第 42 页

?Calm yourself, Steve,? he said reassuringly. ?You know whom I represent here. The matter will be taken care of. I assure you.?

Pyle saw him out but was not calmed. Even the CIA fouled up sometimes, he reminded himself too late. Had he known more, and read less fiction, he would have known that a senior officer of the Company could not have the rank of colonel. Langley does not take ex-Army officers. But he did not know. He just worried.

On his way down, Easterhouse realized he was going to have to return to the States for consultations. It was time, anyway. All was in place, ticking like a patient time bomb. He was even ahead of schedule. He ought to give his patrons a situation report. While there he would mention Andy Laing. Surely the man could be bought off, persuaded to hold his fire, at least until April?

He was unaware how wrong he was.

?

?Dieter, you owe me, and I?m calling in the marker.?

Quinn sat with his contact in a bar two blocks away from the office where the man worked. Sam listened and the contact looked worried.

?But, Quinn, please try to understand. It is not a ques-tion of house rules. Federal law itself forbids non-employees to have access to the morgue.?

DieterLutz was a decade younger than Quinn, but far more prosperous. He had the gloss of a flourishing career. He was in fact a senior staff reporter with DerSpiegel, Ger-many?s biggest and most prestigious current affairs magazine.

It had not always been so. Once he had been a free-lancer, scratching a living, trying to be one step ahead of the opposition when the big stories broke. In those days there had been a kidnapping that had made every German headline day after day. At the most delicate point of the negotiations with the kidnappersLutz had inadvertently leaked something that almost destroyed the deal.

The angry police had wanted to know where the leak had come from. The kidnap victim was a big industrialist, a party benefactor, and Bonn had been leaning on the police heavily. Quinn had known who the guilty party was, but had kept silent. The damage was done, had to be repaired, and the breaking of a young reporter with too much enthusiasm and too little wisdom was not going to help matters.

?I don?t need to break in,? said Quinn patiently. ?You?re on the staff. You have the right to go and get the material, if it?s there.?

The head officesof DerSpiegel are at 19 Brandstwiete, a short street running between the Dovenfleet canal and the Ost-West-Strasse. Beneath the modern eleven-story building slumbers the biggest newspaper morgue in Europe. More than 18 million documents are filed in it. Computerizing the files had been going on for a decade before Quinn andLutz took their beer that November afternoon in the Dom-Strasse bar.Lutz sighed.

?All right,? he said. ?What is his name　

?PaulMarchais,? said Quinn. ?Belgian mercenary. Fought in the Congo 1964 to 1968. And any general back-ground on the events of that period.?

Julian Hayman?sfiles in London might have had some-thing onMarchais, but Quinn had not then been able to give him a name.Lutz was back an hour later with a file.

?These must not pass out of my possession,? he said. ?And they must be back by nightfall.?

?Crap,? said Quinn amiably. ?Go back to work. Re-turn in four hours. I?ll be here. You can have it then.?

Lutzleft. Sam had not understood the talk in German, but now she leaned over to see what Quinn had got.

?What are you looking for　 she asked.

?I want to see if the bastard had any pals, any really close friends,? said Quinn. He began to read.

The first piece was from an Antwerp newspaper of 1965, a general review of local men who had signed on to fight in the Congo. For Belgium it was a highly emotional issue in those days?the stories of theSimba rebels raping, torturing, and slaughtering priests, nuns, planters, mission-aries, women, and children, many of them Belgian, had en-dowed the mercenaries who put down theSimba revolt with a kind of glamour. The article was in Flemish, with a German translation attached.

Marchais,Paul: born inLi?ge 1943, son of a Walloon father and Flemish mother?that would account for the French-sounding name of a boy who grew up in Antwerp. Father killed in the liberation of Belgium in 1944/45. Mother returned to her native Antwerp.

Slum boyhood, spent around the docks. In trouble with the police from early teens. A string of minor convictions to spring 1964. Turned up in the Congo with JacquesSchramme?s Leopard Group. There was no mention of the rape charge; perhaps the Antwerp police were keeping quiet in the hope he would show up again and be arrested.

The second piece was a passing mention. In 1966 he had apparently quitSchramme and joined the Fifth Com-mando, by then headed by John Peters, who had succeeded Mike Hoare. Principally manned by South Africans?Peters had quickly ousted most of Hoare?sBritish. So Marchais?s Flemish could have enabled him to survive among Afrika-ners, since Afrikaans and Flemish are fairly similar.

The other two pieces mentionedMarchais, or simply a giant Belgian called Big Paul, staying on after the disbanding of the Fifth Commando and the departure of Peters, and re-joiningSchramme in time for the 1967 Stanleyville mutiny and the long march to Bukavu.

FinallyLutz had included five photocopies of sheets ex-tracted from Anthony Modeler?s classic, Histoire des Merce-naires, from which Quinn could fill in the events of Marchais?s last months in the Congo.

In late July 1967, unable to hold Stanleyville,Schramme?s group set off for the border and cut a swath clean through all opposition until they reached Bukavu, once a delightful watering hole for Belgians, a cool resort on the edge of a lake. Here they holed up.

They held out for three months until they finally ran out of ammunition. Then they marched over the bridge across the lake into the neighboring republic of Ruanda.

Quinn had heard the rest. Though out of ammunition they terrified the Ruandan government, which thought they might, if not appeased, simply terrorize the entire country. The Belgian consul was overwhelmed. Many of the Belgian mercenaries had lost their identity papers, accidentally or on purpose. The harassed consul issued temporary Belgian ID cards according to the name he was given. That would be whereMarchais became Paul Lefort. It would not be beyond the wit of man to convert those papers into permanent ones at a later date, especially if a Paul Lefort had once existed and died down there.

On April 23, 1968, two Red Cross airplanes finally re-patriated the mercenaries. One plane flew direct to Brussels with all the Belgians on board. All except one. The Belgian public was prepared to hail their mercenaries as heroes; not so the police. They checked everyone descending from the plane against their own wanted lists.Marchais must have taken the other DC-6, the one that dropped off human car-goes at Pisa, Zurich, and Paris. Between them the two planes carried 123 mixed European and South African mercenaries back to Europe.

Quinn was convincedMarchais had been on the second plane, that he had disappeared into twenty-three years of dead-end jobs on fairgrounds until being recruited for his last foreign assignment. What Quinn wanted was the name of one other who had been with him on that last assignment. There was nothing in the papers to give a clue.Lutz re-turned.

?One last thing,? said Quinn.

?I can?t,? protestedLutz. ?There?s already talk that I?m writing a background piece on mercenaries. I?m not?I?m on the Common Market meeting of agriculture Minis-ters.?

?Broaden your horizons,? suggested Quinn. ?How many German mercenaries were in the Stanleyville mutiny, the march to Bukavu, the siege of Bukavu, and the intern-ment camp in Ruanda.?

Lutztook notes.

?I have a wife and kids to go home to, you know.?

?Then you?re a lucky man,? said Quinn.

The area of information he had asked for was narrower, andLutz was back from the morgue in twenty minutes. This time he stayed while Quinn read.

WhatLutz had brought him was the entire file on Ger-man mercenaries from 1960 onward. A dozen at least.Wilhelm had been in the Congo, at Watsa. Dead of wounds on the Paulis road ambush.Rolf Steiner had been in Biafra; still living in Munich, but was never in the Congo. Quinn turned the page. Siegfried ?Congo?Muller had been through the Congo from start to finish; died in South Africa in 1983.

There were two other Germans, both living in Nurem-berg, addresses given, but both had left Africa in the spring of 1967. That left one.

WernerBernhardt had been with the Fifth Commando but skipped to joinSchramme when it was disbanded. He had been in the mutiny, on the march to Bukavu, and in the siege of the lakeside resort. There was no address for him.

?Where would he be now　 asked Quinn.

?If it?s not listed, he disappeared,? saidLutz. ?That was 1968, you know. This is 1991. He could be dead. Or anywhere. People like that ... you know ... Central or South America, South Africa ...?

?Or here in Germany,? suggested Quinn.

For answer,Lutz borrowed the bar?s telephone direc-tory. There were four columns ofBernhardts. And that was just for Hamburg. There are ten states in the Federal Repub-lic, and they all have several such directories. ?If he?s listed at all,? saidLutz.

?Criminal records　 asked Quinn.

?Unless it?s federal, there are ten separate police au-thorities to go through,? saidLutz. ?You know that, since the war, when the Allies were kind enough to write our constitu-tion for us, everything is decentralized. So we can never have another Hitler. Makes tracking someone down enormous fun. I know?it?s part of my job. But a man like this ... very little chance. If he wants to disappear, he disappears. This one does, or he?d have given some interview in twenty-three years, appeared in the papers. But, nothing. If he had, he?d be in our files.?

Quinn had one last question. Where had he originally come from, thisBernhardt? Lutz scanned the sheets.

?Dortmund,? he said. ?He was born and raised in Dortmund. Maybe the police there know something. But they won?t tell you. Civil rights, you see?we?re very keen on civil rights in Germany.?

Quinn thanked him and let him go. He and Sam wan-dered down the street looking for a promising restaurant.

?Where do we go next　 she asked.

?Dortmund,? he said. ?I know a man in Dortmund.?

?Darling,? she said, ?you know a man everywhere.?

?

In the middle of November, Michael Odell faced President Cormack alone in the Oval Office. The Vice President was shocked by the change in his old friend. Far from having recovered since the funeral, John Cormack seemed to have shrunk.

It was not simply the physical appearance that worried Odell; the former power of concentration was gone, the old incisiveness dissipated. He tried to draw the President?s at-tention to the appointments diary.

?Ah, yes,? said Cormack, with an attempt at revival. ?Let?s have a look.?

He studied the page for Monday.

?John, it?s Tuesday,? said Odell gently.

As the pages turned Odell saw broad red lines through canceled appointments. There was a NATO Head of State in town. The President should greet him on the White House lawn; not negotiate with him?the European would under-stand that?but just greet him.

Besides, the issue was not whether the European leader would understand; the problem was whether the American media would understand if the President failed to show. Odell feared they might understand only too well.

?Stand in for me, Michael,? pleaded Cormack.

The Vice President nodded. ?Sure,? he said gloomily. It was the tenth canceled appointment in a week. The pa-perwork could be handled in-house; there was a good team at the White House nowadays. Cormack had chosen well. But the American people invest a lot of power in that one man who is President, Head of State, Chief Executive, Com-mander in Chief of the armed forces, the man with his finger on the nuclear button. Under certain conditions. One is that they have the right to see him in action?often. It was the Attorney General who articulated Odell?s worries an hour later in the Situation Room.

?He can?t just sit there forever,? said Walters.

Odell had reported to them all on the state in which he had found the President. There were just the inner six of them present?Odell, Stannard, Walters, Donaldson, Reed, and Johnson?plus Dr. Armitage, who had been asked to join them as an adviser.

?The man?s a husk, a shadow of what he once was. Dammit, only five weeks ago,? said Odell. His listeners were gloomy and depressed.

Dr. Armitage explained that President Cormack was suffering from deep postshock trauma, from which he seemed unable to recover.

?What does that mean, minus the jargon　 snapped Odell.

What it meant, said Armitage patiently, was that the Chief Executive was stricken by a personal grief so profound that it was depriving him of the will to continue.

In the aftermath of the kidnapping, the psychiatrist re-ported, there had been a similar trauma, but not so pro-found. Then the problem had been the stress and anxiety stemming from ignorance and worry?not knowing what was happening to his son, whether the boy was alive or dead, in good shape or maltreated, or when or if he would be freed.

During the kidnap the load had lightened slightly. He had learned indirectly from Quinn that at least his son was alive. As the exchange neared, he had recovered somewhat.

But the death of his only son, and the savagely brutal manner of it, had been like a body blow. Too introverted a man to share easily, too inhibited to express his grief, he had settled into an abiding melancholy that was sapping his men-tal and moral strength, those qualities humans call the will.

The committee listened morosely. They relied on the psychiatrist to tell them what was in their President?s mind. On the few occasions when they saw him, they needed no doctor to tell them what they were seeing. A man lackluster and distraught; tired to the point of deep exhaustion, old be-fore his time, devoid of energy or interest. There had been Presidents before who had been ill in office; the machinery of state could cope. But nothing like this. Even without the growing media questioning, several present were also begin-ning to ask themselves whether John Cormack could, or should, continue much longer in office.

Bill Walters listened to the psychiatrist with an expres-sionless face. At forty-four he was the youngest man in the Cabinet, a tough and brilliant corporate lawyer from Cali-fornia. John Cormack had brought him to Washington as At-torney General to use his talents against organized crime, much of it now hiding behind corporatefa?ades. Those who admired him admitted he could be ruthless, albeit in pursuit of the supremacy of the law; those who were his enemies, and he had made a few, feared his relentlessness.