Rules of Deception

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 a

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 a

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 a

“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 Hoffma

“One moment, please.”

A male voice picked up the line. “Mr. Schmid? This is Ha

“About Thor.”

Silence. Clearly, Jonathan didn’t have the password to get past Hoffma

“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 Hoffma

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

“How do you know about Mr. Blitz?”

“I was there. I saw him.”

“Impossible.” Hoffma

“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.