Rudy pushed back his messy cowlick. He hurried to the office window that looked out on the quad and inched aside the white curtain. His body stayed concealed behind the frame. “How many people saw you arrive?”
“Two students playing soccer. That’s all.”
“Two is more than enough,” Rudy said. “Did you tell them you were looking for me?”
“No, I made up a name.”
“Well, that’s smart, but it may not help either of us. Memories are long around this place. You should leave. Get away from the school, and get away from Engelberg altogether. They’ll be coming for you.”
“Who?”
Darkness spread like a shadow across the man’s features. “There are names we don’t say out loud around here. People are always listening.”
“Rudy, I know about Le Renouveau. Do they still exist? Are they still recruiting here?”
“They’re recruiting everywhere,” the man replied.
Bourne joined him at the window and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I need your help. I’m sorry if my being here puts you at risk, but I need information.”
Rudy peeled his gaze away from the window. He looked Jason up and down like a ghost and then wrapped his arms around him in a tight embrace. “Jesus, yes, of course. I’m sorry. It’s good to see you, David. I’ve missed you. Ten years ago, I was sure I’d never see either of you again.”
“Either of us?”
“You and Monika. How is she?”
Jason felt disoriented, hearing Monika’s name on someone else’s lips, hearing this man remember a woman whom Jason barely remembered at all. “Monika’s one of the reasons I came to see you.”
“All right, yes, talk to me. But I’m serious, you shouldn’t be here, David. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed. If you’re seen, people will recognize you. And don’t forget, the police would like to catch up with you, too. No one ever found the bodies in the chalet, but your name came up as a suspect in those who went missing—given that you yourself vanished soon after. As did your fiancée.”
Bourne tried to stifle his reaction to the word fiancée. It reminded him of everything he’d lost, and he felt another wave of anger at Nash for keeping this secret from him all these years. “Rudy, tell me what you remember from back then. I need to know exactly what happened.”
His friend’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand. Why do you want to know that? You were there.”
Bourne explained.
He gave him the shortened version of the story, and Rudy was so stunned that he made him repeat it when he was done. After that, his friend went to his desk and found a bottle of Jägermeister and poured them two shots. They sat down next to each other on the old sofa. Jason had a brief vision of being in this office in the old days, and he remembered Rudy keeping a photo of the two of them in ski gear framed above this same sofa. The photo wasn’t there anymore. The only personal item in the office seemed to be the picture of his wife on the end table.
“No memory,” Rudy murmured. “Unbelievable. You’re saying you don’t know me?”
“I don’t. I’m sorry.”
His friend sipped his drink and shook his head. “Well, I’ve forgotten some of those days myself, but that was all the beer we drank. We had some good long nights, David. The twenty years between us never mattered. And Monika? My God, you were supposed to marry her. I was supposed to be your best man. All these years later, I assumed the two of you were living happily somewhere under different names.”
“What can you tell me about Monika?”
Rudy shrugged. “She was beautiful, of course, although it was the kind of beauty that seemed to keep people at arm’s length. She was smart, well-read, which you’d expect from an English professor. She came to the college a few months after you did, and the two of you hit it off immediately. I was glad. You always struck me as a lonely soul, David. She seemed to be good for you.”
“Do you remember where she came from?”
“I don’t. I believe she was German, but that’s all I recall. Monika didn’t talk much about her past. You even mentioned yourself a couple of times that she seemed to be closed off. Like she had secrets.”
Secrets. Bourne wondered what that meant.
“That last night, Rudy,” he went on. “Tell me about the night at the chalet.”
The man shook his head. “That’s a night I wish I could forget.”
“I obviously told you something.”
Rudy exhaled loudly and settled back into the cushions of the sofa. He glanced at the photo on the end table with a grimace. “You did indeed. You told me everything. You showed up at my house after midnight. Monika was with you, but she was shell-shocked. She couldn’t even speak. My wife—Lisette—she put her to bed in one of our guest rooms. That was when you told me the truth about yourself. That you were some kind of spy for the Americans. That you’d been trying to break into an extremist group that was operating on campus.”
“Did you know about it?”
Rudy rubbed a hand across his beard and closed his eyes. “Ja, we all knew. Nobody said anything. We knew there would be…consequences…if we spoke up. Nothing has changed since then. There’s still a conspiracy of silence.”
“What about the chalet?” Jason asked. “What did I tell you?”
“You said you’d killed four men. Three students and a teacher. I was horrified, needless to say. But you told me the whole story—how they’d taken Monika, how they wanted you to murder her to prove your loyalty. You fought back and were able to get away. But then you said you had to escape. Leave the country altogether and start over somewhere else. Both of you.”
“Did I tell you how I planned to do that?”
“You said you knew people who could take care of the scene. But you didn’t trust them to help Monika. You wanted to do that yourself.”
“I would have needed papers. A new ID.”
Rudy nodded. “You asked if I knew anybody who could do the work fast. Someone you could trust to stay quiet.”
“Did you know anyone?”
“I made some calls. That’s the thing about working security. You get to know a fair number of cops and criminals. I was able to locate a twentysomething French communist who worked in a bistro on Schweizerhausstrasse. Apparently, when he wasn’t dishing up schnitzel to the tourists, he was part of an underground network for refugees around Europe. That was the beginning of angry times here, you know. An anti-immigrant referendum had just passed in Switzerland.”
“Is he still around?” Jason asked. “What’s his name?”
“Yanis Lorchaud. Yes, he’s still in town. He owns the restaurant now. All the communists become capitalists as soon as they start making money. But I’m not sure if he’s still in the immigrant business.”
“Did I tell you anything about Monika’s new identity? Or about where I was taking her?”
“No, my friend, and I didn’t ask,” Rudy replied. “I didn’t want to know the details. People knew we were friends. If anyone came knocking at my door, I didn’t want to be able to give you away.”
Something in his voice gave Bourne a chill.
“Rudy, did someone come knocking?”
His friend glanced at the photo on the end table. He closed his eyes tightly. “Yes, they did, David. Yes, they did. Two strangers claiming to be Interpol came to my office and asked questions about you and the missing men from the school. I told them I knew nothing. I hadn’t seen you. But I made a mistake.”
“What?”
“I let the name of Le Renouveau cross my lips. I suggested things were happening here that they should investigate.”
Jason knew what was coming next.
“Two hours later, I got a call,” Rudy went on. “Lisette was in the hospital. They’d beaten her and broken both of her legs. She never walked again.”
Manfred waited until Josef had gone to the showers, leaving him alone in their college apartment. Then he went to the large digital clock hung over his desk and removed it from the wall. On the back side, he removed the plastic panel for the battery compartment and pulled out the three AA batteries inside. With his fingernail, he pried open a plastic base at the bottom of the compartment.
Inside was a small pay-as-you-go mobile phone.
He powered it up and waited for the phone to acquire a signal. When it did, he tapped in a number from memory and activated a timer to keep watch on the length of the conversation. The phone was intended for emergency use only, and even then, no call was supposed to exceed sixty seconds.
An American voice answered on the first ring. “Identify yourself.”
“Wolfgabel. Location Gamma-Bravo-Alpha.”
The man on the other end of the line didn’t need to consult a codebook to know that the caller was Manfred Seitz of Stiftsschule Obwalden in Engelberg, Switzerland. Just as Manfred knew that the American voice on the call belonged to a man named Justin Ely, who was head of intelligence for Le Renouveau.
Justin was the man who’d recruited him two years earlier.
“Proceed.”
“I received the communiqué about the man you are looking for,” Manfred said.
“And?”
“He is here. Just as you anticipated.”
There was a pause of several seconds on the phone.
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“Quite sure.”
“How long ago did you see him?”
“Fifteen minutes. He was inquiring about our head of security. He’s with him now.”
“Excellent,” Ely replied. “That’s good work. I’ll check in with our other resources in town and activate our plan. We’ll need to move rapidly. I’m heading to the airport now. I’ll be on-site in three hours.”