Rules of Deception

“How do you know?” he asks, as she wraps her body around his.

“The same way you do.”

He lies down in the grass and she arranges herself above him. The moonlight dances across her burnt copper hair. The trees sway. Somewhere, a shriek pierces the sky.

The train pulled in from Chur, and a minute later, from the opposite direction, one from Zurich. Passengers crowded the pavement fronting the station. It was now or never. Jonathan left the doorway and hurried across the street. Vaulting the wall bordering the parking lot, he walked down the center aisle. If anyone was watching the station, they had a clear view of him. One six-foot-three-inch Caucasian male clad in a newly purchased navy parka, a matching ski cap pulled low over his brow to hide the thick, slightly curly hair that had started to go gray at the age of twenty-three.

Don’t rush, he told himself, straining to keep his muscles in check.

He pulled the keys from his pocket and activated the remote entry. He had the feeling that things were run very tightly around here. Emma had always been a stickler for organization. The car beeped. Don’t look around, he told himself. It’s Emma’s, which means it’s yours. An S600. Diamond Black. The car every surgeon’s wife was born to drive.

He slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door. He touched the gearshift and the engine roared to life. He jumped in his seat, slamming his head against the roof. “Shit,” he muttered, before realizing that he’d pressed the ignition button atop the shift lever. It was the latest in automatic functions. He settled down, finding his breath. Soon, he decided, cars would be driving themselves.

It was then that he took in the interior of the automobile. The smell of fresh leather, the pristine condition of the cabin, the air-crackling “newness” of the vehicle. Not just a Mercedes, but a brand-spanking-new, top-of-the-line sedan. Cost: stratospheric. Not so much a car as a temple of luxury; automotive engineering elevated to a higher plane. He got himself settled, adjusting the seat, the mirrors, putting on his seat belt. He slid the transmission into reverse and backed out of the space. The car moved in hushed silence, negotiating the ice-encrusted pavement as if floating on a cloud.

He felt a sudden, irrational streak of hatred for it, not just because it was evidence of Emma’s deception, but because it represented the life he’d never wanted. Too many of the surgical residents at Sloan-Kettering had dreamed aloud about their Park Avenue practices and houses in the Hamptons. They could have their baubles and bangles. God knew they’d worked hard enough to get them. It was just that to him, medicine was not a means to an end. Medicine was the end itself. He refused to be defined in any way by his possessions. By cars like this. It was actions that mattered. Dr. Jonathan Ransom took care of others.

He backed out of the parking space and drove to the exit. On the main road, traffic sped past in both directions. Pedestrians took advantage and crossed in front of the Mercedes. A man drew up and stopped in the glare of Jonathan’s headlights. Shielding his eyes, he looked through the windscreen at Jonathan. It was a policeman. Jonathan was sure of it. He dropped his hands from the wheel and waited for the man to draw his pistol and shout, “Out of the car! You’re under arrest.”

But a moment later, the man was gone, another head weaving in and out of the sea of homebound commuters.

Traffic cleared. Jonathan eased the car onto the street, turning left, away from the station. Four blocks down the road, he pulled over and rolled down the window. “Get in.”

Simone climbed into the car. Pulling her coat around her, she took in the car’s interior. “This is Emma’s?” she asked.

“Guess so.” Jonathan joined the autobahn, heading east. A roadside sign read, “Chur 25 Km.”

A shadow crossed Simone’s face. “Where are you going?”

“Back to the hotel. We have to find out who sent those bags.”

18

“Hotter.”

A guard turned the nozzle regulating the butane burners. Blue flames flared from beneath the enormous copper vat. The temperature gauge showed one hundred forty degrees. The needle inside it began to rise.

It was called the Pot, and it dated to the early seventeenth century. Five feet high and again as wide, it had been a fixture of the public laundry works in Aleppo when Syria had been a province of the Ottoman Empire. The needle touched one hundred fifty degrees. Immersed to his shoulders in the rapidly heating water, Gassan began to kick frantically. He could not allow his feet to touch bottom for fear of being scalded.

The needle passed one hundred sixty degrees.

It had been a long night. Gassan had showed impressive pluck. He had suffered and still not divulged a word about to whom he’d delivered the fifty kilos of plastic explosives. Colonel Mike no longer looked so cleaned and pressed. His mustache drooped with the sweat of his exertions. The evil of the place had sunk into his pores.

“Hotter.”

Bubbles formed at the edge of the cauldron. Gassan began to call out. No prayers for him. No pleas to Allah. Just a stream of obscenities cursing the West, cursing the president, cursing the FBI and the CIA. He was no zealot. He was that other thing. The terrorist defined by his actions. The rebel with no cause but to destroy.

Philip Palumbo sat on a chair in the corner. He had grown tired of the pitiable cries long ago. He’d run out of sympathy for dirtbags like Gassan around the time that he’d worked the bombings in Bali. Twenty bodies. Men, women, and children enjoying a seaside jaunt to the tropics. All dead. A hundred more wounded. Lives ended. Lives ruined. And for what? Just the usual tripe about getting at the West. The way Palumbo saw things, we all had a contract with society to treat our fellow man fairly and to obey the laws. Break that contract, go outside the boundaries of fair play, then all bets were off.

Gassan wanted to kill i

“Let’s go back to the begi

The questions hadn’t varied in ten hours.

Outside, dogs could be heard baying at the full moon. A large transport rumbled past, shaking the walls.

Gassan began to speak, then pursed his lips and drove his chin into his chest. A guttural scream formed in his throat and erupted into the room.

“Hotter,” said Colonel Mike.

The flames grew. The needle touched one hundred eighty degrees.

“What are their plans? Give me the target. I want a place, a date, a time.” Colonel Mike was relentless. A man was either made to do this kind of thing or not. Colonel Mike had been born to torture like a jockey to riding.

One hundred ninety.

“The first thing that falls off is your dick. It bursts like an overcooked sausage. Then your stomach will swell inside you and your lungs will begin to boil. Look at your arms. The flesh is peeling off. The sad thing is that this can go on for a long time.”