Rules of Deception

14

Marcus von Daniken stood beneath the awning of the Sterngold outdoor café at Bellevueplatz, a cell phone pressed to his ear. “Yes, Frank,” he said, speaking loudly to drown out the voices of the diners around him. “Did you get anything on the passport?”

It was one o’clock. A malicious wind screamed across the lake, snatching bits of flume off the whitecaps, swirling them through the air, and slapping the foam against von Daniken’s cheek.

“An interesting question,” said Frank Vincent of the Belgian Federal Police. “Tell me, Marcus, is there anything you forgot to mention about Lammers? I mean, any ties to us?”

“What kind of ties?” asked von Daniken.

“With our country. With Belgium.”

“No. Lammers worked in Brussels for a year or two, but that was in 1987, twenty years ago. What have you got?”

Vincent grunted, disappointedly. “You see, we tracked down the original passport holder, Jules Gaye. We located his application and ran through his home address, birth certificate, even checked his tax records. He’s an international businessman, if you’re interested. Owns a dozen companies all over the world. Clothing was his line. Traveled quite a lot. Dubai. Delhi. Hong Kong.”

Von Daniken thought of all the stamps in Lammers’s passports. Lammers traveled frequently, too. “So he’s a real man?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Vincent. “Wife. Kids. House on the Avenue Tervuren. He’s real, alright.”

“What are you saying? That Lammers was leading a double existence? One family in Zurich, one in Brussels?”

“No. That much we can rule out. Lammers and Gaye are definitely two different people.”

Only then did von Daniken catch the noise of a car honking in the background. “Frank, where are you?”

“At a pay phone,” said Vincent. “The last one in Brussels.”

“A pay phone? What the hell are you doing there?”

“You’ll know well enough in a second.”

“Frank, did you find Gaye or not?”

“Of course I found him.” Vincent paused, and his voice lost its serrated edge. “Gaye’s passport was a replacement job. He lost his old one while he was traveling and needed a new one on the spot. He showed up at our consulate in Amman.”

“Amman? What was he doing there?”

“Visiting a textile factory. All strictly legit. I called our boys out there and they remembered the case. In fact, it’s safe to say they’ll never forget it.”

Von Daniken pressed the phone to his ear, straining to hear Vincent over the ambient traffic noise. He was wondering what was so memorable about issuing a new passport to a tourist.

“Happened two years ago, August,” Vincent went on. “Gaye showed up with a story that his passport had been stolen from his hotel room, along with his wallet and some other belongings. He offered his driver’s license as proof of identity. A nice gentleman, by all accounts. The passport was issued on the spot. About two weeks afterward, the body of a European man and his wife were found in a wadi halfway to nowhere. The local gendarmes said the couple had been killed by bandits, but it was hard to tell. They’d been dead a long time. Weeks. Maybe months. You can imagine the condition of the bodies in that heat, not to mention the desert jackals, the flies. The thieves had made off with their belongings, so identification was impossible. Eventually, the police traced the rental car back to a small hotel. They hauled the manager into the morgue and he was able to confirm that the corpses in the jeep had been his guests. He recognized the man’s shirt. According to him, it was Gaye.”

“But it was never proved…”

“Sure it was. His family asked for a DNA test. It took three months, but the hotel manager was right. It was Gaye sure enough.”

“Are you saying that it was Lammers who applied for the replacement passport?”

“You tell me. Was Lammers one meter eighty tall, eighty-five kilos, fair hair going to gray, blue eyes?”

Von Daniken drew up an image of the prostrate corpse lying in the snow. “Close enough.”

“You know what I’m thinking, Marcus? That job out there in the desert…it was also professional.”

One point still bothered von Daniken. “But that was two years ago. Surely you blocked the passport.”

“Of course we did. We blocked it immediately.”

“So what’s the big deal? Why are you calling me from a pay phone?”

“Because a month later, someone unblocked it.”

“Who?” demanded von Daniken.

There was a moment of silence. Far away, on a crowded boulevard in Brussels, a truck blared its horn. “Someone high up, Marcus. Very high up.”

15

“Bastards! Espèce de salopards!” Simone Noiret banged the dashboard with every epithet. “He was trying to kill you! Why?”

“I don’t know,” replied Jonathan, in a faraway voice. The heater was blasting him with a torrent of warm air, yet he couldn’t keep from shivering. The image of the policeman lamely grasping at the ante

“But you must,” Simone insisted.

“They wanted the bags. That’s all I can think of. The guy lost his cool when I fought back.”

“The bags? That’s all? There must be more to it than that. Surely-”

“What do you want me to say?” Jonathan protested, turning toward her. “I’ve never seen those men before in my life. I’m just as frightened as you are. Arguing about it won’t help. We have to figure out what to do.”

Simone recoiled at the outburst. “Pardon me,” she said, settling into her seat. “You’re right. We’re both frightened. I didn’t mean to imply…”

“I know you didn’t. Let’s just sit here a few minutes, chill out, and figure out what we’re going to do.”

They had parked in a pine glade high on the mountain overlooking the city. Below them, no more than two miles’ distance, a swarm of flashing lights had converged on the train station. He counted ten police cars and two ambulances.

He poked his index finger into the neat round hole that the bullet had drilled into the dashboard. “Those men back there…one of them is dead, the other’s gravely injured at the least. I can’t just sit here. I’ve got to explain what happened. I’ve got to tell them that this whole thing is some kind of mistake. They went after the wrong person…”

“Look at the bullet hole, Jon. It’s your police who made it. And now you want to turn yourself in?” Simone threw up her hands in exasperation.

“What other choice is there? By now, every cop in this canton, and probably the whole country, has a description of us. Tall American with gray hair accompanied by a dark-haired woman traveling in a silver BMW 5 Series. In an hour, they’ll have our names…or at least mine. We won’t be hard to find.”

“And then what are you going to say? Are you going to tell them it was all in self-defense? They won’t believe a word.” Simone fished in her bag for a cigarette. “Pourris, Jon. You know what that means? Rotten. Bent. These policemen, they were no good.” She needed two hands to steady her lighter.

Jonathan opened the ID case. The identification belonged to Oskar Studer. Wachtmeister. Graubünden Kantonspolizei. It was then that he noticed that the car wasn’t equipped like other police cars. There was no two-way radio. No inboard computer. No gun rack. It was remarkably clean. Not a speck of dirt on the carpets. No empty coffee cups. The odometer read two thousand kilometers. There were some papers in the side compartment. Car rental documents made out to one Oskar Studer. The car had been taken out that morning at ten and was due back in twenty-four hours.

Pourris. He knew precisely what the word meant.

All thoughts of going to the police vanished.

He put the papers back. “They knew I was an American,” he said. “They were waiting for me.”