Rules of Deception

43

At his home, Marcus von Daniken could not sleep. Lying in bed, he stared at the ceiling, listening as the habitual sounds of the night tolled the passing hours. At midnight, he heard the radiator click off. The old wooden house began to shudder, surrendering its stored heat in groans and cracks and faint, pining voices that seemed to wail forever. At two, the nightly freight passed over the Rumweg Bridge. The tracks were five kilometers away, but the air was so still that he could count the cars as they rumbled over the trestles.

A drone.

He knew that this would be the case that defined his career. He knew it because things like this did not happen often in small, cozy Switzerland, and he was proud of the fact. He imagined the unmanned aircraft cutting across the sky, bearing its nacelle of plastic explosives. He pondered the possible targets. The terrorist, Gassan, had said that Quitab wanted to take down a plane, but here in his bed, in the dark of the night, von Daniken conjured up a dozen other possibilities, ranging from a dam in the Alps to the nuclear power plant at Gösgen. A drone like that could fly anywhere.

In his mind’s eye, the white unmanned aircraft grew larger in size and changed shape, until it was no longer a drone packed with twenty kilos of plastic explosives, but an Alitalia DC-9 carrying forty passengers and a crew of six en route from Milan to Zurich, among them his wife, his unborn child, and his three-year-old daughter. He was dreaming and he knew it, but the knowledge did nothing to lessen the impending horror. He saw the plane nosing through clouds, its landing gear hanging clear of the fuselage in preparation for arrival. It was not February, but November. A night much like this. Freezing temperatures. Sleet. Ground fog.

In his dream, he was standing inside the cockpit, lecturing the captain that he had no business flying in such conditions. The captain, however, was busy talking to a stewardess, more concerned about getting her phone number than paying attention to the faulty altimeter that had him flying three hundred meters too low.

And then, with the merciless acuity of all dreams, von Daniken saw his wife and daughter seated in the rear of the plane as it hurtled toward the mountainside. As was his custom, he took the seat next to them and gently laid his fingers over their eyes, closing their eyelids and shepherding them to a deep, painless sleep. He was certain that little Stéphanie’s head had been touching his wife’s shoulder.

At 19:11:18 hours November 14, 1990, Alitalia Flight 404 struck the Stadelberg, altitude four hundred meters above sea level, head-on, just fifteen kilometers from Zurich Flughafen. The speed at the moment of collision was four hundred knots. According to the accident reports, when the ground collision alarm sounded, the captain had less than ten seconds to avoid hitting the mountain.

Von Daniken shot upright in his bed before he was forced to watch it explode.

“Not again,” he said to himself, his breath coming fast and shallow.

No more planes would go down on his watch.

He would not allow it.