All of the Big Three in the ‘States were saying that their cars came ready to roll, through whatever you wanted to do to them nowadays. No break-in period required. I still felt that a car, or van in this case, should be given a chance to break in to the driver’s style and get the burrs out. That took about five hundred klicks in my book, so this baby was ready for some action. I took a moment to adjust the power seat and exterior mirrors. The outside ones were heated on this model. Not bad.
The interior rear-view was set almost right, even though Mark was a good five inches shorter than me. I had to lower the seat all the way from the top position to the bottom. The ‘All Wheel Drive’ marker was in the appropriate place on the dash.
The garage door had opened all the way, very quietly. It was the one that ran on a rotating screw mechanism. Only the best for our lad Mark, it seemed. I turned to Godsen. She was going through the glove compartment.
“Belt up, we’re off.” She closed the door to the glove box, and saluted.
“Aye, aye, Skipper.” Then she put her belt on.
I backed slowly out of the garage, watching the twin mirrors mounted high on either side of the door, but there were no other cars in sight. The whole thing took less than a minute, and then we were in the lane. I hit the overhead panel for the remote and the door started closing right away. I pulled out of the lane at the top end, and turned left towards the street our new home was on. At the corner I went left again and slowed right down to a crawl.
Godsen gave me a strange look, then asked “What are we doing, exactly?”
I was checking the left side of the street. Parked cars, house windows, strollers on the sidewalk, the basic routine.
“Checking for anomalies. Anything out of the ordinary. You do the right side, Okay?”
“Okay.” She started doing the job, scanning everything in sight. She was a lot easier to work with when we were alone together, but I tried not to make anything out of it. Still, that smile in the square by the church would take some time to forget. It had been a beauty, as smiles go.
We got to the end of our block without incident, and I turned right and merged with the flow of traffic. The van responded much more quickly than mine, and I had the Chrysler 3.3 Litre V-6. This engine had been worked on. The cornering was solid as a rock. Mine was pretty solid too, but this baby couldn’t have known we had hit any corners yet. Soon enough.
I turned west onto the Limmatquai for about a kilometer and crossed the over the Limmat river, which put us about a kilometre west of the Bahnhof. Three blocks later we intersected with an entry ramp to the main road out of town in the direction of Dietikon. I took it at an increased speed, seventy klicks to be truthful. The ramp was posted for thirty, and still we were as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. As soon as I had merged from the entry lane I had a clear path ahead on the fast lane side. I signaled, and crossed over two lanes to get to the far left. Now I was clear straight-ahead for a couple of klicks until the highway curved to the right to avoid the Limmat River.
I was watching the road on all sides, as well as ahead and behind. Before I punched it, and I was going to punch it, I advised Godsen to grab the handle above her door. It was the same as mine in that respect. The handle was large enough to grab quickly in a crisis and not miss, yet unobtrusive, being above the door frame. It also helped to keep your passengers from ending up in your lap on a hard turn. That might not be so bad under different circumstances, but I tucked that thought away in the trunk at the back of my ‘odd but strangely pleasing’ memory room. She responded with a lively “What?”, and then I hit the gas. We’d been traveling at about one hundred and ten KPH when I punched it. The acceleration pushed us both back in our seats something fierce. Within six seconds we were doing something beyond the scope of the speedometer’s ability to accurately display for us. I had the needle pegged at one-eighty, and we were still accelerating. That’s about one-ten in miles per hour. I backed off the pedal, allowing room for acceleration manoeuvring. The four speed Overdrive transmission shifted smoothly up from third to fourth. The RPM indicator showed that we were turning over at just a tad more than three thousand. About thirty-four hundred. The Overdrive was working perfectly. We still hadn’t started to slow down though. The kick-down had put us up in the high range of operation rather quickly, and the Overdrive was keeping us there. I still had plenty of room left in the gas pedal. I started playing with it, pushing it down, getting acceleration, then backing off. Like tapping your foot to a good song, and every tap pushed us back in our seats, then eased off immediately when I lifted my foot from the gas.
In those few moments when I’d told Godsen to hang on, we’d leaped ahead with surprising alacrity, and now we were well ‘round the curve that had been two K’s down the road. I had had a feeling that the van was customized beyond the special interior, and I had been right. It was a V-6, but that’s where the similarity with mine ended. This van must have been capable of turning out two hundred plus Brake Horse Power. That went back to the small block three fifty that I’d had in my Camaro ‘Sleeper’. Not bad for a van in the nineteen nineties. We were still pegged on the speedometer, and Godsen was still holding on to the handle over the door frame. I started backing it off until the needle edged away from the peg stop, and let it coast down to about one hundred and fifty KPH. That seemed fair enough for the road we were on, a modern highway made for modern vehicles. There had been no sensation other than the push of gravity when I’d played with the gas pedal. It was as smooth as the proverbial baby’s bottom.
“Well, what do you think?” Godsen looked at me like I had become certifiable in the last five minutes.
“What?”
“What part of that didn’t you understand? What do you think of the van’s performance?”
“Van? It drives like a formula one car. I thought these were family vehicles.”
“Formula one, eh? That’s pretty good praise. I wonder how it handles off-road?”
Godsen immediately responded.
“I’m sure it’s wonderful at off road travel. Could you let me out at the next exit, please?”
“Don’t worry so much, I’m not going to try that out today.” I smiled as I kept track of the traffic around us. We were still passing most of it.
“Would it be too much to ask where we’re going then?”
“We’re going back to the Sommerau in Dietikon. I want to see who’s been sniffing around after us today.” Godsen stiffened up some at that.
“Don’t you think that might be a little dangerous?”
“Everything is dangerous now. The rules have changed, and we need to know the enemy. They’re not going to sit still for losing two of their people, and I think they still want to have that chat with you that they’d planned for this morning. Only now, I figure they would want to include me in that list.”
“You feel that this is worth the effort and the danger?”
“I must, or I wouldn’t be doing it, would I?” I could see her eyes reflecting the mornings action, live and up front. “Don’t worry, you aren’t going in, I am. I’ll be fifteen minutes maximum, then we head for the hotel and the girls. In fact, give them a call now. I reached into my inside pocket and pulled out my NEC 401 cellular, handing it over to her.
“I do have my own you know, and it’s smaller than this one. I can handle it better.” Now she was getting indignant.
“Yes, I do know. And so may the opposition. We’ve got a bombshell of information to discuss when we get back to town. In the meantime, this phone is registered to a name that won’t show me as the owner, and the digital signature has been changed from the original. In addition, it runs on a split frequency. One for transmit, and another for receive. So, it would be hard to track the signal or eavesdrop. Okay?”
“Okay, I get it. Give me the damn thing.” She took it from my hand as I offered it to her without taking my eyes off the road. The Dietikon exit was about one or two kms from here, and I didn’t want to miss it.
She sighed. “Yes.”
Women. I tried being nice.
“How were the girls?”
“The ‘girls’?” My use of the term ‘girls’ had irritated her when I had meant to do the opposite. Maybe her blood sugar was getting low.
“Ms. Sauvé and Captain Westwood. Is that better?”
“Oh, crap. I’m sorry Jeffry, I’ve just been thinking about the day so far, and it seems like I haven’t added very much to the situation besides having to be rescued. I normally work at the top of my abilities, and that hasn’t showed well today. The girls are fine. Therese wants to know when you’ll be back, Westwood wants to know if you’re treating me well, they’re both tired and maybe they’ll have a nap. That’s it.”
“Thanks.” I turned to open the door, and I felt a hand on my arm.
“Be careful.” I looked back at her, and saw that she was being honest.
“I will.” Then, instead of opening the door, I checked my watch. “What time do you have?” She started to say something, then changed her mind, looked at her wrist, and said to me what she just saw.
“Okay, that’s close enough.” She was three minutes and some seconds off, whereas I had set mine to the exact local time when we’d been in the Bahnhof. That big clock they have there near the ticket machines is never off by more than ten seconds, with reference to GMT. The watch she was wearing was just an expensive woman’s watch anyway, and if she’d set hers at the same time, she might still be off. I’d compensate. “I’m going to be gone exactly twenty minutes. If I don’t show then, give me one-minute grace, then get back to the hotel right away. I’ll catch up with you there before your appointment with Herr Schnorrer. Check?” This time there was no hesitation.
“Check.”
I got out and started walking away from the van, towards the hotel.
~
Chapter Twenty
W
hen I was within one block of the hotel I turned up the street and slipped into the back lane. I was at the back door exactly two minutes and fifteen seconds after leaving the van.
I knocked on it and Kurt opened the door himself, a stroke of luck on my part. He’d been directing the sous-chef in some complicated bit of cooking wizardry from what I caught in his exchange of French with him. We headed into the kitchen and then took the stairs up to Kurt’s’ apartment. The staircase was on the near side of the kitchen and was a short trip.
Once we were safely ensconced in the comfort of Kurt’s private den, the first thing he did was to break out a bottle of chilled Feldschlösschen for each of us. We sat in comfortable big leather chairs, the kind with brass studs all along the edges. Black leather, naturally. A man’s first choice. Kurt had bought these chairs long before he met and married his wife. We’d spent many a night here playing chess and downing shots of kirsch. There was a low mahogany table between us, where we set our beers. I filled him in with an absolute minimum of information, which was better for him.
He’d been away in Basel the day before, and had spent the night, returning only a half hour after the entire incident had been swept up and carted away. That ate up about five minutes, then I got down to it.
“Kurt, I need to ask a favour.” I knew in advance that he would agree, but the rules of etiquette had to be followed. He swept his arms wide, indicating everything around him.
“Name it, Jeffry.”
“Okay. First of all, I have very little time, so I have to act quickly. Did anyone come around today after I left with my party?”
“Not that I know of, and I kept a close watch on everything after I came back and heard what had happened. You said ‘firstly’, so what is second?”
“I need to use your system to log on to the Web and pick up some important information, and print it. The information I’m talking about is extremely sensitive, and not for casual eyes. In fact, it could be dangerous to know about.” Kurt looked out of place in his chef’s whites, hat puffed high and leaning to one side, feet up on the table, sitting in the big chair. He looked pensive for about three heartbeats.
“Fine. I must get back to work. The next time you come, I want you to call me first, so that I can be here when you arrive.” We both stood, and clasped hands across the table.
“I promise.”
“Fine, then. I must go and make sure these Frenchmen are not ruining my reputation.” He turned and left, heading down the staircase with practiced ease at breakneck speed. I checked my watch. Ten minutes left. Just enough.
I walked over to the system in the corner of the room and flipped the power switch on his surge protector turning on the system, the monitor, and the laser printer all at once. I wasn’t keen on that way of starting a system, but Kurt had his own opinions about everything.
As soon as the system had finished booting, I launched Kurt’s Web browser. The first thing I did was hit my own Home Page, and check my inbox for mail. Walter was as good his word. There were three messages from his code name, Victorinox. There were also a few others, but none of any immediate interest except for one, from Cynthia.
I downloaded the four of them, and then logged of. First, I ran the decryption on Walter’s files, then I sent the whole batch to the printer. I kept tabs on the print manager, and as soon as the last page of the last file was fully sent to the printer memory, I began wiping my tracks, deleting the HTML pages in the cache, and then the download files themselves. At that point I switched to system utilities, and began a defragmentation of the drive, including all free space as well as files.
Kurt would find a nice surprise when he ran the system the next time he booted, because he hadn’t run a defragmentation since Noah started building his Ark. The fragmented file percentage was up in the high twenties. While I was at it I set up the System Agent to run a thorough ‘check and fix’ every Sunday, followed by a defragmentation. The defrag job would run for at least half an hour, so I put a little note on the keyboard saying ‘Please do not turn me off until I finish my work. Thank you.’
I grabbed the printout from the laser and folded it into a square that would fit into my back pocket. Then I hit the stairs as fast as Kurt had. When I got down to the kitchen, Kurt was putting the finishing touches on some kind of beautiful dessert cake. That was his real specialty, the desserts. People came from the small villages and towns all over the area to dine out in his hotel, but I think the attraction was the amazing desserts he produced. He made up the recipes as he went along, which meant that they couldn’t be had anywhere else in the country.
He looked up as I hit the bottom step. I gave him the ‘thumbs up’, and he nodded back at me, returning to his cake. It looked like one of his Multi-Mouse concoctions, with white and dark chocolate shavings covering the whole thing. It was big enough to feed the ‘Frisco chapter of the Hells Angels without any side dishes, so I knew that he had a full dining room tonight. I checked my watch, and saw I was rapidly running out of time. I had about seventy-five seconds to get to the van, including the grace period.
The door slammed shut behind me as I hit the alley running. At the end of the alley I turned left and jogged up to the cross street I wanted, then turned right, and put on some speed. The street here was totally residential, and some homes were getting ready for dinner, and some were still awaiting the return of their owners from a hard day’s work.
When I got to the block where I had parked the car, I turned right and moved into the middle of the street. I had to in order to stop Godsen. She’d taken her orders well and was in the process of leaving. When she spotted me she
slammed on the brakes and managed to stop just before running me down. Lucky me.
I circled over to the passenger side and tried to open the door, but she had the locks down. I knocked on the window and she looked around for the controls. I pointed down at the armrest, and she hit the right button first shot. I opened the door and slipped into the passenger seat pulling the belt over to buckle myself in.
“Jeffry! I almost ran you down,”
“Almost don’t count kid. Hit it. Head straight for the hotel.” I laid my head back on the headrest and thought about the information I had in my pocket. This was what had been missing. Now we’d be able to make some headway. I hoped.
Godsen turned at the corner and then at the next one again, circling the block to get to the main road through town, which would in turn lead us to the highway into Zurich. I had to tip her off when we were closing on the entry ramp, and again when we were close to our hotel, but otherwise she drove fine. A bit slower than I would have, with an Interpol Badge in my pocket, but what the hell. I had some time to think, and that was essential at this stage.
We were in far deeper than either of us had anticipated initially. If she’d been telling me the truth when we first met and talked the mission over. I guided her to the street that our hotel was on, and then we found a parking spot around the corner on a quiet side street that was perfect for our purposes.
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 45