Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

Slowly, the men in the room rose. Zvi Hirsch was the first to clap. The others joined in. One by one, they pressed to shake the prime minister’s hand. All said the same words.

“Long live Israel.”

At his home, Marcus von Daniken could not sleep. Lying in bed, he stared at the ceiling, listening as the habitual sounds of the night tolled the passing hours. At midnight, he heard the radiator click off. The old wooden house began to shudder, surrendering its stored heat in groans and cracks and faint, pining voices that seemed to wail forever. At two, the nightly freight passed over the Rumweg Bridge. The tracks were five kilometers away, but the air was so still that he could count the cars as they rumbled over the trestles.

A drone.

He knew that this would be the case that defined his career. He knew it because things like this did not happen often in small, cozy Switzerland, and he was proud of the fact. He imagined the unmanned aircraft cutting across the sky, bearing its nacelle of plastic explosives. He pondered the possible targets. The terrorist, Gassan, had said that Quitab wanted to take down a plane, but here in his bed, in the dark of the night, von Daniken conjured up a dozen other possibilities, ranging from a dam in the Alps to the nuclear power plant at Gösgen. A drone like that could fly anywhere.

In his mind’s eye, the white unmanned aircraft grew larger in size and changed shape, until it was no longer a drone packed with twenty kilos of plastic explosives, but an Alitalia DC-9 carrying forty passengers and a crew of six en route from Milan to Zurich, among them his wife, his unborn child, and his three-year-old daughter. He was dreaming and he knew it, but the knowledge did nothing to lessen the impending horror. He saw the plane nosing through clouds, its landing gear hanging clear of the fuselage in preparation for arrival. It was not February, but November. A night much like this. Freezing temperatures. Sleet. Ground fog.

In his dream, he was standing inside the cockpit, lecturing the captain that he had no business flying in such conditions. The captain, however, was busy talking to a stewardess, more concerned about getting her phone number than paying attention to the faulty altimeter that had him flying three hundred meters too low.

And then, with the merciless acuity of all dreams, von Daniken saw his wife and daughter seated in the rear of the plane as it hurtled toward the mountainside. As was his custom, he took the seat next to them and gently laid his fingers over their eyes, closing their eyelids and shepherding them to a deep, painless sleep. He was certain that little Stéphanie’s head had been touching his wife’s shoulder.

At 19:11:18 hours November 14, 1990, Alitalia Flight 404 struck the Stadelberg, altitude four hundred meters above sea level, head-on, just fifteen kilometers from Zurich Flughafen. The speed at the moment of collision was four hundred knots. According to the accident reports, when the ground collision alarm sounded, the captain had less than ten seconds to avoid hitting the mountain.

Von Daniken shot upright in his bed before he was forced to watch it explode.

“Not again,” he said to himself, his breath coming fast and shallow.

No more planes would go down on his watch.

He would not allow it.

Sixty kilometers to the south, in the mountain hamlet of Kandersteg, the lights blazed in a small hotel room where a slim, muscular man stood naked in front of the mirror, shuddering violently. He was a sight from a grotesquerie. Great daubs of blood painted his cadaverous flesh. Feverish black eyes peered from sunken hollows. Strands of lank hair were pasted across his damp forehead.

The Ghost was dying.

The poison was killing him.

One of his own bullets had ricocheted off the bullet-resistant glass, entering his abdomen above the liver. The wound was barely the size of a sunflower seed, but the skin surrounding it had colored a sour yellowish brown, like a week-old bruise. With each heartbeat, rivulets of blood slid down his flat, hairless belly. He could feel the lead lodged close to the surface. The impact of the bullet against the glass had shattered the hollow-point jacket. It was only a sliver, and coated with bare micrograms of the poison. Otherwise, he would already be dead.

A spasm wracked his body. He closed his eyes, willing it to pass. Already, his breathing was growing labored and his sight dimming. His fingertips tingled as if being pricked by needles. In the recesses of his mind, he looked across the abyss. He saw shapes there, beasts writhing in torment. He saw faces, too. His victims cried out his name. They were keen for his arrival.

He drew back from the precipice and opened his eyes. Not yet, he told himself. He wasn’t ready to pass over.

In one hand he held his knife. In the other a gauze bandage, dampened with rubbing alcohol. With his fingertips, he located the sliver of lead and positioned the blade above it. He stilled his shuddering, then cut deftly and quickly, freeing the sliver. The bandage burned terribly.

Afterward, he forced himself to drink tea while he sat on his bed. He remained there for three hours, doing battle with the poison. Finally, the spasms ceased. His perspiration lessened, and his breathing returned to normal. He had won the battle. He would live, but the victory had left him weak, both mentally and physically.

Though exhausted, he could not permit himself to sleep. He showered to cleanse the blood from his body. He dried himself, and then set up his shrine on the windowsill. The shrine was composed of sticks from a banyan tree, a pinch of soil from the farmland near his home, and drops of water from the sacred headwaters of the Lempa River. He prayed to Hanhau, the god of the underworld, and Cacoch the creator. He asked that he be allowed to find and kill the man who had escaped death earlier that night. When he was finished, he dashed the water around the foot of his bed to guard him against malicious spirits.

Only then did the Ghost crawl between the sheets.

And as he slept, a voice warned that he would never see his home again. It said that he would not kill the American, but that Ransom would kill him. It begged him to take his own life now. It was Hanhau, trying to lure him to the shadow world. In his dreams, he laughed to show Hanhau that he paid him no mind.

He woke at dawn with only one intention.

Kill Ransom.

By ten o’clock that morning, the task force had scored its first easy victories.

Von Daniken had pinned down the Banca Popolare del Ticino as the institution where Blitz conducted his banking. Copies of all account transactions-deposits, withdrawals, payments, wire transfers to and from-were due within the hour. Additionally, he’d learned that the Villa Principessa had not been rented or leased, as suspected, but had been purchased twenty-four months earlier for three million francs by a shadowy investment trust domiciled in the Netherlands Antilles. All paperwork had been handled by a fiduciary agent in Liechtenstein. Von Daniken had dispatched emissaries to Vaduz, the capital of the tiny mountain principality, to interrogate the executives who had handled the transaction.

Myer had likewise struck gold, establishing a list of twelve phone numbers called by both Blitz and Lammers on a regular basis. Several belonged to manufacturing concerns with whom Robotica did business. Subpoenas were being issued to force the companies to divulge the names of those who were recipients of the calls. The other numbers were mobile designations belonging to foreign telecoms. It would be necessary to work through the embassies in France, Spain, and Holland to obtain subpoenas granting them access to the records.