“I can’t imagine such an alliance.”
Gertner threw up his hands in exasperation. “Goodness gracious, are all women, even Swiss women, so thickheaded that they cannot see the mountains for the glare of the glaciers?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Have you thought about who was behind the attacks in New York and Washington?”
“You’re talking about September eleventh? The World Trade Center and the Pentagon?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Al-Quaida,” Liese said. “What are you driving at?”
“Indulge me. What was the purpose of those attacks?”
“Terrorism,” Liese replied offhandedly. “Militant Islamics striking at the infidel as they have been doing for a lot of years now.”
“Splendid. And the result, in practical terms? Have the Muslims won their war?”
“No, so far it’s backfired,” Liese said. But then it dawned on her what Gertner was getting at. She’d heard the view mentioned in roundabout terms, but she thought it was a minority opinion. Now she wasn’t so sure. “You think that the Israelis engineered the attacks. Mossad, to focus America’s attention on the Muslims.”
“It makes sense to me,” Gertner said. “And I am not alone in this thinking.” He gave Liese a shrewd look. “But the current point, so far as you’re concerned, is learning if there is any connection, no matter how slight, between Prince Salman and Kirk McGarvey, and therefore the American intelligence establishment.”
“You’re crazy,” Liese said. “Salman is a Saudi not an Israeli.”
“Perhaps he is, but then Mossad is devilishly clever with its cover stories. We Swiss have been victim to more than one of their operations. I expect you’ll do your best with this assignment, especially now that you and I have come to a clear understanding that this is not a simple job of surveillance.”
“I’ll tell you this, Ernst: I’ll do everything within my power to prove that Kirk is not in some sort of collusion with the prince, and that the attacks were just as they seemed, engineered and carried out by al-Quaida.”
“Good,” Gertner said. “I merely ask that your prejudices do not blind you to the truth, even if the truth should fall unfavorably on Mr. McGarvey.”
Liese reached the narrow gravel road, where she switched off her headlights and went the rest of the way to the small chalet in starlight. The simple A-frame lodge was owned by a Bern businessman who sometimes cheated on his taxes, and was very cooperative when the Federal Police asked for his help. The lodge was perched on the hill of a finger directly across a small bay from the five-hectare palatial compound of Prince Salman.
There were only a few security lights on over there at this hour of the morning. She telephoned the chalet as she came up the long driveway. “It’s me.”
“We have you,” Claude LeFevre, answered. He was one of two men who had pulled the morning shift.
Liese had been given a total of eight men, which was a luxury for this kind of operation. Everybody was getting plenty of sleep, and their thinking was still sharp. No one had gotten bored yet, though boredom would come. Most cops hated surveillance, no matter how important the subject. Unless, of course, it was a beautiful woman who liked to take off her clothes in front of windows. Then the pigs would line up as if at the trough.
And most Swiss cops hated being bossed by a woman. But that was just too bad, Liese thought, getting out of her car as the sky in the east began to lighten. They had a job to do, and they were going to do it right. Marta would have expected nothing less for Kirk.
The chalet was dark except for the fire on the hearth in the middle of the great room, and the soft green glow of the communications and surveillance equipment set up on a low table a couple of meters back from the main windows that opened toward the bay.
LeFevre was finishing breakfast, a sausage and black-bread sandwich, and Detective Tomas Ziegler was looking at the compound through a set of powerful Zeiss image-intensifying binoculars set on a sturdy tripod.
Liese laid her purse on the table. “Are they up and about at this hour?”
“I saw a light, but it was in the staff wing,” Ziegler said.
“One of them had to take a pee then,” LeFevre suggested. They were both very young and very superior, though Ziegler had already tried to hit on her.
“Any telephone calls overnight?” Liese asked, heading into the tiny kitchen to heat the pot for some tea.
“Just the school,” LeFevre said. “About nine.”
“One of the kids sick?” The prince had a wife and four children — three girls and a boy, all away at boarding school outside Zurich.
“The school didn’t call; the Prince’s wife called them,” LeFevre said.
Liese stopped what she was doing and went back into the great room. “That was late for her to call the school. Who did she talk to? What did she want?”
“The headmaster. She wants her kiddies back home with her. And she sounded as if she was in a great hurry—”
“Verdammt,” Liese said, going for her phone. “The prince is coming home — either that, or something is about to go bad for them, and they’re circling the wagons. Either way we’re going to need some intercept people up here.”
LeFevre was confused. “What do you mean?”
“It’s the start of term, you idiot. They were supposed to stay there until December break. If she’s called them home, it means she’s talked to her husband.” The operations officer at Nidwalden came on the line, and Liese began issuing her instructions.
FIVE
On the bridge of the Spirit of ’98 First Officer Matt LaBlanc studied the overhead multifunction monitor, his pale blue eyes narrowed with puzzlement. He was an excellent, if unimaginative officer, who did everything strictly by the book.
He picked up the ship’s phone and called engineering. “We’re losing speed over the bottom; is there a problem?”
Sterling Granger, the engineering officer on duty, came to the phone. “RPMs are steady at seven hundred. We might have picked up something on one of the props. Stand by.”
Besides LeBlanc, the only other crew on the bridge were Officer-in-Training Scott Abfalter and the helmsperson, Able-Bodied Seaman Nina Lane, who was so tiny she was barely able to see over the top of the ship’s wheel. The weather tonight wasn’t much different than it normally was at this time of year. The Spirit was taking the seas in her stride; she was built for these waters, but a couple of minutes earlier she had suddenly lost a half knot of speed over the bottom as registered by their bottomsounding sonar. The present weather was a known, as were the tidal and wind-driven currents, but none of those factors could explain the loss in speed. It was almost as if they were towing a sea anchor.
Granger, whose real name was Babrak Pahlawan, came back. “I’m showing the same thing here. We may have picked up some debris on one of the props.”
“Wouldn’t we be able to feel the vibration if the shafts were out of balance?” LeBlanc asked. This was the first trip he’d made with Granger, and he didn’t have a measure of the man yet.
“Not necessarily. It depends on what we’ve picked up and how it’s streaming, if that’s the problem,” Granger said. “Stand by.”
Something wasn’t right to LeBlanc, who’d been with the company for ten years. He had the hours for the Master of the Oceans certificate, and he would be taking the test in a couple of months. Granger’s explanation didn’t make any sense to him. “How’s the helm feel?” he asked Lane. “Have you noticed any change in the past few minutes?”