The Dragon Factory

Interlude

Conrad Veder stood in the shadows beneath one of the arches in the courtyard of the Old Castle in Stuttgart. He chewed cinnamon gum and watched a pigeon standing on the plumed helmet of Eberhard I, Duke of Württemberg, a wonderful statue sculpted by Ludwig von Hofer in 1859. Veder had read up on the Old Castle before coming here, partly as research for this phase of the job and partly out of his fascination with German history. He was a man of few abiding interests, but Germany had intrigued him since the first time he’d come here thirty-four years ago. This was his first visit to Stuttgart, however, and this morning he had whiled away a pleasant hour on the Karlsplatz side of the Old Castle in a museum dedicated to the memory of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a former resident of Stuttgart who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. A couple of years ago Veder had seen the movie Valkyrie, based on the incident. He thought Tom Cruise was a good fit for Stauffenberg, though Veder liked neither the actor nor the traitor who had failed in what should have been an easy kill.

After reviewing all the data, including floor plans of the site of the attempted assassination, Veder concluded that he would have done it differently and done it correctly.

He checked his watch. Almost time.

He took the gum from his mouth, wrapped it in a tissue, and placed it in his pocket. Veder never left useful traces behind. Veder had little respect for police intelligence, but their doggedness was legendary.

A group of tourists came ambling past — fat Americans in ugly shirts, English with bad teeth, haughty French. It was no wonder stereotypes persisted. As they passed, Veder melted into the crowd. He was dressed in jeans and a lightweight hooded shirt with the logo of the VfB Stuttgart football club embroidered on the right chest and the emblem of the Mercedes-Benz Arena on the back. There were at least five other people in the square with similar shirts. He wore sunglasses and a scruff of reddish gold stubble on his jaw. His gait was slouchy athletic, typical of the middle-aged ex-athlete who resented being past his prime. It had taken Veder only a few days to identify the personality subtype among the crowds in the city. He saw hundreds of them and now he was indistinguishable from any of the others who wandered in and out of the shops and museums around the Old Castle.

He followed the crowd into the Stauffenberg museum. Veder was not dressed this way when he had visited the museum earlier that day. The other costume had been similarly based on a common Stuttgart look, and like this one it was equally at odds with Veder’s true appearance.

It was possible, even likely, that he could have wrapped this job up during his early visit, but he liked the distractions and confusion that a group would provide. Earlier the attendance at the museum had been sparse. If someone very smart was to have watched the security tapes from the morning they might have been able to make some useful deductions about Veder’s true physical appearance. But amid a sea of tourists he was virtually invisible.

The crowd was made up of three different tours, and the tour guides herded the people into one of the rooms to await a brief lecture by Stellvertretender Direktor Jerome Freund, the professor who was the assistant director of the museum. Freund came out of the back, walking slowly and leaning on a hardwood walking stick with a flowery silver Art Nouveau handle. Veder knew that the limp had been created by a high-powered bullet smashing Freund’s hip assembly. That shot had been one of the very few misses Veder had ever made, and he disliked that he had failed in the kill. That, at the time, he had been bleeding from two .22 bullets in his own chest did not matter. It was one of three botched jobs — all related to the work he had done for his former “idealistic” employers.

Freund was a tall man with a Shakespearean forehead and swept-back gray hair. His spectacles perched on the end of his nose and arthritis stooped the big shoulders, but Veder could still see the wolf beneath the skin of a crippled old man.

The speech Freund gave was the same one he had given that morning. Even the professor’s gestures were the same. Ah, Veder thought, there is nothing so useful as routine.

He waited until the professor began describing the day of the assassination attempt. If this was all rote to the man, then he would raise his cane and use it to point to the large photo that covered one wall, tapping the photo with the cane tip to indicate where Stauffenberg and Hitler had each stood. All throughout the talk Veder pretended to take photos with his digital camera. Sure enough, the professor turned and began tapping the wall.

If Veder was a different kind of man, he might have either taken pleasure in how easy it was or been disappointed that it did not challenge his skills, but Veder had the cold efficiency of an insect. Insects are opportunistic and they don’t gloat.

He pressed the button on the camera and the tiny dart shot out of a hole beside the fake lens, propelled by a nearly silent puff of compressed gas, traveling at a hundred feet per second. Freund flinched and swatted the back of his neck.

“Moskito,” he said with a laugh, and the hot, sweaty tourists chuckled. It was hot and flies, gnats, and mosquitoes were everywhere. The lecture continued, the moment forgotten. Veder remained with the tourists until they finished the tour, and as the crowd boiled out into the courtyard he detached himself and strolled idly across to the opulent market hall. He bought clothes in different stores, changed in a bathroom, and became another kind of tourist who vanished entirely into the crowd.

Veder had no desire to linger. He did not doubt the efficacy of the pathogen on the dart, and he had no need to see his victim fall. He would read about it in the papers. It would make all of the papers. After all, how often does a German scholar die of Ebola?

By the time the first symptoms appeared, Conrad Veder was on a train to Munich. He was asleep within twenty minutes of the train leaving the station. By then Jerome Freund was already beginning to feel sick.