“I have no idea what you’re talking about. What attack is it this time?” Marti turned toward his men and began to call out to them.
“Don’t even think about it,” said von Daniken, taking a sheaf of papers from his jacket. “It’s all here. Account 517.623 AA. A numbered account, but even they’re not anonymous anymore. Have a look, if you don’t believe me.”
Marti scanned the documents. “They won’t hold up in court. Inadmissible. All of it.”
“Who said anything about court? I’ve already e-mailed a copy to the president with a note explaining our ongoing investigation. I don’t think she’ll want to serve alongside a spy, do you?”
“But…but…” Crestfallen, Marti dropped his head.
Von Daniken took the papers from his hand. “Now then, Alphons, what exactly is Jonathan Ransom doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know or you won’t say?”
“All I know is that they wanted him out of the way. He’s not a part of it.”
“A part of what? Don’t lie to me. There’s a band of terrorists somewhere out there with a drone that they intend to crash into an airplane in the next forty-eight hours.”
“I told you. I don’t know anything about the drone.”
“Well then, what do you know about? You’re not earning five hundred thousand francs a month to twiddle your thumbs. I want to know everything. Who? Why? For how long? If you can tell me anything that might help stop the attack, now is the time. This is the only chance you’re going to have to mitigate these charges.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Marti after a long silence. “But if anyone asks, I’ll deny all of it.”
Von Daniken waited.
Marti sighed. “I don’t know anything about the attack. It’s export licenses they wanted. They’re under my purview as justice minister.”
“Who wanted them?”
“John Austen.”
“Who’s that?”
“A friend. A fellow believer.”
“Don’t give me that nonsense. Who is he?”
“A major general in the U.S. Air Force. His real job is running a top-secret outfit called Division. Two years ago, his organization arranged the purchase of a company in Zug called ZIAG that manufactures high-end engineering products. ZIAG was sending goods to Parvez Jinn in Iran. It was my job to sign off on them. But it’s over now.”
“What kind of goods?”
Marti looked at von Daniken as if the question were a personal insult. “What kind do you think?”
“I’m a policeman. I prefer that the crooks do the confessing.”
“Centrifuges. Maraging steel. That kind of thing. I made sure that all the paperwork passed through the right channels and that no one at customs took too close of a look.”
“You mean the machinery to process uranium for nuclear weapons?”
Marti nodded. “It’s not my business what they care to do with it.”
“What about the attack?”
“I told you. I don’t know anything about an attack. I want to stop the drone as much as you.”
Von Daniken took this in, squinting as he tried to make some sense of it all. Why would the United States circumvent its own efforts to prevent the Iranians from gaining nuclear weapons technology? He replayed the events of the past days-the murders of Blitz and Lammers, the discovery of the drone and the explosives, and now the revelation that a Swiss company secretly belonging to the Americans had been supplying Iran with state-of-the-art nuclear weapons technology.
Slowly, an idea dawned on him.
A monstrous idea.
He stared at Marti with a new and profound hatred. “Why?”
But Alphons Marti didn’t respond. He’d clasped his hands and bowed his head, as if in prayer.
73
At one p.m., Sepp Steiner, chief of Davos Emergency Rescue, left his office on the summit of the Jakobshorn, elevation 2,950 meters above sea level, and walked outside. The forecast had called for a high-pressure system to move in from the south, but so far the sky was as woolly and threatening as ever. He strode to the far side of his office and checked the barometer. The needle was locked steady at 880 millibars. Temperature: -4° Celsius. He flicked the glass with his finger and the needle jumped all the way up to 950.
Turning his face to the sky, he studied the clouds. For the last three days, the ceiling had resembled a becalmed sea. This morning, there was a change. Instead of the gray panorama, he could discern individual clouds. The air was noticeably dryer. The breeze had picked up, but it had changed direction. It was coming from the south.
Steiner rushed back to his office and grabbed a pair of binoculars-Nikon 8x50’s that his colleagues joked made him look like a tank commander. Putting them to his eyes, he scanned the mountains from east to west. For the first time in a week, he was able to make out the peaks above Frauenkirchen. He stopped at the Furga, his field glasses trained on Roman’s, the near-vertical chute where his older brother had perished so long ago. The woman was still there, lying deep in the crevasse. Steiner would not want to leave his wife to sleep for eternity in the ice.
Just then, the breeze softened. A cleft opened in the clouds directly above his head and an azure sky gazed down. He jogged the few steps to the weather station. The temperature read minus two. The high-pressure front had arrived.
Hurrying indoors, Steiner fired up his radio and alerted his men.
It was time to go back to Roman’s.
Three hours later, Steiner’s team reached the knoll where Emma Ransom was last seen. They had come by a secondary route used only in fine weather that was favored by alpinists and ice climbers. It was a shorter trek but much steeper, presenting two separate vertical pitches of twenty meters each.
The last traces of the storm system that had sat over the entire country for the past five days had dissipated. Blue sky reigned and the afternoon sun shone fiercely. A vast field of snow glittered with the secrets of a thousand uncut diamonds.
Steiner gazed up the mountain. There was no sign of the life-and-death struggle that had taken place on this spot. Similarly, it was impossible to discern the location of the crevasse.
He ordered his men to spread out in a line. Each held a two-meter probing stick in front of him. Step by step they advanced, jabbing their poles into the snow to test for solid ground. It was Steiner who discovered the crevasse when he thrust his pole into the snow and it kept right on going until he was bent to the knee.
A quarter of an hour later, his men had cleared a ten-meter swath that permitted them a clear path to the fissure. Flags were set in the snow demarcating the crevasse’s boundaries, as Steiner supervised the fixing of the ropes. He would be the one to descend into the chasm and retrieve the body. After a final check of his harness and knots, he turned on his miner’s light and called, “On belay.” Allowing the rope to play through his fingers, he walked backward into the earth.
Inside the crevasse, the air was cooler. As he descended, the ice walls gave way to striated granite. All light from above dimmed. Soon he was stranded in an obscure paradise, his eyes trained on the halo of light emitted by the halogen bulb.
After he’d rappelled one length of rope-exactly forty meters-he saw the body. The woman was lying on her stomach, one arm stretched out above her head as if she were calling for help. The walls fell away and he allowed himself to slide down the rope more quickly, a steady, unbroken descent like a stone dropping into a pond. As he approached the crevasse’s floor, he was able to make out the patrolman’s cross on her jacket and the fleece of auburn hair covering her face.