Fellowship of Fear (24 page)

The orderly stationed at the reception desk, a large, powerful man with huge forearms, came to the foot of the stairs. "Hey, what’s going on?" he said.

"This kid was just walking out with my radio," Gideon said.

"Like hell," the boy said. "This is my radio, man."

"Suppose we go up to my room and see," Gideon said.

"Sir, do you want me to call the MPs?" The orderly stood in the middle of the stairwell, one gigantic hand on each bannister.

"I think that would be a good idea," said Gideon.

"No, wait, man," the boy said. "Okay, I took the radio, but… the door was open…I just saw it there…it was stupid…Hey, let me go, man. I never done anything like this before."

Gideon was sorry for the boy, hemmed in by two threatening men who towered over him, but he didn’t believe his story.

"What were you doing here?" he asked.

"I’m a courier. I was delivering a message. My name’s Manny Pino," he volunteered. "Look, man—"

"To whom?" asked Gideon.

"Huh?"

"To whom were you delivering a message?"

"Major… Major Rosen."

Gideon looked at the orderly. The man shook his crewcut head. No Major Rosen there.

"But," the boy said, "I couldn’t find him, he wasn’t here, so I—"

"Where’s the message?" said Gideon.

The boy began to cry. Gideon kept a firm grip on his arm. "Call the MPs," said Gideon.

   THE military police had been able to get nothing more from Manny Pino. In the end, they had taken him away snuffling and terrified. They had also taken the radio and had told Gideon to check through his things to see if anything else was missing.

Grumbling, more annoyed than angry, he found the list of his belongings—so well-used that it was beginning to fray along the creases—and quickly checked off the items. As he had somehow expected, nothing else was missing.

He flung himself into the standard-issue green armchair and pondered. He knew why he was so irritated; he was in the dark again. Only a few hours ago, he had considered things pretty well wrapped up. Delvaux had cogently if implausibly explained away almost everything. As far as Gideon had been concerned, the case was closed; he was ready to forget the theft of the socks.

And then he had returned to his room to pack before leaving for the airport, and found everything blown wide open again. Why in the world would anyone take the trouble to break into his room to steal a $14.95 plastic portable radio? The calculator standing there in plain sight was worth five times as much. It made about as much sense as the socks.

He did, however, know a few things for certain. He knew, most comfortingly, that it was definitely not Ferretface’s doing, unless Monkes had arranged for it before he was killed; and he knew that the theft had conveniently occurred during the time Marks had ordered him to stay away from his room. That made it rather likely that whoever was behind it had access to NSD’s instructions…or was acting
on
NSD’s instructions.

Was it possible that Delvaux had not been leveling with him? He pondered some more, frowning blankly at the neat green lawns below.

   BRUNSSUM, Holland, lies in the Dutch Alps, a pleasant region of low hills that serves as a vacation destination for flatlanders who cannot afford to go abroad. To the gourmets of the world, Brunssum is known, if at all, as a good place to spend the night when on pilgrimage to the Prinses Juliana Restaurant in Valkenburg a few miles away. To the military, on the other hand, Brunssum is headquarters of AFCENT, Allied Forces Central Europe, its offices situated in the deep caverns of an old mine on the edge of town.

But for those fortunate few who are both gourmets and members of the military, Brunssum holds a secret unknown to Michelin and Fodor and Arthur Frommer: the International Dining Hall in the AFCENT compound. Here is what many claim to be the finest restaurant in the Netherlands; it is indisputably the best bargain.

Hilaire Delvaux, having shown his ID and paid his $1.50 at the door, had moved through the cafeteria line and helped himself to a double portion of dilled shrimp and asparagus salad, and to consomme madrilene. From the T-shirted man behind the counter, he had ordered the hall’s renowned Friday Night Special, Beef Wellington, accompanied by fresh slivered green beans and mushrooms.

Now he sat at a marred plastic-topped table, the food in front of him. Elfin and plump, with his small feet barely touching the floor, he made an odd figure among the lean, uniformed soldiers dressed in the blues and greens and browns of seven different armies.

Delvaux had looked forward all day to the Beef Wellington; he had more than once described it as England’s sole contribution to the world’s cuisine. Since his hot dog with Gideon that morning, he had eaten nothing, in order to conserve his appetite. But now he wasn’t hungry. The meat lay cooling on his plate, its crust slowly turning soggy.

The conference with Embacher had gone badly. The director general, never an easy man to get along with, was understandably under pressure to solve the case. He had ranted and desk-pounded even more than usual:
Who
was the Russians’ USOC source?
Why
hadn’t Delvaux been able to identify him?
What
was the information the Russians were trying to get out of Torrejon? Exactly what were they going to do with it? Had they or hadn’t they gotten it? What did Delvaux propose to stop them? Didn’t Delvaux understand there were only two days left before Operation Philidor, whatever in God’s name that was?

Yes, Delvaux thought, shuffling string beans with his fork, he understood very well. For all anyone knew, Operation Philidor might be a small adventuristic sortie…or it might be the start of World War III, the end of European civilization. But couldn’t Embacher grasp the kinds of problems he faced? They had doubled his staff of agents to twenty-four, but how could twenty-four men keep track of the forty-four members of the USOC staff? They couldn’t— not when one needed at least three men to keep full-time surveillance on a single person, and not when the entire staff had ID cards that would admit them to nearly any base in Europe.

Later on, a massive review of airline and customs records, and of military records as well, might turn up the source. But how much difference would it make later on? As of now, it could be any one of them. Well, not Professor Oliver and probably not Frederick Rufus. But even there, could one be sure?

He pushed himself away from the table and went to get coffee, nearly bumping absentmindedly into two kilted Scots. What he needed was a hundred men; Embacher should have brought in agents from the CIA, from MI-5. Delvaux had suggested that, and Embacher had just raved on and turned a deeper purple. The man would rather see the end of the world than lose face. That’s what came of putting political appointees in such positions. Leaving Delvaux with no coherent instructions, he had stomped from the room and run off for an airplane to take him to SHAPE headquarters in Mons.

As he sat down with the coffee, an aide from the director general’s office ran breathlessly to his table; there was a top-priority call for him from Spain. Would he come at once?

   "YES, Karl," Delvaux said into the mouthpiece, "I understand. But I wish to hear his exact words. Will you read the transcript to me, please, from the point where he admits what he was doing, or rather, just before?"

Clearly, but crackling and thin, the words came from the agent in Madrid:

Pino: I ain’t no thief, man. I wasn’t stealing nothing. I was putting something in the dude’s room.

Crow: So what were you doing with the radio? Come on, Manny, you better start telling the truth.

Pino: I am telling the truth. I was putting some secret information in one of his books.

Crow: You want to let me have that again?

Pino: Printouts. I copied some stuff off of printouts in the computer room, and I wrote them on a little piece of paper like the guy told me, and I snuck into this guy’s room, and stuck them in his book, like he told me.

Crow: Who told you? Oliver, the guy whose room it was? Pino: No, I never seen him before. He wasn’t supposed to know about it, man. No, this was the guy I met in the bar.

Crow: All right, never mind. What was it you copied?

Pino: I don’t know. The guy told me the code number of the sheet. It was mostly numbers. Uh, deployment, something like that. Yeah, deployment patterns, stuff like that. Tactical fighters or something. I don’t remember.

Crow: All right. Now listen to me, Manny. You’re in a hell of a lot of trouble. You’ve been spying—

Pino: Hey, man, I ain’t no—

Crow: You’ve been spying, and that means you could be executed.

Pino: (Shouts and jumps from chair; forcibly restrained.)

Crow: Manny, you’re only making it worse for yourself. Now either cooperate—

Pino: Okay, okay, okay.

Crow: All right, then tell the truth. I mean it.

Pino: I am telling the truth. Look. I’m in this bar in Madrid on Monday night—

Crow: What was the name of the bar?

Pino: Oh, come on, man, I don’t know. It was where all those bars are, where they sell those shrimp. All the guys go there.

Crow: All right, go ahead.

Pino: So I’m in this bar, and this guy comes up to me, and he’s a reporter from the
New York Times
. Mr. Johnson.

Crow: Did you see some identification? Pino: What, are you kidding? A guy starts talking to me in a bar, I’m supposed to ask for his ID?

Crow: What did he look like?

Pino: I don’t know—like a reporter, I guess. He was pretty old, fifty or sixty. He seemed like an okay guy.

Crow: All right, go ahead.

Pino: So he tells me he’s writing this story about the crummy security on American bases. Like a, a…

Crow: An expose?

Pino: Right, right. So he says if I put the stuff in this guy’s book, he’ll sneak it off the base and then the
Times
does a big article, and then they’ll pass some laws to tighten up security.

Crow: Go ahead.

Pino: Well, that’s all, man. I know it’s dumb, but I done it. I was trying to be patriotic.

Crow: He gave you money, didn’t he?

Pino: Well, yeah, a hundred dollars, but that’s not why I done it. I—

Delvaux cut in. "Karl, did he tell you how he knew which book to put it in?"

"Yes, he—"

"No, read me the transcript." For a moment there was no sound but the crackling and humming of the wires.

"Here it is," said the agent.

Pino: The guy in the bar, he told me to put it in the back of a book, just stick it between the pages so it doesn’t show.

Crow: Just any book?

Pino: No, he gave me the name. I wrote it on a piece of paper. Hey, I still got it. It’s in my wallet. (Contents of wallet examined. Found cocktail napkin with penciled note: Skull of Sinanthropus Pekinensis, Franz Weidenreich.)

"Why did he say he took the radio, Karl? Impulse?"

"Uh-uh. Here, let me find it…"

"No, no. You can just tell me."

"He says the man in the bar told him to take it. Not the radio, necessarily, just
something
. Pino said the man told him it would be a cover."

"I’m afraid I don’t see—"

"Well—this is according to Pino, now—the alleged reporter told him that Oliver had ways of knowing if anyone had been in his room, even if a single book or anything was moved a fraction of an inch. But if something was
missing,
the idea was that Oliver would be bound to think somebody had been in there to steal something; it wouldn’t occur to him that somebody had
left
something."

Delvaux laughed drily. "What do you think of all this, Karl?"

"We haven’t put Pino on the polygraph yet, but I’d bet he’s not lying. I think the whole thing is so crazy that maybe it’s true."

"That’s precisely what I think. Splendid work, Karl. You’ve done wonderfully."

Delvaux’s breath was shallow with excitement as he replaced the telephone. So Monkes had been correct after all. It
was
Gideon Oliver, but an innocent Gideon Oliver, who was unknowingly carrying tactical aircraft deployment plans from Torrejon. No doubt the Russians had gotten the information in the same way at Sigonella, only then it had been three pairs of socks, not a radio, that had served as cover.

If only he had given credence to Oliver’s complaint then and had investigated the theft …But it was too late for that now. Now the only important thing was to find Oliver and the book before the Russians did. How strange to think that the key to an East-West confrontation might lie between the pages of an abstruse text in the care of a brilliant but frighteningly naive professor of anthropology.

But where
was
Oliver? He had been scheduled for a flight from Madrid to Frankfurt that afternoon. He was probably in Germany already, on his way to Heidelberg. My God, was it already too late? There must have been a hundred chances for them to get the information from Oliver: at the airport in Madrid, on the airplane itself, at the Frankfurt airport, at the train station in Frankfurt… No, he told himself. Do not become addle-brained at the moment of success. Be rational.