Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 01 - Fellowship Of Fear

by Fellowship Of Fear

  "What exactly are you asking me to do?"

  "Simply to tell us if anyone, at any of the bases to which you are assigned—anyone—asks you to obtain or transmit sensitive information from that base to himself or to anyone else."

  To his faint surprise, Gideon was disappointed. "You’re not asking me to do anything? Just report back to you?"

  "That’s correct. If the occasion arises." The blue eyes looked steadily at him.

  "Well, of course I’ll do that. I’d have done it without your asking."

  "I’m glad to hear that. Are there any further questions I can answer? If not, I’ll leave you in Mr. Marks’s capable hands." He hopped down from the sill.

  "I do have some questions," Gideon said. "You said there was very little danger to me. Unless I’m missing something, I can’t see any risk at all."

  "You’re quite right. A poor choice of words on my part. My English is far from perfect." He smiled, revealing stumpy, yellow teeth with gaps between them. His eyes didn’t smile.

  "I imagine the details are secret," said Gideon, "but can you give me some idea of what sort of thing they’re after?"

  This time the eyes smiled a little. "Ah, we would tell you if we knew, but the sad fact is that we don’t know."

  "You don’t know what they’re looking for?"

  "We do not."

  "Then…how will you know if you’ve kept them from getting it? Or if you haven’t? Or how to try?"

  "Ah, we’ll know, Dr. Oliver, but as to how we’ll know, I’m afraid we can’t share that with you."

  "But what about me? I wouldn’t know a sensitive request if one bit me on the nose. I mean, unless someone asked me for a hydrogen bomb formula."

  Marks snickered. Delvaux ignored him. "We’d like very much to know if someone does. But we think…perhaps someone asking you if you happen to have a key to the computer room, or if you can get him the address of one of the officers in your class, or some such thing."

  "But you can’t expect me to run and tell you every time—"

  Delvaux’s eyelids flickered. "Dr. Oliver, you are making too much of this. We are not asking you to be some sort of spy or agent. We are merely requesting of you the kindness to notify us if you are approached with a request that strikes you as peculiar and which might in some conceivable way relate to matters of security. Truthfully, we think it extremely unlikely that such an event will occur; we are merely providing for all contingencies. We leave it entirely to your discernment as to whether something is sufficiently extraordinary to notify us."

  He rubbed his hands together. "That, I think, is as much as I am permitted to tell you. Will you help us?"

  "Monsieur Delvaux, excuse my ignorance. I don’t know what sort of authority NSD has. Are you asking my help or ordering it?"

  Delvaux laughed. Gideon caught a whiff of cheese again: Emmenthaler.

  "Dr. Oliver, the Security Directorate is replete with responsibility, but sadly lacking in authority. We are asking, merely asking. What do you say?"

  "Ja," said Marks, "vee are only esking. But uff course ve hef our vays." He screwed an imaginary monocle into his eye.

  Delvaux pretended not to notice him. "What do you say?" he asked again.

  It was a time to temporize, Gideon knew. There were some elements here that made no sense, and he knew he wasn’t thinking as clearly as usual. Moreover, he wasn’t the sort of man who went out of his way to find ways of breaking his bones or puncturing his skin. Nevertheless, the proposition stirred his interest. Working with NSD would add a notable dimension of excitement and adventure to the whole European assignment. The probability of real danger—danger that he couldn’t cope with—seemed reassuringly low; not, of course, that he took Delvaux at his word.

  "Yes, I’ll do it," he said.

  "Excellent," said Delvaux. "Wonderful. I must get back to my office, I’m afraid. Mr. Marks will explain the details. Good-bye and thank you." Before Gideon could rise, he had shaken hands and darted gnomelike out the door.

  "Le directeur," said Marks. He lit a cigarette, went back to his own chair, and leaned back in it, looking out the window. He had returned, Gideon gathered, to his bored and abstracted mode.

  "Is he French?" Gideon asked. "The accent wasn’t quite—"

  "Belgian. France isn’t a NATO member, as you know."

  "Of course," Gideon said, but he hadn’t known. Which was ridiculous. He’d have to get his head out of his archaeology texts and see what was going on in the twentieth century; or so he’d been resolving for at least five years now.

  "Now," Marks went on, still looking out the window and languidly smoking. "When you have something to pass on to us from the field—from the base you’re teaching at— you call back to Heidelberg, to the USOC registrar’s office, and say, ‘My class roster is incomplete. Could you let me have an updated one?’ Got it?"

  "Those exact words?"

  "That would be dandy, but words to that effect will do."

  "All right. Do I speak to anyone in the registrar’s office, or must it be to the registrar himself?"

  "Herself. Mrs. Swinnerton. No. All you need to do is leave the message with the clerical unit."

  "Is Mrs. Swinnerton in on this, then? Is she one of your agents?"

  "Classified information. Need-to-know principle. You wouldn’t want me to go around telling other people you’re in on it, would you?"

  Gideon nodded. "Okay, what happens after I call?"

  "Then you hang up and wait and see."

  "At the telephone?"

  Marks had already smoked down his cigarette. He exhaled heavily and, with a large gesture as if he were turning the handle on a meat grinder, he stubbed it out. He stifled a yawn. His eyes moved to the memorandum he’d been working on. "No," he said, "just go about your business. We’ll contact you. You’ll know it’s us because we’ll make some reference to your roster." He pulled the tablet into writing position. Gideon was being dismissed, and rather more peremptorily than he liked.

  In an undergraduate psychology class, he had once taken a projective test consisting of a series of cartoons. Each cartoon showed a little man saying something irritating to a second person. You were supposed to be the second person, and you took the test by filling in two blank comic strip balloons above his head. In the balloon drawn with solid lines, you wrote your spoken response. In a second balloon with dotted lines you wrote what you were really thinking. Since then, he had often found himself mentally filling in the second balloon when he dealt with annoying people. It kept him from saying things that got him in trouble—sometimes, anyway. Now he wrote in the imaginary box: pompous little fart.

  Aloud he said, "All right, I guess I’ve got it."

  "There is one more thing, of paramount importance," said Marks. "This whole thing is strictly between us."

  "I understand that."

  "You understand, fine. But I mean strictly. You, me, Delvaux. That’s all."

  "I heard you, Mr. Marks."

  "That excludes Fu Manchu."

  Gideon got to his feet. Cold stares were not his forte, but he managed what he thought was a fairly good one. "I beg your pardon?" Inside the dotted lines he wrote: nerd.

  "Fu Man Lau. Nummah One Son."

  "Look, Marks—"

  Marks pretended to read Gideon’s anger as confusion. "I had the impression that you and Lau were getting on fairly well. I just want to make sure you understand. You, me, and Delvaux."

  "You don’t even tell your own people?"

  "John Lau isn’t one of our people. He’s in the safety side of the house; we’re in counterespionage. I told you, we operate on the need-to-know principle. In this line of work, the fewer people who know what you’re doing, the better for you and for them. The branches don’t tell each other what they’re doing."

  "Apparently Lau or someone else in safety told you what happened to me last night."

  "I needed to know. I thought it might have some bearing. It doesn’t."

 
; "You’re awfully sure of that. Do you know something about it that I don’t?"

  "You don’t need to know what I know," Marks said with an unappealingly arch smile. "Now, if there isn’t anything else, there are some very important people waiting for my recommendations." He gestured at the memorandum.

  Gideon made a final entry in his imaginary balloon: self-important twirp. Then he politely said good-bye and left.

  FOUR

  TYPICALLY, he was a worrier, but the somber, beautiful castle ruins and the grand sweep of the terraces put out of mind the fantastic happenings of the last fifteen or twenty hours. Solitary and relaxed, he roamed over the grounds until dusk.

  For dinner he went to a sedate weinstube that had been in business, according to a plaque outside, since the 1600s; its dark, polished wooden tables might have been its original furnishings. He made a richly satisfying meal from a bottle of Mosel wine and a plate of weisskase, a creamy cheese served with heavy rye bread and small dishes of paprika and raw onions.

  At the hotel, he half-expected Frau Gross to refuse him entrance, but she seemed almost friendly. She wouldn’t go so far as to return his smile, of course, but she did give him his key—which had been found under the bureau—and wished him a good night.

  He had a moment’s nervousness when he opened the door to his room, looking into the alcove and bathroom before closing it. The impulse to peek under the bed, however, he resisted, drawing a firm line between sensible precautions and outright paranoia. He set the alarm for o7:00 a.m. so he could get an early start on the military red tape involved in making travel arrangements for Sicily. By 8:30 he was happily, dreamlessly asleep.

  THE great stone eagles on either side of the entrance had once gripped laureled swastikas in their talons, but those had long ago been chipped away by young GIs laughing into the newsreel cameras, so that now they did duty as American eagles, guarding the headquarters of USAREUR—United States Army Europe—the heart of America’s military presence on the Continent.

  The eagles depressed Gideon, as did the rest of the giant complex. Despite the bright USAREUR banner over the gate, the architecture of the huge structures proclaimed them relics of Hitler’s Germany, and the vast, cobblestoned interior courtyard conjured up maleficent platoons of gray-jacketed, goose-stepping Wehrmacht soldiers. Fortunately, the paperwork went faster than he had expected. By 11:30 he had his identity card, his military European driver’s license, and his travel orders for Sicily. He was also very hungry and knew that at least part of his black mood came from having forgotten to have breakfast.

  The cafeteria was a relief, dowdy and American, with its noisy young GIs and the friendly smell of grilling hamburgers. Gideon got a cheeseburger, french fries, and a strawberry milkshake, the most American lunch he could think of. Then, as a fitting end to the meal, he had coffee and apple pie.

  Much restored, he brought a second cup of coffee to his table and began to go over his interview with Marks and Delvaux the day before. At the time, he had been too tired to think of many questions, but he had plenty today.

  If they didn’t know what the Russians were looking for or why they were looking for it, what made them think anybody was looking for anything at all? And why did they think that whatever it was would turn up at the particular bases to which he was assigned, as opposed to the hundreds of others in Europe? Or was that what his surprise schedule was all about? Had Dr. Rufus assigned him to "sensitive" bases on instructions from NSD? Could Dr. Rufus be an agent himself? It didn’t seem likely.

  And, above all, why him? Why come to a new, green anthropology professor for this kind of thing? On the other hand, was he the only one? Was it possible that every faculty member was being treated to the same routine?

  Maybe, but improbable. But then, was any of it probable? He had already put his questions about the schedule to Dr. Rufus and learned nothing except that they made the chancellor nervous (unless that was the way he always was).

  When he finally finished at USAREUR, he went across the street to USOC Administration and headed for the faculty library to do some class preparation. He was still mulling over his questions when he passed a door that read, "Office of the Registrar, D. Swinnerton." On the spur of the moment, he went in. Although he didn’t expect her to tell him anything voluntarily, she might unwittingly give something away if he were discreet. It was pretty unlikely, but really, where was the fun in being in the spy business if you couldn’t play-act at it a little?

  At the back of a room in which four or five clerks sat working was a space separated from the rest by glass partitions. Gideon walked over to it.

  "Mrs. Swinnerton?"

  A plump, round-faced woman of fifty looked up from her desk and smiled sweetly. "Why, hello, Dr. Oliver."

  Quick work. He’d never met her, but she knew him by sight. Interesting. "I didn’t know you knew me," he said with a smooth smile.

  "Certainly. Everyone does, from when Dr. Rufus introduced you at the dinner."

  So much for his first coup. "Oh," he said. "Well, I just wanted to meet you, since we’ll probably be in contact quite a bit." Clumsy. Not what he’d had in mind as an opening.

  "Thank you, it’s certainly nice of you to come in and say hello. Not many do." Behind her grandmotherly smile, she looked a little puzzled.

  "Uh, you’ve certainly got a good reputation with the faculty," he said. "I understand your rosters are just about always accurate and on time." Oh, that was even more brilliant, the suave, inconspicuous way he’d slipped that in. The next time he did some sleuthing on his own, he’d take some time beforehand to figure out what to say.

  Mrs. Swinnerton was looking more confused. "Thank you," she said again.

  "Oh, and I was thinking," Gideon said, "what if I’m teaching at some base and I have a problem with a roster and it’s not during working hours? How do I get in touch with you?"

  The smile had disappeared now. Her expression was puzzlement and nothing else. "What kind of problem? Why couldn’t it wait for the next day?"

  "Well, if a roster was incomplete, say…."

  "But what’s the hurry? You could call us the next day. Besides, the simplest thing would be to tell the education office on the base. Let them tell us. That’s their job."

  "Ah, I see, yes. Yes, that would be the thing to do." Gideon was perspiring with embarrassment. "Well, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to know you, Mrs. Swinnerton. Got to get to the library now. Good-bye."

  He turned and dashed for the door, having arrived at two conclusions: 1) Mrs. Swinnerton was no NSD agent—or she was a very good one, and 2) it was just possible that espionage was not his metier.

  AT 4:30 he sat alone in the library, coffee cup in hand, browsing through a pile of anthropology texts. Dr. Rufus and Bruce Danzig came in together, deep in conversation, poured themselves some coffee, and joined him. Danzig blew on his coffee and sipped it, shifting it from cheek to cheek with quick little mouth movements, like a chipmunk eating a nut. Dr. Rufus drank heartily and said "ah."

  "Ah," he said, "I’m glad to see you’ve discovered our library. Very proud of it. Bruce has done quite a job, wouldn’t you say?" Even in the quiet library, Dr. Rufus didn’t speak; he orated.

  "Yes, quite good," Gideon said. "I’m just catching up on this year’s papers."

  "Did you want to check something out?" Danzig asked without interest.

  "Thanks, not this time. These Sicilian lectures are just a basic overview of hominid phylogeny. I think I can get by with my notes."

  "As you wish," said Danzig. He chewed up another mouthful of coffee.

  "Now, now, now, now," said Dr. Rufus, "some of our students are pretty sharp cookies, after all. Don’t you think you ought to have some resources at hand? No charge, you know, and it will make Bruce here very happy."

  Danzig didn’t appear much concerned, but Gideon didn’t want to offend Dr. Rufus, so he said it might be a good idea if he did take along Simon’s Primate Evolution and Hrdlicka’s Skelet
al Remains of Early Man.

  The chancellor beamed abstractedly. "Fine, fine." He finished his coffee and smacked his lips. "Well. Um." All three men rose.

  Gideon signed the book cards and gave them to Danzig.

  "Well, I’m off to Sicily," he said. "I’ll see you in a week— that is, if I decide to come back. Some pretty great ruins down there; Syracuse, Agrigento…"

  "Yes, fascinating," Danzig said.

  "Fine, excellent," said Dr. Rufus. "Have a wonderful time."

  Sicily: BOOK 2

  FIVE

  GETTING to the U.S. Naval Air Facility at Sigonella had taken a full, grueling day: a 3:00 a.m. train to Frankfurt, Lufthansa to Rome, Alitalia to Palermo, an incredibly decrepit bus to Catania, and a two-hour drive in a rented Fiat to Sigonella. Each leg of the trip had seemed tackier than the one before.

  The drive from Catania had been the worst. Sicilian road signs were somewhat cursory at best, and the base itself was not on local maps. What should have been a thirty-fiveminute trip had taken two hours, made all the more unpleasant by the animated, wild-driving young males who had nearly forced him off the road half a dozen times. Three drivers had shouted curses at him and made obscene gestures when he took what seemed to him to be reasonable safety precautions. Although their intent was unmistakable, all the words and most of the gestures were unfamiliar. Once, when he had stopped at a light that was just turning red, the driver following a few inches behind him was forced to lean hard on his brakes and had directed the familiar hand-to-forearm jerk at him. Gideon had noted with an anthropologist’s interest the intercultural appeal of this signal, and had tried a middle-finger thrust in return. He had been gratified to learn that it, too, was understood in Sicily.