“What are you cleared for?”
“Almost everything. What do you want, Scotty?”
General Weir put his garrison cap on his head and held out his hand. “Thank you, Fritz. I’ll let you know later in the day.”
A cab took him to the headquarters of Belgium’s NATO mission in Germany, a three-story, salmon-colored building situated in the district of Wilhelmshohe, on the outskirts of the immense park which served as a frame for Ludensdorf’s elegantly restored summer palace.
Captain Alain Tranchet-LeRoi was waiting for his visitor in an office on the second floor of the building, a corner room with narrow, leaded windows which faced the park and the shining curve of a river in the distance.
Alain was tall, though not as tall as Weir had expected him to be, and stocky rather than muscular, not quite the athletic appearance the general had expected to see. He must be twenty-nine now, nearing thirty, the general thought, younger than Mark.
They had last met when Alain was eighteen. It had been his birthday and the general had visited him at the university with his mother to celebrate that and a prized soccer victory. Emile LeRoi had been in Holland on business that weekend, Marta had explained to her son. Alain had played for his district and now the university and there was talk that day about a tryout with a professional soccer team in South America.
It had been a festive afternoon, as Weir remembered it, idyllic and mannered, like an Impressionist painting, the college buildings of Louvain purple in the sunlight, the quads emerald green, the soccer field lined with picnic tables.
General Weir offered his hand and then patted Captain Tranchet-LeRoi warmly on the shoulder. “So good to see you, Alain, after all these years. I would not have been surprised if our appointment had been at a stadium somewhere, rather than the military.”
The captain smiled thinly, there was a touch of chill in his clipped careful English. “Establishment football was just a passing thing. I had a head for the game, no pun intended, but on the professional level I was outclassed. I think my father was more disappointed than I was.”
He lit a cigarette from the embossed leather box on his desk and walked to the windows. “My mother told me how glad she was to see you,” he said. “ ‘I feel almost young again, Alain’ was the way she put it.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if to relieve tension. “Christ! If we could give both generations prefrontal lobotomies it might be all to the good.”
“We all have our pasts to live with,” Weir said. “Marta’s and mine happened to cross.”
“Ah, yes, and our futures.” The Belgian gestured with his cigarette, sending a whirl of smoke through the office. “May I show you, sir?”
Tarbert Weir joined him at the window and looked down to the area in the parking lot at which the captain was pointing. He singled out a Belgian staff car, a Mercedes Benz 300 Diesel with black panels, brown fenders and heavy-duty tires. It carried NATO license plates and NATO and Belgian flags bolted to the bumpers. Tranchet-LeRoi’s smile was enigmatic, barely amused. “You couldn’t get that from a soccer player,” he said.
For the next ten minutes General Weir sat on one side of the desk while the captain spread out certain items between them. He was a chain smoker, and he sipped frequently at a coffee cup on his desk though the liquid was obviously cold. He must be more like his father than his mother, Weir thought; there was little of Marta’s vitality and warmth in his manner. The general was aware that the younger man was not meeting his eyes and that his face could have been that of a man of forty rather than a decade younger. There was a look of weariness in the lidded expression. Alain’s hair, while still full, was a fading ash blond, a shade away from gray.
When the items were lined up between them, the captain pushed each one across the desk toward Weir with a well-manicured finger. Besides the key to the Mercedes there was a leather case with NATO markings for the general’s identity cards and a packet of documents with appropriate seals and stamps, defining the temporary assignment for General Tarbert Weir, U.S. Army, retired, now serving as an accredited observer at the NATO field maneuvers in the proscribed areas outside Ludensdorf.
“I would advise you to wear these at all times in the field,” the captain said, pointing to a pair of stretch armbands, each marked: OFFICIAL OBSERVER. “Another one of the improvements since your time,” he added. “These have reflecting threads, and can be seen in the dark.”
He picked up a waterproof pouch, untied the binders and pulled out a small-scale grid map. A long gray ash from his cigarette fell on the map and he blew the residue away with impatience, sending a dust of ash onto the sleeve of Tarbert Weir’s uniform. For a moment the two men’s eyes met and it was Tranchet-LeRoi who turned away first. “My apologies, general,” he said coolly. He made a cross with a pencil on the map. “I have checked rosters and here is where your man should be at 2:00 a.m.”
“And you want this, of course,” he said, dropping a pair of keys on a metal ring to the desktop. “The key to — what was the quaint phrase my mother said you used?”
“ ‘Maison Gris’ is what your group calls them, I believe,” Weir said. “The United Kingdom uses ‘Bluebirds’ and the Germans say ‘Falltur’ or ‘Trapdoor’. The American code word has always been ‘Case Ace’.”
“My mother tells me you were one of the bright military minds who helped organize this ‘safe house’ system, for top political personnel and high Army brass, an emergency escape route.”
“Marta’s wrong there,” Scotty Weir said. “Those escape houses, old ski chalets, country schoolhouses, isolated farms — that route was selected, laid out and supplied in the late 1940s, the time of the first Berlin airlift, in preparation for a ‘worst possible scenario,’ an invasion of the continent by the Russians. It was a concern even then, captain.
“I didn’t organize or pick these hideaways originally, but I did assist in reorganizing and relocating the system in the middle sixties.”
Weir picked up the key ring and examined the small metal tag with the numeral two imprinted on it.
“There are three Case Aces within a fifty mile radius of these maneuvers,” Weir said. “I requested number two because it’s up the mountain, secluded, and the closest to Ludensdorf.”
General Weir gathered the identification documents into the leather folder and put it, with the map pouch and armbands, into his inner tunic pocket. Then he hooked the keys to the Mercedes and the key to Case Ace, number two, onto his personal key ring.
The silence in the office stretched out. The general knew their business was not finished but he was determined the captain would speak first.
Tranchet-LeRoi lit a fifth cigarette with fingers that trembled in anger. “Goddamn your Yankee stubbornness,” he said at last. “You’re not going to ask about the gun, are you?”
“I figured you’d bring it up.”
“All right. A gun is something else, Weir. So far the car, the observer’s credentials, those things are harmless, almost official. But I can’t issue a permit for a regulation service revolver unless you tell me exactly what your plans are.”
“I can’t do that, Alain,” he said.
“Then I have only one option,” the captain said and opened the top desk drawer. “I offer you something personal, something of a family heirloom on my father’s side.” He put a self-loading pistol, the barrel etched with silver inlay, and a small box of ammunition on the desk. “It is in perfect firing condition. I have checked it out myself.” He paused. “It could do the trick for you.”
Weir looked at the gun without touching it. “And it could also get me arrested for carrying an unofficial firearm, couldn’t it? You could pick up that phone before I got out the front gate.”