Chapter 34 - The St. Gallen Trail
The train ride from Basel to St. Gallen was a blur of frosted glass, alpine conifers, and razor-sharp anxiety.
We had left the freighter before it reached the main locks of Zeebrugge. The man with the wand never made it off the catwalk—his radio and device now rested at the bottom of the English Channel, along with the false papers Arthur had bought. We had slipped into the freezing waters of the estuary aboard an emergency tender, cutting through the commercial traffic until we hit the Belgian coastline, cold to our marrows, shivering, and alive.
Now, three days later, the Swiss Federal Railway carriage was nearly silent, save for the muffled clatter of wheels gliding over seamless mountain rails.
I looked at the photograph from Eleanor’s ledger, flattened against my knee beneath the fold of a German newspaper.
*Subject Two: Julian’s son.*
The boy’s name, according to the marginalia in Eleanor’s hand, was Nicholas. In the photograph, he couldn't have been older than eight, sitting in an austere, high-ceilinged room with leaded windows overlooking a snow-draped courtyard. His eyes were uncannily like Julian’s—the same pale hazel, slightly hooded, harboring an innate wariness that no child should ever possess.
Julian had claimed for seven years that his first marriage had ended without issue. He had paraded his second wife, a cosmetic heiress from Milan, through the family galas, playing the role of the devoted, childless socialite while secretly maintaining a secondary trust fund in the canton of Appenzell.
He hadn't been hiding the boy from the press. He had been hiding him from our father.
"Look, Mommy," Maisie said, her breath fogging the double-paned window. "Castles."
Far up on the ridgeline, emerging through the swirling mist of Mount Säntis, stood the stone towers of the private academies that dotted the hills of St. Gallen—sanctuaries for the hyper-wealthy, where tuition was settled in gold bullion and privacy was guarded by private security firms staffed by former cantonal police.
"Not castles, Maisie," I murmured, checking the address scribbled on the corner of the ledger. "Fortresses."
We disembarked at the main station into air so cold it felt like inhaling pulverized glass. I had bought Maisie a thick down parka in Zurich with cash, its hood lined with faux fur that shadowed her face. To any casual observer, we were merely a well-off mother and daughter arriving for the winter ski break.
But beneath my layers of wool and cashmere, the weight of the pistol pressed against my ribs, and every black Mercedes idling by the taxi rank felt like a gun barrel aimed at the center of my skull.
We took an electric cab up the serpentine mountain roads toward the *Institut Sankt Katharina*, an ancient boarding school perched on a limestone ledge overlooking the valley. As the car climbed, the signal on my new burner phone began to flicker, hunting for towers through the heavy mountain snowfall.
Then, a text message arrived.
No sender ID. Just eight words:
*THE ARCHIVIST IS DEAD. THEY ARE INSIDE KATHARINA.*
I leaned forward immediately, tapping the glass partition separating us from the driver.
"Turn around," I said, my voice cutting through the soft classical music playing on the radio.
The driver glanced in his rearview mirror, surprised. "Madame? We are only two hundred meters from the front gates."
"Turn the car around now," I repeated, reaching into my bag.
May you like
Before the driver could react, a deafening crack shattered the silence of the alpine road. Up ahead, through the curtain of falling snow, the heavy iron wrought gates of the *Institut Sankt Katharina* were suddenly illuminated by the blinding flash of an emergency flare, followed instantly by the deep, concussive boom of a diesel explosion within the courtyard.
***
