“You may use this phone,” said the Italian, pressing a cell phone into his hand. “Take your time. I will leave you.” He retreated, then paused at the door. “Of course, if you think they are fake—”
“They’re not fake,” said Elata. There was no sense bothering to compare the paint.
“You’ll want to study them carefully before your conclusion. There are X-rays, whatever you want.”
Elata said nothing.
“I’ll leave you,” said the Italian, slipping away.
The phone rang just as Morgan pushed himself back from Lucretia on the divan. Minz, her head resting on her sister’s leg, reached for him lazily.
At other times, most other times, he would not have bothered to answer the phone, but he was waiting for this call. He reached back and took the handset; as he brought it to his ear he felt a sharp pain in his chest, a difficult feeling of remorse — what if the Picassos were fake?
The Italian and his partner would be eliminated, but that would be no consolation, none at all.
“Yes,” said Elata. His voice was hushed, the syllables of the word drawn out.
Morgan said nothing, reaching back and hanging up the phone instead. He slid one hand beneath the oversized divan, reaching for the alphanumeric pager so he could set the exchange in motion.
His other hand slipped onto Minz.
“Be with you in a moment, hon,” he said, turning his full attention to the pager’s miniature keyboard. “But we’ll have to make it quick; I have to meet a helicopter at the airport in ten minutes.”
FOURTEEN
The snowmobiles descended toward cold corners through razor bends in the slope, tacking between rock falls, ramparts of drifted and avalanche-piled snow, blue ice pinnacles that soared hundreds of feet into the dusky hanging clouds.
Out front, Burkhart again coaxed the team to speed, his engine greedily pulling fuel from the tank. The wind bragged in the faces of his riders, pelted them with freezing precipitation. Spiral blooms of snow and hail exploded in the beams of their headlamps. Bullets of electrically charged graupel smacked their helmets, flattened out with little coughs of static that went rasping up and down their encrypted radio communications link.
If his task went off as Burkhart intended, the storm would be their only resistance. But in matters like this there could be sudden and unexpected turns, and he had done all he could to prepare his men for a change in plans.
Their firearms had been an easy choice. Lightweight, compact, field-tested after hours sheathed in ice at minus- 300°F cold-chamber temperatures, the Sig Sturmgewehr
552’s were optimally designed for extreme-weather commando action. Their hinged trigger guards could be moved to the left or right to facilitate firing with alpine-gloved hands. The variable-magnification optics were frost-resistant and reticulated with luminous tritium markings, their foresights hooded against glare and snow. Each of the transparent three-stack magazines under their barrels held thirty rounds of 5.56 × 45mm NATO ball ammunition. Attached side by side for rapid open-bolt reload, they effectively gave the guns a ninety-round capacity.
The riders carried these assault weapons on their backs in biathlon harnesses, as Burkhart had done on ski-patrol drills with the Swiss special forces, where he’d had to unclip his weapon from its straps and zero in on a line of numbered targets from both prone and standing positions, firing after rapid downhill runs, his performance measured to a rigorous standard of time and accuracy.
In his elite unit, Burkhart’s skills had leaped above the highest bar. It was as if he were born possessing them. But he’d accepted recognition from his superiors and comrades with indifference. His competitiveness came from old angers of the soul, and he’d worn his decorations as emblems of a secret spite. For the child of the moon, every medal pinned to his chest was a reminder of some beautiful shining face that had once looked scornfully at him under the sun, left further in the past as he flogged himself toward new levels of accomplishment.
At last, though, it was restlessness as much as anything else that had sent him along the path of the mercenary. His prowess had seemed wasted against cardboard soldiers. What pluck was there in mock combat against an enemy that bled red dye? Games had not demanded enough of him. And so he had moved on to find a profitable and satisfying alternative.
Since then Burkhart had only improved upon his innate abilities, refining his tactical know-how, his situational adaptability. He had actualized a vision of his own potential, made it hard as steel, and found a kind of chambered peace within it.
Now Burkhart took a sinuous curve around a glacial edge and urged his bike over a series of jarring bumps into the downhill channel he had reconnoitered before the storm. A final glissading run, his flaps threshing up a wake of powder, gravity squeezing the ribs around his heart, and then he was on a smooth flat field of ice, headed across the basin between the mountains and frozen shore.
Dimly visible through the snow, just a handful of miles seaward, lay the UpLink base.
“Pete.”
Nimec turned his head from the window in the empty corridor. It was oval and not much larger than a porthole, its fixed pane reinforced with a shatter-resistant polymer coating. He had stood there alone staring at the thick pulsing snow outside, listening to the freight-train roar of the wind, once pressing his hand against the glass to feel its buffet. He could see neither land nor sky, only the close, incursive whiteness.
“Meg,” he said. He had not noticed her approaching. “Figured I’d take a look at the thousand-pound giant.”
“And maybe stare him down?”
“Maybe.”
She stood beside him awhile.
“I’ve been trying to find you,” she said. “Ron Waylon told me he’d taken you on the grand tour, then left you at your workstation after you two went poking around the utilidors.”
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t exactly. Just had a hunch you might be where everyone else wasn’t, and wandered around until I hit the spot.”
“It would’ve been faster and easier to have me paged.”
“But absent the intimate touch for which we strive at this lodge.”
Nimec looked at her another moment, then moved his somber eyes back to the window.
“I know what you’re thinking and feeling, Pete,” she said.
“Never occurred to me you didn’t.”
“One thing to keep in mind is that the storm won’t reach the Valleys. None of them do. The mountains form a barrier. And any snow that does get over them is dried by the katabatic effect before it hits the ground.”
He kept staring out the window.
“Our people have been missing eleven days,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Maybe no one’s been able to get to Bull Pass on foot since they were lost. Or obviously down in a chopper. But the boss told me MacTown sent out pilots in Twin Ospreys. And we’ve used Hawkeye III. State-of-the-art satellite recon that can practically image a mole on somebody’s chin.”
“Pete, you know air and orbital sat searches are hampered by the terrain no matter how sophisticated the tech. There are recesses, cliff overhangs… too many blind spots.”
Nimec turned to her again.
“Eleven days,” he said. “And counting. We have to be honest. Let’s believe they found food and water caches. Give them that. How long before they’d all succumb to the cold? When do we stop talking rescue, and admit anything we do is about recovering bodies?”
Another silence.
“I won’t offer false encouragement,” Megan said. “Not to you or myself. But neither will I stop hoping. You’d have to know Scar. He’d try to find places where they could shelter, and the same ground features that make hunting for his group difficult might very well provide it.”