Everything was going according to plan. Alex, a fine natural athlete, was responding brilliantly to the practice climbs and extreme physical training. Luc Bresson had put many climbers through the rigors of a major ascent preparation in short order, and Hawke was performing at an even higher level than Luc had expected, given Hawke’s somewhat . . . hedonistic lifestyle. After a week, he told Luc that the air at Base Camp now seemed thick and rich and deliciously saturated with oxygen.
It was a good day on the mountain. Storms were expected later this evening, but for now it was almost pleasant up at Camp Bivouac. Hawke was on his cot, reading a worn paperback called A Purple Shroud For Dying. He was recovering that afternoon from intense physical exertion and a recurring battle against altitude sickness.
Luc Bresson stuck his head into Alex’s tent at five o’clock that afternoon and said, “Bonjours Monsieur! Ca va?”
Alex raised his head up and said, “Hey, Luc, what time is it? I must have fallen asleep. What’s up?”
“Are you available for comms? There’s someone on the camp radio who wants to talk to you. Is it okay?”
“Depends on who it is. Is it Sigrid?”
“I am sorry, no.”
Alex put his head back down on the pillow and closed his eyes.
“She’s the only one I want to talk to. Sorry.”
“It’s Chief Inspector Congreve calling. He is at the Stadtspolizei building. He says it’s most urgent.”
“Good. Something must be happening down there. Please tell him I’ll be there in two minutes.”
“Alex?”
“Right here.”
“I’ve got some very good news. We finally caught a break. A banking friend of Sigrid’s Jon Levin, with Credit Suisse Security Systems came up with the name of a potential hacking suspect. Former bank employee, forensic accountant who’d left under a cloud.”
“Here we go.”
“Right. He was running a high-pressure, secret sweatshop in Chinatown. Sigrid and I went there and managed to apprehend him. We got him to agree to cooperate fully in the investigation. As well as his entire staff.”
“Wow. Good on you. Sigrid too?”
“You’d have been proud of her. Magnificent job. I’m thinking of taking her on as my personal assistant. At any rate, with the help of the police, we were able to extract the information we’ve been looking for. The exact location of Sorcerer.”
“Amazing. Where the hell is that old devil?”
“Roughly ten thousand feet above your head. Just look straight up”
“Jesus, Ambrose. The Bat Cave?”
“Hmm. There are two entrances to the complex inside the mountain. Built by Swiss engineers in the Nazi era. One of them is below the surface of Lake Zurich. A hundred yards offshore, and about fifty feet below the surface. The other is a secret door, camouflaged by faux granite boulders. It’s on the ledge where Lieutenant Christian Hartz landed after his fall. Where he discovered the corpse.”
“Just above the Murder Wall?”
“Precisely. You’re going to have to climb that bloody wall again, I’m afraid, Alex.”
“Luckily for us, I’m not afraid. Luc just told me he thinks I’m all systems go. At first light.”
“Very good, Commander Hawke. My assistant and I both wish you Godspeed.”
“How is Sigrid doing?”
“You won’t recognize her when you get back. She appears to be infused with some new spirit. Quite phenomenal, actually. It seems as if the notion of fear has flown from her vocabulary. Ready to tackle just about anything, actually.”
“Is it real?”
“Oh, I daresay it’s completely real, Alex. And I’m being very serious about this. A transformation of sorts. I think she hated her job at the bank. Completely unsatisfying for a woman of her intellect and aspirations.”
“Where is our heroine just now?”
“She just rang to see if I’d heard from you. She’s at home, preparing to go out. We’re meeting for dinner at Cafe Du Jours. Eight o’clock this evening. We shall drink to your very good health. Perhaps I’ll even spring for a bottle of Cristal 1953 and Beluga caviar.”
“So sorry to miss it.”
“We’ll do it all over again when you come home.”
“I’m going to call her now. Listen, Ambrose, I cannot thank you enough for what you’ve done. Taking such good care of her, I mean, and cracking the case.”
“Thank her. I couldn’t have done it without her.”
“Gotta run.”
“Quickly, Alex, what are they saying about the weather up there tomorrow?”
“Ideal.”
“Meaning crap.”
“I guess I’ll find out. If anything drastic should happen to me up there, I hope you’ll—”
“See you soon, Alex. Take good care of yourself.”
The day dawned red.
Hawke started up the first face at five.
He planned to attack the face in two stages. The first “pitch,” in the lexicon of ascent, would end five hundred feet up at a small hollow in the back of the ice flow. It was situated just beneath a large overhang on the wall he’d nicknamed “the Wowie Zowie” during his last climb. A gentle enough way to start, he told himself. Get loose. Start looking for the “zone,” the mental space he needed to occupy when it all got deadly serious.
Hawke was carrying a three-eighths-inch climbing rope, one hundred fifty feet long. In each hand he held an ice ax—a thin, six-inch pick attached to a sixteen-inch fiberglass handle—and strapped to the soles of his climbing boots were his crampons. These were sets of two-inch steel picks, twelve per boot. The front two pointed forward from the toe of each foot.
By planting the picks of his ice axes with a series of carefully directed swings, then balancing on the toe spikes of his crampons after kicking them half an inch into the ice, Hawke could haul himself up the sheer face of Wowie Zowie like some overgrown arachnid. It was a technique he’d used since his very beginnings in the Alps, universally known as front-pointing.
Instinctively prudent, he would safeguard his ascent as much as possible. Every thirty feet he would pause to twist in a threaded eight-inch titanium tube with an eye at one end, then clip an aluminum snap-link called a carabiner through the eye. After that it was just a simple matter of clipping the rope trailing from his waist harness through the carabiner, and up you go!
Five hundred feet off the ground, after many arm-withering hours of battling gravity and the brittle ice of Wowie Zowie, he reached the point where the rock overhung his position like a ragged, rotten awning. He scrunched up under the overhang as close as he could get and fired in another screw. Then he leaned out past the lip of the roof, got his axes planted on the underside, and went for it.
He swung out on his arms, cranked off a pull-up, and started front-pointing upward to the ledge. Once on top, he launched himself into the second stage. He was moving upward at a pretty good clip, and then he wasn’t. This higher face, he soon discovered, was an infirm concoction, honeycombed with air pockets. He studied the stuff, which, upon closer inspection, resembled Styrofoam more than ice. Not good.
He took a peek below and saw that climbing back down to the ledge would be well nigh impossible. He took a brief moment to consider his next moves. Weather was threatening. He needed to find a place to hunker down soon. So, hoping the ice would improve as he climbed higher, he pushed onward.
It got worse. As he swung his ice axes over and over with burning arms, trying in vain to chop through the deteriorating ice and find something solid to sink his picks into, he found it harder and harder to keep a grip on his tools.
All of a sudden every anchor point he’d placed sheared out, and he found himself “logging some air time,” as climbers called the act of falling. He hurtled upside down until the force of the fall plucked his uppermost screw out of the rotten ice like a toothpick out of a cocktail sausage. He fell past the ledge he’d just left and kept falling.
He felt at that moment that he might actually crater.
It was a verb he never used except when he was on solid ground, in some cheery alpine après-ski environment, sharing a laugh and a drink by the fire with a pretty girl. The phrase crater is reserved for those unhappy occasions when a climber suffers the misfortune of falling all the way to the ground.
Luck, as was its habit sometimes, was on his side, because the next screw held and he bounced to a stop on the stretchy nylon rope after falling a mere sixty feet, bruised and frightened but otherwise unharmed. He hung there for a while, spinning lazily in space while he thanked any number of his personal deities, including his lucky stars. When that was accomplished, he started hauling up that bloody rope.
Once atop the ledge, he went about the business of making it cozy. Darkness was falling, and it was futile to try and gain any more ground. If the weather held and he got an even earlier start in the morning, he felt he could reach his destination sometime in the late afternoon. If, of course, he had a bit less excitement than he’d had today.
He first checked all of his gear to make sure he’d not lost something vital to his health in the fall. Then he broke out his rations. He devoured them, heated some water with his stove, and had a lovely cup of tea. He stood up and shoveled snow for a while until he’d cleared enough flat space to pitch his tent. He fully intended to enjoy his evening. It had been a long, eventful day, but he’d had far worse. Far, far worse.
But not to dwell on them was the secret of sanity up here, where confidence and a positive outlook could keep you alive. He would sip his chamomile tea to settle himself, watch the red sky go to black and fill with cold, pinprick stars. And then he would read his book, and then he would sleep.
The average mountain tent has about as much elbow room as your average red phone booth in London, with less floor space than a queen-sized bed. Being tent-bound on a mountain isn’t wholly an ordeal. The first hour or two can pass in some dreamy euphoria as you’re lying peacefully in your sleeping bag, watching stars come out, or raindrops trickle down from the sky, or snowdrifts slowly climbing the walls around you.
Within the realm of your tiny tent, there is an atmosphere of guiltless relief. The night has blessed you with a sturdy alibi for not risking your life for a few hours. Your life is secure for a while, without anguish or pangs of conscience, or fear.
There is nothing to be done but drift back off to untroubled sleep.