Authors: Dominick Fencer,Baibin Nighthawk
137
Skylinep92 got up at 7:30 am, she jumped in the shower and dressed in a military suit. She chose a black one to avoid being too flashy, then she went down to the lobby.
The Colonel was already at the table, he was waiting for her and having a hearty breakfast.
"Good morning, Anaïs. I just received some good news from my Israeli friends: we know where Savannah is headed, he’s trying to escape to Northern Europe in a light sport aircraft. He may well attempt to disturb us today, but we’ll have the Israeli cavalry all around us so I'm not too worried about him. We'll wait for him together. You’ll be on the ground and I’ll be in a helicopter. Finally, you’ll say goodbye to this job that makes you so sick!" he said with satisfaction while scratching his chin and handing her the coffee pot.
Anaïs nodded as the Colonel explained how the operation would take place, but now she feared that something had gone wrong. Mark hadn’t contacted her as she had expected, and moreover, the last time they had met online he had told her that he would be travelling by helicopter and not in a light sport aircraft.
At 9:45 am the Colonel and Anaïs left the hotel and headed for Notre-Dame; Anaïs scoured the environment around the Colonel carefully with her eyes to see if Savannah was lurking around.
At one point Reed’s phone rang.
"Are you already there? What? No, I haven’t seen the newspapers this morning, I didn't have time… Ah! Really? As if that wasn’t enough!" Reed spoke in bits and pieces, because Anaïs was close to him, then he ended the conversation saying: "We’ll catch up later, okay!" and he hung up abruptly.
The Colonel went straight to a kiosk, bought a newspaper and read aloud the news announced by the CDC on the new H5N1 virus, then he exclaimed: "They screwed us, Anaïs! Now everything goes to the CDC and we cannot do anything interesting, shit!"
"Good heavens! Who do you think was responsible for that?"
"I'll investigate. We obviously have a mole in the team, and we’ve lost the agreement with the Israelis. Now the only thing that remains is to hunt down that son of a bitch Savannah. I’ll call Bain. I haven’t heard from him since we arrived in Switzerland. Paul Ward will have a stroke."
Anaïs was relieved and imagined that it had been Grigoriy Kozloy on the phone, and she hoped that Mark had already informed him of the inoculation of the antidote that would shortly normalize the brain wave phenomenon.
"Ransley, are you okay? This is Walton. What about our patients? I understand…so you're with Jago now…of course, you can eliminate the anxiolytic, there is no more need. Well, I would say that we can then proceed with the first shipments to Europe.
“I'll see you in two days. I'll call Jago tomorrow morning, New Mexico local time. Did the CDC in Atlanta already contact you? Yes, they are very efficient. See you soon."
"So?" asked Anaïs.
"Everything is going well, apart from the question of the avian virus. We’ll ship soon, we had a little mishap that we have solved brilliantly. And now, let's go meet our friend Mark Savannah with all due honors."
"I'm ready!" Anaïs replied. She understood perfectly that Reed was struggling not to give into an angry outburst.
138
It was cold above Zinal, la cabane de Tracuit was a couple of hours walk away and Weisshorn loomed before her eyes like a huge sail covered with ice.
Anaïs had to complete her mission, if intelligence discovered her double cross, first they would burn her and then they would use her as a bargaining chip with the hostile faction of the Russian counter-intelligence, which meant a life expectancy of zero after hours of torture and questioning.
She was an expert in counter-intelligence, she knew what she was getting into and if she had managed to get by up to now, she could do it again this time.
She knew that it was possible to leave the Agency only when you reached the age of retirement or horizontally in a box, and she didn’t at all like the idea of leaving horizontally after spending her last moments with a Russian torturer.
They were lying in wait for Mark Savannah, Anaïs on the ground and Colonel Reed in a helicopter.
Anaïs was as taut as a violin string and ready for action; the Israeli informant had done a good job, he had intercepted the likely route Mark Savannah’s Citius would fly. The Israeli agent had in fact quickly discovered the former British agent’s contact in Switzerland and his identity: he had hacked the firewalls, the encryption and authentication, monitoring and logging systems, blocking the reset system and reprogramming the server file transfer protocol to track and relay the information about Savannah’s next steps.
Absolutely nothing futuristic, on the contrary far from it; Mark’s contact had simply succumbed to the pressure of the situation and had left a clue: the key to access the hidden partition that he had on his Vaio VPCZ21X9E and from there it had not been difficult for the Israeli hacker to identify the name of the server, user and password.
The target had left tracks because that afternoon he was with a woman and he had forgotten to comply with the security procedures; on the same day, the Israeli agent and his team had visited him at dusk, cleaning everything up at the end of the raid.
"Never underestimate your opponents," Skylinep92 thought. "There is always someone in the world smarter than you, it is only a matter of time and if you get distracted and lower your guard for a moment in a complicated and dangerous situation, you're a goner."
Anaïs thought with horror how some very intelligent and talented men could lose their head for anonymous women of no quality; in fact, she remembered what Mark had told her about his friend Pavel.
The Swiss contact, who had the task of protecting Savannah and of helping him escape, had compromised not only the operation, but he had also lost his life because of a woman and Anaïs was furious about it.
Anaïs had learned over time to ignore pain, but not anger. She had never been able to quell her anger, so she decided to focus her attention once more on the mission, and avoid adding anger to the tension of the moment.
For a moment she looked at herself in the metal plate of the protective gloves she was wearing: she had dark circles under her eyes and the camouflage colors on her face gave her the air of a phantom.
She was a brilliant woman, an experienced undercover secret agent and a deep-thinker, and yet she had always felt alone and had messed up two love affairs in the space of a few years, both with men of intelligence and character.
Her first lover had later taken refuge in the arms of an ordinary woman, probably someone that guaranteed him stability with a limited need for autonomy, in addition to a life without excitement.
"Fuck the two of them and their spineless cunts!" she said aloud, turning abruptly toward the helicopter.
Anaïs perched herself up on tiptoe and searched for Colonel Reed’s cold eyes in the Gazelle SA 342 M; he was waiting for the signal, ready for takeoff.
‘Fucking greedy, duplicitous bastard!’ she thought to herself.
The air was heavy, almost corporeal, the forest around her seemed to hold its breath and was slowly tinged yellow as the sun stretched its rays over the ground.
The sniper applied plenty of force to her legs so as not to overload her back and she put the FIM-92 Stinger on her shoulder; its weight of almost 110 lbs. made it literally an undertaking to be able to shoot the missile by herself, but she managed it every time, paying for it with showy blue bruising that no one medicated for her.
The signal came right on time. The BRM Citius appeared on the horizon skimming the treetops.
The Gazelle took off, they had to intercept him and force him into a perimeter where she could shoot him down.
Skylinep92 followed him on foot along the designated bisector, her heart leaped into her throat, her muscles on alert. When she transformed herself into a sniper, her brain went hell bent for leather elaborating measures and continuing to adjust aim.
"He’s in range. Go! How the hell did the Israeli intelligence fuck you, Mark? Shoot, Anaïs!" she talked to herself. "Otherwise Reed will put you under investigation. Shoot! Shit!"
Savannah knew his business, he avoided the air-missile with a maneuver worthy of an aerobatic Sukhoi and he hid in the forest without landing. The Colonel pursued him to flush him out and into the open. Reed wouldn’t stop until one of the two surrendered, his pilot was being careful not to intrude into Italian airspace.
Anaïs was dripping with sweat, her hair was wet, she saw the light-sport aircraft reappear again, but suddenly a private helicopter emerged from the trees forcing Savannah to pull up abruptly; the aircraft attitude quickly changed, it climbed steeply then seemed to stop in mid-air, it would stall at any moment. And that was the moment Anaïs was waiting for, ready with another missile.
She fired. The light-sport aircraft exploded in the air like fireworks out of control, then the plane’s fiery pieces fell among the trees below. Finally, it was over.
Anaïs fell to the ground and took off the FIM-92. She knew they wouldn’t come to pick her up. It was in fact a borderline mission and officially she was at her home in Zermatt.
Now Anaïs could take charge of Professor Nicholas Mayer’s astrophysics laboratory and change her life; inevitably she’d be alone with her inner landscapes that couldn't be shared, waiting once again for a flower from a stranger.
Quickly the two helicopters disappeared over the horizon and she went into the woods to retrieve her backpack.
She checked that all the equipment was there, then she changed into mountaineering clothes and, instead of going down to the valley, she began climbing towards the Cabane de Tracuit.
She wouldn’t find anyone waiting for her to arrive; she wouldn’t be stopping there. She would continue until she reached 12,467, just over 2,300 feet from the top of the Weisshorn.
The sunset began to color her hair red and hours of walking and the climb began to take its toll on her legs and arms.
Anaïs knew she had to search for a specific point, she was at an altitude of 12,467 feet and she had to use GPS to locate the coordinates.
After having identified the point, she continued the climb until she reached an opening in the wall of the mountain and found a natural cave. The sun had set and Anaïs began to use her flashlight and some LED devices to complete the work.
Assembling a device to remotely control an aircraft that afternoon when Reed had left her free had been beastly work. As always she had done it practically alone, with only Pavel’s support, who had instructed her from Sofia while he was sitting in his bunker, stuffing himself with pizza and speaking broken English while he chewed.
139
"May God protect you, son," Adrian said to Mark Savannah. "No fighter-interceptor will follow you in Swiss airspace or in Italy. Their intelligence services have been informed, so you got a green light; instead remember that when you leave these corridors, you don't have any protection."
"How is Boris?"
"Of course, he’s been "killed" by our infiltrator on the Israeli team; in reality, he’s in excellent health.
“I'm sorry I couldn’t do more, regardless of the evidence you provided that I shared with the main agencies. Reed holds the balance of power and that makes the difference. You have been allowed to escape but they have placed a ban on killing Reed,
sic transit gloria mundi
…
“You’ll have to solve this issue personally. Your former agency and the U.S. Intelligence will never help you, not to mention the Russians, Kozloy is the first, imagine the Israelis. Yes, I have understood what you’re doing."
"Will you come visit me, Adrian..."
"Maybe with Davis…who knows?"
"You’ll never tell me why Andrew Davis hates Walton I. Reed, will you?"
"He had plenty of time to tell you the reason in Argentina. Evidently he doesn’t want you to know, and I’ll not do it for him. You know me."
Mark smiled, hugged him, thanked him again and finally said goodbye to him. Then, without wasting any more time, he boarded the Lambada motor glider that was waiting for him.
The mountain hangar opened within minutes and he took off with less than 490 feet to spare, then he quickly disappeared over the horizon.
140
Anaïs knew she had to spend the night in the cave and hurried to begin the dismantling and destruction of the devices to erase any clues.
As she was pulling the tools out of her backpack, she realized that the Yaesu VX-6l tri-band transceiver, that was tucked into an inside pocket of the backpack, was transmitting some audible frequencies: she went nearer and realized that the pace might suggest the old, nostalgic Morse code.
She took a pen and a notebook from her pocket but she stopped writing as soon as she realized that the message was being repeated: "Fighting Falcon - fly by wire - Mirage Rafale Takuba n Amänär."
"Fighter jets...Mark? Takuba n Amänär, the sword of Amänär...Balteo of Orion in the Tuareg language. I understand who and where you're going!" She said talking loudly with satisfaction, then she realized what the message implied: "But this is... it's an invitation!"
A huge smile spread across her face thinking back to him, as if she had climbed Kangchenjunga alone and broken the record of ascent.
She paused for a moment to think back to that particular afternoon in the back of the hangar at Wiley Post Airport and again a long shiver ran up her back.
"To hell with the spineless cunts and their routine!" she exclaimed, jumping for joy like a teenager, consuming the last energy she had.
Then, like a fury, she destroyed everything, she put the fragments in the backpack and fell asleep exhausted on the damp rock.