Spy (35 page)

I
t was pitch black outside, nothing but the dripping leaves of the overgrown banana trees in the lush hotel garden. Steady rain was hammering the canvas roof above his head and hissing on the river running beside the deeply rutted hotel drive. Of course it was raining. He was in the bloody rain forest.

Ambrose and Stokely were en route to some kind of hospital, moldering away out in the countryside. It was called the St. James Infirmary, which he found a charming name, but apparently the institution itself was not. It was said to be a wretched place, formerly a home for indigent children.

Harry Brock and another man, a local chap named Saladin, had been standing on the hotel dock to help with the luggage and mooring lines when the Blue Goose first arrived from Key West. Harry Brock and this other chap had arrived in Manaus four days ago. At Hawke’s request, they had been doing all the preliminary legwork on the widow. It had not been easy, Harry said. He’d been shown a badly decomposed corpse with a death certificate attached. The name on it was Hildegard Zimmermann.

Saladin wasn’t buying it. He had zero confidence in the local police; they’d kept looking.

Harry had told Ambrose, as they stood on the dock under an umbrella, he and Saladin now felt there was a reasonable chance they might find Hildegard Zimmermann still alive in a secret hospital currently used by the military. Congreve had thanked him for all his hard work and then asked for a car. He and Stokely would leave for the hospital immediately after checking in and having a bite to eat.

“How long do you think it will take us to get there?” he asked Stokely. They had reached the end of the long hotel drive and were about to turn right onto the primary road along the Rio Negro.

“About an hour upriver. Then we go into the jungle. If the road isn’t too washed out, we’ll be all right. That’s what Brock said.”

“You know this Harry Brock quite well, I take it?”

“I do. He helped Alex and I in Oman last year.”

“Bit full of it for my taste.”

Stokely looked over at him. It had been a long day in a small airplane and Ambrose was finally beginning to get on his nerves. “If I knew what Harry Brock was full of, I’d order a case of the stuff and split it with you.”

“Bollocks.”

Stokely was driving, thank God; the roads were ridiculous. The car, some sort of official four-wheel drive vehicle this Brock character had borrowed. Very official looking, taken from the local constabulary car pool via the CIA station chief in Manaus. It was beastly uncomfortable. Not that he’d ever mention it or complain, of course.

They were all such rugged outdoorsy fellows, every last one of them. Stokely, the Aussie pilot, Mick, this serious Arab fellow named Saladin, and, of course, the American spy, Harry Brock. Wearing their bloody bush shorts, shirts with epaulets, naff kit from the Indiana Jones Collection. Even the very attractive woman he’d met at the front desk, Caparina, he thought her name was, had a machete hanging from her belt.

He’d looked at his luggage waiting to go up on the trolley. All he had in his trunks were three-piece linen suits and gabardine trousers. And the pith helmet he’d found in his aunt’s attic which currently adorned his head.

“So, how do you like the Jungle Palace?” Stokely asked, trying to lighten the mood.

Congreve craned around and looked back at their hotel. Three stories high, a wide verandah on each floor, and surrounded by overwhelming vegetation. The shuttered windows, some open to the elements, were aglow through the misty rain.

“The Jungle Palace, I would say, only lives up to half it’s billing,” Congreve said with a grin.

“The Jungle part, you mean?” Stoke said, laughing.

“Precisely.”

Harry Brock certainly had exotic tastes in hotels. The palace was on the extreme fringes of Manaus. Brock had chosen this remote hostelry for one reason. Because it was perched on the banks of the Rio Negro; and there was a dock where Mick could moor the Grumman Goose seaplane.

Ambrose, bone tired from the flight down, sat back and tried to think positive thoughts. The hotel’s bar food was edible, at least. And the barman had Johnnie Black and was generous with his whisky. After flying by seaplane all day from Key West, it had been pleasant to taxi up to one’s private dock and heave out the luggage.

The
Blue Goose,
which had this day proved her airworthiness beyond question, certainly looked right at home in this tropical environment. She was moored on the river, just off the hotel dock. And, should it come time to get out of here in a hurry, Ambrose could think of no better man to do the job than the Goose’s pilot, a former bush pilot from Queensland, Mick Hocking.

All in all, there were some positives. There was a complimentary bottle of gin in one’s room. A vast four-poster with clean linen sheets stiff as boards, and acres of mosquito netting. A verandah outside his room where he could smoke his pipe in peace. And, Ambrose had learned upon checking in, there were eighteen species of bats in the garden.

How perfectly charming. All of this grandeur and luxe living, and only a scant thousand miles up the Amazon River.

Well, no matter, the game was afoot. He and Stokely Jones were wasting no time, already off on their mission to find the Widow Zimmermann and unlock the code. He had the thriller, the book he and Alex Hawke now fondly called the Da Zimmermann Code, resting in his lap. He had sweated bullets over the damn thing, reading and re-re-reading the book until his eyes glazed over.

Finding Hildegard Zimmermann was vital. There was simply nothing more he could do, no possible arrangement or rearrangement of words or ciphers, that would budge it forward past the mid-point. Where were those brainy chaps in Room 40 when one really needed them?

He closed his eyes, exhausted, in the vain hope of a catnap before they arrived at their destination.

“We’re here,” Stoke said seconds later, and he sat bolt upright just as they drove through the iron gates. There was a dimly lit guardhouse and uniformed sentries on either side of it. Seeing the Police shields on their doors, the guards snapped to a salute as the speeding buggy passed through. Ambrose noticed high stone walls with nasty concertina wire atop them. They soon passed under an arch, including an ancient portcullis, and now were on the hospital grounds proper.

St. James Infirmary suddenly loomed in the headlights. It looked more like a large prison reformatory than a hospital for destitute children. Pretty ghastly, but there you had it. They slowed, and Stokely waved some kind of credential at a lone sentry posted at the entrance to the bricked forecourt. He waved them in, and Stoke parked next to a decades old ambulance standing just outside the main entrance.

“I speak fluent Portuguese,” Congreve reminded Stokely, opening his door. “Just in case.”

“Don’t say anything unless you have to,” Stoke said as they climbed out of the car. “Anybody wants to know, you’re an English doctor who’s here to examine the patient for scientific reasons.”

“And who are you?”

“A friend of the guy who slipped the Chief of State Security in Manaus ten grand so you could see her tonight, Doc.”

“Ah. Why is she here?”

“This is where you go before you disappear.”

At the end of a long dark hall, an elderly woman in a starched nurse’s uniform sat at a reception desk in a pool of white light.

“May I help you?” the old woman said, her Portuguese sounding very neutral, if not downright unfriendly. She was tapping her pencil on a clipboard: a sign-in sheet upside down.

“Good evening, I’m here to see a patient,” Congreve replied cordially in the nurse’s native tongue.

“Name?”

“Mine? Or, the patient’s?”

“Yours,” she said, rather impatiently.

“Dr. Congreve. Dr. Ambrose Congreve.”

She checked the clipboard and looked up at Stokely. “Who is he?”

“My driver.”

Stokely offered her his best credential, a broad white smile.

She hesitated, then wrote something on a thin slip of note paper. She folded the paper and shoved it across the desk. In return, Stoke slid a sealed envelope across to her. She pocketed the envelope and nodded her head, indicating the stairwell.

“The Latin way,” Stoke said, opening the note the nurse had given him.

“It works,” Congreve replied, following him to the stairs.

“Your driver? You have to say that?”

“Whom would have me say you were?”

“Psychiatrist would be more like it. I’ve been trying to cure your fear of flying all damn day.”

“Where are we going, Dr. Jones?”

“Room 313,” Stoke said, “Top floor.”

If the hospital was grim, the top floor was grimmer. It was a long, poorly lit corridor. Filthy. There was a nurse’s station situated beneath a skylight at the center of the wide hall. The periodic lightning flashes gave the elderly nurse on duty a distinctly netherworld appearance. She wore steel-rimmed spectacles that glinted with each strobe as she silently watched their approach.

They paused at her desk and another envelope was delivered and pocketed. The nurse said a few words in Portuguese and Congreve nodded.

“What did she say?” Stoke asked.

“We’re allowed ten minutes, max. No gifts. No items can enter or leave the room.”

“You’ve got the lady’s book?”

“Of course. Underneath my mackintosh.”

Room 313 was at the end of the long hall, on the right. The door was closed and Ambrose tapped lightly upon it before entering. The patient was in a bed on the far side of the room, beneath a dormer window overlooking the hospital grounds. Heat lightning flickered in the heavy cumulus clouds moving rapidly over the treetops.

A candle was burning on the woman’s bedside table, and it nearly guttered out when the door swung open. Ambrose fingered a switch on the wall but nothing happened. A jagged arc of lightning flashed across the sky as the two men crossed to the bed.

There was a sagging shelf of books and a crucifix mounted on the wall above her head. Asleep, she was lovely. White hair framed her pale face, and her thin chest rose and fell slowly under the white muslin gown. There was only a whisper of breath from her lips. She appeared so peaceful propped up against her pillow, Congreve was loath to disturb her.

“Hand me that chair, will you?” he whispered to Stokely.

“Thank you.” He pulled the wooden chair right up to the bed. He placed his gift on the nightstand beside the candle. Then he reached out and gently took the old woman’s hand.

“Frau Zimmermann?”

Her eyes fluttered open.

“Ja?”
She responded automatically in German, asking Congreve if it was time for her medicine.

“Nein, nein,”
Congreve said in a perfect mimicry of her dialogue, “I’m a friend of your late husband, come to ask you a favor.”

“
Was ist los?
What’s going on?” she asked, raising her head from the pillow and searching Congreve’s face. Stokely hung back in the shadows, invisible in this light.

“Do you speak English, Madam Zimmermann? It would be simpler.”

“Of course I speak English. I am a diplomat’s wife.” Her voice was remarkably strong given her feeble appearance.

“I saw the ambassador in England. Shortly before he died.”

“You knew my husband?”

“Not well. We met once, but we spoke of many things. He…he asked me to give you this. It was his last request.”

“Gifts are not allowed in here,” she said, a flicker of fear in her eyes, but then she saw the book in Congreve’s hand.

“Please take it. There is a letter for you. Inside.”

She took the book and it fell open to reveal the letter. She pulled the single page from the envelope. Congreve watched her eyes scan the rows of numerals as easily as if she were reading a child’s poem.

She folded the book across her chest and closed her eyes. For a moment, Congreve thought she’d gone back to sleep.

“Whose side are you on, Doctor?” she said, her eyes remaining shut.

“Your husband’s,” Congreve said, silently praying it was the right answer.

“Why have you come?”

“Before he died, your husband saved the lives of many hundreds of people at Heathrow Airport. I believe that, knowing the end was near for him, he had…he had a change of heart. About whatever it was he’d been involved with.”

“He was a broken man, Doctor Congreve. These people in Brasilia, these Arabs, they tricked him into doing things he should never have involved himself in. The bombing at the synagogue in Rio. What could he do? He protected his family. He was a good man, Doctor. A statesman. He had a brilliant career.”

“Why did he do it?”

“Money, of course. Why does one do anything? Money or power. He had plenty of the latter. He knew I was dying. We had spent all our money. We lived too well for too long. Sold everything. He still needed money for my treatment. Sadly, it only prolonged the agony. Look at me.”

“I’m very sorry.”