As he and Alice entered the parking lot-a plowed meadow across the street from the Lac de Morat-she maintained a vivacious conversation, raving first about the white-turf races and then about a new refrigerator she had her eye on.
They approached the silver-gray BMW 330 sedan she’d rented under a Norwegian alias. The 330 was one of the ten most popular models in Switzerland and number one in Gstaad, where they were renting a chalet, or, more accurately, where the fictitious CFO of her fictitious Belgian consulting firm was renting a chalet.
They intentionally bypassed their 330 in favor of another silver-gray BMW.
“Oh, wait, that’s not us,” Alice said.
Doubling back provided the opportunity to glimpse reactions from the twenty or so other drivers returning to the parking lot. Charlie spotted a man fumbling with his keyless remote. Probably a result of the champagne in his other hand. Or the champagnes that had preceded it. Everyone else proceeded directly to their cars.
Gstaad was a forty-five-minute drive from Avenches, or could have been if not for Alice’s choice of SDR-surveillance detection route. At the first green light they came to, she sent the BMW skidding into a looping right turn. At its apex, with Charlie clutching his armrest so that centrifugal force wouldn’t dump him onto Alice, and when she ought to have tamped the brake, she crushed the accelerator, rocketing them onto a side street. She had the right combination of creativity and controlled recklessness to win a NASCAR race, he thought.
“I think we left my stomach back at the light,” he said.
Her eyes darted between the mirrors. “We’ll probably be able to go back and get it. I’m pretty sure we don’t have a tail.”
He exhaled, before she added, “But we need to be absolutely sure.”
She took a last-second left at the next intersection, cutting across a lane of oncoming traffic and entering a shopping mall. One car swerved. A van braked sharply, the driver screaming and shaking his fist. The car directly behind the man braked and skidded, narrowly missing rear-ending his van.
Alice concerned herself just with the vehicles that had been behind the BMW. All simply continued along.
“That sure would have surprised a tail,” Charlie said. “Or convinced him that you took Driving Training at the Farm.”
She laughed. “Or in Rome.”
Exiting the mall, she began taking left turns at random. The odds that anyone other than a surveillant would stay behind them for three such turns were beyond astronomical.
“You do get to see more of the sights this way,” she said blithely.
“People don’t consider the benefits of being a fugitive.”
Another quick turn and Charlie’s side mirror showed only the town of Avenches shooting aft. The chalets became specks, then disappeared altogether behind a mountain of fir trees laden with snow.
As Alice drove up the rugged Bernese Oberland, Charlie scanned the sky. The Cavalry sometimes deployed unmanned aerial vehicles-UAVs, remotely piloted, miniature aircraft equipped with cameras sharp enough for their operators to view a driver’s face from ten thousand feet up. Some UAVs carried laser-guided missiles capable of turning the road into a crater and the BMW into shiny gravel.
Alice smiled. “Given their small size and high altitudes, the odds of spotting a drone aren’t too good.”
Charlie sat back, admitting, “The odds are probably better that I’ll discover a new planet.” A moment later, he resumed scanning. “It’s harder to just do nothing.”
On their descent from the mountains, wispy, low-lying clouds dissipated, revealing a valley dotted with toylike chalets, Alpine ski slopes, and cows whose bells blended into a single mesmerizing chord. The slopes converged at Gstaad’s central village, a congregation of rustic Helvetian buildings, many with bright red geranium-filled window boxes. Factor in the fairy-tale turrets and horse-drawn sleighs and Gstaad was less believable than the Disneyland version of an old-world Swiss hamlet. After just a week, Charlie dreamed that he and Alice would stay for the rest of their lives.
As she nosed the car into a parking spot behind the train station on Hauptstrasse, the sun dipped behind a pair of soaring peaks, bronzing the entire valley.
They proceeded on foot through an empty alley to the Promenade, Gstaad’s main street, where the only vehicles permitted were horse-drawn. The alley was another in Alice’s bag of countersurveillance tricks. Pick out the surveillants before leading them to the chalet.
Among the boutiques, galleries, and cafes on the Promenade was Les Freres Troisgros, a tavern whose grilled bratwurst was good enough to persuade Charlie to stay in Gstaad even without Alice. The tavern’s large front windowpane reflected no one behind them in the alley.
“We good?” Charlie asked.
“We are or they are.” Alice pushed open the door, surrounding them with the aromas of roasting meat and ale. She led the way inside with circumspection in place of her usual buoyancy. If she saw or sensed anything wrong, she wasn’t saying, not in a barroom with a hundred eyes upon them, all aglow in candlelight-Les Freres Troisgros had no electric lights. A collection of big smoke-darkened stones held in place by ancient beams, it had changed little from the seventeenth century.
Charlie fought the compulsion to stare at the jolly and ruddy faces. He worried he’d come here once too often.
He and Alice received their takeout orders without being shot at or otherwise imperiled. But on the way out, in the smoky mirror behind the bar, he caught a glimpse of a ruddy middle-aged man wearing a black beret. The man was staring at them as he snapped open a cell phone.
“Ghost, I think,” said Alice, taking Charlie’s hand in hers.
“Because of the beret?”
“Yeah.”
“Over-the-top for a pro, right?”
“One would hope.”
The question became: Who was he calling?
Not someone who followed them to the car. At least as far as Charlie or Alice could tell.
Letting Alice ride shotgun-in point of fact, 9mm pistol-Charlie drove away from the village, managing the winding mountain road up to a secluded cream-colored chalet. In the dwindling sunlight, the structure blended in with the towering pines.
With a stern gaze at a field blanketed with a fresh snowfall, Alice said, “Hit teams love snow. With a few thermal-insulated, arctic-terrain ghillie suits and rifle wraps, you can turn a clearing like this into an excellent ambush site.”
“Great.”
“A euro says we’re home free, though.” She cracked a smile.
“I love you” almost slipped from his lips for perhaps the twentieth time that day, but all he said was, “You’re on. And good luck.”
Just tell her, he urged himself. Why the hell not? As soon as they parked.
He pulled onto the mountainside ledge they called the parking deck. From here it was a two-minute walk through woods up to the chalet. While she climbed out of the car, he ratcheted the parking brake and turned off the engine. He heard and felt stuttering thuds from above the trees. A white medevac helicopter, common enough in winter resort areas.
The helicopter slowed to a hover directly overhead, plunging the clearing around the BMW into darkness.
Charlie felt an all-too-familiar icy terror.
“Blast,” Alice said. “I owe you a euro.”