Chapter 55 - Flight to the Fog
The service tunnel was barely three feet wide, lined with rusted iron rungs plunging straight down into the drainage system of the Altaussee mountain range.
I fell more than I climbed, the jagged rock tearing through my wool coat and biting into my palms. Above me, the heavy steel hatch shuddered under the concussive force of high-explosive breaching charges, but the salt mine’s ancient drainage infrastructure swallowed the sound into a low, rumbling hum.
Twenty minutes later, soaked in freezing subterranean runoff and streaked with soot and blood, I kicked through the rotting wooden slats of an abandoned ventilation outlet on the northern face of the mountain.
The Austrian winter hit me like a physical blow. The storm had intensified into a blinding whiteout, erasing the pine forests below. But three hundred yards down the mountain road, idling silently behind a snowbank with its running lights extinguished, sat the secondary extraction vehicle—the unarmored, unmarked station wagon I had paid a local mechanic ten thousand euros to park there forty-eight hours ago.
Never trust mercenaries. Never rely on a single exit. That was the rule that had kept me alive in a house where footsteps outside my bedroom door at night meant violence.
I broke through the waist-deep drifts, threw myself into the driver’s seat, and pressed the ignition. The diesel engine rumbled to life.
Plugging the encrypted phone into the dash, I watched the satellite uplink re-establish itself.
Sarah Sterling’s London medical facility had appeared on the central console’s live feed for only twenty seconds, but twenty seconds was all my private intelligence contact in Munich needed.
The notification flashed on my dashboard screen:
*Location identified: St. Jude’s Private Palliative Facility, Highgate, London. Property owned by: The Sterling Sovereign Trust.*
May you like
I stepped on the gas, the snow tires churning gravel as the car fishtailed onto the mountain pass, leaving the burning tomb of Altaussee behind. Sarah Sterling had spent forty years pretending to be a memory. It was time for the ghost to meet her accountant.
***
