The Lions of Lucerne

by Brad Thor

  Miner was also right about something. Any attempt to try to get a judge to compel him to answer her questions would be met with resistance from the highest ranks of the Swiss government. Lacking any evidence whatsoever against Miner, there was no way anyone would force him to cooperate.

  With Miner refusing to cooperate, Claudia didn’t even have straws to grasp at. All she had was air. Her investigation had been marked by failure after failure. Though her gut told her one thing, her mind told her it was a million-to-one shot that she could have turned Miner into a bona fide suspect. Now Claudia Mueller’s investigation and her career were at a complete standstill.

  As Gerhard Miner pulled into the long-term parking lot at Zurich International Airport, he was no longer thinking about Claudia; his mind was back on his mission. The sudden schedule change had bothered him, but such was the nature of his business. Heads of state often shortened trips or changed plans altogether at the last minute. As this trip was set to coincide with the birthday of the American president’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Miner had been certain that, barring any international incident, the president would spend as much time as he could on his ski trip. The fact that the president was now planning to cut it short by a couple of days was inconvenient, but it didn’t make the mission impossible.

  Miner entered the empty first-class line and presented his ticket and passport. He went out of his way to be extra flirtatious with the female desk staff, who wondered why such a handsome man did not have an attractive woman traveling with him to Athens.

  While waiting in the Swissair lounge for his flight to board, he changed tack and acted enraged when a young waitress spilled a glass of cabernet all over his trousers. The poor young girl thought it was her fault, when, in fact, Miner had leaned his shoulder forward and nudged her tray as she was placing a cocktail napkin on the table. His explosion earned him an effusive apology that lasted from the first-class lounge all the way to the gate from a Swissair airport services manager. Once Miner had been seated on the plane, the manager again apologized and asked the chief first-class flight attendant to take especially good care of this long-suffering passenger. Miner had achieved exactly what he wanted. At least five people would be able to vouch that he had boarded the Swissair flight to Greece.

  He spent the next week and a half in the popular ports of Paros and Mykonos, spending too much money entertaining new friends and repairing repeated “mechanical problems” on his rented sailboat. He overtipped waiters, barmen, and harbormasters. Not only would Miner be remembered, but many would be anxiously awaiting the return of the man and his easy-flowing money next season.

  Secure that his alibi was well established, Miner sailed to the uninhabited island of Despotiko, about three hours southwest of Mykonos. Waiting there for Miner, just as planned, was his cousin from the Swiss town of Hochdorf, a carpenter who bore an incredible likeness to him.

  Happy to have a free vacation and knowing the sensitivity of his cousin’s occupation, the carpenter from Hochdorf never asked any questions. The plan was for him to continue sailing south to Santorini and then Crete, where he would leave the rented yacht, citing a string of mechanical problems as the reason. The carpenter would then make his way to the western port of Patras, where a first-class cabin was booked on a Minoan Line cruise ship to Venice.

  His cousin would be traveling on Miner’s passport and Visa credit card. Knowing that cabin stewards present first-class passengers’ passports for them to customs officials as a courtesy, Miner was not worried about his cousin or his passport receiving any undue scrutiny. The carpenter was to spend a week in northern Italy before proceeding via train to France.

  Miner had booked his cousin on an overnight train in a first-class compartment. As the train would be crossing the French border while passengers were sleeping, the steward would gather passports as passengers boarded, present them to border officials sometime during the night, and then return them with breakfast in the morning.

  After a week in France, the carpenter would take a final overnight train back to Switzerland, where the customary passport collection by the steward would once again be conducted. When the steward delivered the passport with breakfast the next morning, the carpenter was to place it in a thick, manila envelope with the canceled train tickets, credit card receipts, and other odds and ends he had been told to accumulate during his wonderful vacation. The envelope was addressed to a post office box in Lucerne and stamped with more than enough postage. When the train arrived in Bern, the carpenter would mail the envelope from the train station post box before catching his connecting train back to Hochdorf.

  With eyewitnesses, customs records, and a credit card trail that would lead through three European countries all but guaranteed, Miner entered Turkey from Greece with a false Maltese passport as part of a tour group, feeling quite confident that his alibi, if ever needed, would be airtight.

  Twenty-four hours later, the people seated in the airline’s waiting area paid no attention to the rumpled western European businessman who sat reading a day old copy of The International Herald Tribune. Disguised with blond hair, a full beard, blue contacts, and padding that made him appear twenty kilos overweight, Miner was now traveling on a Dutch passport as Henk Van DenHuevel of Utrecht.

  He sat reading an article he had found quite by chance. It dealt with the upcoming ski vacation United States president Jack Rutledge was to take with his daughter, Amanda, and what it would cost American taxpayers.

  As first-class passengers were welcomed aboard flight 7440 from Istanbul to New York, Miner folded the newspaper under his arm and made his way toward the gate thinking, They have absolutely no idea what this trip is going to cost.

  2

  “You guys having an awesome day or what?” asked the young liftie as Scot Harvath and Amanda Rutledge shuffled up to get on the next chairlift. He was referring to the snow that had been falling all day.

  “Light’s kinda flat,” replied Amanda.

  Scot had to laugh. Amanda was relatively new to skiing, but she was picking up the lingo and the idiosyncrasies of a spoiled skier pretty quickly.

  “What’s so funny?” she said as the lift gently hit them in the back of the knees and they sat down, beginning the ride up to Deer Valley’s Squaw Peak.

  “You, that’s what’s so funny.”

  “Me? What do you mean?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mandie; your skiing’s come a long way, but you’ve skied, what, maybe five or six times in your life?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “And it’s always been that east coast garbage. All ice, right?”

  “And?”

  “Well, it’s just funny to hear you complaining about the light when you are skiing on snow people would kill for.”

  “I guess it is kind of funny, but you’ve got to admit that it’s tough to see anything in this weather.”

  On that point, Amanda Rutledge was one hundred percent correct. The snow had been falling steadily for a week. Hoping to indulge his passion for astronomy, Scot had brought his telescope on this trip. The lights back home in D.C. made it impossible to see anything in the night sky. Unfortunately, the weather in Park City had so far refused to cooperate. Today, in particular, it was really coming down. Visibility was extremely low, and the conditions worried Scot enough that he suggested the president and his daughter take the day off and wait to see what tomorrow brought. Regardless of what the head of his advance team had to say, though, the president made it clear that he and Amanda had come to ski and that’s exactly what they were going to do.

  Unfortunately for his ski plans, the coalition the president had cobbled together to get his fossil-fuel reduction bill—the bill that signaled a financially devastating blow for the major oil companies, but would breathe long overdue life into America’s alternative-energy sectors—through Congress was starting to crack. The president’s constant hand-holding of key “swing” voters was absolutely necessary if he was to see his legislation thro
ugh. The predicted turnover in the upcoming congressional election spelled doom for the president’s pet project. The simple fact was that this bill could pass only in this session.

  Even though he had already shortened the length of his vacation before leaving D.C., the president was thinking about returning even earlier now. Scot understood the man’s desire to get in as much skiing and quality time with his daughter as possible before returning to the capital.

  “Are you dating anyone now?” asked Amanda.

  The sudden change of subject caught Scot off guard and pulled his mind back from the president’s problems and the weather.

  “Am I dating anyone? Who wants to know?” he teased.

  Blushing, Amanda turned away from his gaze, but kept speaking. “I do. I mean, you never seem to talk about anybody.”

  Scot started to smile again, but didn’t let her see. He thought she must have been building up her courage all day to ask him.

  Amanda had had a crush on Scot ever since he’d become part of daily life at the White House, and everybody knew it. More than once, the president had had to reprimand his daughter and remind her not to distract Scot while he was on duty. Amanda, or Mandie, as Scot called her, was a good kid. Despite having lost her mother to breast cancer only a couple of years ago, she seemed as normal as any other child her age. She was smart, athletic, and would someday grow into a beautiful woman. Scot decided to change the subject.

  “That was one heck of a birthday party last night,” he offered.

  “It was pretty cool. Thanks again for the CDs. You didn’t have to get me anything.”

  “Hey, it was your birthday. The big sixteen. I wanted to get you a car, but your dad’s national security advisor thought that behind the wheel of your own machine, you might be too dangerous for the country. So, the Ferrari will just have to sit in my garage until we can change his mind.”

  Amanda laughed. “Not only were the CDs sweet, but I really appreciate the lessons today.”

  Before joining the SEALs and subsequently being recruited into the Secret Service, Scot had been quite an accomplished skier and had won a spot on the U.S. freestyle team. Against the wishes of his father, Scot had chosen to postpone college to pursue skiing. He had spent several years on the team, which trained right there in Park City, Utah. He did extremely well on the World Cup circuit and had been favored to medal in the upcoming Olympics. When Scot’s father, an instructor at the Navy SEAL training facility in their hometown of Coronado, California, died in a training accident, Scot had been devastated. Try as his might, after losing his father, he hadn’t been able to get his head back into competitive skiing. Instead, he chose to follow in his father’s footsteps. After graduating college cum laude, he joined the SEALs and was tasked to Team Two, known as the cold-weather specialists, or Polar SEALs.

  Scot knew that it was not only his familiarity with Park City, but also his background and experience that were key factors in his being selected to lead this presidential advance team. He also knew that was why President Rutledge had agreed to indulge his daughter’s request for Scot to ski on her protective detail today and give her pointers.

  Amanda had been overjoyed, and despite the “flat light,” she felt the day had been perfect.

  “You’re an excellent student, so the lessons are my pleasure.” Scot’s radio crackled, interrupting their conversation. He held up his hand to let her know he was listening to his earpiece. Amanda remained quiet.

  “Norseman, this is Sound. Over,” came the scratchy voice via Scot’s Motorola. Norseman was the call sign Scot had picked up in the SEALs, which had remained with him ever since. At five feet ten and a muscular one hundred sixty pounds, with brown hair and ice blue eyes, the handsome Scot Harvath looked more German than Scandinavian. In fact the call sign didn’t derive from his looks, but rather from a string of Scandinavian flight attendants he had dated while in the SEALs.

  The voice on the other end of Scot’s Motorola identified as Sound, was the head of the president’s protective detail, Sam Harper. Harper had taken Scot under his wing when he joined the team at the White House. The head White House Secret Service agent, whom Harper and Scot reported to, was William Shaw—call sign Fury. When you put Harper together with Shaw, you got “The Sound and The Fury,” and anyone who had ever screwed up on their watch knew exactly how appropriate that title was.

  Communications had been fine over the past week, but for some reason the radios had been cutting in and out today. Maybe it was the weather.

  “This is Norseman, go ahead Sound. Over,” said Scot via his throat mike.

  “Norseman, Hat Trick wants to know how Goldilocks is doing. Over.”

  “Mandie,” said Scot, turning to Amanda, “your dad wants to know how you’re holding up.”

  When then Vice President Rutledge came into office after having three times been named one of D.C.’s sexiest politicians, the hockey-inspired nickname Hat Trick, meaning three goals, became an inside joke among the people who knew him. Though Jack Rutledge found the media’s focus on his looks somewhat embarrassing, he didn’t object to the nickname, and so, via the Department of Defense, which issues the presidential and vice presidential code names, it stuck. After the president’s wife passed away, word quietly spread among White House staffers that the president would not seek to return to Pennsylvania Avenue for a fourth time. The code name had turned out to be aptly prophetic.

  Amanda’s code name, on the other hand, was an obvious call. With her long, curly blond hair, she had been called Goldilocks for as long as anyone in the White House could remember.

  “I’m a little hungry, but other than that pretty good,” she said.

  “Sound, Goldilocks is shipshape, though she’d like to get into the galley sometime in the near future. Over.”

  “Roger that, Norseman. The lifts close to the public at sixteen-thirty; that’s twenty minutes from now. Hat Trick wants to know if Goldilocks wants to keep going, or if we should wrap it up. Over.”

  Scot turned to Amanda, “Your dad wants to know if you want to have them keep the lift open for us, or if you want to make this the last run and we’ll ski back to the house?”

  “My toes are getting kind of cold. I think I’ve had enough skiing for today. Let’s make this the last run.”

  “Sound, Goldilocks wants to little piggy. Over.” “Little piggy” referred to the children’s nursery rhyme where the fifth little piggy went wee, wee, wee, all the way home.

  “Roger that, Norseman. Hat Trick concurs. Let’s meet at the last lap. Over.”

  “Last lap, roger that, Sound. Norseman out.”

  When Scot, Amanda, and their security detail reached the meeting point known as the last lap, the president, Sam Harper, and the rest of the team were already waiting for them.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” said the president as his daughter skied up, and he gave her a hug. “How’s your skiing coming along? Notice any difference now that you’re sixteen?”

  “Sixteen doesn’t make any difference, Dad. But I have gotten better.”

  “Is that so?” replied the president, glancing at Scot.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. President. Amanda has come a long way this afternoon. I think she could take us all down Death Chute if she wanted to,” said Scot.

  “Death Chute?” said Amanda. “You’ve gotta be nuts. I wouldn’t even snowplow down that thing!”

  Several of the Secret Service agents laughed nervously. Death Chute was one of the most difficult of the off-piste chutes that fed back to the area where the presidential party was staying. The home the president was using was located in the ultraexclusive ski-in, ski-out Deer Valley community known as Snow Haven.

  The Secret Service agents’ nervousness was well founded. Death Chute required a tremendous amount of skill to navigate and would have been a nerve-racking challenge for even the best of them. Not only were there lots of rocks and steep vertical drops, but as the piste began to flatten out before dropping off again, there was
a wide plateau filled with trees.

  Quite an accomplished skier, the president loved tackling a new chute each day on his way back to the house. He skied easy runs with his daughter in the mornings, and then they split up after lunch so he could ski the more difficult trails. The superchallenging, end-of-the-day chutes he had to choose from were technically known as backcountry and not part of Deer Valley’s marked and maintained trail system. Therefore, the chutes had not required a lot of work for the Secret Service to secure. All of the routes feeding into them were simply made off-limits to any other skiers.

  As the president’s confidence grew, so did his desire to tackle harder chutes. The “rush” he got was a rewarding way to end the day. All of the chutes he had tried up to this point were grouped in one area. Death Chute stood alone, a bit further to the east, and the Secret Service knew it was only a matter of time before the president decided he wanted to give it a whirl.

  The only person who could possibly have given him a run for his money on Death Chute was Scot, and he was skiing with Amanda’s detail today. Amanda would take the long, easy way down, as she had all week. That was okay. The last thing the president wanted was for his daughter to get hurt.

  “So, honey,” began the president, “what do you think? You take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be sippin’ hot chocolate afore ye?”

  “I might beat you yet!” yelled Amanda as she gave herself a push and started shooting down the longer, yet safer of the two routes. Scot and the rest of his team smiled at the president’s group and took off, quickly catching up with Amanda. She seemed hell-bent on beating her father back to the house, an impossibility unless she dropped over the rim of the bowl and shot straight down. Even with her growing skill and confidence, Scot knew she wasn’t ready to tackle something that serious yet.