Rules of Deception Read Free Page A

cut through with a solid line. He dialed the number for Rega anyway. The call failed. “Nothing. It’s a black hole.”
    Emma stared at him a moment and he could see that she was working hard to keep it together. “But we’ve
got
to talk to someone.”
    “There’s no one to talk to.”
    “Try the radio again.”
    “What for? I told you, it’s broken.”
    “Just do it!”
    Jonathan kneeled beside her. “Look, everything’s going to be okay,” he said in as calm a voice as he could muster. “I’m going to ski down and bring back help. As long as you have your avalanche transmitter, I won’t have any problem finding you.”
    “You can’t leave me here. You’ll never find your way back, even with the beacon. You can’t see twenty feet in any direction. I’ll freeze. We can’t…
I can’t
…” Her words trailed off. She dropped her head onto the snow and turned her face so he wouldn’t see that she was crying. “I almost had it, you know…that last turn…I just was a little late…”
    “Listen to me. You’re going to be fine.”
    Emma looked up at him. “Am I?”
    Jonathan brushed the tears from her cheek. “I promise,” he said.
    Reaching into his rucksack, he found a thermos and poured his wife a cup of hot tea. While she drank, he gathered her skis and placed them in the snow behind her, forming an X so he could spot them from a distance. He removed his patrolman’s parka and laid it over her chest. He took off his cap and placed it over Emma’s, pulling it down so that it covered her neck. Finally, he fished the space blanket from the rucksack and gingerly slid it beneath her back and around her chest. The word “HELP” was spelled across it in large fluorescent orange letters, meant to aid in cases of air evacuation. But there would be no helicopter flying in today.
    “Pour yourself some tea every fifteen minutes,” he said, taking her hand. “Keep eating and above all, don’t fall asleep.”
    Emma nodded, her hand gripping his like a vise.
    “Remember the tea,” he went on. “Every fifteen—”
    “Shut up and get out of here,” she said. She gave his hand a last squeeze and released it. “Leave before you scare me to death.”
    “I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”
    Emma held his eyes. “And, Jonathan…don’t look so unsure of yourself. You’ve never broken a promise yet.”

2
    Three hundred kilometers to the west of Davos, at Bern-Belp airport outside the nation’s capital, snow had been falling since morning. Menacing Arctic CAT snowplows rumbled up and down the runways, making mountains out of the gathered snow, ugly parodies of the Alps, and depositing them at the head of the taxiway.
    At the west end of runway one-four, a cluster of men stood huddled together, eyes trained to the sky. They were policemen waiting for a plane to land. They had come to make an arrest.
    One man stood slightly apart from the others. Marcus von Daniken was fifty, a short, hawkish man with black hair shorn to a grenadier’s stubble and a grim, downturned mouth. For the past six years, he’d headed up the Service for Analysis and Prevention, better known as SAP. It was SAP’s job to safeguard the country’s domestic security against extremists, terrorists, and spies. The same role was performed in the United States by the FBI and in the United Kingdom by MI5. At that moment, von Daniken was shivering. He hoped the plane would land soon.
    “How are conditions holding?” he asked the man next to him, a major from the Border Guard.
    “Another ten minutes and they’re closing down the field. Visibility’s for shit.”
    “What’s the plane’s status?”
    “One engine down,” the major said. “The other’s overheating. The aircraft just turned onto final approach.”
    Von Daniken searched the sky. Low above the runway a set of yellow landing lights blinked in and out of the mist. Moments later, the plane dropped out of the clouds and into view. The aircraft was a Gulfstream IV