Read Online The Secret Agent by Francine Mathews - Free Book Online

not linger in doorways, growing cold when he might be skiing. He saved his conversation for the longer twilight of spring and summer, when the Haute Savoie emptied of the hungry-faced women from New York and Paris with their flowing fur coats, their brass-colored hair. By May the door to Max’s workshop high on the hillside stood ajar each afternoon, and the effort of a hike through the meadowand wildflowers was rewarded with cold beer from the barrel he kept in the stone cellar of his old Savoyard farmhouse. There was a time when Sabine herself had begged to accompany Jacques, with no greater reward in view than to study Max’s bent head in silence as he manipulated the images on his design screen.
    To see him thus, profile turned toward the summit, new-minted skis making twin tracks through the powder, was a source of relief. The rumors, Jacques thought, must be wrong. Max had strapped a pack to his back along with a length of rope, a small ice pick and an avalanche beacon; he was intending, then, to venture
off-piste.
Risky, perhaps, so late in the ski season; the winter had been unusually mild, and the cornices in the high peaks trembled in sunlight, the avalanche cannon boomed at dawn and the thunder of sudden snow slides roared through the town most afternoons. Nothing Max had not heard before.
    Jacques shrugged at nobody in particular—perhaps an image of his wife he still carried in his mind. If Max Roderick was in the very midst of Le Praz by eight-fifteen, then he had already shot five hundred meters down the length of Jean Blanc from his home in Courchevel 1850. Nobody but a true man of the Alps skied so purposefully, and with so much gear, at this hour of the morning. Unless …
    Unless Max had spent the previous night in Le Praz itself, and was only now crawling back toward Courchevel 1850 and home. And what was more likely? Jacques’s expression darkened. Max Roderick would never take the
piste
into Le Praz if he intended to ski the backcountry, as his gear suggested. Had he awakened in his stone house in the early hours of morning, and glanced at the fresh powder blanketing the peaks, nothing would have kept him from the tram that led to the heights of Saulire, thetricky demanding couloirs and the broad, flat bowls where he loved to test his skill and exhaust his strength. Jacques watched Max disappear from sight, feeling a flare of rage toward the man. It was only a matter of time before Max abandoned Courchevel like all the rest; he had merely pretended, after all, to be one of them.
    The rumors had begun four days before, when the Dash 7 from Paris with its forty-seven passengers overshot the runway that ran alongside the Boulevard Creux and ended, engulfed in snow from nose to tail, on the neighboring
piste.
This was not entirely an unusual occurrence. The runway was just slightly more than a thousand feet long and was set at an incline—downhill for takeoff, uphill for landing. Private planes, unused to alpine conditions and thin air, routinely ended nose-up in the groomed expanse beyond the altiport; for a Dash 7 to do so, however, was news. The miscalculation might potentially be called a
crash.
    Jacques had witnessed the affair himself from the comfort of Boulevard Creux, where he sat drinking a robust red wine from a local vintner and delicately considering the merits of a terrine. He heard the whine of the Dash 7’s engines; from the corner of his eye, saw the clumsy shape descend like a falling house on the tilted landscape. The terrine, he decided, was not without merit but strove for too much. He pushed it aside and concentrated on a fine soft cheese from a dairy farm near Méribel.
    Cries of horror and immense excitement—a woman’s scream from the adjacent table—an overturned chair. Jacques stood, his napkin still tucked into the collar of his shirt as though he were a yokel, and not an institution in the life of the most glamorous ski area known toman—and stared out at the huddled