Sighting
Bastien Mirabaud
Bastien Mirabaud walked into his brother Valerian’s office and hesitated before he said anything. In his hands, he held one piece of paper and his cell phone.
Valerian had turned seventy this year, and his hair had finished turning as silver-white as the pristine snow on the Swiss Alps. Also, like the alpine snow, there was still plenty of it.
Bastien still had quite a bit of the dark blond in his gray hair, but it was thinning on top.
Valerian’s office was situated on the top floor of a small, white building that was centuries old. Geneva Trust, a private Swiss bank, was almost a hundred and fifty years old. As the board chairman of Geneva Trust, which the Mirabaud family owned and managed for generations, Valerian was accorded the largest office.
Bastien’s office was one floor down and half the size, but it was more than sufficient for his needs. He held most of his meetings in one of the several generous conference rooms.
Valerian looked over his half-glasses at him from where he was typing on his computer. “Yes?”
“I am not sure whether you want to know this.”
Valerian leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his lean stomach. “Then it’s probably something I definitely should hear.”
“Someone used Raphael’s passport yesterday morning to leave the Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport. Because his problems all stem from before Switzerland signed the Schengen agreement, his passport didn’t return any records immediately. However, our friends with Interpol finally got a notice about him.”
Valerian turned back to his computer and settled his hands on the keyboard. “Raphael has been dead for years. It’s a mistake or a forgery.”
“His passport has been renewed twice in the interim since we last saw him.”
Valerian shrugged. “It was probably easier to counterfeit a renewal application than to apply for a brand-new one.”
Bastien slid the paper onto Valerian’s desk. “Here’s a copy of the passport with the picture on it. I think you should look at it.”
Valerian glanced at the paper, and then he turned and inspected it more carefully.
Bastien said, “He looks just like you did when you were around thirty.”
Valerian glanced up, his gray eyes solemn. “He disappeared when he was seventeen. They could have used age-progression software and, again, counterfeited the passport. Did we miss any other record of him?”
“There’s nothing. I just checked. He dropped off the face of the Earth, and nothing until yesterday morning.”
Valerian set down the photocopy. “What else?”
Bastien handed him the phone. “This was uploaded to a video website this morning. Interpol’s facial recognition software linked it to the passport picture.”
In the cell phone video, blurry from the phone bobbling around during the filming, a blond man was bent on one knee in an aircraft aisle. The woman’s hair, also blond, was visible above the seatback, but nothing more.
Valerian’s hand rose to his mouth as he watched.
The man said,“Durchlauchtig,I was wrong to leave while we were in London. It was the most stupid mistake I have ever made in my life. Will you marry me?”
Even though he spoke German, his Swiss inflection was unmistakable.
“That’s my son.” Valerian’s voice sounded like he had been punched in the gut. “That’s his voice.That’s Raphael.”
“I think so, too,” Bastien said.
He touched the screen. “He filled out. He’s larger around the shoulders. He was such a skinny teenager from growing too fast, but he looks strong now.”
“He does look good.”
Valerian picked up the phone and ran the video again. “What flight was this on?”
