Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [76]
She fired back, once.
Walt lay dead on the street long before the report had finished resounding through the bare woods.
The muzzle flash having revealed her position, Frank whirled, firing.
She dove headlong toward the bus shelter. The metal sidewall offered a measure of protection. One of Frank’s bullets sparked against it, cracking the glass over the movie poster so that it appeared to be a jigsaw puzzle of Santa Claus.
Alice returned fire. Her bullet struck Frank’s right wrist. His gun clattered against the ice, bouncing toward her.
“Good job, Frank,” she said, springing to her feet. She stepped out from behind the bus shelter. “Now, what I really want is your coat.” She had only her T-shirt and underwear to counter the well-below-freezing night. “Unbutton it, shake off one sleeve at a time, then toss it to me.”
Gritting his teeth against the pain of his wound, the hulking Italian complied.
Before daring to pluck the overcoat off the road, she wedged her gun against Frank’s kidney. With her free hand, she patted him down, turning up his switchblade as well as a satphone and, an unexpected bonus, Mercedes keys. She pocketed the lot, saying, “As if the bus driver was going to have change for a hundred-euro bill.”
The big man gripped his injured wrist and moaned.
“That’s what you get for trying to kill me.”
She prodded him into the woods until they were out of sight of any passing motorists. About twenty yards in, she kicked his knees out from under him. Toppling forward, he attempted to break his fall with his bad arm. He came to rest on his side in a pile of snow, sticks, and dry leaves.
Squatting beside him, Alice pressed the muzzle of her gun against the base of his skull. “I don’t want to shoot you again,” she said. “And I won’t if you tell me who hired you—”
He rolled to his left, at the same time launching his steel-toed boot at her face.
She ducked, slashing his ankle with the side of her hand, breaking bone.
With a scream, he leaped to his good foot and threw a roundhouse that eluded her parry, hitting her jaw like a truck.
The world flickered. She dropped against frozen ground.
He sat astride her stomach, trying to wrest the gun free of her grip, leaving her no choice but to pull the trigger.
The shot snapped his head backward. Hot blood lashed her. He thumped into the snow and lay still, the angle of his head oddly similar to that of the mannequin in the bus shelter.
Admittedly not one of the six billion most patient people in the world, CIA case officer Blaine Belmont had paced perhaps five miles in his office at the American embassy in Geneva until, finally, a cable from a deputy director of operations authorized payment of $1,000,000 to Carlo Pagliarulo. As soon as the Italian gave up the goods, the funds would be wired to him.
But now Belmont was unable to reach him. Fighting to keep the exasperation out of his voice, he instructed the techs to triangulate Pagliarulo’s cell phone.
Two hours later, the CIA officer stood over the Italian’s corpse about fifty feet into a wooded area on the road to La Vernaz, an hour east of Geneva.
“Not the end of the proverbial road,” Belmont told his team, if only to boost his own spirits. The snow mannequin in the bus shelter and the pair of bodies were almost as good as videotape of what had taken place there. Unfortunately, Rutherford could be anywhere by now.
Within twenty minutes, things were looking up. Belmont flipped open his phone to watch two-day-old National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency KH-13 satellite overpass footage of Pagliarulo hauling an unconscious young woman from a black SUV to the small La Vernaz farmhouse that had been rented a week beforehand by a man named Hans Baehler.
The landlord, whom Belmont’s people woke as they raced by car to the farmhouse, said that Baehler had paid cash and seemed like a nice person in his e-mails, which turned out to be untraceable. Belmont would have been surprised to hear anything different.
At the isolated farmhouse, the CIA team