by Fritz Galt
“When you melt the snow, the rock remains.”
“That’s right. Now take another snap.”
Yashito handed him the camera and posed beside the flag, his face to the sun. Trevor pressed the shutter release, but there was no click.
The camera had frozen.
Trevor handed it back with a shrug to Yashito, who stuffed it inside his shirt to warm it up.
“Tell me,” Trevor said. “Why CERN?”
“Why not CERN? Why not the best?”
“But the Americans have their own particle accelerators. Why must they come here?”
“For the magnets, the focusing lenses that direct the beam. They must separate the flux pins, the crystalline faults, every two nanometers.” He squeezed his thumb and forefinger together. “Less than this distance apart. Americans designed their software for CERN magnets because they’re state of the art. Like this metro. Like this restaurant. State of the art.”
“So when does their experiment start?”
Yashito regarded Trevor with consternation. “They have already begun.”
Natalie couldn’t get the grotesque scene in Alec’s apartment out of her mind. She stumbled onto the cobblestone street seeking relief.
She couldn’t just leave a dead body in her brother-in-law’s apartment. He could be implicated and, if still alive, arrested.
At the very least, decency called for some sort of action. Or was she already beyond that?
She didn’t know.
Anaïs looked wobbly as well, so Natalie walked her to a nearby bistro that she remembered visiting before with Alec and Mick.
The young woman’s eyes took in the details of the place, the wooden bar counter, the rows of bottles and the fresco on the wall. They all seemed to hold special meaning for her.
Natalie left her to her reverie and found a phone in the back.
Who to call? The embassy in Bern? The consulate in Geneva? She didn’t want to give herself away. Her anonymity was working so far. She was getting close to something. Then she remembered the upcoming rendezvous with Khalid. Her antics were also getting her into trouble.
She decided on a neutral course of action. She dialed the local police. A polite young woman took down her information: the address, the body, the dog, Alec’s name and his connection with the consulate.
When asked to describe the body, she wanted to say how cold the skin had felt, how the room stunk and how his ponytail was thick with his blood. In the end, she simply described him as “a young Middle Eastern man.”
When asked for her name, she hung up.
It felt like a burden was lifted. She had dumped her discovery on the police.
She had her own investigation to conduct.
She felt a strong impulse to call her contact in SATO, the mechanical voice with no human being behind it. The voice that had not cared to hear Alec’s supposedly dying words about Proteus.
Would the name “Proteus,” scrawled on Alec’s wall and imparted in “Alec’s” dying words, mean anything to him now? Did she trust her contact any longer?
She would give him one last try.
The phone connected and began to ring. For a frenzied moment, her hand turned cold and clammy. A voice inside her head told her to hang up immediately.
The ringing stopped. There was a strange airy sound, like wind.
“So what’s up?” the voice said.
She sighed. The sequence felt strangely comforting. “Again, it’s me.”
“Tell me what’s happening.” That was definitely wind in the background.
She felt the impulse to hang up again. It was the person who had said she was finally free of Mick.
“Over my dead body.”
There was a long pause. She wasn’t getting anything out of the man. With each call, she was only giving information away.
“You tell me something for once,” she said. “What would you do if a young man propositioned a married woman?”
“It would depend on who the young man was.”
She closed her eyes. “Doesn’t marriage count for anything anymore?” she asked quietly.
“Not in this case.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said, and hung up.
Everett zipped out of the ambassador’s residence in his two-seat convertible. He flew over the Aare River on the Kirchenfeld Bridge, then crawled through the lunchtime crowds and green trams that snarled traffic at the Münsterplatz.
When he finally arrived at the Chancery building, employees were leaving on lunch break.
He was feeling hungry as well. He heaved out of the car and took a stroll several blocks to the local Migros buffet. Sitting indoors behind a trellis and artificial vines, he munched on a plate of lettuce and slurped on a yogurt.
Then he went to the restaurant phone to call his wife.
Estrella was just heading to Marzili, the outdoor public pool, with their nine-year-old son. No, she hadn’t expected him for lunch. In her Paraguayan accent, she reminded him that they were hosting the bridge club that night. She had just finished baking the pastries.
He hung up smiling. She was a socially active person and was well adjusted in Bern. She didn’t speak German, but had many friends who spoke English or Spanish. She immersed herself in their son’s pursuits, and had her own social circle outside of the embassy.
Where did he fit in? Seeing her so contented made him want her even more for himself. Perhaps they had overextended socially.
He carried a cup of Starbucks back to the office and got to work.
First order of business was to deal with the closure of the Zurich operation. A bunch of novice, know-it-all Congressmen had told the State Department that America didn’t need a Consulate General in Zurich.
Nobody had asked for his opinion. Setting up a dummy corporation in Zurich was twice as expensive and infinitely more risky and time-consuming than maintaining and working out of a consulate building. But that was what the CIA would have to do.
He didn’t want to think of how the closure would overburden the embassy. The tiny Konsulat on Zollikerstrasse handled the bulk of trade issues and U.S. non-immigrant visa applications in Switzerland.
After putting the final touches on a draft proposal for the dummy corporation, he stared at the cold coffee at the bottom of his cup. He was doing all the work. Where the hell was Mick?
As twilight glimmered over the Gurten, Bern’s mountain park, he pulled out the phone number used by the creepy Montreux mortician who was asking questions about what the embassy knew concerning Alec’s death. He double-checked a phone list. The 22 city code that the “mortician” had actually called from was a Geneva prefix.
He dialed the number and waited.
“Hello. This is CERN.”
He felt his eyebrows twitch in surprise. The Nordic voice had a lazy drawl. The voice of someone funded to eternity and feeling no particular rush.
“Which division am I talking to?”
“This is the LHC.”
The Large Hadron Collider. Alec’s department.
“I’m calling from Security,” he lied. “With whom am I speaking?”
He wrote down the name: Anders Lie.
“Is this your telephone number?”
“No, I was just passing his office.”
“Whose office am I calling?”
“This is Khalid’s outside line. Khalid Slimane.”
Everett jotted the name down. “Is Khalid still there?”
“No. He just left for the day. He smells very sophisticated tonight. He says he has a date. Now, that could be a security risk.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t think he’s ever been with a woman before. He might damage his equipment.”
“I’ll alert the medical staff.”
Chapter 19
The doorbell rang in Anaïs’ apartment.
Natalie took a deep breath and studied herself in the full-length mirror. Was she ready?
She had borrowed
the sequined red dress that hugged her slender form. Her square, exposed shoulders tapered into long, shapely legs. She stood slumped back on one hip with a standoffish scowl. She didn’t want Khalid to fall for her. She only wanted to find Alec.
“Take this,” Anaïs said, and slipped something into the eel-skin purse she had lent Natalie. “I’ll wait in the back room.”
“What is it?”
Anaïs gave her a professional nod, her face pinched in the bedroom door.
Natalie grabbed the purse and felt inside as she crossed to the front door. Inside, were several elastic disks wrapped in cellophane.
Great. Anaïs had slipped her condoms.
“Anaïs,” she whispered back across the room. “I just want to butter him up. You know, admire his great engineering skills.”
“What skills? He’s a terrible engineer. Even Alec says so.”
Perfect. So much for appealing to his ego. She wasn’t quite ready to zero in on his id.
She pressed a button that released a lock at the building’s front entrance.
Footsteps pounded on the stairs below, and she smoothed the form-fitting gown. Tiny sequins jingled around her half-exposed breasts. The small sparkles converged momentarily over her flat stomach and swept down the outer fringes of her thighs. A light, flowery fragrance emanated from her neck and bare arms.
Then came the knock on the door.
She straightened up and squared her shoulders.
Okay, Mick. This one’s for you.
The moment she opened the door, she realized that all her worries were unfounded. Khalid was the kind of fellow who couldn’t tell a sarong from a sackcloth. His eyes landed on every object in the entryway but her as he attempted to present himself.
“Khalid Slimane at your service.”
“Come in,” she said, and stood back to let him in.
But he remained firmly in place. Only his Aramis cologne entered the apartment.
“Slimane,” she said to break the ice. “That’s an interesting name.”
“Slimane was my father’s name,” he explained.
“I see.”
He had come with a plan, and he stubbornly refused to deviate from it.
“I would like to take you somewhere that will suit you,” he said. “Tonight you look very—” He seemed to forget the adjective he had intended to use.
He glanced up again, his eyes snagging on her cleavage.
He blinked. “In short, I’ve made a reservation at Jean-Jacques.”
“Sounds great.”
The door clicked shut behind them, like the end of an era. His fingers brushed against her wedding ring as he tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow. The purposeful march of their heels punctuated the silence of the stairwell.
By the time they reached the bottom step, she was fitting snugly in the contours of his body.
“My car,” he said.
He indicated a shiny blue Porsche parked across the street.
What a car. And the latest model. Natalie wobbled to a sudden halt on the cobblestone street.
He reached around to steady her, and his fingers explored the curve of her rear.
His cologne took on a new power. At that moment, looking into his fawn-like eyes, she sensed her fragrance tentatively mingling with his in the humid evening air.
That evening at the O’Smythe residence, Trevor was busy with Yashito, but encouraged Mick to relax and work out in the gym.
With little else to do, he obliged.
The gym was just down the hall from his bedroom, and there he found Zafina hard at work.
He closed the door softly and watched her training routine with a critical eye.
Her latissimus dorsi spread hard and lean along the sides of her sculpted back. Known in gym circles as “lats,” this impressive set of muscles below her shoulder blades strained at what Mick would call a heavy reverse-grip pull down.
Her thick quadriceps secure under a padded support, she yanked the bar down hard, dragging a metal cable over a pulley and pulling up on a stack of weights. The bar grazed her saturated white workout suit and came to a quivering rest against her chest.
Sweat dripped from her chin onto the bar and then down a dark channel between her breasts. Long hair fell back in a trembling mass as she contracted her lats and leaned back against the tug of the weight.
“Don’t hunch your shoulders,” he instructed her as he approached the weight equipment. “Keep ’em down.”
“Right,” she rasped, and let up on the bar.
The cable slid over the pulley, and the weights came down with a crash.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
He drooped a towel over the stationary cycle and looked around the villa’s glitzy, mirrored workout room. “Trevor told me to take a break.”
She eyed him suspiciously through the weight machine, but didn’t move from her seated position.
He stripped down to a pair of gym shorts that Trevor had provided. Then he removed his shirt. His body still felt cold. He hadn’t performed any exercises yet to flood his muscles with blood, but as he stretched he could see his muscles move around under his skin.
Zafina’s eyes roved approvingly over his brawny musculature.
He flipped the towel around his shoulders and straddled the stationary cycle. After he took a few pedals to start the machine, the display panel lit up. He began a gentle tour over rolling terrain. While he never left the gym, his mind took him on a country road he remembered in New Mexico.
He always began on that road as it led from his family’s hacienda through a grove of apricot trees and onto the open road.
At last Zafina rose from the bench and stood before him. She picked up some free weights and began casual repetitions. At the top of each curl, she squeezed her biceps into a thick ball, blood vessels nearly popping out of her skin. In the mirror, he watched her gluts pinch her one-piece suit tighter with each rep.
Stuck in the office late after work, Everett dutifully followed the ambassador’s instructions to find out more about the ousted French diplomat. He sat at his desk, phone in hand, waiting for someone at Swiss police headquarters to answer.
At last a low, intimidating voice came over the line. “Federal Police.”
Everett whipped a ballpoint pen from behind his ear and poised it over his Broncos clipboard.
“Inspektor Tobias Bürgi, please.”
“Ja, what?” the voice said.
“Oh, Tobias. This is Everett. I didn’t expect to find you in the office this late. Do you have a minute?”
“Sure.”
“A couple of things,” he began, picturing the rotund inspector with his buzz cut and Seventies sideburns. He glanced over his checklist. “First, I have an official request. As a strong counterintelligence partner of Switzerland, we need to know more about the French espionage case.”
He heard Tobias sigh. And as he did so, his abrupt police demeanor evaporated. “This is something very important. But we can’t discuss it, you see.”
“I’m under all sorts of pressure to report on it,” Everett said. “Perhaps there’s something we can do to help.”
“I can’t discuss this over the phone.”
“Whoever wants this information wouldn’t be listening to you and me,” Everett reminded him.
The entire conversation halted like the freeze frame of an important play. Everett waited for several long seconds.
“We have evidence of Polisario activity in our country,” Tobias said.
“Polisario? As in the Western Sahara? Why in the world would the Polisario be in Switzerland?”
“There must be limits to this conversation,” Tobias cautioned.
“I understand.”
“So you know about the Polisario?”
“To a degree.” Although Everett had never visited the Western Sahara, he once was interested in serving in Morocco.
In 1976, as he remembered, Spain relinquished its grip on the land south
of Morocco, called the Western Sahara. Later that year, Morocco annexed the mineral-rich, but sparsely populated, land. Supplied and encouraged by Algeria, which was trying to undermine the Moroccan monarchy, a Western Saharan guerrilla movement declared independence and launched attacks on the Moroccan presence in that vast coastal territory. The name of the movement was the Polisario Front.
“If you understand the situation,” Tobias said, “then you understand France’s reluctance to recognize Western Sahara’s independence movement. It would appease Algerian guerrillas, some of whom are responsible for bombing the Paris metros.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Two days ago, we found two bodies floating in Lake Geneva near Montreux. One was that of a young foreigner. The other turned out to be a Swiss coroner. At first glance, it appeared they had perished in the storm. But, in fact, earlier that night, the coroner had performed an autopsy on the same young man found in the lake. Strange, ja? Our police asked Interpol to run a check on the man’s fingerprints, and they got a hit.”
“And?”
“One moment, please.” Tobias took a call on another line.
Everett hurriedly scribbled notes. In seeking a few nuggets of information about the French espionage affair, he had struck a vein in the Alec Pierce case. Perhaps the police had identified the man who, on his deathbed, claimed to be Alec Pierce.
Tobias came back on the phone. “They found a match.”
“He was…?”
“The dead man turned out to be an engineer at CERN. He was an engineer, ja, but he also had connections with a terrorist group that advocates the Polisario Front’s cause.”
A terrorist at CERN? Perhaps Alec had uncovered him in his security investigation.
“So why did you expel a French diplomat?”
“Since Interpol is headquartered in France, the French track their own cases quite thoroughly…”
“So you suspect the French killed the terrorist. Did you arrest the assassin?”
“No. But that doesn’t matter so much. We expelled a low-ranking diplomat at the French UN mission. We picked his name at random.”