The Cellist by Daniel Silva

57Massif de la Vanoise, France

The Russian president’s Ilyushin aircraft departed Chambéry Airport at 1:47 a.m., some thirty-two minutes later than scheduled. Gabriel asked Paul Rousseau whether anyone on board the plane had unexpectedly disembarked before takeoff. Rousseau put the question to Chambery’s tower staff, and the tower staff double-checked with the ground crew. The answer bounced back a few seconds later. There were no members of the Russian president’s traveling party on the tarmac, or anywhere else for that matter.

“Where are the helicopters?” asked Gabriel.

“Still at the airport.”

“I need one.”

“You’re not going to find her in the middle of the night. We’ll mount a search-and-rescue operation first thing in the morning.”

“She’ll be dead in the morning, Paul.”

Rousseau put the request to the senior Service de la Protection officer, and the SDLP man raised it with the helicopter pilots. All three volunteered.

“One is all I need,” said Gabriel.

“He’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

Mikhail Abramov ran Gabriel up the winding road to Courchevel’s tiny airport. The Airbus Super Puma touched down at 2:14 a.m. Gabriel hurried across the tarmac and climbed aboard.

“Where should we start?” shouted the pilot.

Gabriel pointed to the southwest, toward the peaks of the Massif de la Vanoise.

When the snowmobile’s engine finally died, Isabel’s ears sang in the sudden silence—a persistent note, sweet and pure, like the sound Anna Rolfe produced when she laid her bow upon the strings of her Guarneri violin.

The next sound she heard was the crunch of Felix dropping into crisp snow. He loosened the nylon rope holding the tarpaulin in place and cut away the packing tape he had wrapped around the padded blanket. Isabel made two counterclockwise rotations and came to rest next to the sled. She tried to free herself, but it was no use. The snow had her in its grip.

Felix stood over her, laughing. Finally, he reached down and jerked her upright. She wrapped her arms around her torso, clutching the last remaining warmth to her body.

He lowered the zipper of his arctic suit and drew a gun. “Chilly?” he asked.

The involuntary vibration of Isabel’s jaw temporarily robbed her of the ability to respond. A bright three-quarter moon illuminated their surroundings. They were in a small valley, rimmed by mountain peaks. There were no lights visible, nothing she might use to orient herself.

Clenching her teeth, she managed a single word. “Where . . .”

“Are we?”

She nodded.

“Does it matter?”

“Please . . .”

He pointed to the tallest mountain in sight. “That’s the Aiguille de Péclet. Three and a half thousand meters, give or take.”

A gust of wind carried away the loose tarpaulin. Isabel looked at the blanket lying on the bed of the cargo sled.

“It won’t save you. It’s minus ten Celsius, at least. You’ll be dead within two hours.”

So that was how he intended to do it—death by exposure. Isabel reckoned Felix’s estimate was generous. In her sodden Max Mara cocktail dress and Jimmy Choo suede pumps, she would likely begin suffering from the effects of hypothermia within a few minutes. She would experience confusion, her speech would slur, her heart rate and respiration would slow. At some point, she would lose the ability even to shiver. That was the beginning of the end.

She looked again at the blanket. “Please . . .”

Felix placed a hand between Isabel’s shoulder blades and shoved her toward the tree line. The snow conditions were reasonably favorable for walking—a few inches of fresh powder atop a rock-solid base—but the Jimmy Choo pumps were definitely a mistake. With each step, the four-inch heels impaled themselves in the snow.

“Faster,” demanded Felix.

“I can’t,” replied Isabel, shivering.

He gave her another shove, and she pitched face-forward into the snow. This time she made no effort to free herself from its frozen embrace, for she was listening to a distant sound and wondering whether it was only a hallucination brought on by the cold.

It was the same sound she had heard while standing on the terrace of Le Chalet de Pierres with Oksana Akimova.

It was a helicopter.

Though Isabel did not know it, the helicopter in question, an Airbus H215 Super Puma operated by the French military, was one hundred meters above the gap-toothed peak of Dent de Burgin, its searchlight sweeping across the snowpack on the eastern slope. There was no sign of a Lynx snowmobile, but Gabriel glimpsed what appeared to be a small sphere of light in the narrow glacial valley below. The sphere of light, when illuminated by the Airbus, turned out to be a solitary hiker. He signaled the helicopter by crossing his poles overhead and then pointed to the snow to indicate that he was following a set of tracks. The helicopter banked to the south, toward the Aiguille de Péclet. The solitary hiker planted his poles in the snow and trudged on.

Felix lifted Isabel from her place of rest. “Walk,” he commanded.

She wasn’t sure she was capable of it. “Where?” she asked, trembling.

A hand appeared over her shoulder and pointed toward a conical tree, spruce or pine, its lower limbs submerged beneath the snow. She labored forward, two awkward steps, then a third. She could only imagine how ridiculous she must have looked. She forced the thought from her mind and focused instead on the sound of the helicopter. It was growing louder.

She took another step, and her legs collapsed beneath her. Or perhaps she allowed them to buckle; even she wasn’t quite certain. Felix again heaved her upright and ordered her to keep walking toward the tree. But what was the point of this ritual death march? And why had he selected a tree as her destination?

At once, Isabel understood.

Beneath the canopy of the tree limbs was a cylindrical weak spot in the snow known as a tree well, one of the most dangerous hazards on any mountain. If she tumbled into it, she would be unable to free herself. Indeed, any attempt to claw her way back to the surface would only hasten her demise. The unstable snow surrounding the tree would pour into the well like water down a drain. She would be buried alive.

She held her ground and turned slowly. Felix didn’t notice; he was searching the sky for the helicopter. The zipper of the arctic suit was lowered several inches; his neck was exposed. The gun was in his right hand, pointed toward the snow.

Improvise . . .

The cold had done nothing to diminish the pain in Isabel’s throbbing left arm. But her bow arm, strengthened by nearly thirty years of practice, felt fine. Reaching down, she removed the pump from her right foot and grasped it firmly around the arch. She formed an image in her mind, a smiling Felix clutching an immense fixed-weight dumbbell, and then swung the stiletto heel of her shoe toward the exposed flesh of the Russian’s throat.

In the instant before the blow landed, he lowered his gaze from the blackened sky. The tip of Isabel’s stiletto heel cleaved into the soft skin below his left cheekbone and ripped a gash in his face that extended to the corner of his mouth.

Howling in pain, he covered the wound with his left hand. His right was now empty. Isabel released her shoe and seized the gun in both hands. It was heavier than she imagined it would be. She aimed it at the center of Felix’s chest and backpedaled slowly away from him.

Blood pumped from the wound to his face and flowed over his left hand. When at last he spoke, it was in the moneyed American accent of Fletcher Billingsley.

“Ever used one before?”

“Please,” she said.

“Please what?” He took a step forward. “You might want to chamber the first round and release the safety. Otherwise, nothing is going to happen when you pull the trigger.”

She took another step backward.

“Careful, Isabel. It’s a long way down.”

She stopped. She was no longer shivering. It was the beginning of the end, she thought.

The gun was now steady in her grasp. She made a slight adjustment to her aim and said, “Leave.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because if you don’t—”

Felix lowered his hand, exposing the terrible wound to his face, and blundered toward Isabel through the snow. Pulling the trigger proved more difficult than she had anticipated, and the recoil nearly knocked her from her feet. Nevertheless, the round somehow managed to find its intended target.

He was now lying on his back in the snow, clutching the base of his neck, writhing in agony. Isabel lowered her aim and pulled the trigger a second time. The sharp crack of the gunshot echoed among the surrounding mountain peaks and then died. After that, there was only the beating of the helicopter rotors. It was the most beautiful sound Isabel had ever heard.