Rules of Deception (16 page)

33

Jonathan sat with knees drawn
to his chest, his back against the wall. A nook in the corner opposite held a vase of fresh flowers. A crude iron crucifix hung above it. The shelter had been built into the hillside by the Swiss Alpine Club and resembled a grotto, its floor and walls fashioned from stone and mortar. From where he sat, he had a clear view of all paths converging to his position. One led from the east, a level track tracing the hillside’s contour. Another climbed from the lake, zigging and zagging in a series of switchbacks. A third track approached from the west. Beyond the hillocks that fell steeply away, through the torrential rain, the whipped gray crescent of Lago Maggiore filled the horizon.

Simone lay on her back on the rough flooring, her clothing drenched, her chest heaving. “Do you see anyone?” she asked, panting. “Anyone at all? Are they following us?”

“No,” said Jonathan. “There’s nobody out there.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God.” With a grunt, she pushed herself to a sitting position. “This is too much,” she said, cradling her head in her hands. “I’m terrified. That man…Blitz…I’ve never seen a man shot like that. What are we going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

Abruptly, Simone lifted her head, as if seized by an idea. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” she said. “We’re going to get off this mountain. We’re going to take a bus into Lugano and find a place to dry off. Then we’ll buy you new clothes. A suit. Something professional. Then we’ll cut and dye your hair and put you on a train to Milan. That’s what we’re going to do.”

“I need a passport first,” said Jonathan. “Preferably one without my name or picture inside it.”

Simone waved off her initial plan. “Okay, forget the train. We’ll wait for a while, then go back and get the car. We’ll drive across the border. They wave everyone through. They won’t stop a banker in a Mercedes. I’ll come with you.”

As she spoke, her eyes bore into him. Christ, thought Jonathan, if I look as scared as she does, we’re in trouble.

“And then what?” he said. “Keep running?” Hauling himself to his feet, he pointed across the mountainside in the direction of Blitz’s villa. “Look back there. The police know all about the stunt I pulled at the railway station. My fingerprints are all over Blitz’s office. I’m the killer, Simone. I’m the guy who blew Blitz’s brains out. Whatever chance I had of convincing them that what happened yesterday was self-defense is gone.”

“That’s why you need to leave the country.”

“That won’t solve anything.”

“But you’d be alive. You’d be safe.”

“For how long? They won’t stop looking for me just because I crossed the border. They’ll send my picture to every country in Europe.”

Jonathan crossed his arms, trying to imagine how it would play out if he left the country. Time and again, he came to a dead end. He couldn’t see it, partly because his mind wasn’t conditioned to cut and run. He’d spent years battling up impossible slopes in impossible conditions. After a while, he’d gotten to thinking that you could do anything if only you didn’t quit. You didn’t have to be great. You just had to keep going.

When he was young and brash and a little too cocksure, he used to say that he was against retreating on general principle. It was that tenacity that had gotten him through college and medical school in seven years, and had led him to stay in field medicine when, one by one, his colleagues had fallen away.

“They plumb broke and ran,” Emma used to say, after a shot or two of Jack Daniel’s. “Cowards, the lot of ’em. Hearts the size of mice, and their John Henry Thomas not much bigger.”

He heard her voice speaking the words as clearly as if she were sitting next to him. Suddenly, his eyes felt hot, irritated. He wanted to hold her hand. He yearned for her strength.

Simone looked at Jonathan from beneath a tangle of wet hair. “What the hell is going on?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What was our girl involved in?”

“I don’t know.”

“She never told you? How could she keep something like this a secret? You must have had an idea. It’s why you keep going on with this…why you keep chasing her ghost. Tell me the truth, Jonathan. Were you in it with her? A team? I’ve heard of couples doing this type of thing together.”

“What type of thing is that?”

“I don’t know what to call it. Spying. Being an agent. I mean, that’s what this is, isn’t it? The fake driver’s license. The men after the bags. All that money. One hundred thousand francs. It wasn’t a thief who shot Blitz, was it?”

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

The answer seemed to confirm her worst suspicions. Her shoulders slumped, as if weighed down by the sum of her accusations.

Jonathan slid across the floor and sat next to her. “I don’t know what Emma was involved in,” he said. “I wish to God I did.”

Simone held his gaze a moment too long. “I don’t know if I believe you.”

Jonathan looked away, running his hands over his face, struggling for a clue as to what he should do next. “And so,” he said finally. “What are you going to do?”

“I told you.
We
are going to find our way into Lugano and get you some new clothes. Then we’re going to change how you look. And afterward, we’re—”

“Simone, stop right there. You can’t stay with me. This whole thing is out of control.”

“You expect me to leave?”

“When we get down the mountain, we’re going to split up. You’re going to Davos to see Paul, and you’re going to forget that this ever happened.”

“And you?”

Jonathan made a decision. “I’m going to find out what she was doing.”

“Why? What good can it bring? You’ve got to look after yourself.”

“I am. Don’t you see?”

Nodding, Simone clawed in her bag for a cigarette. She lit it and blew out a cloud of smoke. He noticed that her hands weren’t shaking anymore. “At least let me help you with some clothes,” she said. “Before I go…”

Jonathan put his arm around Simone and hugged her. “That much you can do. Now, let’s see if we can make any sense out of this stuff I took from the office.”

He opened Blitz’s briefcase and began to rummage through the papers he’d grabbed from the desk. Most were bills, miscellaneous housekeeping items. He handed them to Simone, who cast a quick glance at each, then tossed them back into the briefcase. Neither of them found anything to shed light on who Blitz was or who he worked for.

In a side pocket, Jonathan discovered a Palm PDA: a phone, word processor, e-mail, and web browser all in one. He hit the on button. The unit lit up, activated to the phone function. In the upper corner, an asterisk appeared and began to blink, indicating an incoming message. He clicked on the asterisk. The unit demanded a password. He punched in 1-1-1-1, then 7-7-7-7. Access denied. He swore under his breath.

“What’s that?” asked Simone, sliding closer to him, her eyes focused on the screen.

“Blitz’s PDA. Everything’s password protected. I can’t access the software. Not e-mail, not Word, not the browser. What do you use for a password?”

“It depends. I’ve got a different password for each account. I used to use my mother’s birthday, and then the street address of my home in Alexandria where I grew up. These days, I’ve been sticking with 1-2-3-4. It’s easier that way.”

And Jonathan? He had only one password. Emma’s birthday. 11-12-77.

Suddenly, he remembered the bracelet containing the flash drive he’d found in Emma’s overnight bag. He slipped it off his wrist, pried it open, and plugged the flash drive into the Palm’s USB port. An icon titled “Thor” appeared on the screen. He double-clicked on it, and a screen appeared, asking for his password. “Damn it all.”

“Is that yours?” Simone inquired, reaching out to touch the flash drive.

“Emma’s. I found it in her bags when I went back to the hotel. It wants a password, too.” He tried Emma’s birthday, then his own. He tried their newest ATM PIN, then the one before that. He tried their anniversary. All failed.

Plowing through the papers, he located the memo addressed to Eva Kruger on ZIAG stationery concerning Project Thor. “I’m going to call and ask them about it.”

“Who?”

“ZIAG, or whatever the name is of the company Blitz worked for.”

Simone made a halfhearted attempt to pry the Palm out of his hands. “No, Jonathan, don’t. It will only get you into more trouble.”

“More trouble?” Jonathan stood and walked to the far side of the grotto.

He activated the phone and heard a dial tone in his ear. At least that worked without a password. Memo in hand, he punched in the number listed at the top of the page. The phone rang twice before being answered. “Good afternoon, Zug Industriewerk. How may I direct your call?”

The voice was young, female, and eminently professional.

“Eva Kruger, please.”

“Whom may I announce?”

Her husband, actually,
Jonathan responded silently. He hadn’t prepared an answer because he hadn’t expected the company to exist. “A friend,” he said after a moment.

“Your name, sir?”

“Schmid,” said Jonathan. It was the closest thing to Smith he could think of.

“One moment.” A neutered beep sounded as the call was transferred. A voice mail message responded. “This is Eva. I’m away from my desk. If you leave your name and number, I’ll return your call promptly. For further assistance, dial the star key to speak with my assistant, Barbara Hug.”

The language was Swiss German spoken fluently and with a Bernese twang. There was no question but that Eva Kruger was a native Swiss. The problem was that it was Emma’s voice. Emma who stumbled over
“grüezi,”
and couldn’t pronounce
“chuechikaestli”
if her life depended on it. Emma who, besides a decent grasp of what she called her “schoolgirl’s French,” was a self-admitted imbecile when it came to languages other than the Queen’s English.

Jonathan punched the star key. He wanted to speak with Barbara Hug. He wanted to ask if that was her real name, or if she took it only for liaisons involving false eyelashes and skimpy lingerie, not to mention envelopes packed to bursting with cold, hard cash.

But a moment later, Fräulein Hug’s voice mail offered a curt message and he hung up.

Immediately, he redialed the number. When the receptionist answered, he gave the name “Schmid” again. Now he had an alias, too.

“I’d like to speak with
Mrs.
Kruger’s superior,” he said, remembering the wedding ring with the engraved anniversary. “It’s an emergency.”

“I’m afraid he’s busy at the moment.”

“Of course he is,” railed Jonathan.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Jonathan had found the envelope containing the passport-sized photos of Emma and a man named Hoffmann. “Give me Mr. Hoffmann.”

“One moment, please.”

A male voice picked up the line. “Mr. Schmid? This is Hannes Hoffmann. Mrs. Kruger is out of the country. What did you wish to speak with her about?”

“About Thor.”

Silence. Clearly, Jonathan didn’t have the password to get past Hoffmann either. Then, surprisingly: “Yes, what about Thor?”

“I think you may have a problem getting it wrapped up as soon as you’d like.”

“Mr. Schmid, I’m afraid we don’t discuss business with strangers.”

“I’m not a stranger. I told you I’m a friend of Eva’s. It’s just that you shouldn’t be relying on Gottfried Blitz, either.” Jonathan waited for another rejoinder about not discussing business with strangers, but all he got was dead air. “You know him, don’t you? I mean his name is on a memo you sent out.”

“Yes.” The response was tentative. “What about Mr. Blitz?”

“He’s dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They got him this morning. Snuck into his house and shot him in the head.”

“Who is this?” asked Hoffmann.

“I already told you. My name is Schmid.”

“How do you know about Mr. Blitz?”

“I was there. I saw him.”

“Impossible.” Hoffmann said it dismissively, as if Jonathan was referring to a practical joke that couldn’t be pulled off.

“Send someone to his house if you don’t believe me. The police are already there. Give him a call and you’ll find out.”

“I will. Immediately. Now, tell me who this really is?”

“Check the phone number.”

There was a pause, followed by the sound of a sharp intake of breath. “Who is this? What did you do to Blitz?”

Jonathan hung up. From now on, he was going to be the one asking the questions.

34

In accordance with the rules
that applied to all homicides, the body of Theodoor A. Lammers, chief executive of Robotica AG, Dutch citizen, suspected agent provocateur for an unknown country, and victim of a professional assassin, was transferred to the University Hospital morgue and given a complete autopsy. The procedure was performed by Dr. Erwin Rohde, chief medical examiner for the canton of Zurich.

Rohde was sixty years old, an elfish man with watery blue eyes and a cap of gray hair. There was no question about the cause of death on this one, he thought, as he stood over the body and examined the wounds to the face and chest. If the shots to the head hadn’t killed the victim, the shot to the chest had. The round black bullet hole was positioned directly above the heart.

Murder was relatively uncommon in Zurich, and in Switzerland on the whole. The country had recorded a total of sixty-seven homicides the previous year. Less than the American city of San Diego, which at just over one million inhabitants had one-seventh the population of Switzerland. Of those sixty-seven, twenty died at the hands of organized crime, the victims primarily criminals themselves. But he had seen nothing like this in years.

Selecting a scalpel, Rohde made an incision across the top of the forehead and continued along the circumference of the head. After peeling back the skin (half over the face, half to the nape of the neck), he used an electric saw to cut off the top of Lammers’s skull. It was messy work. The gunshots had more or less eviscerated the brain.

Rohde dug out several misshapen pieces of lead and dropped them into the basin to his right. The bullets were dumdums, or hollow points, that mushroomed on impact. He freed another piece of metal and paused.
Isn’t that odd?
he thought to himself. Instead of a normal healthy pink, the area around the bullet fragment was colored a brackish brown. Normally, such coloring was indicative of necrosis, the unprogrammed killing of cellular matter by an outside source, either an infection, inflammation, or poisoning.

Rohde excised a chunk of the cerebellum and deposited it in a specimen bag. Leaving the closing to his assistant, he set to work examining the chest wound. The bullet had pancaked upon striking the heart, but was otherwise intact. It was a quick business to remove it. Adjusting the overhead lamps, he bent to study the organ. The heart was colored a rich, healthy maroon. All except the tissue surrounding the wound. There, the muscle was the same fecal brown he’d observed in the brain.

Rohde excised a nub of tissue and held it to the light. There could be no doubt that what he was observing was an advanced case of necrosis. This specimen, too, he preserved.

Scooping up the plastic bags, he took off his robe and hurried from the operating theater.

Two minutes later, he arrived in the forensics lab. “I need to use the GC-MS,” he said, referring to the gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer

Something on the bullet was killing the flesh.

C31-H42-N2-O6.

Erwin Rohde stared at the formula displayed in the mass spectrometer’s readout, waiting for the machine to translate it into a known substance. Ten seconds passed without any words appearing. The spectrometer, capable of identifying over 64,000 substances, was stumped. A second request to analyze the tissue offered the same result. Rohde shook his head. It was the first time in twenty years that the machine had failed him.

Writing down the formula, he hurried back to his office. That it was a toxin or poison, he was certain. The question was what kind of toxin. Rohde tried running the molecular signature through his own computer. Again he came up with a blank. Perplexed, he slid his chair back. There was one man he could count on to provide him the answer.

Consulting his address book, Rohde dialed an overseas number: 44 for England, 20 for London. The four-digit prefix belonged to New Scotland Yard.

“Wickes,” answered a dry English voice.

Rohde introduced himself, stating that he had attended Wickes’s seminar the past summer titled “New Forensic Technologies.” Wickes was a busy man who gave short shrift to social niceties. “What is it, then?”

Rohde offered a summary of Lammers’s postmortem and the mass spectrometer’s failure to identify the compound causing necrosis of the brain tissue and heart muscle.

“Just the composition,” Wickes cut in. “Leave the rest to me.”

Rohde read off the list of components. When Wickes returned to the phone, his tone was a good deal less imperious. “Where did you say you found that tissue?”

“Around gunshot wounds to the head and chest.”

“Interesting,” said Wickes.

“Do you mean you’ve found the substance?”

“Of course I found it. The compound you gave me is that of a batrachotoxin.”

Rohde admitted to having never heard of such a toxin.

“No reason for you to have,” said Wickes. “Not in your neck of the woods, is it? From the Greek
batrachos
, meaning frog.”

“Frog poison?”

“Genus
Dendrobates.
Poison dart frogs, to be exact. Little devils size of your thumb. Found in rainforests in Central America and western Colombia. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica. Batrachotoxin is one of the most lethal in the world. One hundred micrograms—about the weight of two grains of salt—is sufficient to kill a one-hundred-fifty-pound man. The poison’s only recorded use, other than by frogs to protect themselves, of course, is by indigenous Indians who coat their darts with the stuff when they go hunting for monkeys and the like.”

“So the bullets were coated? But why?”

Instead of answering the question, Wickes posed one of his own. “Do your men have a line on the killer? Don’t have him in custody, do they?”

“No.”

“Didn’t expect so. I’m certain that he’s a professional.”

Rohde told him that the police did believe that the murder had, in fact, been committed by a trained killer.

Wickes cleared his throat, and when he spoke his voice had assumed a conspiratorial edge. “Reminds me of something I saw when I was with the Royal Marines. This was in El Salvador a while back, 1981 or ’82. We were over from Belize, engaging in joint exercises with the Yanks. Back then, the country was on fire. Everyone jockeying for power. Communists, fascists, even a few democrats. The government was running death squads in the countryside, killing off all opposition. Nothing more than cold-blooded murder, really. A few of the soldiers were Indians and none too happy about what they were being asked to do. They’re a superstitious bunch. Believe in ghosts and the spirit world. Shamans. Shape-shifters. You name it. They’d a ritual to protect themselves against the ghosts of the men and women they killed. To stop the victims’ spirits from haunting them, they’d dip their bullets into poison. Kind of kill the soul before it left the body.”

“That’s terrible,” said Rohde.

“You know who trained those squads, don’t you?” asked Wickes.

“What do you mean, ‘trained them’?”

“Taught them their craft. Put them into the field. Made them do what they do.”

“I have no idea,” said Rohde.

“It was the Yanks. The Company. That’s what they called themselves back then. You want to find your killer, that’s where you better start looking.”

“With ‘the Company’? Do you mean the CIA?”

“That’s right. Bunch of bloody bastards.”

Wickes hung up without a goodbye.

Erwin Rohde sat down. He needed a moment to digest what he had just learned. Poisoned bullets. Assassins. Things like this simply didn’t happen in Switzerland.

Almost reluctantly, he picked up the phone and dialed the personal number of Chief Inspector Marcus von Daniken.