The Dolomite Solution (3 page)

It was six a.m. and Leonhard Aldo was scurrying around the house searching for anything he might need for the next week at his real home in Austria. There were papers scattered across the coffee table, magazines stacked high on both end tables, and even the dining room table was cluttered with journals and old papers that had meant something once, but now he could not remember what purpose they had served.

He looked out the window to the east to catch the sun trying to poke over a crest of the sharp Dolomite peaks, obscured somewhat by a blue hue in the scattered clouds. There was a fresh dusting of snow that Aldo knew would melt as soon as the sun's rays beat down on it. Only the shadows would spare the snow and ice for any length of time in late March.

Aldo hurried toward the second bedroom, which he had turned into an office, and shuffled through the papers in his open briefcase. He had to be sure everything was there. He couldn't afford to get all the way to Innsbruck and find he had left some vital data back in Italy that he needed for the presentation. It wasn't only that problem with proximity. Deep down he wanted all of his findings with him. It was that important.

He started for the door and stopped abruptly, looking down at himself. He had forgotten his pants again. He laughed to himself as he went to the bedroom, removed his brown Oxfords and then slipped on a pair of wool slacks. He checked his appearance in the mirror once more, as if silver-backed glass could show him something his naked eyes had failed to. His dark hair had grown too long and he had not been able to find a comb, so it poked up comically on one side. At fifty, he thought he looked his age. His beard, which had also gotten long and scraggly, had streaks of gray in it. He didn't have time for his own appearance. Time was something that was finite in man's life, he knew, constantly ticking backwards until death. And only God knew when that would be, so accomplishment had to be swift.

He headed back to the office, started to close his briefcase, and suddenly remembered the computer disks. He made room in the case for the box of disks and then closed and locked the aluminum case. He thought back to his graduate school days in Vienna when he had lost an entire years' worth of work after the pipes had burst in the second floor bathroom. That's when he had bought the waterproof case. From then on, he locked his most vital work in the case each night, and always carried it with him wherever he went. Some of his colleagues in Innsbruck had called the silver case a tumor growing from his right arm. Yet he had never lost another piece of work, and he didn't intend to.

Scanning the house one last time, Aldo left and walked down the stone steps to his yellow Fiat.

●

A few kilometers south of Passo di Villa, an older BMW pulled to the side of the road. The driver was a man in his early forties, dark hair slicked back, and a leather coat slung open, revealing the butt of a 9mm automatic under his left arm. He gazed at his partner in the passenger seat, a man ten years his junior, who had taken his lead in fashion. Together they looked like brothers from a disharmonious family.

The younger man chambered a round in his 9mm Beretta. “Are you sure he's going to Innsbruck this morning?” he asked.

The older man's left eye shifted sideways uncontrollably, and he said, “That's the word. Scala will fly to meet him this evening, and they go to Tirol Genetics to brief them tomorrow morning.”

“It's a shame they won't make it,” the younger man said, smiling.

Lazy eye saw a car coming from town. A yellow Fiat. “That's him. Let's do it.”

He turned the car sideways in the road, blocking the Fiat's path.

●

Sixteen kilometers down the mountain from Leonhard Aldo's village, Toni Contardo pushed her arms against the side of her Alfa Romeo, tightening her calf muscles as if preparing for a jog. Then she stretched her arms back behind her head and tightened her hard muscles. She swiveled her neck in a circle trying to loosen the kinks. At thirty-four, she was an extremely attractive woman with long, black curly hair. She wore a black leather coat well below her knees, tight dark jeans, and Italian leather pumps. For her the day had started over an hour ago, as she awoke from a short nap following a vigilant watch of the scientist's house. Then she drove down the mountain to this spot.

She got back into her car and tried to make herself comfortable in the leather bucket seat, but it was useless. In the past week, she had sat in her car more than she had ever hoped to, almost becoming a part of it. She needed her usual morning jog. But she couldn't take it. She knew the scientist's car would come down out of the tiny mountain road that wound up through the canyon to Passo di Villa any moment now, and she had to be ready. While sitting in a booth behind the two scientists two nights ago, she had found out that Aldo would drive to Innsbruck and present his findings to his employer in twenty-four hours. Scala would first go to the University of Milan and then fly up to meet Aldo the next day. Tonight.

Toni had a perfect view of the road where she sat. She had pulled her car off to the mountain side of the road in the early morning darkness, waiting for Aldo's beat up Fiat to appear. She could have simply gone to Innsbruck and waited for the scientist at his house, but she didn't want to let Aldo out of her sight for that long.

She powered the windows down to let in some cool fresh air, took in a deep breath, and then slowly exhaled. Maybe she could get used to the mountains after all. She had lived in Rome for so many years—working first for the old CIA and then the new Agency—she knew it would be difficult to call any other place home. New York seemed so far away, both in distance and in memory.

She thought back on the last week. It seemed so long ago when the Agency's Vienna office had called her boss in Rome asking for her by name. She had flown to Vienna for a quick briefing, flown back to Rome to pack her things, and then driven north to the Dolomites and the tiny village of Passo di Villa. Having taken the small room in the only pension in town, Toni had passed herself off as a mountain climber. The area was normally infested with climbers, but she was pushing the season by a few months. Her days had been spent taking short hikes, and nights she had watched the scientists from a distance, trying to confirm how close they had come to finding the secret of the region.

She was used to working alone, but smiled thinking how nice it would have been if Jake Adams had been with her this past week. He loved the mountains.

Toni's reverie was broken by the sound of tires squealing and a tiny engine stroking to red line. It was coming down the mountain canyon at high speed, but she wouldn't be able to see it for a moment, she realized.

Her wait wasn't long. She started her engine when she saw the first flash of a car streaking toward the mountain highway. The little yellow Fiat braked hard, tires burning and engine churning, and it barely made the corner, not even hesitating at the stop sign. It was the Austrian scientist. But what was the hurry?

Toni's answer came in seconds, as a second car, an older BMW completed the same maneuver and picked up the pace toward the Austrian's car.

Toni pulled out after them.

●

Tires screeched as the Fiat cornered sharply around the switchback. The front tires seemed to leap and hop as they dug into the dry pavement, hit the streaks of snow run off, and then the dry again, squealing as it lurched around the tight curves.

When the car pointed toward the straightaway, Leonhard Aldo looked into the rearview mirror. The old BMW was still there and closing fast.

He had barely left Passo di Villa when he came across the BMW turned sideways on the road. He had stopped abruptly and then sped off around the car through the ditch when the two masked men had drawn their weapons. He had heard the guns fire, but had not felt any bullets hit his car. Why were they after him? He was only a scientist. Were they merely thieves looking for money? If that had been the case, which Leonhard didn't believe for a minute, then they had chosen the wrong man. For he was not rich by any measure.

The BMW was closing in. But Aldo knew the Dolomite Road to Bolzano quite well, since he traveled it often from his native Austria, and there was a turn up ahead. A sharp turn.

He jammed the brakes and his tail slid outward, almost to the edge of the road. He downshifted, gave it gas, and pulled out of the spin. He tried not to look down. It was nearly a straight drop of a hundred meters to the Avisio River below. It was another hundred meters up to his right. And that was also a concern, with rocks falling and recent snow melting and freezing across the road. He had almost lost control coming down the canyon road where the ice had formed a black sheen, unnoticeable on the pavement.

Shifting into fourth gear, Aldo wondered again why these men were after him. He glanced at the briefcase on the seat next to him. Could they want that? Impossible. Nobody knew his research's significance yet. Nobody but his Italian associate. And even the two of them were not entirely certain of their assertions. The solution would be a phenomenal achievement of DNA research. They would share the Nobel. Their names would go down in history. They would be heroes of the modern era.

He downshifted for another corner, cranking the wheel with both hands. The car slipped again, almost going over the edge. Aldo straightened the Fiat and jammed the gear shift into third.

Looking back once more, he noticed the car was only a length behind him. His little engine whined at the red line, until he pulled the stick back to fourth again. He forced his mind to forget about why these men were behind him, and put it to the subject at hand—keeping the car on the road. Maybe he should just pull over. Give them what they wanted. No. They looked too desperate. He knew his life was in danger. Then he tried to think of the road ahead. He had never traveled the road so fast. All the curves seemed to jumble in his mind like a can of worms. Now he wasn't sure what was ahead.

By the time Leonhard Aldo saw the sign that the switchback was ahead, it was too late. He was going too fast. He hit the brakes and the clutch and slammed the stick around to second, but the car reeled forward across the other lane, through a small patch of low bushes, and over the edge.

The car seemed to float in the air forever. When it finally hit the rocks below, it smashed with tremendous force, crumpling to half its original size. Then it flipped over into the rapid river. Aldo was dead instantly.

Back up the side of the mountain, the BMW pulled to a stop, backed up, and two men gazed down toward the wreckage. They argued for a moment and then hurried back into the BMW when they saw another car coming up the road. In a moment they were speeding off toward Bolzano.

●

The Alfa Romeo pulled over to the side of the road and Toni Contardo stepped out and walked to the edge of the road, gazing down the canyon.

She saw the car immediately below and then heard the BMW rounding a corner, its tires squealing, further down the mountain. Damn it. She had been so close. Now this. She would have to go down, she knew, but it wouldn't be easy. The drop-off was almost a sheer line straight to the river.

Back at the car, she got rid of the leather coat and the pumps and changed into hiking boots and a sweat shirt from the trunk.

It took her nearly fifteen minutes to reach the Fiat below. The car was wedged between two rocks, with water rushing through the broken back windows. The car had flipped over onto its hatchback and looked like a rocket at a launch pad about to shoot off into space.

Peering inside, she noticed the mangled body nearly imbedded into the steering column. The man's left arm was missing—probably clipped off when the hood collapsed. His face was nearly gone, with glass shards sticking out like grotesque acne. There wasn't much room left inside the compartment, so it was easy to see that the briefcase she had watched him carry everywhere was not there.

She slammed her hand against the car. “Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.”

Then she peered off downstream. It must have floated off, she thought. There's no way she'd find it now. The river flowed down through fierce rapids before connecting up with a larger river. By the time someone found the case, if they ever did, it would have surely broken apart, spilling its contents, which she could only speculate on, into a thousand different directions.

She backtracked up the side of the mountain to her car, changed her clothes and sat behind the wheel for a moment thinking. She knew that Aldo was never without his briefcase. Two nights ago she had broken into the man's home while he was eating dinner at a local restaurant. His computer's hard drive was clean. The house had nothing but technical journals strewn about. No, Aldo's work had gone over the cliff with him. Only his partner Giovanni Scala had a copy of their important work. She thought about the BMW streaking down the mountain toward Bolzano, and a sudden rush came over her. They had to be going after Scala in Milan.

“My God,” she said aloud, cranking over her car. “Scala.”

She raced off down the road.

Waking up in a strange bed is something that happens to everyone at some point in their life. There's that confused feeling of helplessness while your brain tries to sort out how you had gotten there. Then the clicking back through time in your memory, trying desperately to determine if you are dreaming or if you had actually meant to be in that bed. Jake's mind blurred with these thoughts, conceding, at least, that he wasn't in bed with a strange woman who had looked good in the dark. Not that that had ever happened to him before. He did wonder what had happened to the blonde he had left at his apartment. Unfortunately, he had not even gotten her number.

She was the least of his worries as he tried to focus on things in the room that might explain where he was. His vision was a blurry mess of uncoordinated synapses.

He tried to sit up, but something kept him from moving forward on the bed more than an inch. The room was dark, with dim lights lining the top of one wall, shining up toward a featureless ceiling. He tried to turn his head, but the pain streaked through his skull from back to front, as if a knife were about to poke his eyeballs out from his brain. He tried to move his arms. It was useless. He was strapped down with leather restraints. He wasn't sure if the pain was completely a result of the crushing ache in the back of his head, or if the alcohol had finally started to wane, and he was experiencing a tremendous hangover.