The Julian secret

CHAPTER TEN

Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, Delta Crown Room, Concourse B

The next day

Gurt was sipping a beer, her eyes wandering across the crowded room. "Explain again why we are going to Chicago."

Lang was stirring sweetener into a cup of flavorless coffee. "These people, whoever they are, obviously have someone watching."

Gurt waited for the wail of a nearby infant to subside rather than raise her voice. "Obviously?"

Resigned to the fact that he was going to add-no taste other than sweet to his beverage, Lang took a sip and grimaced. "First, they know I usually park and pick up the Porsche myself. How many residents you think pay the same fees I do and still fetch their own car?"

Gurt shrugged. "Those who do not need wheelchairs or walkers?" The building had a fair percentage of what management euphemistically referred to as "seniors."

Lang was uncertain if Gurt was serious or making a joke. It was hard to tell with Germans. "Actually, almost everyone, old or young, uses the valet car service. Whoever planted the bomb knew I didn't. They also knew I was going to use the Gulfstream for this trip."

Gurt set her glass down. "Or were willing to wait until your next flight in it."

"Possible," Lang conceded, "but I don't think so. The acid would have completely eaten through that cable in a day or two, and then the sabotage would have been detected." He frowned. "Of course, that's why we're flying commercially now, so the plane can be completely torn down and inspected, make sure there are no more surprises waiting."

Gurt stood and went to refresh her beer. Admiring glances from men and jealous ones from women followed her like the wake of a ship.

She returned with a glass in one hand and a paper cup of snacks in the other. "Did you ever consider that was what these people wanted you to do, fly the airlines? It would be much easier to know your wheneabouts."

"Whereabouts."

"Whatever."

The implication that he was being manipulated was disturbing. "Why would they do that? I mean, if the cable had parted, they would have succeeded."

"Only if killing you was what they wanted," Gurt said.

She took a sip and made a face as though she had bitten into something tart. "To call this beer is to advertise falsely."

''You say that about every American beer."

"It is true with every American beer."

"If they wanted to know where we were going, all they had to do would be call up the international flight plan that has to be filed with the FAA. I'm pretty sure they're more interested in making sure whatever we found in Spain stays a secret. Problem is, what did we find?"

Falsely advertised or not, she took another drink, this time without the face. "It is also a simple matter, is it not, to chop into the electric files of either the airline or credit card company and see what your flight reservations are?"

They both knew the answer. Even with the technology available when Lang was with the Agency, obtaining the passenger manifests of any carrier had been simple. In fact, the lists of Iron Curtain airlines were routinely scrutinized.

Cooling had not improved the taste of Lang's coffee. He put the cup down, pushing it away in unconscious rejection. "We can't keep our destination secret, but we can make sure no one is actually following us by taking an indirect route."

Primary instruction at The Farm, the Agency's training facility in the Virginia countryside.

Gurt finished her beer, shot a look at the bar, and decided against another. "Why would they follow us if they know where we are flying?"

Lang leaned across the table. "They might not, but an indirect route might very well make them think we believed we were evading them." He proffered two sets of tickets. "Take a look."

Gurt frowned, squinting at the small type. "But these…" She grinned. "The shuffle is on again?"

He nodded.

Lang's eyes felt as though they had sand in them, and his lids weighed a ton each. Sleep had evaded him on the flight from Chicago to Paris. It was as if his subconscious kept him awake in the belief that, should an emergency occur at 35,000 feet, he could do something about it if sufficiently alert. Tired of the novel he had brought along, he tried to get interested in the in-flight movie. A childish comedy sufficiently sanitized by the airline to offend no passenger, it had also been leeched of any entertainment value.

Idly, his mind wandered. How many times had he crossed the ocean? At least once or twice a year while he was with the Agency. Then there had been that trip with his wife, Dawn.

The memory was weighted with sadness. Dawn, bright and cheerful, had been only too happy to work while Lang attended law school after leaving government service. After all, the law practice would mean she would have her husband home at night instead of excuses phoned from undisclosed places. He would succeed, she was certain.

And he had.

An unexplained gap in his resume between college and law school had made him less than attractive to the big law firms, but he had no intention of spending the rest of his life in stuffy boardrooms, toadying to corporate clients. Instead, he had relied on his Agency contacts for a steady flow of the less reputable part of the practice. Seedy, but able to pay their legal bills. A member of an ambassador's staff involved in a scheme to bribe an official of a foreign government; a national floral chain importing more than roses from Colombia.

His practice had become profitable, and Lang and Dawn had taken the first of a planned series of trips to Europe before beginning a family. Instead, their lives were commandeered by the silver spider, the name he gave the arachnid-like form that appeared in X-rays of his wife's reproductive system. The spider grew while Dawn seemed to shrink, until she was little more than a near-lifeless bag of skin-and bone. At her bedside, they planned trips both knew they would never take. Away from the hospital room and the stench of certain death, Lang cursed a god whose eyes might have been on the sparrow but whose back was turned to Dawn.

The end had been anticlimactic and merciful. He had missed her long before.

The empty months spent in an empty house made for an empty life. At first, he dated tentatively, more to please friends than from any desire of his own. The women all had one defect or another, defects he realized were more in his eyes than real. What was missing was that they were not Dawn. He finally sold the house and most of the furnishings and moved to his present high-rise condo.

Even the new place seemed empty. He took on more cases than he could effectively handle, hoping to leave no time for sorrow. That didn't work, either.

In the search for his sister's killers, he had renewed his acquaintance with Gurt, a coworker he had bedded on an irregular basis until he met Dawn. At first he had felt guilty, as though' betraying his wife with another woman. The priest, Francis, wise in the way only a man who had never had woman problems could be, had pointed out that Lang did not have to stop loving Dawn to love Gurt, too.

And he had.

The only problem was Gurt's systematic refusal to even discuss a more permanent arrangement. Sooner or later, Lang supposed, she would go back to Germany, back to the Agency, leaving him as bereft of children and family as before. Until then, though, he had intended to savor every moment.

He had almost managed to doze off when the flight attendant announced an imminent landing. Gurt was bright-eyed and eager for whatever the day held. As always, she had slept soundly from the moment the 757's wheels retracted into their wells.

Lang felt it was one of her most unattractive attributes.

Both retrieved their single bags from the overhead bin. Checked luggage meant a predictable stop at baggage claim as well as the possibility that the suitcases might well take off on an excursion of their own.

Modern travel: breakfast in New York, dinner in Paris, and baggage in Istanbul.

More important, a person standing at a baggage carousel was a fixed target, vulnerable to a point-blank shot or the stab of a knife. The Agency had discouraged any bag that could not be carried aboard.

He had never been in Paris's Charles de Gaulle air terminal when it was not mobbed. Africans in bright colored cotton robes mixed with the pastel Hindi saris, while mustachioed men in caftans herded their wives and children along. Overhead speakers kept up a stream of unintelligible announcements that blended with a hundred different languages in a re-creation of Babel.

Little had changed since his last visit.

Without further communication, Gurt ducked into the ladies' toilet, leaving Lang to guard her bag. When she reappeared, he headed for the men's while Gurt strained to recognize anyone from their flight. When Lang emerged, he feigned interest-in a magazine rack while Gurt disappeared into the crowded exits. Lang kept an unobtrusive surveillance of reflections of passengers scurrying by the glass of the newsstand. He noticed no one purposely hovering nearby. In exactly five minutes, he hurried after, Gurt.

At the bottom of a steep escalator, he fed coins into a machine, took a ticket, and boarded a train headed into the city. En route, he changed cars twice and trains once, disembarking just across the Seine from the Ile St. Louis. He was fairly certain he had not been followed, but the sparse foot traffic across the nearby bridge would reveal any tail he had missed.

Across the river, he waited patiently on the narrow Rue Louis until he succeeded in getting a cab. The driver mumbled unhappily when Lang gave him the destination, less than a mile away. No one got into the following taxi, and Lang finally gave a sigh of relief despite the cabbie's continuing expression of displeasure at so short a fare.

Oh well, the French were always displeased about something: the wine, the food, or lesser things such as politics or the economy. Lang's pronunciation of the destination must have revealed him as an American, for the cabbie turned to complaints of U.S. involvement in Iraq, although Lang was unable to see why a French citizen would be concerned. France had, after all, opted out.

The French: Our national flag is the tricolor; our battle flag a single color: white.

Minutes later, he was paying the still-protesting driver in front of a pizzeria on the Left Bank along the Quai d'Orsay, one with a view of both Notre Dame and the statue of Michael. Gurt was sipping a cup of coffee at one of the tables lining the curb.

Lang took the one other chair at the table. "All clear?" Gurt looked at him over the rim of her cup. "I saw no one."

In minutes, they were descending another escalator, this one to the St. Germain station. They went directly to Orly, the airport for most of Paris's European flights. Lang used a credit card to buy two one-way tickets on different flights to Frankfurt and used the time before the first to arrange for a car.

"The card is traceable," Gurt said as they sank into seats at his departure gate.

Lang shrugged. "I know, but all my bogus IDs expired years ago. We'll just have to hope if someone's tracking us, they're still looking in Paris or they won't have the resources to meet both Paris-Frankfurt flights."

"They won't have to look, just check the files of your card company."

"Maybe the Agency office in Frankfurt can help, give us some ID we can use." Gurt shook her head slowly. "Neither of us are actively employed there now."

She was right. Ever fearful of one more wave of unfavorable publicity, the Agency wasn't likely to furnish bogus papers to a former employee and one on an. indefinite leave. Lang mentally kicked himself. In an age when teenage hackers were capable of multimillion dollar identity thefts, it would have been a simple matter to create his own false -persona. In spite of the ease of access to information, few government agencies ever bothered to cross-check. The death of someone around the desirable age appeared in the obituaries and, with the readily available date of birth, a request in that name could be made for replacement of a lost Social Security card. The card could be used to obtain a driver's license, and both to obtain a certified copy of a birth certificate to be parlayed into a passport. Assuming the deceased had even modest credit, the banks were only too happy to ship their plastic, one and a half percent interest for the first six months.

Lang consoled himself with the speed at which the bureaucratic wheels turned. Establishing a good false identity with real documents took months. How many more attempts on his and Gurt's lives could be mounted in that time? Lang didn't want to even guess.

They would have to go with what they had.