Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

“Get out,” said Simone.

Next to her stood a compact man with dark hair, a pale complexion, and dead eyes, holding a pistol at his side. Jonathan needed no introduction.

“If you please,” the man said with a quick flick of his pistol. “And don’t bother with whatever that is you’re holding.”

Jonathan dropped the tire iron and climbed out of the car. They had parked in a lay-by a few hundred feet from the top of the mountain. The vista was dramatic, a panorama of towering granite piers in every direction.

“I suppose it’s too late to say that I want to leave the country.” Jonathan’s throat was suddenly dry. He needed water.

“I tried to warn you off,” said Simone.

“Why didn’t you tell me you worked with Emma? That would have been enough.”

“I don’t. In fact, I’m as interested to learn what she was doing as you are.”

“Then who are you with?”

Simone just stared at him.

He took a step toward the edge of the lay-by and glimpsed a sheer rock face. He judged it to be a thousand-meter fall to the valley floor.

Simone stretched out her hand. “I need all the information Parvez Jinn gave you.”

“He didn’t give me anything,” said Jonathan.

“You came all this way to see Jinn and you didn’t even ask him what he’d smuggled out of the country? I’d have thought he’d have practically pressed it on you.”

“I went to see Jinn to ask him if he knew who Emma was working for, and possibly, if she’d told him her real name.”

“No, you didn’t. You came to Davos to get out of trouble. To get your proof.”

Jonathan said nothing.

“Why are you making this so hard?” she asked.

“You don’t have to do this, Simone.”

“You’re right. I don’t. But Ricardo, here, does.”

Ricardo, the assassin, sniffed the air. “Please, if you have any information, now is the time to give it to Mrs. Noiret.”

“What’s your game?” asked Jonathan, ignoring the man who had tried to shoot him in the tunnel and later stab him. “Did you have this guy kill Blitz, too?”

“My game is the same as everyone else’s in this business. This is not about playing doctor.”

Jonathan took the flash drive out of his pocket and held it in his palm. “Iran’s entire nuclear program is on this thing. Jinn thinks it’s enough to start a war.”

Simone glanced at the drive. “Does he? I don’t concern myself with those issues.”

“Tell me who you work for and why you wanted Emma so badly. Tell me that, and it’s yours.”

“I work for the Central Intelligence Agency. I’m your friend. Believe me.”

“My friend?” Jonathan shook his head. Spinning, he cocked his arm and threw the flash drive over the cliff.

“Merde!” Simone jumped toward the cliff. Furious, she looked at Jonathan, then at the man named Ricardo. “He’s yours.”

Jonathan gazed into the sky and took a deep breath. The air was marvelously crisp.

Just then, there was a thudding noise, like a hand slapping a bare back. Jonathan flinched, expecting to feel something sharp and final. He drew a breath. Nothing had struck him.

The assassin collapsed to his knees. A red stain blossomed on his chest. He gasped, and as he fell forward onto the snow, blood poured from his mouth.

Simone spun to look behind her, searching the rugged terrain above them. A figure detached itself from a shelf of rock. A person dressed in black and gray, with a knit cap tight on their head and eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses. A hand pulled off the knit cap and a spray of amber hair tumbled free. When she was a few feet away, she took off her sunglasses.

“You,” said Simone. “But how…”

Emma Ransom raised her pistol and fired a bullet into Simone Noiret’s forehead. Simone tottered and retreated a step, stunned and uncomprehending. Emma kicked her savagely in the chest. Simone plummeted off the precipice.

Emma stepped to the edge and watched her fall.

She stood ten feet away cradling a strange-looking gun in her arms, some kind of pistol with a silencer and a folding stock. There was no sign of a broken leg. Nor were there any visible injuries sustained from a three-hundred-foot fall. She looked at him as if he were a stranger, offering no indication that she desired to hug or kiss him, or that she was happy to see him at all.

“But I saw you,” he said. “In the crevasse.”

“You thought you saw me.”

“The blood…the trail in the snow…your leg was broken. I saw the fracture.”

“It wasn’t my bone. It was all incredibly sloppy. I had to work fast. When I found out-.”

“Emma,” he said.

“-that it was set for this weekend, I began to-.”

“Emma!” he shouted. “Is that even your name?”

Without answering, she turned and began jogging down the hill. Rooted to the spot, Jonathan was filled with a flux of emotions: wonderment, anger, elation, and bitterness, all of them warring with one another. It took him a second or two to sort his feelings out. Still stunned, he followed her down the road to where she’d left her car two switchbacks below. It was a VW Golf that had seen a lot of wear. He made for the driver’s side, but she was already there, opening the door and dipping her head inside the cabin. By the time he climbed into the passenger seat, the engine was running, the car in gear and beginning to move.

“I talked to the hospital,” he said. “The nurse there told me that the Emma Everett Rose who was born there died in a car accident two weeks after her birth.”

“Later,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything later.”

“I don’t want everything. I only want the truth.”

“The truth, even,” she said. “Right now, I need you to tell me something. Jinn’s flash drive. You’ve still got it, right? I mean, you didn’t really throw it over the cliff?”

Jonathan dug the second flash drive out of his pocket. “No,” he said. “I tossed yours.”

She snatched it out of his hand. “I’ll forgive you,” she said. “This time.”

Emma attacked the hill as if it were a racetrack, punching it on the straights, braking into the turns, downshifting crisply. Emma who couldn’t manage a stick to save her life.

Until now, he’d kept her identities separate. There was Emma Ransom, his wife, and there was Eva Kruger, the operative. He’d convinced himself that Emma was the true side of her-the authentic side-and that Eva was the cover. Watching her drive, he knew he’d been wrong. For the first time, he was seeing the real Emma, the woman she’d never allowed him to see. It came to him then that he didn’t know this woman.

“I didn’t expect you to be so good at this,” she said, when they reached the valley floor and turned west toward Davos and Zurich.

“What did you expect?”

“I was afraid you might chuck it all and disappear into the mountains for a few years. Pull the lone explorer bit.”

“I might have, if I hadn’t gotten the baggage claims. Everything went haywire when I picked up the bags. After I killed the policemen, I had to keep going. It was the only way to clear myself. Simone tried to convince me to leave the country, but when I saw what was inside the bag, I couldn’t run away. I had to know.”

“Of all the days for the train not to deliver the mail,” she said with a dismissive shake of the head. “I guess I was wrong about you going into the mountains.”

“I’ll forgive you,” he said. “This time.”

She laughed at this, but it was a concession and it rang hollow.

“And so,” he said. “Your turn. I’ll make it easy for you. Start with the mountain. What exactly did I see?”