Brad Thor - The Lions Of Lucerne

As twelve o’clock grew near, Scot’s hopes of swarms of tourists to use as camouflage began to diminish as many of them headed off to the restaurants for lunch. A few stragglers were still roaming about, and there were the people who probably got off the 11:53 train to look forward to, but he didn’t hold out much hope for the cover he had counted on.

His nerves began to crackle and adrenaline coursed through his body as he walked down the snowy path toward one of the entrances to the Ice Palace. He figured they would expect him to enter from the main door off the elevator from the train station, and therefore chose a completely different approach. He stood outside, waiting for the right moment to start walking, having timed to the second how long it would take him to reach the halfway point. As soon as he entered the mouth of the Ice Palace, the wind that had been whipping around his face outside immediately dropped off.

He walked ahead slowly, ever aware of the slick floor beneath his boots. One hand gripped the railing as his other hand remained in his right coat pocket, where he’d transferred the Glock. Pretending to admire the sculptures carved out of the sheer ice walls, he moved from niche to niche, as if he were following the stations of the cross in an old cathedral. He was no longer picking up his feet, but rather shuffling them along the ice, getting a feel for the movement.

Up ahead, the corridor turned to the right and obstructed his view. He kept up his pace-shuffle to a sculpture, stand for a moment to appreciate it, and then shuffle to the next. He listened intently for any other sounds coming from within the cavern of ice, but heard nothing.

A wisp of a voice, from behind the iron door he had clamped down on his mind, asked him how he would know whom he was looking for and what he would do when he found them. Scot pushed the thought away and focused his energy. He would know whom he was looking for. He would be able to tell by looking in their eyes. People accustomed to killing had a very distinct look and bearing about them, just like the men at Union Station who had tried to kill him on Wednesday.

He rounded the bend in the corridor, a gust of circulating air biting at his earlobes. Before he had come in, he had removed his hat, thinking his odd appearance might fool the people he was after and thereby give him a slight advantage.

The bend behind him, Harvath now was looking at a sculpture of a large bear with a salmon captured in its jaws. Another gust of ventilation wind blew through the corridor, which glowed an eerie blue from the ice. As Harvath prepared to move along to the next sculpture, he felt a hard jab in his back and heard a woman’s voice. She spoke in English, but with a Swiss accent. “We are quite fond of bears in Switzerland. It’s a lovely sculpture, isn’t it, Mr. Sampras? Or should I say, Mr. Harvath?”

“Sonofabitch,” Scot mumbled to himself. He was taken completely by surprise. He hadn’t heard her sneak up. She must have been behind one of the sculptures, waiting for him to pass before coming after him. His body tensed, ready to strike.

She could feel it. “Relax, Mr. Harvath. This is a gun I have at your back.”

“You don’t say. And I thought you were just happy to see me.”

“I am not amused, Mr. Harvath. Please take your hand out of your pocket. Slowly.”

Scot did as he was told. “How do you know my name?”

“That is not important. What is important is your interest in-”

At once, the woman’s sentence was interrupted by flying pieces of ice. At first it seemed as if the statue were falling apart, but as the trajectory of the chips began changing, Scot knew all too well what was going on. Someone was shooting at them with a silenced weapon from the bend in the hallway, and they were closing fast.

The woman behind Harvath was equally distracted by the flying ice chips, quickly coming to the same conclusion he had. Without wasting a moment more, Scot drove his right elbow down hard into her stomach. He heard her gun clatter onto the ice. With a moan, she fell backward.

Scot spun, intending to pick up her weapon, but it slid in the direction of the approaching shooter and he would have had to climb over the woman to get to it. His eyes locked on her face for a brief moment. She is amazingly beautiful, was the last thing that registered in his mind before he took off running as fast as he could down the corridor.

Because he couldn’t get much traction on the ice, he wasn’t able to cover much ground. He moved into an alcove to catch his breath and drew the replica Glock from his pocket. He heard more muffled spits from a suppressed weapon coupled with the tinkling of breaking ice as it shattered and hit the floor. When the noise stopped, it was replaced by a scratching noise that sounded like mice behind drywall. Now he knew how the shooter was able to move so fast-crampons.

The scratching sounds stopped only feet away from where Harvath now hid. There were two shooters, and they were listening for him. No one moved, and Harvath dared not even breathe.

Then one of the shooters broke the silence. “Links?” he asked, German for left. His companion didn’t answer.

The man spoke again. “Links, rechts, was?” (Left, right, what?)

Obviously angry at his partner for talking, the other man heatedly admonished him with something that sounded like, “Chew Tea.” It didn’t sound like German, but Scot thought he recognized the word from somewhere.

The first man now responded with what sounded like, “Yah beh say!”

And the second man came right back with, “Chutee!”

Harvath now knew what he was hearing. During his travels on the ski team he had made it his goal to learn specific phrases in as many different languages as possible. His favorites had been the ones for shut up and fuck you. It was juvenile, he knew, but people always said, in any language you learn the bad words first. Besides, even if you knew nothing else, you could always get a guy laughing if you could say “shut up” and “fuck you” in his own language.

The “shut up” and “fuck you” he was hearing now, chutee and yah beh say, were Serbian. Why were these men speaking German first and then swearing at each other in Serbian?

Scot heard the resumed scrape of crampons along the ice. They were less than three feet from where he now stood. His hands tightened around the toy Glock. If one of them moved close enough, he could surprise him and press the pistol to his head while he ordered the other to drop his weapon. It might work. It would have to work. His ears strained, trying to judge how close they were now.

Abruptly they stopped again. They had heard something. Was it him? He hadn’t even breathed and was beginning to get light-headed from holding his breath. The men began backing away. It wasn’t him. They had heard something else, but what? Maybe someone else was in the hallway.

The men picked up speed, tracing back along the route they had come. Scot didn’t waste any more time wondering why. He skidded out of the alcove and ran as fast as his shuffling feet would carry him in the other direction.

Slipping, he cracked his knee against one of the steps carved out of the ice on his way to the elevator. He regained his footing and allowed himself to slide down the rest of the passageway. He pressed the call button and after two seconds decided it might not be such a good idea to hang around and wait. He turned to his left and ran down the hallway toward the restaurants and the exhibition hall, thankful to be off the ice.

When he reached the other end of the corridor, another set of elevator doors was just closing and he shoved his arm inside to stop them. They opened back up, and aside from a few startled tourists, it looked safe. Harvath rode down one level and exited. He sneaked into the Kino Audiovisual show and took a seat off to the side, where it would be difficult to spot him. He glanced at his watch. The next train out wasn’t for forty minutes.