“You’re a hopeless romantic,” Kate said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Nick smiled. “I can’t help it. It’s in the Fox genes.”
“We can deal with your genes later,” Kate said. “Let’s go find our fathers and get out of here.”
* * *
The two men who’d come in through the eastern gate, and who were now standing in front of the polar bear exhibit, had heard the same muffled scream. They moved quickly along the rail until they were interrupted by a voice. “Guten Abend!”
The two men looked all around them, spotted Quentin standing on the upper platform over the exhibit, and started firing. FWOOMP FWOOMP FWOOMP FWOOMP. Quentin dove for cover as the bullets chipped away at the concrete platform and bounced off the railing with a loud ding. Below Quentin, the mother bear and her cub were becoming agitated by the commotion.
Jake slipped out of the stairway door and was on top of the men before either could react. Jake’s first move was to redirect the first man’s gun toward the second. He got off two shots. The second man was already dead on the ground when the first man threw an elbow at Jake’s face. It glanced off the side of his cheek, stunning him.
They both struggled for the gun. Quentin was about to join the fight when a shot was fired and barely sailed over his head. Quentin went looking on the ground for the second man’s gun, but by the time he found it, Jake had already disarmed the first man, bashing his wrist on the top of the rail and sending the gun into the water below. Jake caught a glimpse of the red star tattooed on the man’s neck, just before the man wound up to take a big swing at him. Jake slipped under it, grabbed the man by the belt, and performed a perfect tsurikomi goshi judo throw. The man sailed over the rail, into the water, where the mother bear was watching and waiting. After everything she had seen in this very unusual night, at least she’d finally get an unscheduled meal out of it.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jake said. They ran into Kate and Nick just before they reached the southern exit. Outside the gate, they found an old beat-up Honda parked in the shadows. A seasoned car thief can break into a late 1990s Honda and have it running in three minutes. It took a cold, wet, and bleeding Nick Fox less than two. When Jake was behind the wheel, Nick sat in the back with Kate and kept pressure on his leg. Quentin sat in the front passenger seat, shivering uncontrollably.
“We can’t try to run tonight,” Nick said. “But we have to get off the streets.”
Earlier that day, they had given Professor Lewis a clean phone. Quentin called it and told Lewis to gather everything from their rooms and to head down to the ground floor using the back stairs.
“Start walking south from the hotel,” Quentin said. “Stay off the main streets. We’ll call you in about thirty minutes.”
They found a tiny motel on Gumpendorfer Strasse. With Nick still soaking wet and bleeding, Jake went inside to the front desk. He didn’t know enough German, French, Italian, or the local Romansch dialect to communicate at first, but after a little bit of sign language, he had the keys to the last two rooms. Jake gave the keys to Kate, then went back out to the car to call Professor Lewis.
He picked Lewis up a few minutes later on a dark corner near the Erholungsgebiet Wienerberg park. The professor threw the bags into the backseat, relieved not to be lugging them around anymore.
“May I inquire if the mission was a success?” Lewis asked.
“We got the next link, if that’s what you mean.”
Before they went back to the motel, Jake pulled up in front of a late-night drugstore. He went inside to pick up rolls of cotton batting, gauze, tape, and antibiotic ointment. He put all of those items in the bottom of his basket, then covered them with bags of snacks and bottles of water.
When Jake was back in the car, he checked behind him for the next few blocks and spotted a Bundespolizei vehicle on his tail. The distinctive white VW with the blue hood and the red stripes, hard to miss.
“Hold on,” he said to Professor Lewis as he careened into a sudden right turn. He made another hard right, then a left, ran through a traffic light. His tail was gone.
When Jake got to the motel, he parked a block down the street and helped the professor with the bags. The two motel rooms had been turned into a small hospital ward. In the first room, Quentin had stripped off all of his wet clothes, and sat huddled near the old radiator, wrapped up in a blanket.
Jake went into the other room, where Nick was in the bathroom, with Kate waiting outside the door. The professor had taken the next map link out of the metal tube, had it spread out on the little desk in the corner, and was studying it intently while tapping away on his laptop. Jake knocked on the bathroom door and gave Nick the first aid supplies.
Nick came out a few minutes later, wearing a bathrobe and several layers of gauze and tape wrapped around his leg. Then Quentin arrived to join the party, still wrapped in his blanket.
“I feel a thousand years old,” Quentin said to Jake. “How’s the leg?” he asked Nick.
“I’m going to have a great scar,” Nick said. “And a great story to go with it.”
“We got lucky tonight,” Kate said. “We all know that, right?”
Everyone else nodded in silence.
“They keep finding us,” Kate said. “We’ve got to figure this out.”
“What about Jessup?” Nick said. “Does he have anything yet?”
“I’ll call him again,” Kate said, “but Interpol is a huge organization. It only takes one person in the right place to keep tabs on us.”
“So how do we plan on surviving this next mission?” Quentin asked. “Like Kate said, we can’t get away from these guys. God knows what we’ll walk into next time.”
“Actually,” Lewis said, turning away from his laptop, “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”
“What do you mean?” Quentin asked.
“This next piece of the map,” Lewis said. “It’s in a place where nobody’s stepped foot in years.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Professor Lewis had carefully unrolled the map, still curled from seventy-five years spent in a metal tube tucked behind a rock in a polar bear exhibit. Now he read aloud the banner that ran along the right side. “Der Fels ist stabil, während sich die Welt dreht.”
“What does that mean?” Quentin asked.
“It means, ‘The rock is steady while the world turns,’ ” Lewis said. “It was the official dedication given to this monastery in the Alps.” He turned his laptop around and showed them a picture of a snowcapped mountain.
Nick bent down to look more closely at the screen. “This is the rock?”
“It’s a mountain called Furggen in the Swiss Alps, on the border with Italy, halfway between the Matterhorn and Testa Grigia. Elevation well over ten thousand feet.”
“I don’t see a monastery,” Nick said.
The professor switched to another image, an old black-and-white photograph of a crude wooden building. “This is the Furggen Monastery, built around the turn of the century. The only access was a set of cable cars, one running from the town of Breuil-Cervinia to a midway station named Plan Maison, then another car from Plan Maison to the top of Furggen.”