Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

“You’ll be seeing your work from a different side, that’s all. Think how much you’ll learn. Besides, you’ll look cute in a suit. Ever so handsome, I daresay.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Next thing I know, you’ll have me joining a country club and playing golf.”

“Aren’t doctors supposed to love golf?”

Jonathan fixes her with his serious gaze. He knows there’s something else.

Emma props herself up on an elbow. “There’s another reason.”

“What’s that?”

“I want to go. I’ve had enough of all this for a while. I want to eat at a restaurant with white tablecloths. I want to drink wine from clean glasses. Wine glasses. I want to put on makeup and wear a dress. Does that sound so odd?”

“You? A dress? Not possible.” Jonathan throws back the top sheet and climbs out of bed. This is not a discussion he wants to have. Now or ever. “Sorry, I don’t do admin.”

“Please,” says Emma. “Just consider it.”

Turning, he looks at his wife draped in the white cotton bedding. Her cheeks are raw and sunburned, strafed by constant exposure to sun and wind. Her auburn hair has gone from teased to tangled to just plain tortured. The cut on her chin is taking too long to heal.

Just consider it…

In Geneva, they’d have plenty of mornings like this. Time to lounge. Time not only to talk about starting a family, but to do something about it. And, of course, there’s the climbing. Chamonix, two hours’ drive to the north. The Berner Oberland, two hours to the east. The Dolomites to the south.

“Maybe,” he says, pulling back a curtain and staring across the hard, arid landscape. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

A loose assembly has gathered in front of the mosque for morning prayer. The men greet each other in the Arab fashion, a kiss to each cheek.

“You getting up?” he asks over his shoulder. “If you want, I can go out and get you some breakfast…”

It is then that he sees the car. A white sedan driving madly across the dirt. A car where no car should be. Plumes of dust spray from its tires as it rocks and rattles on the hardscrabble surface. Behind the windscreen, two silhouettes.

“Move,” he calls to the crowd, though his voice is only a whisper. Then louder. “Get out of the way! Move! Hurry!”

Helpless, he watches the car plow into the crowd, sending bodies flying. Screams. Gunshots. The car slams into a wall of the mosque, bricks and mortar toppling onto the hood. For a moment, silence. In his mind, he is counting…

A flash of light.

A garish pulse that sears his retina.

A quarter of a second later, the noise comes. A thunderclap that strikes his eardrums hard enough to make him wince. Not one explosion, but three in succession.

Jonathan hurls himself onto the bed, covering Emma’s body with his own as the shockwave blows out the windows, spraying the room with glass, launching the curtain rod like a Crusader’s spear, and shaking loose a veil of dust and mortar.

“A car bomb,” he says as the noise dies. “It drove into the mosque.”

Dazed, he stands and brushes the debris from his hair. Emma pushes herself off the bed and dances across the broken glass to the dresser, where she throws on her clothes. Jonathan searches for his medical kit, but Emma already has it and is stuffing it with gauze, bandages, and antiseptic wipes taken from their portable supply locker. He comes to her side and begins calling out the medicines he needs. In ninety seconds, his bag is full.

Black smoke curls into the sky. The mosque is gone. The blast has obliterated the structure. Only the base of the building remains, shorn walls resembling broken teeth. Paper and debris rain from above.

Jonathan slows as he approaches the ruined vehicle. He gazes down at a pair of smoking boots. Nearby, an arm reaches to the heavens, its hand clutching a Koran. Somewhere else lies the upper half of a human being. Everything is charred black and daubed with blood. Around him survivors are getting to their feet, staggering aimlessly. Others rush toward them, heeding the pitiful calls of the wounded. The smell of burning oil and cauterized flesh is overpowering.

“Over here,” says Emma. Her voice is rock solid. She stands next to a young man lying on his back. The man’s face is a bloody mess, the flesh of his chest flayed and badly burned. But it is his leg that draws Jonathan’s attention. Shattered bone protrudes from his pant leg. A compound fracture of the femur.

“Don’t move,” Jonathan instructs the man in Arabic. “Keep still.” To Emma: “I’m getting a splint. It’s crucial that he stay just as he is or he’ll nick his femoral artery.”

Emma grasps the man’s shoulders and combats his thrashing as Jonathan splints the leg.

Jonathan raises his head and counts a dozen more who need urgent treatment. His decision whom to treat will determine who lives and who dies.

“Okay,” he says, meeting Emma’s eye.

“Okay what?”

“ Geneva. Let’s go.”

“Really?”

“Those white tablecloths are looking pretty good right about now.”

Jonathan began the curving descent to Brig. The time was 21:45. The outside temperature a chill -3° Celsius, or 27° Fahrenheit. Negotiating a hairpin turn, he felt the rear tires slip, only to regain their traction a second later. The road was icing up.

Despite the inclement weather, he had made good time. As expected, there had been little traffic on the alpine road. He’d counted six cars passing him from the opposite direction. None of them police. On several occasions, he’d glimpsed the flare of headlights behind him, but the driver had either pulled off the road a while back or hadn’t kept up. The navigation unit clicked down another notch. Thirty-eight kilometers remained to his destination. To his right, he observed a sign with the name “Lötschberg” and a symbol of a car piggybacking on a flatbed train next to it.

Emma had arranged the promotion. Not Emma herself, of course, but the people she worked for. Her higher-ups. The implication was clear. They had a person inside DWB.

Who was it, then? Someone in personnel? One of the vice-directors? The director herself? Between them, he counted one Somali, two Brits, and a Swiss.

Would it have been easier if one were American? Jonathan wondered. Would he have considered the problem of Emma’s allegiance solved? Stirring America into the mix would only add to the confusion. Emma was a vocal critic of the “world’s greatest democracy.” She did not believe in nation building and spheres of influence, doctrines going by any name, and realpolitik.

But if she wasn’t working for America, then who? The Brits? The Israelis? What did the French call their espionage unit…the wingnuts who had tried to sink the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor way back when? With a fright, he realized that she could be working for anyone. The country didn’t matter. Only the ideals did.

Emma and her duty to interfere.

As the windscreen filled with white and the frozen night closed around him, Jonathan’s mind was fixated on the fireball that had engulfed the mosque. The blinding burst that erupted a millisecond before the explosion assaulted his ears.

Was the car bomb part of it, too? The final straw needed to convince him to go? He begged Emma for the answer. But he’d lost touch with her.