Priceless Page 3

  Jasper Leong was a citizen of Hong Kong, which should explain the hints of a strange accent in his otherwise impeccable English. He worked in telecommunications—smartphones and tablets were the future of civilization.

  Not many people knew his real name, origin, and life story. Even most of his business associates were sure that “Hermod” was the name of an organization. It seemed to them impossible for a single man to carry out their often sophisticated commissions. And so they repeated the rumors to one another about a criminal cartel that acted the same way as a large corporation, with branches in the world’s biggest cities, a network of agents, and secret bases in glass-bottomed submarines.

  In fact, Hermod always operated alone.

  3

  Olaf covered the piece of wall separating them, reaching Gmitruk in a few minutes.

  He glanced upward.

  “We’re past the tough bit, but I’ll lead on the final stretch. I’ve had my fill of fear for the entire trip. I spent half an hour imagining your old ass landing on my head—I almost pissed my pants.”

  “Not so old.”

  “I’m not the one who’s retiring in three weeks. Yes, I know you’re not forty yet. Even if it is just military retirement, you’ve got a whole life of professional challenges ahead of you, like supermarket security guard or parking lot attendant. You could say life is just beginning for you, Major.”

  “I promised to give up the service after twenty years. So I’m leaving.”

  “I thought you’d been released from your promises.”

  The joke fell flat, and Olaf didn’t push it; he realized the topic was still sensitive. Only now did he notice that Anatol was packing up his gear.

  “Have you gone crazy? You’re not going to finish the climb?”

  Anatol glanced at Olaf without regret or apology in his eyes. Just the cold concentration of a professional soldier.

  “No. I got a call. We have to go down. Now.”

  “But it’s just one pitch and then we can go down on the trail. We might pick up some lady tourists.”

  “Now.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  Olaf sighed and started packing his kit. He looked around for a place to make the descent.

  “Can you tell me what’s up, at least?”

  Gmitruk shook his head.

  “Would you have to shoot me?”

  “No. Waste of bullets. I’d use the Polish Army’s secret deadly method.”

  They’d been climbing together for so many years that they didn’t need to discuss what to do. In minutes they were packed and ready to rappel. They prepared a rope and threw both ends into the abyss. The orange snake began to swing on the rising wind; there was a change of weather in the air.

  Olaf clipped a descender onto the rope.

  “The Polish Army’s deadly method, huh? It’s probably called cirrhosis of the liver.”

  “Down you go.”

  Olaf pushed off against the rock face and rappelled.

  “How much pension money will you have after twenty years? Peanuts.”

  “I’ve got add-ons.”

  “Such as?”

  Gmitruk sighed, then pulled down the rope and prepared for the next rappel. There were still three similar stretches between them and the foot of the mountain.

  “Would you have to shoot me?”

  Anatol waved his hand.

  “Quit pretending it’s all top secret,” said Olaf. “There’s probably a law that covers the add-ons, not some confidential NATO regulation.”

  “Would you please just descend?”

  Olaf nodded and clipped on the descender.

  “For taking part in antiterrorism combat, two percent of the basic for each year, and one percent for each year of intelligence service abroad. It adds up.”

  Olaf smiled from ear to ear. “God, if you fed that kind of line to the tourists, we’d be screwing nonstop at the refuge all week.”

  “Down you go.”

  4

  The weather was rapidly deteriorating, but it didn’t matter to Janusz Hauptmann. He was leaning against the railing of the viewing terrace on Kasprowy, gazing at the peaks.

  He’d never liked the mountains, yet destiny was always linking his fate with these dumb piles of rocks. It was in the mountains that he’d met his ex-wife, Izabella. It was from the mountains that his student Maciej had come and stolen her from him. It was to the mountains that his career as a geology professor had taken him, as a specialist in karst formations. And recently in the mountains he’d met a woman. The first since the days of Izabella. Unexpectedly, the acquaintance had turned into intense flirtation, and had brought him to the viewing terrace of this horribly crowded mountain where everything was overpriced.

  He glanced at his watch. Two hours had passed since the time they’d agreed to meet. The wind was getting stronger and colder, and a gray cloud was rapidly approaching Kasprowy, erasing successive ranges from the landscape. On top of it all he needed to piss. Time to accept that he’d been stood up and go home.

  He bought a ticket and went up to the cableway. Evidently the rest of the tourists weren’t concerned about the imminent breakdown in the weather, because not counting the operator, the downward car was completely empty. Janusz Hauptmann sat on a narrow bench and tried not to look down into the abyss.

  5

  At the transit station sixty tourists patiently waited for the automatic gates to let them enter the car to the summit. Most of them were newbies, so the group gazed at Kasprowy Peak and at the cables rising sharply upward. The idea of entrusting your life to something that looked like a fishing line stretched between the rocks prompted a mild sense of unease.

  Joanna Banaszek wasn’t feeling uneasy—it was all the same to her. After five years of raising her two sons alone, she had finally met a man she liked enough to introduce to her kids on a joint trip to the mountains.

  It had been a mistake. It had started with hysteria and ended in aggression.

  The gates opened, letting them inside. And a good thing too—she was starting to freeze, as a cold wind had blown up. She took a sudden step, and the tip of her long umbrella got stuck in the platform grating; people went past her, hemming and hawing.

  Antoni, her new guy, helped her free the umbrella and gently pushed her inside, then the doors closed behind them. Her older son scowled and seized the umbrella from Antoni, then presented it to his mom with a smile.

  As she glanced up at the rocky summit, it crossed her mind that something was bound to happen up there. Either one of them would push the other over the precipice or they’d make peace—in any case, she couldn’t imagine returning the same.

  6

  With a vacation mood all around him, the man known as Jasper Leong battled the urge for a beer. He was sitting over his second Coke in the farthest corner of the Yurta Café, right next to the lower cableway station, looking like one of those city types glued to their cell phone.

  In fact, Hermod was switching between the images shown by the Russian cameras, not wanting to miss the right moment. The weather worried him. The gathering cloud meant fog and a lack of visibility, then rain, which could disrupt communication with the cameras and detonators.

  He’d have to hurry.

  He watched on the screen as a man in funny old-fashioned glasses, taking tiny steps as if he had to piss, entered the cable car at the upper station—the only passenger.

  Then he watched as a pretty, well-groomed but slightly tense woman of over thirty struggled with her umbrella and boarded the car at the lower level, having a tough time squeezing into the crowd of tourists.

  He put the tablet down and reached into his backpack for his phone.

  7

  Major Anatol Gmitruk left all the climbing gear with Olaf except for a small water bottle, which he put into the side pocket of his pants. He sent his pal off to the shelter with orders to wait there and make sure the tourists didn’t drink all the beer. Then he ran at
a steady pace toward Kasprowy. For a while along level ground, without a pack, cooled by the mountain wind, it would have been a pleasure—if not for the familiar tension that always accompanied him on missions. Once again he spoke to his commander, and once again he heard confirmation that this was not an exercise.

  At the foot of Kasprowy, which in winter served as a superb ski slope located on the other side of the summit from the cableway, he slowed to a quick march. If someone were monitoring the area, running uphill among the plodding tourists might give him away.

  8

  The conductor of the downward cable car hummed along to the meaningless summertime hit coming from the radio: “Your breath is my oxygen that has its home in me.” Janusz Hauptmann sighed and closed his eyes. All his life he had suffered from vertigo, and this stretch was the worst. The car fell from the platform of the upper station as if ejected and glided downward, swiftly moving away from the wall, dangling over 650 feet above the ground. Hauptman was finding it hard to breathe.

  He only had to hold on for a few stupid minutes. The car glided on toward the station, high above the stony scree. Hauptmann opened his eyes and rejoiced at the sight of the cable car moving in the opposite direction. Once they passed each other, it would mean he was halfway there.

  9

  She was painfully aware of the dissonance. On the one hand, the austere beauty of the mountains stretching in all directions, the unlimited expanse, freedom. On the other, being crowded in a cattle car, the cheesy breath and unpleasant smells, all spiced up with crappy music, the lyrics to which a monkey must have tapped out on a typewriter: “I fill the space with normal air, seeking so-called happiness there.” Joanna Banaszek sighed—she couldn’t wait to get out of the stuffy cable car.

  She wiped the steamed-up window to get a view from above of her favorite place in the Tatras, the hotel at Kalatówki. Sitting on a broad clearing, from a distance the angular building seemed in total contrast to their situation. Here everything was light and airy, nothing but a small tin box suspended on thin strings. Over there, the granite walls stood firmly on the moraine, a symbol of stability and security. It would be nice to have dinner in a place like that—who knows, maybe the men in her life would even talk to each other.

  “Mom, look, look!” said her younger son, tugging on her sleeve and pointing.

  A cable car was slowly gliding toward them from above, and from this perspective it seemed to be floating in midair.

  “It’s coming straight at us!” her older son squealed. “We’re going to crash!”

  The younger boy clung to her leg. “I don’t want to crash!”

  She felt old and tired. She wanted to be at the top already. She adored open space, cableways, chair lifts, and airplanes, but only when she was alone. With the children she always felt nervous. She wanted to see them on solid ground the whole time, far away from danger. Stupid thoughts entered her mind—in planes she thought of crashes, birds flying into the engines, speed sensors freezing. Now she was reminded of the Cavalese disaster, the time a military plane cut through an aerial tramway cable. She remembered that the passengers weren’t killed so much by the fall as by the three-ton cableway hook that crushed the car and all the people inside.

  She was glad they were halfway there.

  She looked at the approaching car, which was empty apart from the conductor and a funny little guy in old-fashioned glasses made of thin wire.

  “But I must come into the light, to get back my peace of mind” came howling out of the speakers, and the cable car abruptly stopped. The surprised passengers fell against each other, mumbling apologies.

  Both cars swayed side by side.

  10

  He was halfway to the summit, with the people standing on the viewing terrace clearly in sight, when his phone rang.

  “You can’t go in the front door. It’s bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “He got in touch and told us to stop both cars on the upper stretch. He threatened a disaster if we don’t fulfill his demands or if we try anything stupid like sending in a helicopter or the army or attempting to evacuate the passengers.”

  “How many?”

  “Two people going down, sixty-one up. Lots of kids.”

  “Any chance he’s bluffing?”

  “Zero. We’re installing a telescope that will give us a precise view of the cableway, then we’ll know more. What do you think?”

  Anatol tried to think like a terrorist. “Not the supports. They’re too solid. And the tourist trail runs past, too many people are looking. The explosive charges should be on the cables, that’s the weakest element. And somewhere high up—the lower station is in the forest; it’s hard to monitor that.”

  “We think so too. Any ideas?”

  “One. I’ll try by the back entrance.”

  “We’ll keep you up to date.”

  He hung up. No good luck, thank you, we’re with you. That was the good old army. He’d often thought of staying a little longer, but a promise is a promise. Even though the person he’d sworn it to didn’t care, he had to keep his word. Twenty years, then retirement. He’d seen what happened to people who were addicted to the service.

  11

  “No way!” said the conductor.

  “But I can’t hold it,” said Hauptmann.

  “Are you a child, sir?”

  Hauptmann had too small a bladder to be put off. He really had to go.

  “I’m gonna take a leak in the corner,” he said.

  A tense silence filled the car, excluding the pop song on the radio. “You said I inspire rage, you treat me like I’m guilty,” crooned the singer.

  “All right, all right,” said the conductor. “I’ve been there before too.”

  He turned a key on the control panel, went up to the doors, and parted them a couple inches.

  “Just be quick.”

  Hauptman went up to the gap in the door, overlooking Mount Giewont, where a cold wind was blowing; he pressed himself against the doors, closed his eyes to avoid looking into the abyss, and took the longest piss of his life.

  “You watched as I reeled and fell, into the chasm bottomless as hell,” said the pop singer.

  12

  Hermod raised an eyebrow when he noticed the doors of the cable car were ajar. He hadn’t expected them to start playing tricks so quickly. He tapped out the detonation code on his phone, suspended his thumb over the green button, and waited. It would mean changing his plans, but not by much.

  Although the doors had only opened a few inches. Too small for someone to fit through. What were these Poles up to?

  Someone stuck a finger through the gap. Seconds later, water trickled from the finger. He stared in amazement, then sighed and pressed the red button to cancel the code.

  13

  The whole car burst into laughter as they watched what was happening next door. Only Antoni didn’t laugh—he was trying to extract information from the conductor.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s up,” he said. “But I can assure you we’re one hundred percent safe. It’s a beautiful day, the cableway has its own emergency energy supply, and worst case they’ll take us away in a special car and we’ll get down by ladder. Sometimes there are brief interruptions caused by gusts of wind, but they never last longer than fifteen minutes. Please have a little patience.”

  “Okay. But I don’t get why they haven’t informed you about what’s going on. You’ve got a radio and a cell phone. Please find out why we’ve stopped.”

  “For God’s sake, just be patient.” The conductor was trying to hide his anxiety. Sure, service interruptions and stops were frequent, but they always went by in an atmosphere of jolly banter with his colleagues. This time all he’d heard from them was a cold, laconic order to wait. And not a word more.

  14

  Anatol was certain the entrance to the platform from the station building side was being monitored by the terrorists. He thought about heading for the rock face stre
tching below the cableway platform. A steep, stony crag where nobody walked and nobody climbed.

  He passed beneath the seats of the seasonally inactive ski lift and reached one of the ridges of Kasprowy. Behind him was a mountain pasture and the tourist trails, in front of him a sheer drop. Far below lay the town of Zakopane, flooded in sunshine. But up here the clouds were blocking the light, and the change in the weather was coming on fast. About half a mile ahead, suspended in midair, the two cable cars gently rippled.

  He took off his red jacket and stuffed it under a stone. He’d freeze, but in a gray T-shirt and dark pants he’d be almost invisible against the rocks. Even if the terrorists had mounted cameras on the cable cars, they would have to be small battery-powered devices, unable to rotate or change focus, transmitting poor-quality black-and-white images. The chances of people in the cars spotting him were very small, and the chances of him being spotted by a camera were nonexistent.

  He wove his way along the ridge and started an easy traverse climb toward the upper cableway station, which was perched on the cliff about a hundred yards higher up and two hundred to the right. At first it wasn’t much of a challenge. A shelf, a straight chimney, a convenient crevice, a bit of not too steep slab. A short, easy stretch.

  Fifteen minutes later he was beneath the station; above him he could see the protruding platform grating and the cables on which the cars were hanging.

  A couple of hundred feet to climb and he’d be at his destination. By now he had an idea what to do next. And although he was shivering from the cold, he was pleased to see the first line of clouds appearing over the ridge, gray and tattered.

  16

  Hermod’s emotions never got in the way of his work. And although he didn’t blink, delay, or hesitate, it wasn’t a nice thing to do. He tapped out the nine-figure code on the telephone and pressed the green button.

  17

  The climb was harder than it had looked. The crevices were full of wet moss, every other stone came off in his hands, the wind was getting stronger, and his fingers were going numb. He also had no equipment, no ropes, and no partner, which didn’t help matters. The terrain wasn’t demanding, but a stupid mistake or a nasty surprise and he’d end up a heap of broken bones three hundred feet below.