Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

"Ah, we’ll know, Dr. Oliver, but as to how we’ll know, I’m afraid we can’t share that with you."

"But what about me? I wouldn’t know a sensitive request if one bit me on the nose. I mean, unless someone asked me for a hydrogen bomb formula."

Marks snickered. Delvaux ignored him. "We’d like very much to know if someone does. But we think…perhaps someone asking you if you happen to have a key to the computer room, or if you can get him the address of one of the officers in your class, or some such thing."

"But you can’t expect me to run and tell you every time-"

Delvaux’s eyelids flickered. "Dr. Oliver, you are making too much of this. We are not asking you to be some sort of spy or agent. We are merely requesting of you the kindness to notify us if you are approached with a request that strikes you as peculiar and which might in some conceivable way relate to matters of security. Truthfully, we think it extremely unlikely that such an event will occur; we are merely providing for all contingencies. We leave it entirely to your discernment as to whether something is sufficiently extraordinary to notify us."

He rubbed his hands together. "That, I think, is as much as I am permitted to tell you. Will you help us?"

"Monsieur Delvaux, excuse my ignorance. I don’t know what sort of authority NSD has. Are you asking my help or ordering it?"

Delvaux laughed. Gideon caught a whiff of cheese again: Emmenthaler.

"Dr. Oliver, the Security Directorate is replete with responsibility, but sadly lacking in authority. We are asking, merely asking. What do you say?"

"Ja," said Marks, "vee are only esking. But uff course ve hef our vays." He screwed an imaginary monocle into his eye.

Delvaux pretended not to notice him. "What do you say?" he asked again.

It was a time to temporize, Gideon knew. There were some elements here that made no sense, and he knew he wasn’t thinking as clearly as usual. Moreover, he wasn’t the sort of man who went out of his way to find ways of breaking his bones or puncturing his skin. Nevertheless, the proposition stirred his interest. Working with NSD would add a notable dimension of excitement and adventure to the whole European assignment. The probability of real danger-danger that he couldn’t cope with-seemed reassuringly low; not, of course, that he took Delvaux at his word.

"Yes, I’ll do it," he said.

"Excellent," said Delvaux. "Wonderful. I must get back to my office, I’m afraid. Mr. Marks will explain the details. Good-bye and thank you." Before Gideon could rise, he had shaken hands and darted gnomelike out the door.

"Le directeur," said Marks. He lit a cigarette, went back to his own chair, and leaned back in it, looking out the window. He had returned, Gideon gathered, to his bored and abstracted mode.

"Is he French?" Gideon asked. "The accent wasn’t quite-"

"Belgian. France isn’t a NATO member, as you know."

"Of course," Gideon said, but he hadn’t known. Which was ridiculous. He’d have to get his head out of his archaeology texts and see what was going on in the twentieth century; or so he’d been resolving for at least five years now.

"Now," Marks went on, still looking out the window and languidly smoking. "When you have something to pass on to us from the field-from the base you’re teaching at- you call back to Heidelberg, to the USOC registrar’s office, and say, ‘My class roster is incomplete. Could you let me have an updated one?’ Got it?"

"Those exact words?"

"That would be dandy, but words to that effect will do."

"All right. Do I speak to anyone in the registrar’s office, or must it be to the registrar himself?"

"Herself. Mrs. Swinnerton. No. All you need to do is leave the message with the clerical unit."

"Is Mrs. Swinnerton in on this, then? Is she one of your agents?"

"Classified information. Need-to-know principle. You wouldn’t want me to go around telling other people you’re in on it, would you?"

Gideon nodded. "Okay, what happens after I call?"

"Then you hang up and wait and see."

"At the telephone?"

Marks had already smoked down his cigarette. He exhaled heavily and, with a large gesture as if he were turning the handle on a meat grinder, he stubbed it out. He stifled a yawn. His eyes moved to the memorandum he’d been working on. "No," he said, "just go about your business. We’ll contact you. You’ll know it’s us because we’ll make some reference to your roster." He pulled the tablet into writing position. Gideon was being dismissed, and rather more peremptorily than he liked.

In an undergraduate psychology class, he had once taken a projective test consisting of a series of cartoons. Each cartoon showed a little man saying something irritating to a second person. You were supposed to be the second person, and you took the test by filling in two blank comic strip balloons above his head. In the balloon drawn with solid lines, you wrote your spoken response. In a second balloon with dotted lines you wrote what you were really thinking. Since then, he had often found himself mentally filling in the second balloon when he dealt with annoying people. It kept him from saying things that got him in trouble-sometimes, anyway. Now he wrote in the imaginary box: pompous little fart.

Aloud he said, "All right, I guess I’ve got it."

"There is one more thing, of paramount importance," said Marks. "This whole thing is strictly between us."

"I understand that."

"You understand, fine. But I mean strictly. You, me, Delvaux. That’s all."

"I heard you, Mr. Marks."

"That excludes Fu Manchu."

Gideon got to his feet. Cold stares were not his forte, but he managed what he thought was a fairly good one. "I beg your pardon?" Inside the dotted lines he wrote: nerd.

"Fu Man Lau. Nummah One Son."

"Look, Marks-"

Marks pretended to read Gideon’s anger as confusion. "I had the impression that you and Lau were getting on fairly well. I just want to make sure you understand. You, me, and Delvaux."

"You don’t even tell your own people?"

"John Lau isn’t one of our people. He’s in the safety side of the house; we’re in counterespionage. I told you, we operate on the need-to-know principle. In this line of work, the fewer people who know what you’re doing, the better for you and for them. The branches don’t tell each other what they’re doing."

"Apparently Lau or someone else in safety told you what happened to me last night."

"I needed to know. I thought it might have some bearing. It doesn’t."

"You’re awfully sure of that. Do you know something about it that I don’t?"

"You don’t need to know what I know," Marks said with an unappealingly arch smile. "Now, if there isn’t anything else, there are some very important people waiting for my recommendations." He gestured at the memorandum.

Gideon made a final entry in his imaginary balloon: self-important twirp. Then he politely said good-bye and left.

Typically, he was a worrier, but the somber, beautiful castle ruins and the grand sweep of the terraces put out of mind the fantastic happenings of the last fifteen or twenty hours. Solitary and relaxed, he roamed over the grounds until dusk.

For dinner he went to a sedate weinstube that had been in business, according to a plaque outside, since the 1600s; its dark, polished wooden tables might have been its original furnishings. He made a richly satisfying meal from a bottle of Mosel wine and a plate of weisskase, a creamy cheese served with heavy rye bread and small dishes of paprika and raw onions.

At the hotel, he half-expected Frau Gross to refuse him entrance, but she seemed almost friendly. She wouldn’t go so far as to return his smile, of course, but she did give him his key-which had been found under the bureau-and wished him a good night.