Hawke downshifted, caught second gear, and accelerated into a tight curve, the Aston’s powerful 6-cylinder motor howling, the Dunlop tires chirping as he came tearing out of the turn. They actually were running a bit late, but then, that was just an excuse. He could now see the hotel in the distance, perched beside the lake.
They met Blinky in the Hotel de la Paix restaurant soon after his speech in the ornate gilded ballroom. Hawke found them a table in the sun-filled dining room paneled in old walnut, with tall windows overlooking the frozen shores of Lake Geneva. Full of lively chatter, clinking glasses, and busy waiters.
Hawke picked up his menu and said, “Well done, Blinky. Most, if not all, of it was way over my head. But I’m sure Sigrid learned quite a lot. She spent the entire time taking notes, for God’s sake. And I didn’t realize you were quite so funny in public. You should be doing stand-up comedy instead of pushing chocolate on the unwary British.”
Blinky blinked his eyes rapidly and laughed. “I have only one rule in public speaking. Don’t bore the audience. Even if it’s about something as excruciatingly boring as cybersecurity. God. I got tired of listening to myself.”
Sigrid laughed. “I wasn’t going to say it, but I usually find PowerPoint presentations uniformly stultifying. Yours was very funny, Blinky.”
The waiter arrived with their three Bloody Marys, and Hawke said, “You said you had a bit of news for us when you rang last night, Blinky. Don’t be shy about sharing it.”
“Hmm. There are developments. Firstly, Wolfie finds himself snowed under at St. Moritz. His Tenth Mountain is immobilized, and he himself has moved down to Badrutt’s Palace in town. He’d like us to drive over, and he’s booked three rooms for us at the Palace.”
“When?” Hawke said.
“Tomorrow being Saturday, he thought you could make it, Sigrid. We’ll meet him at noon if that works for you both?”
“Absolutely,” Sigrid said.
“Good, that’s done. Let me tell you more about our frozen corpse, if I may, and where he might actually have come from.”
“Please do.”
“I had a little chat with Wolfie’s young grenadier yesterday,” Blinky said, “the one who discovered the body. The soldier’s name is Lieutenant Christian Hartz, from Bern. He was excused from duty in St. Moritz yesterday in order to show me the exact spot where he’d found the body. Veddy interesting, veddy, veddy interesting.”
“Just tell us, Blinky. Don’t be a dramatic Nazi about it. You’re not on stage anymore.”
Blinky laughed at himself. “It’s dramatic enough, I assure you,” he said. “Do you remember that when you and Ambrose first arrived in Switzerland, I mentioned something about the Bat Cave and the Sorcerer?”
“Of course. Batman. We’ve been curious about that ever since,” Sigrid said. “What is the connection, Blinky?”
“As you, darling Sigrid, are well aware, the Sorcerer disappeared from sight about ten years ago. The most powerful man in Switzerland simply vanished into thin air. In the papers for months. There was the inevitable nationwide search, Interpol was involved, but in the end they came up empty. Even in his seventies, the Sorcerer was a strong mountaineer. Climbing was his passion. It was finally decided that he had been solo up on a mountain and fallen to his death. The body was never recovered, adding to the shroud of mystery.”
“The BBC did a documentary on his disappearance many years ago. Remember, Blinky?” Sigrid said. “Perhaps we could get a copy for Alex?”
“Great minds think alike, and so do ours,” he said, pulling a DVD out of his jacket pocket and handing it to Alex.
“Fascinating. I’ll watch it tonight.”
“Tell us about the Batman connection,” Sigrid said. “We’re all mystified.”
He blinked rapidly and said, “Ah, yes, the mythical Bat Cave. Well, our notion is entirely theoretical. But one of the more interesting theories is this. It was advanced early in the police investigation of the death. That is, that the Sorcerer may be hiding in one of the thousands of abandoned air force bases that still exist all over Switzerland. Like that of the Seventh Fighter Squadron of the Schweizer Luftwaffe. With its advanced F/A-18s and—”
“Hold on a tick, Blinky,” Hawke said. “Abandoned air force bases? How the hell does anyone hide at an abandoned air base?”
“I assumed you’d ask that question, Alex. I’m now about to reveal a state secret, so treat it as such. We never talk about these things. Ever since our Luftwaffe was founded in 1914. Since our country is so small, its size creates a military problem. Our military has much to hide. That’s why you see tiny hidden airstrips, like Band-Aids, all over the countryside.
“What you do not see are the hangars themselves or the explosives rigged beneath all the bridges on our borders. Or the massive heavy artillery hidden in place to prevent an invading enemy from clearing or repairing the damage from a blown bridge. The Porcupine Principle applies not only to all of our bridges but also to all highways and railroads.
“Concealed explosives, heavy guns, and artillery all around you number in the tens of thousands. And even that number is deliberately understated. You might double or triple it for our purposes. Mountains everywhere have been made so porous that entire Swiss Army divisions are based inside them. Even as we speak there is one not five miles away.”
“You’re joking,” Sigrid said.
“Oh, but I’m not. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are countless long-range cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways run on narrow ground between the edges of two lakes, like the highway you just took, or run at the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rock slides high above the roads are ready to slide. We still throw rocks at the enemy, you see. Voila—the Porcupine Principle.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Sigrid asked.
Blinky smiled and said, “You even think about pricking us, we prick you back. And we prick you exponentially harder than you can even conceive. It’s why we’ve never endured wars or occupations in over seven hundred years.”
Hawke smiled. “They all know you’re bad, Blinky, they just have no bloody clue just how bad you are.”
“Precisely,” he said. “And believe me, we are far, far badder than I’ve led you both to believe. Our forces spend twelve months of every year learning how not to go to war. Sorry, what were you saying, Alex?”
“Tell us more about these Luftwaffe bases hidden inside the Alps. The ones where our mysterious Sorcerer may have been hiding in plain sight for lo these many years.”
“Of course. Our F/A-18 fighter bases, too, are all hidden in plain sight. That is to say, Schweizer Luftwaffe squadrons and attack helicopters reside within hangar complexes constructed deep inside hollowed-out mountains, from one end of the country to the other. Obviously, in order to shield them from enemy air attacks.”
“Obviously,” Hawke smiled. He was a bit incredulous about Blinky’s revelation, having never been made aware of Switzerland’s secret fortifications and hidden air force before. That information was clearly one of the country’s most closely guarded secrets.
Sigrid said, “This is astounding. How in the world do they get the jets out of the hangar and up into the sky?”
“Simple. Airplanes and choppers are brought up from the vast underground hangar facilities by a system of high-speed elevators. And then launched by catapults, exactly like those found on modern aircraft carriers.”
“Launched how, exactly?” Hawke asked.
“The peaks of countless numbers of our Alps contain runways hidden behind extraordinarily realistic granite-plastic blocks. They are, in effect, movable sections of fake rock. Hydraulically controlled. Virtually undetectable. Climbers make their way up to the summits every day without any idea of what lies inside the face of the mountain they’re on. In case of attack, all of these false sections withdraw hydraulically inside the mountain, creating airfield runways in the sky. Our commanding officers are so good, we can now get an entire squadron airborne in twelve minutes.”
“Good God,” Hawke said. “Astounding.”