Hugh Miller - Prime Target

‘So what’s being done?’ Mike said.

‘For the moment, Andreas Wolff provides emergency ICON security by changing the custodian routines at twelve-hour intervals. He will do this until his new generation of self-enhancing safeguards are test-run and installed.’

‘So if Wolff leaves the picture for any reason,’ Sabrina said, ‘the whole of ICON security collapses?’

‘It could be that extreme,’ Philpott said. ‘We could shut down ICON temporarily in an emergency, but the disruption would be catastrophic. It would be nearly as bad as having the system broken into. The new security arrangements will change everything. ICON will in effect become auto-secure. But until then we remain at serious risk. Without Wolff’s support, records and operational strategies could be uncloaked long enough to bring this organization’s security to its knees.’

Philpott stopped abruptly and looked at his watch.

‘Right.’ He stood. ‘That’s it. I have to go. Compare notes. Make sure you all know the same amount about the case. The facts as they stand present us with a paradox, but in theory the way forward is simple. Find out what links the names on that list and you will have a line on why Emily Selby was killed. When you know that, you’ll know what you’re up against. Lucy, thanks for your input.’

Halfway to the door he stopped. ‘I may change my mind later, but in the meantime I think Sabrina should dig up the whole story on Emily Selby, with special reference to her association with Erika Stramm.’

‘Shouldn’t we maybe get somebody to interview Stramm right away?’ Whitlock said.

‘No. I want us to know something about the relationship before she feeds us her version. Mike, I want you to get to work on that key Sabrina found. C.W., keep trying for a linking factor between the names on the list.’

Philpott strode to the door and pulled it open.

‘In order to proceed we need a picture, something with shape and features we can identify. Do your best for me on this one.’

Mike and C.W. muttered assurances. Sabrina nodded.

‘I deserve it, after all,’ Philpott said, and left.

‘Now, tell me honestly, what did you think? Were you bored? Or did you enjoy the visit as much as you told the guide you did?’

Karl Sonnemann, one week off his sixty-fourth birthday, stood smiling like a boy on the street outside Goethe’s birthplace in Frankfurt. His hands rested on the shoulders of Charlotte Gustl, a slender, shapely Münster girl with hair the colour of butter. Charlotte was twenty-two, one of Karl’s literature students at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University. As of last night she was technically his mistress, too.

‘I truly, truly loved the place,’ Charlotte said. ‘I’m sure I shall dream about it.’

‘I did feel that a visit to the birthplace might touch a chord in you,’ Karl said.

‘Seeing that little room where he slept. Where he had his dreams, oh…’ Charlotte clasped her hands under her chin. ‘I could feel, or I imagined I could feel, the surge of the forces that empowered him. This has given me a new perspective on Goethe, Professor.’

‘Karl,’ he said, beaming at her. ‘I told you, call me Karl.’

‘Very well.’ She coloured a little as he slid his arm through hers. ‘I seem to have moved forward years in the space of twenty-four hours.’

‘As they walked towards the taxi rank he squeezed her arm, thinking how alike they all were, the girls he picked to be his special blossoms for a term or two. How much alike in the way they looked, in what they said, in how they gave their bodies to him, season after season…

How much alike, yet he never tired of them, and he found each one breathtakingly new. When he turned fifty a friend had winked at him and asked him how long now, how long before he would have to defer to his years and abandon his little hobby. At the time, Karl had said he would never cease, not until he died, and he said it wishing it were true. Now he felt it might indeed be true; he would simply never stop. The girls showed no more resistance as time passed, he still managed to charm them and, just as important, he could identify the ones he had charmed the most, and so take advantage.

‘I thought we would have a leisurely lunch at Alexander’s,’ he said, ‘and then go back to the university, where my only tutorial of the day is with a Fräulein Charlotte Gustl, if I’m not mistaken.’

She chuckled. It was a moist throaty sound, a variation of the sounds she made against his ear in the night, under crisp sheets at the Excelsior Hotel. For a moment Karl found himself overcome by the swiftness of one sound conjuring up another, and by the sharp, tactile memory of her warmth and closeness…

‘There’s that young man again,’ Charlotte said.

‘Which one?’

‘The one I said was watching you at the birthplace.’

Karl turned. The young man was looking in a shop window a few metres away. Karl had noticed him as they went into Goethe’s house, standing by the edge of the pavement, looking aimless, or trying to. For a terrible moment Karl considered the possibility that the young man, for all his fair-haired, clear-eyed wholesomeness, was a detective. What if Ursula, after so many years, had begun to suspect, and had set this snooper to find out for sure?

Karl turned away, smiling at the wildness of his imagination. ‘I think he has taken your fancy, that young man. You seem to be tracing his movements.’

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