If the innkeeper was surprised to see me, the declared cripple, walking lightly out of the elevator, she didn’t show it. I’ve said it before: these Swiss people are weird, and sometimes you think you’re talking to a robot, as far as facial expressions are concerned. It didn’t really matter what she thought, though, since I wasn’t planning on coming back. We passed through reception with a light “good day,” and then scuttled to the car outside.
Conversation in the car was limited to directions that I gave Tom from time to time. I had to concentrate and get ready for when we reached the chalet. I needed to make sure that I would be able to get into the thugs’ heads, and it took me some time until I reached the first thug, the one I had named “Ugly.” The other one I named “Uglier” for distinction. Ugly was sitting at a kitchen table, drinking cheap wine that made me grimace at the taste. He was talking in a guttural language with the uglier thug, and that helped me to visualize him too. I decided on an experiment: instead of disconnecting from Thug no. 1 and then making connection with the other, as I had done until then when I wanted to switch targets, I opened my mind to Thug no. 2 without disconnecting from Thug no. 1 and found myself inside his head. This kind of head hopping can be a bit disconcerting at first, because you find yourself looking at the person in whose head you were a split second before, without experiencing any noticeable transition, but I tried that a few times until it came more naturally to me. When I was confident that I would be able to jump quickly into the thugs’ heads, I looked for Mary. She was still taped to the chair, and Vlad was still lying at her feet, motionless. I sensed how scared she was and felt pity for her. I debated whether to reassure her, but decided against it. I could have taken control of her voice and spoken to her, but that was likely to spook her even more.
I lay back in the passenger’s seat and gazed at Tom. He was driving in silence, with a faint smile on his face, as if we were about to go flower picking. “I’m ready,” I said. I touched his arm reassuringly, although it was obvious that he didn’t need reassuring.
He smiled a broader smile and instinctively touched the gun that he now kept in a holster clipped to his belt. “So am I,” he said, without taking his eyes off the road.
We had left the car behind the chalet, where the road was a little lower than the building’s level, so it wasn’t exposed to view from the chalet’s windows. Now we stood beside the door, debating what to do.
“We can’t just ring the bell,” Tom said. He had assumed a purposeful expression that gave me confidence he would be up to whatever happened. Apparently, he was in his element, walking into something that was likely to develop into a shootout.
“Of course not. Let me see what’s going on in there.” I perched against the whitewashed wall of the chalet and closed my eyes to concentrate. Uglier, the larger of the two thugs, was easier for me to locate, and in a few seconds I was seeing through his eyes. “They’re walking down the stairs to the basement. God knows what they plan to do to Mary. We must hurry,” I whispered.
Without wasting any time, Tom turned toward the side of the chalet and motioned to me to follow. A window opening into the kitchen was ajar and Tom pushed it lightly. It’s lucky that the Swiss are so trusting that they don’t put bars on their windows. Tom climbed in before me, gun in hand, and covered the room with it while I followed. In no time, we were standing at the top of the stairs leading to the basement.
“Wait!” I said. “Let me see what’s going on down there.”
I located Uglier and what I saw through his eyes scared me. His companion was standing before Mary, a whacking big knife in his hand. “I’ll count to five before this little blade starts working on you. Where is the dossier that Vlad gave you? Who did you give it to? If you have anything to say, say it now and spare yourself the pain. You’ll tell me, in the end, you know that.”
“I … I don’t know anything. Vlad didn’t give me any dossier, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I told you, please …” Mary pleaded desperately.
“Don’t say I haven’t warned you,” said Ugly, with a twisted, evil smile, which showed how much he was enjoying it.
There was no time to think, plan, or discuss. I acted instinctively. Taking possession of Uglier’s muscles, I made him take a step forward, and with his right fist I landed a mighty blow on his companion’s jaw. Ugly took a staggering step back. He gaped at his companion with an incredulous expression on his face. “What? … Why?” he managed to say. Uglier’s thoughts were in shambles, and he was nowhere near able to formulate a coherent one. He tried to speak, but I didn’t let him and the most he was able to produce was a whining, guttural sound.
I opened my eyes for a second and gazed at Tom. “Quick!” I said. He didn’t need much explaining and immediately charged down the stairs and into the basement. I followed and parked myself at the door, ready to help, if needed. The two thugs stared at us, completely astonished.
“Hands up!” Tom barked. His size and gun were apparently convincing enough, because Ugly dropped his knife, and both thugs raised their hands up high. “To the corner of the room, on your knees, move!” Tom ordered, and they obeyed without giving him any backchat.
“Keep an eye on them,” I said. I picked up the knife and used it to free Mary from the duct tape. She was in shock and for a moment didn’t speak.
“Who are you?” she asked at last.
“We are friends,” I said, as if that wasn’t obvious already. “What’s the deal with Vlad?” I asked, pointing at Vlad’s body on the floor.
“I don’t know. He is breathing but hasn’t come around for quite a long time. But hey! How do you know his name?”
“I know a lot. About him and about you, too. I’ll explain later. Do we need him, or we leave him here?” I said, pointing at Vlad.
“The hell we leave him here. He’s valuable, and he goes where I go,” Mary said, speaking quietly, but not quite able to hide some emotion.
I kneeled beside Vlad and cut the cords that were binding his hands and feet.
“All right, then. Tom, the gentleman is not in walking condition, so you’ll have to carry him. The problem is that we have these two idiots to deal with.”
“Give me the gun,” Mary ordered. Tom took a step back, making sure to keep the thugs all the time covered with the gun. He gazed at me, and when I nodded in assent, he handed the gun to Mary. The Uglies kept silent and wide-eyed, as if waiting to see if Mary would shoot them. “I’d shoot them,” Mary said, as if reading their thoughts, “but they may come in handy, so I won’t, for now. There is duct tape over there in that drawer. Bind them so they are uncomfortable and make sure not to get in the line of fire while you do it.”
She didn’t have to tell Tom twice. In five minutes, the two thugs were bound and gagged, lying uncomfortably on their sides on the floor. We left, locking the door behind us and took the key with us for good measure.
“We need to find my purse. It must be somewhere around here, and then we may go,” said Mary.
“I believe I saw it in the kitchen, Undersecretary Payne,” said Tom. He was carrying Vlad on his left shoulder as if he had no weight at all.
Mary stopped in her tracks and gazed at him at length. “Have we met before?” she asked him.
“Of course. We were together all morning,” said Tom. He looked perplexed, and who could blame him.
“I don’t think so. I’ve never seen you in my life and I spent my morning tied to a chair … or at least, that’s all I can remember. I’ll have to make sense of all this, at some point.”
“I’ll help you out with that,” I said, “but first we need to find a safe place to sit down and talk. We can’t stay here, and finding a good place to go to may be a problem, seeing that we can’t go around with Vlad on Tom’s shoulder. We have wheels, by the way.”
“Agreed. Oh, here’s my purse,” said Mary. She opened it and peered inside. “The keys to my Zurich safe house are here and that’s where we go.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “The danger to us is not only from the outside. There is danger from our own people. Nobody can know where we are.”
“Listen, girl, I’m not stupid. Nobody who doesn’t need to know has a clue that this safe house even exists.”
“Good,” I said. “And the name is Tessa, not ‘girl’.”
I mean, WTF. I had just saved her ass and she was already patronizing me! I stood beside her and planted a piercing gaze in her eyes. She gazed back for perhaps thirty seconds.
“I like you,” she said at last and kept on walking.
But not for long. The exit was blocked. We stood facing three men, one fat and red-faced, another thin and pale, and the third about average in everything. Each one of them held a whacking big automatic gun in his hands, pointed at us.