The Painted Messiah Read Free

pausing to consider or to test or even to think. Exactly as Kate climbed.
    Stopping at last if only to understand his progress, Ethan felt his nerves betray him. He began to reach for his next hold but then hesitated. Kate was waiting just under the top of the cliff and watching him now. Could she see he was getting into trouble? Hear it in his breathing? He made a long reach, and found himself unable to catch a decent toehold. He pulled back and probed more carefully. Nothing. He looked down at his rock and felt his hands beginning to sweat. All he could think about was a climb in the Bergell Valley some years earlier. The rock had frightened him before he began. About halfway up, fighting it every inch of the way, his fingers had suddenly released their hold as if they had a mind of their own. It happened sometimes when a climber was tense or frustrated or scared. If you were wearing a harness, you could kick away and hang quietly until you got your focus back. In a free climb you were dead.
    For a moment, he could not bring himself to let go with his left hand. It was the same thing that had happened on that day. First the muscles locked up. Then the fingers opened. Still clutching the rock, Ethan brushed his toe over the stone until he found a small crevice. It was not sufficient to hold him, only to take some of the weight out of his fingers. He looked now for another ledge, and realized his left hand had begun to cramp.
    Taking his weight into his toes he finally broke free with his hand and tried to shake the blood back into it. As he did this, he stretched his left leg out, going for a fresh toehold, and almost fell when a cramp struck his hip. This was the point when you kicked out and laughed, trusting to your ground person and the rope. You lost, the rock won. Maybe you tried again tomorrow. Maybe you took up hiking.
    He heard Kate now. 'Get left. You've got a decent shelf not more than ten feet away. Ethan tried looking for it. 'Trust me. It's there. Get to it now. Take your time, but do it, don't think about it.' It was not what she said, but the fact that she was there, that she understood he was in trouble.
    Ethan focused on her voice with that faint, soft feminine British accent. He forgot his feet, his cramp, his fingers. Forgot death itself. 'Your left foot is on it, Boy. A little higher. Good.' He pulled himself higher, stepping into a thin shelf, and found another fingerhold, nothing more than a pocket within the stone. His hands felt soft, the cramp in his hip faded. He shook his hands but it was only habit. The blood was flowing, his strength returning. And then he found himself directly opposite Kate, both of them just under the edge of the cliff.
    'I thought I was going to lose you,' she whispered.
    'Cramps,' he said.
    'They don't ask how, they just ask how far down. Are you good now?'
    'I'm good.'
    'Team Two, we are in place. Repeat. We are in place.'
    The Palace Hotel, Lucerne

    From the rooftop of the Palace Hotel Sir Julian Corbeau pulled his gaze from the explosion of colour in the sky over Lucerne and fixed his eyes upon the Contessa Claudia de Medici, a slender, middle aged woman standing close to the parapet. She had been in the country almost two decades without once venturing out to a social gathering of this sort. Corbeau wondered why she had finally relented. It wasn't a fondness for fireworks, he was sure of that. The bankers never failed to invite her, of course, but it was only a matter of form.
    Her sole extravagance was her annual party for a hundred or so of Switzerland's social elite. Everyone Corbeau knew attended it. It was, they liked to say, the party of the year - littered with luminaries from around the world. When they had begun, Corbeau's troubles in America had created something of a scandal, and that may have been the reason she had overlooked him, but more recently, as America-bashing had become something more than just posturing, Julian Corbeau had enjoyed a burgeoning