6
Darkness pressed in
from all sides. Jonathan blinked. His eyes were open, but the black remained absolute. He tried to raise his head, but found it locked into place. His legs and arms were likewise pinned down. Snow encased his body as if he lay in a concrete bath. He could not lift a hand, not a finger. All the while, a steady voice told him to remain calm. It mused that it was not as cold as he’d expected. But, yes, it was dark. No one had ever mentioned the dark. His breathing grew labored. The air was going fast. He realized that he was buried deep below the surface, and that no one could possibly find him in time. Fear rose from deep inside him, crawling upward through his stomach, gathering speed and strength, gutting his discipline and strangling the calm, reasonable voice. The dark. The pressure. The failing air. He was overcome by a full-throated terror. He opened his mouth to scream and sucked down a torrent of snow and ice.
He bolted upright in bed.
“Emma,” he gasped, his hands searching the mattress beside him.
He’d had the dream again. He needed to hear her voice. To feel her hand on his shoulder. He turned on the light. Emma’s side of the bed was unbothered. The crisp white duvet remained neatly folded down. A corner of her nightshirt extended from beneath her pillow.
She’s gone.
It came over him slowly, like an approaching storm. His breath quickened. His fingertips began to tingle. Something sharp and cold tore into his stomach and forced him to bend double at the waist. He sobbed.
She’s gone.
The words played over in his mind as images of her body lying alone and abandoned in the frozen darkness tormented him.
Finally, a measure of calm returned. His breathing slowed. The terror passed, but he knew it wasn’t gone for good. He could feel it lurking nearby, waiting.
He stood and walked to the window. Snow continued to fall heavily, and the faint light of dawn cast the low, stately clouds with a funereal hue. The view gave out over rolling hills dotted with chalets. A half mile farther on, a forest climbed the flank of the imposing peaks that cradled the town.
Opening the balcony door, he stepped outside. Cold scrubbed the air clean of scent, and his first breaths burned his throat and lungs. He stood at the railing, studying yesterday’s route. His eyes followed the path deep into the mountains, through cloud and mist to the hooded peak of the Furga. And beyond it, to Roman’s.
I know this mountain and I didn’t do anything to protect you from it.
I know this mountain and I left you alone on it.
I know this mountain and I let it kill you.
When his shivering grew uncontrollable, Jonathan stepped back inside. He was struck by how neat the room appeared. He knew that it was foolish to think it should look different now that she was gone. Yet he couldn’t help feeling betrayed by its normalcy, when nothing was normal at all.
He sat down at the desk and opened the drawer. Sunscreen, pocketknife, maps, lip balm, bandana, beacon, and the two-way radio lay scattered inside. He picked up the radio and flicked it on and off. It was dead.
A wire…a detached wire.
After coming off the mountain, Jonathan had been taken to the police station where he’d been examined by a doctor, then made to answer a fusillade of questions. Full name: Jonathan Hobart Ransom. Birthplace: Annapolis, Maryland. Occupation: board certified surgeon. Employer: Doctors Without Borders. Nationality: American. Residence: Geneva.
And then the questions about Emma. Birthplace: Penzance, England. Parents: deceased. Siblings: one sister, Beatrice. Occupation: Nurse. Administrator. Human being with an oversized conscience and a “duty to interfere.” Wife. Best friend. Anchor.
There were other questions. About his experience as a mountaineer. About how he’d failed to monitor the weather. About Emma’s fall and whether or not she was bleeding when he’d left her, and his failure to spot the radio’s defect prior to climbing. And finally, about his decision to continue climbing when he’d realized the storm was intensifying.
It wasn’t his decision, he wanted to say. It was hers. Emma never turned back.
Setting the unit on the desk, he let his eyes wander to the mountains. Jonathan could trace the beginning of his love affair with climbing to a trip to California the Ransom family had taken when he was nine years old. Their goal was to ascend Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower forty-eight states. The plan was for his older brothers to set out from Whitney Portal, altitude 8,500 feet, at five in the morning, and make the twenty-two-mile round trip to Whitney’s 14,500-foot summit in one day. Jonathan and his father would accompany them the first few miles, then stop to enjoy a picnic lunch and do some fishing until the boys returned.
But even then Jonathan was showing signs of an independent streak. Like all boys who idolize their older brothers, he had no intention of being left behind. His father, who was forty years old and never missed a chance to have a meal with his cocktail, might stop. But not him. And so, when Ned Ransom pulled up after four miles and suggested they break for an early lunch, Jonathan sprinted ahead, defying all calls for him to come back. He didn’t stop until he reached the peak almost eight miles later. One hundred yards ahead of his brothers.
The die was cast.
By the time Jonathan was sixteen, all he cared about was climbing. An equivalency test freed him from high school. College wasn’t a consideration. Summers were spent guiding up Mount McKinley, winters combing the slopes as a ski patrolman. Every penny saved was put toward the next expedition. He bagged his share of big names: Eiger Nordwand, Aconcagua, K2 by the Magic Line without a lick of bottled oxygen. It was all about the rush. Hanging it out there as far as you dared, then pulling it back at the last second.
It was at this time that he became aware of a flaw in his character. The flaw derived from his almost unnatural strength and his (all too natural) rebellious spirit, and it involved a growing and pronounced inclination for fistfighting. The bars of mountain resorts were as full of braggarts and louses as any others. He was choosy and made it a point to single out the loudest of the bunch. Someone deserving of comeuppance. Someone who looked like they might make a match of it. He would order a shot of bourbon to get his nerves just right. Then it was just a matter of making the proper comments. With any luck, he’d find himself in a back alley within five minutes.
The fights were brutish and short. He was a canny fighter, quick to pick up on an opponent’s weaknesses. He would circle for a minute or two, avoiding the sweaty clenches and ungainly wrestling that were the hallmarks of amateur brawls. Then he would move in. A jab to the jaw, a punch to the gut, and a roundhouse to the side of the head. It rarely lasted longer than that. He prided himself on his economy.
He knew that the trait was dangerous and, worse, self-destructive. He also knew that it involved his addiction to risk. He found himself challenging bigger men, venturing into openly dangerous establishments. He began to lose, but even then he was unable to cure himself of this flaw. During his climbs, he sought out uncharted routes. He hungered for the impossible face. He yearned to go higher, farther, and faster.
Then one day, it went away. The fighting. The desire to master a stretch of vertical granite. The need to endanger his life to feel alive. Gone like that. He hung up his gear and decided that that part of his life was finished.
People whispered that it was because of the avalanche. They said he’d lost his nerve. They were wrong. He hadn’t quit. He’d just found a bigger rush. And it was on a concrete highway, not on a vertical face.
He was twenty-one. It was a Sunday night and he was coming back to Aspen after a weekend doing free ascents up Angels Landing, a two-thousand-foot slab of red rock in Zion National Park. As usual, the traffic through the mountains was a nightmare. A Ford Bronco in front of him tried to pass the eighteen-wheeler a few vehicles up. The Bronco was old and consumptive, hopelessly slow, and it collided with an even bigger juggernaut coming the other way. The driver died instantly. The passenger was alive when Jonathan reached her. She was a girl, fourteen at most. Jonathan got her out of the car and laid her on the ground. The gearshift had pierced her chest and blood was spurting from the wound like a ruptured hydrant. With only his patrolman’s training to rely on—knowing only vaguely what to do—he’d rammed his fist into the perforation, keeping pressure on the ruptured artery and arresting the loss of blood. The girl was conscious the entire time. She never said a word. She just stared up at him with his hand buried inside her ribs until the ambulance arrived.
All that time, he could feel her heart beating…actually feel the organ itself, pumping against his hand.
The ultimate rush.
He quit his job the next week and enrolled in college to study medicine.
Jonathan’s thoughts came back to the here and now. Turning away from the window, his eyes fell on Emma’s night table. It stood as she’d left it. An open bottle of mineral water. Reading glasses balanced on a stack of romance novels. “You don’t understand,” she’d said once, trying to explain why she was so slavishly devoted to stories about strapping Scotsmen and time-traveling buccaneers who rescued damsels in distress and lived in castles on the Firth of Forever. She liked them because they were predictable. Happy ending guaranteed. It was an antidote to her job where hardly anything ended happily, or, at the very least, not predictably.
Finally, his eyes landed back on the corner of angel’s-blue fabric extending from the pillow. Sitting down on the bed, he freed Emma’s nightshirt and brought it to his face. The wool was worn and soft and smelled of vanilla and sandalwood. A wave of sensations washed over him. The feel of the firm, rounded muscles that ran the length of her spine. The warmth that radiated from the base of her neck. The desire sparked by her coy smile peeking up at him from beneath the spray of hair.
“Yes?”
Emma would say, drawing out the word like a dare.
Jonathan lowered the nightshirt to his lap. All that was gone. A current of longing seized him. A current so powerful that it threatened to grow into a panic. Panic at his permanent, inconsolable loss.
He looked at Emma’s nightshirt and breathed easier. He was not ready to say goodbye. He folded it up and replaced it under the pillow. For a while yet, he wanted to keep her with him.
7
The headquarters
of the Service for Analysis and Prevention was located in a modern steel-and-glass building on the Nussbaumstrasse in Bern. The staff of the Swiss counterespionage service numbered fewer than two hundred souls. Their tasks were geared primarily toward information collection and analysis, and involved keeping tabs on registered agents of foreign governments, most of whom resided in Bern, and monitoring what it regarded as clandestine communications traffic in and out of the country. Only thirty officers were assigned to more active work—that is, the day-to-day investigation and infiltration of extremist groups operating on Swiss soil, including foreign terrorist cells. In every sense it was a small, tightly run operation.
Marcus von Daniken arrived at seven sharp and set to work. Picking up the phone, he dialed an internal number. A woman answered. “Schmid. ISIS.”
Von Daniken identified himself. “I need everything we have on a subject on our watch list named Theo Lammers. It’s urgent.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll send it right away.”
A minute later, a chime rang from his computer indicating a newly arrived e-mail. Von Daniken was pleased to see that it was the file from ISIS. The report was a summary of information passed along by the Belgian police.
Theodoor Albrecht Lammers was born in Rotterdam in 1961. After earning a doctorate in mechanical engineering at Utrecht University, he drifted in and out of jobs at several undistinguished firms in Amsterdam and The Hague. He came to the notice of the authorities in 1987 while working in Brussels as an associate of Gerald Bull, the American armaments designer. At the time, Bull was busy creating a “supergun” for Saddam Hussein. Code-named Babylon, the gun was actually a giant artillery piece capable of lobbing a shell hundreds of miles with deadly accuracy. His work for the Middle Eastern potentate was a matter of public record. All the same, Bull and his associates (Theo Lammers included) were considered “persons of interest” by the Belgian police.
Von Daniken knew the rest of the story himself. Gerald Bull was murdered in 1990, shot five times in the back of the head by an assassin waiting in the foyer of his Brussels apartment. At first, speculation had it that it was the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, which had killed him. The speculation was incorrect. At the time, the Israelis had kept up a distant but cordial relationship with the scientist. As prospective clients, they were eager to know exactly what he was up to. It was for this very reason that the Iraqis had killed him. Once the Babylon gun was built, Saddam Hussein did not want Bull sharing its secrets with anyone, especially the Israelis.
Von Daniken closed the e-mail, then stood and walked to the window. The morning was gray and grim, wet snow dropping from lowlying cloud cover. The view gave onto a parking lot, and farther on, a half-finished office tower, crawling with laborers despite the weather.
And Lammers? he asked himself. What had he been up to that warranted keeping an Uzi in his workshop and a variety of passports in his bathroom? Or to necessitate sending a professional killer to lie in wait behind his woodshed?
Von Daniken returned to his desk. Several dossiers lay on top. They were labeled “Airports and Immigration,” “Counterterrorism/Domestic,” “Counterterrorism/Foreign,” and “Trafficking.” He skimmed their contents, saving “Counterterrorism/Foreign” for last.
This dossier contained a summary of wires from foreign security services. In 1971, the chief of the Swiss intelligence service, alarmed by the specter of politically motivated acts of violence, helped establish a confederation of Western European law enforcement professionals charged with ensuring their country’s internal security. The group became known as the Club of Bern. After 9/11, the group formalized their relationship and took the name “Counterterror Group,” or CTG.
The topmost report was from his counterpart in Sweden and stated that Walid Gassan, a suspected
extremist
(Sweden did not countenance the use of the word “terrorist”) had been spotted in Stockholm. It went on to say that Gassan was deemed a priority suspect in the bombing of the Sheraton Hotel in Amman, Jordan, as well as several failed attacks, and requested that any information regarding Gassan or his accomplices be forwarded to the Swedish intelligence service immediately.
The report was accurate, if incomplete.
Walid Gassan had passed through Switzerland in January. Working off a tip from an informant in Geneva’s “Big Mosque,” von Daniken had sent a team to track him down and arrest him. Though not wanted in Switzerland, the red flag warrant issued by Interpol gave von Daniken the authority to take Gassan into custody. As it turned out, fate had been with Gassan, and the terrorist had slipped across the border before von Daniken could do anything more than issue an alert about his whereabouts. He thought of the fingernail he’d found in the aircraft. Maybe his reports on Gassan’s movements had done some good. He did not know, however, whether the terrorist had been kidnapped off the streets of Stockholm or some other European city. He would leave it to Philip Palumbo, head of the CIA’s Special Removal Unit, to inform the Swedes of Gassan’s current location, if and when he saw fit.
Von Daniken walked downstairs to the second floor, advancing along a cool, gray-carpeted corridor to the last door on the right. “KILA 2.8,” read the room placard.
“KILA” stood for the Coordination Unit for Identity Documents. It was KILA’s job to maintain a collection of identity documents from every country around the world. Somewhere in its compendious cabinets was at least one example of every passport, driver’s license, birth certificate, and any other commonly produced identity document currently in circulation in more than two hundred countries around the world.
Von Daniken stuck his head in the door. “Max, you busy?”
Max Seiler ran KILA. He was a short, barrel-chested man with blue eyes and thinning blond hair. “I thought you’d be in,” he said, looking up from his work. “Heard you had quite a night.”
Von Daniken filled Seiler in on the details. “These turned up in the victim’s house,” he said, tossing the three passports onto the desk.
Seiler examined the documents. “An agent?”
“Agent. Trafficker. Crook. One of the above.”
Seiler focused on a maroon passport with a royal coat of arms and the words “Europese Unie Koninkrijk der Nederlanden” emblazoned on the cover. “This the real one?”
“As far as I can tell, Lammers is his real name. He had a C permit giving his nationality as Dutch. ISIS has him tracked back to a university in the Netherlands. I doubt that he went undercover before he was eighteen. Regardless, I want a thorough check. Run all of them through Identigate, then drill down for the breeder docs.”
Breeder documents included social security cards and birth certificates: the government-issued paperwork that validated one’s identity.
Leaning to his side, Seiler cleared a stack of papers off a nearby chair. A glance revealed Italian driver’s licenses, German medical insurance cards, English birth certificates. All fakes.
“Jules Gaye, born 1962, Brussels,” he read aloud, after opening the Belgian passport. He flipped through the pages, studying the immigration stamps, then returned to the front page and held it under a goosenecked ultraviolet light. A faint image of Belgium’s royal palace came to life.
“Reactive ink looks good,” said von Daniken.
“The new Belgian issues are sharp. This one has five security features to put a crimp in counterfeiting. A laser-cut pinhole of the passport holder, a watermark of Albert II, an optically variable image of Belgium that changes from green to blue depending on the viewing angle, and two microtaggants. Offhand, I’d say it’s genuine.”
“You mean the blank?”
“Not only the blank. I mean ‘genuine’ as in official. Issued by the proper passport authority.”
“You’re sure?” Von Daniken’s skepticism was born of experience. Belgian passports were the VWs of the false documents trade. Cheap, reliable, and easy to come by. Since 1990, over nineteen thousand authentic blanks had been stolen from Belgian consulates, embassies, town halls, and diplomatic pouches the world over. The country lost passports the way some people misplaced their keys.
“We can check.” Logging onto his computer, Seiler fed the passport number into Identigate, the Swiss police’s repository of over two million stolen and fraudulent documents from around the world. “The Belgians are as scrupulous about reporting stolen blanks as they are lax about losing them,” he said. “If it’s stolen, we’ll get a match.” After a moment, his broad features creased in dismay. “Nothing. As far as the Belgians are concerned, it’s legit.”
“You’re sure it hasn’t been tampered with?”
“Positive. The pictures are burned into the fabric of the passport itself. It’s physically impossible for Lammers to have replaced the original holder’s photograph with his own.”
“Mind if I use your phone?”
“All yours.”
Von Daniken placed a call to a contact in the identity documents department of the Belgian Federal Police. “Frank, I have one of your passports on my desk. Belongs to a man who got himself killed last night. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s the real thing.” He read off the number and the corresponding name.
“It’s genuine,” said Frank Vincent after a second or two. “Number’s in the system.”
“Funny. We have the man down as Theo Lammers, a Dutch citizen. Do me a favor: run a complete check on this Jules Gaye. Go all the way back. Tell me if he’s real, or if he’s a straw man.”
“I’ll need some time. End of the day suit you?”
“Before lunch would be better. And one more thing: tell me where you mailed the passport.”
Von Daniken hung up. Max Seiler was examining the New Zealand passport. Again, it passed muster. The document had not been doctored and its number did not turn up on any of their databases for stolen papers. Von Daniken checked his watch. It was five-thirty p. m. in Auckland. Past closing time. He decided to contact the embassy in Paris, instead. Due to the ten-hour time difference, the Kiwis maintained a beefed-up embassy in France capable of handling most official inquiries.
Von Daniken placed the call and was informed that the passport was authentic. According to the New Zealand authorities, the passport holder, Michael Carrington of 24 Victoria Lane, Christchurch, was a citizen in good standing. Officially, NRA. Nothing recorded against. He requested a review of the issuing documents and was told an inquiry would be made forthwith.
“What do you make of it?” he asked after he’d hung up.
Seiler shrugged. “Two valid passports with your victim’s picture, and differing names. There’s only one answer, isn’t there? Gaye and Carrington are legends. We can rule out a dirty businessman. Looks like you’ve got an illegal on your hands.”
An “illegal” was a trained government agent operating clandestinely on foreign soil without his country’s protection. A deep-cover spy.
Von Daniken nodded. Unsettled, he returned to his office. It had been seven years since anything remotely resembling this case had come across his desk. He had just two questions: Who was Lammers working for? And what had he been doing in Switzerland that had gotten him killed?