Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

And so I did the only thing I could: with a great, open-throated bellow I sprang forward, toward the killer. I could just make out his facial expression an instant before I pummeled him to the ground: a look of dull incuriosity, or was it disbelief? In that split-second interval he tried to take aim, but even before he could raise his pistol, we crashed to the ground, his back thudding against the steel of the tracks and the sharp gray ballast stones, and I heard his gun clatter somewhere out of his hand.

He reared up with immense strength, but I had the advantage both of surprise and of positioning — I had his arms and legs pinioned — and I was able to force him backward, one hand slamming into his throat.

He grunted, reared up again, and then spoke for the first time, a few words in a heavy — German? — accent.

“No — use,” he moaned, but I was not interested in what he had to say, I cared only about what was going through his goddamned mind , but I could hardly draw back and concentrate, there wasn’t time for that, and so I throttled and slammed against his torso.

Back toward the train platform, a glint of light was visible thirty or forty meters or so away.

And I heard a few snatches of thought-language, phrases that seemed to come at me with a bizarre urgency, loud and yet not quite distinct. You can kill me , he thought in German, you can kill me, but there is another. Another will take my place. Another —

— and for just a second, stunned, I lost my grip on his throat. He reared up again, and this time he was able to break my hold, and I fell over backward, my shoes sliding in the gravel as if in a puddle of grease. My right hand flew out as I tried to break my fall, but there was nothing to grab on to except the air, and then—

750 volts DC of electricity

— my fingertips brushed ever so close to the cold, hard steel of the third rail, but I managed to yank them away just in time, in time to see him flying through the air toward me.

I reached around for my weapon, but it was gone.

With a sudden lurch I propelled myself upward, cracking into him, sending him flying over my shoulder toward the electrified third rail as the approaching train was upon us, thundering, unbelievably loud, and I saw his legs shudder from the electricity just a split second before the train, its emergency horn bellowing, bore down on him and, oh Jesus Christ, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, the legs were still shuddering, but they ended at the hips, the lower half of his body shivered, a bleeding stump severed entirely at the waist, a quivering chunk of human flesh.

Up ahead came the thunder of another approaching train. Serenely, in a glacial calm, I climbed up to the footpath and the safety of the nearest recess. The train came, and I flattened myself against the wall of the niche. When it had passed, I made my way out of the tunnel without looking back.

The village of Mont-Tremblant was a tiny cluster of buildings — a couple of French country restaurants, a Bonichoix supermarket, and a hotel fronted by a green awning, oddly out of place, looking like a scale model of one of the grand hotels in Monte Carlo. Looming all around were Quebec’s Laurentian mountains, green and lush.

Molly and I had flown separately to Montreal’s two international airports from Paris on different commercial airlines, she into Mirabel via Frankfurt and Brussels; I into Dorval via Luxembourg and Copenhagen.

I had employed several standard tradecraft techniques to ensure that neither one of us could easily be followed. We’d each used the Canadian passports that my French contact in Pigalle had forged for us, which meant that both sets of American passports — in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Alan Crowell, and Mr. and Mrs. John Brewer — were still virgin; they could be used at some time in the future if an emergency arose. We had departed from different airports, Molly from Charles de Gaulle, I from Orly. Most important, we had flown first-class and on European carriers — Aer Lingus, Lufthansa, Sabena, and Air France. The European airlines still treat first-class passengers as important personages, unlike the American ones, which give their first-class fliers a bigger seat and a free drink and that’s it. As an important personage, your seat will be held until the very last moment; in fact, they usually page any first-class passenger who’s checked in but not yet boarded. For every leg of our journey we boarded at the last possible second, which meant that our forged passports were given only the most cursory of glances as we were ushered aboard.

Although we had taken circuitous routes, miraculously we were able to land within two and a half hours of each other.

I’d rented a car from Avis, picked Molly up, and began our 130-kilometer journey up 15 North. The highway could have been anywhere in the world, the industrial and then suburban outskirts of Milan or Rome or Paris or, for that matter, Boston. But by the time 15 became 117 — the Autoroute des Laurentides — the broad, well-paved road cut a handsome swath through the magisterial Laurentian mountains, through Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and then Saint-Jovite.

And we sat there, over our uneaten plates of escargots Florentine and pan-fried trout, like a couple of dazed prizefighters, barely talking. We hadn’t talked on the way either.

Partly it was because we were both so exhausted, and jet-lagged on top of it. But partly we were silent, I think, because we had been through so much in the last days, together and separately, that there was far too much to talk about.

We’d gone through the looking glass: everything was getting curiouser and curiouser. Molly’s father was a victim, then a villain, and... now what? Toby had been a victim, then a savior, then a villain, and... now what?

And Alex Truslow, my friend and confidant, the crusading new director of the CIA — was in fact the leader of the faction that for years had profited illegally off the Agency.

As assassin code-named Max had tried to kill me in Boston and in Zurich and in Paris.

Who was he, really?

The answer had come in the last, amazing few moments of my telepathic ability, as the assassin and I struggled on the tracks of the Paris Métro. With one last burst of concentration I had tuned in; I had read his thoughts.

Who are you? I had demanded.

His real name was Johannes Hesse. “Max” was only his code name.

Who hired you?

Alex Truslow.

Why?

A hit.

Who was the target?

His employers didn’t know. All they knew was that the victim-to-be was the surprise witness before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Tomorrow.

Who was it? Who could it be?

Twenty-four hours or so remained.

Who was it?

So why were we here, in this isolated and remote place in Quebec? What had we expected to find? A hollow tree containing documents? A jack-o’-lantern with microfilm inside?

I had my theories now, theories that would explain everything, but the final piece of the puzzle still remained. And I was convinced that we were about to find it buried in an abandoned stone lodge on the shores of Lac Tremblant.

The registry of deeds for the village of Mont-Tremblant was located in the nearby larger town of St.-Jerome. But it turned out to be of little assistance. The stolid Frenchman who kept the records and issued licenses and did sundry other bureaucratic tasks, a man named Pierre La Fontaine, curtly informed us that all of Mont-Tremblant’s records had been entirely destroyed in a fire in the early 1970s. All that remained were deeds registered since then, and he was unable to turn up any record of the sale or purchase of a house on the lake involving the names Sinclair or Hale. Molly and I spent a good three hours combing through the records with him, to no avail.