Rules of Deception

“Any word as to where? Zurich, Geneva, Basel-Mulhouse?”

“None.” Von Daniken cleared his throat. The wear and tear of the last few days was taking its toll. Dogged circles ringed his eyes, and even seated, his posture was slumped. “Tell me, General, what kind of runway does this thing need to take off?”

“Two hundred meters of open road,” said Chabert. “A drone this size can be out of its transport packaging and up in the air in five minutes.”

Von Daniken recalled his meeting at Robotica AG, Lammers’s company, and the prideful description of sensor fusion technology that melded input from a variety of sources. For all he knew, the pilot-or “operator”-could be all the way in Brazil, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. “Any chance of jamming the signal?”

“You’re better off locating the ground station. The drone works on a three-legged principle. The ground station, the satellite, and the drone itself, with signals constantly passing back and forth between them.”

“How big is the ground station?”

“It depends. But if the pilot is flying it out of line of sight-that is, if he’s relying on the drone’s onboard cameras-he’ll require video monitors, radar, a stable power source, and uninterrupted satellite reception.”

“Could it be mobile?” von Daniken asked. “Something, say, he could stick in the back of a van?”

“Definitely not,” declared Chabert. “The operator will have to be in some kind of fixed installation. Otherwise, he won’t have enough power to boost the signal a long distance. You said they intend on taking down a plane. This UAV doesn’t have the size to carry air-to-air missiles. Is it your belief that whoever is behind this intends on flying the drone into another aircraft? If that’s the case, they’ll want to be in visual range of the target. It’s a damned tricky business to fly these things by camera and radar.”

“I can’t say with any certainty,” responded von Daniken. “But it’s probable that plastic explosives will be used.”

“Well,” said Chabert, brightening. “Then at least we know what the nacelle is for. I’d assumed it was for more avionics.”

“What nacelle are you talking about?”

Using a ballpoint pen, Chabert tapped at a teardrop-shaped canister that appeared to hang from the nose of the drone. “The maximum weight allowance is thirty kilos.”

Von Daniken groaned inwardly. Some twenty kilos of Semtex was missing from Blitz’s garage.

“Is that enough to bring down a plane?” asked Marti.

“More than enough,” said Chabert. “The bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie fit inside a cassette recorder. It needed less than a half kilo of C-4 to tear a hole two meters by four out of the side of a Boeing 747. At ten thousand meters altitude, the plane didn’t stand a chance. Imagine a drone traveling at five hundred kilometers an hour delivering a charge fifty times as big.”

Marti backed away from the table, his complexion the color of curdled milk.

“But that’s only half your problem,” said Brigadier General Claude Chabert.

Von Daniken narrowed his eyes. “How’s that?”

“With a charge of that size, the drone itself is, in effect, a missile. It wouldn’t necessarily have to wait for a plane to become airborne to kill everyone aboard. It could just as easily destroy the target on the ground. The detonation would ignite the fuel in the wing tanks. The fireball and the shrapnel it would provoke would initiate a chain reaction. Any plane parked within twenty meters would cook off like overheated ammunition.”

Grimacing, Chabert ran a hand across the back of his neck. “Gentlemen, you may very well lose the entire airport.”

Chabert had left five minutes earlier. Von Daniken sat on the edge of the conference table, arms crossed over his chest, as Alphons Marti paced the floor. Only the two of them were left in the room.

“We need to alert the proper authorities,” said von Daniken. “I think the call should come from your office.”

The list was long and ran to the Federal Office of Civil Aviation, the Federal Security Service, the police departments of Zurich, Bern, Basel, and Lugano, as well as their brother agencies in France, Germany, and Italy, over whose airspace the drone could intrude. It would be up to them to contact the airlines.

“I agree, but I think it’s too early in the game. I mean, exactly what kind of attack are we talking about?”

“I thought we just went over that.”

“Yes, yes, but what about the specifics? Do we have a date, a time, or even a place? Everything we know so far is based on the ravings of a terrorist who gave up the information under what I can only imagine as the utmost duress.”

Marti’s tone was reasonable, a patient parent upbraiding a rowdy child. Von Daniken matched it note perfect. “Gassan may have been under duress, but what he said has proven accurate. He wasn’t lying when he said he delivered fifty kilos of Semtex to Gottfried Blitz, a.k.a. Mahmoud Quitab. We also have a photo showing that Blitz either is, or was, an Iranian military officer. I feel comfortable assuming that Lammers built a drone and delivered it to Blitz. I’d say that, coupled with Gassan’s confession that Blitz’s target was a plane in Switzerland, is more than enough for us to go to the authorities.”

“Granted, but both Lammers and Blitz are dead. Would it be unreasonable to assume that the other members of their group-oh, what do you call it-their cell, might also be dead? If you ask me, I’d say someone’s doing our work for us.”

Von Daniken thought of the flecks of white paint found on the corner of Blitz’s garage, the twenty kilos of missing plastic explosives, the tire tracks that matched those of the Volkswagen van reported to have been used to transport the explosives. “There are more of them out there. The operation’s bigger than two men.”

“Maybe there are, Marcus. I won’t dispute that something’s going on. But you’re not giving me much ammunition. Tell the civil aviation chieftains, and then what? Do you expect them to cancel their flights? Are they going to reroute all planes headed our way to Munich and Stuttgart and Milan and ship everyone here by rail and bus? What if we had a threat against a tu

Von Daniken stared hard at Marti. “We’ll need the close support of the local police,” he said after a moment, pretending that he hadn’t heard a word that Marti had said. “We’ll go house to house in a radius of ten kilometers from the airport. Then we’ll-”

“Didn’t you hear the general?” Marti interrupted in the same maddeningly reasonable tone. “The drone could be launched from anywhere. It could take out a plane in France or Germany, or…or, in Africa, for all we know. Please, Marcus.”

Von Daniken dug a fingernail into his palm. This wasn’t happening, he told himself. Marti was not making light of the threat. “As I was saying, we’ll begin with a house-to-house search. I promise you it will be conducted quietly. We’ll start in Zurich and Geneva.”

“And how many policemen do you expect this will involve?”

“Several hundred.”

“Ah? Several hundred quiet policemen who’ll walk on their tiptoes and not breathe a word of why they had to leave their wives and children in the dead of night to go knocking door-to-door with instructions to look for an armed missile.”

“Not to look for a missile. To speak with residents and inquire if they’ve noticed any suspicious activity. We’ll run the operation under the guise of a search for a missing child.”

“‘Quiet policemen.’ ‘A friendly inquiry.’ By tomorrow morning half the country will know what we’re up to, and by tomorrow evening, I’ll be on the evening news explaining to the other half that we believe that there’s a terrorist cell operating within our borders with the intention of shooting down a passenger airliner, and that there isn’t a damned thing we can do to stop them.”