Rules of Deception

“Apology accepted,” said Palumbo.

“Oh, and by the way,” said von Daniken. “I happened to find this on the floor.” Leaning closer, he dropped something small and hard into the CIA officer’s hand. “I trust you’ll pass along any information that concerns us.”

Palumbo waited until von Daniken had left the aircraft before opening his hand.

In his palm was a man’s torn and bloody thumbnail.

3

“She’s gone.”

Jonathan stood on the crest of a foothill two hundred meters from the foot of Roman’s. The wind howled in fits and spurts, blanketing him in whiteout one minute and tapering off the next. Holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes, he was able to spot the crossed skis, the letters “HE” screaming from the survival blanket, and farther to the left, the orange safety shovel. But he did not see Emma.

Jonathan left the three members of the Davos Rescue Squad and ski

Jonathan activated the avalanche beacon strapped to his chest and turned in a circle searching all points of the compass. The beacon contained a homing device with an effective range of one hundred meters, some three hundred thirty feet. The instrument emitted a long beep-a test function-then was silent. The whomp whomp of snow settling, distant as Indian war drums, drifted across the mountainside.

“Do you have a signal?” asked Sepp Steiner, chief of the rescue team, when he reached his side. Steiner was a short, spare man with hollow cheeks and gun slits for eyes.

“Nothing.”

It was then that he saw it: a crimson petal lying in the snow. Jonathan bent down to touch the drop of blood. There was another a few inches away, and another farther on. “This way,” he said, waving an arm for the others to join him.

“Don’t go any farther,” cautioned Steiner. “There’s a crevasse just ahead a few meters.”

“A crevasse?”

“A deep one. It cuts to the bottom of the glacier.”

Jonathan squinted, trying to make out the fissure, but saw nothing beyond an impenetrable white wall. “Get me roped up.” He removed his skis, then pulled on a seating harness and attached the rope to his waist.

“Be careful,” said Steiner, after taking off his skis and securing Jonathan to his own harness. “We don’t want to lose you, too.”

Jonathan swung round to face the smaller man. “She isn’t lost yet.”

At first, the drops were difficult to find, hardly more than pinpricks. Then they grew larger, more closely spaced, until the blood ran in a steady line as if someone had punctured a can of grenadine and poured it into the snow. Except this syrup was colored the oxygen-rich red of arterial blood.

When had Emma passed this way? Jonathan wondered. Five minutes ago. Ten? Bending lower, he discerned where she’d placed her good foot and where she’d dragged the other. Ahead, there was a depression in the snow, and in its center, a gaping hole.

Dropping to his belly, he crawled forward and shined his flashlight into the opening. A gallery of ice and stone beckoned, ten meters across, bottomless. Rolling to one side, he checked the homing beacon. The digital readout flickered and the number 98 appeared. Jonathan’s stomach buckled. Ninety-eight meters translated to over three hundred feet.

“Do you have a signal?” asked Steiner. “Is she in there?”

“Yes,” said Jonathan, but he refused to elaborate. “I’m going down. On belay.”

“Belay on,” confirmed Steiner.

Jonathan enlarged the hole with his ax. A chunk of snow fell away and the crevasse yawned beneath him. Dangling his boots into the hole, he shimmied backward until the snow collapsed under his chest. He plunged into darkness, slamming into an ice wall before the rope grew taut and caught him. “I’m in.”

Kicking off the wall, he allowed the rope to pay out between his fingers and dropped farther into the chasm. The flashlight revealed a pristine and savage landscape, an ice queen’s eternal palace. It was an illusion. The crevasses existed in a state of flux, widening, narrowing, slaves to the constantly churning forces of the underlying rock strata.

Ten meters down, he spotted a patch of black and white on a ledge a stone’s throw away. It was Emma’s cap. Like a pendulum, he swung back and forth, springing off the ice wall to build his momentum. The third time, he tilted his body perilously close to horizontal, stretched his arm, and grabbed it.

Cap in hand, he steadied himself and directed the flashlight toward the ledge. The snow there was disturbed and violent with blood. Not a trail this time, but a stain as large as a grapefruit. He could no longer lie to himself about what had happened. Emma had tried to walk down the mountain. Her movement had caused the splintered bone to nick the femoral artery. The artery was the principal passageway for blood pumped by the heart to the lower extremities: legs, feet, and toes. As a surgeon, he knew the consequences. Without a tourniquet, she would exsanguinate in minutes. In layman’s terms, she’d bleed to death.

He checked the beacon. The readout showed eighty-nine meters. Just under three hundred feet. The directional indicator pointed down. He shined the beam toward the floor of the crevasse. Oblivion.

“Lower,” he said.

“I can give you another twenty-five meters. That’s all we’ve got.”

Jonathan glanced up. The gap he’d come through appeared as bright as a tear in the night sky. He waited for the second line to be tied to the first. Steiner gave him a tug and Jonathan recommenced his descent. He paid the line out slowly, stopping every ten feet to swing the light around him, check for obstacles, and search for Emma. The numbers on the beacon grew smaller. Light from the world above disappeared. The ice walls glowed a ghostly blue…70…68…64…Suddenly, the rope grew taut.

“That’s it,” said Steiner.

Jonathan guided the light slowly back and forth, painting the ice below with a pale beam. He caught a flash of red. His patrolman’s jacket? He moved the beam a few inches to the left and saw a glint of copper. Emma’s hair? His heart jumped. “I need more rope. Another length.”

“We have no more.”

“Get some,” he ordered.

“There’s no time. A small avalanche just ripped out the slope behind us. The entire mountain could come down at any moment.”

Jonathan directed his gaze along the beam of light. The patch of red came into focus. He moved the light an inch to the right. It was the cross on his patrolman’s jacket. The glint of copper was his wife’s hair.

Emma. Her name caught in his throat.

He could see her now, at least her outline. She lay prone on her stomach, one arm extended above her head, as if calling for help. But there was something wrong…the ice around her was not white at all, but dark. She was lying in a slick of her own blood.

“She’s here,” he said stubbornly. “We can reach her.”

“She fell one hundred meters,” argued Steiner. “She could not have survived. You must come out. I won’t risk the lives of four men.”

“Emma!” Jonathan shouted. “It’s me. It’s Jonathan. If you’re okay, move your hand.”

His wife’s form remained still, as his voice echoed inside the chasm.

“Quiet,” said Steiner, his anger tight as a fist. “You’ll kill us all.”

The rope gave a jerk. Jonathan bounced against the wall and rose a few feet. Steiner was hauling him out. Enraged, he dug his toe spikes into the ice, then drew his knife and pressed the blade against the rope, inches from his face. He had crampons. He had an ice ax. He would climb down the wall to her.