"Well, gentlemen, I'm for an after-meal hike on the mountain before this afternoon's short session. All this sitting around in meetings is making me sluggish." Professor Rab Rahmani stood up from the table in the dining room of the InterContinental Davos hotel, his eyes going to the rise of the Rhaetian Alps of Switzerland beyond the walls of the mountain resort hotel in the highest town in Europe. He took up the thick coat that had been draped on the back of his chair and had impeded the otherwise excellent waiter service during the lunch.
Across the restaurant, young and eager Erik Hinkel of the courtesy staff of the international nuclear physicists conference being held in the hotel popped up from his table and took up station at the exit. He had a heavy coat folded over his arm.
The men—and woman—who had been at the professor's luncheon table, fawning on the leading American nuclear physicist, had all taken in the coordinated movement of the handsome, young, Germanic blond Hinkel across the room. Rahmani was famous—or infamous, in some circles—for having solved the problem of being caught, as a defected Iranian scientist, working in the Iraqi nuclear program and being captured by the Americans in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, by defecting to the United States. Since then he had been one of the leading lights in the American nuclear program. Rahmani also had a certain reputation with young men, which the Americans seemed happy to overlook to have the power of his brain working
for
them rather than
against
them.
"Remember that the next session starts at 2:00," a German physicist said. "Although it only goes until 3:00. I would have preferred that they give us the whole afternoon off so we can get out and enjoy the snow."
"And don't stray far," the French professor Felix Dederaux added. "It looks like it is about to start snowing again." They all gazed out of the broad wall of glass overlooking the town of Davos, with the peaks of the Rhaetian Alps rising above the hotel on the right of the window. Light flurries had just started, but they promised to bring more snow to add to that already on the ground.
"I won't be long," Rahmani said. "And I will have a guide. Young Erik Hinkel has agreed to show me a path up into the mountains with a spectacular view of the town."
"Yes, we can see that Hinkel eagerly awaits," the somewhat sour Sun Park, of South Korea, a fan of Rahmani's work but not, in her verbal criticism, of Rahmani personally, quipped as she brought her coffee cup to her lips to hide the smirk on her face.
All eyes at the table watched Rahmani move gracefully toward the exit. Erik Hinkel's eyes also were glued on the elegantly turned-out man as he approached. Sun Park sighed at what she'd be interested in doing with the Iranian-America, but what she strongly suspected would never be possible. Rahmani was a striking figure—tall, dark, and handsome, highly presentable and charismatic even in his early fifties. The graying at the temples of his luxuriously waving hair made him even more distinguished looking than in his earlier years, which had shown the man off in newspaper photos as Bollywood movie handsome—tall and slim, with a dancer's body and movement and with a strut of well-earned self-assurance of receiving what he was due and that he was due quite a lot.
The snow flurries had picked up a pace as the two men climbed the mountain trail. The path was cut into the side of the mountain above the hotel, but still on hotel property, in such a way as to give hikers from the hotel a walk that would be as unchallenging as possible but still permitted access to a view above the hotel that took in not only the unusual sideway egg, golden dome shape of the InterContinental but also the ski slopes sweeping down into the center of Davos. The snow had been shoveled off the path that morning, but it was starting to drift in again as the flurries turned into something more blanketing.
By the time they reached the first lookout, the view—if the visibility hadn't already closed the view down—being of a ski slope, with the lights of Davos below, it was as if they were the only two men on earth. No one else was up here.
"I'm afraid there will be nothing at all to see in a few minutes," young Hinkel said, raising his voice to be heard by Rahmani, who was impatiently pacing back and forth ahead of him. "Soon, perhaps, we won't even be able to see the opening to the path back to the hotel. I suppose we'll have to go back down and try this again at another time." Erik turned back on the path, but Rab walked swiftly back to him, reached out, and pulled the younger, smaller man into his body.
"Let us linger for a moment more," he exclaimed into Erik's ear, having to raise his voice above the whooshing sound of the snow now falling heavily in the fir trees lining the upward side of the path. "We haven't had a time of privacy, and if I've read you correctly, you are interested in having privacy with me. True?"