Rules of Deception

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 ru

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 ru

“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.

35

“You’ll never shoot it down,” said Brigadier General Claude Chabert, commander of the Swiss Air Force’s 3rd Fighter Wing. “Turboprops are hard enough. They only fly at two hundred kilometers per hour, but this little number has a jet in its tail. Forget it.”

“Can’t you fire a missile?” groused Alphons Marti, bullying his way closer to the center of the table so he could better survey the blueprints of the drone, or “unma

Chabert, Marti, and von Daniken were standing alongside a table in von Daniken’s office on Nussbaumstrasse. It was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon. Chabert, a trained electrical engineer and F/A-18 Hornet pilot with six thousand hours of flight time, had been rushed from his base in Payerne to provide an instant education in the destruction of unma

“A heat signature isn’t enough,” said Chabert patiently. “You must keep in mind that it is a small jet. The wingspan measures four meters. The fuselage runs barely two and a half by fifty centimeters. That’s not much of a target when it’s moving at five hundred kilometers an hour. Conventional radar arrays used by air traffic control are purposefully tuned down to avoid picking up small objects like birds and geese. And this one is stealthy. It has very few straight edges. The exhaust ducts are mounted by the tail fins. If I had to wager, I’d say that silver coating on the body was RAM.”

“What’s RAM?” asked Marti, as if it were something dredged up solely to a

“Radar absorbent material. The metallic color serves to make it more difficult to see with the human eye.” Chabert finished examining the plans, turning to face von Daniken. “I’m sorry, Marcus, but civilian radar would never see it. You’re out of luck.”

Von Daniken sat down in a chair and ran a hand over his scalp. The last hour had given him a devil’s education in the development and usage of drones as military weapons. In the 1990s, the Israeli Air Force had pioneered the use of unma

“Have any idea about the target?” asked Chabert.

“An aircraft,” said von Daniken. “Most probably here in Switzerland.”