar. The last credit card transaction that Mallory undertook was settlement of his hotel bill in Schwyz. Since then, there have been no charges placed on his card of any sort. No cash withdrawals, no hotel booking, no hire car deposit, not even a tank of petrol. It’s possible that they’ve already left Switzerland, and we’re also running checks on the neighboring countries, but so far with no results. Don’t forget,” he added, “that these transactions sometimes take a while to filter through the system, so it is possible that they have booked a hotel room but we just haven’t heard about it yet. We have two tertiaries looking into this now. We’re also checking traffic cameras for any sightings of their original hire car, just in case they’re still driving it.”
That definitely wasn’t what the Italian wanted to hear.
“We need something, anything,” he replied. “At the moment, we’re stuck here in Schwyz because there’s no point in moving unless we have a definite indication of where these two are.”
Toscanelli fell silent for a couple of seconds, wondering if he should mention the other matter that he had so far not discussed with Vitale.
“There’s something else,” he said. “We weren’t the only ones looking for Mallory and Jessop in that cave system. When we came out we were stopped by a sniper team, the man with the long rifle hidden somewhere on the hillside and completely out of our reach, while his spotter turned up at the bottom of the valley with a combat shotgun. There was nothing we could do about either of them, and they held us there waiting for some other people to appear.”
“Go on.” Vitale’s voice sounded dangerously calm.
“A group of six men appeared, and from their appearance and conduct, and what they obviously knew, my guess is that their leader was a senior member of the Swiss government. They were after the chests as well, and they looked at the contents of the six that we had recovered, but decided that they weren’t whatever they were looking for. They told us to leave Switzerland immediately, and threatened to kill us if we didn’t. Have your contacts heard anything about this?”
“It was mentioned, yes,” Vitale replied, “by one of the men I have spoken to. I wondered when you were going to bother telling me about it. If you’re expecting me or the order to intervene, you’re wasting your breath. We have long arms, but the upper echelons of the Swiss government are out of our reach. That’s a problem that you’re going to have to sort out on your own.”
“Anything?” Mario asked as Toscanelli ended the call.
“Nothing so far. There’s no point in moving from here, so we’ll just check out of the hotel and find somewhere else to stay. That will at least make it look as if we’re obeying that Swiss official. But until Vitale comes up with something definite, we’re stuck here and there’s nothing else we can do.”
But a few minutes later, sitting in their hire car having collected their bags from the hotel and paid the bill, he changed his mind.
“No, we can’t just sit here,” Toscanelli said. “This is the first place that Swiss guy will look for us, which is bad enough, but I’m also pretty certain that Mallory and Jessop are long gone.”
“I agree,” Mario said. “Getting out of here is a really good idea. The problem is that we don’t even know which direction to head.”
“We don’t know, but I think we can make a guess.” Toscanelli opened up a relief map of central Switzerland and pointed at their present location. “We’re here, and while we don’t know what the English pair have in mind, it makes sense that they would want freedom of movement, and that really means they must have headed north. If you look the map, down to the south of the town there are basically only two roads, one heading east and the other one going south along the shore of that lake. We know these two are cautious, and so I don’t believe they’d have taken either of these routes, just because they’d have a huge lack of options if they did. One roadblock could trap them and that would be that. I think they’ve gone north. There are several roads up to the north of this place and if you go a bit farther there’s a railway station and an autoroute as well. They’re somewhere up there.”
Mario and Salvatori both stared at the map, following Toscanelli’s reasoning.
“That makes sense,” Salvatori said, “but how far do you want to go?”
“Not far, and we need to stay close enough to the main roads so that when Vitale does come through with a sighting, we can move quickly.” He looked at the map for a few moments, then pointed. “We’ll go there,” he decided. “Rothenthurm. It’s got a railway station and Route 8 runs pretty much through the middle of it.”
* * *
It was late evening when Mallory and Robin returned to the hotel. Implementing her plan had taken longer than they had expected, because it was immediately clear that Richterswil was too small to provide what they needed, and so the very first thing they’d done was to drive the twenty miles or so northwest, following the shoreline of the lake up to Zürich. There, they’d separated, Mallo
ry searching for a very particular kind of shop and an even more specific type of purchase while Robin headed in a completely different direction with a different aim in view.
The first two places Mallory tried had nothing suitable, but in the third one he found almost exactly what Robin had told him to look for. It was more expensive than he had anticipated, and the shopkeeper was notably inflexible about the price, but he did have sufficient cash to cover it. Robin had had a slightly easier time of it, because the very first shop she went into was exactly suited to her needs. She made a number of purchases, and then insisted that the shopkeeper comply with two other requests before she handed over the money.
They met up back at the car, with two more tasks to achieve. The first took less than five minutes at a garage, while the second took very little longer. Although that was a crucial part of Robin’s scheme, it proved to be almost the easiest job of the lot, the company they selected having both the materials they needed and a complete lack of curiosity about their objective. The staff there also expressed no doubts at all about the description Mallory inserted in the appropriate field on one of the forms that had to be completed.
They’d celebrated with a hasty meal in a backstreet restaurant before driving back to their hotel.
“I do rather wonder if all that lot was overkill,” Robin mused when they walked back into the bedroom. “I mean, we could have just gone for it. We’re quite close to the border with Liechtenstein. We could have stuck everything in the back of the car and driven out of here.”
“The only problem with that idea is that Switzerland isn’t part of the Schengen group—which seems to be falling apart anyway—but if we’d crossed the Swiss border in the car, there’s a pretty good chance that we would have been stopped and perhaps the vehicle might even be searched. I have no idea what Swiss laws are about the removal of ancient relics from the country, but I’m reasonably certain they wouldn’t just say that it was all okay and wave us through. This way is definitely safer. A lot more complicated, but a whole lot safer.”
“So we’ll cross the border tomorrow, in daylight?”
Mallory nodded. “Crossing at night is probably a bad idea, simply because the crossing points will be much quieter. But tomorrow morning there should be a good flow of vehicles in both directions and we should be able to slip through unnoticed in the traffic.”
* * *
“Nothing?” Marcel sounded incredulous. “Two people can’t just vanish like that, not in a country like Switzerland.”
“We have no record of any credit card transactions,” his assistant said, “and no indication that they have taken a hotel anywhere or hired another car. In fact, according to the company from which they hired the original vehicle, they’re still driving around in it. The only positive indication that they are still in the country is that their passports haven’t been scanned at any of the airports or border crossing posts. But as you know, that isn’t entirely foolproof.”
“And there’s nothing else?”
“Just one unconfirmed and inconclusive report. A vehicle that might have been the one they hired when they arrived in Switzerland was recorded by a traffic camera in Zürich a couple of hours ago. The car was the right make, model, and color, but it was in fairly heavy traffic and the camera did not record a clear image of its registration plate. The officer I spoke to was only prepared to say that it might been the car we’re looking for. According to the registration database, there are just over thirty cars in Switzerland that could be a match, vehicles that have the right partial registration and are the correct model and color.”
Marcel nodded. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
“Which direction was it heading?” he asked.
The assistant looked at the printed report in his hand. “It was on the southern outskirts of the city and it was heading north, toward the center.”
“That would also take it toward the airport,” Marcel said. “Increase surveillance there and around Zürich itself. If they try to board an aircraft, arrest them on suspicion of stealing valuable archaeological material. And the moment there any other sightings of the car, call me.”
He pulled up a detailed map of Switzerland on the screen of his desktop computer and studied it for a few moments. Then he appeared to come to a decision.
“There are too many places for these two people to hide,” he said. “We need to find them and flush them out as quickly as possible. Implement the second phase of the search immediately. If you have any problems with the media, refer them directly to me.”
41
Switzerland
They had an early breakfast in the hotel and then returned to their room to pack their few possessions. They were almost ready to leave when Mallory’s attention was drawn to the television screen on the opposite side of the room. They’d put it on more or less as a reflex action when they woke up that morning, and while Robin had been taking a shower Mallory had flicked through the channels hoping to find something in English that wasn’t a news program.
He had left the set tuned to one of the local Swiss channels with the sound muted, and even as he watched the moving images a sense of cold and compelling familiarity washed over him, because what the screen was displaying at that precise moment was quite definitely the valley at the end of which the forked waterfall tumbled into the pool at the base of the cliff.
He grabbed the remote control, aimed it at the television, and increased the volume.
The newscaster or reporter was speaking in German and Mallory glanced across at Robin to see if she was listening, which she was. But then any doubt about the substance of the report was immediately removed when two photographs, undeniably showing both Mallory and Robin, appeared on the screen behind a newscaster sitting in a studio. And then a strapline appeared at the bottom of the screen giving a number for people to call. And, again, there was no doubt about the organization that was interested in them, because beside the number was a single word: polizei. As the newscaster moved on to a different story, Mallory turned to Robin.
“What was all that about?” he asked.
“Nothing good,” Robin replied. “I didn’t follow everything in that report, because my German’s not that good, but apparently we’re wanted by the police, and not for stealing antiquities or anything as mundane as that. According to that reporter, we’re wanted for murder.”
“The Italian in the tunnel,” Mallory said as realization dawned. “We need to get out of here, right now.”
As if to emphasize his words, at that very moment they heard the distant sound of a police siren, steadily getting closer.
“I hope that’s nothing to do with us,” Robin said, standing up and picking up her computer case. Mallory had already placed all the deeds in the chest, which was in the soft bag they’d bought to conceal it.
As they walked to the door of the bedroom, they both realized that the noise of the siren had stopped abruptly.
“We’ll take the fire escape,” Mallory said. “I don’t know much about the Swiss police, but that car could well be coming for us, using the siren to cut through the traffic, and then killing it close to their destination so as not to spook the targets. Maybe the receptionist saw the same news report that we did, or perhaps an earlier version, and made the call.”
The fire escape was at the end of the corridor opposite the main staircase. Mallory walked briskly over to it and gave the horizontal bar a hard shove to open it. From somewhere behind him he heard the sound of an alarm. Obviously there was a trip on the emergency exit that indicated when it had been opened. He ignored it and headed down the metal staircase outside the building, carrying the soft bag containing the chest, the heaviest single item, and with his computer bag slung over his shoulder. Robin was close behind him lugging everything else—they were traveling light, and apart from the chest they had only an overnight bag and their two computer case
s.
The hotel had no dedicated parking area, only a drop-off zone in front of the main door, and Mallory had left their hire car on a side street behind the building. At the bottom of the fire escape, he turned left and began to walk as quickly as he could along the pavement toward their vehicle, Robin easily keeping pace with him.
When he was a few yards away from the vehicle, he used the remote control to unlock the doors, and the moment he reached it he lifted the lid of the trunk and swung the soft case inside, followed by his computer bag. The two items Robin was carrying followed immediately. Then Mallory headed for the passenger-side door, handing the keys to Robin as he did so.
“Just in case,” he said. “You’re better at this than I am.”
In a series of economical and fluid movements, Robin sat down in the driver’s seat of the hire car, depressed the clutch pedal, started the engine, engaged first gear, and altered the position of the rearview mirror. Then she pulled out from the side of the road, buckling her seat belt as she did so. She accelerated gently, knowing that squealing tires and aggressive driving would just make it more likely that somebody, and especially a police officer, would see them.
Because she was constantly checking her mirrors, Robin very clearly saw two uniformed figures appear behind the hotel to stare up and down the street, just as she made a left turn.
“Good call on the siren,” she said. “Two members of the Swiss thin blue line have just appeared at the back of the hotel. I don’t think there’s any doubt who they were looking for.”
“Did they spot the car?”
“No idea, because I turned off the street at pretty much the same time, but they probably did. So where to?” she asked.
“That’s a bloody good question,” Mallory said.
“And have you got a bloody good answer? Because we’re coming up to a main road and I need to go either left or right.”
