Ten hours later, and twelve hundred miles north, they stood, separate again, under a bitterly clear blue sky. It was thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, or one degree Celsius, and as far as Jonelle was concerned, no matter how you did it, even in Kelvin, it was too goddamn cold.
They stood under the shadow of the peak of a mountain, in snow about two feet deep. Off to one side, the helicopter’s rotors had slowed almost to a stop, and the whuff, whuff, whuff of their turning was, surprisingly, the only sound in that still blue air. Jonelle had expected howling wind, blowing snow. Instead there was nothing but this unnerving silence, and a world all in shades of blue: hard blue sky, softer, deeper blue snow-shadow, the royal blue brush strokes of occasional crevasses, and about six hundred feet below them, the intense sapphire of the little glacial lake.
Jonelle and Ari were in civvies, which at the moment meant the kind of cold-weather gear that moderately well-off tourists might wear: boots and one-piece snowsuits in muted outdoor colors, mottlings of brown and gold and several greens. Jim Trenchard’s tastes varied; he was in a fashionable but god-awful one-piecer in a shade of violent electric puce that ensured he would never be lost in an avalanche. The thing glowed like neon, even in the shade, and against the blue-shadowed snow, he positively vibrated.
Jonelle and Ari were actively embarrassed to be with him, but the fourth of their party just laughed and told them not to worry. “That’s what everyone’s wearing this year,” said their guide, Konni. “He’ll blend in perfectly.”
Jonelle wondered, but said nothing about it for the moment, since their guide came highly recommended.
Konrad Egli was a liaison between X-COM and the Swiss intelligence agency, a group so secret it genuinely did not have a name, the way MI5 had tried not to, and failed. But then, Jonelle thought, in the country that invented the numbered bank account, why should I be surprised at this? The agency, in turn, had ties with the army, though again the nature of these ties was never precisely described to Jonelle, and she was sure she didn’t need to know. “Just so long,” she had said to Konni when they met at the airport earlier in the day, “as someone at the army knows that someone is likely to be, uh, renting one or another of their facilities…so that they don’t start shooting at us one day when we come out to take care of business.”
“Oh, no,” Konni said, “you needn’t worry about that. It’s all taken care of.” That was the way about half of Konni’s sentences ended. His general bearing was less like that of a military attaché than that of an efficient restaurant maitre d’. He looked like one, too: a tall, blocky, middle-aged man with iron-colored hair and gray eyes, like a walking block of granite. His voice was gravelly, too, except when he laughed. Then you suspected it might start avalanches.
Now Jonelle looked over at Jim’s purple suit and said, “Is that taken care of, too? How do we explain his presence up here? Or ours?”
“You’re fat-cat UN officials wasting public funds,” Konni said cheerfully, “renting expensive helicopters to go on a heli-skiing jaunt. The perfect cover, since any good Swiss would believe it instantly.”
“What if someone sees we didn’t do any skiing?” An said.
“You chickened out,” Konni said and laughed delightedly. “Even better. They’ll definitely believe that”
“Wonderful,” Jonelle said, but she had to smile a little. “Why exactly did you want us to see this spot?”
“Look around you,” Konni said. They did. Even from the strictly tourist point of view, it was a view worth seeing. Northward lay Andermatt town, a scatter of hotels and a lot of little brown and golden houses, held inside a triangle of roads. These led west down the Furkapass valley, east to the set of murderous switchback curves that climbed to the Oberalppass, and north to Göschenen and the northern end of the great Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel. Past them, above them, the lowlands of Switzerland dwindled away into hazy views of Germany. Directly westward rose the great triangular peak of the Furkahorn, ten thousand feet high, and over its shoulder, a crevasse-streaked hundred-lane highway of ice a mile wide: the Grosser Aletschglacier, oldest and biggest glacier in Europe. Beyond that, through the clear air, you could see straight to Geneva, and France beyond. South lay mountain after mountain, like waves in the sea, the Sankt Gotthard pass and the other lesser passes spilling downslope, like rivers, into a golden haze that held Italy beneath it. Then, to the east, the heights of the great north-south running mountain chains of Graubunden, behind which lay Liechtenstein and Austria, and more distant but amazingly still visible, the Czech Republic and the borders of Eastern Europe.
“What if someone sees we didn’t do any skiing?” Ari said.
“You chickened out,” Konni said and laughed delightedly. “Even better. They’ll definitely believe that.”
“Wonderful,” Jonelle said, but she had to smile a little. “Why exactly did you want us to see this spot?”
“Look around you,” Konni said. They did. Even from the strictly tourist point of view, it was a view worth seeing. Northward lay Andermatt town, a scatter of hotels and a lot of little brown and golden houses, held inside a triangle of roads. These led west down the Furkapass valley, east to the set of murderous switchback curves that climbed to the Oberalppass, and north to Göschenen and the northern end of the great Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel. Past them, above them, the lowlands of Switzerland dwindled away into hazy views of Germany. Directly westward rose the great triangular peak of the Furkahorn, ten thousand feet high, and over its shoulder, a crevasse-streaked hundred-lane highway of ice a mile wide: the Grosser Aletschglacier, oldest and biggest glacier in Europe. Beyond that, through the clear air, you could see straight to Geneva, and France beyond. South lay mountain after mountain, like waves in the sea, the Sankt Gotthard pass and the other lesser passes spilling downslope, like rivers, into a golden haze that held Italy beneath it. Then, to the east, the heights of the great north-south running mountain chains of Graubunden, behind which lay Liechtenstein and Austria, and more distant but amazingly still visible, the Czech Republic and the borders of Eastern Europe.
Jonelle nodded. “It’s certainly central,” she said matter-of-factly like someone trying to resist the wies of a good real estate agent.
“That’s not so much the point at the moment,” Konni said. “Tell me: can you see any signs of, shall we say, building activity in this area?”
Jonelle looked around, hard, for about five minutes, before venturing an answer. The others did the same, though she knew they were going to leave the answering to her. The trouble was that the Swiss were past masters at this kind of concealment. You could look straight at a cliff wall and not see the fiberglass fake stone that someone had built and painted to match the real rock—not until someone came along and lifted it away to reveal the iron door underneath.
“On first glance, no,” Jonelle said. “But you’ve got to assume that anyone who might be involved in espionage would have a lot more time to study the area than we’ve got today.”
“That’s true,” Konni said. “But I wanted you to look for yourself because when we investigate the site more closely, you’ll want to recognize your landmarks and remember what you didn’t see. All ready, then?”
Jonelle was ready enough. Wind or no wind, her feet were freezing. With the others, she climbed hurriedly back into the helicopter.
Ten minutes’ flight brought them down to the little helicopter landing site near the train station in Andermatt. “Now what?” Jonelle said.
“Now we take the train to Göschenen.”
“Is the Rhaetische Bahn giving you a commission on this?” Ari inquired. Jonelle gave him a look.
They all dutifully got on the one-car RhB train. It was a most peculiar little creature. The track was slanted at about a twenty-degree angle down from the platform where they boarded, and the train car itself was built at the same angle, with all the seats slightly one above the other, as though on steps or bleachers. After a few minutes of sitting and hissing quietly to itself, the train gave a strangled hoot and started down the slope.
The track twisted and doubled back on itself several times as it made its way down a steep stone face, then went over and through a gorge nearly two hundred feet deep, with a ferocious, green-white, melt-swollen river running through the bottom of it. Finally the track straightened out somewhat, and the train car pulled up and stopped, still slanted, at another platform.
They got out. “Now,” Konni said, “we pick up our ride.”
He led them across the platform to where something most peculiar waited on one of the main-line tracks: a little open maintenance car, painted bright yellow. If you took a Ford flatbed pickup and put it on train wheels, Jonelle thought, it would look like this. Two Swiss railway staff were standing by the little creature, holding bright orange servicemen’s vests and hardhats. Konni greeted them, took the vests and hats and handed them out to Jonelle and Ari and Jim, putting one on himself. “All aboard!” he said then.
They all looked at each other and got onto the “flatbed.” Konni took what looked more like a tiller than anything else, turned an ignition key, started the little beast’s diesel engine, and started running it down the track, southward, toward the opening of the Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel.
Jonelle eyed the approaching tunnel with some concern, sparing only a glance for the bas-relief carved monument to the men who died building this first of the great rail tunnels. “Konni,” she said, “you’re quite sure nothing’s coming?”
“Oh, no,” Konni said, “we’re on the southbound track, not the northbound.”
“You’re sure nothing’s coming behind us?” Ari said.
“We’re well ahead of the twelve-fifty,” Konni said.
I wish I could get at my watch a little more easily, Jonelle thought as the shadow of the tunnel mouth fell over them, swallowing them up. Soon they were left with only the light of the little maintenance car’s front spot, and even that didn’t go very far in this darkness.
It got cold, and colder, and then, bizarrely, started to get warmer. Jim looked around him with amusement, seeing how the stones, which had been frosted closer to the tunnel mouth, were now wet, and ahead were perfectly dry and much warmer. “In these amounts,” he said, “stone is one heck of an insulator.”
“This time of year, yes,” Konni said. “But it’s early, yet. Now then….” They were about a mile into the tunnel. Faintly, they could hear, or rather feel, a rumbling— something rushing by, somewhere. “The other tunnel,” Konni said, “diverges from this one more and more widely as we go through—it’s about half a mile away through the stone, that way.” He gestured to the left. “Our business, though, is over here.”
He looked right and stopped. “All right,” he said, “everybody out.”
Jonelle blinked, then shrugged and let herself down over the edge of the car. It was about five feet down to the track bed. The others followed, and Konni, the last one out, reached for a capped switch on the side of the car, pushed the cap up, tapped a number into the revealed keypad, and slapped the cap down again. The maintenance car jerked a little, then took off back down the track, backwards, leaving them all standing there in the cold and the dark.
Konni came up with a flashlight and turned it on. “Here we are,” he said and walked over to the wall. He put his fingers under a protruding piece of rock and lifted it away—
It was just a fiberglass shell, with a big metal door behind it, for which Konni produced a key “You’ll pull that back in place behind us, will you, Colonel?” he said to Ari.
“No problem,” Ari said. As Konni opened the door, lights came on in a short corridor that ended in another metal door.
They went in, Ari replaced the shell, and Konni locked the door. “I’m not so sure about this,” Ari said. “Anybody could just walk down that train tunnel, at night, say—”
“No, they couldn’t,” Konni said and smiled, and that was all he said, so that Jonelle wondered about the statement for a while afterward. Meanwhile, Konni led them down the corridor to the second metal door, and pushed the button beside it.
The door slid open. It was an elevator, a big freight-hauling one with a door on the other side, as well. They got in, and Konni pushed one of the two buttons. The doors closed.
The ride took about two minutes, during which everyone looked at the floor, or the walls, since there were no numbers to watch. Then the door opened. Jonelle stepped out.
She opened her mouth, and closed it, and opened and closed it again before saying, very quietly, “Holy Buddha on a bicycle!”
They were in the top of the mountain, and it was hollow. It was simply the biggest enclosed space Jonelle had ever seen. To the slightly domed ceiling, far above them, it had to be three hundred feet—though it was hard to tell, with the glare from the lights on the framework hanging from that ceiling. To the far side of the main floor on which they stood, it had to be the better part of a mile. That floor showed signs of having had heavy installations of various kinds on it, though they were all gone now. The huge, echoing place had that vacated feel of an apartment waiting for a new renter.
“It’s the Mines of Moria,” Jim said, looking up at several narrow windows, which let in a surprising amount of light, even though they were at the bottom of crevasses.
“It’s the goddamn Hall of the Mountain King,” Ari said, and the echo took a second or so to come back.
Konni nodded, looking satisfied. “We’re about four hundred feet directly below the lesser peak of Chastelhorn, where we were standing,” he said. “This is only the top level. There are four more below it, each one with a ninety-foot ceiling, all with different accesses for heavy equipment and so forth. All quite secure.”
Jonelle stood there, looking around for a long, silent few minutes, considering. The others were still gazing around them, absorbing the size of the place, but Konni was looking at her, as she could well feel even with her back turned. When she finally swung around to look at him, he said, rather abruptly, “If you don’t like it, I can show you some others—”
Jonelle burst out laughing. “Konni,” she said, “you’re out of your bloody mind. This is exactly what I need. We’ll take it.”
He nodded, and the satisfied, it’s-all-taken-care-of expression came back. “I thought you would,” he said. “I’ll inform…my people…that you’ll be taking possession. The upper echelons will sort out the details.”
“I want to see the downstairs, first, of course.”
“Of course. Right this way, Commander—”
They walked off together, Ari and Jim bringing up the rear. “And if there’s any little thing we can do for you,” Jonelle said, “for…your people, in return for this tremendous favor….”
As they walked, Konni lost most of his smile for the first time since Jonelle had met him that morning. He nodded, leaned close like someone about to ask a favor, and said, “Kill them. Kill every last one of the sons of bitches, Commander. Kill them all.”
She took a breath.
“Konni,” she said, “believe me, it’ll be my pleasure.”