The Zurich Conspiracy

room 398.”
    Josefa hesitates. “Three ninety-eight? Isn’t that just a normal hotel room?”
    Meetings do not usually take place in hotel rooms. Josefa looks at the concierge with a twinge of embarrassment, recalling tales of high-class prostitutes who see well-heeled clients in grand hotels. For a brief moment she imagines the person he may be thinking she is: a slim woman, midthirties, in a bright-blue mohair coat with a matching Fabric Frontline silk scarf, a briefcase in her hand. Her graying hair is upswept (she had a few gray strands by the tender age of twenty—her mother’s legacy). Apart from pale lipstick and very thin eyeliner, she has no makeup on. Fortunately, she also inherited her Italian mother’s dark eyes and heavy eyelashes. Her finely toned skin doesn’t need any cosmetic enhancement.
    Josefa sucks in her breath. “I have been told a small conference room was reserved,” she says in a firm voice.
    The concierge nods an excuse. “All our conference rooms are taken, I’m afraid. But room 398 is a large suite with all necessary office infrastructure, rest assured.” He picks up a thick document and hits the stapler with a sweeping gesture.
    There’s a bang in Josefa’s ears. She winces. And it’s then she realizes: It was a gun that rammed her temple! A revolver or a pistol. That must’ve been it. She goes weak in the knees. Is she still being followed?
    “Would there be anything else?” the concierge asks.
    “The elevator, please,” Josefa says.
    “Over there and immediately on your left.”
    Josefa waits impatiently for the elevator. A cluster of tourists is standing next to her, loaded down with bags of loot from the expensive designer shops between Paradeplatz and Storchenplatz. Josefa, pull yourself together. Everything’s going to be OK. How easily she’s frightened! She’s all nerves. Probably the fault of the poster advertising the military drill. That must’ve stimulated her imagination. The world is still perfectly normal , she tells herself, trying to calm down, take this hotel, for example, or these tourists now floating up with me in the elevator .
    The fourth-floor corridor is deserted. An inviting, illuminated button at room 398 says, “PLEASE PRESS.” But Josefa knocks instead, several times, hard. She waits. Gleaming letters appear, “PLEASE ENTER.” She pushes down on the door handle.
    The vestibule is dark, but there is light in the adjoining suite. Even standing some distance away, she can see that the curtains are drawn. Should something have tipped her off? Should she have been more cautious after the past few months? She’s shifting her briefcase from one hand to the other in indecision when a figure appears in the doorway.
    Josefa freezes. “You?” she gasps. She has no desire to see the man who’s now raising his hand a little. Not now and not ever.
    “I’ve been wanting us to have a little chat for a long time,” she hears him say in a slurred, hoarse voice. At that moment a noise makes her spin around. A man has pushed open the door to the room. He’s wearing a sheepskin coat over a black suit. And in his pocket is a sharp-edged metal object.



The party tent was perched like a sparkling spaceship on a black lake, not one filled with water, of course, but an outspread carpet. Francis Bourdin had the idea of covering the meadow with a platform of boards and laying down carpeting. And when Bourdin, the head of the Loyn Corporation, had an idea, it was Josefa Rehmer’s job to make it happen. She thought she’d pulled it off brilliantly once again.
    The tent was huge. Josefa had dug up one that could accommodate two hundred people at small round tables. Almost all the guests were already seated under gilded crystal chandeliers. The white tables were set with black plates on top of gold ones, resplendent with vases of white tulips, and the chairs were also black and gold. The combination of black, white, and gold was another wish of Bourdin’s, another of his visions, and Josefa did everything possible to make his ideas a reality.
    She was fired up. She wondered if anyone could tell just by looking at her how proud she was of her achievement. Loyn had invited its best customers and business contacts to a spectacular show featuring eighty of the most beautiful Arabian stallions in the world. It was one of the biggest events that Josefa had ever organized for her company. Bourdin had insisted that the party would be in St. Moritz at the