The Man The Mountain Buried

Chapter Nine: The Finish Line

They walked into the finish area on live television.

Their clothes were stiff with ice and their faces were raw from the cold, and meltwater had frozen in white crusts along their sleeves. Someone near the barrier saw them first and stopped talking. Then the silence spread, one face turning after another, until the whole crowd was looking. It parted for them without a sound, a long corridor of bright jackets opening all the way to the podium.

On the big screen, Gunnar was still speaking. "My daughter was the bravest..." He saw them, and the sentence died in his mouth.

Rasmus stood at the side of the stage. His phone slipped out of his hand and clattered onto the boards. Down on the course, the television cameras swung away from the grieving father, searching the crowd, and found the daughter he had just declared dead.

Sigrid didn't stop walking until she reached the stage. She climbed the steps, took the microphone from the stand in front of her father and turned to face the world's ski press.

"My name is Sigrid Ostergaard," she said. Her voice was hoarse, but it carried across the whole valley. "Last night I went down into the Seam, and I found my mother. Liv Ostergaard has been lying in the ice for fifteen years, a few hundred meters from where we're standing." She paused, and her jaw tightened. "She isn't alone. Four rescuers who were supposed to have died in an avalanche five years ago are down there with her. Their hands are tied behind their backs. Somebody put them there."

A wave of noise broke over the crowd. Sigrid unzipped her jacket, pulled out the waterproof pouch and held it high. "I photographed every one of them."

The big screen went black. Somewhere behind the stage, the family's press team had cut the feed, and the cameras on their cranes went dark one by one. It made no difference. All across the hillside, thousands of phones were held up in the air, and every one of them was recording.

Sigrid stepped down and pressed the memory card into the hand of the nearest reporter, a grey-haired woman from a Swiss paper who looked at it as if it might burn her. "Copy it," Sigrid said. "Send it to everyone."

The police chief came pushing through the crowd with two officers behind him, his face red. He went straight for Luca.

"Luca Brenner, you're under arrest for causing last night's avalanche." He reached for his cuffs. "You nearly killed Miss Ostergaard, and you'll..."

"No."

The voice was quiet, but it stopped him. The minister had come down from the guest of honor's box, and he stepped between the chief and the mechanic who had pulled his grandson out of the lake. Two of his bodyguards moved up on either side of him without being asked.

"This man," the minister said, "is going nowhere with you."

The chief looked at the minister, then at the cameras, then at the phones. He put the cuffs away and backed off into the crowd.

Gunnar Ostergaard recovered faster than anyone. Within the hour, his lawyers had set up a table in the press tent and were reading a statement in calm, sympathetic voices. The photographs circulating online were fakes, they said, the work of a daughter unhinged by grief and a disgruntled employee who had been fired for theft. The family was deeply concerned for Sigrid's health. They also wished to note that the Seam had been made safe at dawn and now lay under a hundred thousand tons of snow. It could never be reached again by anyone.

Luca stood at the back of the tent and listened. They didn't need to say the rest. Without the bodies, there was no case. The photographs would become an argument, and arguments could be bought.

When the lawyers finished, a man in a dark coat appeared at Luca's elbow. "Mr. Ostergaard would like a word."

Sigrid was with the medics on the far side of the finish area, wrapped in a foil blanket, the minister's people standing close around her. Luca looked at her for a moment. Then he followed the man.

The VIP tent was warm and empty, all white canvas and soft carpets and heaters glowing in the corners. Gunnar sat alone at a small table. He had taken off his coat and looked like someone's kind grandfather, silver haired and tired. A silver coffee pot steamed in front of him.

He poured two cups without asking and slid one across the table.

"Sit down," he said. "You must be cold."

Luca sat. He didn't touch the coffee.

Gunnar took a sip from his own cup and set it down gently in its saucer. Then he smiled.

"You should have stayed buried, Whiteout," he said pleasantly.

Luca kept his face still. His heart did not.

"I knew the moment Reinholt sent me that photograph," Gunnar went on, in the same easy voice. "Three loops, one through the next. I watched your team's little training film years ago. Nobody else on earth ties it like that." He shook his head, almost fondly. "Two years of fixing my chairlifts. I have to admit, I admire the patience."

Before Luca could answer, the old phone buzzed in his pocket. Only one person had the number. He took it out and answered without looking away from Gunnar.

"Mags."

Her voice was flat in a way he had heard only once before, on the radio, the day his team vanished. "Tomas Verhoeven died an hour ago."

Luca didn't move.

"His oxygen line came loose in the night," Mags said. "Nobody noticed in time. The hospital is calling it a tragic error."

"Nico," Luca said.

"Nico's fine. I checked on him myself." She drew a breath. "I'm sorry."

He lowered the phone and ended the call. Across the table, Gunnar lifted his cup again and drank, his eyes calm and unhurried above the rim, as if he already knew exactly what Luca had just been told.

The bodies were under a hundred thousand tons of snow. Tomas, the man Rasmus had pushed into the ice and the only outsider who had seen the faces in the wall, was dead. The only witness left was a seventeen-year-old boy in a hospital bed.

Luca set the phone down on the whi

te tablecloth and looked across the table at the man who had just won.