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 weredefinitely 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 thearch. 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.
