Author: James R. Hannibal
Category: Thriller
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“Eddie.” Talia held out a hand. “You’re not thinking this through. We can’t hire high-class thieves.”
To her surprise, Tyler backed her up. “Thieves at this level won’t surface for a job unless the employer has name recognition and offers a serious cash deposit. Talia’s right. We can’t steal Lukon’s team.”
“We can’t.” Eddie moved the lobster roll back and forth between himself and Talia. “But you can.” He crossed the floor and stood behind the couch, painting the air around Tyler with his fidget spinner. “You’ve already got this dark, mysterious aura. Put it to good use.”
“You want me to be Lukon?” Tyler laughed.
Talia did not see the humor. “No way, Eddie. Brennan will never go for it.”
“Yes. He will.”
The argument had come from Tyler, voice distant.
“Tyler, be serious.”
“I am serious.” The cocky, scoundrel persona had dropped away. “Brennan is always telling me to put my money where my mouth is. Now’s my chance.” The gears turned behind his eyes for a few heartbeats, and then the scoundrel was back, smiling. “I like it. But if we’re going to sell this—if I’m going to play Lukon the criminal mastermind—I need a backdrop worthy of his legend.” Tyler chuckled to himself. “And I know just the place.” He snapped his fingers and held out an open palm toward Talia. “Tablet, please.”
The tablet stayed exactly where it was, lying on the coffee table. Talia had no intention of jumping every time Tyler snapped his fingers.
Eddie, however, seemed perfectly happy to do so. He stuffed the remains of the lobster roll in his cheeks like a squirrel, jogged around the couch, unlocked the tablet, and handed it over.
Tyler played with the screen for a few seconds, then turned the tablet around, showing them a timber chateau resting on a valley hillside. The lake beyond its raw stone balconies was all aflame with the oranges and golds of a perfect sunset.
Eddie drew in a breath, almost choking on the remnant of his lobster roll.
Talia pressed her lips together. “That’s your place, isn’t it?”
“Guilty. Five floors and ten bedrooms in the Swiss-Italian lake region of Lugano.” Tyler handed the tablet back to Eddie. “It’s an ideal base for recruiting elite thieves. And I had planned to stop by this week anyway. My personal chef, Conrad, misses me when I’m away.”
Eddie used the tablet to shield his face from Tyler’s view and mouthed the words “personal chef” at Talia. He lowered it and walked around the table to stand next to him. “Please, Talia. Let the man do his patriotic duty.”
She was going to regret this. Letting a civilian pretend to be a master criminal. Conning an elite team of thieves. At some point, this plan would go horribly wrong. Her voice seemed to detach itself from the rational portion of her brain and to speak on its own. “Fine.”
“Yes!” Eddie almost knocked her over with a hug.
THE LUKON DECEPTION, as Eddie immediately named their plan, left Talia with a prickling sense of unease. For as long as she’d known him, Eddie had lived with one foot in a fantasy realm—orcs and magic rings, robots molding empires. Talia, however, remained firmly grounded in reality. Life in the foster care system had made certain of that. The balance between the two was a reason they worked so well together. But Tyler, with his money, his plane, and his ridiculous chateau, had upended the scales.
Reality should have kicked in with a vengeance when Talia and Eddie returned to the motel and contacted Brennan for permission. No senior operations officer in his right mind would sign off on such a plan.
Brennan, it seemed, was not in his right mind.
“If Tyler is on board, then so am I,” he said over the tinny, encrypted line. “I’ll settle things on this end—get the boffins to restructure your aliases, run interference with national police forces, that sort of thing.” The line went quiet for several seconds and then he added, “Tyler’s chateau is less than an hour from the aerospace expo in Milan, isn’t it? That’s a stroke of good luck.”
“Right.” Talia dropped her head into her hands while Eddie danced a jig behind her. “How fortuitous.”
They took the Gulfstream that night, taking off from the Avantec runway. Ivanov saw them off, which bolstered Talia’s faith in his innocence. He took Talia’s hand as the others packed their luggage into the jet. “I am sorry to see you go. But I think you know this.”
She squeezed his fingers, cautioning herself against showing any more emotion than that. All she wanted was to tell him the truth about what they knew. She went with a different truth. “I don’t consider my work here finished. I will do my utmost to protect you.”
“You will stop Lukon from stealing my life’s work.”
“Yes.” But I mean so much more. Talia glanced over her shoulder as the Gulfstream hummed to life. “I have to go.”
When she boarded the aircraft, she found Eddie reclining in a leather seat, sipping a Perrier. Otherwise the cabin was empty.
“Where’s Tyler?”
He nodded at the open flight deck door. “Where do you think?”
“You’re kidding me. He doesn’t have a pilot?”
“He is the pilot.”
Talia hurried through the door and squeezed herself into the right seat as Tyler taxied onto the runway.
“Good thinking,” he said, flipping a toggle that did who knows what. He pushed up the throttles and raised his voice over the noise of the engines. “I’m technically required to have a copilot.”
“But I’m not a pilot. I’m a passenger”—Talia gripped the armrests—“who hates to fly!”
“Potato-potahto.” Tyler released the brakes, and the acceleration pushed her back into her seat. A few seconds later he looked over, taking his eyes completely off the runway, and thrust his chin at the straps dangling from the sides of Talia’s seat. “But you might want to buckle up.”
Tyler clearly had some skills. He handled the controls with ease, and a diplomatic clearance that Brennan had supplied got them across Romania and into European Union airspace without trouble. Despite Tyler’s seat-belt joke, Talia did not feel like she needed the seat’s five-point harness until they reached the Swiss-Italian Alps, where he clicked off the autopilot and pushed the nose abruptly down.
“Oh!” she said with surprise as the Gulfstream punched into the misty gray of a midnight cloud deck. Talia watched Tyler flip several toggles. The flashing lights on the wingtips went dark. “Wait. Don’t we need those?”
“Not in the clouds. Saves electricity. Smaller carbon footprint.” He furrowed his brow at her. “I thought you millennials liked that kind of thing.”
“But there are mountains below us.”
“And lights won’t move them out of the way.” Tyler coughed into his fist and frowned. “I’m thirsty. Are you thirsty? Hey! Eddie!”
The endless clouds whipped past the windshield. The altitude readout rolled past twenty-five thousand feet as Eddie’s answer drifted in from the cabin. “Yeah, boss?”
“Grab me a Perrier, will you? Watch the walnut facing on the fridge, though. It’s new.” He glanced at Talia. “Ginger ale for you, right?”
Talia always drank ginger ale when she flew. Did he know that, or was it a guess? Either way, she didn’t answer. Her eyes were glued to the altimeter. Twenty thousand and still falling.
Tyler shouted over his shoulder. “Bring a Socata too, Eddie!” He lowered his voice and leaned across the cockpit. “It’s kind of like ginger ale. Best I can do in this region. Smuggling weapons into Switzerland? No problem. Ginger ale?” Tyler shook his head. “Uh-uh.”
The geek brought a pair of fizzing glasses through the flight deck door and offered Tyler’s first. “Here you go, boss.”
Talia pried her not-a-ginger-ale out of his other hand. “Stop calling him boss.”
“Can’t. He’s Lukon, remember? I’m getting into character.”
The aircraft jumped, forcing Eddie to grab the doorframe for balance
on his way out.
“What was that?” Talia grabbed her armrest with her free hand. It dawned on her she was holding a soda in the other while they were plunging to their deaths. How had Tyler gotten her to that point?
The control column between her knees made tiny movements in all directions, mirroring Tyler’s movements with his own column. “Mountain wave.”
Talia still saw nothing but clouds outside. “And that means mountains, right?”
“It is the Alps.” He rolled his head over to look at her. “Did you know the mountains of the Swiss-Italian border claim nine of the ten highest peaks in Europe? Most of them reach close to fifteen thousand feet.”
“Fifteen thousand?” Talia checked the altimeter. They had just passed fourteen thousand.
“Tighten that belt of yours,” Tyler said. “This is where the fun begins.”
Chapter
twenty-
nine
SOMEWHERE ABOVE THE SWISS-ITALIAN ALPS
SOMEWHERE BELOW FOURTEEN THOUSAND FEET
A SHORT WHOOP, WHOOP ALARM sounded and Tyler punched it off.
“What was that?” asked Talia.
“Proximity alert.”
“Proximity with what?”
“Nothing important.”
She was done with his cavalier attitude. “Tyler, we can’t see the mountains in these clouds.”
“Maybe you can’t. I can see fine. Instrument flying is all about knowing where to look.” He pointed with two fingers at his displays. “I’ll give you a hint. It’s not outside.”
Talia tore her eyes from the windscreen and focused on the displays, a pair of monitors in front of her control column matching those in front of Tyler. The left screen resembled a cartoonish video game, with animated mountains flying past and a blue river below. Talia recognized the display to the right as a blend of optical, infrared, and radar similar to drone feeds she had used at the Farm. The infrared gave definition to the clouds, showing the breaks between them. The radar outlined the terrain behind them in ghostly blue.
“Synthetic vision.” Tyler tapped his videogame screen. “Shows me the mountains and other obstacles.”
“Obstacles? Besides the mountains, what kind of obstacles are there?”
“That kind.” As Tyler banked the jet to follow the curvature of a descending valley, a computer-generated cell tower came into view, approaching fast. As it grew nearer, the blue outline expanded to include a set of razor-thin guy wires ready to slice off their wings.
Tyler shifted to the other side of the valley to give it a wide berth. “I hate guy wires.”
“Me too.” Talia unconsciously leaned to one side as she watched the glowing blue cables of death fly past. “I never hated them before, but I do now.”
After the guy-wire discussion, Tyler stopped speaking altogether. His control movements remained subtle and confident, but there was an added tension in his arms, a tautness in his jaw. Talia had been frustrated by his flippant tone, but that same tone had given her some comfort. Now, with Tyler no longer speaking, her comfort evaporated.
When he spoke again, it didn’t help. “Flaps coming out,” he said, moving a lever beside the throttles.
Talia knew enough to understand that flaps meant they were landing soon. But where? She saw no runways on the displays.
The clouds dissipated, and she looked out through the windscreen to see a faint string of lights ahead. They matched up with one of the animations on her digital display—a curving gray ribbon with dashed lines down the center. She grabbed Tyler’s arm. “That’s a road.”
“Please don’t touch the pilot.” He banked the Gulfstream and dropped the gear.
She jerked her hand away. “Right. Sorry. But by ‘That’s a road,’ I mean it’s not a runway.”
The gray line straightened, growing larger. Outside, streetlamps and a speed limit sign flew past.
“Tyler!”
“A little busy here.”
With a soft thump, the main wheels touched down, and Tyler brought the nose down a moment later, right on the road’s dashed centerline. He pulled up the flaps and applied enough brakes to turn right onto a near-invisible stretch of black pavement, heading straight for the valley wall.
Spotlights flashed on, illuminating huge doors covered in dirt and brush, already swinging open. In seconds, they were through. The doors closed. Halogens flickered to life.
“This is a hangar,” Talia said as Tyler shut down the engines.
“Nothing gets by you, Miss CIA Officer.” Tyler sat back from the controls and let out a breath. A hint of sweat glistened on his brow. “A few Swiss roads double as landing strips—holdovers from the Cold War. There are entire squadrons of Swiss fighters still residing beneath the Alps.” With a flick of his thumb and forefinger, he released his harness and stood. “They’re a bit of a financial drain on the state, so most were shut down.”
“And what?” Talia pressed close to the windshield, tilting her head to see the rock ceiling and the old iron beams far above. “The Swiss government decided to give you one?”
“Something like that.”
Three men and a woman hurried out to bed down the aircraft as Tyler dropped the Gulfstream’s stairs. Eddie’s jaw dropped when he stepped out through the hatch. “We have an underground lair.”
“It’s a hangar,” Talia countered.
Tyler patted her shoulder. “I like lair. To be honest, it came with the house. The Ticino family that owned the chalet had leased this land to the Swiss government for generations. They wanted to downsize. The Swiss wanted to unload the hangar. I happened to have cash on hand. It was a win-win-win.”
Two of his workers brought the luggage over. Tyler greeted them in Italian, and the woman gave him a hug and a basket of bread. After a short exchange, the man touched the woman’s arm and the pair walked back to the jet, close and familiar. The other two, an older man and a younger, cracked open a toolbox and began pulling panels off the engine housings. They shared several features—same nose, same chin.
Talia quietly turned to Tyler. “You employ whole families here?”
“I offer some part-time work to the locals. Luciano and his son are mechanics, quite well known in Formula One racing. They’ve turned high-performance aircraft into a bit of a hobby.”
“Formula One. Sure. And I suppose the married couple unloading your cargo bay are both executives with Lamborghini Corporation.”
“You mean Carmine and Sofia?” Tyler walked away, heading for a glass-walled elevator. “Don’t be absurd. They run the local bakery.”
The glass elevator carried the trio up along the rock wall of the cavern. As they ascended, Talia noticed Luciano and Carmine pulling a green heavy-duty crate out of the cargo bay. It looked almost military. “What’s in the crate?” she asked as the cavern swallowed them, blocking her view. Wet rock, spotted with lichen, passed by the glass doors.
“Import-export, remember? Did you think I spent all my time in Moldova doing charity work for the CIA?”
The elevator brought them up to a limestone grotto in the valley wall. The open portion looked out over a dark lake streaked with the yellow-gold of the village lights. The reflection of a church steeple, lit with spotlights, seemed to reach across the water to touch the far shore.
The grotto extended to an entry on the chalet’s third level, where an older gentleman met them at the door, smartly dressed in slacks and a cable-knit sweater. He bowed, waving them through into the foyer. “Welcome to Switzerland’s Campione d’Italia, an independent enclave with the world’s most liberal tax laws and most questionable residents.” His gaze strayed to Tyler at the words “questionable residents.” He gave Talia a grandfatherly smile. “You may call me Conrad. I look after Chateau Ticino and all its guests. May I take your bag?”
Talia consented, as did Eddie, and Conrad set their luggage aside long enough to shake Tyler’s hand. “Glad to have you home, sir.”
“Glad to be home.” The way the two
clasped hands spoke to Talia of brothers in arms rather than cook and master.
Talia and Eddie followed Tyler into a rustic great room backed by a two-story fireplace. Flying in on the Gulfstream, she had pictured a place like the penthouse at the Mandarin, which screamed man and money. But the chateau had an unassuming feel—no gaudy artwork, only a few icons and paintings in the Eastern Orthodox style, adding color to the corners and alcoves.
Tyler walked backward along a wall of windows that looked out over the lake. “You want the grand tour?”
“Yes,” Eddie said.
“No,” Talia said at the same time. “I need rest. So do you, Eddie. Tomorrow’s a busy day.”
“At least let me show you the kitchen.” Tyler took a left past the windows and descended a short stair behind the fireplace into a kitchen with granite counters and blond wood cabinets. He gestured at a platter with enough sandwiches to feed a small army. “Conrad always makes my favorite snack when I fly in.”
Eddie began building himself a pile.
Tyler snapped his fingers and pointed. “You. Leave some for the folks down in the hangar. Luciano’s kid can eat his own weight in these things.”
After Talia had eaten a tuna sandwich to satisfy Tyler, Conrad led her to a room on the fifth floor. The religious artwork continued in the upper hall with a collection of decorative crosses in a host of materials and styles. Conrad paused to let her admire them and then pushed open a door on the lake side of the hallway. “In here, miss.”
Her bags were waiting inside, with the largest suitcase laid out on a folding rack near the bed, a tall queen with a silk burgundy duvet. A candle was lit on the nightstand. A small tea service sat beside it, warmed and ready. Talia smiled at the cook. “Sandwiches?”
“A delay tactic. I put them out to tempt guests while I set up the rooms just so. It makes me look a bit like a magician.”
She touched his hand as she stepped inside. “Thank you. It’s lovely.”
“You’re quite welcome, miss. Have a good rest.” He bowed good night and closed her door without making a sound.