Fellowship Of Fear

EIGHTEEN

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.

There was no time to waste on speculation. Oliver had to be found quickly. With Operation Philidor set for Sunday, the Russians would have to get hold of the information within the next twenty-four hours, and that would mean some time tomorrow, no doubt at Heidelberg. Whoever the USOC source was, and however patient, he would be tense with the strain of operating on a timetable that left no room for error. And tense spies were dangerous spies; Oliver’s life would be in considerable peril as long as he held the deployment plans.

There were many things to be done. It would be another night without sleep. First, a call to SHAPE at Mons to tell them about the Pino affair. Then he would telephone Thomas Marks in Heidelberg. Finding the professor could hardly present a problem, even for Marks. The schedule of trains arriving at Heidelberg that evening from Frankfurt could be easily obtained, and one or two men placed at the bahnhof to intercept Oliver. For insurance, Marks could be sent to Oliver’s room at the BOQ to wait for him.

Delvaux smiled a small, tired smile. Once again, the harried professor might have a surprise encounter with strangers in his room. This time, however, he would have no cause for complaint. Until Gideon Oliver was separated from the vital, deadly information he carried, his life was worth nothing. And the closer Operation Philidor’s deadline came, the more danger he would be in.