Terminal tac-2

by Colin Forbes

  `I'm sorry to be so late…'

  `But you phoned me first…' She was pouring wine into the two elegant glasses already waiting on a low table. `… and like you, I'm an owl, a creature who prefers the night, who perches on branches and hoots a mournful sound!'

  I think I'd have trouble getting up a tree these days,' he observed. 'Cheers! And this is very welcome. Do you see your stepfather often?'

  `Hardly ever. We don't see eye to eye on anything. He goes his way, I go mine. He doesn't even know what I do to earn my living – at least I don't think so. He is the sort of man who seems to know about almost everything that's happening in Switzerland. He's not regular Army.'

  `I see,' said Tweed, and left it at that. imagine it's far too early for you to have found out anything about the man whose name I gave you?'

  Shoeless, she was wearing her black leather pants with a white blouse which, even in the dim light of shaded table lamps, displayed in all its glory her cascade of titian hair. She had perched herself next to him on the arm of the sofa, her long legs crossed. He suspected she was capable of teasing him and for a moment wished he had such a daughter, a lively, mischievous girl you could carry on an intelligent conversation with for hours.

  `I do already have some possible information about Manfred Seidler,' she said. 'The trouble is ethics are involved – and you were cryptic on the phone. Could I trace a man who had flown in from Vienna very recently on a private Swiss jet. And could I also get any info. on this Seidler type. Are they the same person?'

  `Frankly, I don't know,' Tweed replied evasively. 'The man who flew in from Vienna is important. Seidler is purely an inspired guess on my part. I know a lot about him and his activities. Always close to the borderline of legality and, sometimes, probably over the edge.' He drank more of his wine and she refilled his glass. 'This is really excellent. What's your problem about ethics? Not another client?'

  `You cunning old serpent..' She ruffled his hair. He couldn't remember when he had last let a woman do that to him but Blanche made it seem the most natural, affectionate gesture in the world. 'Yes, another client,' she said.

  `It's important – to my country,' he said, gazing at the photo. 'So probably to yours. We're all in the same boat.'

  `You know, I'd hate to be interrogated by you. You're too damned persuasive by half.'

  He waited, sipping his wine. She had dropped her hand so it rested on his shoulder. He glanced up from behind his glasses and she was staring into space. He still kept quiet.

  `All right,' she said. 'It means breaking a confidence with a client for the first time, but I'm assuming you wouldn't let me do that unless it was something very serious. I'm placing all my integrity in your hands. For me,' she continued on a lighter note, 'that's equivalent to entrusting you with my one-time virginity…'

  `That's safe enough with me,' he said drily.

  `Bob Newman, foreign correspondent. He asked me only this week to trace a Manfred Seidler. I may have got lucky – but I'm not sure. I have an address-and a phone number-for a Manfred. No guarantees issued that he's Seidler, but he does sound like him…'

  `Address, phone number…'

  Tweed had his small notebook on his lap, his old-fashioned fountain pen in his hand. She gave him both items of information out of her head. He knew that both would be correct. Like himself she only had to see a face once, hear a name, read an address or phone number, and it was registered on her brain for ever.

  `What I've given you,' she went on, 'are the details of a girl called Erika Stahel. She may be Seidler's girl friend. Incidentally, Stahel is spelt…'

  `It sounds as though he may be holed up in Basle,' Tweed suggested. 'If it is Seidler…'

  `I've no idea. I have an idea I'm going to regret giving you this information.'

  `You expect to see this foreign correspondent, Newman, again soon?'

  `Why?' she asked sharply.

  `Just that I wondered whether you had any idea what story he is working on…'

  `You're going too far!' The annoyance showed in her tone and she didn't care. She stood up from the sofa arm, walked across to a chair and sat facing him, crossing her legs again. He gazed into her startling blue eyes and thought how many men would be clay in her slim hands, clay to mould into any shape she wished. She spoke angrily.

  `Again you ask me to betray a confidence. Are you really working for the Ministry of Defence in London? I keep your secrets. If I give away other people's, you should cease trusting me!'

  `I spend most of my life in a thoroughly boring way – reading files…'

  `Files on people I have helped you track across Europe…'

  `Files on people who are dangerous to the West. Switzerland is now part of the West in a way it never has been before. No longer is neutrality enough…'

  He took off his glasses and started polishing them on his pocket handkerchief. Blanche reacted instantly, tossing her mane of hair as she clicked her fingers. He paused, holding the glasses in his lap.

  `You're up to something!' she told him. 'I always can tell when you're plotting some devious ploy. You take off those glasses and start cleaning them!'

  He blinked, thrown off balance for a moment. She was getting to know him too well. He put away the handkerchief and looped the glasses behind his ears, sighing deeply.

  `Is Newman interested in the Berne Clinic at Thun?' he asked quietly.

  `Supposing he was?' she challenged him.

  `I might be able to help him.' He reached inside his pocket, brought out Mason's notebook and handed it to her. 'In there is information he might find invaluable. You type, of course? I suggest you type out every word inside that notebook. He must not see the notebook itself. Give him your typed report without revealing your source. Make up some plausible story – you are perfectly capable of doing that, I know. I'll collect the notebook when next I see you.'

  `Tweed, what exactly are you up to? I need to know before I agree. I like Newman…'

  The data from that notebook will keep him running.'

  `Oh, I see.' She ran a hand through her hair. 'You're using him. You use people, don't you?'

  `Yes.' He thought it best not to hesitate. 'Isn't it always the way,' he commented sadly. 'We use people. We all use each other.'

  Reaching inside his breast pocket he brought out an envelope containing Swiss banknotes. He was careful to hand it to her with formal courtesy. She took it and dropped it on the floor beside her chair, a sign that she was still annoyed.

  `I expect it's too much for what I've done,' she remarked. Her mood changed as the blue eyes watched him. Uncrossing her legs, she pressed her knees together, clasped her hands so the fingers pointed at him and leaned forward. 'What is it? Something is worrying you.'

  `Blanche, I want you to take great care during the next week or two. There have been two killings, probably three. What I am going to say is in the greatest confidence. I think someone may be eliminating anyone who knows what is going on inside the Berne Clinic…'

  Will Newman know?' she asked quickly.

  `He is one of the world's top foreign correspondents. He will know. Providing him with that typed report may well be a form of protection. What I am getting at is this – no one must connect you even remotely with that Clinic. I am staying at the Bellevue Palace. Room 312. Do not hesitate to call me if anything happens that worries you. And use the name Rosa- not your own.'

  She was astonished and perturbed. It was out of character for Tweed to reveal his whereabouts, let alone to suggest that she could call him. Always before he had called her. She gave a little shiver as he stood up to go and then ran to help him on with his coat.

  `It's time you bought yourself a new sheepskin. I know a shop…'

  `Thank you, but this is like an old friend. I hate breaking in new things – coats, shoes. I will be in touch. Don't you forget to call me. Anything unusual. An odd phone call. Anything. If I'm out leave a message. "Rosa called…" '

  `And you take care, too.' She
kissed him on the cheek and he squeezed her forearm. He was glad to see that before opening the door she peered through the fish-eye spyglass. `All clear,' she announced briskly.

  As he trudged homeward up the Junkerngasse through the silent tunnel Tweed's mind was a kaleidoscope of conflicting and disturbing impressions. Berne was like a rabbit warren, a warren of stone.

  As the raw wind fleeced the back of his head exposed above his woollen scarf he remembered standing by the Plattform wall, staring down at the frothing sluices where poor Mason had been found. Mason had done his job so well – the notebook was a mine of suggestive information.

  But the image which kept thrusting into his mind was that silver-framed portrait of Colonel Signer in Blanche's sitting-room. That had been the greatest shock of all. Victor Signer who was now president of the Zurcher Kredit Bank, the driving force behind the Gold Club.

  Twenty-Five

  Friday, 17 February. Kobler stood behind the desk in his first floor office at the Berne Clinic, his back to the huge smoked glass picture window overlooking the mountains beyond Thun. It was ten o'clock in the morning and he was staring at the large man with the tinted glasses who again remained in the shadows. The soft voice spoke with a hint of venom.

  `Bruno, you do realize that last night's experiment was a disaster.' It was a statement, not a question. 'How could the Laird woman possibly have left the grounds? Now we have no way of knowing whether the experiment succeeded or not…'

  Kobler never ceased to be astounded by the Professor's colossal self-confidence, by the way he could focus his mind like a burning-glass on a single objective. Wasn't it Einstein who had said, 'Clear your mind of all thoughts except the problem you are working on' – or something like that? And Einstein had been another genius.

  Kobler's mind was full of the problem of the police holding the Laird woman's body and the dangerous developments that could lead to. All of this seemed to pass the Professor by. As though reading his thoughts, the soft voice continued.

  `I leave to you, Bruno, of course, the measures which may be necessary to deal with those tiresome people who had the impertinence to interfere last night.'

  `It will be attended to,' Kobler assured him. 'I may have more positive news – about Manfred Seidler…'

  `Well, go on. God knows you've been searching for him for long enough. Another tiresome distraction.'

  `I concentrated men in Zurich, Geneva – and Basle,' Kobler explained. 'Knowing Seidler, I felt sure he would hide himself in a large city – one not too far from the border. The most likely, I decided, was Basle. Not Zurich because of the works at nearby Horgen he is too well-known there. Not Geneva because the place crawls with agents of all kinds who spend their lives looking for people. So, the largest number of men I put on the ground in Basle – and it paid off…'

  `Do tell me how.'

  The flat, bored tone warned Kobler he was talking too much. The events of the previous night had imposed an enormous strain on him. He came to the point.

  `We got lucky. One of our people spotted Seidler walking into the rail terminal. He bought a return ticket to Le Pont up in the Jura mountains. It's a nowhere place, a dot on the map. The interesting thing is he didn't use the ticket right away. He just bought his ticket and left the station. We are covering that station with a blanket. When he does use that ticket we'll be right behind him. I'm flying Graf and Munz to Basle Airport from the airstrip at Lerchenfeld…'

  `They leave when?'

  `They are on their way now.' Kobler checked his watch. 'I expect them to be at Basle Hauptbahnhof within the hour. And Le Pont would be an excellent place to deal with the final solution to the Seidler problem. Everything is under control,' he ended crisply.

  `Not everything,' the voice corrected him. 'My intuition tells me the main danger is Robert Newman. You will yourself delete that debit item from the ledger…'

  Having gone to bed in the middle of the night, Newman and Nancy slept until the middle of the following morning. Newman, for once, agreed without protest to the suggestion that they use Room Service for a late breakfast.

  They ate in exhausted silence after dressing. The weather had not improved: another pall of dense cloud pressed down on the city. Nancy was in the bathroom when the phone rang and Newman answered it.

  Who was that?' she asked when she came back into the bedroom.

  `It was for you.' Newman grinned. 'Another wrong number…'

  `That's supposed to be funny?'

  `It's the best I can do just after breakfast. And I'm going out to see someone about what happened last night. Don't ask me who. The less you know the better the way things are turning out…'

  `Give her my love…'

  Which, Newman reflected, as he walked down the Munstergasse, had been a shrewder thrust than Nancy probably realized. The brief call had been from Blanche Signer. The photographs she had taken of the Berne Clinic from the snow-covered knoll were developed and printed. The surprise, when he arrived at her apartment, was that she was not alone. Carefully not revealing his name, she introduced a studious-looking girl who wore glasses and would be, Newman judged, in her late twenties.

  `This is Lisbeth Dubach,' Blanche explained. 'She's an expert on interpreting photographs – normally aerial photos. I've shown her those I took of the Fribourg complex. She's found something very odd…'

  The Fribourg complex. Blanche, Newman realized, was showing great discretion. First, no mention of his name. Now she was disguising the fact that the photos were taken at the Berne Clinic. On a corner table where a lamp was switched on stood an instrument Newman recognized in the middle of a collection of glossy prints.

  The instrument was a stereoscope used for viewing a pair of photographs taken of the same object at slightly different angles. The overall effect obtained by looking through the lenses of the instrument conjured up a three-dimensional image. Newman recalled reading somewhere that during World War Two a certain Flight Officer Babington-Smith had – by using a similar device – detected from aerial photos the first solid evidence that the Nazis had created successfully their secret weapon, the flying bomb. Now another woman, Lisbeth Dubach, years later, was going to show him she had discovered what? As he approached the table he was aware of a tingling sensation at the base of his neck.

  `This building,' Dubach began, 'is very strange. I have only once before seen anything similar. Take a look through the lenses, please…'

  The laboratory! The building jumped up at Newman in all its three-dimensional solidity as though he were staring down at it from a very low-flying aircraft. He studied the photos and then stood upright and shook his head.

  `I'm sorry, I don't see what you're driving at…'

  `Look again, please! Those chimneys – their tips. You see the weird bulges perched on top – almost like huge hats perched on top?'

  `Yes, I see them now…' Newman was stooped again gazing through the lenses, trying to guess what he was looking at could mean. Once again he gave it up and shook his head.

  `I must be thick,' he decided. 'I do now see what you've spotted but I can't detect anything sinister..

  `Once while visiting England,' Dubach explained, 'I made a trip to your nuclear plant at Windscale, the plant where Sir John Cockcroft insisted during its design that they had to install special filters on the chimneys…'

  `Oh, Christ!' Newman muttered to himself.

  `There was a near-disaster at Windscale later,' Dubach continued. 'Only the filters stopped a vast radiation cloud escaping. The filters you are looking at now at the Fribourg complex are very similar..

  `But one thing we can tell you,' Newman objected, 'is that this building has nothing whatever to do with nuclear power.'

  `There is something there they are making which needs the protection of similar filters,' Dubach asserted.

  Newman, still absorbing the appalling implications of what Lisbeth Dubach had detected in the photos, now found himself subjected to a fresh shock.

  As so
on as they were alone, Blanche produced a sheaf of papers from an envelope and placed them on the sofa between them. They were, Newman observed, photocopies of typed originals. He had no suspicion that – by making photocopies of the sheets she had typed from the notebook – Blanche was protecting her source, Tweed.

  She had gone to the length of typing them single-spaced, whereas her normal typing method was double-spacing, as Newman was well aware. She was careful with her explanation.

  `Bob, I can't possibly tell you the identity of the client concerned. I'm breaking my iron-clad rule as it is – never to show information obtained for one client to another…'

  `Why?' Newman demanded. 'Why are you doing it now?'

  `Bob, don't push me! The only reason I'm showing you this data is because I happen to be very fond of you. I know you are investigating the Berne Clinic. What worries me is you may not realize what – who – you are up against. If you read these photocopies it might put you more on your guard. The power wielded by this man is quite terrifying…'

  `So I read these and give them back to you?'

  `No, you can take them with you. But for God's sake, you don't know where they came from. They were delivered to you at the Bellevue Palace. See, I've typed an envelope addressed to you at the Bellevue Palace. They were left with the concierge at the hotel…'

  `If that's the way you want to play it…'

  `I'll make you coffee while you're reading them. I could do with some myself. What Lisbeth Dubach told us has scared the wits out of me. What have we got into?'

  Newman didn't reply as he picked up the photocopies and started reading. The report on Professor Armand Grange had, he realized quickly, been prepared by an experienced investigator who wasted no words. There were also signs that he – or she – had been working under pressure.

  SUBJECT: Professor Armand Grange. Born 1924 at Laupen, near Berne. Family wealthy – owners of watchmaking works. Subject educated University of Lausanne. Brief period military service with Swiss Army near end World War Two.

  Rumoured to be member of specialist team sent secretly into Germany to obtain quantity of the nerve gas, TABUN, ahead of advancing Red Army. Note: Repeat, rumour – not confirmed.