BY CAROLYN HOWE
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Relieved that Germany has resolutely turned away from neo-Nazism, the United States and a majority of governments around the world have lent their support to new Germany Chancellor Wilhelm Vogel’s bid to “restore Germany’s national pride”…
FIFTY-THREE
“Wer ist denn das?” Vogel called out. Who is this? “Wo ist der Leibwächter?” Where is the bodyguard?
Truslow’s silver hair, I now saw, was still neatly combed; his face was red from the scalding heat, or from anger, but probably from both.
I came nearer to him.
And to me, in a voice soft and caring and gentle, he said: “Please, Ben, stop right there. For your own sake. Don’t worry. I’ve just told them you are a friend, that you must not be harmed. Nothing will be done to you. You will not be hurt.”
He must be killed, I heard. He must be killed at once.
“We’ve been looking all over for you,” Truslow continued sweetly.
Ellison must be eliminated, he thought.
“I must say,” he went on soothingly, “this is the last place in the world I expected to find you. But you’re safe now, and-”
I hurled the tray at Truslow, scattering glass mineral water bottles everywhere. One hit Vogel in the stomach; the others shattered loudly on the tiled floor.
Truslow commanded in German: “Halten Sie diesen Mann auf. Er darf hier nicht lebend herauskommen!”
“Stop this man!” he had shouted. “He must not be allowed to leave here alive!”
I leapt through the door and ran with all my might, with as much speed as I could muster, toward the nearest exit, into the Romerplatz, Truslow’s words echoing in my head. And I knew that for the last time, Alexander Truslow had lied to me.
Molly had the Mercedes idling for me at the Friedrichsbad’s side entrance. She threw the car into gear, sped to the city’s outskirts, and found the autobahn A8. Echterdingen International Airport was only sixty miles or so east, a few miles south of Stuttgart.
For a long time, I didn’t speak.
Finally, I told her what I had seen. She reacted just as I had, with shock, horror, and then white-hot anger.
We both knew now why it was that Truslow had recruited me, why it was that Rossi had deceived me into becoming an Oracle Project subject, why they were so elated to discover that the experiment had worked on me.
A great deal now made sense.
Aloud, as we barreled down the autobahn in Molly’s skilled hands, I pieced it together. “Your father didn’t commit any crime,” I told her. “He wanted to do whatever he could to save Russia. So he agreed to help Vladimir Orlov empty out the Soviet treasury of its gold reserves, help move it abroad, hide it. He had it moved to Zurich, where some of it was put into storage in a vault, and some of it was converted into liquid assets.”
“But where did it go from there?”
“It fell under the control of the Wise Men.”
“Alex Truslow, you mean.”
“Right. By asking me to help track down this missing fortune-which he told me had been diverted by your father-he was actually using me, using my talent, to locate the half of the gold he couldn’t get access to. Because your father had locked it away in the Bank of Zurich.”
“But who’s the co-owner of the account?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Truslow must have suspected that Orlov had stolen the gold. That’s why he employed me to find Orlov, which the CIA hadn’t been able to do.”
“And once you found him-?”
“Once I found him, I could read his thoughts, presumably. And learn where he had put the gold.”
“But Dad was co-owner of the account. So no matter what, Truslow would need my signature!”
“For some reason, Truslow must have wanted us to get to Zurich. What was it that the banker said-by accessing the account, its status was altered from dormant to active?”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know.”
Molly hesitated, let an eighteen-wheeler pass us. “And what if the Oracle Project hadn’t been successful on you?”
“Then he might not have found the gold. Or he might have. But in any case, it would have taken much, much longer.”
“So you’re telling me that Truslow used the five billion he did have access to as-as a fulcrum, to cause the German stock market crash?”
“It fits, Molly. I can’t be certain, but it fits. If Orlov’s information is right, and the Wise Men-read Truslow, and probably Toby, and probably others-”
“Who now run CIA-”
“-Yes. If the Wise Men really used Agency intelligence to gather inside information on foreign markets, and were able somehow to engineer the U.S. stock market crisis of 1987, it must have been these same people who pulled off the far bigger German one.”
“But how?”
“You channel a paltry few billion dollars-deutsche marks-secretly and suddenly into the German stock market. Used swiftly and suddenly, by experts with access to computer trading accounts, it can be used to acquire vast sums of money on credit in order to destabilize an already weak market. To seize control of much larger assets. To buy and sell on margin, buy and sell, using computerized program trading, at a speed possible only in this age of computers.”
“But for what?”
“For what?” I echoed. “Look at what’s happened. Vogel and Stoessel are about to control Germany. Truslow and the Wise Men now control CIA…”
“And?”
“And-I don’t know.”
“But who’s going to be killed?”
I didn’t have the answer to that exactly, but I knew that there was a leak-someone who knew about this conspiracy between Truslow’s people and Stoessel’s, between Germany and America. And this person, whoever it was, was about to testify before the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence hearings on corruption in CIA. “Corruption,” that is, masterminded by the new Director of Central Intelligence, Alexander Truslow.
A secret witness was about to blow the whole thing in two days. If he (or she) was not killed first.
At Echterdingen Airport I tracked down a private airline and a pilot who was about to go home for the evening. I offered him double what he normally got for flying to Paris, and he turned around, donned his flight jacket, and guided us to his small plane. He radioed ahead for clearance to land, received it, and then we took off.
At something after two in the morning we arrived at Charles de Gaulle, went through the briefest of customs formalities, and got a cab into Paris. We got off at the Duc de Saint-Simon, on the rue Saint-Simon in the seventh arrondissement, woke the night clerk who dozed at the concierge desk, and wheedled a spare room. She was not happy about being disturbed. Molly halfheartedly insisted upon accompanying me on my nocturnal mission, but she was feeling queasy from the pregnancy and was easily dissuaded.
Paris, to me, wasn’t just one of the world’s great cities; it was, or at least it had become, a stage set for my recurrent nightmares. Paris wasn’t the Île and the Left Bank and the rue Royale. It was the rue Jacob, that dark, narrow, echoing street where Laura and my future child were murdered and James Tobias Thompson III was paralyzed for life in a sequence that repeated and repeated itself, became more and more ritualized and grotesque and artificial. Paris had become a synonym for tragedy.
Yet I had no choice but to return.
Now I found myself in a depressing second-floor-walk-up photographer’s studio on a seedy strip along the rue de Sèze. Below were forbidding little black-painted storefronts marked with signs that read SEX SHOP and VIDEO and SEXODROME and LINGERIE LATEX CUIR and the flashing green crosses of the Grande Pharmacie de la Place.