Chapter Fourteen

Thank God for the protein bars, Jake tells himself, as he gnaws happily on his second one: dark chocolate, coconut and almond. Taking a short break after about two hours of thigh-crushing climbing has brought them to a natural spring where they fill their water bottles. Sitting now on a rock, enjoying the pure joy of nothingness. No exertion. No pushing on.

“We should get moving,” Vosenko says. “Huber.” He pronounces the name like a death sentence.

“Shit, Yuri, we don’t even know if the bastard is after us. Maybe the army boys caught him.”

“He’s after us,” Vosenko says evenly. He stands now, humps his pack back on.

Jake picks up the wrappers of the protein bars, gets his own pack on, wonders again about Vosenko’s new plan as they push on uphill.

“I know a spot,” Vosenko announced as they began their trek. “Head for one of the alpine huts in the Hochschwab Alps northeast of Kragossen. Keep one step ahead of Huber until we can set our own little trap. We follow trails that will lead to the town of Mariazell, but we close the trap before that. And he’s going to follow us, trust me. That was like a pilgrimage route for Reni and me. Our regular trek. Her son has to know that. Has to figure that’s where we’re headed.”

Not much to go on, Jake figures, but better than what I can come up with. Which is to use their cells to call in help.

Except that ‘help’ is already on the scene and they may not know the good guys from the bad guys.

And except, as Vosenko pointed out to him minutes ago, cell in hand to demonstrate—there is no signal up here.

Like Vosenko said, on our own.

Another two hours of stiff uphill climbing, and Jake can begin to feel the burn in his lungs and thighs. Useless information that he has stored since childhood comes in handy. Naismith’s rule: an hour for every three miles forward plus an hour for every 2000 feet of ascent. Been at it for four hours now, but Jake is damned if he can figure out how to calculate. Not so handy after all. Exertion is getting to his head.

And it’s getting cold now as the sun lowers in the west.

And his damn hiking boots have not been broken in. His right heel is working on a blister.

But an image of Huber and his sniper rifle makes him shut the fuck up about it and keep moving. They stop again now for a quick snack. But when Jake picks up the wrapper he’s dropped, Vosenko shakes his head.

“No. Leave it this time. Cookie crumbs.”

They pass by a trail with a wooden sign in the shape of a hand with the forefinger pointing the way, the word ‘Sonnscheinhütte’ carved in the wood. Jake thinks for a moment that this might be their home for the night. Slows down.

“No,” Vosenko says. “Further up the peak. Safer.”

Darkness is setting in as they finally come upon another large Alpine hut, the Almhütte, closed for the season. But with the temperature dropping quickly, they are not overly concerned with a little breaking-and-entering. A window at the rear of the hut obliges with a tap from the butt of Jake’s Glock. He reaches in, unlatches it, and the window opens outward. They throw their packs in first and then scramble inside, landing in a dormitory style room with four sets of bunk beds, mattresses rolled up at the foot of each. They go into the main room. Plank floor, massive stone fireplace in one corner, and long communal pine table with rows of benches on each side. Black circular burn marks on the table from past dinners, piping-hot cast iron pans set directly on the wood.

Jake can see his breath, but no way they will light a fire and make it too easy for Huber to track them and make him suspicious. They put their packs in a dormitory room in the front so they are able to hear the approach of anyone. Unroll a couple mattresses and choose bunks like they’re at summer camp. Jake is feeling an aching cavern in his stomach where food should be, but no steaks for dinner.

Back to the main room for the night’s feast. “What will you do when we have this all sorted?” Vosenko suddenly asks as they sit at the table to enjoy their meal of protein bars. “Going back to that college of yours?”

“Aren’t you the optimistic one,” Jake responds.

A shake of the head from Vosenko. “Strength in numbers. Simple calculation. We outnumber that dog two to one. Stay positive.”

Brings a smile to Jake’s lips. A pep talk from Vosenko.

“Well?” Vosenko says.

“I don’t know. There’s somebody. Back in Vienna. Friend of Reni’s.”

“The babysitter, you mean?”

“How the hell do you know about her?”

“Reni, of course.”

“Jesus.”

“She was a shit agent,” Vosenko says. “I loved her, you know? Really loved her. But that woman should never have been recruited. We would not have done so.”

“Come on, Yuri. The KGB invented the honey trap.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Not as any kind of agent. She enjoyed talking too much.”

They munch in silence for a moment.

Vosenko gives him a hard look. “We were going to use it against you, the infidelity. Kompromat. Try and turn you.”

Jake puts his protein bar down, returns the look. Stomach suddenly sour, pulsing at his temples. “So, Reni told you everything about Tania?”

A nod from Vosenko.

“Why didn’t you use it?”

“Well, then Reni was killed, and Vienna was a little crazy about spies. You got pulled out. No need.”

Demoted, career on a shit path. Stationed in Belfast for a time and then Langley. Anne and Elin back in the States, in Oregon. Everything in fucking tatters. Stomach does a flip-flop at the memory.

They sit in silence, listen to the wind picking up outside.

“Early night,” Vosenko says. “Start at dawn.”

They take turns throughout the night on guard duty, listening for anyone approaching. Jake goes on duty first, and Vosenko quickly is snoring like a beached whale. But what they spoke about at the table gives Jake no peace. In the deep darkness, it all comes back to him, the end of it.

He and Elin were already on the road to divorce—their life paths diverging. Elin wanting the big city lights of an executive career, not having to worry about where her spook husband was posted. Divorce on the table, pained discussions.

And then Elin returning unexpectedly early one morning from one of her trips for AmEx. Tania still in the bathroom, getting ready to leave before Anne awoke. Hot water heater humming, shower splashing. Her overnight bag on the unmade day bed.

And the look in Elin’s eyes as she took it all in. The sadness and the hurt of betrayal he could never get out of his brain. As if he planned it to hurt her. Decades later and it still brings tears.

Yeah, they were no longer working as a couple. Yeah, there was plenty of disfunction in the bedroom. But he took the coward’s way out. It wasn’t on Elin. It wasn’t on Tania. It was on me.

And then they were gone, Elin and his baby daughter. Back to her parents’ house in Maryland first, and then across country to Oregon where she landed a corporate job. Where Anne grew up. Where he tried to become a dad again later, after Belfast, after Langley. But it was too late. Always a job of catch-up, feeling the deep guilt that he’d abandoned Anne. The guilt that kept him from even calling Tania. And that was the shits. Because that was real. Tania. That was the kind of love he’d been missing. That Elin had surely been missing, too. Both keeping up the act of happy parents. And so, he’d lost his family and lost Tania because he was a fucking coward.

He shakes his head, rubs a hand over his eyes. Tries to purge the evil memory.

And then he hears it—a scuffing sound from outside. His stomach jerks, Glock out immediately, on his feet, edging toward the window. More scuffing. His throat tightens, hand grips the pistol like he’s squeezing a lemon.

Wake Vosenko? He’s making such a racket with snoring, the noise has got to carry outside. He lets it go for another minute, hoping it was nothing. Then it comes again, the scuffing sound, closer now.

Gun up, he slides silently next to the window. Pulls out his cell with left hand, clicks the flashlight, cell against his stomach to shade the light. Another scuff, even closer now, and he suddenly shines the light outside, Glock on speed dial, ready to fire.

Caught in the sudden light, a big-horned chamois bounds off into the darkness.

The light awakens Vosenko. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Jake says, heart still pounding. “Go back to sleep. I got this.”

He awakes in a cold sweat, the bloody vision of the bellhop at the Intercontinental playing a loop in his mind.

Huber covers his head in the mummy bag—part of his mountain cache. The bloody vision persists, even as he opens his eyes. Then slowly it dissolves into the darkness like smoke dispersing.

Fully awake now, he reconsiders his position. Takes his mind off the elevator.

Earlier, he broke into the Sonnscheinhütte for the night. He’s in no hurry. Knows his way around the mountains. At home. After all, his commando training included a ten-day survival run in the Alps near Salzburg. Thirty kilometers a day.

His sniper rifle is broken down now and stored in his large backpack. He is content to bide his time. Added spring water to the dehydrated food packets from the cache, ate it cold for his dinner. Sustenance.

Jacobs and Vosenko have a head start on him, but Huber has a good idea where they are headed. He knows the KGB pig hiked with his mother many times in these mountains—she would bring back little keepsakes from such outings. Tiny metal medallions that hikers would affix to their walking sticks.

He has a collection of four of those, all from the same location. A place his mother held sacred, as if she were a practicing Catholic. Mariazell, on the far side of the Hochschwab peak. That is clearly the direction they are heading. So, a head start on him this first day, but tomorrow…

As the wind kicks up outside, he thinks of how close he is now to completing his cycle of revenge. The one called Sanderson, the first. He will never forget that. Others might have stopped after that one, but not Daniel Huber. No, he wanted them all, each and every one responsible for his mother’s death. Sanderson may have pulled the trigger, but the others were part of it. All guilty.

It took all of his skills to get Sanderson to admit to being the one who killed his mother. All of his persuasion. The thought of it warms him, and he curls into a fetal ball in the mummy bag.

One regret. His arts of persuasion were too strong with Sanderson. He demanded to know why he’d shot his mother. But by that time, the man was squealing in agony, even the promise of a quick death could not calm him. Blabbering, shitting his pants. It was too much and Huber finally slit his throat, not forgetting to get his t-shirt in the mirror in the process—his calling card.

And the calling card worked; it has brought Jacobs and Vosenko to his hunting grounds.

But the regret: He will never know for sure now who ordered his mother’s death.

What he does know is who has informed him of this terrible injustice, who came up with the idea of Reckoning.

It started with an email six months ago from a complete stranger who claimed to be his father. Signed himself only as “Carlo.”

He made no reply to that initial email, thought it the work of a crank, someone after money. You hear about such scams.

Then another and another, each with details about his mother that only someone who had been close to her would know. Her birthplace, her friends at work, that she loved chocolate ice-cream above all else. Until he finally began to trust Carlo, think of this anonymous emailer as Carlo. And he wanted to think Carlo was his father. The father he had grown up without.

For, with the death of his mother, a series of foster homes in Wiener Neustadt, Linz, Tulln, Hollabrunn. He can remember each of these, remember the pitying looks of the women who told him to call them Mutti; of their men who looked at him with obvious disgust, collecting the checks for his care from the municipal authorities. And remember each incident that sent him packing to the next foster home—a broken teapot, a fight with one of the biological children in the family, a slashed tire on the family car after the “father” had slapped him to the ground for spilling his milk.

So, when Carlo explained how his mother had died, when he talked about the men responsible for her death, watching her bleed out on the cold stone steps of a cathedral, Daniel Huber was ready to believe. He was ready to seek vengeance. Ready, because Carlo, a collection of bytes on his phone, was more real than any of those around him. Carlo, his father.

And Carlo wired money for him to travel to the United States. To hunt down the first two on the list. To make the one called Sanderson finally admit that it was his finger on the trigger. And so close, so close to telling who had given the order.

And then death.

The one named Driscoll was easier—for the victim. Held down in his fancy pool with the long reach of the pool sweep.

He closes his eyes, and once again the freak vision of the bellhop swims in his head, the terror in the eyes, the explosion of intestines once he’d slashed the stomach wall.

He digs deeper into the mummy bag, closing out the darkness, shutting out the memory.

Vosenko watches Jake twitch in his sleep, hears the small hum of sigh as if he is responding to a dream. So trusting, he thinks. So helpless.

Vosenko is unaccustomed to trusting other humans. That was trained out of him in the KGB, left behind with childhood dreams like being an Olympic swimmer.

And, he thinks, I must have appeared equally helpless to Jacobs when I was sleeping and he was keeping watch.

It has been many years since he has let his guard down enough to sleep in front of another like this in private. Reni was the last. Since then, his nights have been solo affairs.

He wonders if Jacobs had such thoughts watching him asleep.

They have formed a bond, it is true. He has, in the short amount of time spent together, grown close to the American. Trusts him. Odd, the spin of time. Strange, the careening of lives.

Vosenko thinks again of what he said tonight. It is true: Reni was a shit agent. And it is also true: He loved her. Loves her still in memory—the delicate hollow of her throat; her small, perfect breasts; how she could make her ears wiggle.

But he did not know her at all. Not really. Not that she had a child, a child that with this spin of time wants to kill him. And not why she was killed or who killed her. So many nights trying to come to terms with that. Was it Jacobs? Is that why the urgency to stop Daniel Huber? Because of his guilt?

But he seriously doubts now it was Jacobs, his new comrade.

The low, short “hoo” of an owl outside brings him back to the here and now; brings him back to the march tomorrow. For march it must be, still headed east, but at speed. He takes a map out of his pack as well as a mechanical pencil and leaves the slumbering Jacobs in the dormitory room, moves to the main room to sit at the long pine table, spreads out the map to double-check their route. They can make no mistakes taking the wrong trail. Thorough. No pissing around. The thought of Huber with his sniper’s rifle makes such caution a necessity.

Huber’s sniper rifle. Odd, Vosenko thinks. He is not afraid of death. Does not fear it. It is waiting for him at any rate. It is Jacobs he thinks of. Jacobs with his rediscovered love in Vienna, with his daughter in the States. For himself, there would be no mourners. No one to regret the passing of Yuri Vosenko, former KGB colonel.

It’s an evil thought, one experienced in his depths with a pain that sets him shaking, prelude to a seizure. He tries to will himself to calm, manages to scoop a pill out of the container he keeps in his shirt pocket, swallows it without water, and breathes deeply, deeply. Closes his eyes, focuses on the Baltic Sea where he swam as a youth, where his family plied their trade in amber. Keep it away, he asks a nameless power. Keep it at bay. Give me just a few more days.