Chapter 37 Thomas
Thomas
Iknew I should’ve slept longer, but despite the drugs the doctor had forced down my throat, I had too much adrenaline coursing through me to rest properly.
When I had shut my eyes, my dreams replayed the night before on an endless loop.
Some part of my subconscious mind then offered one disastrous version of the Council session after another, doom-filled predictions that claimed all our efforts had been for naught.
So I rose on unsteady legs and made my way back into the living room.
The Baroness sat by a roaring fire, snuggled beneath a woolen blanket.
Her eyes were fixed on the flames, though I doubted she was actually watching the wood burn.
I sat on the end of the couch closest to her, not wanting to be alone as we waited for news.
The radio played Mozart.
According to the CIA woman, it had been playing Mozart for the last hour—a string quartet, delicate and precise, utterly at odds with the tension coiling through the farmhouse.
Every few minutes, an announcer would break in with weather reports, traffic updates, and the mundane business of a wintery morning.
And every few minutes, we would all stop breathing, waiting for news that didn’t come.
“They should have announced something by now.” Marcus stood by the window, his burly arms crossed as he watched the road as if expecting trouble. “The Council convened at ten. It’s almost noon.”
“These things take time,” the Baroness said, pulling the blanket up to her chin while somehow maintaining the aura of imperial grace. “We Swiss do not rush important decisions. It is one of our more admirable qualities, would you not agree?”
“It’s also one of your more infuriating ones, if you ask me,” Danny muttered.
“Patience, gentlemen.” The Baroness allowed herself a thin smile. “Swiss sensibility will win the day. It always does.”
Despite her confident tone and the air of command that settled so easily across her shoulders, her eyes still stared blankly at the flickering flames, even as she spoke words meant to inspire.
I watched her fingers, watched the way they pressed against each other, white at the knuckles.
I caught the way her eyes kept drifting to the radio, then away, then back again.
Her imperial mask was firmly in place, but beneath it, I knew the Baroness was as terrified as the rest of us.
Will came and sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. He’d returned from his phone call with Manakin a short time ago, his face giving away nothing. When I’d asked what Manakin said, he’d just shaken his head. “I’ll fill you in later. Let’s see how this plays out first.”
Now he was silent. His hands rested on his thighs, fingers tapping an irregular rhythm completely at odds with Mozart’s cadence. I reached over and stilled them with my own hand.
He glanced at me, something grateful flickering in his eyes.
“What if it’s not enough?” Eddie asked. He was the youngest of the American team, barely twenty-five, and he’d been pacing since dawn. “What if they just bury it? What if the Council votes for emergency powers anyway?”
“Then we will find another way,” the Baroness said.
“That’s not good enough,” Eddie said.
“No.” She met his eyes. “It rarely is.”
The Mozart continued.
A minuet now, light and playful.
I wanted to put my fist through the radio.
The woman who led the American team emerged from the back of the farmhouse, a cigarette dangling from her lips.
She’d been making her own calls, coordinating with whoever handled her end of things.
Apparently, her fear of discovery was far less than ours.
She’d chosen to use the good doctor’s telephone rather than finding an anonymous payphone as we had.
“Anything?” Marcus asked.
“Lots of chatter.” She dropped into a chair, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling. “Swiss military units are moving, and police cordons are going up around the Federal Palace. Something’s happening, but nobody’s saying what.”
“That could be good,” Will said.
“It could be bad, too. Or it could be both.” The woman shrugged. “Welcome to intelligence work.”
Bisch moved through the room to sit on the floor beside the Baroness. I think she was as surprised as the rest of us. His hands extended toward the fire, seeking warmth. Bisch hadn’t spoken since he and Will had returned from the village.
I wondered what he was thinking.
Did he believe we’d succeeded?
Or was he already planning escape routes for when everything fell apart?
Knowing Bisch and the Baroness, they’d likely planned for both.
The radio crackled.
We all froze.
“—and now, continuing our morning programming, we present—”
More Mozart. Fucking great.
A collective exhale drifted through the room.
“I’m going to lose my mind,” Danny said.
“Get in line,” Marcus replied.
The Baroness rose from her chair and tossed her blanket aside. It was a smooth motion, controlled, but I noticed the way she steadied herself against the back of the chair for just a moment. She crossed to the window, her back to us, and stared out at the snow-covered landscape.
“When I was a girl,” she said quietly, “my father told me that Switzerland was different from other nations. We did not have the luxury of size or great military strength. We survived by being useful to everyone and to no one in particular, by making ourselves indispensable. He said that as long as Switzerland remained useful, it would remain free. The moment we became a liability to the great powers, they would devour us without a second thought.”
“And now?” Will asked.
“Now I wonder if he was right.” She turned to face us. “The Order believed they could make Switzerland useful to Moscow. They were not wrong about our value—only about the methods by which they chose to subvert our way of life.”
“The method being a coup,” I said.
“The method being force.” Her eyes were hard.
“Switzerland has always understood that survival requires flexibility and accommodation, the ability to bend without breaking. What Lüthi and his conspirators never understood is that we bend by choice, not by compulsion. The moment someone tries to force Switzerland to its knees, every citizen becomes a patriot.”
“You think that’s what’s happening now?” the CIA woman asked. “In that chamber?”
“I think Josef Frei has spent forty years serving this country. I think he has seen threats come and go, crises that would have broken lesser nations. I think—” She stopped and drew a breath. “I think he will do what is right because that is who he is.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
The Baroness didn’t answer.
Another half hour passed.
The Mozart gave way to news—but only local news.
A traffic accident on the Limmatquai.
A fire in a warehouse district.
Ongoing power outages, now being attributed to “infrastructure failures under investigation.”
“Infrastructure failures,” Marcus said bitterly. “That’s one way to describe it.”
“They cannot say more until they know more,” the Baroness said. She had returned to her chair, her composure fully restored—or at least the appearance of it. “The government will not speculate publicly. It is not our way.”
“The Swiss way is driving me crazy,” Will said.
“Yes.” A ghost of a smile touched the Baroness’s lips. “It does that to outsiders.”
I shifted, and a spike of pain shot through my shoulder.
“You should rest,” Will said quietly.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You were half dead twelve hours ago.”
“And now I’m half alive. That’s an improvement, isn’t it?”
He gave me a look that said we’d be discussing this later, and I gave him one back that said I was looking forward to it.
The radio crackled again.
“We interrupt this program for a special announcement.”
The room went still. The Baroness shot to her feet, Bisch rising beside her and taking hold of her hand with a gentleness that surprised me. She winced at his touch but refused to pull away. My mind refused to process whatever that meant.
I felt Will holding his breath beside me. The others looked to do the same.
Even the air seemed to stop moving.
“We now go live to Federal Council President Josef Frei, speaking from the Federal Palace in Bern.”
Silence filled the airwaves.
Then a new voice spoke. It was older, gravelly, and carried the weight of one who’d just fought a great battle.
“My fellow citizens.”
I reached for Will’s hand. He was already reaching for mine.
“This morning, the Federal Council convened in emergency session to address the crisis that has gripped Bern and our nation. The events of the past twenty-four hours demanded our immediate attention and our most careful deliberation.”
Frei paused.
The farmhouse was deathly still.
“I speak to you now not to offer false comfort, but to share the truth. Switzerland has just faced a grave threat from men who swore oaths to serve this nation. Instead, they chose to betray it.”
The Baroness closed her eyes.
“The attacks that struck Bern last night were not the work of foreign agents or communist agitators, though a foreign hand guided many of the efforts. The assaults on Bern were orchestrated by Swiss citizens—men who believed they could seize control of our government through fear and deception. They manufactured a crisis in the false hope of using it as justification for the assumption of extraordinary powers. They sought to seize control of our government and, by extension, our nation. They failed.”
“Jesus Christ,” Danny whispered. “They actually did it.”
“This morning, acting on evidence provided to the Federal Council, we have taken decisive action. Federal Councilors Rudolf Lüthi and Hans Brenner have been placed under arrest and charged with treason against the Swiss Confederation. Additional arrests are expected in the coming days.”
Frei’s voice hardened.