But the course of events these past six weeks had not been normal, the scribes told their readers—as if they needed to be told. They went on to describe the effect on President Cormack of the loss of his son as traumatic and disabling.
All three writers listed a chronicle of lapses of concentration, canceled speaking engagements, and abandoned public appearances in the previous fortnight since the funeral on Nantucket island. “The Invisible Man,” one of them called the Chief Executive.
The summary of each was also similar. Would it not be better, they wrote, if the President stepped down in favor of Vice President Odell, giving Odell a clear twelve months in office to prepare for reelection in November ’92?
After all, reasoned Time, the main plank of Cormack’s foreign, defense, and economic policy, the shaving of $100 billion off the defense budget with a matching reduction by the U.S.S.R., was already dead in the water.
“Belly up” was how Newsweek described the chances of the treaty’s ratification by the Senate after the Christmas recess.
Easterhouse landed at Houston close to midnight, after twelve hours in the air and two in London. The headlines on the newsstands in the Houston airport were more overt: Michael Odell was a Texan and would be the first Texan President since Lyndon Johnson if he stepped into Cormack’s shoes.
The conference with the Alamo Group was scheduled in two days’ time in the Pan-Global Building. A company limousine took Easterhouse to the Remington, where a suite had been reserved for him. Before turning in, he caught a late news summary. Again, the question was being asked.
The colonel had not been informed of Plan Travis. He did not need to know. But he did know that a change of Chief Executive would remove the last stumbling block to the fruition of all his endeavors—the securing of Riyadh and the Hasa oil fields by an American Rapid Deployment Force sent in by a President prepared to do it.
Fortuitous, he thought as he drifted into sleep. Very fortuitous.
The small brass plaque on the wall of the converted warehouse beside the paneled teak door said simply: THOR SPEDITION AG. Lenzlinger apparently hid the true nature of his business behind the façade of a trucking company, though there were no rigs to be seen and the smell of diesel had never penetrated the carpeted privacy of the fourth-floor suite of offices to which Quinn mounted.
There was an intercom to seek admittance from street level, and another with closed-circuit TV camera at the end of the corridor on the fourth floor. The conversion of the warehouse in a side street off the old docks—where the river Weser pauses on its way to the North Sea to provide the reason for old Bremen’s existence—had not been cheap.
The secretary, when he met her in the outer office, seemed typecast. Had Lenzlinger had any trucks, she could easily have kick-started them.
“Ja, bitte?” she asked, though her gaze made plain it was he, not she, who was the supplicant.
“I would like the opportunity of speaking with Herr Lenzlinger,” said Quinn.
She took his name and vanished into the private sanctum, closing the door behind her. Quinn had the impression that the mirror set into the partition wall was one-way. She returned after thirty seconds.
“And your business, please, Herr Quinn.”
“I would like the chance to meet an employee of Herr Lenzlinger, a certain Werner Bernhardt,” he said.
She went backstage again. This time she was gone more than a minute. When she returned she closed the door firmly on whoever sat within.
“I regret, Herr Lenzlinger is not available to speak with you,” she said. It sounded final.
“I’ll wait,” said Quinn.
She gave him a look that regretted she had been too young to run a labor camp with him in it, and disappeared a third time. When she returned to her desk she ignored him and began to type with concentrated venom.
Another door into the reception area opened and a man came out. The sort who might well have been a truck driver; a walking refrigerator-freezer. The pale-gray suit was well enough cut almost to conceal the masses of beefy muscle beneath; the short, blow-dried hairstyle, aftershave, and veneer of civility were not cheap. Under all that he was pure knuckle-fighter.
“Herr Quinn,” he said quietly, “Herr Lenzlinger is not available to see you or answer your questions.”
“Now, no,” agreed Quinn.
“Not now, not ever, Mr. Quinn. Please go.”
Quinn had the impression the interview was over. He descended to the street and crossed the cobbles to where Sam waited in the car.
“He’s not available in working hours,” said Quinn. “I’ll have to see him at his home. Let’s get to Oldenburg.”
Another very old city, its inland port trading for centuries on the Hunte River, it was once the seat of the Counts of Oldenburg. The inner core, the Old Town, is still girdled by sections of the former city wall and a moat made up of a series of linked canals.
Quinn found the sort of hotel he preferred, a quiet inn with a walled courtyard called the Graf von Oldenburg, in Holy Ghost Street.
Before the shops closed he had time to visit a hardware store and a camping shop; from a kiosk he bought the largest-scale map of the surrounding area he could find. After dinner he puzzled Sam by spending an hour in their room, tying knots every twenty inches down the length of the fifty feet of rope he had bought from the hardware shop, finally tying a three-prong grapnel to the end.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I suspect, up a tree” was all he would say. He left her still asleep in the predawn darkness.
He found the Lenzlinger domain an hour later, due west of the city, south of the great Bad Zwischenahn Lake, between the villages of Portsloge and Janstrat. It was all flat country, running without a mountain due west across the Ems to become northern Holland sixty miles farther on.
Intersected by myriad rivers and canals, draining the wet plain toward the sea, the country between Oldenburg and the border is studded with forests of beech, oak, and conifers. Lenzlinger’s estate lay between two forests, a former fortified manor now set in its own five-acre park, the whole bounded by an eight-foot wall.
Quinn, dressed from head to toe in camouflage green, his face masked with scrim netting, spent the morning lying along the branch of a mighty oak in the woods across the road from the estate. His high-definition binoculars showed him all he needed to know.
The gray stone manor and its outbuildings formed an L shape. The shorter arm was the main house, with two stories plus attics. The longer arm had once been the stables, now converted to self-contained apartments for the staff. Quinn counted four domestic staff: a butler/steward, a male cook, and two cleaning women. It was the security arrangements that held his attention. They were numerous and expensive.
Lenzlinger had started as a young hustler in the late fifties, selling penny packets of war surplus weaponry to all comers. Without a license, his end-user certificates were forged and his questions nil. It was the age of the anticolonial wars and Third World revolutions. But operating on the fringe, he had made a living, not much more.
His big break came with the Nigerian civil war. He swindled the Biafrans of more than half a million dollars; they paid for bazookas but received cast-iron rain pipes. He was right in supposing they were too busy fighting for their lives to come north to settle accounts.
In the early seventies he got a license to trade—how much that cost him Quinn could only guess—which enabled him to supply half a dozen African, Central American, and Middle Eastern war groups, and still have time to conclude the occasional illegal deal (much more lucrative) with the E.T.A., the I.R.A., and a few others. He bought from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and North Korea, all needing hard currency, and sold to the desperate. By 1985 he was parlaying new North Korean hardware to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war. Even some governmental intelligence agencies had used his stocks when they wanted no-source weaponry for arm’s-length revolutions.
This career had made him very
wealthy. It had also made him a lot of enemies. He intended to enjoy the former and frustrate the latter.
All the windows, up and down, were electronically protected. Though he could not see the devices, Quinn knew that the doors would be, as well. That was the inner ring. The outer ring was the wall. It ran right around the estate without a break, topped with two strands of razor-wire, the trees inside the park lopped back to prevent any overhanging branches. Something else, glinting in the occasional ray of wintry sunshine. A tight wire, like piano wire, running along the top of the wall, supported by ceramic studs; electrified, linked to the alarm system, sensitive to the touch.
Between the wall and the house was open ground—fifty yards of it at the closest point, swept by cameras, patrolled by dogs. He watched the two Dobermans, muzzled and leashed, being given their morning constitutional. The dog handler was too young to be Bernhardt.
Quinn observed the black-windowed Mercedes 600 leave for Bremen at five to nine. The walking refrigerator-freezer ushered a muffled, fur-hatted figure into the rear seat, took the front passenger seat for himself, and the chauffeur swept them out through the steel gates and onto the road. They passed just below the branch where Quinn lay.
Quinn reckoned on four bodyguards, maybe five. The chauffeur looked like one; the refrigerator-freezer, definitely. That left the dog handler and probably another inside the house. Bernhardt?
The security nerve center seemed to be a ground-floor room where the staff wing joined the main house. The dog handler came and went to it several times, using a small door that gave directly onto the lawns. Quinn surmised that the night guard could probably control the floodlights, the TV monitors, and the dogs from within. By noon Quinn had his plan. He descended from his tree, and returned to Oldenburg.
He and Sam spent the afternoon shopping, he for a rental van and a variety of tools, she to complete a list he had given her.
“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I could wait outside.”
“No. One vehicle on that country lane in the middle of the night is bad enough. Two is a traffic jam.”
He told her what he wanted her to do.
“Just be there when I arrive,” he said. “I suspect I may be in a hurry.”
He was outside the stone wall, parked in the lane, at 2:00 A.M. His high-roofed panel van was driven close enough to the wall for him to be able to see over it clearly when he stood on the van’s roof. The side of the van, in case of inquiry, bore the logo, created in masking tape, of a TV aerial installer. That would also account for the telescoping aluminum ladder fixed to the roof rack.
When his head came over the wall he could see by the light of the moon the leaf-bare trees of the park, the lawns running up to the house, and the dim light from the window of the guard’s control room.
The spot he had chosen for the diversion was where a single tree inside the park grew only eight feet from the wall. He stood on the roof of the van and swung the small plastic box on the end of the fishing line gently ’round and ’round. When it had enough momentum he let go the line. The plastic case curved out in a gentle parabola, went into the branches of the tree, and fell toward the ground. The fishing line jerked it up short. Quinn paid out enough line to leave the box swinging from the tree just eight feet above the turf of the park, then tied off the line.
He started the engine and ran the van quietly down the wall a hundred yards, to a point opposite the guard’s control house. The van now had steel brackets bolted to its sides, something that would perplex the rental company in the morning. Quinn slotted the ladder into them so that the aluminum structure jutted high above the wall. From its topmost rung he could jump forward and down into the park, avoiding the razor-wire and sensor cord. He climbed the ladder, attached his escape rope to the topmost rung, and waited. He saw the loping shape of a Doberman cross a patch of moonlight inside the park.
The sounds, when they came, were too low for him to hear, but the dogs heard them. He saw one stop, pause, listen, and then race off toward the spot where the black box swung from its nylon line among the trees. The other followed seconds later. Two cameras on the house wall swiveled to follow them. They did not return.
After five minutes the narrow door opened and a man stood there. Not the morning’s dog handler, the night guard.
“Lothar, Wotan, was ist denn los?” he called softly. Now he and Quinn could hear the Dobermans growling, snarling with rage, somewhere in the tree line. The man went back, studied his monitors, but could see nothing. He emerged with a flashlight, drew a handgun, and went after the dogs. Leaving the door unlocked.
Quinn came off the top of the ladder like a shadow, forward and out, then twelve feet down. He took the landing in a paratroop roll, came up and ran through the trees, across the lawn, and into the control house, turning and locking the door from the inside.
A glance at the TV monitors told him the guard was still trying to retrieve his Dobermans a hundred yards up along the wall. Eventually the man would see the tape recorder hanging from its twine eight feet above the ground, the dogs leaping in rage to try to attack it as the recorder uttered its endless stream of growls and snarls at them. It had taken Quinn an hour in the hotel room to prepare that tape, to the consternation of the other guests. By the time the guard realized he had been tricked, it would be too late.
There was a door inside the control room, communicating with the main house. Quinn took the stairs to the bedroom floor. Six carved-oak doors, all probably to bedrooms. But the lights Quinn had seen at dawn that morning indicated the master bedroom must be at the end. It was.
Horst Lenzlinger awoke to the sensation of something hard and painful being jabbed into his left ear. Then the bedside light went on. He squealed once in outrage, then stared silently at the face above him. His lower lip wobbled. It was the man who had come to his office; he had not liked the look of him then. He liked him now even less, but most of all he disliked the barrel of the pistol stuck half an inch into his earhole.
“Bernhardt,” said the man in the camouflage combat suit. “I want to speak to Werner Bernhardt. Use the phone. Bring him here. Now.”
Lenzlinger scrabbled for the house phone on his night table, dialed an extension, and got a bleary response.
“Werner,” he squeaked, “get your arse up here. Now. Yes, my bedroom. Hurry.”
While they waited, Lenzlinger looked at Quinn with a mixture of fear and malevolence. On the black silk sheets beside him the bought-in-Vietnam child whimpered in her sleep, stick-thin, a tarnished doll. Bernhardt arrived, polo-neck sweater over his pajamas. He took in the scene and stared in amazement.
He was the right age, late forties. A mean, sallow face, sandy hair going gray at the sides, gray-pebble eyes.
“Was ist denn hier, Herr Lenzlinger?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” said Quinn in German. “Tell him to answer them, truthfully and fast. Or you’ll need a spoon to get your brains off the lampshade. No problem, sleazebag. Just tell him.”
Lenzlinger told him. Bernhardt nodded.
“You were in the Fifth Commando under John Peters?”
“Ja.”
“Stayed on for the Stanleyville mutiny, the march to Bukavu, and the siege?”
“Ja.”
“Did you ever know a big Belgian called Paul Marchais? Big Paul, they called him.”
“Yes, I remember him. Came to us from the Twelfth Commando, Schramme’s crowd. So what?”
“Tell me about Marchais.”
“What about him?”
“Everything. What was he like?”
“Big, huge, six feet six or more, good fighter, a former motor mechanic.”
Yeah, thought Quinn, someone had to put that Ford Transit van back in shape, someone who knew motors and welding. So the Belgian was the mechanic.
“Who was his closest buddy, from start to finish?”
Quinn knew that combat soldiers, like policemen on the beat, usually form partnerships; trust and rely on one
man more than any other when the going gets really rough. Bernhardt furrowed his brow in concentration.
“Yes, there was one. They were always together. They palled up during Marchais’s time in the Fifth. A South African. They could speak the same language, see? Flemish or Afrikaans.”
“Name?”
“Pretorius—Janni Pretorius.”
Quinn’s heart sank. South Africa was a long way off, and Pretorius a very common name.
“What happened to him? Back in South Africa? Dead?”
“No, the last I heard he had settled in Holland. It’s been a bloody long time. Look, I don’t know where he is now. That’s the truth, Herr Lenzlinger. It’s just something I heard ten years back.”
“He doesn’t know,” protested Lenzlinger. “Now get that thing out of my ear.”
Quinn knew he would get no more from Bernhardt. He grabbed the front of Lenzlinger’s silk nightshirt and swung him off the bed.
“We walk to the front door,” said Quinn. “Slow and easy. Bernhardt, hands on top of the head. You go first. One move and your boss gets a second navel.”
In single file they went down the darkened stairs. At the front door they heard a hammering from outside—the dog handler trying to get back in.
“The back way,” said Quinn. They were halfway through the passage to the control house when Quinn hit an unseen oak chair and stumbled. He lost his grip on Lenzlinger. In a flash the tubby little man was off toward the main hall, screaming his head off for his bodyguards. Quinn flattened Bernhardt with a swipe from the gun and ran on to the control room and its door to the park.
He was halfway across the grass when the screaming Lenzlinger appeared in the door behind him, yelling for the dogs to come around from the front. Quinn turned, drew a bead, squeezed once, turned and ran on. There was a shriek of pain from the arms dealer and he vanished back inside the house.