Countdown to Midnight

Two

With a friendly wave goodbye to the staff, Nick Flynn stepped out of the shop where he’d just returned his rental skis, poles, and boots. His breath steamed in the cold evening air, a brief puff of fog visible in the warm, golden light from streetlamps and windows. Softly falling snowflakes swirled down out of the sky, deadening sounds.

After a quick glance both ways to make sure he wasn’t being observed, he joined the other tourists sauntering along the little town’s narrow streets. Brightly lit buildings painted in pale blues, yellows, greens, and other colors created a festive atmosphere. From the snatches of different conversations he overheard in multiple languages, most of those who were out and about were headed for dinner or drinks at one or another of the local restaurants and bars. There were a few couples strolling hand in hand, but the majority were clumped in larger groups, abuzz with laughter and good cheer after an enjoyable, active day on the ski slopes.

Conscious that someone obviously on his own in the middle of this convivial scene might draw unwelcome attention, Flynn tucked himself in behind a gaggle of casually dressed men and women around his own age. Casually, he ambled along the sidewalk a few feet from them — close enough to make it seem like he was one of the group to anyone watching, but just far enough away that none of them felt crowded by a stranger. And whenever they stopped to check out shop windows or read one of the menus posted outside different restaurants, he followed their example.

From what he could make out, these people all worked for the different regional offices of a larger multinational enterprise — some of them British, others French or German or Swiss — who’d been invited to Kitzbühel for a corporate “team-building” exercise… which really translated as a lavish ski weekend with lots of late-night partying. One hell of a nice boondoggle if you could wangle it, he decided with a touch of cynical amusement. Maybe he should pitch a similar idea to the sharp-eyed Mr. Fox, his Quartet Directorate boss. But at the thought of his new employer’s likely reaction, one side of Flynn’s mouth quirked upward. Considering the questionable results of his first assignment so far — a dead senior Iranian government informant and at least one unknown assassin on the loose — it might be wiser if he held off on making smart-ass suggestions for the time being.

While he was pretending to be interested in a display of new ski jackets and other winter apparel in a store window, his cell phone vibrated once. It did the same thing again a moment later. Those back-to-back aborted calls were a signal confirming that the brief mission status report he’d sent to Four had been received. Structured as a routine business communication, his text had read: Client meeting productive but no firm agreement reached. Unfortunately, competition reacted fast and beat our price. That was it. Short, simple, and completely dull. But while there were no hidden layers of encryption buried in the message, the ordinary-sounding phrases he’d chosen were sufficient to let Fox know that his rendezvous with Arif Khavari had yielded intriguing intelligence, but no hard evidence… and that the Iranian had been killed before he could say more.

At least the elderly Englishman who’d tutored him in the Quartet Directorate’s covert communications protocols would have applauded his technique, Flynn hoped — though perhaps not the results he was reporting. “Tell me, in your view, what is the very best sort of code?” the other man had asked in a dry, Oxbridge-tinged voice at the very beginning of their lessons.

“One that doesn’t look anything like a code at all,” Flynn had shot back.

“Full marks, Mr. Flynn,” the Englishman had said with a slight smile. The world’s major intelligence agencies, like his old employers in the UK’s premier signals intelligence organization, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), routinely sifted all phone calls, texts, and emails — using powerful supercomputers to scan for anomalies, key phrases and words, and indications of unusually strong encryption. “Which is why those of us in Four, when we communicate amongst ourselves, are very careful to avoid any such nonsense. Plain language messages, innocuous-seeming, thoroughly uninteresting, and perfectly appropriate to your current cover story, are the surest means of flying under the radar of unsympathetic people like my former colleagues at Cheltenham, those in your own country’s NSA, and others working for Russia’s SVR and GRU or China’s Ministry of State Security.”

Flynn winced inside at the painful memory of what had come next. Like most things involving the Quartet Directorate, what had seemed simple at first was actually fiendishly complex. Making this “hidden in plain sight” communications method work in the field required the rote memorization of hundreds and hundreds of seemingly ordinary phrases and words in different languages, each of which had specific secret meanings depending on how they were used in any given sentence. Thanks to a good ear and a near-perfect memory, he’d managed the arduous task over the course of a couple of weeks of intensive practice, but only at the cost of grade-A migraines and dry, bloodshot eyes.

He looked up, suddenly aware that the international group of late-twentysomethings he was tagging along behind had finally decided on a place to eat. Smiling and laughing, they all began filing into a little Asian restaurant next door. Which meant he’d just lost his primary source of camouflage.

Unhurriedly, Flynn glanced around, discreetly scanning his surroundings again. The dinner-and-drinks crowd was definitely starting to thin out, but there still seemed to be a few people headed toward Kitzbühel’s train station — which was his destination. He checked his phone. The last train that would get him to Vienna tonight was due to arrive in a half hour. And he planned to be aboard when it pulled out.

He slid his phone back out of sight and started off, trailing after an older couple towing rolling suitcases. Mentally, he crossed his fingers. So far, this entire supposedly low-key operation had seemed jinxed from start to finish. Now, if ever, would sure be a good time for some of the luck his Irish immigrant grandfather so often swore by.

Five minutes later, Flynn figured out he was not going to be that lucky. From a shadowed vantage point across the street from the train station, he’d spotted trouble waiting for him on its brightly lit platform. He could make out two hard-faced men trying to blend in with the other passengers already gathered there. Although they were dressed in ski apparel pretty much like that worn by everybody else, their behavior was different. And it was clear to him that they were covertly surveilling the small crowd… looking for someone.

Looking for him, he was sure.

He dismissed the possibility that these guys were just plainclothes Austrian federal police keeping travelers safe from pickpockets and other petty criminals. They didn’t have the right demeanor. If he had to bet his life on it, and he did, he was confident those two men were part of the opposition team that had taken out Khavari so effectively and permanently. But neither of them looked Iranian or even Arab. Instead, something about their facial structure and mannerisms practically screamed “made in Moscow” to his twitchy subconscious. Which strongly suggested they might be more of the foreign mercenaries Khavari had warned about.

Flynn frowned. In his considered judgement, he had just two chances of slipping past those watchers to board the train without being detected — slim and none. And he sure as hell didn’t want to give them another shot at him sometime during the four-hour-plus nighttime rail trip to the Austrian capital, especially since he’d have to change trains en route. He might be able to take one of those guys in a fight. Maybe. On a good day. But going up against two of them in the close, confined quarters of a railway coach or at some semideserted transfer stop? No sale, he thought grimly. If he wanted to commit suicide, he’d pick a much less messy and far less public option.

Unfortunately, that still left the problem of how he was going to get out of Kitzbühel in one piece. If the bad guys had a surveillance team keeping tabs on the train station, they probably had someone watching the bus depot and even the car rental agencies in this little town — all two of them.

Suddenly, he felt a woman’s warm arm slide through his. At the same time, her cheerful, friendly voice said loudly, “Da bist du, Max! Ich fragte mich, wohin du gegangen warst. There you are, Max! I wondered where you’d gone.” Her German was perfect, with just the slight vowel and consonant changes that would mark her as Austrian to any trained linguist eavesdropping on them.

Startled, Flynn looked down and saw Laura Van Horn looking back up at him with a mischievous expression on her attractive face. When he’d first met her, she’d been the copilot of a crippled Air National Guard C-130J that had made an emergency landing at his last duty station, a lonely radar outpost on Alaska’s frozen northern coast. Later, he’d learned that her primary job was as one of Four’s top special agents. And it was her recommendation that had prompted a final decision to recruit him into the Quartet Directorate.

Which left the question of just what on earth she was doing here in Kitzbühel now? This was supposed to be a one-man operation, with Flynn as that one man. But this wasn’t the right moment to ask awkward questions, he knew, at least not while they were out in the open and under probable observation. Instead, it was time to put on a show for anyone paying close attention to them. Adapting fast, he matched her phony conversational gambit on the fly using the same idiomatic Austrian German. “Oh, I thought I’d check to see if Karl and Clarissa had gotten here yet. In case we needed to change our dinner reservations, I mean.”

Van Horn laughed softly, playing along. “Those two? You must be joking. They wouldn’t be caught dead on a train. I bet they’ll drive in later tonight. So, for now, I have you all to myself.” Tightening her grip on his arm slightly, she turned him around until they were headed directly away from the train station.

A block farther on, Flynn glanced down at her. “Okay, Laura, what’s the deal here?” he asked quietly. “And no bullshit.”

“Bullshit? Who, me?” she said with exaggerated innocence. Seeing his pained expression, she shrugged. “I tagged along on this op purely as a precaution, sort of an emergency backup,” she said. “Br’er Fox wanted someone flying distant cover for you, just in case the shit hit the fan.” She looked him up and down. “And based on those goons I saw parked at the train station, I guess it has.”

Somberly, Flynn nodded. Quickly, he filled her in on the sniper ambush during his meeting with Arif Khavari.

Van Horn’s eyes narrowed. “So what’s your estimate of the opposition strength?”

“No way to tell,” he admitted. “Those two men at the train station, for sure.”

“Make that three-plus,” she told him. “I spotted another one keeping an eye on the station parking lot. Whoever these guys are, they want you bad.”

“I’ve always been a popular fellow,” Flynn said virtuously.

Van Horn snorted softly. “Popular isn’t really the word I’d have chosen, Nick.”

“So now what?” he wondered.

She grinned impishly. “Simple. We blow this cow town and leave the bad guys standing around in the cold wondering where you went. My ride’s parked not far away, outside a really cute little Gasthaus.”

Flynn stared down at her. “You got a car? And a hotel room?” He shook his head in disbelief. “All Four gave me was a second-class train ticket.”

“Senior operative status, remember, Nick?” Van Horn murmured in amusement. “There are some perks, you know — along with the occasional inconvenience of being tasked with rounding up a newbie gone astray.”

For just a moment, Flynn felt himself bristle. Finding out how far he’d been kept in the dark on this assignment pissed him off. But then he forced himself to relax. In the circumstances, Fox’s decision to position Van Horn as discreet support if things went wrong had proved to be a very sensible safety measure. With an inward sigh, he decided to bow to the inevitable and let himself be rescued. “Moo,” he lowed in agreement, mimicking a lost steer she’d just roped.

Half an hour later, they drove out of Kitzbühel in the four-door Mercedes Van Horn had rented when she flew into Vienna. Her usual preference in cars was something flashier, in bright red, but she’d opted for a more discreet dark blue sedan for this assignment. “Just another of the cruel sacrifices I make for undercover work,” she’d told Flynn with theatrical sigh and self-mocking smile when they got in. “They never stop.”

At her insistence, he drove, following her directions to take a two-lane highway heading northeast, toward Salzburg and Vienna. Outside of town, the snow-covered fields and small clumps of trees lining the road were in darkness. Clusters of bright lights — ski chalets and on-mountain restaurants — dotted the steep slopes rising on either side of the valley. It was still snowing lightly, and the falling flakes caught in their headlights glittered briefly as they flew past.

Apart from the tiny red taillights of a car briefly visible far ahead before vanishing around a curve, they seemed to have the road all to themselves. Much as Flynn wanted to put distance between himself and their unknown enemy’s kill team, he fought the temptation to floor it. The snow wasn’t accumulating fast enough to make driving dangerous, but there was no point in making themselves unnecessarily conspicuous by speeding.

Despite his careful driving, they were just a couple of miles north of Kitzbühel when Flynn saw a pair of blue flashing lights appear suddenly in his rearview mirror and turn out onto the highway behind them. It was a lone rider on a motorcycle. And he was closing the gap between them fast.

“We’ve got company,” he muttered to Van Horn.

She craned her head around to peer back through the sedan’s rear window. “Yeah. How truly nice.”

“Is that a cop?” Flynn asked.

She turned back around with a frown. “Maybe. And maybe not.” Her right hand slid inside her jacket. “But somehow I don’t think Br’er Fox will be very happy if we end up in an Austrian slammer after a high-speed chase through the Alps.”

Nodding tightly, Flynn eased his foot off the accelerator, moved over onto the narrow verge of the road, and then braked to a stop. He tapped a control to roll down the driver’s side window. A blast of cold air whistled in, along with a few snowflakes that spun and swirled around the interior before melting.

In his rearview mirror, he saw the rider pull in behind them and dismount from his motorcycle. The blue lights on the bike strobed rhythmically, eerily illuminating the night around them. The cyclist pulled off his white plastic helmet and hung it on the handlebars. Then he strode forward confidently, with one hand on the pistol holstered at his hip.

Flynn’s eyes narrowed in concentration. Was the other man wearing a police uniform? Or just a mix of dark-colored civilian clothing? In the weird, oscillating blend of light and shadow created by those flashing lights, it was almost impossible to be sure one way or the other.

The motorcycle rider reached the window and bent down to peer inside.

“What’s the problem, Officer?” Flynn asked politely in German.

The other man shrugged. “Nur eine Routineprüfung. Ihr Führerschein, bitte? Just a routine check. Your driver’s license, please?”

Flynn’s hackles rose. He’d caught the faint hint of an accent — the wrong accent — in the man’s voice. He felt a rush of adrenaline flood his system, ice-cold even in the already frigid winter air. Time seemed to slow. One part of his brain noticed the man’s right hand darting fast toward the weapon at his hip. Oh, hell.

“Lean back, Nick,” Laura Van Horn said conversationally. Then she fired twice with her own pistol, the sound of the shots deafeningly loud inside the car.

Hit dead center by both rounds, the motorcyclist staggered back from the window. His mouth opened wide in shock. Reddening stains spread outward from the holes punched through his black leather jacket. He fumbled again at his holster. Without hesitating, Van Horn leaned even farther around Flynn and squeezed the trigger two more times. Her third shot slammed into the man’s chest. Her fourth caught him in the face and exploded out the back of his skull.

He collapsed onto the road and lay still.

Flynn didn’t wait to see more. He put the Mercedes in gear and pulled away. He glanced at Van Horn.

“Not a cop,” she mouthed. Both their ears were still ringing from the sharp crack of four shots fired in rapid succession.

He nodded grimly. Whoever these guys were, they’d launched a full-court press to find and kill him — with lookouts apparently posted at all the exits from Kitzbühel. He sped up. The more miles they put between themselves and the dead man lying twisted on the highway, the better.

A little farther up the road, Van Horn had him swing left at a junction — turning onto a highway that would take them west to Innsbruck, then south to the Brenner Pass, and from there into Italy. “Change of plans,” she told him, reading the text she’d just received from Fox. He wanted Flynn back in the States ASAP, and it had just become blazingly obvious that Austria was too damned hot for both of them. With Arif Khavari dead and their still-unidentified opposition out in force and looking for blood, returning to Vienna would be a sucker’s move.