Swiss never had in their possession a jamming device, that item isn’t part of the theft you’re investigating. The kidnappers I’m looking for could have purchased it on the black market or directly from the North Koreans. What stands out on your list are the glare guns. Tell me about those.”
“They were Russian issue. Dostov was the name of the company that created them. There were two in the Basel depot. They were brand-new, and the army hadn’t even had a chance to fully test them yet. The manufacturer had only produced a limited number and was loaning them to different governments in hopes that they could create large-scale orders for the device. These were prototypes in a sense, so even if an individual wanted to buy them, they weren’t available for sale.”
“What were you planning to use them for?”
“At this stage, I don’t think we planned on using them for anything. My government had acquired them strictly to test their effectiveness.”
“Effectiveness against what?”
“Switzerland is a relatively peaceful country, despite your experiences in the Jungfrau,” Claudia said with a smile. “As such, we have been looking into a series of nonlethal weapons. Over the next two years we will be hosting several high-profile economic and diplomatic summits. After the WTO and World Bank disturbances the U.S.A. experienced, we decided we needed to be better prepared to handle civil unrest.”
“But why the Russians? Why buy equipment from them when we have a very strong alliance with your country and are developing similar technology?”
“From what I understand, your testing of nonlethal laser weapons has not been very successful. The Russians seem to have it more finely tuned. Also, I have no idea if this is a technology that the Americans are sharing. Besides, we were only going to test it. We had not yet decided if we were going to buy it.”
“So, this shipment of weapons arrives at the Basel depot, and before your people get a chance to use it, it’s stolen. How did the thieves know it was coming and where it would be?”
“We suspect there was a leak.”
“Could Miner have had access to this information?”
“Yes, and knowing this, I had both a motive and the means. Motive was easy-money. I tried to check his alibi, but he claims he was working on a classified assignment at the time of the theft.”
“What about his superiors? This guy has to answer to someone.”
“He’s very clever. Whatever he was up to, he had his tracks well covered.”
“It looks that way.”
“What is it about the glare guns that interests you so much?”
“You know, for the longest time I have been wondering how one of the finest protective details in the world could be ambushed and killed with only one man getting a shot off.”
“You are referring to your president’s team?”
“Yes. It didn’t make sense to me until I began thinking about the glare guns. If Miner is connected to the president’s kidnapping and he brought the glare guns with him, I can see how the Secret Service agents were taken out. Blinded and disoriented, they wouldn’t have been able to safely evacuate the president or take any shots. But…”
“But what?”
“How did one of the agents get a shot off and manage with that one shot to kill a bad guy?”
“Maybe he wasn’t as affected as the other agents.”
“Or maybe that’s just what somebody wanted us to think.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It never sat well with me that the kidnappers would leave one of their own behind. I also never liked it that this guy was found holding a gun that directly tied him to where he was from. For such a carefully planned assault, it seems very careless, and therefore very suspicious.”
“If the one body was left at the scene on purpose, what does that say?”
“It says that somebody really wanted us to believe that a Middle Eastern group was behind the kidnapping.”
“And what about the demands of the FRC?” said Claudia.
What about them? Scot thought. Today was Sunday, a week since the avalanche. He had been on the run since Wednesday. Just four days, but it felt like a lifetime. America might have already caved in by now, or a whole new set of demands could have been made. All he knew he got from looking at an occasional newspaper-the vice president was refusing to deal, and the president had not yet been returned.
“That’s a big question mark. Everything points away from a Mideastern organization, except the demands,” said Harvath.
“Maybe who committed the kidnapping and who paid for it are two separate groups.”
“That’s the direction I am taking, and it’s the only thing that could explain the Fatah’s involvement. So, if you find one of the groups, you should be able to find the other.”
“What else do we have?”
“Well, we have the two shooters in the Ice Palace speaking Serbian and my source’s confirmation of a Swiss assassination team working in Yugoslavia in recent years.”
“And they called themselves the Lions, right?”
“Yes. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Kind of, but it’s really just a feeling.”
“Coming to Switzerland was just a feeling for me, but with every gun that gets jabbed in my back or bullet that whizzes past my head, I’m learning to trust my feelings even more, so, please, share.”
“Well, when you first mentioned the Lions, it made me think of words like ‘proud’ and ‘arrogant.’ Those words remind me of Gerhard Miner-”
“The lunch you had with him.”
“Yes, which seems silly, but there was another picture that came to mind when you talked about the assassination team being Swiss and being named the Lions. There is a very famous monument in Lucerne of a dying lion. It was carved out of a rock ledge as a tribute to the men of the Swiss Guard who died defending King Louis and Marie Antoinette during the revolution.”
“You think there might be some sort of symbolic connection?”
“Why not? Switzerland has always been proud of its neutrality, but also very proud of the ferocity and courage of its mercenaries. Ferocity and courageousness, just like a lion.”
“This monument is in Lucerne?”
“Yes.”
“And where does-”
“Miner live?”
“Yes.”
“He has an apartment in Bern, but his main home is in Lucerne.”
“The Lions of Lucerne. You might not have been reaching very far at all.”
63
The next morning, Scot used the color kit Claudia had bought with their groceries and dyed his hair once again. He wanted to return to his sandy brown, but he needed two applications to cover up the white blond and subsequently ended up with a much darker shade than he’d hoped for. At least it didn’t all fall out, which had been a definite possibility with all of the chemicals it had been subjected to in the last couple of days. With his hair short, yet conservatively colored, hopefully no one would bother to give him a second look.
After straightening up the house and boarding up the broken window as best they could, Scot and Claudia left to pursue the only other lead they had, a package mailed from a small village north of Lucerne called Hochdorf.
“Do you think he’ll tell us anything?” asked Scot.
“We won’t know until we try, will we?” Claudia responded.
