Terminal

Seventeen

Wednesday, 15 February. Lee Foley had been sitting in the cinema for an hour when he checked his watch. He had spent most of the day inside different cinemas – there are over half-a-dozen in Berne. It had been a more restful activity compared with the previous day's expedition to spy out the lie of the land round the Berne Clinic.

He had used this technique before when he went under cover, when an operation reached the stage of a loaded pause. After leaving the Savoy Hotel, he had parked the Porsche at different zones. He bought food he could take away and eat while he sat inside a cinema. He slept while inside a cinema. He emerged into the outside world well after dark.

Leaving the cinema, he took a roundabout route to where the car was parked. Satisfied that no one was following him, he headed straight for the Porsche. He approached the car with caution to be certain no one was watching it. He strolled past it along the deserted arcade, then swung on his heel, the ignition key in his hand. In less than thirty seconds he was behind the wheel, had started the engine and was driving away.

Tommy Mason had finished writing his report for Tweed which included details of his brief trips to Zurich by train. He was stiff from sitting in one position in his bedroom for so long and he wanted to think. Mason thought best while he was walking and wanted to ease the stiffness out of his limbs before he went to bed.

He walked out of the main entrance to the Bellevue Palace. At that time of night the huge hall and the reception area beyond – the area which within days would be used for the Medical Congress reception – were empty. The night concierge looked up from behind his counter, nodded to Mason and went back to checking his schedule for early morning calls.

Mason, protected against the freezing cold of the night with his British warm, woollen scarf and a slouch hat, made his way down to the river. He had taken the same walk the night before. It crossed his mind he was breaking a cardinal rule. Never keep to a routine. Vary your habits – daily. Worse still, he had left the Bellevue about the same time the night before. He had become so absorbed by his report he had not realized what he was doing.

Still, it was only the second night. He damned well had to get some exercise or he wouldn't sleep. His mind was active. Mason guessed that he was close to promotion. The fact that Tweed had pulled him out of Vienna and stationed him temporarily in Berne indicated that.

The wind caught him as he reached the Aarstrasse. He stepped it out, heading for the Dalmazibrucke, a much lower bridge than the Kirchenfeldbrucke he would eventually use to cross back over the river to reach the Bellevue.

Absorbed as he was by his thoughts- the report for Tweed, his coming promotion – Mason continued to look round for any sign of life. No traffic. No other pedestrians. To his left, in the dark his eyes were now accustomed to, the ancient escarpment on which Berne is built rose sheer in the night. He continued walking.

He reached the Dalmazi bridge, and still the whole city seemed to have gone to bed. The Swiss started their day early so they were rarely up late. Below him the dark, swollen flow of the water headed for the curious canal-like stretch below the Munster. At this point the Aare empties itself through a number of sluices to a lower level before continuing its curve round the medieval capital. He heard the car driving slowly behind him. It stopped. He turned round.

At the same moment the driver switched his headlights on full power. Mason was temporarily blinded. Bloody nincompoop. The headlights dipped and the car remained stationary. A courting couple, Mason guessed, oblivious to the cold of the night inside their heated love nest. The driver had probably intended to turn them off and had operated the switch the wrong way, his mind on more enticing prospects.

He was in the middle of the bridge when he resumed his walk. The lead-weighted walking stick – the most innocuous of weapons – struck him with tremendous force on the back of his skull. He was sagging to the pavement when powerful arms grasped him, hoisted him and in one swift, final movement propelled him over the rail of the bridge.

Unconscious, Mason hit the ice-cold water with a dull splash. Less than half a minute later a car's engine fired at the entrance to the bridge and was driven away. In that half- minute Mason's body had been carried close to the Kirchenfeldbrucke. Passing under the high, vaulted arch supporting the bridge, the body was suddenly swept to the right as the flow of the Aare increased in power and speed.

Caught up in a frothing whirlpool, Mason's skull hammered with brutal force against the sluice where it lay trapped. Time and again the river hurled the body into the sluice with the action of a sledgehammer. The slouch hat had gone its own way, bobbing along the surface until it, too, was swept sideways through a more distant sluice. It passed through effortlessly, soggy now with water. Somewhere before the next bend in the Aare it sank out of sight. Bernard `Tommy' Mason would never see his cherished promotion.

Gisela, assistant to Arthur Beck, looked up from her desk as her chief came into the office, took off his overcoat and hung it by the loop. He sat down behind his own desk, unlocked a drawer and took out the file on Julius Nagy.

`It's terribly late,' Gisela chided. 'I thought you'd gone home. Where have you been?'

`Walking the arcades, trying to make some sort of sense out of this apparently disconnected series of events. One stolen mortar, one stolen rifle with its ammunition, the disappearance of Lee Foley. No news about him yet, I suppose?'

`None at all. Would you like some coffee?'

`That would be nice. Then, talking about going home, you push off to your apartment. As you said, it's very late…'

When she had left the room Beck pushed the file away. Sitting gazing blankly into the distance, he began drumming the fingers of his right hand on the desk.

Behind the wheel of the Porsche Lee Foley was careful to keep inside the speed limit as he drove along N6, even though the motorway from Berne to Thun was deserted. He had divested himself of his English outfit and now wore jeans and a windcheater. Pulled well down over his thick thatch of white hair he wore a peaked sailor-style cap of the type favoured by Germans.

He would spend the night at a small gasthof outside Thun. By the time the registration form reached the local police in the morning – or maybe even twenty-four hours later as he would be registering so late – he planned to be away from Thun.

When he got up in the morning he would use a public booth to make the agreed phone call at the agreed hour. This, Foley was convinced, could be the first decisive day. And very shortly he would surface, come out into the open again. It was all a question of getting the timing right. Foley was very good at sensing timing: he had established the right contacts.

He drove on, his profile like that of a man carved in stone. Taken all round, it had been a strange day. He dismissed it from his mind. Always tomorrow – the next move – was what counted.

In Basle it was well past midnight as Seidler paced back and forth across the sitting room. On a sofa Erika Stahel stifled a yawn. She made one more effort.

`Manfred, let's go to bed. I have been working all day…'

`That bastard Newman!' Seidler burst out. 'He's playing me like a fish. People don't do that to me. If he knew what I've got in that suitcase he'd have seen me when I first called him in Geneva…'

`That locked suitcase. Why won't you let me see what you have got inside it?'

`It's a sample, a specimen…'

`A sample of what?'

`Something horrific. Best you don't know about it. And it's the key to Terminal. It's worth a fortune,' he ranted on, 'and I'll end up giving it to Newman for a pittance, if I'm not dead before then. A pittance,' he repeated, 'just to gain his protection…'

`I've banked a fortune for you in that safety deposit,' she reminded him. 'Surely you don't need any more. And when you talk about it being horrific you frighten me. What have you got yourself involved in?'

`It will soon be over. Newman said he'd meet me. The rendezvous will have to be a remote spot. I think I know just the place…'

Erika realized he could go on like this for hours. He was nervy, strung up, maybe even close to a breakdown. She stood up, walked into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water and a bottle of tablets.

`A sleeping tablet for you tonight. You'll need to be fresh for your meeting, all your wits about you. We're going to bed now. To sleep…'

Ten minutes later Seidler was sprawled beside her in a deep sleep. It was Erika who stared at the ceiling where the neon advertising sign perched on the building opposite flashed on and off despite the drawn curtains Horrific. Dear God – what could the suitcase contain?

The same atmosphere of restlessness, of moody irritability which infected Basle was also apparent all day in Berne. Gisela had noticed it in her chief, Arthur Beck, and both Newman and Nancy had found the day a trial. They had felt lethargic and everything seemed such an effort they passed the whole day trying not to get on each other's nerves. Before going to bed, Newman went out for a long walk by himself.

Returning, he tapped on their bedroom door and heard Nancy unlock it. She was wearing her bathrobe. The second thing Newman noticed as he walked into the bedroom and threw his coat on the bed was a fresh pot of coffee, two cups and a jug of cream on a tray.

`I've had a bath,' Nancy said as she lit a cigarette. Did you enjoy your walk? You've been out ages…'

`Not especially. Enjoy your bath?'

`Not especially. Trying to bathe myself was one hell of an effort. Like paddling through treacle. What's wrong with us?'

`Two things. The concierge explained one cause – the fohn wind is blowing. You get edgy and tired. Yes, I know – you don't feel any sense of a wind but it drives people round the bend. And the suicide rate goes up…'

`Charming. And the other thing?'

`I sense this whole business about the Berne Clinic is moving towards a climax. That's what is getting to us…'

The unmarked police car with the two plain clothes Federal policemen drove slowly along the Aarstrasse towards the lofty span of the Kirchenfeld bridge. The river was on the far side of the road to their left. Leupin sat behind the wheel with his partner, Marbot, alongside him. They were the two men Beck had earlier in the week sent to the Bahnhof to watch for Lee Foley. It was Marbot who saw the sluice.

In the middle of the night it was freezingly cold. Because they had the heater on full blast the windscreen kept misting up with condensation. Leupin cleared it with the windscreen wipers while Marbot lowered the side window at intervals to give him a clear view.

`Slow down, Jean,' Marbot said suddenly. 'There's something odd over there by that sluice…'

`I can't see anything,' Leupin replied but he stopped the car.

`Give me the night-glasses a sec…'

Shivering, rubbing his hands as the night air flooded in through the open window, Leupin waited patiently. Marbot lowered the binoculars and turned to look at his companion.

`I think we'd better drive over there – where we can get on to the walkway to the sluices…'

As the car was driven away to cross the Aare, Mason's battered, waterlogged body continued to be churned against the sluice, a sodden wreck of a man with the head lacerated in a score of places.