Blowback

SIXTY-FOUR

Back at the hotel, Harvath began printing out all of the digital stills from both their surveillance on the ground in Le Râleur and their reconnaissance flight over Château Aiglemont. As he did, he was still haunted by the feeling that there was something familiar about it, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

After removing the art from one of the walls, they pinned up the pictures with thumbtacks. In addition to what looked like the original monastery buildings, Aiglemont had a glass solarium, which probably covered a pool of some sort, a structure housing the mechanical system for the funicular, a narrow concrete or stone patio in front, and a sickly piece of green which turned out to be a small, oblong patch of Alpine meadow that ran along the side of the main buildings and ended in an abrupt drop-off to the valley floor thousands of feet below.

“What do you think?” said Jillian as she stood back and admired their handiwork.

The first thing that came to Harvath’s mind was, I think we’re screwed, but he kept that thought to himself for the time being. “Let’s watch the video,” he replied.

They attached the camcorder to the TV and played the footage several times over, with Harvath stopping it in different places so he could note the reaction of the Aga Khan’s security forces. When he had seen enough, he said, “Those are definitely Rayburn’s men.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because they are doing exactly what the Secret Service would do in that kind of situation, right down to that man with the shoulder-fired missile. Château Aiglemont might as well be the White House as far as we’re concerned. In fact, it’s better than the White House because it’s protected by mountains on three sides and the only approach is via that funicular.”

“So are you saying it can’t be done?” asked Jillian as she watched Harvath walk over to the minibar and remove a beer.

Harvath looked at the freeze frame on the television and then up at the pictures tacked to the wall. “I don’t know,” he replied as he pried off the cap and took a long swallow. “I don’t know.”

Jillian didn’t like what she was hearing. “There’s got to be some way. What if we could get inside the funicular car in the village? That would work, wouldn’t it? It’s a two-car system. They’re counter-balanced. For the one at the top to come down, the one at the bottom has to go up, right?”

“True,” responded Harvath, “but how would we get them to send the other car down?”

“I would imagine that they would need to re-supply at some point, wouldn’t they?”

“At some point, yes, but who knows how well provisioned they already are up there?”

“The waitress at the café today said that sometimes when the security personnel are not working, they come down to the village. What if we did it then?”

Harvath took another sip of his beer and thought about it. “We’d still have to get around the police guarding the car at the bottom.”

“We could come up with some sort of diversion,” replied Jillian. “One of us could distract them.”

“And if we got halfway up and they discovered we had managed to sneak onto the funicular, what do you think would happen then?”

“There would be quite a welcoming party when we got to the top.”

“Exactly,” said Harvath, taking another long swallow. “We’d be sitting ducks. Besides, if I know Rayburn, those funicular cars are wired with cameras, as well as intrusion monitors. Even if we got past the Swiss police, the security personnel at Aiglemont would know the minute we opened the door on that car, or the rooftop hatch,” he added, seeing the look on Jillian’s face. “I told you, Rayburn was one of the best the Secret Service ever had. I know better than to underestimate a man like that. We need to come up with something a lot better.”

“Supposing he is actually there, could we somehow lure him into the village and then force him to take us back up to the top with him?”

A quiet ping echoed in Harvath’s mind as if his mental radar had bounced back off something he had been searching for. “I like the idea of using him to get us inside,” he said, “but it’s still too dangerous. With a man like the Aga Khan, money is no object, especially when it comes to security. His people will be the absolute best. They know that the funicular is the only way to get to Aiglemont, and they will have anticipated every possible covert and forced use of it to gain access to the Château. For all we know there’s even two sets of passwords to get the operator up top to start it moving — one for everything’s okay and another for start her up, but I’m bringing company so have the men ready and waiting when we get there. We’d never know. If we do this, it can’t involve the funicular.”

Jillian was growing frustrated. Harvath was the professional, and he wasn’t offering any suggestions of his own. All he was doing was sitting there, drinking his beer, and shooting down every plan she came up with. Jillian decided to give it one final try. “What about a glacier plane? That meadow looked long enough to land one on. Or what about a helicopter?”

“Too noisy,” said Harvath, without even considering it.

“You know what then?” replied Jillian, tired of trying to help when all of her ideas were being shot right down. “You figure it out. I’m not going to sit here and be made to feel like an idiot for my suggestions.”

“The only reason you haven’t heard me suggest anything,” he replied, “is because I don’t always spit out the first thing that comes to my mind.”

“At least we’re clear on how much you value my input,” said Jillian, her annoyance building to serious anger. “You know what, Scot? I have no idea how you handle problem solving in your line of work. I’m not an intelligence operative. I don’t know anything about the military. I’m a scientist. All I know is that as a scientist, I try to rule out the simplest possible answers first and then proceed to the more difficult ones from there. And when working with colleagues on problems, we scientists do spit out what first comes to mind. It’s a rather radical process called brainstorming.”

Whether it was the insult that shook it loose or not, once again Harvath felt that ping in the back of his mind. It was that feeling of familiarity about Aiglemont. “The simplest possible answer,” he repeated to her. “You’re right.”

Suddenly, Harvath had his answer. He knew why Aiglemont and its security felt so familiar to him, and he also knew how he was going to get inside. But all of it was going to ride on cashing in on one very big favor.