Fellowship of Fear

“Shoot.” He flipped the notebook closed and dropped it into his pocket.

“First of all, what are you doing here, really?”

John’s injured surprise was clearly genuine. “Hey, look, you’ve been assaulted with intent to kill. That’s a crime, you know, even here, and I’m a cop.”

“I know, I know, but why you? This is over a thousand miles from Heidelberg. Aren’t there any other cops? And why is this a NATO security matter at all? Why not the local MPs?”

John tipped his chair back against the wall. “Let me put it this way: USOC is my beat. The agreement they have with the army calls for protection for the faculty wherever they send you guys. And since the only places they send you are NATO bases, it’s natural that NSD has the responsibility. Traveling is no problem for us. We just hop a MAC flight.”

“Why do we need protection at all? And why can’t the local military police handle it?” Gideon asked again.

“Believe me, it’s a lot simpler than negotiating with the local security people every time you go some place, and explaining who and what you are, which isn’t always so easy. You’re not military, you’re not civil service, you’re not tech reps—and you go to some pretty weird places.”

Gideon hiked himself into a sitting position so that his eyes were level with John’s. It took more effort than he expected. “Look, let me level with you, and maybe you’ll do the same with me. I’m in way over my head with this spy business I’ve gotten myself into. What I’m wondering is, are you really a cop, or are you a spy or an agent or whatever they call it?” John began to answer, but Gideon cut him off. “And am I some kind of a pawn? I don’t like being used, especially when it nearly gets me killed.”

John frowned, arranging his words. He tipped his chair forward onto all four legs again. “My branch is Safety,” he said slowly, with careful emphasis on each word. “Protection of life and property. We’re just like the MPs, only we get assignments that cut across their lines. As of this year, I’m assigned to USOC. Before that I was doing the same thing for USAREUR, before that at AFCENT in Holland. And before that I was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill cop in San Diego and Honolulu. I couldn’t be more ordinary and run-of-the-mill if I tried. Until you started making my life complicated, that is.” It was a long speech for John. He blew out his breath as if he’d been chopping down trees.

Gideon nodded slowly. “I believe you,” he said. “Tell me this, John. Do you think there’s any connection between what Marks and Delvaux asked me to do and these things that have been happening to me?”

“I don’t know what they asked you to do, but I’ve been wondering the same thing.” He gestured at the pudding. “Hey, go ahead and eat your whatever-it-is.”

Gideon made a small gesture of impatience. “Is that really true? That you don’t know? It’s hard to believe an organization could function that way, the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.”

“Doc, we have to operate that way. We work on a need-to-know basis. The fewer people who know the dirty stuff, the better. Intelligence doesn’t have any trouble finding out what we’re doing, because we’re not into nasty tricks and sensitive information. But they don’t tell us what they’re doing, and we don’t ask.” He paused. “We’re not supposed to, anyway.”

It was the hint Gideon had been waiting for. “Well, I’d like to tell you anyway. All this craziness has to be connected. It’s stupid to treat it as a bunch of unrelated incidents.” He waited for an invitation to go on, but John just looked at him with a faint smile. “Besides,” Gideon continued, “I don’t trust Marks. I do trust you.”

“Oh, you can trust him,” said John, “he’s just, well…”

“A nerd. John, would I be compromising you by telling you about it?”

“Yes,” said John in a small, stern voice. Then he smiled, and then the smile became the laughter of schoolboys sharing secrets.

Gideon told him about the interview in Heidelberg, the theft of the socks, and the subsequent interview in the base laundry. John listened, walking about the room, neither taking notes nor asking questions. “Huh,” he said finally. “How about that?”

“Come on, John, don’t be inscrutable with me. It all has to be related, doesn’t it?”

The policeman came back to the chair and sat down. “Here’s what I would like: I would like it if you would eat your dessert, and if I could please be the cop, and I ask questions, and you answer them. Okay?”

Gideon laughed and winced once more. “Okay.”

He spooned up a lump of the gray pudding and pushed it around his mouth with his tongue. “My God, what is this stuff? It’s insoluble.”

“What, the pudding or the case?”

Gideon remembered to catch himself before laughing. “Why, John, that’s funny.”

Lau accepted the compliment with a slight nod. “Let’s go over a few things. I’m assuming that none of these guys were the same as the ones that jumped you in Heidelberg.”

“Right. These were Italians.”

“You mean they spoke Italian.”

“No, they were Italian. I don’t understand the language, but a native speaker—”

Lau held up his hand. “Okay, I forgot. We’ve been through this before. Speech rhythms and so forth.”

“Right.”

Lau bowed his head in mock defeat. “All right. What about the one that showed up at the end, the one who apparently saved you? You told the shore patrol he looked familiar. Was he one of them?”

“One of the ones from Heidelberg?” For a moment Gideon wasn’t sure. Could he have been the ferret-faced man? The man on the bridge had seemed to move in the same spare, powerful, dangerous way. No, Ferret-face had been more compact, more coiled.