Fellowship of Fear

they become recognizable entities in their own right, foreground rather than background…

So it was with the maimed thing by which he kneeled. At first he knew only that it wasn’t John. Now he knew who it was. He opened his eyes and looked.

Ferret-face. With pity and revulsion, but also with the sense of a great load lifting from his shoulders, he studied the dead man. There was little remaining of the right side of his face. Through shreds of red muscle and gleaming ligament, Gideon could see the round yellow condyle of the shattered mandible. One eye was half-open, one was closed, and the lower part of the face was queerly askew because of the broken jaw. Even so, and even with the drying blood that covered the features, it was unmistakably Ferret-face.

The hunter had himself been hunted down. But by whom? Almost indifferently, Gideon turned the question over in his mind, but he couldn’t concentrate. He was more absorbed by a glow of triumph—vicious, but undeniably satisfying. I am still here, alive, his thoughts ran, and you are dead. I’ve won; you’ve lost. With an effort, he put aside the ugly thoughts and looked up at the students clustered around the door.

“Well, he’s certainly dead,” Gideon said, his voice echoing in the cool concrete structure. His words jogged a young, crew-cut student out of his stupefaction.

“You better not touch anything, Professor.” When Gideon looked up at him, he blushed and added self- consciously, “I’m in the military police. We’ll have to inform the Guardia Civil.” Again, a self-important, embarrassed pause. “This looks like homicide.”

Gideon resisted a strange urge to laugh. Looks like homicide. What did he think—that a heart attack had blown away half the man’s head? He rose to a standing position, conscious of the bloody stains on the knees of his beige trousers.

“You’re right, of course,” he said. “Maybe there’s a telephone in the village.”

The MP came forward and offered Gideon his hand to assist him in stepping over the corpse and the blood- soaked ground. As Gideon took it and came back through the door, the boy stiffened and froze, eyes wide with dismay.

“Jesus Christ, there’s another one!”

Gideon spun and looked within. At the far end of the narrow twenty-foot-long aisle that bisected the building lay what could have been a discarded, life-sized puppet. It was on its back in the gloom, its arms akimbo, its legs outflung, and its head and shoulders propped against the base of the concrete wall.

It was the man from the Prado: the man with the umbrella.

16

GIDEON TOOK ANOTHER LONG swallow, and the warmth and relaxation finally began to spread outwards from his stomach. It was his second bourbon, and he was drinking it in the dim cocktail-lounge atmosphere of the Officers’ Club bar on the base. A dull ache at the back of his neck reminded him that he had been sitting rigidly erect since he came in, and he let himself sink back with a sigh against the booth’s black plastic upholstery.

Since he had found the second dead man, his mind had been working in a kind of otherworldly fervor, agitated and darting, turning in upon itself, questioning, testing, doubting—yet it had produced nothing of consequence, and little in the way of logical thinking. Gideon had given up trying to direct his racing thoughts hours ago and now sat there like an observer, watching his own mind go where it would. The bourbon seemed to be helping, however. He signaled the waitress for another.

The first thing he’d done when he’d gotten back from Torralba had been to telephone John in Heidelberg from the lobby of the BOQ, but John had been out of the office. Rather than trying to get another line to call him at home, he had asked to talk to Marks. He had been connected at once and had briefly described what had happened. Marks had instructed him not to return to his room but to go to the Officers’ Club and wait there for the telephone to ring in the booth just outside the bar.

Gideon had been reassured by Marks’s brisk efficiency and by the fact that he was familiar with details such as the location of a telephone booth at Torrejon. He had, however, defied orders and returned to his room to shower and change his bloody clothes.

When the telephone rang, Gideon took his drink with him to the booth.

“Hello?” Gideon said.

“Who is this?” It was Marks.

“For Christ’s sake, it’s me. Gideon Oliver.”

“Are you alone?”

“No, I have eleven pals from the KGB in the booth with me. Look, Marks—”

“All right. Hold your horses. Now listen. You’re not to go back to your room under any circumstance. We have a place for you—”

“Why not?” Gideon asked.

“Don’t get excited. You’re to go—”

“I’m not excited. You just told me not to go back to my room. I want to know why not.”

“Don’t give me a hard time, Oliver. You’ve already caused a lot more trouble than you’re worth.”

Gideon very nearly hung up on him. Instead, he took a long, slow sip of his drink and mentally drew a dotted- line balloon. But he couldn’t think of anything to write in it.

Marks apparently heard the tinkling of the ice in the glass. “You’re not drinking, are you? That won’t do. I’m not going to have you—”

“Let me remind you,” said Gideon, steadied by the alcohol and by Marks’s familiar offensiveness, “that I don’t work for you. I was fired, remember?” Marks began to interrupt, but Gideon talked over him. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to say what you want to say, and then I’m hanging up. Go.”

“You stupid—”