Rules of Deception

Jonathan began the curving descent to Brig. The time was 21:45. The outside temperature a chill -3° Celsius, or 27° Fahrenheit. Negotiating a hairpin turn, he felt the rear tires slip, only to regain their traction a second later. The road was icing up.

Despite the inclement weather, he had made good time. As expected, there had been little traffic on the alpine road. He’d counted six cars passing him from the opposite direction. None of them police. On several occasions, he’d glimpsed the flare of headlights behind him, but the driver had either pulled off the road a while back or hadn’t kept up. The navigation unit clicked down another notch. Thirty-eight kilometers remained to his destination. To his right, he observed a sign with the name “Lötschberg” and a symbol of a car piggybacking on a flatbed train next to it.

Emma had arranged the promotion. Not Emma herself, of course, but the people she worked for. Her higher-ups. The implication was clear. They had a person inside DWB.

Who was it, then? Someone in perso

Would it have been easier if one were American? Jonathan wondered. Would he have considered the problem of Emma’s allegiance solved? Stirring America into the mix would only add to the confusion. Emma was a vocal critic of the “world’s greatest democracy.” She did not believe in nation building and spheres of influence, doctrines going by any name, and realpolitik.

But if she wasn’t working for America, then who? The Brits? The Israelis? What did the French call their espionage unit…the wingnuts who had tried to sink the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor way back when? With a fright, he realized that she could be working for anyone. The country didn’t matter. Only the ideals did.

Emma and her duty to interfere.

As the windscreen filled with white and the frozen night closed around him, Jonathan’s mind was fixated on the fireball that had engulfed the mosque. The blinding burst that erupted a millisecond before the explosion assaulted his ears.

Was the car bomb part of it, too? The final straw needed to convince him to go? He begged Emma for the answer. But he’d lost touch with her.

Disillusioned, he heard only silence.

40

Marcus von Daniken tossed a dossier onto the desk. “Not exactly the manpower I was hoping for,” he said. “But you’ll do.”

He looked at the four men seated around the table. None had slept a wink in the last thirty-six hours. A welter of empty coffee mugs attested to their hypercaffeinated state. The glaring overhead lights didn’t help much either.

To his usual crew of Myer, Krajcek, and Seiler, he’d added Klaus Hardenberg, an investigator from the financial crimes division. After a few minutes of bantering, they’d decided to call themselves a task force, in spite of their limited numbers. It would make it easier to explain the long hours to their wives, even if they were forbidden from discussing the focus of their work.

Von Daniken didn’t bother to flatter them that they were the best men in his department.

“Let’s start with questions,” he said, sliding into a chair. “Anything that’s bothering you, let’s hear it.”

The voices came at him fast and furious. Who did he think killed Lammers? What was the co

Finally, there was a question posed in various forms by all the men present: Why did Marti have his head stuck so far up his ass?

Von Daniken was unable to answer any of the questions, and his ignorance highlighted the fault that ran through the center of the investigation. Essentially, they knew nothing about the conspirators or the plot.

It came down to one thing: there was too much to do and too little time to do it.

Von Daniken divided the inquiries into four areas. Finance. Communications. Field investigation. And transportation. He would take finance. His experience as a member of the Holocaust Commission had left him with a raft of acquaintances and contacts, as well as a few friends in the banking establishment.

“We’ll start with the Villa Principessa,” he said. “That’s no squatter’s hovel in Hamburg. It takes real money to set up digs there.”

It would be his job to find out who had leased it, for how long, and where the payments had come from. The key would be to discover where Blitz did his banking. Of all the threads, this one carried the potential for the greatest yield. Once it was discovered where he conducted his daily business, von Daniken could backtrack and trace the origin of funds transferred into the account. As importantly, he could see where monies were cha

Klaus Hardenberg would cover the second line of inquiry, focusing on credit. Von Daniken said he wanted all records for Blitz, Lammers, and Ransom over the past twelve months. Tracking their expenditures would yield invaluable information about their daily activities and provide a road map as to their whereabouts during the past twelve months.

Lammers would be the easiest of the three. Five charge cards had been found in his wallet. In order to avoid deportation, his wife was cooperating with their inquiries.

Blitz was another story. No wallet or identification had been found in his home. However, by a stroke of luck, one page of his December Eurocard statement had slipped beneath the credenza in his home office. The charge card would yield a credit history, along with banking references and some form of national identification number.

The jury was still out on Ransom. Immigration had only just come back with his details. As of this moment, Ransom’s passport number and Social Security number were being run through Interpol and forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Crime Information Center.

Kurt Myer was in charge of communications. He’d begun work upon returning from Ascona. “Swisscom is sending over a list of all calls made from Blitz’s home in the last six months,” he reported. “We’ve already got Lammers’s list for the same period. First, we’ll cross the two and see if they have any friends in common. Then we’ll go back a level and take a look at all calls made to and from their correspondents. We should have the first reports by seven in the morning.”

“Good,” said von Daniken. Five years earlier, he’d been instrumental in passing into law a requirement that telecommunications companies keep a six-month call log for every registered number. “After you run the two lists, isolate all cellular numbers and see if we can find some similar names. If they’re using SIM cards, trace the numbers back to their point of sale.”

“I can guarantee we’ll find some similar names,” said Myer. “It’s just a question of how careful they were. Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Let’s keep our fingers crossed that they’re not registered to foreign telecoms,” said von Daniken.