Number one, he ordered liquor, which Claudia didn’t touch while working, and number two, he went on to lecture Claudia on her poor taste for turning down a fabulous dessert wine that the hotel Food amp; Beverage manager kept specially in the cellar for him. No doubt, Claudia thought to herself, Miner had something good on the F amp;B manager to rate such treatment. She made a mental note to check the manager out when she got back to Bern.
It wasn’t enough that he let her know the wine was a special delicacy the hotel reserved solely for him. No, Miner had to go on and make sure that uneducated little Claudia knew exactly what she was missing. In a tone that was entirely haughty, and which entirely suited Gerhard Miner, he launched into what sounded like a rote recitation of a wine club’s tasting notes.
Vin de Constance was a dessert wine from the Constantia estate in South Africa. It was a favorite of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had thirty bottles a month shipped to Elba to ease the misery of his banishment. The king of Prussia as well as Louis XVI loved Vin de Constance. Dickens celebrated it in Edwin Drood, and Baudelaire said, “only the lips of a lover surpassed it in heavenly sweetness.” Only twelve thousand bottles were produced annually, with almost all of them accounted for before they hit the market. An American colleague who had introduced Miner to the stuff helped arrange for a case to be sent to Switzerland. No small feat, as Vin de Constance was one of the most coveted wines in the world.
Throughout this ridiculous speech, Claudia developed a pretty good plan for where Miner could put his wine if the hotel’s cellar ever got overcrowded. Though she had already politely declined Miner’s offer, he poured the expensive liquid into her glass anyway. A faint sneer developed at the corner of Miner’s mouth when Claudia grabbed the neck of the bottle and repeated, “I said, no thank you.” The sneer, which Miner quickly masked with a false smile, proved to Claudia that the man was not completely impenetrable. She counted this as one small victory in the series of sharp defeats that had been their lunch.
Claudia had so strongly insisted on questioning Miner because he was her last possible lead. She had exhausted everything else. Claudia had gone back and questioned the military base staff again and again. She had monitored their bank accounts and purchasing patterns, hoping that if there was someone involved on the inside, he or she would slip up and make a large deposit or a large purchase that couldn’t be explained away. To date, nothing had come to light. Nothing had turned up in Switzerland, and nothing had turned up on the black markets abroad.
The Vin de Constance lecture notwithstanding, Claudia felt as if she didn’t know any more today than she had yesterday and that her whole trip to Lucerne had been a waste of time. As far as the missing weapons were concerned, Miner did have better means than anyone else in all of Switzerland to steal them. Claudia was dead- on. But just because Miner had once been involved in government-sanctioned exercises testing the security of Swiss military establishments didn’t mean that he had anything to do with her theft.
Miner was also right about something. Any attempt to try to get a judge to compel him to answer her questions would be met with resistance from the highest ranks of the Swiss government. Lacking any evidence whatsoever against Miner, there was no way anyone would force him to cooperate.
With Miner refusing to cooperate, Claudia didn’t even have straws to grasp at. All she had was air. Her investigation had been marked by failure after failure. Though her gut told her one thing, her mind told her it was a million-to-one shot that she could have turned Miner into a bona fide suspect. Now Claudia Mueller’s investigation and her career were at a complete standstill.
As Gerhard Miner pulled into the long-term parking lot at Zurich International Airport, he was no longer thinking about Claudia; his mind was back on his mission. The sudden schedule change had bothered him, but such was the nature of his business. Heads of state often shortened trips or changed plans altogether at the last minute. As this trip was set to coincide with the birthday of the American president’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Miner had been certain that, barring any international incident, the president would spend as much time as he could on his ski trip. The fact that the president was now planning to cut it short by a couple of days was inconvenient, but it didn’t make the mission impossible.
Miner entered the empty first-class line and presented his ticket and passport. He went out of his way to be extra flirtatious with the female desk staff, who wondered why such a handsome man did not have an attractive woman traveling with him to Athens.
While waiting in the Swissair lounge for his flight to board, he changed tack and acted enraged when a young waitress spilled a glass of cabernet all over his trousers. The poor young girl thought it was her fault, when, in fact, Miner had leaned his shoulder forward and nudged her tray as she was placing a cocktail napkin on the table. His explosion earned him an effusive apology that lasted from the first-class lounge all the way to the gate from a Swissair airport services manager. Once Miner had been seated on the plane, the manager again apologized and asked the chief first-class flight attendant to take especially good care of this long-suffering passenger. Miner had achieved exactly what he wanted. At least five people would be able to vouch that he had boarded the Swissair flight to Greece.
He spent the next week and a half in the popular ports of Paros and Mykonos, spending too much money entertaining new friends and repairing repeated “mechanical problems” on his rented sailboat. He overtipped waiters, barmen, and harbormasters. Not only would Miner be remembered, but many would be anxiously awaiting the return of the man and his easy-flowing money next season.
Secure that his alibi was well established, Miner sailed to the uninhabited island of Despotiko, about three hours southwest of Mykonos. Waiting there for Miner, just as planned, was his cousin from the Swiss town of Hochdorf, a carpenter who bore an incredible likeness to him.
Happy to have a free vacation and knowing the sensitivity of his cousin’s occupation, the carpenter from Hochdorf never asked any questions. The plan was for him to continue sailing south to Santorini and then Crete, where he would leave the rented yacht, citing a string of mechanical problems as the reason. The carpenter would then make his way to the western port of Patras, where a first-class cabin was booked on a Minoan Line cruise ship to Venice.
His cousin would be traveling on Miner’s passport and Visa credit card. Knowing that cabin stewards present first-class passengers’ passports for them to customs officials as a courtesy, Miner was not worried about his cousin or his passport receiving any undue scrutiny. The carpenter was to spend a week in northern Italy before proceeding via train to France.
Miner had booked his cousin on an overnight train in a first-class compartment. As the train would be crossing the French border while passengers were sleeping, the steward would gather passports as passengers boarded, present them to border officials sometime during the night, and then return them with breakfast in the morning.
After a week in France, the carpenter would take a final overnight train back to Switzerland, where the customary passport collection by the steward would once again be conducted. When the steward delivered the passport with breakfast the next morning, the carpenter was to place it in a thick, manila envelope with the canceled train tickets, credit card receipts, and other odds and ends he had been told to accumulate during his wonderful vacation. The envelope was addressed to a post office box in Lucerne and stamped with more than enough postage. When the train arrived in Bern, the carpenter would mail the envelope from the train station post box before catching his connecting train back to Hochdorf.
With eyewitnesses, customs records, and a credit card trail that would lead through three European countries all but guaranteed, Miner entered Turkey from Greece with a false Maltese passport as part of a tour group, feeling quite confident that his alibi, if ever needed, would be airtight.
Twenty-four hours later, the people seated in the airline’s waiting area paid no attention to the rumpled western European businessman who sat reading a day old copy of The International Herald Tribune. Disguised with blond hair, a full beard, blue contacts, and padding that made him appear twenty kilos overweight, Miner was now traveling on a Dutch passport as Henk Van DenHuevel of Utrecht.
He sat reading an article he had found quite by chance. It dealt with the upcoming ski vacation United States president Jack Rutledge was to take with his daughter, Amanda, and what it would cost American taxpayers.
As first-class passengers were welcomed aboard flight 7440 from Istanbul to New York, Miner folded the newspaper under his arm and made his way toward the gate thinking, They have absolutely no idea what this trip is going to cost.
