The Aquitaine Progression (22 page)

“I’m
sorry
. It’s … it’s a complicated brief. Christ, I wouldn’t raise my hand to you, you’re a celebrity.” Converse laughed because he knew it was expected.

“Well, my second bit of news for you, good buddy, is that celebrity or no, the smoking lamp’s been on for a couple of minutes now and you still got a reefer in your fingers. Now, I grant you, you didn’t light it, but we’re getting a lot of Nazi looks over here.”

“Nazi …?” Joel spoke the word involuntarily as he
pressed the unlit cigarette into the receptacle; he was not aware that he had been holding it.

“A figure of speech and a bad line,” said the actor. “We’ll be in Cologne before you put all that legal stuff away. Come on, good buddy, he’s going in for the approach.”

“No,” countered Joel without thinking. “He’s making a pitchout until he gets the tower’s instructions. It’s standard—we’ve got at least three minutes.”

“You sound like you know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Vaguely,” said Converse, putting the Leifhelm dossier into his attaché case. “I used to be a pilot.”

“No kidding? A
real
pilot?”

“Well, I got paid.”

“For an airline? I mean, one of these
real
airlines?”

“Larger than this one, I think.”

“Goddamn, I’m impressed. I wouldn’t have thought so. Lawyers and pilots somehow don’t seem compatible.”

“It was a long time ago.” Joel closed his case and snapped the locks.

The plane rolled down the runway, the landing having been so unobtrusive that a smattering of applause erupted from the rear of the aircraft. Dowling spoke as he unfastened his seat belt. “I used to hear some of that after a particularly good class.”

“Now you hear a lot more,” said Converse.

“For a hell of a lot less. By the way, where are you staying, counselor?”

Joel was not prepared for the question. “Actually, I’m not sure,” he replied, again reaching for words, for an answer. “This trip was a last-minute decision.”

“You may need help. Bonn’s crowded. Tell you what, I’m at the Königshof and I suspect I’ve got a little influence. Let’s see what we can do.”

“Thanks very much, but that won’t be necessary.” Converse thought rapidly. The last thing he wanted was the attention focused on anyone in the actor’s company. “My firm’s sending someone to meet me and he’ll have the accommodations. As a matter of fact, I’m supposed to be one of the last people off the plane, so he doesn’t have to try to find me in the crowd.”

“Well, if you’ve got any time and you want a couple of
laughs with some actor types, call me at the hotel and leave a number.”

“I probably will. I enjoyed riding shotgun.”

“On a cattle drive, pardner?”

Joel waited. The last stragglers were leaving the plane, nodding at the flanking stewardesses, some yawning, others in awkward combat with shoulder bags, camera equipment and suit-carriers. The final passenger exited through the aircraft’s concave door and Converse got up, gripping the handle of his attaché case and sliding into the aisle. Instinctively, without having a conscious reason to do so, he glanced to his right, into the rear section of the plane.

What he saw—and what saw him—made him freeze. His breath exploded silently in his chest. Seated in the last row of the long fuselage was a woman. The pale skin under the wide brim of the hat, and the frightened, astonished eyes that abruptly looked away—all formed an image he vividly remembered. She was the woman in the café at the Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen! When he last saw her she was walking rapidly into the baggage-claim area,
away
from the row of airlines’ counters. She had been stopped by a man in a hurry; words had been exchanged—and now Joel knew they had concerned him.

The woman had doubled back, unnoticed in the last-minute rush for boarding. He felt it, he
knew
it. She had followed him from Denmark!

Converse rushed up the aisle and through the metal door into the carpeted tunnel. Fifty feet down the passageway the narrow walls opened into a waiting area, the plastic seats and the roped-off stanchions designating the gate. There was no one; the place was empty, the other gates shut down, the lights off. Beyond, suspended from the ceiling were signs in German, French and English directing passengers to the main terminal and the downstairs baggage claim. There was no time for his luggage; he had to run, to get away from the
airport as fast as possible, get away without being seen. Then the obvious struck him, and he felt sick. He
had
been seen; they knew he was on the flight from Hamburg—whoever
they
were. The instant he walked into the terminal he would be spotted, and there was nothing he could do about it. They had found him in Copenhagen; the woman had found him and she had been ordered on board to make certain he did not stay in Hamburg, or switch planes to another destination.

How?
How did they do it?

There was no time to think about it; he would think about it later—if there was a later. He passed the arches of the closed-down metal detectors and the black conveyor belts where hand luggage was X-rayed. Ahead, no more than seventy-five feet were the doors to the terminal. What was he going to do, what
should
he do?

N
UR FÜR HIER
B
ESCHÄFTIGTE
M
ÄNNER

Joel stopped at a door. The sign on it was emphatic, the German forbidding. Yet he had seen those words before. Where? What was it?… Zurich! He had been in a department store in Zurich when a stomach attack had descended to his bowels. He had pleaded with a sympathetic clerk who had taken him to a nearby employees’ men’s room. In one of those odd moments of gratitude and relief, he had focused on the strange words as they had drawn nearer.
Nur für hier Beschäftigte. Männer
.

No further memory was required. He pushed the door open and went inside, not sure what he would do other than collect his thoughts. A man in green overalls was at the far end of the line of sinks against the wall; he was combing his hair while inspecting a blemish on his face in the mirror. Converse walked to the row of urinals beyond the sinks, his demeanor that of an airlines executive. The affectation was accepted; the man mumbled something courteously and left. The door swung shut and he was alone.

Joel stepped back from the urinal and studied the tiled enclosure, hearing for the first time the sound of several voices … outside, somewhere outside, beyond … the
windows
. Three-quarters up from the floor and recessed in the far wall were three frosted-glass windows, the painted white frames melting into the whiteness of the room. He was confused.
In these security-conscious days of airline travel with the constant emphasis on guarding against smuggled arms and narcotics, a room inside a gate area that had a means of getting
outside
before entering customs did not make sense. Then the obvious fact occurred to him. It could be his way out! The flight from Hamburg was a domestic flight, this part of the Cologne-Bonn airport a domestic terminal; there were no customs! Of course there were exterior windows in an enclosure like this. What difference did it make? Passengers still had to pass through the electronic arches and, conversely, authorities wanting to pick up a passenger flying domestically would simply wait by a specific gate.

But no one waited for him. He had been the last—the second to last—passenger off the late night flight. The roped-off gate had been deserted; anyone sitting in one of the plastic chairs or standing beyond the counter would be obvious. Therefore, those who were keeping him in their sights did not want to be seen themselves. Whoever they were, they were waiting, watching for him from some remote spot inside the terminal. They could wait.

He approached the far-right window and lowered his attaché case to the floor. When he stood erect, the sill was only inches above his head. He reached for the two white handles and pushed; the window slid easily up several inches. He poked his fingers through the space; there was no screen. Once the window was raised to its full height, there would be enough room for him to crawl outside.

There was a clattering behind him, rapid slaps of metal against wood. He spun around as the door opened, revealing a hunched-over old man in a white maintenance uniform carrying a mop and a pail. Slowly, with deliberation, the old man took out a pocket watch, squinted at it, said something in German, and waited for an answer. Not only was Joel aware that he was expected to speak, but he assumed that he had been told the employees’ men’s room was being closed until morning. He had to think; he could not leave; the only way out of the airport was through the terminal. If there was another, he did not know where, and it was no time to be running around a section of an airport shut down for the remainder of the night. Patrolling guards might compound his problems.

His eyes dropped, centering on the metal pail, and in desperation he knew what he had to do, but not whether he could do it. With a sudden grimace of pain, he moaned and grabbed
his chest, falling to his knees. His face contorted, he sank to the floor.

“Doctor, doctor … 
doctor
!” he shouted over and over again.

The old man dropped the mop and the pail; a guttural stream of panicked phrases accompanied several cautious steps forward. Converse rolled to his right against the wall; he gasped for breath as he watched the German with wide, blank eyes.

“
Doctor …!
” he whispered.

The old man trembled and backed away toward the door; he turned, opened it and ran out, his frail voice raised for help.

There would be only seconds! The gate was no more than two hundred feet to the left, the entrance to the terminal perhaps a hundred to the right. Joel got up quickly, raced to the pail, turned it upside down, and brought it back to the window. He placed it on the floor and stepped up with one foot, his palms making contact with the base of the window; he shoved. The glass rose about four inches and stopped, the frame lodged against the sash. He pushed again with all the strength he could manage in his awkward position. The window would not budge; breathing hard he studied it, his intense gaze zeroing in on two small steel objects he wished to God were not in place, but they were. Two protective braces were screwed into the opposing sashes, preventing the window from being opened more than six inches. Cologne-Bonn might not be an international airport with a panoply of sophisticated security devices, but it was not without its own safeguards.

There were distant shouts from beyond the door; the old man had reached someone. The sweat rolled down Converse’s face as he stepped off the pail and reached for his attaché case on the floor. Action and decision were simultaneous, only instinct unconsciously governing both. Joel picked up the leather case, stepped forward and crashed it repeatedly into the window, shattering the glass and finally breaking away the lower wooden frame. He stepped back up on the pail and looked out. Beyond—below—was a cement path bordered by a guardrail, floodlights in the distance, no one in sight. He threw the attaché case out the window, and pulled himself up, his left knee kicking fragments of glass and what was left of the frame to the concrete below. Awkwardly, he hunched his whole body, pressing his head into his shoulder blades, and
plunged through the opening. As he fell to the ground he heard the shouts from inside: they grew in volume, all in counterpoint, a mixture of bewilderment and anger. He ran.

Minutes later, at a sudden curve in the cement path, he saw the floodlit entrance of the terminal and the line of taxis waiting for the passengers of Flight 817 from Hamburg to pick up their luggage before the drivers collected their inflated night prices to Bonn and Cologne. There were entrance and exit roads leading to the platform, broken by pedestrian crosswalks, and beyond these an immense parking lot with several lighted booths still operating for those driving their own cars. Converse slipped over the guardrail and ran across an intersecting lawn until he reached the first road, racing into the shadows at the first blinding glare of a floodlight. He had to reach a taxi, a taxi with a driver who spoke English; he could not remain on foot.… He had been captured on foot once, years ago. On a jungle trail, where if he had only been able to commandeer a jeep—an enemy jeep—he might have … 
Stop it!
This is not ’Nam, it’s a goddamn airport with a million tons of concrete poured between flowers, grass and asphalt! He kept moving in and out of the shadows, until he had made a complete semicircle—one-eight zero. He was in darkness, the last of the taxis in the line ahead of him. He approached the first, which was the last.

“English? Do you speak English?”

“Englisch? Nein.”

The second cabdriver was equally negative, but the third was not. “As you Americans say, only the asshole would drive a taxi here wizzout the English reasonable. Is so?”

“It’s reasonable,” said Joel, opening the door.

“
Nein!
You cannot do that!”

“Do what?”

“Come in the taxi.”

“Why not?”

“The line. Allviss is the line.”

Converse reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a folded layer of deutsche marks. “I’m generous. Can you understand that?”

“Is also urgent sickness. Get in,
mein Herr
.”

The cab pulled out of the line and sped toward the exit road. “Bonn or Köln?” asked the driver.

“Bonn,” replied Converse, “but not yet. I want you to
drive into the other lane and stop across the way in front of that parking lot.”

“Was …?”

“The other
lane
. I want to watch the entrance back there. I think there was someone on the Hamburg plane I know.”

“Many have come out. Only those with luggage—”

“She’s still inside,” insisted Joel. “
Please
, just do as I say.”

“She?… 
Ach, ein Fräulein. Ist ja Ihr Geld, mein Herr
.”

The driver swung the cab into a cutoff that led to the incoming road and the parking lot. He stopped in the shadows beyond the second booth; the terminal doors were on the left, no more than a hundred yards away. Converse watched as weary passengers, carrying assorted suitcases, golf bags, and the ever-present camera equipment, began, to file out of the terminal’s entrance, most raising their hands for taxis, a few walking across the pedestrian lanes toward the parking lot.