A walled-in enclosure occupied the far corner of the floor. Entrance was governed by a steel door decorated with a sign that read “Privat.”
“I’m reasonably sure this is it,” said von Daniken.
Myer took a knee and brought his flashlight to bear. “Shut up as tight as the National Bank,” he muttered.
“Can you open it?” von Daniken asked.
Myer shot him a withering glance. “I’m reasonably certain I can.”
Myer laid out his tools and began fitting one after another into the keyhole. Von Daniken stood nearby, his heart pounding loud enough to be heard in Austria. He wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing. First, breaking and entering without a warrant, and now, tampering with private property. What had gotten into him? He’d never been one for the cloak-and-dagger stuff. The fact was that he was a desk man and proud of it. Fifty years of age was a little long in the tooth to be participating in one’s first surreptitious operation.
“Nine minutes,” said Krajcek, his nerveless voice funneling through von Daniken’s earpiece.
By now, Kübler and his radiation detector had made their way onto the factory floor. He shunted the detector to his right and the histogram morphed into a new signature. The display read “C3H6N6O6,” and next to it the word “Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine.” He recognized the name, but he was more accustomed to calling it by its trade name. RDX. Maybe this wasn’t a wild-goose chase after all.
“Eight minutes,” said Krajcek.
Kneeling on the factory floor, Myer manipulated two picks with a conjurer’s touch. “Got it,” he said as the tumblers fell into place and the door swung open.
Von Daniken stepped inside. The beam of his flashlight landed on a workbench littered with power tools, pliers, screws, wires, and scrap metal. One look and he knew that they’d found it. Theo Lammers’s workshop.
Von Daniken turned on the lights. It was a larger version of the one he’d seen the night before in Erlenbach. Drafting tables stood at either end of the room. Both were covered with mechanical drawings and schematic blueprints. All manner of boxes sat on the floor. He recognized the names printed on them as manufacturers of electrical equipment.
Taped to the nearest wall was a blueprint for some type of aircraft. Standing on his tiptoes, he studied the specifications. Length: two meters. Wingspan: four and a half meters. This was no MAV. This was the real thing. The drawings identified it as a drone, the remote-controlled aircrafts used to overfly enemy territory and, if he wasn’t mistaken, on occasion to fire missiles. The thought raised the hackles on his neck. There, pinned to the corner of the blueprints, was a photograph of the finished product. It was large. A great condor of an aircraft. A man was standing next to it. Dark hair. Dark complexion. He brought the photo closer. The timestamp showed it was taken one week ago. He turned it over. “T.L. and C.E.,” as well as a date, were written on the back. T.L. was Lammers. Who was C.E.?
“Four minutes,” said Krajcek.
Von Daniken traded concerned looks with Myer. The men continued with their search. Myer foraged through the boxes while von Daniken rooted around the papers on the drafting desks.
“Two minutes,” said Krajcek.
Just then, von Daniken remembered the initials in Lammers’s agenda. G.B. He looked at the back of the photograph again. The initials weren’t “C.E.” but “G.B.”
He brought up the photo he’d taken and used the in-camera zoom to read the phone number next to G.B.’s name. Area code 078. The Tessin, the country’s southernmost canton, where the cities of Lugano, Locarno, and Ascona were located. It was his first real lead.
It was then that he saw Kübler standing in the doorway. The man didn’t speak, but walked toward them like an automaton, his eyes fixed to the radiation detector. “RDX,” he said. “The place is thick with it.”
The initials required no explanation. RDX, short for Royal Demolition Explosive, was well known to any law enforcement official involved in counterterrorism. First developed by the British prior to the Second World War, RDX was the prime component in many types of plastic explosives, and the inciting charge used in all nuclear weapons.
Von Daniken felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. A drone, a company that manufactured hyperaccurate guidance systems, and now plastic explosives. “But I don’t see any in here,” he protested. “Where could it be hidden?”
“It’s not here now. I’m just detecting traces. But the readings are fresh.”
“How fresh?”
Kübler studied the display. “By the rate of decay, I’d say twenty-four hours.”
Before Lammers’s dinner with G.B.
“Sixty seconds,” said Krajcek. “I have the watchman’s car three blocks away and closing.”
“Out,” said von Daniken as he furiously snapped photographs of the blueprints. Kübler hustled out of the workshop. Myer followed. Von Daniken moved to the door. It was as he was going to turn off the lights that he saw it.
A baby brother.
At the far end of the room, pushed back on a shelf beneath the counter, was a smaller version of the MAV in Lammers’s office, perhaps half the size-no more than twenty centimeters long, another twenty high. The wings, however, were cut from a different shape, nearly triangular. He observed that they were fixed to a central hinge and flapped up and down, like a bird’s wings.
Caught for a moment between staying and going, he rushed over and grabbed the miniature aircraft. The assembly weighed no more than five hundred grams. Not exactly light as a feather, but pretty damn close.
“Does it fly?” he’d asked Michaela Menz earlier that afternoon.
“Of course,” was the indignant reply. “We launch it from the loading docks.”
Von Daniken noted that the underside of the wings was covered with a light, tensile fabric that was colored a flashy yellow and patterned with a familiar black marking.
Myer pushed his head back into the office. “Goddamn it, man, what are you doing? We have to get out of here!”
Von Daniken held up the MAV. “Look at this.”
“Leave it!” Myer fired back. “What the hell do you want with a toy butterfly, anyway?”
21
Outside the city of Vienna, in the wooded hamlet of Sebastiansdorf, lights burned in the windows of Flimelen, a traditional Austrian hunting lodge. Built as a retreat for Emperor Franz Josef, the rambling estate had followed its owner to the grave at the close of the First World War. For forty years, it had sat abandoned and uncared for. Windows broken, doors pried loose for firewood, the stones of its foundation removed to build other, less majestic homes, it seemed to have been swallowed whole by the forest itself.
And then in 1965, it was reborn. From one day to the next, workmen arrived and began to restore the decrepit building. New windows were put in. Sturdy doors installed. Farther down the road a guard post was built. Needing a secluded getaway in which to discuss its most confidential affairs, another organization had claimed Flimelen for its own. Not a government, but the creation of many intent on preventing disaster or war.
Four men and one woman sat around a long table in the Great Hall. At the table’s head presided a stiff, unsmiling man of Middle Eastern extraction with a fringe of graying hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. He wore a scholar’s narrow spectacles, and indeed, he held degrees in law and diplomacy from universities in Cairo and New York. Though it was close to midnight, and the others had long since taken off their neckties and loosened their collars, he kept his jacket on, his necktie in the finest order. He viewed his position with the utmost gravity. For his efforts, he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Few people could boast that the fate of the world depended on him and not be branded an arrogant, bald-faced liar. He was one.