The Lions Of Lucerne

Even though it hadn’t been easy getting close to the senator, André had eventually succeeded. While he didn’t have the political network that Mitch’d had, he was an excellent fact finder and quickly assembled his own dossier on the New York senator and the causes closest to his cold heart. Several months later, through a partner’s wife at his firm, André was able to wrangle an invitation to the Gold Circle Ball of the International Diplomats’ Forum.

At the black-tie affair, André was every bit as striking in his tuxedo as Mitch would have been. He came to the event bolstered by a couple of martinis, convinced he would be able to seduce the senator. The senator had indeed noticed André, but it took “coincidentally” bumping into him at several more important functions before the two had a real conversation.

Once they had their first “date,” André wisely played hard to get, acting unimpressed with the senator’s lifestyle and power, which only served to set the hook deeper. Snyder was soon thoroughly taken with André and couldn’t get enough of him. Jealous and insecure, he wanted André with him every moment.

Lately, though, Snyder had seemed tense. None of the signs would have been visible to a casual observer, but André had been studying him long enough to know when something was afoot, and whatever it was, it was very big.

All of his experience as a lawyer told André that he could be in a lot of trouble snooping around in the life of one of the country’s most powerful senators, but he wasn’t after state secrets. He wanted personal secrets, and André knew the man was dirty. He knew he was responsible for the deaths of Mitch and Simon, and André wanted to hang him with that, if not something equally damning. He also knew that if Snyder ever caught on to him, an accident would happen just as easily to him as it had to Mitch and Simon.

When Snyder had sneaked out of the house shortly after receiving the first strange phone call around midnight, André had known something important was happening. He’d let himself out a side door and caught the senator getting into a cab a half a block down the street. The rain made it difficult to see, but André managed to get the cab’s number and soon thereafter caught one himself.

The senator was in a hurry and didn’t take many precautions against being followed. André had no trouble staying with him. A half hour later when the cab turned onto a posh residential street in McLean, Virginia, André knew where his quarry was headed. He told his cab to stop and watched the senator’s driver say something into an intercom at the large iron gates of a brick Georgian Revival. Moments later, the gates swung open and Snyder’s taxi drove through. Satisfied, André instructed his cabbie to take him back to the town house in Georgetown. He lay in bed awake for the rest of the evening, pretending to be asleep when the senator came home. He didn’t stir until Snyder got out of bed to take the second phone call.

Now, in the overcast light of a rainy morning, André hung up the black Sony phone and rolled over to his side of the bed, contemplating the implications of what he had just heard. It was time to get up, and he thought a hot shower might steady his nerves.

He walked into the bathroom and didn’t even feel the radiant heat from the tiled floor on the soles of his feet. He turned the shower control to hot and climbed in, scrubbing himself with a lemon beeswax soap, one of the many bath products the senator liked to indulge himself with. His mind racing, he was so preoccupied he didn’t notice his lover had entered the bathroom until the shower door swung open.

“André, I think you and I need to have a little chat.”

20

When Harvath and Hollenbeck had hiked to the bottom of Death Chute, there was a Sno-Cat waiting to take them back to the command center. Once they were seated inside and were underway, Hollenbeck pulled a stack of Polaroids out of his parka and handed them to Harvath.

“Ever seen one of these back in your SEAL days?”

Harvath looked intently at the first picture. It was a box, painted white, about the size of the average surround-sound subwoofer. By its appearance in the picture, it had been found buried in the snow. Scot flipped through the shots, which were taken from different angles. In some, the box was partially obscured by the branches of a pine tree it was under.

“I don’t know. It looks like a white box,” Harvath said, handing the photos back to Hollenbeck.

“When our guys found it, we had no idea what it was either. Our gut said it might be an explosive device, so we got the bomb tech guys up there right away.”

“Where? Up there?” Scot asked, gesturing over his shoulder back toward Death Chute. “I thought this was an FBI investigation now.”

“It is, but we were operating outside the secured crime scene under the pretext of discovering if any of our agents might have survived the slide.”

“But you said they were all accounted for.”

“Now they are. But we hadn’t released that information to the FBI at that point. Listen, I don’t want to split hairs with you. I busted your ass up there because that’s my job. I’ve heard about that guy, Zuschnitt. He’s got a reputation with the FBI for being a real prick. That’s probably why he got stuck posting the crime scene. Think about it. That’s a pretty long rotation to be standing with your thumb up your ass in the freezing cold.”

Harvath laughed at the image. It was the first time he had laughed all morning. “I guess you’re right.”

“Damn straight I’m right. Now I want you to look at these,” he said as he pulled another group of Polaroids from his pocket. “Once we determined the device was not an explosive, we were able to discover that it was encased in panels and that the panels could be removed.”

Scot flipped through this set of pictures with greater interest. Each displayed a different exposed section of the box’s interior, which contained densely packed electronics.

“It looks like an air-sick bag for a supercomputer that had a really bad lunch. There must be at least a hundred circuit boards crammed in there. There could never be enough air circulation in there to keep whatever this thing is from overheating. Unless-”

“It was placed in the snow?” responded Hollenbeck, who’d already come to that conclusion. He pulled some more photos from his parka and narrated as he flipped through them. “The alloy construction of the box probably helped circulate the cold. There are also fans and a set of tubes with screened vents, which we think acted as a cooling system. Any guesses yet as to what its purpose is?”

“Judging from this picture,” said Scot, pointing to the one Hollenbeck had just revealed, “I’d say that little device there is a low-profile ante

“Yup, that’s exactly what we found.”

“So, this device is a transmitter of some sort. I’d be willing to bet you may have found the source of our communications problems.”

“It was. We shut it down, and the radios and everything else came back on line clear as a bell. What do you make of this?” said Hollenbeck as he removed a final Polaroid from the stack and handed it to him.

Harvath studied it carefully. “The writing looks Korean. By the sophistication of the equipment, I’m going to guess this is something from our friends in the north. Most of the components will probably turn out to be Taiwanese, but the overall design and assembly is probably North Korean.”

“I had our communications guy look at it, and then I slipped Jim Bates and some of his White House Communications Agency people up to take a peek. They’ve never seen anything like it, but they’re all guessing it’s a very sophisticated jamming system.”