Preston Child - The Babylonian Mask

“Engel, perhaps?” Purdue tried to help.

“No, too short,” Sam contested. His eyes floated across the building, to the sky, dropping around the area of the three German soldiers. Sam gasped. They had vanished.

“Himmelfarb?” Purdue guessed.

“Aye, that’s the one! That’s the name!” Sam exclaimed in relief, but now he was concerned. “They’re gone. They disappeared, Purdue. Fuck! I am just losing it all over the place, aren’t I? I used to be able to tail a fart in a windstorm!”

Purdue was quiet, perusing the information he’d obtained from hacking into the off-limits covert files from the comfort of the car, while Sam stood in the cold morning air, waiting for something he did not even grasp.

“These lads are like a spider,” Sam moaned as he searched through the people with his eyes hidden under his whipping fringe. “They’re threatening while you watch them, but it’s so much worse when you don’t know where they’ve gone.”

“Sam,” Purdue spoke suddenly, starting the journalist who was convinced that he was being stalked for an ambush. “They are all airmen in the German Luftwaffe, section Leo 2.”

“And what does that mean? Are they pilots?” Sam asked. He was almost disappointed.

“Not quite. They are a bit more specialized,” Purdue clarified. “Come back to the car. You’ll want to hear this over a double rum on the rocks.”

Nina woke up on the couch, feeling as if someone had implanted a rock inside her skull and merely pushed her brain aside to ache. She was reluctant to open her eyes. It would be too hard on her cheer to find that she had gone completely blind, but it was just too unnatural not to. Carefully she allowed her lids to flutter apart. Nothing had changed since the day before, for which she was exceedingly grateful.

Toast and coffee permeated the living room where she had keeled over after a very long walk with her hospital partner, ‘Sam’. He still could not remember his name and she still could not get used to calling him Sam. But she had to admit, apart from all the discrepancies about him, thus far he had helped her stay undetected from the authorities, authorities who would have loved to have thrown her back into the hospital where a madman had already come to say hi.

They’d spent the whole day before on foot, trying to reach Mannheim before dark. Neither had any credentials or money on them, so Nina had to play the pity card to get a free lift for them both from Mannheim to Dillenburg north from there. Unfortunately, the sixty-two-year-old lady Nina was trying to convince had felt it would be better for the two tourists to get a meal, warm shower and a good night’s sleep. And this was why she had spent the night on a couch, playing host to two large cats and an embroidered pillow that reeked of stale cinnamon. Geez, I have to get hold of Sam. My Sam, she reminded herself as she sat up. Her lower back had stepped into the ring with her hips and Nina felt like an old woman, full of aches and pains. Her eyes had not deteriorated, but it was still a problem for her to act normally when she could hardly see. On top of that, both she and her new friend had to keep from being recognized as the two patients missing from Heidelberg’s medical facility. It was particularly hard for Nina, as she had to pretend not to have sore skin and a devastating fever most of the time.

“Good morning!” the kind hostess said from the doorway. With a spatula in one hand she asked in a disturbingly heavy German drawl, “Do you want eggs with your toast, Schatz?”

Nina nodded with a goofy smile, wondering if she looked half as bad as she felt. Before she could ask where the bathroom was, the lady had vanished back into the lime green kitchen where the smell of margarine joined the array of flavors wafting into Nina’s keen nose. Suddenly it hit her. Where is Other Sam?

She recalled the hostess giving them each a couch to sleep on the night before, but his was vacant. Not that she wasn’t relieved to be alone for a bit, but he knew the countryside better than her and he had been serving as her eyes thus far. Nina was still in her jeans and shirt from the hospital, having discarded the scrubs just outside the Heidelberg facility once the majority of eyes were off them.

Throughout the entire time she shared with the other Sam, Nina could not help but wonder how he had passed as Dr. Hilt before he left the hospital after her. Surely the officers on guard would know that a man with a burned face could not possibly have been the late doctor, regardless of a clever disguise and a nametag. Of course, she had no way of discerning his features with the state that her sight was in.

Nina pulled her sleeves over her reddened forearms, feeling the nausea grip her body.

“Toilet?” she managed to call out around the doorway of the kitchen, before bolting down the short hallway the lady pointed to with the spatula. Barely at the door, the waves of convulsions attacked Nina and she quickly slammed the door shut to purge. It was no secret that acute radiation syndrome was causing her gastrointestinal malady, but not receiving treatment for this and the other symptoms only exacerbated her circumstances.

When she had vomited herself even weaker, Nina timidly appeared from the bathroom and made her way to the couch where she’d slept. Another problem was keeping her balance without holding on to the wall as she went. Throughout the small house Nina realized the rooms were all unoccupied. Could he have left me here? The bastard! She frowned under the spell of the climbing fever she could not fight anymore. With the added disorientation of her flawed eyes, she strained just to make it to the warped object she hoped to be the large couch. Nina’s bare feet dragged along the carpet as the woman rounded the corner to bring her some breakfast.

“Oh! Mein Gott!” she shrieked in panic at the sight of the small frame of her guest collapsing. Briskly the lady of the house set the tray down on the table and rushed to come to Nina’s aid. “My darling, are you alright?”

Nina could not tell her that she had been in hospital. In fact, she could hardly tell her anything. Spinning in her skull, her brain hissed while her breath felt like an open oven door. Her eyes rolled back as she went limp in the arms of the lady. Soon after Nina came to again, her face feeling ice cold under trickles of sweat beads. A washcloth was on her forehead and she could feel an uncomfortable fumbling at her thighs, which alarmed her into a swift upright position. An indifferent cat met her gaze as her hand grabbed at the furry body and released immediately afterward. “Oh,” was all Nina could manage, and laid back down.

“How are you feeling?” the lady asked.

“I must be getting sick from the cold here in a strange country,” Nina blabbered softly to maintain her deceit. Yeah right, her inner voice mocked. A Scot recoiling at German autumn. Good one!

Then her hostess said the golden words. “Liebchen, is there someone I should call to come and get you? Husband? Family?” Nina’s moist, pallid face lit up with hope. “Yes, please!”

“Your friend here did not even say goodbye this morning. When I got up to drive you two to town he was just gone. Did you two have a fight?”

“No, he said he was in a hurry to get to his brother’s house. Maybe he thought I would hold him up, being sick,” Nina answered, and realized that her hypothesis was probably precisely true. When the two of them spent the day walking along the backcountry road outside of Heidelberg, they did not exactly bond. But he did tell her what he could remember about his identity. At the time, Nina had found the other Sam’s memory remarkably selective, but she had not wanted to rock the boat while she was this dependent on his guidance and tolerance.