Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

Lieutenant Conti, who had been listening in on the exchange, tucked his chin into his neck and lifted his hands in a quintessentially Italian gesture. “But why would Ransom shoot Blitz and then call the ambulance to save his life?”

Von Daniken exchanged looks with Myer. Neither man wanted to answer the question for the time being.

Von Daniken walked over to the desk and tapped a few keys on the laptop. The screen displayed a hodgepodge of fractured colors. Here was something else that bothered him. Was Blitz working on a broken computer when he’d been shot? Or had he purposefully ruined it to prevent anyone from finding out what was on its hard drive?

One by one, he opened the desk drawers. The top two were empty, except for a few scraps of paper, rubber bands, and pens. The bottom drawer was locked, but appeared to have been tampered with. He glanced up and noticed a few moving boxes placed against the wall. He rushed to see what was inside and was disappointed to find them empty as well.

Just then, the crime scene technicians arrived. All unnecessary personnel were ordered out of the room. Myer slipped past von Daniken in the corridor, whispering that he was going to get the daisy sniffer, which was what he called the explosives and radiation detector.

As the technicians filed into the house, von Daniken went upstairs and made his way to Gottfried Blitz’s bedroom. He wasn’t thinking about the victim so much as the man who might have killed him. He was looking for a clue as to why a cop killer whose wife had died in a mountaineering accident was in such a hurry to visit Blitz.

The search of Blitz’s bedroom turned up nothing. The night table was stacked with German celebrity glossies; the dresser filled with neatly folded clothing; the bathroom stuffed to bursting with cologne, hair products, and a variety of prescription drugs. But nowhere did he find anything that would tie Blitz to the drone, or indicate how he planned to use it.

Von Daniken sat down on the bed and stared out the window. It came to him that there were two groups and that they were somehow battling one another. There was Lammers and Blitz on the one side, and those who wanted them dead on the other. The quality of the killings combined with the discovery of the drone and the RDX marked it as an intelligence operation.

The prospect angered him. If an intelligence agency knew enough about a plot involving RDX and a drone to take decisive measures to stop it, why hadn’t they contacted him with the information?

He turned his mind to Dr. Jonathan Ransom, who apparently had phoned the paramedics. According to the station manager, Ransom had been hellbent on discovering who had sent the bags to Landquart earlier in the week. The logical assumption was that he didn’t know Blitz. How, then, had Ransom come to be in possession of the baggage claims?

If, however, von Daniken were to assume that Ransom and Blitz were working together-that they did know each other-the pieces fell into place. Stopped by the police after picking up the bags, Ransom had panicked, killed the arresting officer, then run down his partner in his hurry to flee the scene. Cover compromised, Ransom fled to Ascona to seek instructions from his controller. His ignorance of Blitz’s address could be put off to a cardinal rule of espionage: Compartmentalize information, or in the vernacular, keep it need-to-know. Hence, his need to speak to Orsini.

And the wife? The Englishwoman who had perished in a freak mountaineering accident? Might Ransom have killed her when she’d discovered that he was an agent?

Von Daniken scowled. He was grasping. Spinning fantasies out of thin air. Rising, he made his way to the stairs. He wanted to know what was in the bags that had made Ransom deem them worth killing for. There was little prospect of finding out, at least in the short term. The officer Ransom had struck with the car lay in a coma. His prognosis was not optimistic.

Von Daniken’s phone rang, interrupting his thoughts.

It was Myer, and he sounded worried. “In the garage. Come quickly.”

The garage was detached from the main house and accessible by a side entry. A late-model Mercedes sedan occupied one space. The other was empty, but a fresh oil stain and a set of muddy tire tracks testified to the fact that a vehicle-either a truck or a van by the width of its axle-had recently been parked there.

Myer skirted the Mercedes and made his way to a storage closet built into the rear wall. He opened the doors and stood back so von Daniken could have a clear view. Stacked on the shelves were bricks wrapped in white plastic and bound in groups of five by duct tape.

“Is it what I think it is?” said von Daniken.

“Thirty kilos of Semtex still in its factory wrapping,” said Myer. “Won’t be hard to find out where this came from.”

Plastic explosives were tagged with a special reactive chemical that identified not only the manufacturer, but the lot number. The practice allowed the explosives to be tracked, and in theory, at least, to defend against illegal sale and trafficking.

“Take one,” said von Daniken.

Myer didn’t hesitate before removing a brick and tossing it to Krajcek, who slipped it into his overcoat. As material evidence, the explosives officially belonged to the Tessin police, but von Daniken didn’t feel like filing a request and waiting a week for the evidence to be catalogued and then released. Plastic explosives were not passports.

“Check the car?” von Daniken asked.

“Just the trunk. It’s clean.”

Von Daniken climbed into the Mercedes and rummaged through its contents. The vehicle was registered to Blitz. His driver’s license was tucked into the flap alongside the door. As he removed it, a piece of blue paper fell into his lap.

An envelope. One of the flimsy old-fashioned ones marked “Air Mail.” He saw the writing and his heart skipped a beat. It was Arabic written in a fountain pen’s faded blue ink. The postmark read, “Dubai, U.A.E. 10.12.85.”

Von Daniken opened it. The letter itself was written in Arabic, too. One page, the script neat and precise. A laser printer could hardly do better. He couldn’t read a word of it, but that didn’t matter. The faded photograph tucked inside told him all he needed to know.

Staring into the camera was a strapping young soldier dressed in a green uniform complete with a Sam Browne belt and an officer’s oversized cap. Flanking him were his mother and father. Proud grins were the same the world over. Von Daniken had never been to Iran, but he recognized a picture of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei when he saw it, and he knew that the giant, four-story painted portrait of the religious figure that dominated the photograph’s background could only have been taken in Teheran. Even so, his attention kept returning to the military man’s face and his strange blue eyes. A zealot’s eyes, he thought.

Just then, his cell phone rang. He checked the screen. A restricted number. “Von Daniken.”

“Marcus, it’s your American cousin.”

Von Daniken handed the letter to Myer and told him to find someone who spoke Arabic. Then he stepped outside the garage and resumed his conversation. “No more engine problems, I trust.”

“All taken care of.”

“I’m glad.”

“We talked to Walid Gassan.”

“I figured.” Von Daniken wondered where they’d hidden him on the plane. “When did you take him down?”

“Five days ago in Stockholm. One of our informants received word that Gassan had taken delivery of some plastic explosives up in Leipzig. We brought in a jump team to nab him, but he’d gotten rid of the stuff before we could arrest him.”