Rules of Deception

20

At five minutes before midnight, an unmarked van pulled up to the loading dock at the rear of Robotica AG’s headquarters in the industrial quarter of Zurich. Four men climbed out. All were dressed in dark clothing and wore watch caps pulled low over their brows, surgeon’s gloves, and crepe-soled shoes. Their leader, the shortest by three inches, rapped once on the passenger door and the van drove away.

Clambering onto the dock, he walked past the corrugated steel curtain that secured the delivery bay. He held two keys in his hand. The first disarmed the security system. The second opened the employee entrance. The men filed into the darkened building.

“We have seventeen minutes until the patrolman makes his next rounds,” said Chief Inspector Marcus von Daniken as he closed the door behind them. “Move fast, be careful what you touch, and under no circumstances are you to remove anything from the premises. Remember, we are not here.”

The men slipped flashlights out of their jackets and headed down the corridor. With von Daniken were Myer from Logistics/Support, Kübler from Special Services, and Krajcek from Kommando. All had been apprised of the circumstance surrounding the operation. All knew that if caught, their careers would be terminated and that each stood a chance of going to jail. Their loyalty to von Daniken superseded the risks.

It was Myer from Logistics who’d contacted the security company to obtain the watchman’s schedule, as well as the keys to safely enter the premises. Swiss industry had a long history of cooperating with the Federal Police.

Allowing the others to pass, Kübler removed a rectangular device resembling a large, bulky cell phone from his workbag and held it in front of him. He moved slowly down the corridor, his eyes glued to the histogram pulsing across the backlit screen. Abruptly, he stopped and punched the red button beneath his thumb. The histogram disappeared. In its place appeared “Am-241.” He glanced up. Directly over his head was a smoke detector.

The device he was carrying was a handheld explosives and radiation sensor. He was not worried about Am-241-or americium-241-a mineral used in smoke detectors. He was looking for something a little more exciting. He continued down the corridor, waving the radiation sensor in front of him as if it were a divining rod. The space looked clean. So far.

Von Daniken didn’t have the key to Theo Lammers’s office. Cooperative or not, the security company couldn’t provide what it didn’t have, and the chief executive’s office was strictly out-of-bounds. Myer spread a chamois roll containing his picks and blanks on the floor and set to work. A former instructor at the cantonal police academy, he needed just thirty seconds to open the lock.

Von Daniken swept the beam around the office. The MAV was on the table where he’d last seen it. He picked it up, studying it from varying angles. It was amazing that such a small device could travel at such high speeds. What interested him more was its purpose, peaceful or otherwise.

He put down the MAV and took several photographs of it with his digital camera, then moved on to Lammers’s desk. Surprisingly, the drawers were unlocked. One after another, he removed the dead executive’s folders, spread the documents on the desk, and photographed them. Most appeared to be customer correspondence and internal memoranda. He saw nothing to indicate why a man might feel it necessary to keep three passports and a loaded Uzi in his home.

This is his public life, von Daniken told himself. The smiling side of the mirror.

“Twelve minutes,” whispered Krajcek, sticking his head into the office. Krajcek was the muscle, and the silenced Heckler & Koch MP-5 he carried in his hands proved it.

The agenda.

Von Daniken spotted it almost by accident on a sideboard next to a photograph of Lammers with his wife and children. He picked up the leather-bound book and skimmed through the pages. The entries were curt to the point of being coded, mostly notations for meetings with the name of a company and its representative. He turned to the last entry, made the day of Lammers’s death. Dinner at 1900 hours at Ristorante Emilio with a “G.B.” A phone number was listed beside it.

Von Daniken photographed the page.

Finished in the office, he and Myer made their way past the reception area and through a pair of swinging doors onto the factory floor. “Where’s his workshop?” Myer asked as the two men snaked between mobile pushcart workstations.

“How should I know? I was only told that Lammers built the MAVs there.”

Myer stopped and held him by the arm. “But you’re sure it’s here?”

“Reasonably.” Von Daniken recalled that Lammers’s assistant had not specifically indicated that the workshop was on the premises.

“‘Reasonably’?” asked Myer. “I’m risking my pension for ‘reasonably’?”

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?”