by Gregg Loomis
Lang regretted the words as soon as he had spoken them. If anyone was qualified to gauge how safe remaining in Atlanta was, Gurt was that person.
"Our son," Gurt corrected. "It is more without danger if we leave."
How do you argue with that?
"Let me speak to him."
Manfred gave a thorough description of his exploits with Grumps and his latest visit to the local International House of Pancakes, a place the child equated with heaven itself Lang had to admire his mother's courage in taking an active three-year-old to a place where containers of sticky, multicolored syrup were not only within reach but easily opened as well. As the child stopped for breath in his excited narrative, Lang was convinced his son was intelligent and mature beyond his years, an observation which uniformly drew his skepticism when voiced by other parents. The inconsistency never occurred to him.
Gurt took the phone back from a reluctant Manfred. "We were having lunch with Uncle Fancy when you called."
Uncle Fancy. The conjunction of the hard and soft consonants of the priest's name defeated the three-year-old tongue, hence the sobriquet, one Francis bore with good humor.
"Put him on."
"On what?"
Gurt's Teutonically literal mind and her difficulty with the American idiom was both one of her most endearing and annoying qualities.
"Let me speak to him."
"How's my favorite heretic?" Francis's bass boomed through the ether.
"Fine," Lang replied. "I hope to be home soon. I need your advice."
"Tell me you've seen the light, Paul on the road to Damascus. Veritas praevalebit"
"More like Demosthenes holding the light in search of a single honest man. Don't fire up the incense yet. The truth I'm looking for is more church history than religious ... I think."
"You know I'm available anytime — particularly if single malt scotch is involved." He became serious. "I've learned not to ask, but Gurt really believes she and the child are in some sort of danger."
It was an invitation to explain. Doing so might well expose the priest to the same people who had employed Baldy and Co.
Lang said nothing.
Francis began again. "You might be interested to know I've been summoned to Rome for a convocation of African and African American priests. Church business, but I thought you and Gurt, Manfred, too, for that matter, might want to come along. As well as you know the city ..."
"Thanks but no, not at the moment. Gurt's leaving to visit with her father for a few days."
"Perfect! That leaves you free to come along. I think she might trust me with your behavior."
Lang didn't want to hurt his friend's feelings, but he couldn't very well explain why he didn't have time for optional travel. "I'm pretty busy right now, Francis. We can talk about it when I get back, probably tomorrow."
Francis didn't do so well hiding disappointment. "It's not for another week. Perhaps then."
Lang had gotten what he sought: affirmation the priest was going to be available to answer questions about James the Just, reputed brother of Jesus. "Let's hope. Now, let me speak to Gurt again."
The additional conversation did little but make him aware of the hole in his life that was the absence from Manfred and Gurt. He could not remember ever being so impatient to get home. He fell asleep almost immediately after terminating the call, but not before mentally marking the toy store he had passed. There were a number of items in the window that might interest an exceptional three- year-old.
VI.
Josefska
Mala Strana
Prague
0812
The Next Morning
Old Town Square was empty of yesterday's tourists. Anyone following Lang would have been obvious. The sole traffic on the Charles Bridge was a woman with a head scarf on a bicycle, its handlebar basket full of baguettes that still had a freshly baked aroma.
Ignoring leg muscles still in denial from yesterday's excursion, Lang took a circuitous route to the bookseller's shop. The neighborhood was just awakening to the new day. A few merchants were rolling up steel mesh blinds as restauranteurs swept already spotless sidewalks. A woman exited from somewhere down the row of Baroque buildings, pushing a pram. No Baldy. Unwilling to take unnecessary risks, Lang took another lap around the block, this time trying not to be obvious as he scanned windows and doorways.
He finally stopped in front of Klaus's business, taking a final glance left and right. Pushing a button beside the door, Lang was rewarded with the sound of pealing bells from within. A minute passed, then another. Lang tried again with the same lack of result. He took a step back and looked at the upper-story windows. European shopkeepers frequently lived above their stores. Perhaps the old man was still upstairs, unable to hear.
More from frustration than because he expected success, he used the head of his cane to rap on the door. To his surprise, it swung open a couple of inches.
Klaus had not impressed him as a careless man, the sort who might forget to lock up. Holding the cane in his left hand, Lang used it to push the door wide, his right hand on the butt of the Browning in the small of his back.
The only available light was that coming through the shop's filthy display window, a light filtered by an accumulation of dust. He could make out silhouettes: a table, a counter running the length of one wall, but little else. His left hand searched the wall until he found a switch. The single overhead bulb did little more than chase the pervasive shadows into corners where they waited sullenly. Startled, Lang snatched the Browning up only to grin sheepishly at his own reflection in a dozen or so old-fashioned glass bookcases, each crammed with leather-backed tomes. The room had an overlaying musty smell of prolonged disuse. But there was something else, too, an odor that was familiar yet not quite remembered clearly enough to identify.
Lang went to the foot of a staircase and peered into the darkness that inhabited the area above the fifth step. There must be an elevator here somewhere, the means of a wheelchair-bound man to ascend to the floors above.
But he saw none.
Instead, as he looked closer, he could make out the faint impression of a shoe's print in the dust that coated the stairs.
But how...?
Lang went to the doorway of the shop and looked outside. Next to the store, massive oak doors were flanked by a brass plaque with names and individual buttons. That was it, of course. The shop had a street entrance, but also access to the apartments above by an elevator that served all units from a common foyer. Klaus, if he lived above, could enter his apartment by elevator or his shop from the street.
OK, so how did a cripple leave a footprint?
Lang went back to the stairway, wishing he had thought to bring a flashlight. He placed a tentative foot on the first step and, using the cane, brought the other up to the next.
Progress was slow and got even slower when he ran out of what poor light there was and had to feel his way with the hand holding the pistol while using his cane to push upward. Each riser sent an ache from hip to ankle.
More than once, he was tempted to shout upward, to tell the antique-book dealer he was here. After all, Klaus had seemed eager enough for the money. Something else, perhaps his agency training or some sixth sense gained by experience, told him he did not want to announce his presence to everyone in the building any more than he wanted to confine himself in an elevator.
He reached a small landing. Light leaked around three edges of a door. Lang put his head next to it and listened. The only sound was of an occasional automobile passing in the street below.
Lang gently pushed the door open. The smell from downstairs grew stronger.
With the door halfway opened, Lang could see into a short hallway, its stone floor partially covered by an Oriental runner.
In a single motion, he was in the hall. He pulled back the slide, cocking his weapon as he swept right and left.
"Mr. Klaus?" he called in a low conversational tone. "Mr. Klaus, dobry den?"
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His answer was a silence that seemed to intensify the longer he waited.
The first door off the hallway was to his left. He nudged it open and looked into a bathroom from the last century. A claw-footed tub with the usual European shower hose filled one wall across from a toilet with an overhead water tank. He eased the door shut and tried the next one up the hall. A tiny kitchen contained a small box of a refrigerator, a two-eyed gas range and a microwave. There was barely room for a short wooden countertop and a doorless cabinet filled with mismatched dishes. Through the kitchen, he was looking into part of the dining/living room. A floor-to-ceiling window allowed cheerless sunlight through gauzy curtains.
If Klaus made the sort of money Eon had paid him, he certainly didn't spend it on luxurious living.
Browning held in an extended hand, Lang stepped across the kitchen's cracked linoleum and into the room. Klaus was seated near a corner. Now Lang recognized the odor he had been unable to identify: blood.
Blood soaked the old antiquarian's shirt, blood filled his lap. Blood was puddled on the worn carpet. Blood that was already turning brown and dried into a crust along the jaw-to-jaw slit in the neck.
Lang swept the room with his weapon. Books, manuscripts, scrolls and stacks of loose paper occupied every horizontal surface. And dust.
Either in an unsuccessful defense or death throes as Klaus suffocated or bled to death, the wheelchair had smashed into a sturdy, tufted sofa, knocking a wheel off the axle. It was wedged between the dead man and the upholstery.
Lang surveyed the room. The copy he had come for could be in plain sight and still invisible. It would take hours if not days to sort through the material in this room alone, not even contemplating the shop downstairs and the remaining room at the end of the hall, a room he guessed had been the old man's bedroom. And Lang was fairly certain he didn't have hours. Sooner or later an unanswered phone, a missed appointment, something would result in a visit to this apartment and a grisly discovery.
Lang stepped to a battered end table and looked down on what appeared to be an atlas in a language he couldn't identify. Under it were two rolls of parchment held together by a rubber band.
He was so intent on making at least a cursory search, he barely heard the creak of a floorboard.
Gun outstretched, he whirled.
Too late.
The heel of a hand from behind him hit his wrist, sending the Browning spinning across the room.
A forearm was around his neck, closing his air passage. Another hand held a knife, a long switchblade. Like Baldy's. Probably like the one that had killed Klaus. His attacker's body was jammed against his, making it impossible to use the sword in the cane.
With one hand, Lang dug and clawed at the forearm that was squeezing off his air. With the other, he held off the knife. It was an unequal contest; his assailant was too strong.
Letting go of the choking arm for an instant, Lang drove his elbow backward, jamming the point into a stomach rigid with muscle. There was a grunt and an exhalation of air, but the grip around Lang's neck grew tighter.
A gray fog was growing at the periphery of Lang's vision, a sure sign of oxygen deprivation. The only real question was whether Lang's throat was going to be cut like Klaus's before his air-starved brain went blank.
Unless he did something and did it quick.
But what?
VII.
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport
Atlanta, Georgia
8:31 pm EST
The Previous Evening
Gurt was watching the man who was watching her.
She was quite accustomed to men staring before hitting on her. But this one was pretending to be engrossed in a newspaper, so engrossed that he had been holding up the same page for the last twenty minutes.
She had first noticed him when she and Manfred had arrived at the gate. Not the gate from which they would actually depart, but one chosen almost randomly as a precautionary measure. Just in case someone like the man with the newspaper showed up. She had little doubt he would hang around the departure area until she boarded the flight to ... She flicked her eyes to the electronic board behind the check-in booth. To Paris.
That was, of course, one of any number of places she and her son were not going tonight.
The flight to the City of Light was scheduled to push back from the gate in seventeen more minutes. She had deliberately chosen Atlanta's leading airline, knowing its storied inability to make an on-time international departure. She supposed that, being a company based in the languid South, posted arrival and departure times were informational only; that is, the plane would definitely not depart or arrive before the time given. How long thereafter was slightly less predictable than the stock market, future interest rates or the next professional athlete to be accused of steroid use. Experience had taught her that taking an international flight on this airline to connect with a foreign carrier's schedule was a guarantee of time to be spent in unplanned places.
But she was not connecting and what she had in mind would work only with a dominant if inefficient airline.
Between scratchy announcements of varied reasons the Paris flight would be predictably delayed, she attempted to keep a wide-eyed Manfred entertained. Or at least from becoming a nuisance to passengers already irritated by the airline's endless supply of excuses. Walks up and down the concourse or following the lights of planes until they disappeared into the night sky worked for the moment. Whenever she left the gate area, her watcher moved to a position where he could see. Several times he muttered into a cell phone.
She surmised she was not the person her minder's superiors were really interested in. They wanted Lang. She was merely someone who might be going to meet him and therefore worth keeping under observation in case Lang slipped his tether. Perhaps they didn't actually know where he was, a fact she doubted. For all she knew, whatever organization the news reader was working for had already hacked into the airline's reservation system. If so, no wonder they had a man to see where she was going after periodic and less-than-subtle tails for the last few days, tails she had regularly evaded. She booked the flight under her own name. The agency's paranoia as to possible adverse publicity regarding unnecessary pseudonymous travel required it when not on agency business.
Excuses finally exhausted, first-class boarding for the Paris flight was announced. Holding Manfred's hand in one of hers, Gurt rolled her suitcase on board with the other. As anticipated, the flight attendant barely glanced at the two boarding passes before both Gurt and her son were ensconced in large, comfortable seats with leg room large enough for an normal adult. It only took a few minutes before a man stood in the aisle, looking from Gurt to his boarding pass and back again.
"You sure you're in the right seat?" he asked, his tone indicating the answer he expected.
Gurt took a long look at the slip she held in her hand. "Flight one seventeen, two A and B."
By this time the flight attendant had arrived. "Wrong flight, honey. This one goes to Paris."
Gurt stood, feigning both surprise and embarrassment. "I am so sorry." She bent over to unbuckle Manfred's seat belt before retrieving her bag from the overhead compartment. "I hope I have not caused .. ."
The displaced passenger's eyes were fixed on the place the top button of her blouse was fastened. "No trouble at all. Hope you make your flight."
Gurt took her time, standing aside as the other passengers trooped aboard like cattle into a pen. When the last one was through the door, she led Manfred up the passageway to the gate area. As she had expected, the man with the newspaper was gone.
She calmly walked down the concourse to the flight she had planned to take all along. She had also planned on the fact its departure would be delayed.
There was something to be said for predictability as a substitute for punctuality.
VIII.
Prague
Lang felt weakness in his knees as he struggled to gasp air through the strangleh
old. The knife's blade was inexorably moving toward his throat. He was smaller than his opponent to begin with; his partially healed injuries had tipped the scales even further.
He leaned backward.
The man behind him reflexively took a step forward, the better to balance dead weight.
That was when Lang brought the heel of his shoe smashing into the arch of the other man's foot.
Metatarsal bones crunched like dry twigs.
Simultaneous with a yelp of pain, the grip around Lang's throat relaxed slightly and he went totally limp. The sudden gravitational pull against the loosened grasp dropped Lang to the floor like a sack of concrete.
Fighting the urge to stop long enough to fill his lungs, Lang rolled across the planks and the worn carpet toward where he had last seen the Browning when it was knocked from his hand.
A bellow of rage made him glance backward. Baldy, his ruined nose covered in a dirty bandage, glared through a pig's bloodshot eyes. He was unable to put weight on his crushed foot. He was padding across the floor on his knees, the switchblade extended.
He swiped at Lang, the blade glittering like a streaking comet in the window's light. As Lang jerked back, before Baldy could draw back again, Lang was on his feet, delivering the hardest kick he could muster to the side of his enemy's head.
He may as well have used a pillow. Baldy wagged that shiny, shaved head like a boxer shaking off a hard right cross and came on, muttering something Lang was happy he could not understand. The intent was clear enough.
Lang gave ground, his eyes searching for his missing weapon, until he felt the wall at his back. His hand touched the top of a chair. Baldy made no effort to dodge as Lang raised it above his own head to bring it crashing down on Baldy's.
Unlike the brittle furniture of cinema, the wood did not shatter or even crack. It did, however, lay Baldy out flat for about a two count before he used a table to struggle to his one good foot and came on, dragging his other.
Talk about hardheaded determination.
Lang slid along the wall as Baldy continued, the knife making small circles in the air. Lang stopped. He waited until his assailant was almost within striking range. Then, leaning back on his left leg, he swung his right in an arc, the foot-sweep common to judo, jujitsu and any other number of martial arts. His foot knocked Baldy's out from under him.