3rd World Products, Book 17 (27 page)

She grinned. “So we’re really just repossessing it, right?”

“You got it.”

Takeoff was a breeze. The wind was right, the truck was at the far end of the field, and we lifted sooner than I’d expected. Flying high enough to avoid ground obstacles and low enough to avoid most radar, we headed for the border. Marie keyed the radio and said, “UFO Boston” every few seconds until someone answered, “Road crew, Boston. Road crew, Boston.”

Marie answered, “Boston, Road crew. Boston, Road crew,” and held the radio’s mic in her lap as she said, “All set.”

A few rounds peppered the plane as we flew over the border, but the shooting quickly stopped and nobody was hit.

On the western side I found the right bit of road blocked off by six jeeps and a deuce and a half truck. Road flares helped outline the road for us and vehicle lights made up the difference. I managed to set the plane down gently enough and shut down the engines.

The jeeps rushed toward us and men gathered up the road flares, which had been sitting on buckets of dirt. The men turned the flares upside down and crammed them into the dirt, then moved up the line until all the buckets reached the truck.

We were hustled out of the plane and into the jeeps and driven to a house in the woods about fifteen minutes away. After a quick debriefing, Will and I were issued one room and Connie and Marie were issued another. I don’t know what arrangements were made for the others. An Army sergeant knocked on the door at six the next morning. Our clients were already gone. We were fed and debriefed a bit more, then allowed to leave around ten.

Waving a hand in front of my face, Marie said sharply, “Hey! Yeah, you! You were somewhere else.”

Letting my reveries fade, I replied, “I was remembering that night. Our airplane ride.”

“So was I. That’s probably why I didn’t notice you were off in space right away.”

“Fun times, huh?”

She grinned. “Yeah, they were. What was it you were going to say about Emily?”

With a shrug, I replied, “Let’s find her,” and put the question to my core. An answer popped up quickly and I put it on a screen that showed us a mid-forties blonde woman in a business outfit. She worked for a bank in Heilbronn.

“My God,” muttered Marie, “That’s her? She looks older than me. What about her mother?”

“This says her mom died four years ago. Hang on one.”

Fishing up more details, I found Wilhelm in Darmstadt; he’d become an auto mechanic and opened his own shop.

Marie chuckled, “Well, I guess he was ‘sincere’ about coming to the west after all.”

Next I tried to find the plane. It had been stored for half a year or so, then returned to the Russians. For some reason, that really disappointed me.

I said, “We shoulda kept it. They never paid off the war loans.”

Studying the plane, Marie nodded and chuckled, “Yeah.”

After a moment, she sighed and sat down, then sipped her coffee and made a face. “It’s old and it’s cold.”

“That happens when you don’t drink it fast enough.”

“Don’t ‘advise’ me, damn it. Take me to fresh coffee.”

I chuckled, “Oh, yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am,” and put the flitter in motion toward Europe.

Chapter Nineteen

Marie picked Wiesbaden as a place that would — as she put it — ‘be a good mix of German and American’. Galatea reached us before we reached Germany and I had our flitter blend with Tea. It happened so smoothly we didn’t even have to adjust our seats. The flitter we’d used above Iran was simply converted to field energy and absorbed by Tea.

Glancing around somewhat wide-eyed, Marie said, “That was slick. I couldn’t tell when one flitter ended and Galatea began.”

“That just means she did it right.”

Running her hand over the console as if touching it for the first time, Marie asked, “You’re telling me I could have one of these?”

“The use of it, yes. It would belong to 3rd World.”

As if some great decision had been reached, she nodded and said firmly, “Okay, then. I’m definitely in.”

“There was still a question about it?”

Looking at me, she replied, “Yes.”

Huh. Wouldn’t have thought so. Oh, well. We began descending toward the east side of Wiesbaden and Marie became very intent as she peered ahead of us. Tense about our rate of descent? No.

She abruptly pointed down and to our right a bit and said, “Over there. There used to be a place near the train station.”

But when we reached the area, she couldn’t find whatever she’d been looking for. After a long look around, she pointed west and said, “That way. There’ll be something between here and town.”

Her tone showed disappointment. No surprise; I’d felt the same way when my familiar landmarks hadn’t survived the decades.

“Here’s one,” she said, again pointing, “At least these places are still on every other corner.”

We landed around the corner from the cafe. Stepping out of Tea’s stealth field made us seemingly appear out of nowhere, but there was nobody around to see us do it. The cafe occupied the corner of a building that had a stone above the middle doorway. Old-style script numbers carved into the stone read ‘1803’.

Marie looked up and smiled. “In America, that would be the address, not the year it was built.”

Inside the cafe we found heavy wooden furniture, but the sense of age didn’t match the rest of the place. Marie glanced around and chose a table. The older woman who came to take our order saw her briefly caress the back of a chair and told us the furniture had been made in 1924. That figured; a lot of it had probably become firewood in the hardest years after World War 1.

As the woman left with our orders, I asked, “Do you think it’s still here, ma’am?”

Marie gave me a mystified look and, “Do I think what’s still here?”

“Whatever you’d have left. And wherever you’d have left it.”

Meeting my gaze for a moment, Marie sat back in her chair and said, “The first place was the drop.”

“Always have a backup plan.”

“That doesn’t automatically mean this is it.”

I chuckled, “Of course not, milady. Who used to sit here with you?” Nodding toward the chair on her right, I added, “In that particular chair?”

Marie’s gaze hardened briefly, then she glanced at the chair and sighed, “Conrad Hecht. He was… a friend. I met him almost six months after Mike died. He wasn’t in the trade.”

Looking at me, she asked dryly, “Aren’t you going to ask if I was sure about that?”

Shaking my head, I said, “No. If you didn’t check him out, someone else did. So he was your excuse for coming here. You just incorporated a little business with pleasure.”

For a time, she just looked at me, then said, “You make it sound so cold. But yes, that’s essentially how it was.”

I shrugged. “No judgment from me, lady. I had a couple of places like this too. Do the drop, meet the friend, play a bit, check the drop on the way back. There was nothing wrong with combining work and play if they didn’t get too mixed together.”

Nodding at the world beyond the windows, she said, “The backup drop was a loose stone in that wall, but the stones are different now. Back then they were cobblestones in cement.”

Looking at the wall, I saw flat, square tile stones like you see in gardens. I said, “Well, it’s at the end of a street. Maybe somebody ran into it.”

Marie nodded again. “Probably so. I always sat here. Conrad sat there. I’d get here first because his bus…” She paused and said, “Never mind. It’s ancient history.”

“If they’re good memories, go ahead and share them.”

She shook her head. “They’re good, but they’re private.”

“Ah. Yes’m. Got a few of those myself.”

The cafe woman brought our food and beers and we dug in. When we left, we walked to the wall and Marie touched a stone about knee-high on the head-high wall.

In a sigh, she said, “Right about there. The wall was only a little higher then. I’d sit here and wait for Conrad’s bus.”

“Want to see if he’s still in town?”

With another sigh, she said, “Oh, he is. Right up the hill from here, in fact. He died in 1998.”

Looking up the hill, I saw the church and its cemetery that took up that end of the block. I also saw an elderly woman watching us from the flower shop two doors away and nodded to her. She turned and waved at someone, then opened the door and came toward us, staring in amazement at Marie.

I said, “Heads up. Company coming.”

Marie turned to see her, then grinned. “Frau Mueller! Hello!”

I whispered, “Oh, damn. Big mistake, ma’am.”

“What? Why?”

“You’ll see.”

Frau Mueller was already demonstrating why. She halted a few yards away and blurted in German, “
You know me?!
”

I chuckled softly, “And now you get to explain. That’s why.”

“I don’t mind explaining.”

“Uh, huh. We’ll see.”

Frau Mueller came no closer, so Marie approached her as she said, “It’s so nice to see you again! Ed, Frau Mueller used to let me wait for Conrad inside her shop in bad weather.”

I said, “That was nice of her,” but stayed put. Frau Mueller’s spooky expression told me things probably wouldn’t go well.

Frau Mueller apparently understood some English; she exclaimed, “But you
cannot
be Marie!
You cannot!
”

Marie tried to assure her she was, indeed, herself, but Frau Mueller quickly crossed herself, yelped in German, “
This is not possible!
” and backed away two paces.

I said, “Toldja so.”

Turning to shoot me a glare, Marie said, “You just shut up for now, okay?” and while her attention was elsewhere, Frau Mueller did her elderly best to hurry back to her shop. With a last quick look at Marie, she ducked inside and I heard the snap of a deadbolt lock.

Marie stood staring dumbfounded for several moments. I moved to stand beside her and she growled, “Not one word. Please.”

Okay. I just stood there and tried to look like a tourist until Marie turned and marched back toward the cafe. Calling up my board, I passed her and stopped. She glanced back at the flower shop, then called up her own board and we soared above Wiesbaden.

I let Marie take the lead. In silence we circled Wiesbaden and Frankfurt once, then she headed toward Mannheim. Once there, she circled slowly above the town for a few minutes, then continued toward Kaiserslautern.

When we arrived at K-town, she hovered briefly above the shiny new building where our old offices had been, then angled down to the train station. I thought she intended to land, but she didn’t, instead cruising slowly past the front of the place before soaring back up into the sky.

Again heading southwest, she stopped above Schloss Landstuhl for a time, then flew across the valley to hover above the big white box that had become the nucleus of the Landstuhl hospital complex.

When I joined her, she said dourly, “At least tell me it’s still a US Army hospital.”

“It is. Gates and guards and all.”

“Thank you.” After a moment, she said, “I guess we can go now.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“No. Home. Any-damned-where. I don’t care.”

“Want some free advice, ma’am?”

She grumped, “Not really. I’m not in the mood.”

Nodding, I called Galatea and we slid aboard. As we lifted away, Marie said, “Sorry. What was your advice?”

“Don’t look for your past, just be happy if you find some.” Shrugging, I added, “And approach it cautiously.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“Yup. But I came by it honestly. Experience.”

“I don’t think I can… disconnect… that way.” She sighed and slumped, then asked, “Aren’t we going to use those, uh… super fast flitters to get back to the States?”

I shrugged. “I don’t see a reason, but we can if you want. Would you rather go back and try to fix things with Frau Mueller?”

Giving me a direct gaze, Marie asked, “Exactly how would you propose we do that?”

“The question required a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, ma’am.”

Her gaze hardened for a moment, then she nodded. “Yes.”

Nodding in return, I sent a probe to the shop as we turned around. Mueller was still there, sitting behind a desk in the back and fidgeting almost mindlessly with a floral arrangement. She looked about ready to cry.

When we arrived at the shop, I parked the flitter six feet above the street in front of the shop and sipped my coffee.

Marie asked, “What now?”

“Now we wait.”

“For what?”

“A crowd.”

“Why?”

“Just watch, ma’am.”

At first rather tentatively, a number of people came out of various shops and offices to stare at the flitter. A double-toned siren wailed briefly some distance away, then a cop car eased to a stop perhaps fifty feet away. Soon there were about thirty people standing around staring up at the flitter.

Marie got up and paced around the flitter staring right back at them for a time. When I said, “They can’t see us in here,” she looked at me. I added, “To them it looks like a big silver egg.”

After about fifteen minutes, she asked, “Ed, what the hell are we trying to accomplish by hanging up here?”

An older priest and a gaggle of his followers came down the hill toward us. I pointed at them and said, “Stand by. You’ll see.”

The priest and the cop conferred, and as they did so, I lowered the flitter and dropped the hull field. Waving and smiling, I pointed at each of them and gestured for them to come aboard. The old priest looked reluctant, but when the cop stepped forward, he stiffened up and followed.

It took about another fifteen minutes to meet and greet and less than completely accurately explain the situation. Looking at Marie, the men expressed their own amazement, but the priest agreed to try to explain things to Frau Mueller. He descended the ramp and knocked on the flower shop door. Frau Mueller opened the door a crack, then let him in.

Meanwhile, the cop seemed very taken with Marie. He prattled on like a schoolboy, only occasionally including me in a question or a comment. Marie gave me a fisheye glance in the midst of it all and I gave her a shrug. Sorry, sweetie, but you’re a hottie again.