LACKING VIRTUES (61 page)

The car had been traveling in a direction that brought it no closer to her. She was about to stop watching it and try again to rest when it slowed and turned. The hum of its engine replaced the lapping of the river, soft, persistent, searching.

She held her breath and waited for the car to pass. It was still a couple of miles away. It was just a car. It did not have to have Claussen’s farmhouse as its destination. Her fantasy was nothing but her fear, she told herself, and it was again creating monsters out of nothing.

Then the car’s lights went out. She listened. It was still coming, more slowly now, so quietly she could hear the night bird cry, and the river lap and the mole rustling in the meadow grass.

She knew then that it was Claussen. The night had been trying to tell her something. She had listened and failed to understand.

Part of her terror remained; part of it turned into purpose. She felt enormous strength surging inside her pain-racked body. She knew she needed to work fast. Practical considerations were what mattered now. If she didn’t get there in time, it would be the same as not getting there at all.

She struggled out of her cocoon in the plane’s tail, dragging her useless ankle and Steven’s pack. She stepped on the lower wing with her good foot and heaved the pack down beside her. She dug for the pistol, found it and shoved it into her belt.

The moon shone brightly. She could see where she needed to go. But how was she to get there?

She put a little weight on her ankle. The pain was like a tooth being drilled without anesthetic.

Take a moment . . . take a moment. You must devise some sort of support.

What was that roll she had moved to get more comfortable in the plane? She climbed back inside, suppressing a cry when her ankle hit the seat back. She felt around in the dim light until she found it. Patching canvas, the same stuff the plane’s skeleton was covered with.

She heard the car engine stop. She needed to hurry, she knew she needed to hurry. She felt as if she were stuck in mud, as if her most trivial actions took an eternity.

On the wing again, she tore through Steven’s pack in search of a knife. Wet clothes, remains of provisions . . . Did the plane have a tool kit aboard?

She found it under Warner’s seat.

Moonlight, thank God for the light. She rummaged through the old tools, some of which she didn’t recognize. The search finally paid off. The knife had a wooden handle and a narrow rusty crescent blade. It felt sharp enough to do the job.

Time passing. Everything took time.

The width of the roll seemed right, about ten inches, but the material was very stiff. She held onto the end of canvass and threw the roll overboard, then hauled a yard of the material into the cockpit. It didn’t cut easily, she needed two hands to stretch and hold it, another hand to cut it. She used her teeth as a third hand and started sawing. As she worked, she fought to maintain her composure against rising waves of panic. Why was everything taking so long?

Her shoe was already off. She raised the leg of her jeans and wrapped her ankle as tightly as she could, then pulled the pant leg over the bandage to keep it from unraveling. It wasn’t a cast, it wasn’t perfect, but it was the best she could do. She had to go.

She slid on her stomach off the backside of the wing, landed on her good foot and started to walk. The pain was excruciating. Several steps and she couldn’t bear it any longer. She tried to hop on her good foot. She tripped on a clump of meadow grass and landed face-down.

She crawled the last 30 yards to the forest, breathing so hard her lungs felt like fire. Her ankle had stopped throbbing when she came to the dirt path that led through the forest. She would try to walk again, but first she had to rest for a few seconds.

The river lapped at the bank beside her. She could judge the speed of the current by the little whirlpools floating past in the moonlight. If she hadn’t been traveling upstream, she would have been tempted to swim.

She got to her feet and tried to walk. The first time she put her bad foot down, pain shot through her like a lightning bolt. No good. She thought of Steven and Warner being surprised and murdered just because she could not tolerate pain. She had given up too easily, she decided. She picked up a stout branch and used it as a cane, hopped two steps and put her bad foot down again. The same pain shot up her leg, but it was noticeably less than it had been. Or had she just gotten used to it? Nicole gritted her teeth and took a normal step. The same pain but less intense. Her ankle was going numb!

God had finally heard her cry for help. She could move, she could walk, she could fly! They might have to chop off her foot because of what she was doing to it, but she didn’t care. It was not far now, she knew it wasn’t far.

***

In a large airy first floor room with a chair and sofa but no windows, Warner and Steven found Claussen’s roll top desk. Warner opened it.

Hundreds of handwritten pages were piled in neat stacks. He selected one of the pages and began to read. Steven looked over his shoulder.

German! It might as well have been Greek. No use hanging around.

He went to work checking out the rest of the room. The walls were white here, too, and there were none of the watercolors he had seen in the corridor. But the sound system looked state of the art. The butcher evidently enjoyed music.

Steven peeked in on his collection of discs: all German, all classical. Sophie, he thought, would have approved of his taste. How people so different could like the same music he would never understand. There were a lot of things he would never understand.

Sophie. The pain that accompanied the tiniest thought of her doubled him over. He felt his fury rising, as it had done again and again since he had learned of her murder. This was the lair of the man who had killed his number one soul mate. Those pages in the desk might prove the role Claussen had played in bringing down the jets. They had come here to find just such proof. Yet the victory already seemed weak, pale and incomplete. He wanted Claussen, wanted to ring the bastard’s neck with his own hands.

Pumped up with fresh ire, Steven opened a closet. There was a row of five or six boxes inside that had been stacked along the wall. They were numbered – and labeled in German.

He opened one of the boxes. It was filled with official-looking documents. The alphabet was Cyrillic, the symbol at the top of each page the Hammer and Sickle.

“What’s in there?” Warner called from the desk, where he had not moved since he began to read.

“Documents, man. Could be KGB records on Operation Whatever. You read Russian, Frank?”

“No. Are the boxes numbered?”

“Yeah, numbered and labeled. What are you finding?”

“Memoirs, the man’s memoirs. I think he’s using your material over there for research. He’s got piles of notes referring to documents in this box or that.”

“Those are his memoirs? That stuff in long hand? He’s not using a computer?” 

“Maybe he thinks writing by hand separates him from the dim-witted masses.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have a copy.”

“He’s arrogant enough to make that a possibility. In any case, Steven, this is a find of unprecedented proportions. From what I have seen, I would say you and Nicole could make a fortune selling it to a publisher.”

“You’re in for half the proceeds.”

“No, not me. As a member of the government, I would be bound to turn it over to the authorities. I’m sure you agree
that
would be a shame, given the grand job the government has done in solving this case.”

“Goddamn right, I agree.”

“I’ll ask you to loan me copies of the documents I need to prove my case in Washington. The documents are yours. Remember, without you and Sophie I would still be at first base. I owe you a lot.”

“You don’t owe me anything, Frank. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t come to France.”

Steven walked over to the desk and took another look at the pages. The handwriting was small, tight and fastidious. Notes in the same hand filled the desk’s many cubby holes. He had a strong sense that Warner was right. This was something big. It was time to load it up and hit the road.

“You’re a genius, Frank,” he said. “Let’s start hauling this stuff back to the plane right now? Three trips should do it.”

“Patience, Steven. We went to a lot of trouble getting here. Let’s make sure we don’t leave until we have everything we can use.”

***

Claussen, driving a BMW 750 registered in the name of Peter Weiss of Bern, Switzerland, thought he glimpsed a faint light in the windows on the east side of his farmhouse. When he came within a mile of the entry gate, he turned off his headlights and slowed to a crawl. He parked on the side of the road and completed the final segment of his journey on foot.

He knew someone had been on his property when he saw that the geese were missing. He circled around behind the farmhouse, where he noticed the broken window.

His first thought was that he had underestimated Delors. The bastard had gotten lucky and guessed his intentions, then sent an SDECE commando unit to intercept him.

He rejected that theory forthwith. The SDECE was sloppy, the CIA was sloppy, but not even Cuban intelligence would announce its presence in such a glaring fashion.

His second thought was that Bauernsachs’ greed had gotten the  best of him. The farmer who used the dog food plant had sold his geese, and now he was trying to make their disappearance look like part of a burglary.

Bauernsachs would pay dearly if he were the perpetrator, but Claussen’s loss would be nil. The last thing a common thief would take would be documents and memoirs. Bauernsachs was shrewd enough to know this. He wouldn’t bother to touch them. He would go for the stereo system.

The same would apply, of course, if an actual burglary was in progress. If this turned out to be the case, Claussen would simply let the scoundrels go. He had not come here for his earthly possessions – at least not those he could replace with money.

He stuck his head through the broken window and listened. He heard voices that brought a smile to his lips. All of his theories were wrong. The intruders were speaking English. Not the Queen’s English, either.  American, the tongue with which he’d had a love-hate relationship for 30 years.

He had to restrain himself not to laugh out loud. It was hard to believe they had done him a favor of this magnitude, hard to believe they had
come to him
.

Pathetic bastards! All of Europe to hide in and they had chosen the one spot from which they could never escape.

He almost felt sorry for them. They were shallow enough to believe the naive optimism of their national myths. They thought they could do anything, and do it better than anyone else. This belief had made them easy prey for Operation Litvyak. It would make them easy prey now.  He silently unlocked the dead bolt and slipped inside. This little encounter was going to be enjoyable, a nice feather in his cap before his departure for Bolivia.

***

Warner was about to say something when his mouth froze in a horrible grimace. Steven thought he was having a coronary until he saw Warner’s hand go for his pistol. The collision between the emerging gun and a foot in a hard leather shoe took place before he had the chance to look around. Warner’s pistol landed on the hardwood floor and clattered under the sofa.

“Greetings, gentlemen,” Claussen said, retreating to the doorway. He drew his stiletto. “I must confess. It flatters me that you consider my work so important. However, it also irritates me when mediocre men take the liberty of meddling in my affairs.”