Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

“One moment, please.”

A male voice picked up the line. “Mr. Schmid? This is Hannes Hoffmann. Mrs. Kruger is out of the country. What did you wish to speak with her about?”

“About Thor.”

Silence. Clearly, Jonathan didn’t have the password to get past Hoffmann either. Then, surprisingly: “Yes, what about Thor?”

“I think you may have a problem getting it wrapped up as soon as you’d like.”

“Mr. Schmid, I’m afraid we don’t discuss business with strangers.”

“I’m not a stranger. I told you I’m a friend of Eva’s. It’s just that you shouldn’t be relying on Gottfried Blitz, either.” Jonathan waited for another rejoinder about not discussing business with strangers, but all he got was dead air. “You know him, don’t you? I mean his name is on a memo you sent out.”

“Yes.” The response was tentative. “What about Mr. Blitz?”

“He’s dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They got him this morning. Snuck into his house and shot him in the head.”

“Who is this?” asked Hoffmann.

“I already told you. My name is Schmid.”

“How do you know about Mr. Blitz?”

“I was there. I saw him.”

“Impossible.” Hoffmann said it dismissively, as if Jonathan was referring to a practical joke that couldn’t be pulled off.

“Send someone to his house if you don’t believe me. The police are already there. Give him a call and you’ll find out.”

“I will. Immediately. Now, tell me who this really is?”

“Check the phone number.”

There was a pause, followed by the sound of a sharp intake of breath. “Who is this? What did you do to Blitz?”

Jonathan hung up. From now on, he was going to be the one asking the questions.

In accordance with the rules that applied to all homicides, the body of Theodoor A. Lammers, chief executive of Robotica AG, Dutch citizen, suspected agent provocateur for an unknown country, and victim of a professional assassin, was transferred to the University Hospital morgue and given a complete autopsy. The procedure was performed by Dr. Erwin Rohde, chief medical examiner for the canton of Zurich.

Rohde was sixty years old, an elfish man with watery blue eyes and a cap of gray hair. There was no question about the cause of death on this one, he thought, as he stood over the body and examined the wounds to the face and chest. If the shots to the head hadn’t killed the victim, the shot to the chest had. The round black bullet hole was positioned directly above the heart.

Murder was relatively uncommon in Zurich, and in Switzerland on the whole. The country had recorded a total of sixty-seven homicides the previous year. Less than the American city of San Diego, which at just over one million inhabitants had one-seventh the population of Switzerland. Of those sixty-seven, twenty died at the hands of organized crime, the victims primarily criminals themselves. But he had seen nothing like this in years.

Selecting a scalpel, Rohde made an incision across the top of the forehead and continued along the circumference of the head. After peeling back the skin (half over the face, half to the nape of the neck), he used an electric saw to cut off the top of Lammers’s skull. It was messy work. The gunshots had more or less eviscerated the brain.

Rohde dug out several misshapen pieces of lead and dropped them into the basin to his right. The bullets were dumdums, or hollow points, that mushroomed on impact. He freed another piece of metal and paused. Isn’t that odd? he thought to himself. Instead of a normal healthy pink, the area around the bullet fragment was colored a brackish brown. Normally, such coloring was indicative of necrosis, the unprogrammed killing of cellular matter by an outside source, either an infection, inflammation, or poisoning.

Rohde excised a chunk of the cerebellum and deposited it in a specimen bag. Leaving the closing to his assistant, he set to work examining the chest wound. The bullet had pancaked upon striking the heart, but was otherwise intact. It was a quick business to remove it. Adjusting the overhead lamps, he bent to study the organ. The heart was colored a rich, healthy maroon. All except the tissue surrounding the wound. There, the muscle was the same fecal brown he’d observed in the brain.

Rohde excised a nub of tissue and held it to the light. There could be no doubt that what he was observing was an advanced case of necrosis. This specimen, too, he preserved.

Scooping up the plastic bags, he took off his robe and hurried from the operating theater.

Two minutes later, he arrived in the forensics lab. “I need to use the GC-MS,” he said, referring to the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer

Something on the bullet was killing the flesh.

C31-H42-N2-O6.

Erwin Rohde stared at the formula displayed in the mass spectrometer’s readout, waiting for the machine to translate it into a known substance. Ten seconds passed without any words appearing. The spectrometer, capable of identifying over 64,000 substances, was stumped. A second request to analyze the tissue offered the same result. Rohde shook his head. It was the first time in twenty years that the machine had failed him.

Writing down the formula, he hurried back to his office. That it was a toxin or poison, he was certain. The question was what kind of toxin. Rohde tried running the molecular signature through his own computer. Again he came up with a blank. Perplexed, he slid his chair back. There was one man he could count on to provide him the answer.

Consulting his address book, Rohde dialed an overseas number: 44 for England, 20 for London. The four-digit prefix belonged to New Scotland Yard.

“Wickes,” answered a dry English voice.

Rohde introduced himself, stating that he had attended Wickes’s seminar the past summer titled “New Forensic Technologies.” Wickes was a busy man who gave short shrift to social niceties. “What is it, then?”

Rohde offered a summary of Lammers’s postmortem and the mass spectrometer’s failure to identify the compound causing necrosis of the brain tissue and heart muscle.

“Just the composition,” Wickes cut in. “Leave the rest to me.”

Rohde read off the list of components. When Wickes returned to the phone, his tone was a good deal less imperious. “Where did you say you found that tissue?”

“Around gunshot wounds to the head and chest.”

“Interesting,” said Wickes.

“Do you mean you’ve found the substance?”

“Of course I found it. The compound you gave me is that of a batrachotoxin.”

Rohde admitted to having never heard of such a toxin.

“No reason for you to have,” said Wickes. “Not in your neck of the woods, is it? From the Greek batrachos , meaning frog.”

“Frog poison?”

“Genus Dendrobates. Poison dart frogs, to be exact. Little devils size of your thumb. Found in rainforests in Central America and western Colombia. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica. Batrachotoxin is one of the most lethal in the world. One hundred micrograms-about the weight of two grains of salt-is sufficient to kill a one-hundred-fifty-pound man. The poison’s only recorded use, other than by frogs to protect themselves, of course, is by indigenous Indians who coat their darts with the stuff when they go hunting for monkeys and the like.”

“So the bullets were coated? But why?”

Instead of answering the question, Wickes posed one of his own. “Do your men have a line on the killer? Don’t have him in custody, do they?”

“No.”

“Didn’t expect so. I’m certain that he’s a professional.”

Rohde told him that the police did believe that the murder had, in fact, been committed by a trained killer.