Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 01 - Fellowship Of Fear Read online

  "You’re telling me that, of the last two visiting fellows, one was killed and one just …just disappeared?" Gideon’s voice, husky with fatigue, rose to an embarrassing squeak on the last word. "And what happened to the ones before that? Does this sort of thing happen all the time around here? Or just to visiting fellows?"

  The chancellor smiled softly and shrugged. Before he could answer, Gideon went on. "Is that why the visiting fellow program was cancelled for a semester?"

  "Well, yes, as a matter of fact. To have two such unfortunate occurrences, one after the other …well, the program was getting a bad name." He chuckled weakly, frowned, converted the chuckle to a discreet cough, and went over the back of his neck with his handkerchief. "Gideon, you know you haven’t slept for almost three nights, and you’re obviously exhausted. Get yourself a good night’s sleep. Things won’t seem so, er, frightening in the morning."

  "I’m not frightened, Dr. Rufus, but I am a little… troubled. I wish you’d told me about this before."

  "Well, I wanted you to take the position, you know. Didn’t want to scare you off. Besides, would you have turned down the chance to teach over here if I had told you?"

  Gideon smiled. "Not a chance. Well, I think I will get off to bed now."

  "I think that’s a good idea." He patted Gideon’s shoulder again. "I’m going too. Can I give you a ride?"

  "No thanks. A walk will do me good. Thanks for talking with me, sir." He was trying to make amends for putting the chancellor through an undeservedly uncomfortable time.

  "Not at all, Gideon, not at all. Glad to have you on board. Get a good night’s sleep now."

  THE night air of Heidelberg was indeed just what he needed. To step from the noise and stale smoke of the

  Weinstube into the dark, open courtyard of the castle was like walking into another century—a clear, cool, tranquil century. Gideon knew well enough that the 1300s, when the existing castle had been built, had been no less traumatic than the 1900s. But now, with the courtyard empty and the air, damp with river mist, on his face, Gideon found the scene wonderfully peaceful. His breath came more easily; his nerves almost perceptibly stopped jangling. He stood in the deserted courtyard, thinking of nothing, letting his mind resettle itself into its usual, placid mode.

  Slowly, he walked down the curving road that descended to the Old Town, stopping now and then to look out over the rooftops and the glistening river, or to run his hand over the jumbled piles of smooth stone blocks that gleamed like pewter in the moonlight: all that remained of the once-formidable castle outposts. The jittery, near-paranoid state he had fallen into now seemed absurd and a little embarrassing; he had been unreasonably rude to people trying to be friendly.

  WHEN he had been offered the visiting fellowship six months before, he had jumped at the chance and had begun to talk about it as his Great Adventure. And then, at the first hint of danger—if you could call it that—he had developed the raving heebie-jeebies. It had to be the lack of sleep. And all that wine.

  The job was perfect; his course material was stimulating, the places he was going were exciting—much more exciting than his original assignment—and his working hours were unbelievable. Each seminar would run for four evenings, Monday through Thursday, leaving the daytime hours free for exploring, and giving him four whole days to travel to the next location and see some more of Europe on the way.

  At the bottom of the hill, along the quiet Zwingerstrasse, he looked with pleasure at the scattered buildings of grand old Heidelberg University. Some of the walls were spray-painted with political slogans, a sight that caused him mild pain. It was one thing to scrawl graffiti on the buildings of Northern Cal; but Heidelberg University…! It just didn’t seem right. A sign of the times, he thought to himself, then chuckled at the pun. He was more than a little tight, he realized.

  Twice during his walk, cars full of mildly boisterous USOC’rs went by on their way from the castle to the hotel. Both times he stepped into the shadows. Not that he was trying to avoid them, exactly, but it was nice to be by himself.

  Reaching Rohrbacherstrasse he was plumped abruptly back into the twentieth century. Even at midnight, the traffic whizzed by steadily at the alarming speed that appeared to be customary for city driving. Forty miles an hour? Fifty? With more prudence than he would have shown on a San Francisco street, he waited at the corner for the traffic light to change, looking at the dark, second-floor windows of the Hotel Ballman across the street. He thought he had identified the one belonging to his room, but realized he was wrong when he saw someone move behind it.

  IN the darkened room, the tall man dozed in the chair, both hands dangling over the sides, knuckles touching the floor. The other one stood at the window, a little to one side. "Here he is," he said.

  The first man stood up at once. "God damn it, it’s about time," he said. He moved to the window. "What the hell is he staring up here for, dumb bastard?"

  "He’s just looking," said the sleek-headed man. "He’s plastered; he can’t see anything. Don’t worry."

  "Who’s worried?" the tall man said.

  They watched him cross the street on unsteady legs. Then, silently, they walked across the room. The tall one stood against the wall to the side of the door, a thin silken cord with a leather ratchet in his hand. The other one stood in the closet alcove a few feet away. They didn’t look at each other.

  WHEN he stepped into the little lobby of the hotel, Gideon expected to find it full of USOC’rs, but they had evidently gone on to do some bar-hopping, or weinstubehopping, more likely. Only the landlady was there, dour and indifferent to his nodded greeting. He climbed the stairs wearily, fatigued to his bones. At the door to his room, he searched unsuccessfully through his pockets for the key. He rattled the handle of the heavy door, also without success. For a few moments he remained befuddled, checking his pockets again and again, grumpily lecturing himself on the counterproductivity of fixated behavior. At last he remembered that he didn’t have the key. In a scene that had amused some of the old-timers, it had been wrestled from him by the proprietress when he had left that afternoon. Odd, with all the reading he’d done on European customs, he had overlooked the fact that you didn’t take your key with you when you left your hotel.

  With a grumble and a sigh he went back downstairs and approached the landlady, who watched him with a malevolent eye. He took a breath and drew for the first time on his recent months of self-study.

  "Guten Abend, gnadige Frau," he said. "Ich habe… Ich habe nicht mein, mein…" Here German Made Simple failed him. He made key-turning movements. She sat stolidly.

  "Das Ding fur…fur die Tur?" he said, continuing to turn his imaginary key in the imaginary lock.

  "Schlussel," she said with a disgusted shake of her head.

  She turned, plucked the key and its large attached brass plate from the rack behind her, and plunked them on the desk.

  "Ach, ja, Schlussel, Schlussel," he cried, grinning with his best try at hearty Teutonic joviality, wondering at the same time why in the world he was trying to placate her. She was, as ever, unresponsive.

  Then back upstairs, under her suspicious glower, with heavy feet and a stomach beginning to go queasy. The second piece of Black Forest cake had been a mistake. Or maybe it was the twelfth glass of wine. With a hand less steady than it had been even an hour before, he inserted the big key in the lock and opened the door.

  When he flicked on the lights, things happened so fast they barely registered. He found himself looking into a taut-skinned face set on a peculiarly long neck. Before he could react, there was a movement behind him and a stunning blow at the base of his skull. A second blow smashed him heavily between the shoulder blades, driving the breath out of him, and something snapped fiercely around his throat. He fell to his knees, clawing at his neck, dazed and breathless, with dimming vision.

  As the darkening room began to swirl about him, the band around his throat suddenly loosened, and he dropped, gasping, to his elbows,
letting his forehead sink to the floor.

  The long-necked man in front of him grasped his hair and pulled his head up. "All right, Oliver," he said, his voice a deep baritone that didn’t belong with the ferret-like face, "give us trouble and you’re dead, you understand?"

  Gideon tried to speak but couldn’t. He nodded his head, his mind a jumble.

  "All right, you know what we’re here for. Let’s have it."

  Gideon managed to croak a response. "Look, I don’t know what this—" The band which had remained loosely about his neck was tugged viciously from behind. The darkness closed in again. Gideon gasped, swayed backwards, and lost consciousness.

  He seemed to be out for only a second, but when he came painfully to his senses, he was lying on his stomach. His jacket had been removed. He groaned and began to turn over.

  "Lay there," the baritone said. "Try to move and I kill you now."

  While they searched his clothing and probed roughly at surprising parts of his body, he lay on his face trying to gather his thoughts and his strength. What could be going on? Who did they think he was? No, they had called him by name; they knew who he was. It wasn’t money; that was clear. They were looking for something specific. They knew what they were about, and they had the brutal competence of professional killers, at least from what he’d seen at the movies. It had to be a bizarre mistake.

  As a man of studied self-observation, Gideon had never satisfied himself as to whether he was physically brave. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. This was definitely a no. His head hurt ferociously, his neck felt as if it had been seared with a hot iron, his stomach was heaving, and his limbs were completely without strength. And he was just plain scared to death; no arguing with it.

  "Look," he said, his mouth against the wooden floor, "this is some kind of crazy mistake. I’m a professor. I just got here—"

  "Shut up. Stand up. Keep your hands behind your head."

  As Gideon began to rise he became aware of something in his right hand. Something cold and hard. The key. The key and its heavy brass plate. Somehow he’d held on to them all the time. He buried them deeper in his palm. Once on his feet, he moved his hands behind his head, keeping both of them clenched, and stood swaying, his eyes closed, while a billow of pain and nausea flowed over him.

  The sleek-headed one spoke again. "Now where the hell is it? If we have to cut your gut open to see if you swallowed it, believe me, we’ll do it. I mean it, you son of a bitch." As if Gideon needed convincing, he removed from his inside jacket pocket a thin, gleaming stiletto, like a prop from an Italian opera, but obviously the genuine thing.

  When Gideon did not reply, the man gazed thoughtfully at him, his tongue playing over his upper lip, his head nodding slowly.

  "So," he said, his rich voice cordial and caressing, "now we see."

  He nodded more sharply to the other man, who was off to the side, barely within Gideon’s range of vision, and who now began to circle around behind him. He was very tall. His eyes down, Gideon waited until he could see the large feet behind his own. Then, as suddenly as he could, he scraped his right heel savagely down the other man’s shin and jammed it into his instep. Almost simultaneously he pivoted sharply from his hips with his hands still clasped behind his neck, hoping to find the other man’s head with his elbow. It smashed into his throat instead. There was an unpleasant crackling sound and the lanky form collapsed against the wall.

  The sleek, ferret-faced man hissed sharply and sprang with athletic speed into a crouch, the knife in his hand, low and pointing upwards. With an unconsciously imitative response, Gideon bent low and thrust the brass plate forward. The other man checked himself for an instant and stared at the plate. He made a gutteral sound low in his throat, then moved in, sinuous and graceful. Gideon hurled the key and plate at him. They flew by his head and into a wall-mounted mirror, which cracked into several large pieces, hung there for an instant, and slid down the wall with a huge crash.

  At the sound, Gideon made for the door, but the smaller man, with a crablike hop, was there before him, still hunched over, still pointing the knife up at Gideon’s abdomen. They stood looking at each other for a few seconds. Off to the side, the tall man groaned and began to get up, clutching his throat. Gideon’s mind was in a strange state. He was certain he was about to die, and almost equally sure it was all a dream. He was calm now, and his mind was focused. He looked about him for anything he might use as a weapon.

  His hand had closed on a heavy ashtray when there was a thumping on the door, accompanied by the landlady’s agitated shouts.

  "Herr Oliver! Was ist los? Herr Oliver!

  The three men froze and watched in fascination as the handle turned and the door opened. When Frau Gross saw the extraordinary scene within, she too remained frozen, so that the four of them seemed—to a slightly bemused, not altogether rational Gideon—like a tableau presented by a high school drama group. Here was the hero, doomed and defiant, lithe, ready to leap; there was the villain, cringing and contemptible, glittering dagger in hand; there was his cowardly minion; and there the heroine, hand upon the door handle, mouth open in artful astonishment…

  The mouth opened yet wider, emitted a preliminary bleat, and then a full-throated bellow.

  "Hilfe! Hilfe! Polizei!

  "Quiet!" whispered Ferret-face urgently. "Ruhig!" He gestured at her with his knife.

  At this, Frau Gross’s formidable jowls quivered, seemingly more in indignation than in fear; her hand moved to her breast so that she stood like Brunhilde herself; and she gave forth a shriek that stunned the senses. The two intruders looked at each other, then dashed out the door, shoving

  Frau Gross out of the way. For a second she stopped howling. Then she took a measured breath and began again with renewed vigor, staring at Gideon with emotionless, piglike eyes.

  TWO

  WITH the morning sunlight streaming through the windows of the Hotel Ballman’s breakfast room, and the fragrance of rich European coffee in the air, the horrors of the night had paled to a kind of good guys—bad guys adventure farce, which Gideon was happily describing to a rapt gathering of fellow USOC’rs. He had already gone over the details with the unsympathetic American MPs and the rough, green-uniformed German Polizei who had arrived within minutes after the two men had fled. Now, with a more amiable audience, he was telling things at his own pace, perhaps leaving out a few unnecessary details here and embellishing a little there for the sake of the narrative flow.

  He was about to explain how he had carefully palmed the key and brass plate as soon as he had entered his room and found the men, when he saw the husky Oriental come in. The newcomer walked to Frau Gross, who was sullenly laying out baskets of hard rolls and individual little packages of cheese and jam. The landlady gestured ill-naturedly at Gideon with her chin, and the big man—Gideon guessed he was Chinese Hawaiian—walked toward him.

  "Dr. Oliver? I wonder, could I talk to you a little?"

  Gideon excused himself and got up, and they went to an unoccupied table.

  "My name’s John Lau, Professor. I’m a police officer." He laid an open card case on the table, revealing a blue, plastic-coated card, and left it there until Gideon had had time to read it.

  NATO Security Directorate Identification was printed across the top, and a better-than-average ID photograph was on the left. Then: Name of Employee John Francis Lau; Issuing Department or Agency AFCENT; Ht 6-2; Wt 220; Hr clr Blk; Eye clr Brn; Birth date 7-24-40; Issue date 4-23-70.

  Gideon nodded. "All right, what can I do for you, Mr. Lau?"

  Lau had made himself comfortable, ordering coffee for both of them, while Gideon had examined his card. Now he flashed a sudden, good-natured smile. "Not Mr. Lau. Just John." He didn’t look like Gideon’s idea of a policeman. "I’d like to ask you a few questions about last night."

  Gideon sighed. "I’ve already been through it three times with the Polizei and the MPs…But I guess you already know that."

  Again the eye-crinkling
smile. Gideon liked the man’s face, relaxed and powerful. "Sure," he said. "Look, what I want to know is, do you have any idea what they were after?" He had a choppy, pleasant way of talking.

  The coffee was dumped down in front of them by Frau Gross. Gideon shook his head slowly while stirring in cream. "No idea, none at all."

  "Well, try guessing, then."

  "Guessing?"

  "Guessing. Pretend you’re me. What would be your theory?" It had the sound of a harmless academic exercise. Gideon sometimes used the very same words in Anthropology 101.

  "Theory? I don’t even have a hypothesis. You’re the expert; what do you think?"

  "You told the Polizei they were Americans," Lau said. "Is that an inference, or can you support it?" Another Anthro 101 question, Gideon thought.

  "I told them one of them—the one that spoke—was an American. I could tell from the way he talked."

  "What makes you so sure? People speak more than one language."

  Gideon sipped his coffee and shook his head emphatically. "Uh uh. I’m not talking about languages; I’m talking about speech patterns. He was born in the U.S., or maybe he came here—I mean there—when he was a kid; five, six, no older."

  Lau looked doubtful, and Gideon went on. "I’m telling you, the guy spoke native American; midwestern, maybe Iowa or Nebraska. It’s a question of stress, of lilt."

  Lau regarded him blankly. Gideon searched his mind for a simple example.

  "Do you remember," he said, "when he said to me, uh…’Try to move and I kill you now’? Well, aside from having no trace of foreign pronunciation, he said it the way only an American would. First, there was the rise-and-fall inflection; unmistakable in simple declarative sentences. Medium pitch at the beginning, up on the ‘kill you,’ and then down on the ‘now.’ "

  "Are you telling me—?"

  "That’s not the critical part. Some foreigners learn to do that consistently. But the way the words are grouped—the flow, the clotting—that’s what tells you for sure. When an American talks, he jams a lot of words into irregular groupings, so the beat’s uneven. If you know how to listen for it, you can’t miss it."