in the hot summer and fall, turns gray-brown and choking; the noise of honking horns and backfiring motor scooters becomes nearly unbearable; and the traffic snarls reach extremities worthy of Rome or Paris. By the time you reach a downtown parking garage, the only thing that keeps you from turning around and driving right back out is the thought of going through all that traffic again.
And then you walk out onto the Paseo del Prado.
It is one of the world’s great avenues. Grand proportions, long rows of green trees, cool, bubbling fountains, and elegant, restful sidewalk cafes create a refuge of quiet and repose in the midst of the mind-jarring hubbub. As soon as Gideon saw it, his jaw muscles, which had knotted during the hot hour-and-a-half drive, relaxed.
He stopped at the first outdoor cafe they came to. “I have to have something cold right now, right here,” he said to John.
“I’m for that,” John said. “Anything to put off the Prado.” They sat at a table in the shade of a tree and signaled for two beers. John leaned the back of his chair against the wide tree trunk.
“It’s beautiful here,” Gideon said. “God, it’s great to be out.”
“Come on, Doc, you make Torrejon sound like Devil’s Island.”
“It is, when you only have five days in Spain and you spend three of them on an air base that looks, feels, and sounds like it’s in the middle of Oklahoma. And smells like it, too.”
“You ever been to Oklahoma?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
They were both depressed, disappointed with three days of effort that had produced nothing. The old leads had evaporated, and there were no new ones. Following John’s suggestion, they had taken adjacent rooms in the BOQ, and John had remained inside, on his side of the thin wall, whenever Gideon had gone out, but no one had ever come. At other times, Gideon stayed in John’s room while John checked with Security on all the ID cards and temporary passes that had been issued during the previous two months; the only USOC’r that had been there before Gideon was a “local” business management instructor, an American woman who lived and taught in Spain. She had left several weeks ago at the end of the summer session.
The only exciting moment had come when Gideon, lurking on John’s side of the wall, had heard an intruder in his own room. Ignoring John’s instructions, he had dashed through the connecting bathroom and burst wildly in upon an elderly Spanish maid who had screamed and hit him with a pillow.
Eric Bozzini had come late Monday morning and had left at four in the afternoon. John had found out the time of his arrival, and Gideon met him with the rented car for the mile-and-a-half drive to the Officer’s Club for lunch. He also drove him back at the end of the day and spent several tedious hours with him in between. Eric was garrulous and good-humored, seemingly not in the least anxious to shake him off. When Gideon wasn’t with him, John shadowed him from a distance. The net result was a certainty that Eric had conducted nothing but Logistics business at Torrejon. What he might have done had they not been there, they had no way of knowing, but Gideon was more convinced than ever that Eric was not the mysterious USOC’r of the Russian messages.
American NATO bases are among the least exotic, most humdrum places in the world. After two days at Torrejon, Gideon, growing restive, had begun to wonder if he’d deluded himself into expecting a nonexistent adventure. Why was he so sure the things that had happened to him were not simply coincidences? Coincidences
On Tuesday night, at their regular after-class meeting in John’s room, John had told him that he had been ordered back to Heidelberg and had to fly out of Torrejon late the following afternoon.
With less difficulty than he had anticipated, Gideon had convinced him that they should give up the hunt and go see something of Madrid on John’s final day. John had grumbled a bit about it being unsafe for Gideon off the base, but hadn’t taken long to agree to a trip to the Prado; he was as frustrated and bored as Gideon.
Now that they were finally out, the beer, the food, and the Paseo were all beginning to raise their spirits. With a try at jauntiness, John banged his empty glass on the table. “I’m still not ready for all those paintings. How about some more shrimp? And let’s split another bottle of beer.”
Both men relaxed with their refreshed beers and let their eyes rove about the scene around them. Gideon looked with pleasure at the eighteenth-century colonnade of the Prado and at the long rows of narrow windows. Three weeks in Europe had hardly diminished his I-can’t-believe-I’m-really-here-seeing-all-these-wonderful-places attitude. John, however, was looking from face to face of diners and passersby with more than casual interest.
“Looking for anyone in particular?” Gideon asked.
“No,” John replied, his eyes continuing to move. “Cop’s habit, I guess. Just seeing if there’s anyone watching us, or anybody else who looks like a cop or an agent. Anybody who doesn’t quite belong.”
“I understand how you’d spot a cop—he’d have his back to a tree or a wall, the way you do—but how do you tell agents?”
“You learn. It’s part of the job.”
“Are you finding anything?”
“Probably not,” John said, smiling as he peeled a shrimp with his fingers. “There are a few people who don’t look Spanish. I was just wondering if one of them could be a Russian. The blond guy leaning against the fountain— the one studying the guidebook so hard.”
Gideon sipped his beer and looked at the tall young man over the rim of his glass for a few moments. “Nope,” he said.
“Nope, what?”
“Nope, he’s not a Russian.”
“If you mean he’s reading a German guidebook, I can see that, too, but that doesn’t prove anything.”
