The Apocalypse Watch (53 page)

How easily the words came. Then, why shouldn’t they? She had been trained since she was nine years old for her life’s work. She did, however, permit the aide to call her a taxi.

Janine had been given the address and the contact code for a member of the Brotherhood before she left Washington. It was a bootmaker’s shop in the Champs-Élysées, the name “André” to be used twice in a brief conversation, such as “André says you’re the best bootmaker in Paris, and André is almost never wrong.” She gave the taxi driver the address and sat back, contemplating what information she would send to Germany.… The truth, of course, but phrased in such a way that the leadership would not only admire her extraordinary accomplishments but see the wisdom of bringing her to Bonn. After all, the ambassadorship to France was one of the most important diplomatic posts in Europe, at the moment so sensitive that the State Department had reached into its corps of experienced professionals rather than accept a
raw political appointee. And she was that professional’s wife. She had been told that the recently divorced foreign service officer was soon to emerge as a star of the department. The rest was easy; Daniel Courtland was lonely and depressed, in search of the comfort she provided.

The taxi arrived at the bootmaker’s shop, yet it was more than a shop, rather, a small leather emporium. Glistening boots, saddles, and various riding accoutrements filled the tasteful front windows. Janine Clunitz got out and dismissed the taxi.

Thirty yards behind the departing cab, the Deuxième vehicle pulled into a no-parking space. The driver picked up the ultrahigh-frequency phone and was immediately connected to Moreau’s office. “Yes,” said Moreau himself, as no secretary had been chosen to replace the murdered Monique d’Agoste, whose death was kept secret under the pretext of illness.

“Madame Courtland just entered the Saddle and Bootery in the Champs-Élysées.”

“Purveyor to wealthy equestrians,” said the Deuxième chief. “Strange, there was nothing in the ambassador’s dossier that mentioned a fondness for horses.”

“The store is also famous for their boots, sir. Very durable and quite comfortable, I’m told.”

“Courtland in boots, durable or not?”

“Perhaps the madame.”

“If she’s partial to such footwear, I suspect she’d march right in to Charles Jourdan or the Ferragamo shop in Saint-Honoré.”

“We’re reporting only what is happening, monsieur. Shall I send my colleague in to reconnoiter?”

“A good idea. Tell him to examine the merchandise, inquire as to prices, that sort of thing. If the madame is being fitted, he can leave quickly.”

“Yes, sir.”

In a Peugeot sedan that had circled the wide boulevard of the Champs-Élysées and parked in a space across from the Saddle and Bootery, a man in an expensive pinstriped
business suit also picked up his car phone. However, instead of calling a number in Paris, he dialed the code for Germany—Bonn, Germany. In a matter of seconds the call was completed.

“
Guten Tag
,” said the voice on the line.

“It is I, again from Paris,” said the well-dressed man in the Peugeot.

“Was it necessary to
kill
the marine driver last night?”

“I had no choice,
mein Herr
. He recognized me from the Blitzkrieger headquarters in the Avignon Warehouse complex. If you recall, you wanted everything I could learn about their disappearance, and since I was the only one who knew where they operated, you yourself ordered me there.”

“Yes, yes, I remember. But why kill the marine?”

“He drove the colonel and the other two, the army officer and the blond woman, out to the warehouse. He saw me then, and again last night. He shouted at me to stop; what was I to
do
?”

“Very well, then I congratulate you, I imagine.”

“You
imagine, mein Herr
? Had they captured me, they would have filled me with drugs and learned why I was
there
! That I had killed Moreau’s secretary and learned where he was.”

“Then I truly congratulate you,” said the voice in Germany. “We’ll get Moreau; he’s far too dangerous to us now. It’s simply a matter of time until you succeed, am I right?”

“I’m confident of it, but that’s not why I’m calling you.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’ve been following an unmarked Deuxième automobile; it was parked for hours in front of the American Embassy. Unusual, I think you’d agree.”

“I do. So?”

“They have under surveillance the ambassador’s wife, Frau Courtland. She just entered an expensive leather shop called the Saddle and Bootery—”

“My
God
!” interrupted the man in Bonn. “The André conduit!”

“I beg your pardon—”

“Stay on the line, I’ll be back to you shortly.” The minutes passed as the man in the Peugeot tapped the fingers of his left hand against the steering wheel, the telephone at his right ear. Finally, the voice from Germany came back on the line. “Listen to me carefully, Paris,” said the man emphatically. “They’ve found her out.”

“Found who,
mein Herr
?”

“
Never mind
. Just hear your orders and follow them.… Kill the woman as soon as it is humanly possible!
Kill
her!”

D
aniel Rutherford Courtland, ambassador to the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, stared silently at the pages of the transcript in his hands, reading and rereading them until his eyes were strained. Finally, tears ran down his cheeks; he brushed them away and sat upright in the chair in front of Wesley Sorenson’s desk.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Ambassador,” said the director of Consular Operations. “This pains me no end, but you had to be told.”

“I understand.”

“If you have any doubts whatsoever, Karl Schneider is prepared to fly here and speak to you privately.”

“I’ve heard your taped interview, what more do I need?”

“May I suggest that you speak to him on the telephone? A deposition may be false, another voice can be used. He’s in the phone book and you can ask for the number from an ordinary operator.… Of course, we could have orchestrated both to substantiate our conclusions, but I doubt even we could alter the telephone information system so quickly.”

“You want me to do it, don’t you?”

“Frankly, yes.” Sorenson picked up a phone and placed it in front of Courtland. “This is my private line, a regular telephone, and not connected to my console. You’ll have to take my word for that. Here’s the area code.”

“I take your word for it.” Courtland picked up the phone, dialed the area code for Centralia, Illinois, as written on the note placed in front of him, and gave the operator the information. He pressed the disconnect, released it, and dialed again.

“Yes, hello,” said the accented voice in Centralia.

“My name is Daniel Courtland—”

“
Ach
, he told me you might call! I am very nervous, you understand?”

“Yes, I understand, I’m nervous too. May I ask you a question?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“What is my wife’s favorite color?”

“
Red
, always red. Or lighter—rose or pink.”

“And what is her favorite dish when dining out?”

“That veal plate—an Italian name. ‘Piccata,’ I think.”

“She has a favorite type of shampoo, can you tell me what it is?”

“
Mein Gott
, I had to order it from our pharmacy and send it to her at the university. A liquid soap with an ingredient called ketoconzole.”

“Thank you, Mr. Schneider. This is painful for both of us.”

“Far more for me, sir. She was such a lovely child, and so brilliant. The ways of the world are beyond my comprehension.”

“Mine too, Mr. Schneider. Thank you, and good-bye.” Courtland hung up the phone and sank back in the chair. “He might have faked the first two, but not the last.”

“What do you mean?”

“The shampoo. It can only be ordered by prescription; it’s a preventative remedy for seborrheic dermatitis, a condition she episodically suffers from. She’s never wanted anyone to know, so I have to buy it under my own name—as did Mr. Schneider.”

“Are you convinced?”

“I wish I could yell
foul
and go back to Paris with a clean slate, but that’s not possible, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“It’s all so crazy. Before Janine, I had a terrific marriage,
I
thought. Great wife, wonderful kids, but State kept bouncing me around. South Africa, Kuala Lumpur, Morocco, Geneva, all as a chief attaché, then came Finland, a real ambassadorship.”

“You’d been tested. Good Lord, man, they plucked you
out of the chief-attaché pool and made you the ambassador to France, a post usually reserved for the high rollers in political contributions.”

“Only because I could put out the brushfires,” said Courtland. “The d’Orsay was becoming more and more anti-American, and I could paste over the anti-French stereotypes coming out of Washington. I guess I’m good at that.”

“Obviously, you are.”

“And it cost me my family.”

“How did Janine Clunes come into your life?”

“You know, that’s a hell of an interesting question. I’m not really sure. I had the normal postpartums after the divorce, the living alone in an apartment, not a house, the wife and the kids back in Iowa, sort of on my own, scratching around for diversions. It was a kind of limbo. But State kept calling me, saying I should put in an appearance at this party or that reception. And then one evening, at the British Embassy, this lovely lady, so alive and so intelligent, seemed attracted to me. She held my arm as we went from group to group, where very nice things were said about me, but they were diplomats I knew, and I didn’t take them seriously. She did, however, and she fed what ego I had left.… I’m sure you can figure out the rest.”

“It’s not difficult.”

“No, it’s not. What’s difficult is now. What am I going to do? I suppose I should be filled with anger, furious at her betrayal, ready to behave like a howling animal lunging for the kill, but I don’t feel any of those things. I just feel empty, burned out. I’ll resign, of course, it would be asinine to continue. If a ranking foreign service officer can be duped this way, he should run, not walk, to the nearest plumbing school.”

“I think you can serve yourself and your country in a better way,” said Sorenson.

“How? Come back and fix the pipes?”

“No, by doing the most difficult thing of all. Return to Paris as if we’d never met, never had this conversation.”

Stunned, Courtland stared in silence at the director of
Consular Operations. “Besides being impossible,” he said finally, “that’s inhuman. I could never do it.”

“You’re a consummate diplomat, Mr. Ambassador. You never would have landed in Paris if you weren’t.”

“But what you’re asking me to do is beyond diplomacy, it goes to the core of subjectivity, hardly a diplomat’s ally. There’s no way I could conceal my contempt. Those feelings I claim not to have now would come rushing to the surface the instant I saw her. What you ask is simply unreasonable.”

“Let me tell you what’s unreasonable, Mr. Ambassador,” Sorenson interrupted, his tone harsher than before. “It’s exactly what you said. That a man of your intelligence and vast experience, a foreign service officer who knows his way around embassies all over the world and is on constant alert to the danger of internal and external espionage, could be deceived into marrying a confirmed Sonnenkind, a
Nazi
. And let me tell you what’s even
more
unreasonable. These people have been in hiding for anywhere from thirty to fifty years. Their time has come and they’re crawling out of the cracks in the walls, but we don’t know who they are or where they are, only that they’re there. They’ve sent out a list of hundreds of men and women in high places who may or may not be part of their global movement. I don’t have to tell you the climate of fear and confusion that’s spreading across this country and the countries of our closest allies, you can see for yourself. Pretty damn soon there’ll be hysteria—who is and who isn’t?”

“I’m not disputing anything you say, but how will my going back to Paris as an innocent husband change things?”

“Knowledge, Mr. Ambassador. We have to learn how these Sonnenkinder operate, who they contact, how they reach their counterparts in the new generation of Nazis. You see, there has to be an infrastructure, a chain of command leading to a hierarchy, and the current Mrs. Courtland, the brilliant wife of the ambassador to France, isn’t small potatoes.”

“You really think Janine can unwittingly help you?”

“She’s the best shot we’ve got—let’s be honest, she’s the
only
shot. Even if we found another Sonnenkind, her rank, the circumstances, and the fact that she’s within minutes by jet of the borders of Germany makes her a prime candidate. If she contacts the hierarchy, or they contact her, she can take us right to those hidden leaders behind the movement. We
must
find those leaders and expose them. As someone said, it’s the only way to rip out the cancer.… Help us, Daniel,
please
help us.”

Again there was silence on Courtland’s part. He shifted his weight in the chair, and, uncharacteristically for a diplomat, he seemed uncertain what to do with his hands. He fidgeted, ran his fingers through his graying hair, and massaged his chin several times. At last, he spoke. “I’ve seen what those bastards do, and I loathe them.… I can’t guarantee I’ll pull it off, but I’ll try.”

Janine Clunes Courtland approached the exquisite leather counter of the Saddle and Bootery and asked to speak with the manager. Shortly, a small, slender man wearing an expensive yellowish toupee that flowed back over his skull and covered the nape of his neck appeared. He was dressed in a riding outfit, complete with jodhpurs and boots. “Yes, madame, how may I help you?” he said in French, glancing beyond her to several well-dressed customers, some standing, others seated.

“You have a lovely shop,” replied the ambassador’s wife, her speech betraying her origins.

“Ah, an American,” enthused the manager.

“Is it so obvious?”