The Casey Collins Trilogy

7

7Goose bumps rose along my arms. I’d underestimated van Hoof. He’d stopped me with brutal finality. I shivered, chilled by new understanding. If I tried to take control again, I had to succeed. Van Hoof wouldn’t give me a third chance.

We continued west toward Utrecht, passing canals and earthen dikes, the gray sky blending with the washed-out colors of the ground and the stone buildings to blur the horizon. The dismal landscape matched my dreary mood. The last time I’d found myself at such a miserable disadvantage, I’d been in Poland. It was during that awful week in April of 1986, following the US air attack on Tripoli. Stefan had vanished and I’d been threatened with death by Abu Nidal’s hired guns.

Frightened, I fled to the lake region northeast of Warsaw to hide. I evaded my pursuers but Stefan turned up after twenty-four hours. He insisted he was there to guard me. I thought it more likely he’d come to seduce me but I was too scared to refuse protection from a former member of the czerwony berety, Poland’s elite Red Beret commandos. I promised myself I’d be strong. I wouldn’t sleep with a man I still believed to be an enemy agent.

The place I’d chosen to hide was near Wolf’s Lair, the spot where Hitler’s officers had tried to kill him in 1944. Stefan told me that Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase containing an explosive charge beneath the table in the conference barracks. Then the colonel found an excuse to leave the meeting. Unfortunately, a colleague moved the briefcase behind an oak table leg. The room was destroyed but Hitler survived.

I knew what happened to the conspirators and I stopped Stefan before he got to the part about the meat hooks.

He paused and said, “I have always had a great fondness for Colonel von Stauffenberg.”

I knew he was speaking his heart’s truth to me. And with fewer than a dozen words, he wiped out my power to resist him. We became lovers that night. We’d been lovers ever since. Until now.

The muscles in my stomach cramped. The pain dragged me back to my dreary present. Beside me in the car, something squeaked. Van Hoof had shifted in his seat. I glanced his way, caught him staring at me.

Had I moaned? I might have. I cleared my throat, stared straight ahead. The wipers slapped rhythmically across the windshield. The drizzle had grown into a shower. And I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life before that moment. Stefan was gone. Nothing I did would bring him back. I tried to console myself with van Hoof’s words, that there was nothing more important than Stefan’s mission. It was how he’d have chosen to die—working toward something that mattered. True, but it gave me no comfort.

Traffic got heavier as we turned south past the exits for Rotterdam and Antwerp. By midafternoon, we’d parked in a lot behind a building in downtown Brussels. Van Hoof pulled the ski cap down over my eyebrows again, then hurried me through a side entrance into a deserted lobby. A huge arrangement of cut flowers gave off a funereal odor. I thought suddenly of my mother. She’d been haunted by imaginary peril for most of her adult life. Four years ago, she’d missed the lump in her breast.

Van Hoof snatched a newspaper from the half dozen neatly piled on an end table. He glanced at it as he hurried me up a set of fire stairs to the top floor and along a door-lined corridor. He unlocked the final door and urged me inside what appeared to be a hotel room.

He tossed the paper at me. Below the fold, my stern-faced passport photo topped a two-inch story. I recognized only two words: “Kathryn Collins,” right under the picture.

“Afternoon paper?” I asked van Hoof.

He grunted an affirmative. “You’re a celebrity.”

“In Brussels? That makes no sense. It’s not like I’m an international criminal.”

“Might as well be, now you got UNN involved. They’ve turned you into such a big story, the wire services can’t ignore you.” He tapped his finger on the picture. “You’re in a hotel for Belgian military officers. If you come out of this room, one of them will recognize you. You must not open the door. I’ve left some cheese and fruit for you. I’ll start making arrangements. Eight o’clock tomorrow morning, you’re heading south.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m not going to Africa.”

“What else can you do? What are your languages—Spanish, Polish, Danish? You can’t talk your way out of Belgium. I’m holding your money. You can’t buy your way out. Your passport is locked in my car. It’s useless to you anyway.” He patted the pocket that held the two Swiss passports. “Unfortunately, you have no other papers. I think you must go where I send you.”

“You could loan me that woman’s passport. Give me money.”

“Yes. If I wanted you here.” He reached for the doorknob. “But I want you far, far away.” And then he was gone.

Far, far away meant war-torn, AIDS-ravaged Africa. A terrifying future. But something else scared me more. I didn’t know if van Hoof would let me live long enough to get there. My stomach muscles clenched. What reason did he have not to kill me?

He was so hostile, rejecting everything I proposed, frustrating every move I made. I slammed my fist against the wall. I wished I’d hit van Hoof’s face. He scared me, yes. He made me mad, too. And anger was a far more useful emotion.

I strode over to the door. Stopped. Turned around and hiked back to the exterior wall. Stalked along the bed to the adjoining wall. Hiked back. The room was only eight feet wide and half again as long, with a ceiling that rose to the underside of the attic roof. The clerestory windows were set in dormers, the bottom sills so high above me I couldn’t see out. There were no pictures on the walls, no decorations of any kind, not even a mirror. My accommodations weren’t plush enough for a colonel or a general. Van Hoof wanted to avoid anyone who outranked him. He’d put me in a garret room sparsely furnished to meet the basic needs of a noncommissioned officer. After fewer than three minutes, I was bouncing off the walls.

A stream of overheated air poured from the radiator and flowed twenty feet upward to the roof. The hot draft made my skin feel scaly. I checked out the wall unit, but there was no way to turn off the blast. The room was as hot as the Congo. Maybe old Belgian soldiers never got over their colonial service. Spent the rest of their days dreaming of the African sun. I ripped off my jacket and dropped it on the desk. Tossed my sweater on top. I kept going until I wore only my underpants.

I threw myself down on the single bed and stared at the distant ceiling. The room was silent except for the hissing of the radiator and clicks from the mini-bar as the coolant cycled on, then off.

By now Holger would know about Karsten Hansen, the unknown man with the Danish passport who’d boarded Global 500 in Heathrow. He’d know about the two US government agents who’d died on the plane. Holger had told me to stay away from him. But my situation had changed. Once I explained, he’d realize that I had no alternative. I had to get to the Father-Major. We could put it all together. Give enough to the FBI to get them off my back. And then I’d help him track down the ones who’d done the bombing.

I hopped up and found a hotel brochure in the night stand. The Flemish words were close enough to Danish so that I could figure out I was situated in the heart of Brussels, near the Royal Palace, the Market Square and—most important—the Central Railway Station. The quickest way out of town. I’d wait until all the Belgian soldiers were fast asleep. Then I’d go to the station. Panhandle ticket money if I had to. Make my way to Holger.

I clicked on the television for company. From the shots of politicians meeting en masse, I guessed the announcer was reading a news story about some activity that day in the local parliament. I was halfway to the shower when the voice-over changed from a man to a woman and my picture flashed on the screen. Then shots of the Hamburg airport. The newscaster made a lengthy report in Flemish. I caught my name, along with “Global” and “Lockerbie Two.” My name in the same sentence that referred to a terrorist bombing. I wanted to throw up. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

First a State Department Public Information Officer: “Subject of a security investigation.” Then a spokesman for the Royal Danish Army—words I understood. “Briefly under our protection in 1986. All ties now severed.” Last, a quick shot of my father’s back as he disappeared inside his house.

My father! They’d staked out my father. I could imagine how he was taking this. Outraged by the press. In a panic to help me. He kept his passport current so he could do so. “If you ever need me, Casey, girl,” he said at least once every time I visited, “give me a call, I’ll come running.” And he was powerless to do anything for me.

I clicked the TV off and opened the mini-bar. In front of the canned beverages was a bunch of green grapes and a red-wrapped wheel of cheese. I shut the door. I wanted something warm. Despite the heat in the room, I yearned for a cup of hot cocoa and a piece of toast. Cinnamon toast, the way my mother used to make it, putting the pieces under the broiler until the sugar caramelized and crusted on top. Cinnamon toast was my favorite afternoon snack when I was in elementary school. I was luckier than my friend Lura, whose mother worked. My mother was at home waiting to feed me and listen to my stories. I knew other people found it odd that she refused to leave the house. But I liked that she was there without fail, my personal adoring audience. It was enough when I was ten.

I sighed. I wanted to curl up on the bed and pray I’d wake up from this nightmare. But I wasn’t a child anymore. I was a grown woman sweating herself to dehydration in an overheated room. Time to act like an adult.

I yanked open the mini-bar, pushed aside the food and grabbed a Jupiler. When I popped the cap, the scent was pungent with yeast, redolent of hops. I took a swallow. It tasted as good as it smelled. Too good for the mess I was in. My face had been on television. I couldn’t leave this room tonight. I’d be recognized for sure. I held the cool aluminum against my burning cheek.

Could I trust van Hoof? No way. He knew more about Stefan’s fate than he was telling. The Swiss passport with Stefan’s picture proved it. Van Hoof must’ve been in Brussels last night—Monday night—when he’d been tapped to meet me. He said he’d gotten to Hamburg at four this morning—in time to see the cops form their welcoming committee. He couldn’t have gotten the Jetta and the Swiss passports on such short notice. Those things required days of preparation, not hours. The car and the passports were intended for Stefan and the mysterious Fräulein Keck. Had she disappeared along with him? Van Hoof was keeping too many secrets from me. I wasn’t going to let that man direct the next part of my life.

I went into the bathroom. The showerhead was ten feet above the tiled floor of the stall, as though the soldiers who routinely used it were all giants. Hot water soaked my hair and streamed down my face. The water smelled faintly of hard boiled eggs, like the hot springs I used to visit with my father. I shut my eyes and let the torrent slide over me.

If I couldn’t trust van Hoof, then what could I do? Go to the American Embassy and turn myself in? Let the FBI send me home again. Fight it out with Buchanan. Do some time if I had to. At least when I got out of the Big House, no one would be chasing me. I moved my head back from under the stream and squeezed water from my hair. Do some time. The Big House. As if pretending I was in a Jimmy Cagney movie would make a prison term conceivable. I’d driven past the correctional facility in Lorton. Inside a place like that, I’d suffer in ways I hated to imagine.

I turned off the water and grabbed a towel. The steam-filled room had the damp-soil odor of a well-fertilized indoor garden. There was no mirror in here either. How did the Belgian Army expect its officers to shave?

I wrapped the second towel around myself and started in on the grapes. I wasn’t going to jail, not voluntarily. And I wasn’t going into hiding in Africa. No, I wouldn’t let van Hoof bury my number one priority under his.

I needed cash and ID and a changed appearance and transportation. Everything van Hoof could give me, but wouldn’t.

I spent the next hour considering the best way to take them from him. I was younger and in good shape, but van Hoof had the well-tuned body of a former commando. I couldn’t overpower him. I had to take him by surprise, get him down and incapacitate him. I knew the technique though I’d never been able to make it work against Stefan. It was impossible to surprise the man who’d trained me. Every time, I landed on the mat with the wind knocked out of me, my body pinned under his. I remembered the slickness of his skin against mine, the musky odor of his sweat, the throaty way he whispered, “Dobrze,” even though I’d lost once again.

But then, he didn’t expect me to defeat him. He wasn’t trying to make a sparring partner out of me. We were in a dangerous profession. He loved me and he wanted to keep me alive. He was a tough teacher because of that. And he taught me some good moves.

They were moves that could take down a big man who wasn’t expecting an attack. And van Hoof wouldn’t be. The key to success, though, was getting into position on the other side of my door well before van Hoof arrived at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. I’d sleep until four. Then I’d take my place in the hallway.

But at midnight, a noise jerked me awake. I was on my feet before I heard it again. Metal scraping against the other side of my doorknob. Then the ticking slide of steel going into the lock. The click as it turned and drew back the latch. The oiled sigh of the hinge as the door opened. An exit sign in the outside hallway cast green light onto the floor of my room. A shoe scuffed against the rug.

Van Hoof had come early. He wasn’t waiting until morning to send me south. He was going to get rid of me now.

I crouched, muscles tensing, right hand fisting, gauging where to strike. Before the door had clicked shut, I threw myself up and at him, putting all my weight behind that single blow to his throat.