The Zurich Conspiracy (40 page)

Schulmann was a brilliant hacker. Had been.

And she was a brilliant parasite. She’d made use of him for her own ambitious plans. He wanted to make a play for Loyn. But she wanted to be Loyn’s figurehead.

A woman who makes it to the top. Who shows them all up.

Werner used her apartment computer so that nobody could find any trace of his secret shenanigans. And he unwittingly presented her with the very trail she needed. What that data pirate raided from the company’s network—that was what she was after too. He compiled files with documents he’d stolen from Loyn’s secret electronic databases. And she…she had surreptitiously fastened a little mirror over the desk. (
Women are known for putting mirrors everywhere, aren’t they, Werner?
) She cracked his password in a few days; after that it was child’s play.

She got up to pour herself another cup of coffee. Then she went to the window and looked at the drifting snow.

Schulmann. She never was afraid of him. She knew him, all right; he was just like her—unscrupulous. But he wasn’t good enough. He didn’t have the right stuff to reach the top rungs on the ladder. Made too many enemies. She despised him with every bone in her slender body.

How good it was that she’d put her money on another guy in the nick of time. Karl Westek. He had his own schemes. And Westek was once a powerful man in a huge corporation. She courted Westek. He needed her.

Then Schulmann was murdered, and that confused her. No, not confused—bewildered was more like it. Pleasantly bewildered. She’d never have believed Francis Bourdin, that slob, could carry out a murder so carefully. And Bourdin had to be the murderer, no question. But then he got scared. Wasn’t up to it. Though the cops couldn’t pin anything on him. Can’t even today.

In spite of the bugs. Schulmann used them to blackmail Bourdin for sure. Werner would never have dreamed Bourdin could pull off a thing like that without telling him. Probably hadn’t been paying enough attention. Must have rankled a hell of a lot. One hell of a lot. And Bourdin—you’ve got to hand it to the guy—simply put Schulmann away.

“Josefa?”

“Sebastian!”

“Am I interrupting you—bothering you?” he said, switching to the more intimate form of address.

“Sebastian, I’m so happy to hear your voice. I thought maybe…maybe we’d never ever—”

“Josefa, everything’s OK now; it’s all over. You’re safe, do you hear? That will never happen again. Never.”

“It was terrible down there. So cold and still…It was scary. I felt so lonely.”

“I know. It must have been horrible. You’re very brave, Josefa. Everybody’s very impressed with you. I wished I could have… Esther Ardelius phoned me because she was so worried. I was… Your father moved heaven and earth.”

“Papa?”

“Yes, I heard from a colleague that he called up somebody in the canton government to urge the police to get a move on. He used all his pull to get them to look for you. And your friends, Helene and Esther—what terrific friends you have, Josefa. They’d move mountains for you. They—”

“Sebastian.”

“I’m talking too much, right? I know, I ought to let you rest, I—”

“Sebastian. I thought about
Rigoletto
when I was down there. And that we wanted to go to the opera. Isn’t that crazy? I thought Sebastian’s sure to have bought tickets already. I can’t now…I can’t just simply go like this…like…like…Do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, I understand. Oh, Josefa. You can’t imagine how I… When are you back in Zurich?”

“Soon, Sebastian. Very soon.”

She heard thunder in the distance. It lasted several seconds. She listened hard. An avalanche. It must be an avalanche.

But she was safe here. The hut had stood here for fifty years. Her father had told her that on a family picnic.

The snow was thinning out, might even stop completely. Suddenly she was shivering, though the heat from the fire was intense. Remembering Karl Westek must have caused her uneasiness.

How angry she was during those weeks when it looked like Westek was letting the whole thing slip through his fingers. He was extremely nervous; Thüring and Salzinger had been rubbed out, Feller-Stähli was no longer in the land of the living either, Van Duisen wasn’t in the game anymore. And to make their misery complete, Westek was right in the middle of expensive divorce proceedings.

That wimp. Her hopes were dashed; her climb to the top of Loyn looked like it was in the utmost danger.

She got madder and madder every time she thought about it. She kicked a piece of wood across the room. That son of a bitch. That backstabber. Westek had wanted to drop her and go it alone. That bastard thought because his pals were dead that maybe his hour had come. Westek, going it alone. He sniffed an opportunity because he had good reason—good information—to suspect that Loyn was buried in debt, that Walther would be forced to sell. Westek supposed as much, thanks to information he had from
her
. That vulture. She’d given him all the data, and now he was cold-blooded enough to cut her out.

It took great effort back then to keep her anger in check. How she’d loved to have drowned him in boiling water! Like a farmer in her village used to do with June bugs. But she knew she had the upper hand, and that kept her calm enough to deal with it.

How stupid Westek was to think she wouldn’t find out about his plans. Now that she was so close to Hans-Rudolf Walther, now that she was indispensable to the old boss, everything had changed. She’d never been so high up before.

No doubt about it: she was coming down to the wire.

Westek had thought he could exploit Walther’s dicey position. He wanted to present himself as a savior in time of need. A white knight. And this was all going on behind her back. A rank amateur, that Westek. She had to ditch him; he was getting in her way.

It had been so simple. They went to the Düsseldorf Investors Convention in his Porsche. She wore a wig, and they registered under an assumed name—he didn’t want to make his divorce any more complicated than it already was. And while he was off on business, she had time, a lot of time, to take care of the Porsche’s motor and brakes. He thought she was going shopping. (
Because that’s what women like to do most of all, don’t they, Herr Westek?
) And she did do it, afterward. After all, she needed an alibi—and shopping bags with impressive names on them. Just in case.

The snow was getting heavier. Her rage had subsided, she noticed with a smile. She fished out a hard, anise-seed stick out of a tin can and nibbled on it, lost in thought. How easily things had gone afterward! The big row with Westek just before the trip home to Switzerland, along the lines of: I’m just your sex kitten, a cheap lay. You don’t love me, et cetera. The sort of things men hate. Naturally he wanted to get rid of her, so she just had to burst into tears, pack her things, and run off. And all it cost her was a ticket to Zurich on the Intercity Express.

Nobody had better get in Claire Fendi’s way. You don’t stab her in the back just like that.

Who would ever suspect that such a dainty, angelic woman was behind the sabotage on the brakes? Westek was only another link in the chain, along with the “accidents” involving Thüring, Salzinger, and Feller-Stähli. They’d be sure to look for the perp, or perps, among the victims of the Swixan bankruptcy.

She warbled away to herself:

For no one knows my little game,

That Rumplestilt
—I mean—

That Death’s Angel is my name!

“No, she said a little lake.”

Kündig’s voice echoed around the white tile walls. He was sitting on the rim of a bathtub. The head nurse had summarily shipped him off to this bathroom when he asked where he could use the phone undisturbed.

He had his cell phone in his right hand, a piece of paper in his left with a sketch that Josefa Rehmer had made. It had occurred to her that Claire might have gone to that out-of-the-way mountain valley, the cirque where they’d gone skiing together. The sketch showed mountains, firs, and a road leading into a valley. “Frau Rehmer didn’t actually see the lake. It was frozen over and under a blanket of snow. A kind of small mountain chalet was somewhere near the lake, in the firs.”

Kündig was dying for a cup of coffee, but his colleagues in Zurich were keeping him tied up.

“It’s an isolated part of the woods, looks like a barrier forest against avalanches.” A barrier forest in an isolated valley? Why? For one lousy chalet? Kündig didn’t even want to think about it. He was a city man, body and soul.

He squirmed on the hard edge of the tub that was digging into his behind. Lucky his colleagues couldn’t see him right now.

“The chalet? It’s right in the middle. No, not the valley, the middle of the woods. So you don’t have her sketch in front of you; I made a point of faxing it, it’s all on there. What? You need more details? No, I can’t disturb her now, she’s sleeping. I can’t see her for an hour. What does the geographer say? So what if it’s a geographer or a mountain guide, the main thing is he knows the area!”

Kündig adjusted his sitting position again.

“Did Düsseldorf come up with anything yet? OK, getting the people in the hotel there is critical. The name Karl Westek assumed he lifted from his former tax adviser. Isn’t that a doozie? Well, thank God I don’t have an expensive divorce hanging around my neck like Westek did. Yeah, and no girlfriend twenty years younger than me if that makes you happy. Is the mountain guide getting somewhere? What’s he say? Yes, yes, I’ve got all the time in the world, I’m in a hospital, you know.” He gave a sigh of resignation.

“What photos? Anonymous sender? Oh, those photos, the ones Westek’s wife got of his sexual escapades. No, that was another bed bunny; that wasn’t the woman in Düsseldorf. No, not Claire Fendi, that’s obvious. The man really couldn’t stop himself, one after the other; he had his brain between his legs. Well, drop it. Let him rest in peace. Too bad we haven’t any witnesses from the convention. Doesn’t matter. But Fendi’s home computer is a genuine gold mine. Wonderful documents, Zwicker says. Sounds good. Seems she wasn’t so clever after all. I’m curious to hear what the lady’s going to tell us.”

He struggled to his feet. That was enough sitting for a while; his rear end was sore.

“No, the sun was in her eyes. At one o’clock, when they were on the slope. So
you
figure out where south is. We could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we could ask Fendi’s parents. They’re somewhere in Spain, Heinz says. And Spain’s big. Her brother died five years ago, car accident. He was a speed fiend. And her father must have been a real tyrant, the genuine article. There was a court case a few years back because the guy’s supposed to have burned all his daughter’s belongings. And you know why? Because she wanted to move out! Yeah, burned them,
tutti quanti
—clothes, books, papers, even her skis, can you imagine? Must have been a royal asshole. And then he got off. Witness versus witness, and the mother claimed she didn’t see anything. Case dismissed, you know the drill. Those characters act like Mongolian chiefs in their own home. And you can never pin a thing on them. What? No, I’m not getting worked up, why should I, we know all that. Heinz is looking for aunts, uncles, distant relatives as we speak. But we might get there first. What—” Kündig came to life.
About time!
“What, three? How are they different? Yes, the minute she’s awake. Bye now.”