The Apocalypse Watch (76 page)

“Good point,” said the colonel. “And you, Captain, why do you think a restaurant is a poor choice?”

“Again, too much room for error, sir,” Dietz said. “A panicked crowd is meat and potatoes to security units. The moment a fire diversion is activated, they’ll race to the subject to protect him, and there’s no way to sedate the guards who aren’t at surrounding tables, even if you know who they are.”

“So you disagree with your associate,” said Karin.

“It’s not the first time, ma’am. We usually work it out.”

“But you’re his superior,” Witkowski interrupted brusquely.

“We don’t pay much attention to rank,” said the lieutenant. “Not in combat anyway. In a month or two I’ll be a captain and then we’ll have to split lunch and dinner checks. I won’t be able to insist he pays anymore.”

“The Thin Man eats like an ox,” grumbled Captain Christian Dietz softly.

“I’ve got a hell of an idea,” Latham suddenly broke in. “It’s damn near close to the yardarm, whatever that is. Let’s have a drink.”

“But I thought you said—”

“Forget what I said,
General
de Vries.”

The five members of Operation N-2 flew into Nuremberg on three different flights, Drew on board with Lieutenant Anthony, Karin with Captain Dietz, and Witkowski by himself. Claude Moreau had made the arrangements: Latham and De Vries had adjoining rooms at the same hotel; Witkowski, Anthony, and Dietz were in different hotels across the city. Their rendezvous was the next
morning at Nuremberg’s main library, between the stacks of volumes devoted to the once-imperial city’s history. They were shown to a conference room as three doctoral candidates and their professor from Columbia University in New York, along with their female German guide. No papers were required, as Moreau’s agents had cleared the way.

“I had no idea this was such a beautiful place!” exclaimed Gerald Anthony, the only former Ph.D. candidate from America. “I got up early and walked around. It’s so medieval—the eleventh-century walls, the old royal palace, the Carthusian monastery. Whenever I thought about Nuremberg, all I conjured up were the World War Two trials, beer, and chemical plants.”

“How could you be a student of the German arts and not have studied the birthplace of Hans Sachs and Albrecht Dürer?” said Karin as they all sat around the thick, round, glistening table.

“Well, Sachs was primarily a musician and playwright, and Dürer an engraver and a painter. I concentrated on Germanic literature and the frequently terrible influences—”

“Do you two academics
mind
?” Latham interrupted as Witkowski chuckled. “We have other things on the current agenda.”

“Sorry, Drew,” said Karin. “It’s just so refreshing to—never mind.”

“I can finish your comment, but I won’t,” Latham broke in. “Who wants to go first?”

“I got up early too,” replied Captain Dietz. “But not being so aesthetically inclined, I studied Traupman’s residence. The Deuxième report said it all. His gorillas prowl around that complex like a wolf pack. They go in, they go out, they circle the building and come back; one disappears, another appears. There’s no way to penetrate and live to tell about it.”

“We never seriously considered taking him in his apartment,” said the colonel. “The Deuxième’s men here in Nuremberg are our observers. They’ll keep us informed by phone codes when he leaves his residence. One of them
should be here pretty soon. You wasted your time, Captain.”

“Not necessarily, sir. One of the guards is a heavy drinker; he’s a big, beefy guy and doesn’t show it, but he swigs from a flask whenever he’s in shadows. Another’s got a rash in his crotch and on his stomach—crabs maybe, or poison oak or ivy—he literally runs into dark areas and scratches the hell out of himself.”

“What’s your point?” asked De Vries.

“Several, ma’am. Having that information, we could position ourselves to take one or the other or both, and once having taken them, use what we’ve learned to extract information from them.”

“You employed these tactics in Desert Storm?” Witkowski was obviously impressed.

“It was mostly food there, Colonel. A lot of those Iraqis hadn’t eaten in days.”

“I want to know how he enters and leaves his limousine,” said Drew. “He’s got to walk out of the apartment house and into his car, then at the hospital he has to get out of the limo and into the hospital. Whether above-ground or in underground parking lots, he’s got to be exposed, if only briefly. Those may be our best opportunities.”

“The compressed times and locations could also work against us, sir,” offered Lieutenant Anthony. “If we consider them, so will his bodyguards.”

“We have dart guns, silencers, and the element of surprise,” said Latham. “They’ve worked more often than not.”

“Go easy,” admonished Witkowski, “one miss and we’re out of business. If they even get a whiff of what we’re doing here, they’ll pack Herr Doktor Traupman off to a bunker in the Black Forest. I’d say we’ve got one shot and it had better work. So we wait, we study, and make sure it’s our
best
shot.”

“It’s the waiting that bothers me, Stosh.”

“The prospect of failure bothers me a lot more,” said the colonel. Suddenly a low, trilling sound erupted from Witkowski’s jacket. He reached in and pulled out a small
portable phone supplied by the German branch of the Deuxième. “Yes?”

“Sorry I’m late for breakfast” were the English words spoken in a pronounced French accent over the line. “I’m only a short distance from the café and should be there in a few minutes.”

“We’ll reorder your eggs, they’re cold by now.”

“Thank you very much. Cold poached eggs are no eggs at all.”

The colonel turned to his colleagues around the table. “One of Moreau’s men will be here in a couple of minutes. Karin, would you mind going to the desk and bringing him here?”

“Not at all. What’s his name and cover?”

“Ahrendt, associate professor, University of Nuremberg.”

“I’m on my way.” De Vries rose from her chair, walked to the door, and left the room.

“That lady is
something
,” said the young commando, Lieutenant Anthony. “I mean, she’s really into history and the arts—”

“We know,” Latham broke in dryly.

The man Karin returned with looked like an average German bank teller, medium height, well dressed in well-pressed off-the-rack clothing of medium cost. Everything about him was medium, which meant he was a superior operative for the spiderlike Deuxième.

“No names are required, gentlemen,” he said, smiling sweetly. “Even false names—they get so confusing, don’t they? However, for convenience sake, just call me Karl, it’s such a common name.”

“Sit down, Karl,” said Drew, gesturing at an empty chair. “I don’t have to tell you how much we appreciate your assistance.”

“I only hope and pray it will be helpful.”

“The praying makes me nervous,” interrupted Drew. “You don’t sound terribly confident.”

“You’ve embarked on an extremely difficult task.”

“We also have extremely competent assistance,” said Witkowski. “Can you add anything to the report?”

“Quite a bit. Let me start with what we’ve achieved since the report was sent to Paris. Traupman funnels the majority of his personal business through the office of the hospital’s immensely wealthy chairman, a politically and socially connected man—it’s an ego trip for Traupman, as if the chairman were at his beck and call.”

“That’s a little weird, considering who Traupman is,” said Gerald Anthony, the scholar.

“Not really, Gerry,” Christian Dietz disagreed. “It’s like the secretary of defense ordering up an aircraft by way of the Oval Office. He may be a big man on campus, but there’s no one bigger than the President. It’s actually very German.”

“Exactly.” The man who called himself Karl nodded. “And since those instructions are recorded so as to avoid error or blame—also very German—we compromised a hospital clerk into relaying Traupman’s instructions to us.”

“Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“Not if he was convinced by a uniform that it was Polizei security.”

“You fellows are good,” said Dietz.

“We’d better be or we’re dead,” said Karl. “At any rate, Traupman has made a reservation for six at the garden terrace of the Gartenhof restaurant for eight-thirty this evening.”

“Let’s try it.” Lieutenant Anthony was emphatic.

“On the other hand, our man at the airstrip informed us that Traupman has ordered his plane to be ready at five o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Destination Bonn.”

“A neo meeting on the Rhine,” said Dietz. “The water’s best, I
know
it.”

“Easy, Chris,” countered the lieutenant. “We screwed up on the north beach in Kuwait, remember?”

“
We
didn’t screw up, buddy, the cowboy SEALs did. They were so hyped, they plugged up the engine returns.… Anyway, we saved their asses by crawling over the sides and—”

“
History
,” Lieutenant Anthony interrupted. “They got
the medals and they deserved them. Two of them got wasted, I hope you remember that too.”

“It shouldn’t have happened,” said Dietz quietly.

“But it did,” added Anthony, even quieter.

“So we have two opportunities,” said Latham firmly. “Tonight at the restaurant, and tomorrow on the Rhine. What do you think, Karl?”

“Both are equally treacherous. I wish you well, my friends.”

In the discarded, obsolete airfield north of Lakenheath, in the cut-down meadows of County Kent, the two huge reconditioned Messerschmitt ME 323 gliders had been assembled. It remained only for the powerful jets to sweep down, their engines cut at ten thousand feet so their descents would make minimal noise. Water Lightning would take place within one hundred hours.

In the flattest expanse of bank land between the Dalecarlia reservoir and the Potomac River, two other mammoth reassembled ME 323 gliders—having first been stripped and shipped across the Atlantic—remained on the ground. The huge reservoir, fed by plentiful underground aquifers, was at the end of the final strip of MacArthur Boulevard, and supplied water to all of Arlington, Falls Church, Georgetown, and the District of Columbia, including the ghettos and the White House itself. At the appointed moment, timed down to a fraction of a minute, two Thunderbird jets would swoop down, their engines briefly cut, and with tailhooks would snare the dual pole wires, yanking the gliders airborne. Due to the stress factors, the liftoffs would be assisted by disposable self-propulsion rockets underneath the gliders’ wings. They would be activated at the instant of impact. The tactic had been tested in the fields of Mettmach, Germany, the new quarters of the Brüderschaft. Properly executed, it was successful. It would be properly executed here, and the entire capital of the United States would be poisoned, paralyzed. Time zero: one hundred hours.

*   *   *

Forty-odd kilometers north of Paris in the Beauvais countryside are the waterworks that supply large sections of the city, including the arrondissements that house much of the government—the entire Quai d’Orsay, the presidential palace, the military security barracks, and a host of lesser departments and agencies. Approximately twenty kilometers east of the vast waterworks is flat farmland, and within this massive acreage are scattered three private airfields catering to the rich who disdain the inconveniences of the Orly and De Gaulle airports. At the field farthest to the east stand two huge freshly repainted gliders. The explanation for the curious is properly exotic. They belong to the Saudi royal family for sport over the desert, and since they were built and paid for in France, who cared to know any more? Several jets—how many no one knew—would arrive sometime soon to haul them away on their journey to Riyadh. The control tower was told that they would be airborne in approximately one hundred hours.
Peu d’importance?

The garden terrace of the Gartenhof restaurant belonged to an older, far more graceful era, when string quartets accompanied fine dinners superbly served and all dishes were carried by hands encased in pure white gloves. The problem was that it
was
a garden, outside on a terrace, profuse with flower boxes overlooking the ancient streets of Nuremberg, within sight of the hallowed Albrecht Dürer house.

Gerald Anthony, Lieutenant, Special Forces, late of Desert Storm, was furious. He had prepared them all for the mission, for his specialty, a conflagration that would erupt suddenly, distracting everyone, especially the bodyguards seated near Traupman’s table who could be sufficiently immobilized during the chaos so as to be useless to their employer. However, the warm breezes winding between the buildings from the Regnitz River were constant, too dangerous for the strategy; only the glass globes around the candles prevented them from being extinguished. A brief, startling burst of fire was all that was needed to spirit Traupman away, but the possibility of the
flames spreading throughout the area, conceivably killing or maiming innocent people in the crowded enclosure, was not acceptable. Equally important, the panic engendered by such an expanding breeze-driven fire could easily work against them, clogging the only entrance with hysterical patrons. If even one guard recovered just enough to draw a weapon, the mission could fail with a single gunshot.

In successive glances, each member of the N-2 unit studied Hans Traupman and his guests surreptitiously. The celebrated surgeon was the leader of the peacocks; all that was missing were brightly colored feathers spreading from half a dozen shoulders, Traupman’s the fieriest. He was a thin, medium-size man with animated gestures accompanied by sudden facial expressions, exaggerated to make an inevitably humorous point, although his aging features resulted in semi-grotesquery. He was not an attractive man, but despite his constant search for approval, if not applause, he was completely in charge—the wealthy host whose abrupt silences caused the others to wait for his next words.

Latham, his appearance altered by horn-rimmed glasses, pasted-on full eyebrows and a mustache, glanced at Karin, equally unrecognizable in the dim candlelight with her pale face unmadeup and her hair sternly pulled back into a hostile bun. She did not return his gaze. Instead, she seemed mesmerized by something or someone at Traupman’s table.