The Lions Of Lucerne

42

If a full dragnet was not already out, it would be very soon. Refusing a direct order from his superiors to come in and answer questions about a murder investigation involving his weapon should put him at the top of every law enforcement hot sheet in the D.C. area. Which meant he didn’t have much time.

As he was preparing to log off from his home computer, Harvath noticed the little flag that showed he had one message. Knowing he didn’t have time for this, he still let his curiosity get the better of him, and he clicked on the new mail icon.

Dear Sir:

Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding Nestlé S.A. chocolate products. We are sorry to inform you that our Lieber chocolate bar is not currently available in the United States. This candy is made exclusively for the Swiss market. We would like to point out that Nestlé has a fine line of chocolates which can be purchased in the United States and other countries abroad. For a full listing of our chocolates, or for any other Nestlé products, please visit our web site at…

Scot logged off of his home computer and signed off from the cyber café’s. He paid the earthy-crunchy chick at the coffee counter for his time on line and headed out the door.

On the pavement, he quickly scanned both directions for signs of anything that seemed out of place. Not noticing anything out of the ordinary, Scot walked down G Street to Twentieth, made a left, and headed north toward Dupont Circle. It had been less than ten hours since he had gotten out of a cab in almost the same neighborhood to meet with Natalie Sperando and André Martin. Now they were both dead and someone was trying to hang him for their murders. There could be only one reason: André had been one hundred percent on the money.

It began to rain again, and Scot popped into a small drugstore and bought an umbrella and an ugly tweed Totes hat. Using the weather to his advantage, he turned his collar up and pulled the hat down to conceal as much of his face as possible. After giving Natalie two hundred dollars last night, paying for his time and breakfast at the cyber café, the Metro pass, and now the hat and umbrella, Harvath was left with seven dollars.

He found an ATM across the street. He slid in his card and punched his code. He selected the withdraw-two-hundred-dollars option and waited. Instead of the thack, thack, thack sound of bills being metered out, he heard the printer printing a receipt; not a good sign. The screen flashed a benign message: Unable to complete transaction at this time. Please try again later.

Could they have frozen my account? Scot wondered. There’s no way they could have moved this fast. It had to be a coincidence. He put his ATM card back in his wallet and continued to head north toward Dupont Circle. When he reached M, he hailed a cab. He had the driver hang a left on Massachusetts Avenue and go through Embassy Row past the vice presidential mansion at the U.S. Naval Observatory. Convinced he wasn’t being followed, he then instructed the driver to change direction and come back along Florida Avenue to North Capitol Street and drop him at Union Station.

The fare was more than Harvath had in cash, but he had flagged a cab from a company he knew took plastic. He leaned forward through the partition to watch if his card would be accepted. It was. He had been overreacting about the cash machine. His accounts hadn’t been frozen. Not yet, at least.

Even though rush hour was over, Union Station was still crowded. Harvath kept his collar up and his hat pulled down close to his eyes. He tucked the umbrella under his arm and walked with his shoulders hunched up as if he was fighting off a chill from the cold air. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his trench coat. His right hand played with a key André Martin had slipped him as they shook hands good-bye last night at J.R.’s. “A copy of my insurance policy,” André had said. “I’ve always liked trains. How about you, Scot?” Those had been the last words André Martin would ever say to him.

As Harvath picked his way through the station toward the lockers, his eyes scanned the room for any surveillance. Normally, he would have hung back for a while to see if anyone was watching the locker, but there was no time for that. The longer he hung around, the better the chances were that the dragnet would swallow him.

Harvath eyeballed a couple potential exits he could sprint to if he was made and, with the small comfort that afforded, moved toward the bank of colored metal lockers. He looked at the key with its number sixty-eight and wondered if Martin had chosen it out of fondness for the old joke: “What’s a sixty-eight? It’s kind of like a sixty-nine except you do me and I’ll owe you one.” If there was anything within this locker that he could use, Harvath definitely would owe André one.

Moving down the row of lockers, Harvath stopped at number sixty-five and casually glanced away toward a set of monitors listing departures and arrivals. No one seemed to be watching him, so he moved to sixty-eight. He inserted the key and opened the locker. Inside was a manila envelope, which he withdrew and tucked inside his suit coat.

Keeping his head down, but scanning in every direction, Scot began to make his way toward the nearest exit. A crowd of noisy teenagers carrying suitcases and pillows, undoubtedly off on some school trip, cut across his path, and he had to slow his pace. When the mob passed, he noticed two men he hadn’t seen before standing less than ten feet away and staring right at him. They didn’t look friendly. Although they were dressed in street clothes, their eyes and their builds were not those of John Q. Public.

Scot’s thoughts were interrupted when the men began moving toward him. “Sir, can we speak with you a moment?” asked one.

Harvath turned in the other direction and began walking faster. He heard the men pick up their pace. Two seconds later, there was a faint metallic click that Harvath recognized right away as the sound of a blade locking into place. Whether it was a switchblade, a stiletto, or some other type of knife, the message was perfectly clear: he was not supposed to leave the train station alive. The use of a blade, rather than a pistol with a sound suppresser, was probably to make it look as if he was the victim of another D.C. mugging. Harvath now knew that these men were professionals and didn’t play for the good guys.

He could sense them getting closer. He didn’t dare turn around and look. From the direction they had approached, they had forced him into an area of the station that was less populated than the rest. While there were several groups of people around, they were not close enough to witness anything. Most likely, the men would come up from behind, slide the blade between his ribs, and hold him up as if he were a friend who’d had too much to drink. They would lead him over to a bench and leave him to die. Harvath’s only chance was to act fast.

Quickening his pace, he pretended he was trying to put some distance between himself and his pursuers. Just as the two men matched his stride, Harvath stumbled, his leg appearing to twist in an incredibly painful contortion. Seeing their chance, the two men moved in, but Scot was ready for them.

Just as he’d expected, the men had planned to engage in what operatives referred to as the friend-in-need scenario. As he began to fall, the first man reached out to grab him as the other man readied his blade.

In a move that seemed to defy gravity, Harvath halted his fall until he could grab hold of man number one, who was already reaching out for him. Locking his right hand around the man’s wrist, with his left he pinched with searing pain into the man’s elbow. He resumed his fall, dislocating his adversary’s arm and sending him sprawling across the floor with a powerful thrust of his legs.

Scot rolled in classic aikido fashion and came up onto his knees, just in time to parry the attack of the man with the knife. The blade was not anything as refined as a switchblade or a stiletto; it was an extremely dangerous knuckle knife. As Harvath dodged the man’s thrust, the edge of the metal knuckles caught him across the lower jaw and sent a white-hot lightning bolt of pain straight to his brain.

As the knife wielder prepared for another run, Scot noticed his accomplice with the dislocated arm was moving off toward the exit. As quickly as he made this realization, the man with the knife came at him again. This time he held it in a manner that suggested his plan was to stab in a downward motion, and Scot readied himself, still with no time to get off his knees. It was amazing that no one had seen what was happening and called for the police.

Scot focused on the blade and prepared for the way in which the man was telegraphing his attack. Then, everything changed. Suddenly, the man had another knife in his left hand, and it came slicing across from left to right. All of Scot’s attention had been focused on the man’s right hand. Stupid. He should have known better.

Harvath was able to move just in time, but the blade caught the left shoulder of his trench coat and tore it. The force of the man’s attack threw him off balance, and as his assailant overextended himself, he made his left side vulnerable. That was the opening Scot needed.

Before the man could regain his balance, Scot drove his right fist up hard into his kidney. He heard a woosh of air along with a deep groan. The man spun with both knives, pivoting back in the other direction. Harvath ducked and repeated the same punch to the man’s right side, achieving the same effect. The man groaned again, and as he prepared to come at Scot for another pass, Harvath jumped to his feet and maneuvered behind him. He landed several swift and painful blows into the man’s back, as well as a kick into the back of his right knee, which sent him sprawling forward onto the polished stone floor.

Before his would-be assassin could recover, Harvath popped him twice in a very painful area beneath each shoulder blade, which caused him to involuntarily release his grip on the blades. The one in his left hand clattered onto the ground, but his right fingers were still inside the knuckle loops.

Harvath stepped on his right hand and pulled the man’s head up by his hair. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Fuck you,” the man sputtered.

From behind him, Harvath could hear the sound of footsteps running in his direction. He glanced back and saw two Amtrak security guards closing in fast. He decided to cut his losses.

Standing up, Harvath kicked the man hard in the ribs, knowing for sure he had broken at least three. He turned toward the approaching security guards and shouted, “You guys take him. I’m going after the other one. He got my wallet!” With that, he ran toward the door the other attacker had used.

As Harvath reached the exit, he pulled up short and carefully glanced through the glass. It could be a trap. He surveyed the immediate area outside the doors before he slipped outside. Everything seemed quiet. There was nothing to suggest that a man had come out only moments before holding his arm and howling in pain. Of course that hadn’t happened. These guys were professionals. There was no question about that. The man would have done his best not to draw attention to himself when he exited. The main question was, Who sent these two and why? Whoever nailed him in the back of the head at his apartment last night could have finished him off then. Why didn’t they?

None of the people nor any of the traffic buzzing up and down Second Street seemed to pay him any attention. Whoever the other man was, he was gone by now. Careful to make sure that he was not being followed, Harvath crossed to the other side of the street and quickly made his way toward Stanton Park. Although he had lost his umbrella in the scuffle, he had managed to retain his hat, and the rain trickled from it in small gray rivulets.

Harvath tried to repair his trench coat by tucking the torn fabric underneath the shoulder seam. It would have to do for now. He was extremely lucky that the blade had not sliced any deeper. He rubbed his jaw, and although it was sore, he quickly determined that it hadn’t been broken. He would live, but he had suffered yet another blunt trauma to his head. That was twice in less than eight hours.

Cutting south on Fourth Street, Scot arrived at the Folger Shakespeare Library. He needed a place where he could catch his breath and gather his thoughts. This seemed as good a place as any. Falling in with a group of older tourists who were scurrying up the stairs to get out of the rain, Harvath blended in with them perfectly as they entered the building. The group checked their wet things and were led into a recreated Tudor gallery with dark oak panels. Everyone oohed and ahhed at the library’s intricately carved Elizabethan doorways. As the group moved on, Scot found a bench and sat down, placing his trench coat next to him.

He withdrew the manila envelope from his suit coat and tore it open. Inside he found several strips of paper that he couldn’t at first make out. Suddenly, he realized what they were. Apparently, André had been using a handheld Xerox scanner and the strips were meant to be put together to show a complete page. Harvath didn’t have time for puzzles, so he quickly sifted through the stack. Most of it seemed to be journal entries, presumably from Senator Snyder’s personal appointment book. But as Harvath continued to sift, something else caught his attention.

Two strips of paper could be placed together to form what looked like a photo negative of a note. The paper was black and the handwriting was white. The handwriting matched the entries in the senator’s appointment book, but why would André have a negative of a note that the senator had written? Harvath pushed the thought aside and read:

Dear Aunt Jane,

All is well here. We are looking forward to your visit and hope that everything is ready on your end. We trust that the money we sent will cover your expenses. We expect your trip to be a roaring success. You know how to contact us if you have any questions.

Yours,

Edwin

Why would Snyder write a letter and sign it “Edwin”? Harvath kept flipping through the pieces of paper. He came across something in a totally different hand and assumed it was André Martin’s.

Aunt Jane? Edwin? Switzerland? Snyder claims he has no living relatives. What’s the connection?

Stapled to it was another piece of paper that listed an address for a post office box in Interlaken, Switzerland, written in the senator’s hand. Switzerland? Scot tumbled the pieces in his mind, trying to figure out how they all fit.

What was the connection? There had to be one. Snyder had had André killed because of what he thought he had discovered. Whatever it was, it must have been explosive if Snyder would kill to protect it. Now he wanted Scot dead. Well, Senator Snyder had a little surprise coming; Scot Harvath was not that easy to get rid of.

Back outside the Folger Library, Harvath turned and headed south. Along the way he tried another ATM and got the same message as before. If he was going to figure things out, he would need a little walking-around money. He flagged a cab and had it take him to the Washington Navy Yard. He gave the driver his remaining seven dollars and got out. Checking carefully behind him, he ducked into Navy Yard Metro station and took the train one stop to Waterfront. There, he emerged again and hailed a cab for his bank on Twelfth Street, just south of Logan Circle.

The bank officer was polite and after comparing Harvath’s signature to the one on his card and looking at his ID, he gestured for Scot to follow him downstairs to the vault that contained the safe deposit boxes. Scot produced his key, and in a synchronous fashion that Harvath felt sure was supposed to impress, the bank officer waited to turn his key at the same moment Scot did, as if they were about to unleash a nuclear weapon.

After the box had been withdrawn, Scot was shown to a small private room, where the door was shut behind him and he was left alone. He lifted the lid of the box and removed the normal things one would expect to find, stock certificates, bonds, legal papers…Once those were removed, he stared down at something he thought he would never need to use.