It was nearly midnight when Tarbert Weir let himself out the rear door and set off at a slow walk along the pathway behind the cottages on South Carolina Row. Here and there lights from windows touched the path and lit portions of the groomed, fragrant shrubbery, tipped with new buds. Above the night breezes, there was a faint murmur of voices, the drone of late movies on TV and an occasional clink of glasses.
Weir walked swiftly but easily, swinging his arms and breathing deeply, looking like a midnight jogger in runners’ shoes and gray track suit. It wasn’t until he was out of the immediate resort grounds, passing behind the shuttered crafts workshop and the Greenbrier museum a half mile from the main buildings, that he broke into a run.
His final telephone conversation with General Stigmuller earlier that evening had been as detailed and grave as a wartime briefing. Stigmuller had said, “I can’t condone or even recommend what you’re doing, Scotty, but I understand what’s driving you and you have my word I’ll back you in every way. It’s the old survivor’s shock syndrome, the way a survivor feels after a battle. You look at the casualties and wish you could be, even try to be, part of them in some way. Am I right, Scotty?”
“That’s part of it, Buck,” the general said, “and I’m not sure yet of the other part. But I’m ready now for what you’ve got for me.”
Stigmuller responded by giving him in detail the Army records of Durham Francis Lasari. “You realize, Scotty, that it’s more than ten years since this man was Army. I can’t bring you any more up to date than this.”
“I understand,” Weir said.
“Private Jackson is a different matter,” Stigmuller went on. “We haven’t been able to locate the original enlistment records under that name, with no middle initial given, but a Private George Jackson was assigned orders out of Chicago about ten days ago and he’s been traveling.”
Stigmuller summarized the orders that had been cut and signed for Private Jackson, starting in Chicago and delivering him currently to an assignment in West Germany.
Now, as he broke into a trot, Weir ran the facts of both cases through his mind. He kept his footsteps light on the spongy sod, staying close to the trees and hedge line of the Lakeside golf course, watching for the exact stand of pines he had chosen as his landmark to make his break to the right and begin the climb up Old White Course.
Weir’s single piece of luggage was there, hidden under a patch of wineberries that edged the fairway. He and Laura Devers had played Old White late yesterday. He had picked up an electric golf cart at the clubhouse, driven round to the back door of the guest cottage. First he loaded a half case of iced beer into the cart. Then he slipped his suitcase under the beer, put two sets of clubs into the cart, and called loudly to Laura to join him.
At the ninth hole, Weir had become aware of a solitary golfer shooting behind them, approaching and playing out each hole in a methodical fashion, never too close to the twosome, but never far behind.
On the eleventh hole Weir had pulled his cart off the pathway into the rough and waited. As the lone golfer drove up in his cart, Weir recognized him as the man assigned to the cottage next to his.
“We’re holding you up, friend,” Weir called out to the golfer, a burly man with a thick neck and protuberant eyes. “Why don’t you play through?”
The man stared at Weir in obvious surprise. “No, no, you play on. I didn’t realize I was crowding you.”
Laura Devers smiled. “This is a long vacation for us and I’m afraid I’m learning the game as I go. I’ll be embarrassed if you just don’t play on through.”
The man agreed, took a couple of practice swings, then turned for a last look at Weir. He hit a long drive straight down the fairway, got into his cart and followed the ball into the distance.
At the twelfth hole Laura Devers took six putts on the green and Weir waited until the sound of the lone golfer’s cart was only a faint whine in the distance. Then he removed his luggage and concealed it in the wineberry bushes.
Now, as the ground began to rise slightly, Weir felt the slip of dew under his feet and smelled the mountain chill in the air. The weather was fair with a few scattered clouds lit by a quarter moon.
Weir had instructed Stigmuller that he wanted an unmarked charter helicopter, not an Army requisition, and Stigmuller understood. Weir then gave him time, location and approximate grid coordinates for the twelfth hole. There would be no radio communications, no ground lights. The time would be exactly 0100 hours and the only signal would be a triple Hash from a flashlight on the middle of the twelfth fairway. There would be one passenger and destination would be disclosed when he was on board.
“You don’t want to give me a flight plan, Scotty?” Stigmuller said.
“Trust me, Buck,” Weir said. “I’ll feel a lot more sure of what I’m doing when I get to where I think I ought to be.”
Now he stood in the shadows at the wood’s edge, suitcase in one hand, a powerful flashlight in the other. He felt the approach of the helicopter even before he saw it, a vibration that seemed to come from the earth and up through the soles of his shoes. Moments later he heard a high, metallic hum and saw a triangle of lights coming toward him across the sky like moving stars.
Tarbert Weir ran out into the fairway, crisscrossed the darkness with three brief flashes from his electric torch, then waited while the machine took its bearings and hovered toward the ground, flattening the moonlit grass with its rotors, and then settled like a trained bird.
Weir ran to the helicopter, slung up his luggage and climbed aboard. The flight to Dallas should take two hours, he calculated, then another flight to Mexico City. By late sunrise he would be on a commercial airline, flying east toward Germany.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Bitte and Danke were purebred Alsatians, intelligent, active, but eager for discipline. Duro Lasari had been working out with them for several days in a secluded promenade in Philo Park. The trees and shrubbery were bare now, held together by a series of winding pathways that led directly to Heidelberg’s oldest bridge, a long, graceful stone arch called Alte Brucke. Between the rows of elm and linden the area was alive with strollers, joggers, nursemaids pushing baby carriages, and students on benches, studying with their coat collars turned up against the wind off the river.
Bitte was a cream and silver female and Danke was a black male with huge paws and a thick body, weighing almost fifty pounds. Lasari had been told by Sergeant Strasser that the dogs responded only to German, but their owner wanted them trained to English commands. In the morning Lasari was picked up at the apartment by an armed driver in a military jeep who took his daily orders from Strasser. The training sessions with the dogs were on staggered hours: four hours the first day, then six, then four and so on. At the end of each time period the dogs were returned to the kennels and Lasari was driven back to Strasser’s apartment.
Lasari was working with beginners’ basics, just as he had learned to dog handle in his early army days. He was training both dogs at once, on a double lead system, walking them back and forth at his heels, left and right with single commands — “heel,” “sit,” and “stay.”
He wore civilian clothes, a zippered windbreaker and chinos tucked into short boots. He carried a pair of cuffed leather gloves folded in his back pocket but the dogs did not nip or show a tendency to bite, so he had decided on barehand signals and rewards.