TWO

Weird Shadows Over Innsbruck

NOTHING EVER LOOKED AS small and vulnerable on the ground as it did from the sky, not even a city of more than a hundred thousand souls. Down below, in the streets, it would all look so comfortingly solid and big. From any side, Ambras Castle would be as majestic as when it was built during the Renaissance. The green copper roofs crowning the cathedral’s dome and the cupolas of its bell towers would rise ever out of reach, that much closer to the heavens.

But from her window seat on the plane, banking in toward Kranebitten Airport, Luna thought the city looked small and lonely. In its valley between mountain chains to the north and south, Innsbruck looked like an array of tidbits served up on a platter, with a river to wash away the crumbs. It was entirely at the mercy of the Alps and the elements.

It was also at the mercy of whatever had come to call them home.

Back in Virginia, Director Brady had warned her about the landing. The mountains did dangerous and unpredictable things to the winds here, and sometimes planes had to land by circling in a downward spiral while gradually cutting speed. This was a particularly bumpy descent, turbulence knocking at the plane like a fist trying to batter its way inside.

If she could’ve told her seatmate why she was really here, and if he’d asked what she was most afraid of—crashing, or facing whatever was waiting once they were down—she wouldn’t have had to think about it. Easy.

Neither, she would’ve said. Failing. That’s the only thing I’m afraid of. Failure. None of the rest comes close.

Claude had flown into Austria a couple days ahead of her, within hours of the third corpse turning up, while back at Quantico they fast-tracked her through some final basic training before shoving her onto a plane of her own. He was there to meet her on arrival in the lobby of the lodge, where it seemed as if everybody else was carrying skis except for her.

You look good—it didn’t matter who said it first. One of them was going to.

So do you—and with that out of the way, maybe the rest would be a little less awkward.

She wasn’t just being kind. Claude looked . . . great, actually. Over the years they’d exchanged letters and sometimes phone calls, a few Polaroids, but it had been more than a decade since they’d seen each other face-to-face. Claude LeGoff had still been a boy then. Now he had ten years of manhood on him. His shoulders were broader, and so was his jaw. When she hugged him, the feeling was a lot like she remembered, only twice as solid.

The wide sideburns made her snicker, a nice touch. Packed into a black turtleneck, with his hair combed down over his forehead, he looked downright Mod. Once they were back home, all he would have to do was shave the sideburns off and he’d be as clean-cut as a Kennedy again, with nothing for Hoover to complain about.

He nodded at her hair. “This is new. Wow. You really hacked it back.”

“Yeah. The Twiggy look.” Short, side-parted, and swept across her brow. Maybe Claude had never heard that it was practically a rite of passage for a woman to cut her hair after a divorce. “I thought it would work here.”

With a glance about the lobby, she spotted no fewer than seven women sporting the same trendy bob. From all sides, she caught snippets of conversations in German and French and Norwegian, and in every English accent from the Beatles to the Queen. Everybody looked fit and healthy, half of them ruddy-faced from the slopes, and the only people who could possibly live from paycheck to paycheck were the staff.

“Do we blend?” Luna said.

“Get a little more windburn on our cheeks and we’ll be perfect.”

Claude took the larger of her two suitcases and led the way to the room, a single for the both of them. Appearances and all. What they were doing here, it wasn’t undercover, exactly, but still, better to give the impression of being a couple than not. The couple they used to be, half their lives ago, now grown-up—it was an easy enough thing to pretend. Just imagine the intended future from their earlier lives.

Claude pointed to a sofa facing the windows with a postcard-perfect view across the valley, of the Nordkette, a horizon-spanning panorama of snowy peaks and crags. “I can take the couch.”

She looked at it, appalled. Swedish minimalist, it was more frame than cushion. “That can’t be comfortable.”

“With enough brandy, who knows?”

“You’re supposed to break your leg at a ski lodge, not your back, don’t you know anything?” she said, and they bickered amiably about it for a couple of rounds, and there, that was it—the closest feeling yet to who they used to be.

There was a time when it felt as though they’d known each other forever, and always would. Small towns were like that, maybe small towns in Wisconsin more than most. Nothing in Mitford ever seemed to change, even as the outside world did.

They’d grown up taking for granted that there was always going to be a war somewhere. They’d been ten or eleven when the atomic bombs were dropped over Japan . . . and once the armies knew how to build the bombs, who could stop at two? Soon there were warheads mounted on ICBMs. One day, they’d probably have them on the Moon if they weren’t there already. So those drills at school—hey, those were new, that was a change. Remember, kids, when you see the flash and the mushroom cloud, be sure to duck and cover. Get under your desk and you’ll be okay.

How could either of them have believed such a thing?

Maybe because it was still the lesser among evils. By then, they already knew there were worse things in the world, and beyond.

Claude checked his watch. “You’ve got ten whole minutes to freshen up, if you need to. The body count went up by one overnight. We should go have a look. And dress warm.”

Luna thought she knew Innsbruck already, a little. Two years ago they’d hosted the Winter Olympics here, and with a fascination for skiing and a love for the beauty of figure skating, she’d tuned in on her Sylvania every moment she could spare. Most of ABC’s coverage came from the slopes and trails and arenas, but some of it had shown the city, as well.

Seeing it in color now, instead of on a black-and-white TV . . . ? She hadn’t known Innsbruck at all.

As the taxi ran them through the streets to the medical complex near the Inn River, Claude opened the leather folio he’d brought and slipped out a stack of photos.

“This new body we’re going to see is the fourth that’s turned up. The shots from that haven’t been developed yet, but they won’t look much different.”

“What are these, then, the last one?”

“The third, right. From the weekend, a guy from the Netherlands. He’d been coming here twice a year since you and I were kids, so you have to assume he knew what he was doing up there. Someone thought to shoot these on the spot, because by then this was familiar, but with the first two bodies, this . . . cocoon-thing, let’s call it . . . hadn’t lasted long enough to photograph it later. Nobody knew what to make of it.”

She shuffled through the stack, lingering longer on each successive shot. The first few set the scene, high in the foothills below the craggier reaches of the mountains, with what looked to be a body lying amid rocks and pines, covered with enough snow that she could barely see the orange of the victim’s jacket.

“The site is a hundred and forty meters off a snowshoe trail,” Claude said. “Going by the length of what they think was his stride, and the depth of the prints, he was running. Uphill. In snowshoes. Have you ever tried that? You really have to be motivated to do that.”

She paused at a shot of tracks, big oblong holes punched in the snow spaced a few feet apart. “What do you mean, what they think was his stride? They’re not sure if these were his?”

“They match the snowshoes. But they only pointed in his direction. They didn’t lead to him, exactly. They terminated about eighty meters off the trail. Somehow he made it another sixty uphill without disturbing the snow in between.”

Eliminate the obvious, Luna. “More snow blew across later and filled in those particular tracks?”

Claude shook his head. “The locals say no. I take them at their word. They know their snow here.”

The rest of the photos were close-ups. With more details visible, what she had taken for snow covering the body . . . wasn’t. At least not like any snow she’d ever seen. It hadn’t accumulated, flakes piling onto flakes. Rather, it looked like strands of ice, spun in directional layers as if to weave a frozen shroud. A bearded face was barely visible inside it, gone deathly white after passing a night in the alpine cold.

“If they know their snow here, does anybody have any idea why it’s done this around him? It’s . . . weirdly beautiful, actually.”

“Not a clue. And don’t make of an issue of it. It bugs them that they don’t. Then again, it’s potentially a meteorological phenomenon nobody’s ever seen, so that’s got to be exciting to someone.”

She looked again. No dead, black skin. Severe frostbite usually seemed to take the nose first, and this Dutchman’s, though bloodlessly pale, didn’t appear disfigured. Should they have expected that? She’d have to ask someone at the hospital.

“They say it’s a peaceful way to go, after a point. Freezing to death.”

“Well, that’s another thing,” Claude said. “There’s some question as to whether this guy was actually dead when they brought him down off the mountain.”

She studied the most detailed close-up. Judging by the visible skin’s lividity, the man was a Popsicle. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. It’s possible he didn’t die until he was in the back of the ambulance.”

“Based on what?”

“That he seems to have turned over inside his body bag. The rescue team swears they put him in faceup. When they zipped him open again, he was facedown. With his hands up under his chest instead of down around his waist.”

“His body couldn’t have shifted during handling?”

“That’s the rational explanation.” Claude winked, as though he might say it but didn’t really believe it.

Once she was done with the photos, he gathered them together and tucked them away again. The boyish grin hadn’t aged a day. “When we were growing up, did you ever in your wildest dreams see us someplace like this?”

No. She hadn’t. There was a time when her imagination couldn’t carry her any farther from home than Madison or Milwaukee. There was a time she had seen herself walking into a church as Luna Bearheart and leaving as Luna LeGoff. A time when her greatest worry was what their children might look like—if one-quarter Ojibwe would be little enough to avoid calling attention to itself. Maybe that would spare them the kind of mockery that had made for her childhood’s most miserable days, at the hands of kids who entertained themselves by coming up with a new name for her every week. Half-Squaw. Princess Running Water. Pocahontas.

But she’d had friends too. As kids, as teenagers, she and Claude had banded together with a few like-minded pals on a mission, confident that Mitford would be safe as long as they were on the job. “The Junior G-Men,” they’d called themselves. They watched out for Russians . . . and by god, one day they’d found them. While out hoofing it on one of his rambles, Claude had spotted a suspicious crew moving into a mansion that had been sitting vacant for enough years that everybody called it the “Witch House.”

Not everything was as it appeared, though.

People you’d respected all your young life could turn out to be working against the entire human race. Beyond the veil of everyday life there could turn out to be gods and monsters that wanted through. And despite what you heard almost every day, there were good Russians too, willing to stand against that, even pay with their lives rather than let it happen.

So back in Mitford, for Luna and for Claude, plenty had changed after all.

Live through an experience like that, and you came out the other side with two choices. You could will yourself to forget it ever happened and pretend everything was normal again. Nothing but a future of malt shops and movies on the weekend, and high school football, as far as the eye could see.

Or you could admit that what you’d seen was real, and there was no going back. You could never again believe the fairy tales, the pacifying lies. There were enemies infinitely worse than Russians that wanted the world in their grip, and you couldn’t stand back content to hope it didn’t come to pass in your lifetime. You had to sign up for the fight.

Which was a great deal easier when you had a name like Claude rather than a name like Luna, as it turned out.

Forty-two years ago, when he’d assumed command of the bureau, one of the earliest changes J. Edgar Hoover made was making sure its ranks were for men only. The first female special agent in FBI history didn’t quite make two years on the job before she was out—within two months of him taking over. Alaska P. Davidson—four decades lay between them, but still she felt a kinship with the woman.

Ancestors could be bound by more than blood.

The medical center was a cluster of buildings near the tip of the triangle where the Inn zigzagged to the north and back, but this fourth casualty wasn’t hospitalized inside any of them. Someone had taken the uncertainties about the Dutchman seriously enough to try adapting to them and give this latest victim a fighting chance. They’d brought him back in the hold of a refrigerated truck, outfitted with a gurney and some monitors, and there he’d remained, most of his shroud of snow intact, while the medical staff had waited for some experimental new gear to be flown over from Zürich.

Fact: People had been found seemingly frozen, yet still alive. Bringing them out of it was a tricky process, with a risk of shock and excruciating pain, as the blood returned to their extremities.

Conjecture: Suppose these four victims, by means unknown, had ended up in a state of hypothermia so deep it was indistinguishable from death. And suppose their Dutchman, presumed dead and loaded in the back of an ambulance, had warmed sufficiently to rouse out of it, and move around in the bag before succumbing—undetected, sadly, because who watched a body during transport?

A grim thought, especially if there was any chance he could have been saved, and the two before him. It was an oversight the locals were unwilling to make again.

This fourth one had been identified as a man named Herriot, a cross-country skiing enthusiast with the lean and weathered look of an Alpine sportsman—but one who’d run into more mountain than he could handle. The color was all but bleached from his face, and his hair lay plastered against his skull with frozen sweat.

The experimental system they’d brought in started with sleeves that slipped onto Herriot’s arms up to the elbows—something about the hands and the bottom of the forearms being nexus points for heat transfer—and were connected by wires and hollow tubes to a machine the size of a steamer trunk. It had an intravenous component, as well, plus a puffy vest they fitted over his torso and inflated with air pumped from a compressor. It all looked very patchwork and prototypal.

A few minutes along, one of the medics reported what she thought was a pulse, beyond faint, slower than any living heart was ever supposed to beat. Four times per minute? Impossible.

Soon, wisps of steam began to rise from him, and however minuscule the movements—a finger, an eyelid, a twitch of his jaw—Herriot began to stir. He’d seemed past saving, yet he was coming back.

Claude nudged her with his elbow. “Breathe,” he whispered.

Right. She’d forgotten.

Herriot’s skin tone began to take on the semblance of life again, a blush of pink blooming on each ivory cheek and the cleft of his chin. The color spread, the spots widening, then merging, as a ripple of excitement went through the medics and technicians gathered around him.

When his eyes opened, Herriot seemed cognizant, if confused, unable to process where he was, what was happening. His gaze rolled upward, to the roof of the truck, then his limbs began to stir. They held him down so he wouldn’t tear loose of the connections. With a gasp he began to bend backward. The steam intensified and his color continued to deepen, from pink to rose and darker—if he kept going, he’d soon be the color of a brick. That he was in pain became distressingly obvious. As a stream began to flow down his face, it seemed impossible that he could progress from half-frozen to sweating in a matter of minutes, yet he had. There was no ice left on him to melt. He was definitely sweating now.

With a gasp and a coil of steam gusting from his throat, he got out a word. Burning, someone translated from what Luna thought sounded French. I’m burning up.

His heels drummed against the gurney, and the tempo of the cardiac monitor spiked as though an unseen hand was cranking a dial. Someone shouted to cool him down again, that they were still going too fast, but with one last cry of anguish it was done. A moment after Herriot slumped back onto the gurney, he flatlined.

Time of death, 11:14 A.M. It was all over but the paperwork, so they left the truck, stepping back into the light of a day that felt too clean and crisp for what she’d just witnessed.

“It’s not that I hope there are any more of them that turn up,” Claude said. “But if there are, I wish they could keep one alive long enough to tell us the last thing they remember seeing.”

They finished the day up on the mountainside, walking in the footsteps of dead men.

They’d had to go back to their room and suit up with extra layers—while they’d dressed warmly enough for the truck, it wasn’t warm enough for a few hours outdoors, especially once afternoon started tipping toward evening. A pair of snowshoes each, rented from the lodge, and they were good to go.

Above the city, they crunched along a network of trails that meandered across stretches of open ground and through belts of evergreens whose branches sagged under robes of snow. Claude had a trail map inked up with four Xs and other annotations about the recovered bodies.

“This isn’t just some weather phenomenon. If that’s all it was, we wouldn’t be here,” she said. “But is it even true there was some sort of Bigfoot sighting up here the night the second victim went missing? Even Brady seemed kind of embarrassed when he was briefing me on that.”

“That part’s genuine, actually. It’s what got this flagged for us in the first place. There’s something that came through in Lovecraft’s writings called the Mi-go, but he seems to have been muddled about them. In a couple of sources he describes them as these winged, alien crustaceans. Nothing hominid about them at all. But the word itself is a mangled version of a Tibetan word for Yeti, and in another source he equates them with Abominable Snowmen.”

She had to laugh. “That’s . . . not helpful.”

“So until there’s a reason to re-evaluate, I think we can ignore it for now. It’s a wild card that doesn’t fit with everything else. There weren’t any other footprints in the snow around the victims.”

“Because what Bigfoot worth his name isn’t going to leave prints behind?”

Claude stopped for a slow look along the valley, from west to east, a plume of breath jetting from his mouth. “I’ve been here enough time, you already qualify as fresh eyes. What do you notice?”

Luna rooted herself while staring out across the sea of roofs below, toward the Nordkette on the far side. Its implacable peaks rose from the valley floor like a monstrous wave, mottled green toward the base and pure white at the top, which threatened to break over the city.

“The victims were all found on this side, right? Nobody over there?”

“Right.”

“Is that significant?”

“Maybe. But with only four, who can say?”

“Until we know better, it still suggests . . .” Luna paused, not sure what, exactly. “Preference? Access? Better knowledge of the terrain over here?”

Claude nodded, liking where this was going. “Anything else?”

With the nearest trees a couple minutes’ slog away, Luna supposed that if she let her imagination get the better of her, she could feel open and exposed. Vulnerable to the elements, or to something potentially worse.

“Everything happening on this side might also suggest . . . a clear shot, maybe? The victims being in range?” She went over that again in her head, if only to consider the implications. “Were these guys targeted?”

“And there’s the $64,000 question.”

The longer they stood here, the more Claude seemed so much more on top of the situation than she was.

“They told me there were frozen bodies, odd circumstances surrounding their conditions, and maybe a monster,” she said. “Have I been briefed fully? It doesn’t feel like it.”

“Fresh eyes, remember.” Claude genuinely seemed to want to soothe a sting she doubted he even understood. “If you’re not already thinking along a certain track, you can see the situation differently. It might help you be more intuitive.”

“That’s how they put it to you? Intuitive?” It almost sounded plausible. Unless you were the one living the indignity of it. “That’s bullshit, Claude. Brady may have been the one telling you this, but it’s Hoover’s voice he’s talking in.”

The more she reconsidered it, the less Director Brady had seemed embarrassed than borderline ashamed when he’d descended on Quantico to whisk her out of the HPL Academy and into the field. In an age of change, it was beginning to feel like she was over here to prove a point, the only one J. Edgar Hoover was prepared to accept—that she didn’t belong here in the first place. Neither her, nor any other woman, still.

The old man wanted her to start behind and have to play catch-up. If she let herself, she could feel sick.

“What’s this situation really about, Claude?”

They got moving again, snowshoes crunching through the crust.

“It started with the usual CID analysts sifting through the usual intel chatter,” he said. “A couple months ago, from the Olde Fellowes back channels we’ve tapped into, they picked up a cluster of references to Innsbruck. No context to make sense out of it, but there it was, all of a sudden on the radar. Then the Yeti sighting, which may or may not have been valid, but the bodies have been real enough, and a puzzle of their own. Finally it came down the chain of command, from someone way above our pay grades, that while you and I should be sitting down to Christmas goose in a few weeks, there’s going to be a high-level NATO summit here in Innsbruck, that’s supposed to be under the radar. Key players only.”

“That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“You saw earlier this year that China set off their third test nuke?”

“I heard.”

“Over the past ten years, China and the Soviets have fallen out with each other. Better for us, obviously. Better for everybody. The rift started under Khrushchev. But as of a couple years ago, with Khrushchev out and Brezhnev in, within two days of China joining the nuclear club, there’s been a faction in the Kremlin pushing to get cozy with China again. It’s gaining strength. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, that kind of thing.”

A terrifying thought. Nobody in their right mind would want to see such an alliance restored. Three nuclear powers that didn’t trust each other was a white-knuckle state of affairs for the world; but there was a deranged stability to it, a tripod of mistrust. Two against one, though? Things could get truly scary then.

“That’s all I know, really, about this summit,” Claude said. “It’s an emergency meeting on how to sabotage friendly Sino-Soviet relations and maintain the status quo. No idea too outlandish, probably.”

She started to see the big picture. “Except the Olde Fellowes thrive on instability, so it’s in their best interests if this fails. Are they sending somebody in to . . .”

No, wait—there were bodies already, weeks ahead of the summit.

“Where security for something like this is concerned, Innsbruck is pretty tight,” Claude said. “It’s manageable. There are a limited number of ways in, and they’re easy to keep an eye on. That’s why it was chosen. But it doesn’t matter how strong your locks are if the killer’s already inside with you. It’s looking like the Olde Fellowes may have allied themselves with somebody who was already here. Or, for all we know, they could’ve been funding him for years, and this is something that fell into their lap and they decided it was too good not to take advantage of.”

“Funding who?”

“His name is Dr. Gerhardt Portner. He’s one of the Nazis who got away. During the war, he was in charge of one of those secret projects the German high command was so in love with. It seems to have been an offshoot of their rocketry program. . . . an energy weapon they were trying to develop, using liquid nitrogen to super-cool pulses and streams of plasma.” He held his gloved hand several inches in front of his face and blew a gust of frosty breath at it. “Call it what it was, though: a freeze-ray.”

“Jesus,” she said. “And it’s here?”

“We have to assume that, yes.”

“So now he’s test-firing it? Calibrating it, maybe?”

“That’s what it feels like. There’s nothing to connect our victims to each other, let alone to NATO. They just loved the snow here.”

“Could that explain the lack of footprints? These guys got blasted from one spot to another?”

Claude seesawed his hand: maybe, maybe not. “There’s an argument that energy weapons might cause displacements in time and space. The Philadelphia Experiment? Somebody lost control there in a big way. A casualty ending up sixty meters away from his last tracks might be the same thing on a smaller scale.”

Okay, then. Fresh eyes and intuitive insights, that’s what they wanted from her? Or claimed they did? Fine. What do I notice here?

She gave the valley the same sweeping look-over that Claude had. For the most part, Innsbruck was not a city of tall buildings, the occasional castle and bell tower aside. From nearly anywhere below, it would’ve been a straight, unobstructed shot to up here.

Only there hadn’t been any witnesses. If Portner had fired his weapon four or more times, why hadn’t anybody seen it happen? He was either doing it from very close to the mountain, or . . .

“Is there any reason to conclude it had to come from below?” Luna turned her back on the city and pointed up-slope. “Could it have come from above?”

There were structures and settlements on the mountain too in a few places. She’d seen them from the air on the flight in, as the plane circled its descent.

Claude followed her finger. “The irregularities of the mountainside would create a lot more obstructions. But there could be a spot common to all four, so there’s no reason to rule it out.” Then Claude kicked at the snow. “Doesn’t quite square with the Dutch guy, though. His tracks show he was running uphill. He had to be running from something.”

“Maybe you’re too long out of Quantico already.” Luna poked him with her elbow. And yeah, that felt good, even through two parkas. “I distinctly remember one of the investigation instructors telling us that if everything lines up perfectly, there’s a good chance you’re looking at it all wrong.”

Claude got a worried look. “We’re presuming a fixed installation. Or something that would be cumbersome to move, maybe mounted on the back of a truck. But it’s not impossible that Portner has worked up something portable already. If he’s done that, all bets are off.”

“Possible, but how likely? If he’s tromping around up here, we’d be talking about a backpack unit, like a flamethrower. That’s highly advanced. I mean, at first glance it looks like he’s had twenty years to develop the thing, but he really hasn’t. Some of that time would’ve been survival. He would’ve had to start over from scratch. Not just his post-war life, but everything. Logistics, materials, funding, making sure it’s all set up through channels where his contacts aren’t going to sell him out . . . which means whoever he found is expecting to get more out of him than they invest in him.”

“Because nobody develops a freeze-ray solely out of the badness of their hearts,” Claude said. “Hellooo, Olde Fellowes . . .”

She turned her back to the peaks and once more began looking below. “Energy weapon, you called it. How much energy are we talking about on the front end, just to get something like that to fire?”

“Considerable is the consensus.”

She found her attention lingering on a structure to the east, at the bottom of the hillside, like a giant playground sliding board—a ski jump. Further beyond, a landing strip, ringed by spectator stands.

“What about down there?” she said. “Are you an Olympics fan?”

“Not really. When I was a boy, I never forgave them after I learned they stripped Jim Thorpe of his medals.”

“I’m talking about the Winter Olympics. Different games.” Luna pointed at the ski jump, then farther out, at the arenas and athletes’ quarters. “See all that? The Olympic Village, it’s called. It was just built for the games here two years ago. I’m pretty sure training and competition still go on around here, but there has to be a lot of unused space now, sitting idle.”

Claude picked right up on her thinking. “And if the Olde Fellowes managed to corrupt the right official or administrator, they could make Portner’s use of it look legitimate on paper, as long as he was careful when he sneaked in the hardware.”

A rapid dusk was coming on now that the sun had ducked behind the peaks. Shadows began to stretch across the valley floor, while the blue of the sky turned deeper, richer. The air was already feeling colder. Time to get moving again.

“Considering what this complex was for, global stage and all,” Luna said, “that whole area down there probably has the newest, most reliable power grid in Innsbruck. If we’re right about this, that could be his number-one need.”

Claude had a dossier on Dr. Portner in their room, and after a dinner of Tafelspitz and dumplings, Luna set up shop at the table by the window.

The longer she spent with it, the more it seemed as if the war that had formed such an indelible backdrop for their childhoods had never truly ended. Twenty-one years after Hiroshima and the fall of Berlin, they’d sent the soldiers home, shuffled the teams, and continued the fighting in less obvious ways.

Japan was a friend now, and the USSR an enemy. Italy was for hedonists. And Germany? Well. Germany was . . . complicated.

The Nuremberg Trials had made for a good show, but behind the scenes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been willing to forgive any atrocity as long as the U.S. got enough in return. And with Operation Paperclip, they had—an importation of 1,600 German rocket scientists who got to pick up where they left off and continue their research for the victors. A sweet deal if you could get it.

It stood to reason that not all of them could, or would even want to, not if Uncle Sam was signing the checks.

Was that the kind of man Dr. Gerhardt Portner was? He’d been a member of the Nazi Party, and rose to the rank of lieutenant. During his time at a research facility in the Polish countryside, he was reported to have delighted in telling batches of new prisoners, brought in as expendable slave labor for the Wehrmacht’s projects, “You arrived through the gates behind you, and you will leave through the chimneys you see in front of you.”

His mission for the Reich, it was said, was more esoteric than rocketry. He was fascinated by the cold. He yearned to harness the cold. Much as the sun’s rays could be focused to a point that might incinerate what it touched, Dr. Portner wanted to concentrate cold’s killing power. Freezing to death was effective, but slow. Any process that could kill so well was worth speeding up.

The only records of his research were fragmentary, bits and pieces recovered from the ruins left after the Polish facility had been abandoned because of Allied bombing near the end of the war, and pieced together later. Dr. Portner and his fellow researchers—such a benign word for such systematic inhumanity—had presumably fled with what they could and recreated the rest.

His freeze-ray had been dubbed Project Thule, a name almost certainly derived from the strains of occultism that had woven through Nazism’s higher echelons. A cold and remote land to the north, Thule might only have been an ancient name for Norway. Mythologized, though, it had become antiquity’s cradle of the Aryan race, peopled by a lineage of giant übermenschen, whose magic had plugged them into the cosmos and brought them knowledge of what lay beyond the stars.

Learning about Portner’s freeze-ray was like learning about atomic bombs. You could hear about kilotons and fallout zones, and it remained academic. To appreciate the true horror of what had been created at Los Alamos, you had to look to the people it had been used on. Say, the short-lived survivors the Japanese had called “alligator people” . . . burned black as cracked leather, faceless, eyeless, a wheezing red hole for a mouth, but no voice, crawling along the ground.

Different weapon, same principle. In a place like Dr. Portner’s facility, slaves didn’t always know what they were working on . . . but the survivors nonetheless had stories to tell, testimony to give to whoever would listen. They may not have known weapons systems, but they knew carnage. They knew the expendability of their lives.

Good god. Portner had tested his prototypes on them.

She could only imagine the fear in his test subjects, peeled off from the workforce for any number of reasons that might have doomed them. Too old, too slow, too sick, too injured. They would be led to a spot along a concrete wall. Stand here. Or chained to a stake in the ground outside. Sometimes they were allowed to run, because a moving target was the ultimate test for any weapon. . . . and if the test failed and the prisoner kept running, there were always rifles, already proven, at the ready.

“At first the boy looked like he’d been burned. His skin turned red, but soon it swelled up and was covered in blisters full of pus. You could see anybody’s ribs but his. They kept him in the infirmary where they had me cleaning, and he lived like that for another four days.”

“Her whole leg was black, the skin was dead, falling off, all the way to the bone eventually.”

“It didn’t kill him but Chaim didn’t seem to understand what just happened to him, poor soul. One of the soldiers took a mallet and hit his arm near the shoulder. It shattered. Like ice, it shattered. A chunk of ice, only made of skin and bone and muscle.”

As early as 1944, Dr. Portner had succeeded in creating something that could do hideous damage, but how reliable it had been was unknown. There was at least one serious accident, resulting in the deaths of soldiers and prisoners alike. The conclusion of the analysts who’d gone over the surviving data was that his freeze-ray’s biggest limitation was its range. Which he had no doubt since improved.

Luna had to push back from the table for a moment. She took a lingering look across at the Nordkette. Even now, somebody on this side, along the southern chain, might be lying in the snow, inches from death.

She turned to Claude. “The bodies here don’t fit the damage described in the war records. These . . .” She slapped her hand flat onto the papers. “They’re ghastly. It’s the kind of trauma you’d expect from a weapon of war. The bodies here, what was done to them was . . . almost delicate. Not even instantaneously fatal.”

“That’s not gone unnoticed,” Claude said. “It could be a variation in the ray itself, and that’s what he’s testing now. He got the horrible death part dialed in early, now he’s working on dialing it back. There’s this new show on TV called Star Trek. You being at Quantico and all, this may be the first you’ve heard of it.”

She had to laugh. “Yeah. Not a lot of leisure time this past year.”

He unholstered his “HPL Special” pistol and held it up. “For them, this would be crude. Their standard sidearm is this thing called a phaser. You can set it to kill, or just to stun. Maybe this is the same principle.”

“For what possible reason would you want a freeze-ray that only incapacitates?”

“Next time we’re sharing scotch-and-sodas with one of the Olde Fellowes, I’m sure he’ll be glad to tell you all about it.”

She dug back into the papers, ready for more atrocities, but by now it was mainly down to a spotty compilation of sightings.

Portner was one of the many who had simply disappeared during the chaotic end of the war. It wasn’t a matter of him putting down a rifle and going back home to civilian life. He was too high profile for that, with a documented history of war crimes. He was a man who had retained his ambitions.

But the U.S. hadn’t gotten him, and neither had the Soviets. Gerhardt Portner remained unaccounted for. The last known photo of him, shot during the war years, showed a mature man in his thirties, with hair swept back from a prominent widow’s peak. A pale scar, rumored to be from some lab mishap, skidded from one side of his nose to the far edge of his cheekbone. It looked less like the result of a cut than something that had been seared. He was not indistinctive, and the survivors of death camps and labor facilities had a long memory for the faces of their captors.

Over the years, he’d been spotted in a few locations across Europe. In Oslo, in Krakow, in Helsinki, men and women who would carry the memory of him to their graves had lifted their arms and pointed, but justice had never caught up with him. He was vapor, like frozen breath on a winter day.

Any pattern to the sightings had emerged only within the past couple of years, with the most recent sightings of him having come from here in Austria. Vienna once, Salzburg twice, and, most recently, Innsbruck.

“Twenty years on the run,” Luna said once she’d closed the folder. “He’s got to be awfully cagey. And dangerous. He’s not even an old man yet. He hasn’t stayed free all this time by not being dangerous. And he can’t be doing this on his own. He’s got help.”

“You sound worried now.”

“Just the two of us, for a crew like that?”

“Never fear,” Claude said. “You and I aren’t doing the heavy lifting. We’re here as spotters, and to sort out whatever connection there is with the Olde Fellowes.”

Her gut clenched. “They can’t be planning on letting him go. A man like that.”

“No.” Claude pointed at the dossier. “I wanted you to go over that first. So you’d be clear on who this man is and what he’s done. I thought that might make it easier to accept where this is headed. You’ll sleep better if you have no qualms.”

“Nazi hunters?”

Claude nodded. “Inter-agency cooperation, it happens all the time. In three other rooms here, there’s a combined total of six Mossad agents. Israeli intelligence. They’ve been doing this kind of thing awhile. These six? Four years ago they were part of a campaign called Operation Damocles. It targeted German scientists who’d gone to work for the Egyptian government. Sometimes it was limited to intimidation. Sometimes . . . more. So they get Portner. We get everything else, whatever there is to recover.”

He seemed so matter-of-fact about it. She tried to connect his cool pragmatism here to the boy she knew, years ago.

“They’re here to do what we can’t, Luna. We’re not authorized for it, and even if we were, we’re not trained for it. Not this. They are.”

She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t find a middle that would connect the ends.

“We’re not assassins,” he said. “We’re not kidnappers.”

No. They weren’t. Not yet.

And she wondered who they might have been had they grown up in some town other than Mitford, where they could’ve come of age with their blinders left intact. Someplace where they could have maintained their illusions that the world, even at its most violent, made an underlying sense, and that the cosmos was ordered, and that everything they did was virtuous, because so were they.

They made the hike—three of them now—as dawn lifted misty and gray, with flurries of snow swirling through the valley. It seemed more than bad luck. It seemed a bad omen, the elements working against them after yesterday’s crystalline skies. They needed visibility and had none.

Only the Israeli team leader didn’t seem bothered. His name was Daniel Yahav, and under his winter gear he moved as if the hard, lean look of his face went all the way down to the soles of his feet. He was, though, nothing if not buoyant. He didn’t explain, and Luna didn’t have to ask: he’d surely seen things go wrong much worse than this.

Stakeout—the term had always conjured images of a couple guys stuck in a car all night, sick of bad food, sick of breathing each other’s stink, and finally sick of each other. This was an upgrade—a shelter not far from the top of the ski jump . . . enclosed, safe, and once they got the kerosene stove going, warm. The deputy commander of the Gendarmerie that Claude had already liaised with had put in a discreet call to arrange it. They would have it to themselves for as long as they wished.

Now all they needed was a view of the valley below.

“Cheer up,” Yahav told them. “Nobody’s dead, it has to clear up sometime, and for now we have this . . .”

From his pack he pulled out a pan and a container of coffee ground to a powder. Within minutes he’d boiled up a thick, muddy brew, Turkish-style, as black as oil with just enough foam to tell the difference. When he poured it into three mugs, no strainer, Claude balked.

“You should know, to refuse a cup is the ultimate in rudeness,” Yahav said, then gave her a wink when Claude took his first sip and grimaced.

Her own reaction? She’d never had coffee any hotter or stronger, and figured by noon, it might leave her spoiled for anything less.

Yahav got on his radio to check with each of his men, who’d taken up positions around the Olympic Village, to watch without being seen. Every now and again, he would squint out the windows as if it merely took a bit of extra concentration for him to pierce the veil of snow and know exactly where each man was down there. A few minutes of that, then there was nothing more for them to say, and the radio went silent.

All Yahav really wanted was to get a visual on what the Village looked like from up here. From above was the only vantage point he hadn’t already familiarized himself with.

“When does he fire that thing? Have you picked up a pattern to it yet?” Yahav asked. “Particular days? Intervals? Anything?”

“Afternoons, we think,” Claude said.

“Why is that?”

“The last time anybody else saw the victims,” Luna said. “Wives, friends, staff wherever they were staying. Before they were reported overdue, they were all last seen either late in the morning or in the early afternoon. None of them seemed to have been a morning person. They all preferred going out later in the day.”

“Any reasons given for that?”

“One of them was a cross-country skier,” Claude said. “His wife told the police he liked it better when the trails thinned out and most people had gone in for the day.”

“And this latest one,” Luna said, “his favorite time of day to be out was around twilight. I talked to the concierge about that. They call it the blue hour, because of the light. Winter, northern latitude, the mountains and snow . . . it can be really gorgeous in a place like this.”

Yahav looked intrigued. “Say this is when Portner is picking them off. When he’s losing light and visibility. That sounds like a targeting system other than visual.”

“Heat signatures, maybe?” Claude said.

Yahav looked at the stove, then out the window. “Could be. We’d have to be putting out a tempting one here, wouldn’t we?”

Claude looked worried now. “Are you saying we should douse the stove?”

“And be freezing our bits off in ten minutes?” Yahav waved it off. “Just another thing to be aware of. So you can be ready to head out the back if your binoculars start icing over.”

Soon, Claude grew restless enough to throw his parka back on and head outside for a look around and a better view of the sky, to see if the weather showed any signs of clearing.

“He’s not fooling me, he’s going to dump that coffee,” Yahav said, and grinned, then began peering at her as if she were an object of curiosity. “Special agent . . . that’s how he introduced you last night. You’re an actual bureau agent too.”

“Right.” No need to share too much. That it had only been official for three days, and getting her out in the field had been so rushed, she didn’t quite feel like one yet.

“I didn’t think your FBI hired women as agents. Not that it isn’t long past due. A ridiculous policy. I thought it wouldn’t die until after Director Hoover does.”

“I’m actually the first in about forty years.”

Yahav peaked his eyebrows. For him, that might have been awe. “I never got the impression Hoover was open to change.”

“Our branch’s director bent his ear long enough to convince him to give it a try. There have been other women who’ve worked with the HPL, but none of them was a bona fide special agent. Director Brady thought it was high time he had one on staff. I was a good fit for that. I grew up with Agent LeGoff, and when I was fifteen I met the same agent who later recruited him.”

Yahav looked as if something made sense now. “I thought it felt like the two of you had a history. Anyway. Well done, Special Agent Bearheart. It’s impressive to see someone be the first to get her foot through a door that’s been shut for forty years.”

Special Agent Bearheart . . . god, the sound of that. And at this moment, a Nazi hunter seemed a safer confidant than Claude did, because Claude would only tell her it was her imagination. Even though Claude had his own misgivings about their boss’s boss.

“I think Hoover’s probably hoping I fail,” she said. “So he can say ‘I told you so’ to anyone who’s tried to get him to modernize. He only let himself be talked into this because the Lovecraft Squad has such a lower public profile. That way, if I fail, I fail out of sight.”

Yahav looked openly sympathetic. “There may have been a time and a place for someone like him. From what I know of Hoover, he was forward-thinking in an era when that mattered a great deal. But those times have passed, and he’s refused to change along with them.”

“I suppose he hasn’t.” Again, discretion. Hoover had changed, but only for the worse. He’d had years to go power-mad.

Yahav swirled his mug and stared at the sludge of coffee grounds. “Let me tell you something that nobody else with my agency might ever admit to on the outside. When we go after Israel’s enemies, there are times we go through doors because of who we believe is on the other side. Terrorist cells, sometimes. On our own soil. In Palestine, Syria, Egypt.”

Then he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.

“But we don’t always know everyone who is going to be on the other side of the door. There’s an unofficial rule we have. There may be ten men in that room, and we know they all want us dead . . . but if we see a woman with them too? Shoot her first. Because to prove herself to men like that, for them to accept her, she’s had to become twice as lethal as any one of them. So we kill her first.”

Yahav gave her as frank a look as anyone ever had, pragmatic and cold and duty-bound, and she realized that only now, for the first time, she was seeing the last face that Portner might see. This was it. Not the one before, the face of the man who’d boiled coffee for them. This face.

“So be her,” Yahav said. “Be that woman.”

The skies began to clear in early afternoon. Soon after Yahav got his overview of the spread and sprawl of the Olympic Village, he returned below, as they too did a couple hours after nightfall, with nothing to show for the day.

They returned the next morning, and the morning after that. Most of the time the skies were with them, if not the endeavor. They trained their binoculars here and there, panning and scanning, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to see—to their eyes, just travelers and athletes. The Israelis had moved in in the guise of a ski team, and during their own watching and waiting, nothing had caught their eye either.

So, up here, the most action was tending the stove.

“I know how we once would’ve tried to keep warm in a place like this.” As soon as it was out, Claude gave her a sheepish look. “Should I not have said that? I shouldn’t have, should I?”

“It’s okay.” Three days up here, Luna was surprised it had taken this long. “You don’t think it’s occurred to me too?”

“Really? I, uh . . . I couldn’t tell.”

He didn’t know, did he—how difficult this was. Most of the time she kept focused on the job, even if it was endless watching. She couldn’t banish it entirely, though. Claude had matured into everything she’d hoped he might be. They’d had a path, once, but the world had closed it off before they could get there. Claude was offered a future that their friends could only have dreamed of in their Junior G-Men days. He’d been torn, and she’d urged him to take it, and he had taken her at her word.

Admit the truth, now: a part of her back then was naïve enough to believe he could only have chosen her. And of all the unlikely outcomes, it eventually turned out to be the same path, and now she’d caught up to him, but for some things there could be no going back.

“It has to stay thoughts and words, though. That’s all.”

“Why?” He looked so stricken. “I never stopped thinking about . . .”

He didn’t finish and she didn’t want him to. Never stopped thinking about me? About everything we planned to be together? I can’t afford to know.

“If we were to let it go anywhere now, Hoover would find out. He would. It’s what he does. You’d come out of it fine. Not me, though. I’d be gone.” She dropped her voice half an octave, turned it gruff. “‘I knew women didn’t belong in the field. Terrible idea. Can’t trust them to stay professional.’”

For a few moments he was the Claude of before, still in Mitford, looking for the bright side. “Hoover’s old, you know. He’ll never retire, but he’s got to die sometime.”

“Don’t we all,” she said.

Late in the afternoon the waiting once again grew tense, as the last of the day’s direct sun disappeared behind the peaks to plunge the sky and the mountains and the valley between into a sapphire twilight so rich it seemed to glow from within.

If they were on the right track, this was the time of greatest risk, when warmth and safety were an illusion. To the proper sensors, they might be a glowing yellow shape waiting to be fired upon. Somewhere below, Dr. Portner might be calibrating his sights on them right this moment.

“Let’s go over it again. Why twilight?” she said. “Why the blue hour? There has to be a reason for it.”

Claude hummed tunelessly, striving to come up with something he hadn’t before. “Fewer targets, farther between? Maybe . . . he wants casualties, but doesn’t want them found right away.”

“Okay. Why would he want that?”

“It’s . . . part of the testing. He wants to see how long they’ll last.”

“Because,” she said, rolling with it, “he’s not trying to kill them. It’s a more refined weapon now, remember. He’s . . . he’s putting them into hibernation.”

Claude looked at her as if something clicked. “Hibernation. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

As he continued to chase that line of thought—that this was the ultimate plan for one or more targets at the NATO summit, that maybe Portner had also developed a way of bringing them out of suspended animation—she looked to the sky, suffused now with a cobalt hue. Entirely natural, yet the effect felt . . . otherworldly.

And was that motion in the air she was seeing?

A flash—another blue within the blue.

“Did you see that?” She directed him to one of the buildings in the Village. One of the taller ones, ten floors or so, and cheerless, something Eastern-bloc about its squared-off severity. She trained her binoculars on its grid of windows and strained to peer through the gloaming.

“No, but . . . third floor from the top, fourth from the left,” Claude said. “That’s an open window.”

He was right. The other windows had a sheen of reflection from the sky. Not that one. “None of what we just kicked around has to be wrong. But what if the timing’s about something simpler? What if it’s just about blending with the natural light?”

Moments later she saw it again, and Claude too this time—an iridescent beam close enough to the shadings of the sky and the last reflected light off the snow that it could hide in plain sight.

She followed its trajectory with relief—up and to the right of them, tilted at an even higher angle. They clearly weren’t the target. But something was. Somebody was. They just couldn’t see what from here, and that wasn’t good enough for Claude. He was on his feet, zipping up his parka and flipping up the hood.

“Call it down to Yahav, 90% certainty,” he said, and didn’t wait for her to confirm before he was out the door.

In the Village below, it was what they’d been waiting for. By late afternoon, the Mossad team was done with surveillance and shifted over to standby, ready to move if they had a target. She relayed the location, then kept watch on the building and the ray projecting from it.

The longer she watched, the more puzzling the display grew. She could see no sense behind what this blue beam was actually doing. It swept like a searchlight, but in a tighter arc. It went through a sequence of offs and ons, not unlike Morse code, until it entered a pulsation phase stroboscopic in its speed.

She couldn’t claim to know how an energy weapon was supposed to behave. Still, unless it was taking out multiple targets—a brand new development if it was—this didn’t feel like a weapon. If she’d observed this without knowing anything more, she would have taken if for some sort of signaling device.

Dear god, what if they were wrong?

She grabbed for the walkie-talkie, but it was too late. The raid had already begun, and she could only watch the hints of it unfolding. The space behind the window had been dark, but was now lit from within by flashes of white light—one at first, then a flurry of them. Shorter, longer, brighter, fainter. A final one, then more lights came on for good, and shone in the windows at either side, as well.

Thirty seconds, in all, it had taken? If that. They’d been efficient.

Yahav, on the radio again: “It’s secure.”

“Tell me there are survivors.”

“One. The one that matters.”

“We’ll be down as soon as we can.”

Stove off, lights too, parka on, pistol clipped at her hip again. Outside, the deep blue of the sky was fading, giving way to the starry blackness beyond and the light of the rising Moon. The cold hit her like a shock, not unwelcome, not unpleasant. Claude was nowhere in sight, and when she called out for him, the only answer was the soft sigh of wind murmuring across the slopes and through the boreal pines.

He’d left tracks, of course, and she began to follow them to the east.

Far downslope, the ski jump lay in partial shadow, curved like the back of some beast undulating in and out of the snow. The sight invoked a flash of home, the narrow valley outside of Mitford that lay between a row of serpentine hills that had always been known as the Devil’s Humps. The Witch House had stood there. Their lives had changed there. They’d learned of things there that she still would rather have never known.

Luna came to a spot in the snow, packed down with overlapping prints, where Claude must have stopped to watch the ray before trudging onward. Soon she came to another, but now his tracks betrayed indecision, as though he’d paused, stamping one direction, then another, unsure which way to go. When she saw how his stride abruptly lengthened, her own pace quickened, as she followed where he had veered uphill, toward a belt of pines, maybe running for shelter.

He’d never made it. The tracks simply . . .

Ended.

She left some indecisive tracks of her own then. Claude still didn’t answer, but he was up here somewhere, had to be, maybe no more than a few dozen yards away. If she could get to him in time, that might be the key—to start warming him before the unnatural cold had time to seep its way down to his bones.

Once more, she cried out for him . . .

And he answered. From somewhere near or far, he answered.

Sound could play tricks up here, echoing from rock and tree bark; maybe that was why he sounded so close, yet so distant. How he’d made it so far uphill, so quickly, she couldn’t begin to guess. He hadn’t even left tracks behind, yet he’d managed to climb so high, in minutes?

It sounded like he was shouting for her to run, but given how his voice echoed, with the rising wind peeling away snatches from the syllables, she couldn’t be sure. All she knew for certain was that Claude was in trouble, and beyond her reach, and he was not yet too cold to scream.

Moving, now . . . he was moving.

At a speed beyond comprehension, Claude was moving.

Drenched with snow, belted with pines, topped with a jagged crown of peaks, the slopes rose in front of her as if to scrape the stars from the sky . . . and somewhere in the night, as if mingling with the lowest clouds, he went sweeping overhead, across the face of the mountain, spirited through the sky. The siren of his scream came at first from her right, then grew louder as it neared, drawing even with her, and faded again as it swung far to her left.

Moments later, when she first saw it, Luna took it for a trick of whirling wind and swirling snow—a form, both solid and ephemeral, more humanoid than not, towering above the pines. But would a trick of wind and snow have lights in it, four of them, large and crimson and globular, where two pairs of eyes would be? This one did. Would its face resemble a mangle of snout and bone, meat and fang? Would it have a spread of antlers as big as leafless trees? She believed her eyes. It possessed the hint of shoulders too, and arms as well. Its movements looked controlled, the locomotion of a being that had learned to stride across the steeps of a mountainside as easily as if it were walking on the wind.

I know this thing . . .

The sight of it stopped her, left her frozen in every way but solid.

Was that why it ignored her? It couldn’t see her unless she was moving?

In my heart, I always have.

It was the sort of monstrous being that once was darkly familiar, spoken about around fires, but rarely mentioned anymore. The old legends died with grandfathers now, and in towns like Mitford, to believe was to be thought a fool.

When Claude bellowed again, she could pinpoint where he was—somewhere within the center mass of this creature that stood between her and the walls of rock and frozen earth, inside the eddies of snow and ice that wreathed it. It burns, she thought Claude was warning her. So cold it burns.

Even now, she was driven by an impulse greater than terror, more fundamental than awe. How else to explain why she began moving again, toward Claude, if not for the fact that she loved him? This specter, this wind-walker, had to drop him sometime. With luck, she could be close by when it happened.

Moving . . . she was moving. Was that why it now appeared to notice her?

She shucked her gloves and drew her sidearm, no thought to it, purely reactive, because to think too much might fling the doors too wide to the madness of what she was seeing. After a moment of hesitation, because Claude was up there somewhere, she went wading forward through the snow, firing at the bloodred glow of its eyes. It had no effect, so far as she could tell, but maybe the overlapping echoes of her shots had made it . . . reconsider.

It emitted a groan like the creaking of a pine trunk twisting in the wind. In a few strides it might be upon her, but then it halted. Nearby, the air shimmered with a ripple of blue and green, like a ribbon of the aurora borealis, only smaller, fainter, localized. The sight seemed to compel the wind-walker to change course, and now it began to ascend, as if striving to keep ahead of the color coming to claim it. Halfway up the mountain it was overtaken, and after another moment, gone, and with its passage came a shower of ice, sharp and stinging cold, driven by the gusts into her face.

She’d always thought of fury in terms of heat and shades of red.

Never again.

From now on she would always think of fury as a force as cold as the empty space between the stars.

In the end, despite her last-minute doubts an hour ago, this lifework of Gerhardt Portner’s still looked like a weapon. It sat before a bank of windows that remained blacked-out until he opened them for another test. Its barrel was a dozen feet long, wrapped in coils of copper. The main body, as big as a bulldozer’s engine block, was fed by a circulatory system of ducts and tubes, some connected to tanks with valves. Like artillery, it was mounted on a platform that was adjusted with cranks and gears. While she’d expected to find it sighted somewhere on the mountainside, instead it was aimed higher still, into the sky.

Troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, beyond. For all she knew, it was aimed at another dimension altogether.

“This isn’t what we thought it would be,” she told Yahav.

She hadn’t explained why Claude wasn’t with her, and they hadn’t yet asked. They knew how to read faces well enough, and divined that it couldn’t be good.

This room where Dr. Portner had labored was the size of a small gym—originally intended as a training facility, she surmised. The five men helping him were younger by many years, Aryan and athletic-looking. She could see them on skis, in bobsleds, firing precision rifles in the biathlon. Maybe they’d come across as cold and standoffish, like competitors protective of their training secrets. Or maybe they’d been friendly, to throw off suspicion. Either way, in their Nordic sweaters and tracksuits, they must have blended.

Now they were all dead. They lay where they fell, and not even death had wiped the surprise from their faces. Yahav’s team stood among their kills as if to safeguard the bodies from rising again, the first soldiers of a Fourth Reich.

And Portner? Not only had he been taken alive, he didn’t appear to have been shot, at least not with standard bullets. A rubber round, maybe. One of the Israelis was carrying a stubby firearm with a widemouthed barrel.

Dr. Portner was seated in a chair turned away from what looked like a communal dining table, where dirty plates mingled with file boxes and notebooks, enough to keep HPL analysts busy for months. His hands were behind his back, and each ankle was lashed to a leg of the chair.

“If he speaks English, he’s chosen not to, just to be a manyak about it.” Yahav motioned one of his team to come forward, a tall fellow with a dense beard and shoulders like medicine balls. “Hillel will translate.”

From his seat, Dr. Portner watched them, back and forth, calm, his eyes giving away nothing more than idle curiosity. He was the same man from the photo, with another twenty years added, and he wore them well. No doubt they were better years than the ones left to the prisoners who’d survived him. His face was more squared off, his hair was lighter, almost certainly bleached, and the scar was exactly the same.

“What’s going to happen to him after tonight?” she asked Yahav.

“We take him back like we did Adolf Eichmann. His crimes are documented. Forty-eight hours from now, his fate will belong to bureaucrats.”

“Will he be accessible later, is what I’m really asking. For more questions, if the need comes up. You hanged Eichmann.”

Yahav gave a little laugh that sounded more like a cough. “I’m a delivery man. I can’t promise you anything. All I can advise you to do is get as much as you can, now, while you can.”

“Right,” she said, then looked Portner in his cold blue eyes. “If you want to put me in my place, this sounds like the only chance for bragging you’ll have. Make the most of it, Herr Doktor.”

Hillel relayed it in German and it coaxed a grin from their prisoner, an expression she’d have found warmer on a skull.

When she asked how long he’d been working with the Olde Fellowes, Portner sagged, as if the question bored him. He didn’t know, he said. Who counts years when you’re doing work you believe in?

Had he developed a method for safely thawing out the victims of his tests? This made him laugh. Why would he care about such a useless thing? They were not for him, anyway. They were never for his research. They were incidental.

The two of them danced around the obvious awhile, as Luna gleaned what she could while Portner seemed unsure of how much she actually knew. Until, at last, she came out with it:

“I know what you’re really doing here.” She pointed out the window. “I saw it, up there. I’m not the first either. Two weeks ago, someone thought she’d seen the Abominable Snowman. That must have been the only thing she could think of, but the difference is, I have a pretty good idea of what I saw. I already know what it’s called.”

As he translated, Hillel began to look increasingly uncertain about what he was in the middle of.

“The Wind-Walker,” she said. “The Wendigo.”

Portner grew testy, spat out some contemptuous retort. She recognized the word untermenschen, and figured it couldn’t have been kind.

“It doesn’t make sense, what he’s saying now,” Hillel told her.

“It may make sense to me. Go ahead.”

“He says he only recognizes the name Ithaqua. And perhaps the God of the Cold White Silence, but that this is really more of a title. All other names are ignorant labels applied by various breeds of subhumans.”

Dr. Portner appeared to understand English well enough to know he was being translated accurately. He craned his neck forward to look her straight on, with pitiless scrutiny—the tan of her skin, the black of her hair, the hazel of her eyes—and the loathing was as plain as the scar on his face.

“Mud people,” he said, his enunciation slow and exaggerated.

He sat back again, smug, seeming to want her to hit him, give him the victory of revealing herself as the baser, impulse-driven creature he must have believed her to be. And she wanted to. To prove herself to men like that, she’s had to become twice as lethal as any one of them . . . and yes, she wanted to be that woman, to be worthy of being shot first.

“You’ve ended up a long way from where you started,” she said instead, staring at the enigma he’d developed. Portner seemed susceptible to flattery, if it wasn’t too obvious. “From a close-range weapon that did the crudest kind of damage, to . . . what would you even call it now?”

That made him stop and think awhile, as if research, labor, and luck had led him to something he had yet to categorize.

“Eine Brücke,” he said in time, as though he had astounded no one more than himself. “Ich würde es eine Brücke nennen.”

A bridge. I would call it a bridge.

And the more the quiet seconds passed, the colder she felt, even inside her parka.

Eine Brücke.

Innsbruck.

“A bridge to where, exactly?”

With a look of disdain, he told her she should’ve known without having to ask. He clammed up for a minute, then relented. Another world, he said. Another world, in another place, in the fold between what the fools believed was all there was to see.

“But you couldn’t keep the bridge open long enough, could you? And now you never will,” she said, maybe the one thing with the power to wound him. He stewed in it—what might have been if he’d had another day, another week, another month.

She leaned down to look him in the face, inches away, matching his disdain with all the contempt of her own she could summon. “Your bridge closed by a bunch of mud people, that’s got to hurt.”

He made a show of seeming less concerned than he should’ve been, and had Hillel tell her that he had friends, with arms long enough to reach into the deepest Jew prison.

“The Olde Fellowes?” she asked, but he was done talking.

And so, again . . .

Eine Brücke. Innsbruck.

As she stepped away from him, the questions came anew: What had truly brought Dr. Gerhardt Portner here, here, to these mountains, this cold, this sky . . . and was there more behind the name bestowed upon this Alpine city than history had recorded? Something for the League to look into, another day.

Whether she would be a part of such an inquiry . . . she couldn’t say she liked her chances at the moment. Come back from your first assignment without your partner? That was all the reason Hoover would need to throw her on the scrap heap as a failed experiment, cast her out in exile to join the ghost of Alaska P. Davidson.

I’m sorry, she thought back through the years, on the verge of a prayer to the dead. I wanted to do you so much prouder than this.

There would be time enough to fret about her career later. To dwell on it now would be selfish, even though there was nothing she could do for Claude tonight. Mounting an effective search would be many hours away.

As Yahav and his team began the cleanup after their raid, Luna figured she could put the hours to use, as well. There would be no sleep tonight, and anything was better than sitting at a window, staring out at the frozen steeps, wondering where Claude lay.

She dug into the records Dr. Portner had accumulated and tried to get an overview of what was here, impose her own order on their system of organization. Not easy when she didn’t read the language, but she could at least discern text from numerical data, and most of it was dated, going back to 1951. Summaries, reports, calculations, charts.

Photos too. No trouble making sense of those. She had seen these damaged people before. Not the same people, but the same suffering, the same terrible wounds, the same appropriation of innocents as the lowest form of test animals.

It was after midnight when she found them, near the bottom of a stack, slipped into one more file folder among many, as if they were just another pair of routine documents. The prints themselves were undated, but the typewritten papers around them were from eight years earlier. Their colors looked washed out to begin with, and had since started to fade.

The first photo showed a man, naked and unwashed, not as emaciated as the test subjects of wartime, but his misery was the equal of any of them. Arms outstretched, he stood manacled to a stone wall. By the look of his face, he was alive, but in his final moments, subject to pain of such a magnitude he was beyond comprehending anything that was happening.

Just as well.

His midsection had been blasted with layers of frost that were themselves in the process of being ruptured, pierced from within by a single, enormous claw, as dark and keratinous as an animal hoof, jutting through his ribs in a flurry of ice crystals.

In the second photo, his head sagged farther down, while the claw, two-feet-long in the first, was already starting to withdraw.

It must have begun here.

The dimensional bridge had first been glimpsed here.

It took the search team, with dogs and helicopter support, most of the morning, but they located Claude by midday. He was higher up than any of the prior victims, on a gentle sloping outcrop near a meandering belt of evergreens. They got her to the site early, before anyone did anything more.

She’d earned some professional courtesy here, and intended to leverage it. The gendarmerie were relieved the situation had been resolved, and cleanly. There were no inconvenient bodies in the Olympic Village, the Israelis were gone, and nobody wanted it to get out what Innsbruck had been used for.

By now there was only a roomful of evidence waiting to be broken down and transported back to the States . . . and Agent Claude LeGoff.

Leave him where he is, Luna had requested. I take full responsibility. If he’s dead, what’s the rush? If he isn’t, you’ve already lost the four ahead of him, you can’t be eager to kill another one.

She got her way, then got them to outfit her with what she needed to settle in and wait in the snow and the cold thin air: a dome tent for mountaineers, a catalytic heater with extra fuel, a sleeping bag and lantern, a few days of rations.

Throughout the rest of that day, and all through the next, she stayed with him. Even though a city sprawled across the valley floor, with castle and cathedral, and they were within sight of cable cars ferrying skiers up the slopes, it still felt as if they were the only people on Earth. Up here, there were no other human voices to hear, just the ancient sounds of the wind through the trees, and the soft thump of snow falling from their branches.

It gave her time to think.

Claude lay untouched and unmoving, part of the landscape now, a form of hibernating life in a chrysalis of snow. Had anyone in Innsbruck thought to leave one of these unfortunate souls in place, to see what might happen? Of course not. This was civilization, still. Bodies were to be recovered. Life was to be saved, and life always meant warmth.

Here, anyway. But there were other worlds, weren’t there? Other realms, the vast unseen between the folds of what was seen, in which life was free to behave very differently.

This frozen sojourn did more than give her time to think. It gave her space to remember . . . even the things she was supposed to be ashamed of, because they had come from a beaten people. Mud people, as some would call them.

But the old legends still could matter, couldn’t they? Tales passed down the centuries by men who’d looked like her grandfather, told and retold around fires, to warn of the perils that could befall unwary travelers in the great woodlands of the north.

Ittakka, or Ithaqua. The Wind-Walker. The Wendigo.

She’d heard them too, hadn’t she, long ago, listening with a child’s ears? Such tales were meant to do more than frighten—she saw that now. They instructed you how to respond when life strayed beyond the boundaries of what seemed possible.

And wasn’t there one about a fur-clad trapper, found by hunters, encased in a chunk of blue ice? He couldn’t move, but his eyes implored them for help. Maybe so, or maybe the tale had grown in the telling. Regardless, the prescription was the same: Leave him. It is his egg now, and he will chip his way out in time, and the people are safely south of him.

Such a lonely, desolate existence on the outside of the egg.

Hell, in most legends, was hot. But for those who knew, it was cold and white.

Daily, she would sit with Claude for as long as she could endure it, then retreat into the tent to warm herself, until she could go back out again. As the sun swung from one end of the valley to the other, and day stacked upon day, her durations under the open sky grew longer, as she grew acclimated to the cold. It occurred to her that time might pass differently inside that icy shroud.

Still, she loved him. Still, she missed what could’ve been, but vowed not to cry, because she remained warm on the inside, and the tears would only freeze on her cheeks.

When he emerged, at last, she missed it, because it happened in the frozen indigo night. She knew only that when she unzipped the tent at dawn of the fourth morning, he was waiting, sitting on the snow surrounded by the tufts and fragments of his shell. Like those before him, his pallor was pale beyond that of the dead, a smooth and chalky white, with a ghostly kiss of lavender-blue. She found something beautiful in it, the unmarred purity of it. The only thing she couldn’t get past was less apparent, but more unnerving. He breathed, but there was no cloud to it, curling in the frozen air.

Yet it was Claude, unmistakably Claude, and if he stared with longing at the tent, it could only have been because that was where she was. To go inside would kill him.

“I missed you,” she said. “I always missed you.”

And to embrace him the way she wanted? That would kill her. The cold radiated from him as from a pillar of stone left to stand through the darkest months of a polar night.

“Where have you been?” she asked, and he knew exactly what she meant.

“Caught between two worlds. This part of me, still here. The rest of me, where he comes from. The God of the Cold White Silence. He would’ve taken all of me there, if there’d been time.”

Claude’s voice, she was dismayed to hear, was the most changed thing about him, a dry and airy buzz that he had to force out bit by bit.

“That’s what infuriates him the most. He gets so little time.”

Claude told her of his dreams, how for what felt like years he had drifted through a wasteland so cold and barren it made the Siberian tundra look as fertile as the Amazon. Borea, he thought it was called, a planet where none of the stars were familiar and the moons were many, and even the mountains were made of ice, like frozen waves sculpted sharp and alien by the howling winds.

Yet, even here there was life, however unwilling.

“The people he steals . . . they’re building a city for him. Out of stone. It’s all they have to work with. But it’s not out of love,” he said. “What else have they got to do?”

The sky was clear, and as the sun rose down the valley, it reflected from the snow in a million glittering points. Claude looked at it with what she realized was fear—if not for today, for the future.

“I don’t want him to find me again,” he said. “I don’t want to go with him.”

“He won’t be coming back here. We stopped that.”

No consolation. “He’ll get through again somewhere, someday. They always do.”

Gradually, because things crawled slowly in the snow, Luna began to grasp the grotesque unfairness of it all, that even as cold as it was now, this was no place for him to linger. One day soon the valley would be green, and Claude was no longer fit to live where flowers might bloom.

North, then. There was only north. There was only the Great White Silence, and the god that always found its way back in time. He would risk much, just to endure. But it would be as vast as it was cold, and maybe he still knew how to hide, like the boy he’d once been, spying on the spies.

“I wish we had it all back.” She pictured him sleeping on that wretched couch in their room at the lodge. More frame than cushion. So many times she’d been a word away from telling him to come to his senses, to come to her. “Just one night.”

“Just one night,” he said, then looked at the tent, as if a part of him yearned to go inside, to face the warmth and be done with it. Five minutes, and he could be beyond any frozen hell.

But he chose differently, life and its less certain paths, as he turned from the tent to the peaks of the Nordkette.

From the outcropping, she watched all morning as he picked his way down the mountainside, to the gentler slopes below, until he was lost to the haze and the winter mists, a vanishing speck in the distance.

Thule. He was bound for Thule.

She waited until he was truly gone before she broke the Silence.