The Secret Agent (11 page)

T
he March sun was just lifting into the sky when Max Roderick left his house. He snatched coffee for breakfast from a bar in town and took the first tram up to the top of Saulire, filled this Sunday with a handful of the one hundred and sixty passengers it usually carried. Courchevel was known for many things—its terrain, its crowd of beautiful young people, its state-of-the-art lifts—but not for its early risers. Heading out into the cold half-light of morning to carve first tracks was a habit Max had kept from years of hard training in the United States, a habit that marked him as a professional in this European playground.

He was carrying a pair of skis he had designed himself and intended to test that morning while he was alone and able to focus. The skis were fairly short for a man of his height, with flaring tips and narrow waists, designed for tight turns in the steeps and for whipping easily through the bumps. The bindings rested on a platform raised
roughly half an inch above the ski’s surface at the waist’s midpoint—an innovation borrowed from downhill racers, who had been wedging their boots higher for years, now. The raised footbed encouraged a swift transfer of weight from one edge to the other, and thus, faster turns.

Max ignored the skiers in the tram: four tourists gawking at the spectacular abyss beneath the swinging cable; a couple locked hand-in-hand in the vast car’s far corner; an elderly man nursing a foam cup of something hot. The latter had his eyes fixed on Max as though he recognized his face from Olympiads gone by—from Albertville, just a few valleys and a decade away. He was holding a pair of skis Max had designed three years before. Max allowed his gaze to drift past the man to the rock wall looming near the front of the tram. His spirits surged as they always did when the mountains seemed ready to fall into the fragile car.

It was eight-fourteen in the morning. By noon the chutes that riddled the backside of Saulire would be filled with cries of ambition and disappointment—but for this hour, at least, he would have them to himself. It was the last day of his ski season; the afternoon would be devoted to packing, and tomorrow he and Stefani would be bound for Bangkok. He closed his eyes and saw again the roiling brown waters of the Chao Phraya, surging through its banks; the elegant lines of the ancient teak house set into its garden; and dimly, as through the smoke of years, the tall man with the white bird on his shoulder. Stefani would love Bangkok—the bold ugliness, the striving squalor. She would wear nothing but silk. The damp climate would turn her black curls into a mass of wild softness, restrained but never tamed by a sprig of orchid-After three good hours of skiing the steeps, Max decided, he’d head back to the old stone house for lunch.

She would be there—it never occurred to him that she might not. He had learned more about her in the past week than she realized; the truth about himself he had learned long ago. To strike the delicate balance necessary between two such strong tempers and wills would never be easy—but he recognized his luck in finding her. For the first time in months, something had gone right.

The tram slid into the cable house; the doors flew open. Max stepped past the attendant, clicked into his skis and skated three hundred feet toward the trailhead at the far side of the peak. The chutes of Saulire were vertical trenches cut into the mountain by eons of wind and weather. The deep snow that blanketed the gentler pitches elsewhere on the mountain was a scant dusting here, more ice than powder. Bare rock thrust outward, granite dark, the length of the couloir.

He wondered, for an instant, how Stefani would ski them—and was brought up short at the thought. He was no longer alone. The sensation was a strange one. In the midst of even his most demanding affairs—even with Suzanne—he had remained essentially solitary. Was it this loss—this invasion—that she fought, rather than him?

He settled the straps of his poles firmly in his palms, tightened his helmet and chose his line.

Like jumping down a ladder,
whispered DiGuardia, his first and forever ski coach.
Except you’re doing it with boards strapped to your feet. Trust your training, trust your equipment. Nothing else is real.

It was the mantra he’d learned by heart, years ago, the half-uttered prayer to whatever god governed ski slopes. He studied the rock face falling away beneath him, bent his knees and sprang into the air.

Twelve feet below was the square yard of snow he
intended to hit. The skis took the full impact of his two-hundred-pound frame, and with a metallic crunch that was audible for a fraction of a second, the right binding sheared completely off.

The ski flipped twice and fell in a gleaming arc some seventy-five feet below.

Max stabbed at the rock surface with his pole—fell forward over his remaining ski—and tumbled like a stone.

Jacques Renaudie skied
only ten days a year. He never started earlier than ten o’clock, so that the rising warmth could soften the ice into something like half-dried cement, which tugged at the undersides of his skis so gently that his speed was broken without the slightest demand upon his aging thighs. He hated the layers of clothes dictated by January and February, and ventured up the mountainside only when he could slide down it wearing a heavy sweater and jeans. He rarely skied more than two hours at a time, taking the best of the mid-morning and leaving the flat light of afternoon to the foolish and the avid. He was a Frenchman and therefore a connoisseur— of the
pistes,
as of everything.

In his day, Jacques had been a hellbent daredevil with a talent for bruising his way through a mogul field faster than any other man in Courchevel. He had worked the competitive bumps circuit at a time when the sport held little glamour and no Olympic slot. If he dallied in his middle age, it was in part because his knees could no longer support the punishment he longed to deal them. Thus two solid hours on the steeps of Saulire this warm March morning: a prize for good behavior.

He was worried about Sabine, who once again had
been out all night and was threatening to join her mother in Paris. He thought suddenly of that woman’s face—the American Max Roderick had picked up off the runway—with its milk-white skin and cunning black eyes. The Snow Queen, Jacques called her; the mythic witch who froze men’s hearts to ice. How Max could turn from a girl like Sabine—

Jacques swore under his breath. He stood at the mouth of his favorite couloir, one the locals called La Trahison.
Betrayal.

A lump of ice the size of a walnut skittered past his ski tips and bounced off the rock walls of the chute, careening downward. He followed its fall idly enough while he adjusted his gloves, and then his eyes narrowed. Far below him like a discarded doll lay the figure of a skier-motionless against the rock-Jacques went rigid, then craned his head for a better look. The suit was bright yellow, the helmet dark blue. A man, from what he could see at this distance, and facedown, his legs splayed at an unnatural angle.

Jacques’s eyes traveled upward, found the ski poles twenty meters above, lying like bent hairpins. The skier had fallen, then, at the very mouth of the chute.

Mon dieu,
Jacques whispered.
Le pauvre con
hadn’t stood a chance.

There were rotors
in the dream, a persistent hacking. Stefani scowled in her sleep and felt the coldness where Max had lain. She sat up abruptly in bed.

Through the windows she saw the tramline rising to the heights of Saulire—and something else: a helicopter beating its way steadily toward the peak. A Medevac chopper. Some fool had attempted terrain he couldn’t handle.

“Max?” she called, and swung her legs to the floor.

The house threw back the stillness peculiar to empty space. She glanced at the clock on the bookshelf under the window. Ten-forty-three. Jesus—how had she slept so late?

She brushed her hair out of her eyes, took his robe from its peg and went in search of coffee.

It required three
men traversing the rock face in crampons and ropes to reach the body where it lay. Forty minutes after Jacques Renaudie sounded the alarm—nearly three hours after the fall—the head of the Courchevel ski patrol bent down by his side and felt for a pulse in the neck.

“Il vie,”
he said tersely.
He lives.

The helmet alone had probably saved him; but from the angle of his head the three men feared for his neck. In the best of circumstances they might have encased him in a foam body shield and flown him immediately to Geneva; but he lay wedged into a sloping cleft on which only one other person could crouch. The last thing anyone wanted was a second casualty among the ski patrol. And yet, the victim must be strapped somehow onto a stretcher with skis, for transport to flatter terrain where a helicopter could land.

The head of the rescue team glanced grimly at the sheer concave wall of the chute rising six stories above. He had traversed the face with the stretcher strapped to his back and had found nowhere that three men, much less a helicopter, might stand. He glanced below, and saw that perhaps ten meters farther down, the chute widened. It would have to be enough.

“Two of us will have to turn him,” he barked, “get him onto the stretcher, and slide him carefully to that spot. It’s the only way.”

His colleagues, roped together and then to the ropes secured at the couloir’s mouth nearly fifty meters above, stamped their crampons into the ice. One drove the blade of his ice axe into the surface of the chute and clung to it while the other inched downward to help un-strap the bulky stretcher from the team chief’s back. The chief stabilized the victim’s head and neck as his colleague slowly log-rolled the inert form onto the gurney. The face was ghastly with bruises and cold; but it was unmistakable.

“Merde,”
the chief muttered.
“C’est Roderick.”

“Max Roderick?”

The name echoed against the stone. It sped upward to Jacques Renaudie like a well-placed bullet as he stood shivering in his sweater and jeans. He had removed his skis and propped them crosswise in the snow near the orange rope that cordoned off La Trahison. He heard the name, stood stock-still an instant, then shouted back down into the chute.

“C’est Max?”

“Oui.”

“Il vie?”

“À peine.”

Barely.

They were sliding the stretcher with great difficulty, now, to the point in La Trahison where the
piste
widened. Their progress was agonizingly slow. From above, Jacques could see nothing but the helmet and the dead weight of the man, a murderous burden to the team attempting to save his life. There was the stretcher poised on the bare ledge. The head of the ski patrol waved wildly to the chopper circling at a little distance; it zoomed nearer, the rotors beating painfully against the thin air. The ski patrol attached the stretcher to the
chopper’s line; all watched as it swung upward, into the gullet of the craft.

Jacques stood there, freezing, until the helicopter had ducked its nose and dropped turbulently away into the sunny March sky; then he stumped slowly back to the tram head. There would be a phone. It was his duty to call.

T
he monstrous titanium cage the doctor called a “halo” was bolted to Max’s blond head. Stefani had arrived after the hideous procedure of driving spear-shaped pins into his skull; thankfully, he was so deeply medicated with morphine that he never flicked an eyelid as two surgeons worked simultaneous torque wrenches on the halo’s bolts. Thirty pounds of pressure per square inch, at the thickest points of the skull, until his head was suspended in the cage and the mobility of his neck was arrested. He had fractured two cervical vertebrae—the C1 and C2—and lost all neurological function in his extremities.

“What does that mean?” she asked the trauma specialist who spoke to her in the waiting room.

“He’s experiencing quadriparesis.”

“He’s completely paralyzed? From the neck down?”

“For the present. It is far too early, madame, to predict the outcome.”

“I don’t understand. If Max broke his neck—”

“Monsieur Roderick suffers from concussion, he fractured two vertebrae, his spinal cord is bleeding,” the doctor explained. “He cannot feel his arms or legs, he has no movement in them—but the cord itself is only bruised, not severed. That is reason to hope.”

The Medevac unit had intubated Max’s lungs. He could not breathe on his own. His neck and head were in traction, now, and his limbs pinned to the surface of a rotating bed. Four hours after his arrival at the hospital, she stared down at the supine figure with rage in her heart. Max’s eyes swiveled beneath his closed lids, lost in opiate dreams.

“You’re saying this vertebral fracture could eventually heal?”

“Some do.” The doctor’s reply was careful. “Monsieur Roderick may require surgery to fuse the fractured bones. But the halo is there to encourage natural healing. He has already come far, madame—for left as he was, several hours on that mountain, Monsieur Roderick should have died. Ninety-eight percent of such victims would not have survived the Medevac flight. Of those that do, ninety percent will never walk again. But there are cases—”

Later, Stefani told Jeff Knetsch, “We’re wasting time. We’ve got to get him to Paris, if it’s a question of surgery. Every minute Max loses, the less chance he has of full recovery.”

“He’d be better off dead than living like this,” Jeff shot out wildly.

“Do you think it was an accident?”

“You tell me,” he retorted. “You’re the
security expert…
” with such malice that she understood, then, that he blamed her for everything that had happened to Max in the past few days.

Stefani pressed her palms against the glass that separated her from Max’s room. Would anyone ever reach through the steel and tubes to touch his skin again?

“I intend to see his skis,” Jeff muttered beside her. “I’ll go over them with a fine-tooth comb. And then I’ll
kill
whoever did this.”

“If the skis were sabotaged, whoever did it is long since gone.”

He laughed brusquely. “You’re the only person who had complete access to his design shop over the past few days.”

“Don’t be a fool, Jeff. You’ve had access for years.”

He seized her roughly by the shoulders with his long, nervous fingers. “I may not be a legend of the ski slopes who screws any woman he can get his hands on. But nobody’s ever been stupid enough to call me a fool.”

She grasped his wrists and stabbed hard at the pressure points, as Oliver Krane had taught her. Jeff let go of her shoulders with a rasp of breath and stepped backward.

“Bitch,” he snarled. “You think you hold the world between your knees. But you don’t hold me.”

“Oliver,” she said
around midnight into the hospital’s pay phone, “Oliver, Oliver,
Oliver.”

“You weren’t sent out as a bodyguard, heart. Stop hitting yourself over the head for another man’s weakness.”

“Weakness? Good God—this wasn’t human error. It was deliberate. We know now that Max isn’t a murderer-he’s a victim, Oliver.”

“And we’re all dreadfully sorry. But given what’s happened to Max Roderick in recent days he should have examined his equipment like a commando,” Krane replied callously. “Every five minutes. And at least before he
trusted his life to it. He shouldn’t have skied alone. All in all, friend Max looks like having a death wish.”

“Knetsch has already called the ski patrol. They’ve recovered Max’s skis. The screws securing the right binding were completely sheared off. So clean a break, the patrol said, that they might almost have been filed.”

“Then they were. Any ideas?”

“Lots,” she said succinctly. “Let’s start with the equipment. He took out a brand-new pair of skis and bindings this morning. Ones he’d designed. He always liked to test his stuff in extreme conditions before it went on the market.”

“Who in Courchevel knew that?”

“About testing the skis? Or which pair he planned to take?”

“Both.”

“His work habits are common knowledge to his friends. But he has only a few of those. Off the top of my head I could name a local woman—Yvette Margolan. Jeff Knetsch. Jacques Renaudie. His daughter.”

“The aggrieved Renaudies,” Oliver murmured.

“It was Jacques who found him today.”

“Peering over the edge of the couloir to inspect his handiwork? When he might have skied two hundred other trails that morning?”

“Coincidence?” she asked bitterly.

“Bugger coincidence.”

Oliver’s abrupt impatience.
I do not accept accident in my part of the world.

“And then there’s this woman,” she added, “named Stefani Fogg. Knetsch is convinced that I want Max dead. That I came to Courchevel for no other purpose. That I’m some kind of black widow.”

“She mates and then kills,” Oliver returned. “Problem is, Knetsch has no motive. Why would
you
kill a client?”

“Revenge against Oliver Krane,” she replied promptly, “for ending my career at FundMarket. I’m supposed to bring you down, Oliver, by destroying Max. Knetsch told me the story himself.”

“Our Mr. Knetsch is a Machiavellian. We shall therefore include him in the suspect list. If he’s flinging accusations, he must have something to hide.”

“He’s Max’s oldest friend.”

“He’s also overdrawn in all his accounts and has a gambling habit that could sink Las Vegas,” Oliver returned brutally. “Max supports his law firm to the tune of sixty thousand dollars a year. That’s a nice little book of business, not to mention the prestige value of touting Roderick as a client. Knetsch might not like our competition; he wants his cash cow all to himself. He knew about the skis?”

“Possibly. But then, so did I. Max propped them by the door of the design studio last night—”

“Inside or outside?”

“Inside. But the door has a very simple lock. A credit card might spring it.”

“Of all the bloody—”

“I know,” Stefani interrupted. “He didn’t take it seriously enough. This threat to his life.”

“Bugger the man for an arrogant fool.”

Suppressed violence, bitterness even, in Oliver’s Etonian drawl; and she suddenly remembered his anguish over Harry Leeds.

“Have you seen Max? To speak to?” he asked.

“Briefly.”

“And?”

“He could tell me nothing.”

Impossible to explain to Oliver the crevasse that had opened at her feet, Max frozen on the opposite side. Max wandering somewhere beyond the halo and rotating
bed, his eyes fixed on the line where wall and ceiling met. Max incapable of speech while the machines breathed for him. Max in the grip of despair so deep it might suffocate him entirely when no one was looking.

“There’s rather a good man in Paris for this sort of thing,” Oliver mused. “Strangholm. Makes the dead walk, so to speak. I’d be happy to call him myself, if you think you could persuade the powers-that-be to send Max there. He cannot do better.”

“Give me Strangholm’s phone number.”

“You might face some opposition.”

“Not if you could persuade Knetsch’s firm to recall him immediately to New York.”

“Ballard, Crump and Skrebneski. I once played polo with Ballard and dallied with Skrebneski’s wife. I shall place the call immediately. We’ll have friend Knetsch out of your hair in a trice. And ducks: this is not your fault. Not even remotely.”

“Did you feel that way when Harry Leeds died?”

A slight check in the conversation, a palpable chilling of their mutual air.

“Chin up, darling. I’ll call tomorrow with all the pertinent medical information.”

But he still hadn’t answered her question.

“The break in
the vertebrae and the seepage of blood within the cord is causing extreme pressure on the spinal nerve.” The head of the Moutiers orthopedic team looked ill at ease, Stefani thought, as though he was giving them data even he didn’t trust. “We would like to send Monsieur Roderick to Paris for further evaluation.”

“When?” Jeff Knetsch demanded.

“Within the hour, if possible.”

“Which hospital?” she asked.

The orthopedist shrugged, his eyes flicking nervously from her face to Jeff’s. “I thought perhaps l’Hôpital-Générale de Paris.”

“I want him sent to Dr. Felix Strangholm, at the Clinique St. Eustache, 27 Rue Carnavalet,” Stefani said. “It’s a private spine center. You know it, surely?”

“As Mr. Roderick’s lawyer,” Jeff broke in quickly, “I must protest. Ms. Fogg has no authority to determine the nature of Mr. Roderick’s care.”

The doctor frowned. “I have heard of
monsieur le docteur,
of course—but am unacquainted with him personally. He is
très pressé.
I am not sure that he would accept another patient on such short—”

“He has already done so,” Stefani cut in. “I received a telegram this morning from Dr. Strangholm authorizing the transfer of Monsieur Roderick to his clinic.”

“You had no right!” Jeff pivoted toward the orthopedist. “I’m sure you know best where Monsieur Roderick should go. L’Hôpital-Générale de Paris will be perfectly acceptable.”

“Do you have medical power of attorney, Jeff?” Stefani demanded bluntly.

He stared at her mutely.

“I thought not. Then we’re at an impasse. Neither of us has the authority to determine Max’s care. Which means that his doctor will have to decide.”

“Madame, I—”

She threw the orthopedist her most impish smile. “Tell me,
monsieur le docteur
If someone you loved were damaged as gravely as Monsieur Roderick, and then offered the chance to be treated by Felix Strangholm— would you send him to a nameless specialist at l’Hôpital-Générale instead?”

“I would not, madame. I would snatch at every
hope and at the slightest possible chance.
Bon.
To Dr. Strangholm it is, within the hour.”

Through the ICU
window, she watched three male attendants disengage one set of tubes and connect another— these, the ones that would sustain Max’s life while he hurtled through the air to Paris.

“I’ve been called back to New York,” Knetsch told her savagely.

“Poor timing,” she returned, “unless you’ve a reason to get out of France fast. Worried about those bindings, Jeff? Afraid they’ll betray you?”

Without hesitation, he struck her across the face. She shoved his chest hard, forcing him backward.

“I wish to God he’d never met you.”

“Oh, that’s a nice touch,” she said appreciatively. “Try it out on your bookie next time you need money.”

The door to Max’s private room was kicked violently open. He lay strapped to a cervical board on a rolling gurney. Stefani fell back against the wall, silenced by the sight of that motionless face, the ventilator taped into his mouth. He was headed for the helipad for the second time in twenty-four hours.

“You’ve been snooping,” Knetsch muttered with suppressed violence.

“That’s right, pal. And I’ve just gotten started.”