Red Snow (19 page)

The Winter Games include three sledding sports: bobsled, luge, and skeleton. In bobsled, which dates back to a nineteenth-century Swiss gentlemen’s pursuit, the driver and brakeman carom down the course in a bullet-like vehicle. In luge—that’s French for “sled”—the athlete lies face up on a flat platform and zips feet-first downhill. The sport originated in sixteenth-century Russia, but the first sleds were hollowed logs used in ancient Scandinavia. The skeleton driver, no bones about it, is into speed. On a streamlined sled like a large cafeteria tray, he zooms headfirst at eighty miles an hour around some of the sharpest and iciest curves in the history of sport.

If the girls were to escape, skeleton was their sport.

Napoleon sprang to his paws the moment the back door blew. Katt placed the crossbow on the floor beside her flashlight, pencil arrows, and cellphone. Scrambling to her feet, she shoved the unlatched dormer window open. Robert had told her during their last conversation to crack the window, giving them a means of escape if someone burst into the chalet.

The floor shook when the second blast demolished the front door, making Napoleon growl.

“You can do it, Becky.”

Machine-gun fire boomed below.

“Pretend you’re on a toboggan plowing downhill.”

The window opening gave them barely enough room to crawl out headfirst, so there’d be no swinging out feet forward like a luger going for the gold.

Another machine gun went rat-a-tat-tat.

“Go, Becky.
Go
!”

Katt grabbed the child by the seat of her snowpants and literally tossed her like a sack of potatoes out the hole.

Boots stomped up the stairs.

“Jump, Napoleon!”

The police dog obeyed the command, springing out the opening and bounding down the roof.

By touch, Katt clamped the trigger lock onto the firing mechanism of the cocked crossbow. If the bowstring released by mistake, she wasn’t strong enough to tug it back in place.

Footsteps on the landing turned her way.

The arms of the bow bounced back from the window frame.

Please let it fit, Katt prayed.

The clomping reached the bedroom door.

By tilting the bow, Katt managed to maneuver it through the window. The door to the hall was locked, but it wouldn’t withstand much stress. With one hand gripping the bow, Katt stooped to retrieve her accessories from near her feet. The jiggling door handle made her jump, and she whapped the flashlight like a hockey stick, hurling her pencil arrows and phone across the floor.

Bam!

Crack!

The wood fractured as a shoulder hit the door.

Losing the backup arrows was no catastrophe—since Katt couldn’t rearm the bow, she could only fire the pencil currently in the slot. But losing her phone—her only link to her potential rescuers—was devastating. Still, there wasn’t time for a scramble to retrieve what she had lost. At least she still had the crossbow. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, the proverb teaches.

Bam!

Crack! Crack!

There wasn’t a moment to spare.

Katt was half outside the dormer when a spray of bullets tore the door’s lock to scrap metal. Wriggling her tail end like a fish, she jackknifed through the opening. As one arm crooked the crossbow back over her shoulder, she arched her other across the crown of her head. In that posture, she plowed down the A-frame’s steep roof.

“Downstairs!” Ice Ax snapped behind her.

*     *     *

The earliest Mounties swung up into the saddles on their steeds. That’s what had put the “mounted” in the Mounted Police. Later Horsemen climbed onto the runners of their dogsleds. But the last dog patrol had made the rounds in 1969. These days, Mounties like Zinc got to straddle the seat of a Ski-Doo instead.

Fortunately, this snowmobile was fit for conquering all wilderness trails, from tight and twisty to rough and tumble. Like an army halftrack, it was propelled by a studded tread at the rear. The studs dug into ice like cleats on a muddy sports field. The skis in front were wide so the vehicle would “float” high over snow. With his glove on the throttle, his heart in his throat, and the track churning up a powder wake, Zinc aimed the Ski-Doo for Gill’s chalet.

Yee-ha!

The route was mostly ice coming through Whistler Village, but on the far side of the highway, the golf course had wide-open fairways of deep, freshly fallen snow. The Ski-Doo had regulators and foam padding to dampen its sound, but in this eerie stillness, you could hear Zinc coming from miles away.

Vroom!

Wind chewed at his face and bit into his bones. Needles of ice struck his goggles and cut his skin. Even with the earflaps of his fur cap pulled down and tied under his chin, he couldn’t stop shivering. The black Ski-Doo had turned white from snow. Leaning into turns to keep from flipping, Zinc wondered if he’d be found frozen in his tracks, man and machine fused together as a weird ice statue.

*     *     *

The eaves of the A-frame weren’t the end of the slide. Wind blowing across the ice of the frozen creek had piled a massive drift on both the bank and the side of the house. Katt’s ride continued until she landed in a billow on the solid waterway.

“Becky?” she whispered.

“Here,” replied a voice in the darkness.

“Where’s Napoleon?”

“He’s with me.”

“Good. Hold out your hand.”

Katt was reluctant to switch on the flashlight, for fear of attracting a machine-gun blast from the dormer window above. So she swept the blackness before her with the back of her palm until it brushed Becky.

“Grab my arm, hold tight, and I’ll pull you behind me. How deep is the snow?”

“It’s up to my waist.”

“Napoleon,” Katt commanded, “follow me.”

A woof acknowledged.

Overhead, she heard the stomp of boots exiting the chalet.

Here they come, thought Katt.

*     *     *

By the time Ice Ax and the Austrian had descended the stairs from the upper floor, the Swede and the Finn were outside the back door, strapping on their snowshoes again.

“Angle upstream,” the Siberian ordered them. “If you shoot the kids, don’t damage their heads.”

He and the Austrian stepped out front to put on their snowshoes. With his back to the house and his Uzi pointed down the driveway, the Norwegian stood guard by the front door. Through his blinder-like night-vision goggles, he’d failed to notice the girls’ escape to his right.

“Down to the creek,” Ice Ax commanded his companions. “Track their footprints. They may go downstream.”

“Look,” said the Norwegian, pointing dead ahead.

A vehicle creeping along the road at the bottom of the wooded lot had turned up the driveway.

While Zinc was off commandeering the Ski-Doo and mounting up in the lot, Robert ushered the reluctant snow bunnies into the stockroom he’d been directed to by Karen and locked the door. Cases of booze were stacked up to the ceiling along all four walls, encircling the cramped business area where paperwork was done.

“Do I need a lawyer?” Mandy asked, arms folded across her chest for a stance of authority.

“No,” said Robert. “I need your help.”

“Help how?” Corrina asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Jessica’s cellphone”—he held it up—“has a list of contacts. Tell me everything you know about each name.”

“No,” said Mandy, firmly.

“No?”

“I’m no snitch.”

“How’d you get her phone?” Corrina asked suspiciously.

“Time is tight. That doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” said the Raven.

“The psycho responsible for all that’s going on here could be listed in this phone,” said Robert, exasperation in his voice. “If so,
you two
could be next.”

“You’re bluffing,” scoffed Mandy.

DeClercq snorted. What a world! It used to be that only the punks gave you attitude, but now every Joe Cool on the block thought that was the proper way to behave. Pulling his regimental badge from his pocket, he held it up beside his face and telescoped in until his angry eyes were a foot from the Blonde’s.

“If you don’t help me and someone dies as a result, I will see to it—so help me God—that you waste your precious youth in prison.” The chief had spent enough years in harness to know the smell of fear. “Do I have to call
your
bluff?” he asked.

He plunked a chair down at one of the tables.

“Sit,” he ordered.

Mandy sat.

“Here,” he said, slapping a pen and a pad of order forms down before her.

Swinging another chair into place, he set it down at a second table so the seats were back to back.

“Sit,” he said again.

Corrina sat. She also got pen and paper.

“Exam time, ladies. No cheating. As I call out each name, scribble down what it means to you. No holding back, understand? This is life or death. When we’re done, I’ll compare what you wrote. I expect the info to jibe. If it doesn’t, you’ll explain why. There isn’t a moment to waste, so let’s work fast. Help me catch this killer and you’ll be heroes. Try to hoodwink me and …”

The chief left the sentence unfinished.

He called up the contact list and read the first name.

*     *     *

After the list was whittled down to its most suspicious members, the chief thanked the snow bunnies and left the Gilded Man. He followed the most trampled path he could find to the Special X outpost in Whistler Village, to avoid the fate Joe had suffered. The detachment was deserted when he stomped snow from his boots and swung open the door.

Everyone was off dealing with the chaos.

Ghost Keeper answered his call to Vancouver HQ.

“Any luck finding information on the company that booked the room where Nick was killed?” asked the chief.

“Negative. Ecuador Exploration is a shell within a shell. We can’t pierce the corporate veil.”

“I’m going to download the contents of a henchwoman’s cellphone. I’ll send it shortly. I’ve trimmed the contacts down to the most likely suspects. See what you can glean from calls in and out, text messages, photos, and browsing history. Anything that could link a number to Mephisto.”

“What’s your strategy?” asked the Cree.

“A long shot,” said the chief.

*     *     *

The only move Robert had left was the chanciest of gambits. If Ghost Keeper could unmask Mephisto from the contacts in Jessica’s phone, the service provider would cough up a billing address. And if the address was in Whistler, Robert would kick in the door.

Should that fail, there was also the phone itself.

An activated cellphone emits a signal. Robert could call every suspect in Jessica’s contact list and use a handheld gadget to triangulate the location of those who responded. Or if he had some inkling of where Mephisto would be tonight, he could track which phone was at that location.

Did he have that inkling?

The trick in chess was to anticipate the next moves of the player on the other side. If Mephisto planned to spread his supervirus, he would need to release it in a crowd of globetrotters who would disperse before it took effect.

Mephisto would know about the 1966 U.S. military experiment to test America’s vulnerability to biological weaponry. A man took harmless bacteria down into New York’s subway system, stood at the edge of the crowded platform, and waited for the next train. When the doors opened, he dropped a light bulb full of bio-agents onto the tracks below. The bulb burst, the doors shut, and the train pulled away. Thirty minutes later, detectors picked up bacterial traces ten blocks across town. The test proved a crowd on the move could disperse biological weapons.

Was there such a crowd here tonight?

Mephisto’s reign of terror had frightened folk into huddling together for safety.

Where would they gather until they could burst free?

The El Dorado Resort and the Gilded Man were clues. The names evoked Spanish conquistadors seeking gold. Ecuador Exploration—the company that booked the ambush room—and the gilding of Nick’s corpse were also clues. Every move Mephisto made was part of the overall game, and he was taunting DeClercq by hinting at where he would strike, just as a chess player warns his opponent by calling “Check!” before he attacks.

“Going for the Gold!”

“Checkmate!”

The chief packed Jessica’s phone and the triangulation device into his briefcase. As he bundled up for yet another trudge through the storm to the El Dorado Resort, he turned on the police radio for an update from Dane and Zinc.

What he heard was the cry most dreaded by officers of the Mounted Police.

“A member is down!”

“Made it,” Dane said into his police radio. “I’m turning up the driveway to Gill’s chalet.”

Blind from the headlight beams reflecting off the dazzling snow, Dane depended on ruts in the groundcover to show him the way, just as he had throughout the harrowing drive in from the highway. With the defroster on full blast and the radio squawking in his ear, he hadn’t heard the machine guns firing minutes ago.

Risky though it was to plow straight up the driveway, the cop couldn’t see without the headlamps. His compromise was to climb no farther than the parking alcove, which, he noticed as he approached, was occupied by Zinc’s Rover. Then he saw Rick Scarlett’s body crumpled in the bloody snow.

“A member is down!” Dane warned the others. Nothing more was required to convey the image of one of their own on the ground.

“It’s Rick,” he added.

Shifting into neutral and yanking on the emergency brake, the cop reached with one hand for the Winchester in the foot well of the passenger’s seat while the other released the seatbelt and swung open the driver’s door. As Dane’s upper body emerged from the four-wheel-drive, a sputter of machine-gun fire drilled a row of spider-webbed holes across the windshield.

Bam!
A bullet struck the rifle and wrenched it out of Dane’s hand, spraining his wrist.

Before he could dive for cover …

Bam!
The driver’s-side window fractured into splinters. A second bullet slammed against his heart so hard that the wind was knocked from his lungs. Luckily, his Kevlar vest stopped most of the dagger-like shards, and the rifle plate protecting his chest flattened the slug.

His left arm wasn’t as lucky.

Bam!
The third slug tore through his biceps and sprayed the snow behind him as red as that around Rick.

“A second member is down!” he gasped as he hit the drift close to Rick’s body.

“Me,” he added.

*     *     *

The dogs of war had swung into action on several fronts. Though trained by different national armies, they’d been whipped into a team by Stopwatch’s precision timing. He’d set them tasks to complete with the promise of cash for every soldier of fortune who made the cut. After that, he’d had them perfect each task by timing them with the stopwatch strung from his neck.

Now, as the Austrian and the Norwegian descended the driveway to exterminate any survivors in the bullet-riddled four-wheel-drive, Ice Ax followed the skid marks gouged by the kids during their ride down the roof to the frozen creek. Maneuvering down the bank, he picked up their trail as they struggled to escape upstream.

“They’re coming your way,” he radioed to the Swede and the Finn out back of the chalet.

*     *     *

“If someone breaks in,” Robert had told Katt during their last talk, “escape through the dormer window and slide down the roof. The snow heaped against the wall will carry you onto the creek. Do you remember the treehouse?”

“Yes,” Katt had replied.

“Hide there so the backup team will know where to find you when it arrives.”

So here they were, Katt, Becky, and Napoleon, struggling through the two feet of snow smothering the frozen creek. The world around them was nothing but cold and blackness. The wind infiltrated the gaps in their clothes and bit at their skin. Both girls had to wipe the backs of their mittens across their teary eyes to keep their eyelashes from icing together when they blinked. Unable to see a thing, they inched ahead by feel. As long as the snow was flat, they knew they were on the creek. Both banks were thick with underbrush.

Finally, Katt figured they were far enough upstream. Memory told her the treehouse was near.

As a girl growing up in Barbados, Gill had dreamed of lazing away the torrid summer heat up in the cool branches of a leafy tree. As a woman with buckets of money, she’d indulged that childhood whim by building a nifty treehouse behind her chalet.

Summertime …

And the living is easy …

It wasn’t summertime now, and living hung in the balance, so Katt hoped she had the distance right. Huffing and puffing from the exertion of hauling Becky behind her, she strained to scale the tangled bank to the invisible trees. Her first step caused the rime to crack and swallow her leg to the thigh. When she planted her other boot, that leg sank as well. It seemed to Katt as if the forest was booby-trapped. With every step she took, bushes beneath the snow tripped her up.

“Ouch!”
Becky yelped.

“What’s wrong?” Katt whispered.

“Brambles,” said the child.

“Shush,” Katt silenced her. “I think we’re there. In a minute, we’ll take a peek.”

*     *     *

The winter warriors had been trained to lie still for hours in snowdrifts to make a kill. In the woods out back of the chalet, the Swede and the Finn stood as still as ice statues among the trees, listening to the silence between the gunfire out front. The mercenaries caught Becky’s yelp as thorns tore her flesh.

The kids were close …

Off to the left …

This side of the frozen creek …

Downstream, Ice Ax heard Becky’s yelp, too.