Circle Around the Sun

by M. D. Johnson

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

  They finished their sumptuous meal and took a brisk after-dinner walk around Ziegelhausen. The village sat snugly on the north side of the Neckar valley. Emily had chosen this as the perfect place to live, not just because of its proximity to the city of Heidelberg, but because of its closeness to the River Neckar itself. The village was also a stones throw from the Odenwald forest, the perfect place for hiking. Their three story apartment building was nestled on a winding hilltop lane that still had cobblestones showing. Little had changed from the way it had looked in 850 A.D. when Ziegelhausen was founded. Emily found it still possible, even in 1974, when the almost magical early morning mist rose from the river, to imagine this was how it may have looked to the early Celts who had settled on what they called Heilingenberg or the Holy Mountain. Like her home in Chester, the Romans had also occupied Ziegelhausen, bringing with them their knowledge of viniculture, but wine growing was not what the area was best known for. Textiles and archeological findings dating back to the Stone Age made this a research paradise. For Emily, Heidelberg and Ziegelhausen seemed like a fairytale complete with castles, ancient bridges, an amphitheatre and a time honored university, but she knew that soon she would settle her family in another place and they would have to begin anew. Right now however, she was enjoying a perfect late summer evening in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

  As they walked back up the hill to their apartments they were surprised to find two vehicles with British Diplomatic plates lurking in their driveway. The doors opened as they approached and Colonel Beresford, Wils de Crecy and Tony Shallal alighted from the cars.

  “What an honor, Gentlemen,” Emily said somewhat sarcastically, as she opened the apartment’s main door allowing them all to enter.

  ‘Good to see you, Em.” Wils de Crecy hugged her and Emily, who usually backed away from such public demonstrations of affection found herself taking in gulps of his cologne, wondering where she had encountered it before. It was sharp, tangy and it clung to her for several minutes after she entered her home. She knew it from somewhere else, yet she couldn’t place it.

  “Hello Tony, how are you? I’m very glad to see you again. Gentlemen,” she said, addressing all of them, “this is my friend and neighbor Margot Blatz and these are my children, Mason and Haley.”

  “Masud, it is good to see you again.” Tony Shallal lifted him up with one arm while he knelt down to greet Haley. “How old are you now, Hallah?”

  For no apparent reason other than his use of her Arabic name, Hallah, who was three going on twelve, responded to Shallal’s question in Arabic. Shallal was astounded, even more so when Mason, as if complying with his sister’s prompt told Shallal in Farsi that he was four and three months. Hallah, now given center stage switched to German. Her brother followed suit until their mother, calling them both a couple of showoffs hurried them into the bathroom where Margot Blatz, having excused herself followed them both inside.

  “Would anyone like a drink?” Emily closed the door of her study where by now the three men were seated.

  “Good grief, Em, how the hell do you cope with those two?” Crecy asked.

  “They’re no problem. Wait until you see the cat and dog,” she replied, acknowledging the scratching on the door and the distinctive yowling of the Siamese cat.

  “How many languages do the children speak?” asked Shallal, helping himself to soda water.

  “You’ve heard most of them. English, German, Arabic, Pashto and Farsi, plus a little French and Italian, because of the au-pairs that I have from time to time. Generally we speak in a combination of English and Arabic.”

  “Hallah is a beautiful child, Amina. She looks a lot like her grandmother,” Shallal said.

  “The sainted Elizabeth! You must be joking!” she replied with a laugh. “Masud, though, is the mirror image of my father”

  Shallal looked at the boy intensely and added sadly “But he has Ghulam’s smile.” Emily felt uncomfortable, as she usually did whenever she spoke of her former husband.

  “As you know, Emily,” Colonel Beresford began, “for the past couple of years, in fact since the Munich Olympics Massacre, the Israeli Government under directive of their Prime Minister has taken part in a series of covert operations, achieving tactical and operational success against the Palestinian guerilla group known as Black September, the group who by their own admission were responsible for the murder of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team. We know that Black September was being controlled by Yasser Arafat, also known as Abu Ammar who has of late been trying to distance himself from the organization, in the interests of world peace we are given to understand! The fact remains that since 1972, the Israelis have had a very interesting method of eliminating their terrorist obstacles. The Golda Meir Directive to Mossad was to develop an ultra top secret covert operation to search out and destroy the PLO terrorist leaders that they believed either directly through Black September or indirectly through the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction association were behind the Munich incident. The Israeli objective was to show that no one could stage a strike against their citizens without fatal consequences. The Israelis sent the message that they would seek and achieve retribution anywhere and everywhere. Money, time, personnel and world approval were of no consequence. They achieved their goal through multiple layers of secrecy, keeping the mission compartmentalized and creating assassination teams outside the reach of even their own political and intelligence red tape. They created the almost perfect hit squad. Each team operated unimpeded and with decentralized control under the auspices of their government.”

  Beresford helped himself to Emily’s Glenfiddich and continued, “But Emily, even at the highest level they could still retain plausible deniability if, as our cousins across the pond would say, the proverbial shit hit the fan! So far of the eleven primary targets, five have been tracked and assassinated along with three additional terrorists killed in a commando raid. All hard targets! There were some casualties of course. The Lilliehammer affair was a bloody disaster.”

  Staring at Emily to achieve a more dramatic effect he said slowly, “But there’s also a question of the freelance assassin; who recruited her, who were her friends and who killed her if it wasn’t the Israelis. We’re all grown up here, we know our tradecraft. No matter how hard we try to institute effective security we always need to recruit outside agents as well as our trained and handpicked operatives. Emily, you know as well as I that it is becoming bloody impossible to operate without creating a body of evidence or a paper trail. But sometimes we can get into a real pickle using British corporate executives or representatives, not to mention specially recruited tourists or diplomats and the like. It’s become just too much of a risk. Those buggers in Whitehall who do operational strategy want to investigate what happened to the woman assassin. Look my dear; I have a source in Israeli intelligence who has told me Mossad was not responsible. And if they weren’t, and she was in the employ of the Palestinians, we can assume they didn’t knock her off. That leaves someone on our side. We simply have to know Emily, and you were perhaps the first person on the scene as well as one of the few people with the connections who can find out who killed her and why.”

  “No! Absolutely not! I do not want to get involved in this Mata Hari stuff ever again. I thought I’d made this perfectly clear. I’m planning on leaving Europe entirely. I’m getting married.” On this fine point, Emily had of course stretched the truth, but looking at their astonished faces, her lie made it all worthwhile. “I have the children to consider,” she added with intentional guilt. She rose to let the cat and puppy into the study, but was somewhat surprised when they actually entered. Both animals had so far shown themselves to be very friendly, but coming into the room, the large Siamese cat began hissing and spitting while the puppy, who just few hours ago had been tail-wagging and happy now cowered and rooted himself to the spot. “Excuse me,” said Emily, “let me take them into the children’s room, they’
re not used to people.”

  It was when she picked up the cat and placed it on the blanket she had taken from Ulla’s place that she noticed the smell on its fur. She picked up the blanket and the odor was there as well. It was cologne. It was de Crecy’s cologne!

  When she returned, she faced Beresford and declared, “On second thought, let me consider this and I’ll ring you tomorrow. I’m leaving for Paris in a few weeks to meet with my son’s grandparents. We are all briefly visiting Afghanistan and then the children and I are going onto the States. I’ll be here for a few months more after we get back, tying up loose ends, waiting for immigration visas and then we’re gone for good.”

  “May we ask who the lucky man is, Amina?” asked Shallal.

  “You may indeed, but I’m under no obligation to respond with an answer! And now gentlemen, if you will all excuse me, I have a lot of work to do tonight. It has been interesting, but I am truly exhausted. Perhaps we can continue this another time. Let me show you out!” Staring at Beresford and trying to silently signal him, she led them all to the door. And when she heard their footsteps descend the marble staircase, she double locked the door and loaded her pistol, placing it in the convenient topmost draw of the hallway credenza, accessible but out of reach of the children.

  “Emily, that was short and sweet!” Margot Blatz had finished bathing the children and was putting them into their beds.

  “I’ll be there in a moment,” she called in to them, “Quiet down you two!”

  “Margot, where did I put the large shopping bag I brought back from my trip?”

  “Actually, I moved it. It’s in the laundry room. It stinks! Not just the cat pee either. It has this rancid perfumed smell mixed with the cat and dog odor. Now it reaks like rotten fruit. It’s horrible. I don’t know how you drove back with it.”

  “I didn’t. It was in the trunk. I bought carriers for the animals.”

  Emily wasted no time in find the bag that had held the blanket. By now the odor on the blanket was faint, but it was still unmistakably strong in the bag. It was de Crecy’s cologne. This meant only one thing. Crecy, or someone wearing the same cologne had been in contact with the animals prior to Emily’s arrival. Whether he had killed Verena was speculation.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

  Emily spent most of the night wondering how she could check Verena’s last moves without stirring the interest of Wilfred de Crecy. If de Crecy had killed Verena he wouldn’t be tried in any British or even an international court. He was a “Gentleman”, she was a terrorist and he had probably done the world a favor. As Emily saw it this wasn’t killing a combatant, an act of war or even self-defense. Verena, and Emily saw her bloodied, crumpled shape ever so clearly in her mind, had been unarmed. This had been a brutal execution.

  What could Verena have known or done to prompt such an action? We are the dogs of war, she told herself. Verena was a hired assassin, yet this was no ordinary balancing of the books. It was an act of revenge. Verena’s face was almost unrecognizable. Had it not been for the girl’s beautiful hands and her long slender fingers that Emily had always felt belonged to a musician, not a salesgirl or a killer, Emily would not have been able to identify her. What she did know for sure was that she should not return alone to Holland. If she did return, it had to be in an official capacity. Perhaps she should first talk with someone else. Someone neutral. She dialed Harrison Cowan in the United States.

  “Harry, I hate to ask you this, but something truly bizarre has happened and I can’t really discuss it over the phone. Is there any possibility that you can come over here for a short holiday or something? I’ll pick up the tab. Make it a business trip or something, but this is really important.”

  “Morning Emily. Yes I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Cowan replied somewhat sarcastically, his Linlithgow accent being more pronounced when he was half asleep. “Actually, I was just going to ring you because I’ll be in Europe in a week. I can hear there’s something amiss, but I’m afraid I can’t get there until Monday of next week if I can get a flight out of Baltimore at all, and I have to be in Amsterdam the following Thursday to meet with a new client.”

  “Actually, Harrison that’s both both weird and bloody perfect” Emily replied smiling to herself at the synchronicity of it all, “I need to be in the Hoorn about that time as well. Check in to the Amsterdam Park Hotel and I’ll join you there. Get a suite with office capabilities, alright?”

  “Certainly, but can you give me hint before I go halfway around the world? I’m a bit long in the tooth for rescuing damsels in distress. I can scuba dive though. I mean forty isn’t that old, I suppose.”

  “Christ Harrison, do stop chunnering. You’re a bloody lunatic. A girl has been killed.”

  “Damn it all Emily, stop right there. I thought we’d agreed to end this cloak and dagger stuff. You’re being used by those bastards, you know that. You’re not MI6, you’re just someone they run every once in a while. Human Intelligence, they call it, monitored by sub-humans with neither heart nor conscience. Frankly, if we are going any place in life, I’d rather there was no involvement by you in the field.”

  “Harrison, this is why I am so reluctant to marry. I cannot accept orders and all the men I’ve ever met keep giving them. Can’t you just trust me to know when something is right?”

  “Now steady on, Emily. You’ve got two children to raise. What the hell are they going to do if something happens to you? Maybe it’s about time you thought of them for a change. Her Majesty doesn’t give knighthoods to women. You’re up against a brick wall with British Intelligence. It’s a laddie’s club m’dear, that’s the root of it. They use women and foreigners. Can y’not understand that? You’re being loyal to the wrong cause. Your first duty is to your family, not the Government. You’re not a signed on civil servant. You’re just a consultant and if you want to live a long and uncomplicated life, ye’ll keep it that way. And yes, I’ll meet you in Amsterdam. Tell the children and Frau Blatz I said hello and why don’t you ask that lovely lady if she’d like to work for me here, then I can keep an eye on all of you?”

  “Harrison, I love you.”

  “Only because I look like Sean Connery and have a powerful Scottish accent that all women adore. And no, I’ll not be wearing a white carnation in the hotel lobby so you can recognize me under my deep cover.”

  “But my dear Harrison, you could always sit there naked instead and hold the carnation between your teeth or some other select place.”

  “You madam, have a wicked mouth. There’ll be no nasty talk on my phone, young lady, if you don’t mind. See you in a few!”

  CHAPTER NINETY

  Emily told Margot that she had to return to Holland in a few days and invited her along for the trip. They could drive there in relative comfort, enjoy the scenery and she’d get to see Harrison Cowan. Frau Blatz had met Harrison briefly during his last visit and the two had gotten along famously. It was evident Margot was very pro any plans that included Harrison and Emily as a team. So as not to surprise her unduly, Emily mentioned Harrison’s comments on employment to her. As expected, Margot declined the trip as well as any move to America. She would, however, consider running any business operations he had in Germany. Perhaps, she added, he could make his European headquarters here in the apartment, which would mean that they would always have a place to stay as well. She could charge him by the contract and that would be easier from a tax standpoint than full-time employment. She was, as Emily readily understood, settled here. She had a retirement pension and as a retiree from the American military system she would not be hassled unduly for visa requirements should she need to briefly visit the continental United States. Why then should she leave, when the world was getting so much smaller? and Emily accepted her explanation without question.

  The telephone call to Archie Beresford was not a simple as she had imagined it would be. She felt quite strongly that she should meet with him for lunch and did not want to alarm him by suggesting that the
meeting be in private, without the presence of Shallal or de Crecy. In particular, she had told him, she did not care to report to de Crecy under any circumstances. She did not like the man at all, nor did she trust him! Beresford was horrified.

  “But you have been assigned to him,” he was becomingly increasingly annoyed.

  “Colonel, let me remind you once again, I don’t work for you. I’m a consultant. I can be as non-cooperative as I choose.”

  “You are on assignment for us, Emily and your contact will be Wilfred de Crecy!”

  “In that case Colonel, I decline the assignment. But I will research the case anyway and I’m sure Interpol as well as the Dutch police will be more than happy to accept my findings.”

  “And how will you explain your presence at the scene?”

  Anyway I want to, Colonel. I’m a researcher and I’ll have a security expert of international reputation with me!”

  “The Scotsman, I presume?”

  “My fiancé, Colonel Beresford.”

  The call ended unceremoniously on that note.

  CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

  Emily made one more trip into the City of Heidelberg, taking the children with her. Stopping at Ulla’s Boutique, she was very surprised to find the place locked and boarded up with a massive sign outside indicating that it was for sale and giving realtor contact information.

  Emily and the children went next door to the Italian coffee bar. They were led in by a round, heavy-set man whose broad smile was most welcoming. He seated them quickly at a window table where he could stand between them and the passers-by outside.

  “Madam Desai, please act naturally. We are being observed by a man in the doorway across the street. He has been looking for Fraulein Ulla. He came in not ten minutes ago asking for you as well. This has been going on for a few days now. Maybe he cannot read the signs, but she has gone. The place is for sale. I think he may have broken into the shop. I’m too afraid to call the Polizei because he does not look like a thief and I am only a gast arbeiter who manages this place. Who will they believe, eh? Please order your coffee and I will come back with a lunch menu. Look inside it and you will find a letter from Fraulein Ulla for you.”