The Longest Fall

Chapter 1: The Dead Man's Gift

The bar was called the Yak & Yeti, which Cleo Marchetti thought was about the most predictable name for a watering hole in Kathmandu, but the beer was cold and the rooftop had a view of the Boudhanath Stupa lit up against the night sky, so she forgave it. She sat alone at a corner table with her third Everest lager and a plate of momos she'd barely touched, flipping through the day's shots on her camera's rear screen. Peaks. Prayer flags. A sherpa's weathered hands gripping a rope. Technically proficient, emotionally dead. The kind of photographs that would earn a polite nod from an editor and a polite pass from a buyer.

She set the camera down and pressed her thumb and forefinger against the bridge of her nose. Three months since Altitude Magazine had dropped her contract. Two months since her agent, sweet Patrice with the patient voice, had suggested she "explore adjacent opportunities." One month since she'd maxed out her remaining credit card to fly to Nepal, convinced that the Himalayas would shake something loose—some spark, some fire, some version of herself that remembered why she'd started doing this in the first place.

So far, nothing.

Cleo was thirty-four, Italian-American by way of a Milanese father and a mother from Trenton, New Jersey, and she had the kind of face that looked like it was always about to argue with someone. Dark eyes, strong jaw, a nose that had been broken once on a boulder problem in Joshua Tree and had healed slightly crooked in a way she secretly liked. Her forearms were ropy with muscle from fifteen years of serious climbing, and her hands were calloused enough that she'd once lit a match off her own palm on a dare.

She was about to signal the waiter for the check when the man sat down across from her.

He didn't ask. He just appeared—dropped into the chair like a stone finding water. He was old, maybe seventy, with a face carved deep by sun and wind. White hair cropped close. Blue eyes that were bright and terrified. European, she guessed. Swiss or German. He wore a linen shirt dark with sweat despite the cool evening air, and his breathing was wrong—shallow, labored, each inhale a small act of will.

"You are Marchetti," he said. Not a question. His accent was Swiss-German, clipped and precise even through whatever was happening to his body.

"Do I know you?"

"No. I know you. I've seen your work. The Cerro Torre photographs. The Karakoram series." He swallowed hard. His hand trembled on the table. "You climb."

"I do."

"Then you must take this." He reached into his shirt and pulled out a folded piece of paper—old, soft at the creases, stained the color of weak tea. He pressed it flat on the table between them. His fingers left damp prints on the surface.

Cleo looked at it without touching it. It was hand-drawn in ink, meticulous and beautiful. A mountain rendered in topographic detail, contour lines tight and confident. But overlaid on the mountain's eastern face was something else: a structure. Rectangular chambers, passages, a series of rooms drawn into the rock itself, as if the mountain had been hollowed out. At the bottom of the structure, in a different hand and a different ink, someone had written characters she didn't recognize—angular, ornate, old.

"What is this?"

"The monastery is real," the man said. His voice had dropped to a whisper. His blue eyes locked onto hers with an intensity that made the hair on her arms stand up. "Eighth summit. Don't let Corso get it."

"Who's Corso? What monastery? Hey—"

His eyes rolled back. His body seized once, a full-body spasm that knocked his chair sideways, and then he was on the floor of the rooftop bar, and Cleo was on her knees beside him shouting for help, and the waiter was running, and the old man's hand found her wrist and gripped it with astonishing strength for exactly three seconds before it went slack.

Jürgen Haldt, as she'd learn his name was from the ID in his wallet, was dead before the ambulance arrived. The hospital would call it a massive myocardial infarction—a heart attack, sudden and total. The police would take a statement from Cleo and return his personal effects to the Swiss embassy. They would not ask about the map, because by then Cleo had already folded it into her jacket pocket.

She told herself she'd turn it in the next day.

She didn't.