Fellowship Of Fear

THREE

The afternoon was free of business. There was a bus tour to the gardens at Schwetzingen, arranged for the new faculty with the compliments of the administration, but Gideon declined to go. Aside from a constitutional aversion to group tours, he didn’t relish the idea of further questions on the attack. He told Dr. Rufus he would use the afternoon to catch up on his sleep. Actually, he was looking forward to spending the time alone, going back to Heidelberg Castle to explore the vast, turreted ruins and terraced gardens at his own leisurely pace.

He lunched at a busy seafood bar on the Haupstrasse, dining happily on little sandwiches of marinated herring- Bismarckhering -at one mark each. When he went back to the hotel to pick up his guidebook to the castle, John Lau was waiting in the lobby, joking with Frau Gross. He actually had her laughing, but Gideon’s entrance had its usual sobering effect.

"Hi, Doc," Lau said, sounding glad to see him. "You got some time to go over to NSD headquarters with me? There’s somebody else who’d like to talk to you."

"Sure." Questions from the police were a different thing than questions from curious colleagues. He had enjoyed the earlier talk with Lau and looked forward to more of the same, plus an inside glimpse of the NATO Security Directorate.

Expecting them to drive to the USAREUR command complex at the edge of town, he was surprised when John walked him two blocks down Rohrbacherstrasse to a two-story brownstone building, heavy, dingy, and cheerless.

"This is your headquarters?"

"In Germany, yes."

"Boy, as far as I can see, you picked the only genuinely ugly building in Heidelberg. I mean, that is an ugly building."

"It figures. It was Gestapo headquarters during the war. I think we got it cheap." He smiled.

Inside there was a small vestibule, vacant except for a few wooden benches and an armed soldier who nodded balefully at Lau’s ID from behind a glass partition. Grayish-green corridors ran off in three directions. It looked as if it were still Gestapo headquarters: gloomy, tacky, smelling of disinfectant and old plumbing, and single-mindedly utilitarian. Gideon felt a small shiver at the back of his neck. It was hard to picture John Lau actually working there.

Lau, in fact, seemed subdued once they were in the building. He walked with Gideon down one of the corridors to an office made marginally less bleak by a wall calendar with a color picture of a Bavarian village. A big-boned, middle-aged woman sat erectly at a typewriter near a window.

"Frau Stetten, this is Dr. Oliver to see Mr. Marks," Lau said, his voice, it seemed to Gideon, lacking its usual friendliness. Then, to Gideon’s surprise, he left.

"Please sit down, Dr. Oliver. Mr. Marks will in a minute be with you." She spoke without looking up from her typing, with a strong German accent and a distinctly chilly manner. Gideon couldn’t help wondering, with uncharacteristic lack of charity, if she had come with the building.

In a few minutes, at some sign that he failed to perceive, she said, "Mr. Marks can see you now. Go in, please." She gestured with her head toward a door behind her.

Gideon opened it and entered a medium-sized office with a single old-fashioned window and plain, fairly presentable gray metal furniture: a desk, three file cabinets, two chairs with cracked green plastic seat cushions. It reminded him of his own office at Northern Cal. A neat small man in suit and tie sat behind the desk. He didn’t greet Gideon, but continued to write with a slow, precise hand on a yellow lined tablet. Gideon could see from the format that he was composing a memorandum. He came to the end of a sentence and placed the period carefully. Gideon waited for him to look up, but the man put the tip of his pencil to his tongue and then began another sentence.

Gideon, who was not slow to take offense when warranted, spoke somewhat sharply. "Mr. Marks? You wanted to see me, I think?"

The man put down his pencil and took a half-finished cigarette from an ashtray before looking at Gideon. He had a natty, carefully trimmed little mustache and short dark hair. Behind horn-rimmed glasses, he made no effort to hide the boredom in his eyes. Gideon didn’t like him at all.

"Have a seat. Glad to see you," he said, the words brimming with bureaucratic indifference. "Do you go by doctor or mister?"

"I go by doctor." Ordinarily, it would have been, "Call me Gideon."

"Doctor. Fine. Well, I suppose Charlie Chan told you who I am?"

"Mr. Marks, if you have some questions, please ask them. I have some things to do this afternoon."

"He didn’t, I see. Well, I didn’t call you in about the incident last night. I’m not in law enforcement."

"You’re not in the NATO Security-in NSD?"

"Yes, I’m in NSD, which you’re apparently unfamiliar with, so let me give you the two-bit lecture." His weary sigh was so elaborate that Gideon began to wonder if he was being offensive on purpose.

"The NATO Security Directorate is concerned with threats to the international security of the NATO community, with particular emphasis on terrorism and espionage. To oversimplify things-"

"Wait, hold it a minute. What does this have to do with me? Did that attack have something to do with espionage? Were they terrorists?"

Again a sigh, this time an exasperated one. Marks leaned back, put his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling. "Dr. Oliver, I’ve already told you once; I’m not interested in that incident. I’ve examined it with care, and it is of no interest to me. This interview has no connection with it. Period."

With an effort, Gideon stifled the impulse to say it was pretty interesting to him

"Now," Marks went on, "to oversimplify things, there are four main branches of NSD. Three of those branches deal with espionage, more or less. The other, Safety, functions in effect, like an ordinary police department-an international police department, however. It’s concerned with protection of life and property. Murder, robbery, that sort of thing. That’s your friend Lau’s province. Now, the Second Bureau, of which I am a deputy director, is, so to speak, the counterespionage branch. Our job is to counteract enemy agents and terrorists. There is another branch concerned with routine intelligence operations, and then there is Bureau Four, our own little internal secret police."

It was an ill-chosen term to use in this building, Gideon felt, but Marks smiled as if he had said something witty. "The Fourth Bureau keeps us all honest," Marks went on. "It polices our own agents, as well as nationals of member countries who are suspected of spying for the other side."

He stopped abruptly. The two-bit lecture was over. "Any questions?"

"Yes. You’ve given me an awful lot of so-to-speaks and in-effects. If it’s all the same to you, I’d appreciate having my information more precise. And I don’t know that oversimplifications are necessary."

"Dr. Oliver, this isn’t a college classroom. Everything you need to know, you’re being told."

"Damn it, you asked me if I had any questions."

The little mustache twitched, the brow contracted, and apathy suddenly changed to clear-eyed, man-to-man candor. "All right, in all frankness, we need your help, Dr. Oliver. We want you to work with us." He inhaled massively on the stub of his cigarette and let the smoke out through tightened lips: Bogart leveling with Claude Rains in Rick’s nightclub.

"Sorry, Mr. Marks, but if you’re expecting a yes or no to that, I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me a lot more."

"I know. I’m just trying to decide how much you can be told." He stood up suddenly and made what Gideon assumed was his momentous-decision face. "I’m going to ask the director just how much we can share with you."

As he walked to the door, he placed his hand on Gideon’s shoulder and tightened it in a gesture of trust and conspiracy. Good God, thought Gideon, the man must have been trained in a used-car salesmen’s school. Closing Technique Number Four: "Just a minute, I’ll have to ask my supervisor if we can go that low." (Smile, shoulder pat.) "I’ll do my best."

He sat alone for a few minutes, trying to make something of the conversation so far. Marks might be a buffoon, but this was certainly NSD headquarters, and he had just been asked, as far as he could tell, to spy for them. And all this naturally had no connection with an attack by two professional thugs-spies? agents?-last night. He wondered if they had learned from John Lau of his deductions based on speech patterns or if they shared Lau’s apparent suspicion that he was a world champion karate master. No, that was ridiculous; he dismissed the thought. He wished he hadn’t gone so long without a decent night’s sleep.

In about fifteen minutes, Marks returned with a round, rumply man in his late sixties. Wrinkled gray trousers belted six inches below his armpits and cuffed well above his shoe tops gave him a jolly, elfin quality slightly out of kilter with his watery blue eyes. He moved quickly, reaching out to shake hands with Gideon before Marks had introduced them.

"Monsieur Delvaux, Dr. Oliver."

"How do you do, Professor. Please sit down." With the greeting came an exhalation of cheese and wine. M. Delvaux had been interrupted at his dejeuner.

"Do not smoke, please," he said from the side of his mouth to Marks, who raised his eyes heavenward-in Gideon’s line of sight, not Delvaux’s-and stubbed out his cigarette. Marks seated himself at a side chair, leaving the one behind his desk for Delvaux, but the older man perched on the large windowsill-he had to hop to get up-and began to speak rapidly and softly in a flowing French accent.

"I would like to give you some background on what Mr. Marks has been telling you. For some time now, we have known-this is between us in this room, you understand- about a Soviet action of some sort that is now being planned. We don’t know what that action is, but we know that it requires certain secret information from a number of NATO bases. The surreptitious procurement of that information is among the highest priorities of their intelligence machine; its prevention is among ours. We are asking your help in an activity that may be of the greatest service to your country and to the cause of peace. To yourself, there is very little danger, virtually none."

"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.