Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 01 - Fellowship Of Fear

by Fellowship Of Fear

  IN the hallway, Gideon’s anticipated elation did not materialize. As telling as Eric’s presence at Sigonella was, as well as his planned trip to Torrejon, Gideon couldn’t bring himself to believe the Californian was a spy. If ubiquity were evidence of spying, then Gideon was a proven spy, too. Interesting thought; in spite of John’s reassurance, it was still possible that NSD’s Bureau Four suspected him, on the same grounds that he suspected Eric. And when they found out—if they didn’t know already—that Gideon was going to be at Torrejon upon his own insistence, and for not terribly cogent reasons, he was going to be even more suspect.

  No, the only difference between Eric and him was that Gideon knew he wasn’t a spy, which left Eric as the only other USOC’r, as far as he was aware, to be at the crucial bases at the right times. And yet, Eric just didn’t feel right as a spy. Could spies be that fatuous, that transparent? Moreover, his explanation of Gideon’s routing through Heidelberg had the ring of truth.

  All the same, he’d see that the information about Eric got back to Bureau Four if he could. He’d have to do it through John and his "contact." How absurd that he was unable to talk to them himself, but he didn’t know who or where they were, and they weren’t on formal speaking terms with Marks. Ridiculous. It was no way to run a cold war.

  "Well, well, Gideon Oliver, talking to himself like a USOC veteran, and after just three weeks. My, my."

  Without realizing it, he had entered the faculty library. At a desk behind the counter sat Bruce Danzig, regarding him from beneath eyebrows facetiously raised, lips set in a prim little smirk.

  Gideon got quickly to the point. "Hello, Bruce. I wanted to return the books I borrowed before I went to Sicily." He placed the two slim texts on the counter. "I understand you’ve been saving some new ones for me."

  "My, aren’t we businesslike today?" Danzig said. Then he deepened his voice in imitation of Gideon’s. "Yes, sir, Professor Oliver, sir!" His chin, never very prominent, disappeared into his collar as he delivered a punctilious mock salute.

  Gideon unenthusiastically returned it with a brief, pro forma smile. "If you have the books available, I’d appreciate seeing them."

  The frivolity left Danzing’s expression; his voice turned glacial. "I’m afraid I’m not sure to what you’re referring. Did you ask me to hold some books for you?"

  Oh Christ, now I’ve hurt his feelings, thought Gideon. He hadn’t meant to; he simply wasn’t in the mood to deal with Danzig’s finical little witticisms. He tried to sound more friendly. "No, but Dr. Rufus mentioned to me that you’d been kind enough to find some books you thought I might use."

  "Oh yes, I recall. It was Dr. Rufus, not I." He sniffed; a gesture of disdain, Gideon supposed. "We were looking over the new arrivals, and he—not I—noted some for which he thought you might have some use. Inasmuch as you showed so little interest in our collection before, I must admit I haven’t personally made any great attempt to search out resources for you."

  "I think you’ve developed an excellent collection, Bruce. It was simply that I didn’t need anything last time. But now, with this ‘Emergence of Man’ series, I need all the help I can get."

  The little librarian was not won over. He continued to watch Gideon coldly.

  The hell with it, Gideon thought. "Look, do you want to let me see them…?"

  "Of course." With a series of meticulous movements— push the desk drawer closed, delicately move back the chair, swivel to the right—Danzig arose and went to the shelves behind the counter. He found the four books at once and brought them to Gideon with a viperous little smile.

  For no reason he could think of, a sudden thought struck Gideon. "I don’t suppose you’re going to be in Torrejon next week?"

  "Torrejon? No, why? What would I go to Torrejon for?"

  "Oh, I just thought we might get together. Didn’t I hear you were in Sigonella last week or the week before? I missed you then."

  "I, in Sigonella? No, you’re confusing me with Bozzini, heaven forbid. Fortunately, my job doesn’t require me to travel. Besides, I detest the Mediterranean. Did you want these books or not?"

  Too bad, Gideon thought. Danzig would have made a more satisfactory spy. Glancing briefly at the books, he saw that two were revised editions of old introductory texts, but the third was Campbell’s excellent Human Evolution, and the fourth was a reprint of Weidenreich’s massive, thirty-year-old Skull of Sinanthropus Pekinensis, one of those classics he’d somehow never gotten around to.

  "I’ll take these two," he said, signing the cards. "Thanks, Bruce. I’ll see you next week."

  "I wait with bated breath."

  WHEN Gideon got back to the BOQ at 4:30, Janet hadn’t returned from the Heidelberg University Library yet. He left a note on her door, asking her to stop by, and went to his room. He hadn’t left any slivers or paper clips or hairs in the door that morning—what was the point now?—but he looked carefully through the room, list of articles in hand. Everything seemed as he had left it.

  Seemed. He knew, however, that he was dealing with an antagonist more subtle and expert than he had previously thought. Why he had an antagonist at all was the real question. If he knew why Ferret-face was dogging him, why he looked at him with such hatred…but he didn’t know, and it was too late in a long day to do any serious speculation about it.

  He poured himself a little Scotch, found three hoary ice cubes in a tiny compartment in the refrigerator, and sat down with the Campbell text—it was good to get the weight off that ankle—for a different sort of speculation. He was, after all, an anthropologist, not a spy, and was soon engrossed in Campbell’s elegant theories on the evolution of bipedal locomotion.

  Janet knocked on his door a little before six. His heart gave a little jump when he saw her. Women book collectors or not, she was the most attractive woman he’d seen in a long time. The only one, really.

  "Good day at der Bibliothek?" he asked, surprised by a slight thickening of his voice.

  She was standing in the doorway, oddly hesitant.

  "Come on in," he said. "Have a drink. I might even be able to dig up some more ice."

  "I can’t, Gideon. I don’t have much time."

  "Why, what’s the matter?"

  "Well, I have a date."

  "A date?" He stood there with the drink in his hand. "With someone else?" he added stupidly.

  "Yes, why not? What’s so amazing about that?" When he didn’t say anything, she went on irritably. "Did you think I was just going to come in and say ‘Take me, I’m yours?’ Listen, Gideon, you just walked into my life yesterday, and you’re going away again tomorrow. I’m not going to sit around pining away just because I went to bed with you last night."

  "Who do you have a date with?" It was all he could think of to say.

  "I don’t see why that’s any concern of yours." Gideon wondered what she had to be angry about.

  "Yes, you’re quite right," he said. "I guess my male chauvinistic value system ran away with me. Enjoy your date. Thank you for last night. I’ll drop you a line from Torrejon."

  To his surprise, her eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. In her annoyance with them, she stamped her foot like a little girl. Gideon wanted very much to take her in his arms and kiss the moisture that shone on her soft cheek. He held back, however, half in what he knew was childish retaliation, half because he wasn’t sure how she would react.

  "That’s what I hate about women," she said. "Damn it. We cry at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t mean anything. Our glands are different." He was sure she wanted to brush the tears away, but she let them stay. "All right, it’s with Eric. It’s just a stupid dinner at some stupid Heidelberg professor’s house."

  Janet with Eric—gross, fat Eric. Gideon suppressed the images that sprang quickly to his mind.

  "Have a wonderful time," he said. "It’s been very pleasant knowing you. Perhaps I’ll see you again when I come back to Heidelberg."

  "Damn you, Gideon, if you wanted to see me tonight, you
could have asked me this morning, instead of assuming you owned me like some caveman. You stupid man!" She glared at him through her tears, looking wondrously huggable. "Stupid man!"

  His mood was ambivalent as he watched her stride down the hall. On the one hand, he was very sorry indeed that he wouldn’t be spending the evening in her company and (another male chauvinist assumption) the night in her arms. But there was also an unmistakable if somewhat wistful sense of reprieve; clearly, he had narrowly missed becoming enmeshed in a Meaningful Relationship. He sighed. Maybe later on he’d be ready to try that. In the meantime, he would have been happy to settle for a Meaningful Experience or even a Moderately Significant Relationship. A Good Lay wouldn’t have been so bad, either.

  He poured himself another Scotch and settled down to spend the evening grappling with the intricacies of simian brachiation.

  A little after midnight, he heard her voice at the door.

  "Gideon!"

  Without putting on a robe and almost without waking up, he jumped from the bed and opened the door a few inches.

  "Yes?" he said, blinking at her in the glare of the lit hallway. She smelled of the cool night, and when she laughed softly at him, he shivered with…lust? Love? He wasn’t sure.

  "What are you laughing at?" he said.

  "You. Look at your hair. You look as if you’ve just come out of six-month hibernation. Open the door some more. I bet you’re not wearing anything."

  As he knew she would, she suddenly pushed at the door. He offered resistance of the most token sort, and she was quickly inside, turning on the light as he took her into his arms and pressed his lips against the soft, clear skin of her cheek, just where he had wanted to kiss her earlier. The roughness of her wool suit against his bare skin and the slipperiness of the slip under her skirt excited him at once.

  "Eek," she said. "Just as I thought. There’s a naked man in here, too. Good heavens, this place is full of them."

  "Mmm," he said, nuzzling at her faintly perfumed throat. "How was dinner?"

  "Lousy. I couldn’t wait to get back here to say something to you."

  Her seriousness brought his face up, but he didn’t let her go. "What is it?"

  "Well…," she said, laying her head on his shoulder, wanting to be coaxed.

  "Come on, tell Papa," Gideon said, his naked skin jumping where her long hair lay over it.

  "Well…just…take me, I’m yours." She raised her eyes to his. "If you want me."

  Without warning, his eyes filled.

  "Gideon," she said, startled, "what’s this?" A tentative finger explored his wet cheek.

  Gideon pretended a gruff embarrassment. "So, I’m crying. Contrary to your theory, lachrymal glands are not sexually specific organs. Males have them, too."

  "How poetically you put things," she said. "It’s lovely."

  He kissed her on the lips—a lingering, eyes-closed kiss, inhaling the peachlike fragrance of her breath.

  When he came up for air, she said, "You know, I feel somewhat overdressed for the occasion."

  "I see what you mean," Gideon said, his fingers already at the buckle of her belt. "Why don’t we lie down and discuss it?"

  IN the morning he made it a point to request the pleasure of her company when he returned the following week.

  Torrejon/Torralba: BOOK 4

  FOURTEEN

  WHEN you enter Madrid from the east, on the highway from Zaragoza and Torrejon de Ardoz, you watch the clean, rocky countryside with its occasional flocks of sheep give way first to blank-faced factories lining the roadway, and then to block upon block of dreary, high-rise apartments that make the heart sink. The air, especially in the hot summer and fall, turns gray-brown and choking; the noise of honking horns and backfiring motor scooters becomes nearly unbearable; and the traffic snarls reach extremities worthy of Rome or Paris. By the time you reach a downtown parking garage, the only thing that keeps you from turning around and driving right back out is the thought of going through all that traffic again.

  And then you walk out onto the Paseo del Prado.

  It is one of the world’s great avenues. Grand proportions, long rows of green trees, cool, bubbling fountains, and elegant, restful sidewalk cafes create a refuge of quiet and repose in the midst of the mind-jarring hubbub. As soon as Gideon saw it, his jaw muscles, which had knotted during the hot hour-and-a-half drive, relaxed.

  He stopped at the first outdoor cafe they came to. "I have to have something cold right now, right here," he said to John.

  "I’m for that," John said. "Anything to put off the Prado." They sat at a table in the shade of a tree and signaled for two beers. John leaned the back of his chair against the wide tree trunk.

  "It’s beautiful here," Gideon said. "God, it’s great to be out."

  "Come on, Doc, you make Torrejon sound like Devil’s Island."

  "It is, when you only have five days in Spain and you spend three of them on an air base that looks, feels, and sounds like it’s in the middle of Oklahoma. And smells like it, too."

  "You ever been to Oklahoma?"

  "No."

  "That’s what I thought."

  They were both depressed, disappointed with three days of effort that had produced nothing. The old leads had evaporated, and there were no new ones. Following John’s suggestion, they had taken adjacent rooms in the BOQ, and John had remained inside, on his side of the thin wall, whenever Gideon had gone out, but no one had ever come. At other times, Gideon stayed in John’s room while John checked with Security on all the ID cards and temporary passes that had been issued during the previous two months; the only USOC’r that had been there before Gideon was a "local" business management instructor, an American woman who lived and taught in Spain. She had left several weeks ago at the end of the summer session.

  The only exciting moment had come when Gideon, lurking on John’s side of the wall, had heard an intruder in his own room. Ignoring John’s instructions, he had dashed through the connecting bathroom and burst wildly in upon an elderly Spanish maid who had screamed and hit him with a pillow.

  Eric Bozzini had come late Monday morning and had left at four in the afternoon. John had found out the time of his arrival, and Gideon met him with the rented car for the mile-and-a-half drive to the Officer’s Club for lunch. He also drove him back at the end of the day and spent several tedious hours with him in between. Eric was garrulous and good-humored, seemingly not in the least anxious to shake him off. When Gideon wasn’t with him, John shadowed him from a distance. The net result was a certainty that Eric had conducted nothing but Logistics business at Torrejon. What he might have done had they not been there, they had no way of knowing, but Gideon was more convinced than ever that Eric was not the mysterious USOC’r of the Russian messages.

  American NATO bases are among the least exotic, most humdrum places in the world. After two days at Torrejon, Gideon, growing restive, had begun to wonder if he’d deluded himself into expecting a nonexistent adventure. Why was he so sure the things that had happened to him were not simply coincidences? Coincidences did happen, after all, and were they not, by definition, unlikely sets of causally unrelated events? With NSD cutting its ties to him, what made him think he’d still be of interest to the Russians, if indeed he ever had been? How did he know they hadn’t already gotten whatever it was they were after at Torrejon? After all he’d been through, he still didn’t know who or what he was looking for. Nor was he very clear on his wheres or whens. That left whys and hows; not so hot there either.

  On Tuesday night, at their regular after-class meeting in John’s room, John had told him that he had been ordered back to Heidelberg and had to fly out of Torrejon late the following afternoon.

  With less difficulty than he had anticipated, Gideon had convinced him that they should give up the hunt and go see something of Madrid on John’s final day. John had grumbled a bit about it being unsafe for Gideon off the base, but hadn’t taken long to agree to a trip to the Prado; he was as
frustrated and bored as Gideon.

  Now that they were finally out, the beer, the food, and the Paseo were all beginning to raise their spirits. With a try at jauntiness, John banged his empty glass on the table. "I’m still not ready for all those paintings. How about some more shrimp? And let’s split another bottle of beer."

  Both men relaxed with their refreshed beers and let their eyes rove about the scene around them. Gideon looked with pleasure at the eighteenth-century colonnade of the Prado and at the long rows of narrow windows. Three weeks in Europe had hardly diminished his I-can’t-believe-I’m-really-here-seeing-all-these-wonderful-places attitude. John, however, was looking from face to face of diners and passersby with more than casual interest.

  "Looking for anyone in particular?" Gideon asked.

  "No," John replied, his eyes continuing to move. "Cop’s habit, I guess. Just seeing if there’s anyone watching us, or anybody else who looks like a cop or an agent. Anybody who doesn’t quite belong."

  "I understand how you’d spot a cop—he’d have his back to a tree or a wall, the way you do—but how do you tell agents?"

  "You learn. It’s part of the job."

  "Are you finding anything?"

  "Probably not," John said, smiling as he peeled a shrimp with his fingers. "There are a few people who don’t look Spanish. I was just wondering if one of them could be a Russian. The blond guy leaning against the fountain—the one studying the guidebook so hard."

  Gideon sipped his beer and looked at the tall young man over the rim of his glass for a few moments. "Nope," he said.

  "Nope, what?"

  "Nope, he’s not a Russian."

  "If you mean he’s reading a German guidebook, I can see that, too, but that doesn’t prove anything."

  "Of course not; I was looking at him from an anthropometric perspective."

  "Oh boy," John said.

  "Oh boy, what?"

  "Oh boy, I’m about to get bullshitted."