Rules of Deception

52

“Is this a complete list of his postings?” Marcus von Daniken was seated in a cramped windowless office deep in the corridors of DWB headquarters. The heat was roaring, and every minute that he sat there he felt another grain of his patience slip away.

The medical organization’s director faced him across the desk. She was a fifty-year-old Somali woman who had immigrated to Switzerland twenty years ago. She had a shaved head and gold hoop earrings, and she made no effort to hide her hostility as she leaned over the shantytown of papers littering her desk and lectured him at the point of a very long, elaborately painted fingernail.

“Why shouldn’t it be a complete list?” the woman asked as she handed him Jonathan Ransom’s file. “Do I look as if I have something to hide? Ridiculous, I tell you. The whole thing. Jonathan Ransom, a murderer! It is crazy.”

Von Daniken didn’t bother to answer. The Graubünden police had preceded him by a day, and it was obvious that they’d ruffled some feathers. He’d be better off having a word with them than trying to argue with her. He accepted Ransom’s file and took his time leafing through the papers. Beirut, Lebanon. Team leader for an immunization-vaccination program. Darfur, Sudan. Director, Refugee Operations. Kosovo, Serbia. Chief medical officer leading an initiative to construct local trauma units. Sulawesi Island, Indonesia; Monrovia, Liberia. It was a list of all the world’s political hellholes.

“Is it normal for your physicians to spend so much time abroad?” he asked, glancing up from the folder. “I see here that Dr. Ransom spent two years in some of these places.”

“That’s what we do.” A disdainful sigh. Eyes to the ceiling. “Jonathan prefers the more challenging assignments. He’s one of our most committed physicians.”

“How do you mean?”

“Often the conditions are arduous. The doctor tends to lose sight of the bigger picture and gets caught up in the suffering. The futility of it can be overwhelming. We have quite a few cases of post-traumatic stress, similar to battle fatigue. But Jonathan never shied from the rougher assignments. Some of us think that it was because of Emma.”

“Emma? You mean his wife?”

“We took the view that she tended to sympathize a bit too closely with the population. ‘Going native,’ as it were.”

“Is it common for husband and wife teams to work together?”

“No one wants to get married only to leave their spouse thousands of miles behind.”

Von Daniken considered this for a moment. He was begi

“We match their strengths to our needs. We’ve tried to lure Dr. Ransom to our Swiss headquarters for a long time. His experience in the field would inject a much-needed dose of common sense into our project evaluations.”

“I see, but who exactly decides where Dr. Ransom is assigned?”

“We do it together. The three of us. Jonathan, Emma, and I. We look at the list of openings and decide where they will be of most help.”

Von Daniken hadn’t known that Ransom’s wife was so intimately involved in aid work. He asked about her position on these assignments.

“Emma did everything. Her title was logistician. She set up the mission, made sure that the medicine got there on time, coordinated the local help, and paid off the bully boys so they’d leave us in peace. She ran the place so Jonathan could save lives. One of her was worth five ordinary mortals. What happened to the woman is a tragedy. We already miss her.”

A wife who involved herself in her husband’s work. A competent woman. A woman who asked questions. Von Daniken wondered if she’d asked one too many. “And what is Dr. Ransom working on at the moment?” he inquired.

“You mean before he started murdering policemen?” The Somali woman gave him another smirk to show what she thought of his investigation. “He’s supervising an anti-malaria campaign we’re mounting in coordination with the Bates Foundation. I don’t think he’s terribly happy. It’s an administrative job, and he prefers to be in the field.”

“And how long is the posting to last?”

“Normally, this kind of thing is open-ended. He would remain in his position until the program was implemented, at which time he’d brief his successor and turn over the reins. Unfortunately, I recently received a complaint about his comportment. Apparently, he’s been a bit brusque with the American side of this…the money side,” she whispered. “Mrs. Bates doesn’t like him. A decision has been taken to remove him from his post.”

Von Daniken nodded, but inside him, a bell sounded and he was aware that he’d located the unseen hand that guided Ransom’s moves from country to country. It started with a complaint voiced to the perso

“Any ideas where he’ll be going next?”

“I was hoping Pakistan. We have an immediate opening at a new mission in Lahore. The director dropped dead of a heart attack. Only fifty, the dear man. He’d scheduled an important meeting with the minister of Health and Welfare for Tuesday. I’d rather hoped that I could convince Jonathan to fly out on Sunday in time to make it.”

“This Sunday?”

“Yes. On the evening flight. I know it’s asking rather a lot of a man who just lost his wife, but knowing Jonathan, I think it would do him good.”

“Sunday,” von Daniken repeated, as it all began to sink in.

Seventy-two hours.

Von Daniken’s theory was simple. Ransom was a trained agent in the pay of a foreign government. His position as a physician working for Doctors Without Borders offered ideal cover to move from country to country without attracting undue attention. The way to figure out who Ransom worked for was to discover what he’d done in the past. That was why von Daniken was seated at a computer in the watch room of the Geneva police on Rue Gauthier, staring at a picture of a gravely wounded woman being freed from a pile of rubble inside a bombed-out hospital. The picture came from the front page of the Daily Star, Lebanon’s English-language newspaper, and was dated July 31 the past year.

The article was titled “Blast Kills Police Investigator,” and it concerned an explosion that had killed seventeen persons, including a prominent policeman who had been leading the investigation into the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister. At the time of the explosion, the investigator was undergoing weekly dialysis to treat a failing kidney. A detective at the scene revealed that he suspected that the bomb had been planted in the floor of the clinic during a renovation completed three months earlier. He estimated that the blast was equivalent to one hundred pounds of TNT.

The article went on to say that no responsibility had been claimed for the attack and that the police were following up reports that Syrian agents had been seen at the hospital prior to the blast.

Von Daniken looked up from the computer. A bomb planted during renovation three months prior to the attack. One hundred pounds of TNT. The scope of the attack sent a chill down his spine. The people involved had to number in the dozens. Builders, contractors, city officials who’d granted permits, someone in the doctor’s office to pass on details of the victim’s appointments. As a policeman, he was impressed. As a human being, he was horrified.

Before Lebanon, Darfur…

A United Nations C-141 transport carrying leaders of the Muslim Janjaweed and the indigenous Sudanese en route to Khartoum to discuss a government-sponsored cease-fire explodes in midair. There are no survivors. Evidence is discovered showing that a bomb had been planted in one of the engines. Both sides claimed that the other was responsible for the calamity. Civil war intensifies.