The Color of Night

CHAPTER 30

LAKE COMO

Strand and Mara got into their car and started up the drive to the main road, the gravel crunching underneath the tires as the headlights illuminated the close walls of pines crowding either side.

The route south along the lake was even more dangerous in the darkness. They rode most of the way in silence, both of them staring out from behind the flailing headlights that raked wildly across the constantly changing view: a wall of rock, a short stretch crowded with woods, darkness as the lights swung out over the lake on a sharp turn, the surprise appearance of a hamlet of a few houses, suddenly another rock wall, another gap of darkness on an outside turn, a short stretch of woods.

Finally Mara said, “There’s a spy inside the FIS? Isn’t that what he said, Harry?”

“Yeah, that’s what he was saying.”

“God, what are you going to do? Don’t you have to tell somebody?”

“I’m going to think about it.”

She turned and looked at him. “Do you think you know who it is?”

Strand hesitated. “Bill Howard.”

“Why do you think it’s him?”

“The timing was right. The opportunity was right. And I know damn well the money was right. Howard hasn’t been happy with his career, and he’s near the end of it. It was his chance to get even for all the disappointments. They must’ve come to some kind of agreement shortly after I retired. After Schrade discovered the embezzlement scheme and broke off with the FIS, Howard must’ve stayed with him, selling him FIS intelligence that Schrade then passed on to Lu. And others.”

Secrets. They accumulated in men’s lives like spiderwebs in lightless corners, one upon the other until they were festooned into a thick and dusty drapery that obscured the turns and, ultimately, hid the way entirely.

“You seem awfully sure of this. What if you’re wrong?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I thought I was wrong.”

Mara was quiet again.

“I was surprised by Lu’s response,” Strand said. “Obviously Schrade’s providing him with intelligence from other sources now-the Germans, the French maybe. And it must be paying off in big numbers. Whatever Schrade’s past betrayal must have cost Lu, he’s willing to overlook it for now.”

“For now?”

“Schrade hurt him very badly. The old man won’t forget that. Lu takes the long view. For now Schrade is useful, but he won’t be always. No one ever is. Time passes. Things change. Revenge is a demon with a long memory and abundant patience. Schrade’s day will come.”

Strand glanced at Mara. She was facing forward, lost in her own thoughts, embracing herself as if she were chilled. Her face and the front of her black dress were washed in a pale jade light from the dials on the dashboard.

He couldn’t imagine what she must be thinking.

After a few moments she said, “What are we going to do now, Harry?”

“We’re going to contact Mario Obando. We’ll set that in motion, and then keep on going.”

“Where?”

“France, I think.”

When they entered the outskirts of Como, Strand turned away from the center and stayed on the outer edges of the city. Mara said nothing as he drove deeper into the working-class neighborhoods, where the silk factories that supplied the famous designers of Milan toiled in a gray sameness. Occasionally he glanced at her. She had leaned her head against the window and was watching the city grow darker and grimmer.

Their room was on the second floor of a begrimed hotel overlooking a dreary piazza. It was filthy.

Strand took off his suit coat and quickly set up his computer on the gritty surface of a small, wobbly table. Getting down on his knees at the baseboard, he took off the cover of the telephone jack. With a pair of wire strippers he kept in his laptop case, he bared a small section of several colored wires and connected color-coded alligator clips to them. The clips led to a hand-size black box that plugged into his laptop. Within half a minute the laptop was up and running. He logged on to the Internet and began the laborious approach to Mario Obando.

Mara pushed aside the lace curtains stiff with dirt, opened the window, and looked down at the cafe across the street. There was a scattering of tables and a few people drinking, talking quietly, and smoking in the jaundiced light. She turned around one of the two chairs and sat down, lifting the skirt of her dress and putting it in her lap. She gathered her hair and twisted it and piled it on her head, holding it with one hand to let air to the back of her neck. She leaned on the windowsill and looked down at the cafe.

When the computer began beeping Strand looked at his watch. It had been only forty minutes since the last communication. Immediately the words began scrolling up on the screen.

Where do you want to meet and when?

Strand typed:

As soon as possible. Europe.

Five minutes passed. Ten. Then words began reappearing on the screen again.

France. Will give you time and place four hours from now.

They bypassed Milan and headed west, soon crossing the Ticino River into the flat landscape of the rice fields that dominated the terrain from Novara to beyond Vercelli. The highway was straight and unremarkable. A low half-moon illumined the cloudless night and the highway, its monotony interrupted only occasionally by the dark clumps of villages or solitary farmhouses.

At Santhia the highway turned northward slightly and began a slow ascent out of the plain. The foothills of the Alps began to punch up out of the landscape, and in the near distance he caught the dim silhouette of the Alps themselves, dark and hulking, blacker than the half-moon night.

At Aosta they stopped for gasoline and two cups of strong coffee and pushed on. The air had grown cool and crisp. In half an hour they entered the Mont Blanc tunnel at Entreves, and when they emerged eleven and a half kilometers later they were in France. Strand turned away from the ski resort of Chamonix and started toward Geneva, half an hour away.

“It’s almost time to check in with Obando,” Strand said. “We might as well stop for the night.”

At the first small road sign advertising lodging, Strand pulled off the main highway and followed a narrow alpine road for a few kilometers into the foothills. They came to a collection of kitschy little “Swiss chalets.” Strand roused the concierge, paid an outrageous price, and got the keys to one of the cottages near the edge of the compound.

Mara insisted on bathing, and while she did Strand tapped into the telephone wires again and logged on to one of the French service providers. Within twenty minutes he had an answer from Obando:

Paris. The day after tomorrow. Cafe Martineau, Blvd. des Capucines. 4:00 P.M.

It was not until they were ready to collapse in bed and Mara threw back the curtains in the bedroom that they understood why they had paid so much for the room. The little cottage was perched on a small promontory above a shallow valley. In the wan light they could see the downward-sloping hillside falling toward a broad alpine meadow and a valley that ran to the left and right. On the opposite side of the valley the land rose up quickly, then fell back and rose again. A mountain range emerged, and almost immediately the gargantuan dark mass of Mont Blanc towered above them in the night sky like another planet that had drifted too close and was rising toward them over the edge of the earth.

“My God,” Mara said. “Look at that.” She stood at the window a moment and then came back and crawled onto the bed. She sat there, embracing her knees, staring at the mountain, a dark behemoth anchored against the cobalt night. At the top, the frail light of the half-moon reflected off the legendary snowy crown.

As Strand lay on the bed beside Mara, looking at her naked silhouette highlighted by the moon glow between her and the mountain, it was not the mountain’s beauty that he saw, but its menace. In the light of day the massive landmark’s brooding gray body was a stunning foil for its majestic, snowy cap. But now, by the beguiling light of the half-moon, Strand sensed something altogether different. Now he felt an ominous pull, something like a beckoning, and the mountain became the physical presence of the Father of Darkness.

He reached out and touched Mara’s bare skin. She turned and looked at him, but he could not see her eyes. Then, without speaking, she lay down beside him, her face turned toward the mountain.