Sam had not been informed by the police officer he spoke to that a nurse had complained about being attacked the night before – a nurse who’d been robbed of her scrubs before she woke on the floor of the room wrapped in blankets.
“Then we have to get in. There’s no point in looking for her all over Germany when we haven’t properly covered the initial area and its vicinity,” Purdue contemplated. His eyes recorded the proximity of the deployed officers and security people in plain clothes. With his tablet he covertly chronicled the scene, the floor access from outside the brown building, and the basic structure of its entrances and exits.
“Nice,” Sam said, keeping a straight face and acting innocent. He whipped out a packet of smokes to help him think. Lighting his first one was like shaking hands with an old friend. Sam drew in the smoke and felt instantly at peace, focused, as if he had stepped back from it all to see the big picture. What he also saw, coincidentally, was the SKY International News van and three suspicious looking men loitering close to it. They seemed out of place somehow, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Glancing at Purdue, Sam noticed that the white haired inventor was panning with his tablet, slowly moving it from right to left to capture the panorama.
“Purdue,” Sam said through pursed lips, “go far left quickly. By the van. By the van there are three suspicious looking bastards. You see them?”
Purdue did as Sam suggested and filmed the three men in their early thirties, as far as he could tell. Sam was correct. It was clear they were not there to see what the commotion was about. Instead, they checked their watches all at once, hands on the buttons. One spoke as they waited.
“They’re synchronizing their watches,” Purdue remarked through barely moving lips.
“Aye,” Sam concurred through a long stream of smoke that helped him observe without looking obvious. “What do you reckon – bomb?”
“Unlikely,” Purdue replied evenly, his voice trailing like a distracted lecturer as he kept his tablet frame on the men. “They wouldn’t remain in such close proximity.”
“Unless they’re suicidal,” Sam retorted. Purdue peeked over the golden frame of his glasses, still keeping his tablet in place.
“Then they wouldn’t have to synch their watches, would they?” he said impatiently. Sam had to concede. Purdue was right. They had to be there as observers, but of what? He pulled out another cigarette before even finishing the first.
“Gluttony is a deadly sin, you realize,” Purdue teased, but Sam ignored him. He put out the butt of the exhausted fag and started walking in the direction of the three men before Purdue could react. He strolled casually across the flat grassland of untended land so as not to spook his targets. His German was appalling, so he decided to play himself this time. Perhaps if they thought him to be a dumb tourist they would be less reluctant to share.
“Hello, gents,” Sam greeted cheerfully, placing his fag between his lips. “Don’t suppose you have a light?”
They did not expect this. They peered with stunned expressions at the stranger who stood there grinning, looking stupid with his unlit cigarette.
“My wife went to have lunch with some other women on the tour and took my lighter with her.” Sam plastered the excuse while taking special care to note their features and clothing. It was a journalist’s prerogative, after all.
The red haired loiterer spoke to his friends in German. “Give him a light, for fuck’s sake. Look how pathetic he looks.” The other two chuckled in agreement and one stepped forward, flicking a flame for Sam. Now Sam realized that his distraction was ineffective, because all three still watched the hospital intently. “Da, Werner!” one exclaimed suddenly.
From the exit guarded by police, a small nurse stepped out and motioned for one of them to come. She had a brief word with the two guards at the door and they nodded satisfactorily.
“Kohl,” the dark-haired one slapped the back of his hand against the arm of the red haired one.
“Warum nicht Himmelfarb?” Kohl protested, after which a quick fire argument ensued that was briskly settled between the three.
“Kohl! Sofort!” the dominant, dark-haired man reiterated forcefully.
In Sam’s head the words struggled to find their way to his dictionary, but he presumed the first word was the lad’s surname. The next word, he guessed, was along the lines of making it quick, but he was unsure.
“Oh, his wife is also giving the orders,” Sam played dumb as he smoked lazily. “Mine is not as sweet…”
Franz Himmelfarb, with a nod from his associate, Dieter Werner, interrupted Sam instantly. “Listen, friend, do you mind? We are on-duty officers trying to blend in and you are making things difficult for us. Our job is to make sure the killer inside the hospital does not escape unnoticed and for that, well, we need to not be bothered while doing our job.”
“I understand. I’m sorry. I thought you were just a bunch of assholes waiting to steal petrol from the news van here. You looked the type,” Sam replied with a somewhat deliberately snide attitude. He turned and walked away, ignoring the sound of one restraining the other. Sam glanced back to see them peering at him, which spurred him forward a bit more quickly toward Purdue’s vicinity. He did not join his friend, however, and avoided visual association with him just in case the three hyenas were looking for a black sheep to single out. Purdue knew what Sam was doing. Sam’s dark eyes widened slightly as their gazes met through the morning fog, furtively gesturing to Purdue that he should not engage him in conversation.
Purdue elected to return to the rental car with a few others who left the scene to get back to their day, while Sam stayed behind. He, on the other hand, joined up with a group of locals who had volunteered to help the police keep an eye out for any suspicious activity. It was merely his cover to keep his eye on the three underhanded boy scouts in their flannel shirts and windbreaker jackets. Sam called Purdue from his vantage point.
“Yes?” Purdue’s voice came clearly over the phone.
“Military grade watches, all the exact same issue. These lads are from the armed forces,” he reported as his eyes strayed all over the place to remain inconspicuous. “Also, names. Kohl, Werner and…uh…,” he could not remember the third.
“Yes?” Purdue pressed as he entered the names into a German military personnel folder in the Defense Archives of the W.U.O.
“Shit,” Sam frowned, wincing at his slacking faculty for memorizing details. “It’s a longer surname.”
“That, my friend, will not help me,” Purdue mocked.
“I know! I know, for Christ’s sake!” Sam seethed. He felt unusually impotent now that his once sharp abilities were challenged and found wanting. It was not the loss of his psychic ability that caused his new found self-loathing, but the frustration of not being able to joust as he once had when he was younger. “Heaven. It had something to do with heaven, I think. Jesus, I have to work on my German – and my goddamn memory.”
“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 journalis
t 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.”
14
Confusion in Mannheim
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.
She remembered that he did wear a long white coat, but other than that it was almost impossible to see his face, even if he still had one. What vexed her a bit was the lack of shock expressed by the sight of him wherever they asked for directions or interacted with others. Surely, had they seen a man whose face and torso had been reduced to toffee, people would make some sort of sound or exclaim some kind of sympathetic word? But they responded in a trivial fashion, showing no sign of concern for the man’s clearly fresh injuries.
“What happened to your cell phone?” the lady asked her - a perfectly normal question to which Nina effortlessly shot the most obvious lie.
“I was robbed. My bag with my phone, money, all of that. Gone. I suppose they knew I was a tourist and targeted me,” Nina explained as she took the woman’s phone with a nod of thanks. She dialed the number she had so well memorized. When the phone rang on the other end of the line, it gave Nina a jump in energy and just a little warmth in her belly.
“Cleave.”My God, what a beautiful word, Nina thought, suddenly feeling much safer than she had in a long time. How long since she had heard the voice of her old friend, occasional lover and periodic colleague? Her heart jumped. Nina had not seen Sam since he was abducted by the Order of the Black Sun while they were on an excursion seeking the famed 18th Century Amber Room in Poland almost two months ago.
“S-Sam?” she said, almost laughing.
“Nina?” he cried out. “Nina? Is that you?”
“Aye. How are you doing?” she smile
d weakly. Her body ached all over and she could hardly sit up.
“Jesus Christ, Nina! Where are you? Are you in danger?” he asked frantically through the heavy hum of a moving car.
“I’m alive, Sam. Barely, though. But I’m safe. With a lady in Mannheim here in Germany. Sam? Can you come and get me?” her voice cracked. The request hit Sam in the heart. Such a feisty, intelligent and independent woman was not likely to beg for rescue like a small child.
“Of course I’ll come to get you! Mannheim is a short drive from where I am. Give me the address and we’ll come get you,” Sam exclaimed on excitedly. “Oh my God, you have no idea how happy we are that you’re okay!”
“What is all this we?” she asked. “And why are you in Germany?”
“To get you to a hospital back home, naturally. We saw on the news that there was a heap of hell loose where Detlef left you. And when we got here you were missing! I cannot believe this,” he raved, his laughter rife with relief.
“I’ll give you to the dear lady who took me in for the address. See you soon, okay?” Nina replied through her heavy-laden breath and gave the phone to her hostess before falling into a deep sleep.
When Sam had said ‘we’, she’d had a bad feeling that it meant he’d sprung Purdue from whatever deserving cage he’d been imprisoned in after Detlef had cold-cocked him beneath Chernobyl. But with the illness ripping through her system like a punishment from the Morphine god deserted in her wake, she did not care for the moment. All she wanted to do was fade away into the arms of whatever awaited.
She could still hear the lady explaining what the house looked like when she abandoned control and slipped into a feverish slumber.
15
Bad Medicine
Sister Barken sat on the thick leather of the vintage office chair with her elbows resting on her knees. Under the monotonous buzz of the luminescent light her hands cradled the sides of her head as she listened to the administrator’s account of Dr. Hilt’s demise. The stout nursing sister wept for the doctor she had known for barely seven months. She had not gotten along smoothly with him, but she was a compassionate woman who truly felt sorry about the man’s death.
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