Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

He fell back, confused, tired. He looked at the fat book on his lap. Opening it, he began to skim the names, addresses, and phone numbers. It’s a start, he thought.

Just then, the passenger door opened and Simone slid into the car.

“Where were you?” he asked.

Simone shrunk back. “I walked to the top of the hill and back. If you must know, I wanted to smoke a cigarette.”

“Where are Emma’s things?”

“I put them in the trunk in case one of us wants to lie down.”

Jonathan nodded, calming himself. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that they’ve been there. I mean in our hotel room. They took the place apart. Top to bottom. But they were good. Very neat. I’ll grant them that. They almost got it right. And then I would never have known.”

Simone stared at him, his fright mirrored in her eyes. “What are you going on about? Who was there? The police?”

“No. At least, not the real police.” He explained about the strange manner in which someone had searched behind the lining of the suitcase and the odd depression the size of a deck of cards.

“Only her suitcase?” Simone asked. “What were they looking for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think, Jon. What could have been inside it?”

Jonathan brushed off the question. He had no idea. “Give me the keys. They might be coming.”

Simone handed him the car keys. “Slow down. No one’s coming. Look.”

Jonathan stared out the rear window. The street was deserted. The storm had confined the town to quarters. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Okay,” he murmured. “We’re okay.”

“Of course we’re okay,” said Simone.

“I heard voices in the hallway. I think the hotel manager was with the police. They were talking about the policeman in Landquart. They know it’s me.”

“You’re safe for now. That’s what matters.” Simone gestured toward the book in his lap. “What’s that?”

“Emma’s address book. We need to find who she knew in Ascona. If one of her friends sent her those bags, their name will be in here.”

“May I?”

Jonathan handed her the leather-bound volume. It was as thick as a Bible and twice as heavy. Emma had liked to say that it contained her life, and nothing less. Simone placed it on her lap and opened it solemnly, as if it were a religious text. Emma’s name was inscribed on the flyleaf. A succession of addresses had been scratched out below it. The most recent was Rampe de Cologny, Geneva. Before that there was Rue St. Jean in Beirut. U.N. Camp for Refugees, Darfur, Sudan. The list went on, a road map of his once and future life.

“How many names does she have in here anyway?” Simone asked.

“Everyone she ever met. Emma never forgot anyone.”

Together, they pored over every page. A to Z. They were looking for an address in the Tessin. Ascona. Locarno. Lugano. Any phone number with the 091 area code. They found names in every corner of the globe. Tasmania, Patagonia, Lapland, Greenland, Singapore, and Siberia. But nowhere did they find mention of Ascona.

Thirty minutes later, Simone set the address book on the center console.

Emma didn’t have a single friend who lived in the southernmost canton of Switzerland. Ascona did not exist.

Rooting in his pockets, he came out with the customer half of Emma’s baggage receipts. “We still have these,” he said. “The porter said that the name of the sender was recorded at the departure station.”

“I don’t think the Swiss are so easy to give out information as that. You’ll have to show identification.”

“You’re probably right.” Jonathan handed Simone the receipts, then started the engine.

“Where are we going?”

“Where do you think?” he asked, head turned over his shoulder as he backed the car onto the road.

Simone shifted in her seat, pushing her hair behind one ear. “But Emma had no friends there. We have no idea even where to begin to look. What can we hope to accomplish?”

Jonathan pointed the nose of the car downhill and touched the gas. “I know how to find out who sent Emma those bags.”

At five minutes before midnight, an unmarked van pulled up to the loading dock at the rear of Robotica AG’s headquarters in the industrial quarter of Zurich. Four men climbed out. All were dressed in dark clothing and wore watch caps pulled low over their brows, surgeon’s gloves, and crepe-soled shoes. Their leader, the shortest by three inches, rapped once on the passenger door and the van drove away.

Clambering onto the dock, he walked past the corrugated steel curtain that secured the delivery bay. He held two keys in his hand. The first disarmed the security system. The second opened the employee entrance. The men filed into the darkened building.

“We have seventeen minutes until the patrolman makes his next rounds,” said Chief Inspector Marcus von Daniken as he closed the door behind them. “Move fast, be careful what you touch, and under no circumstances are you to remove anything from the premises. Remember, we are not here.”

The men slipped flashlights out of their jackets and headed down the corridor. With von Daniken were Myer from Logistics/Support, Kübler from Special Services, and Krajcek from Kommando. All had been apprised of the circumstance surrounding the operation. All knew that if caught, their careers would be terminated and that each stood a chance of going to jail. Their loyalty to von Daniken superseded the risks.

It was Myer from Logistics who’d contacted the security company to obtain the watchman’s schedule, as well as the keys to safely enter the premises. Swiss industry had a long history of cooperating with the Federal Police.

Allowing the others to pass, Kübler removed a rectangular device resembling a large, bulky cell phone from his workbag and held it in front of him. He moved slowly down the corridor, his eyes glued to the histogram pulsing across the backlit screen. Abruptly, he stopped and punched the red button beneath his thumb. The histogram disappeared. In its place appeared “Am-241.” He glanced up. Directly over his head was a smoke detector.

The device he was carrying was a handheld explosives and radiation sensor. He was not worried about Am-241-or americium-241-a mineral used in smoke detectors. He was looking for something a little more exciting. He continued down the corridor, waving the radiation sensor in front of him as if it were a divining rod. The space looked clean. So far.

Von Daniken didn’t have the key to Theo Lammers’s office. Cooperative or not, the security company couldn’t provide what it didn’t have, and the chief executive’s office was strictly out-of-bounds. Myer spread a chamois roll containing his picks and blanks on the floor and set to work. A former instructor at the cantonal police academy, he needed just thirty seconds to open the lock.

Von Daniken swept the beam around the office. The MAV was on the table where he’d last seen it. He picked it up, studying it from varying angles. It was amazing that such a small device could travel at such high speeds. What interested him more was its purpose, peaceful or otherwise.

He put down the MAV and took several photographs of it with his digital camera, then moved on to Lammers’s desk. Surprisingly, the drawers were unlocked. One after another, he removed the dead executive’s folders, spread the documents on the desk, and photographed them. Most appeared to be customer correspondence and internal memoranda. He saw nothing to indicate why a man might feel it necessary to keep three passports and a loaded Uzi in his home.

This is his public life, von Daniken told himself. The smiling side of the mirror.