Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

The attacker sank down to his knees. His chin fell to his chest. Eyes open, he went as still as a toy whose batteries had run out.

Simone pushed herself to her feet. The side of her face was red and swollen. “Is he dead?”

Jonathan placed his fingers on the assailant’s neck. He nodded. He stood, kicked loose a chunk of ice, and pressed it to her cheek.

“Who is he?” Simone asked.

“No idea. I’ve never seen either of them before in my life.”

The attacker’s jacket had fallen open. A silver badge was visible on his belt, and next to it, a pistol. Jonathan knelt to examine the badge. Engraved across the top were the words “Graubünden Kantonspolizei.” His stomach dropped. He slipped his hand into the man’s jacket and came up with an ID case. Sergeant Oskar Studer. The photograph matched.

“A cop.” Jonathan tossed the ID to Simone.

“Go,” she whispered. “Get out of here.”

“I can’t leave. I have to tell the police what happened.”

“They are the police.”

Jonathan had trouble accepting the notion. “What were they doing? They didn’t even say anything.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Simone. “I grew up in a country where you couldn’t trust the police. They took my father. They took my uncle. Never an explanation. I know what the authorities are capable of.”

“Be serious. This isn’t Egypt.”

Simone looked at him as if he were a jackass. “And so? Is that badge fake?”

“I don’t know…I mean, it doesn’t matter. It’s not right. I can’t run away. The guy’s dead. I killed him. I just can’t do-”

“You! Amerikaner. Stay where you are.” Ten feet away, the heavyset blond man rose on all fours. If his carriage was unsteady, the voice was anything but. One hand held a pistol and he was pointing it in their direction.

Amerikaner, thought Jonathan, incredulously. He’d never seen this man before. How could he possibly know anything about him?

The blond man leveled his gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Gazing confusedly at the pistol, he struggled to free the safety.

Jonathan looked from Simone to the corpse in the road to the bloodied man fighting to his feet and pointing a pistol at him. “Get in the car!” he shouted. “Move! Now!”

The driver’s door was open. He flung himself into the car and started the engine. Simone landed in the passenger’s seat and slammed the door, her eyes wild.

A millisecond later, the rear window exploded, pelting their backs and necks with glass.

Simone screamed.

Jonathan threw the car into reverse and rammed his foot on the accelerator. The automobile struck the gunman and there was a solid thwack as he hit the pavement.

Jonathan braked, and shoved the gearshift into first. He let out the clutch too quickly and the car lurched before accelerating down the street.

In a minute, they were out of town doing a hundred eighty kilometers along the highway.

Marcus von Daniken stood beneath the awning of the Sterngold outdoor café at Bellevueplatz, a cell phone pressed to his ear. “Yes, Frank,” he said, speaking loudly to drown out the voices of the diners around him. “Did you get anything on the passport?”

It was one o’clock. A malicious wind screamed across the lake, snatching bits of flume off the whitecaps, swirling them through the air, and slapping the foam against von Daniken’s cheek.

“An interesting question,” said Frank Vincent of the Belgian Federal Police. “Tell me, Marcus, is there anything you forgot to mention about Lammers? I mean, any ties to us?”

“What kind of ties?” asked von Daniken.

“With our country. With Belgium.”

“No. Lammers worked in Brussels for a year or two, but that was in 1987, twenty years ago. What have you got?”

Vincent grunted, disappointedly. “You see, we tracked down the original passport holder, Jules Gaye. We located his application and ran through his home address, birth certificate, even checked his tax records. He’s an international businessman, if you’re interested. Owns a dozen companies all over the world. Clothing was his line. Traveled quite a lot. Dubai. Delhi. Hong Kong.”

Von Daniken thought of all the stamps in Lammers’s passports. Lammers traveled frequently, too. “So he’s a real man?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Vincent. “Wife. Kids. House on the Avenue Tervuren. He’s real, alright.”

“What are you saying? That Lammers was leading a double existence? One family in Zurich, one in Brussels?”

“No. That much we can rule out. Lammers and Gaye are definitely two different people.”

Only then did von Daniken catch the noise of a car honking in the background. “Frank, where are you?”

“At a pay phone,” said Vincent. “The last one in Brussels.”

“A pay phone? What the hell are you doing there?”

“You’ll know well enough in a second.”

“Frank, did you find Gaye or not?”

“Of course I found him.” Vincent paused, and his voice lost its serrated edge. “Gaye’s passport was a replacement job. He lost his old one while he was traveling and needed a new one on the spot. He showed up at our consulate in Amman.”

“Amman? What was he doing there?”

“Visiting a textile factory. All strictly legit. I called our boys out there and they remembered the case. In fact, it’s safe to say they’ll never forget it.”

Von Daniken pressed the phone to his ear, straining to hear Vincent over the ambient traffic noise. He was wondering what was so memorable about issuing a new passport to a tourist.

“Happened two years ago, August,” Vincent went on. “Gaye showed up with a story that his passport had been stolen from his hotel room, along with his wallet and some other belongings. He offered his driver’s license as proof of identity. A nice gentleman, by all accounts. The passport was issued on the spot. About two weeks afterward, the body of a European man and his wife were found in a wadi halfway to nowhere. The local gendarmes said the couple had been killed by bandits, but it was hard to tell. They’d been dead a long time. Weeks. Maybe months. You can imagine the condition of the bodies in that heat, not to mention the desert jackals, the flies. The thieves had made off with their belongings, so identification was impossible. Eventually, the police traced the rental car back to a small hotel. They hauled the manager into the morgue and he was able to confirm that the corpses in the jeep had been his guests. He recognized the man’s shirt. According to him, it was Gaye.”

“But it was never proved…”

“Sure it was. His family asked for a DNA test. It took three months, but the hotel manager was right. It was Gaye sure enough.”

“Are you saying that it was Lammers who applied for the replacement passport?”

“You tell me. Was Lammers one meter eighty tall, eighty-five kilos, fair hair going to gray, blue eyes?”

Von Daniken drew up an image of the prostrate corpse lying in the snow. “Close enough.”

“You know what I’m thinking, Marcus? That job out there in the desert…it was also professional.”

One point still bothered von Daniken. “But that was two years ago. Surely you blocked the passport.”

“Of course we did. We blocked it immediately.”

“So what’s the big deal? Why are you calling me from a pay phone?”

“Because a month later, someone unblocked it.”

“Who?” demanded von Daniken.

There was a moment of silence. Far away, on a crowded boulevard in Brussels, a truck blared its horn. “Someone high up, Marcus. Very high up.”