Dark Chant In A Crimson Key

Chapter Five

How smart I was seemed most arguable at the moment, but under the circumstances, going home seemed like an eminently sensible idea. I called the airport to see what flights were available and learned I just had time to catch one to Newark, if I hurried. I hurried. First I called down to the desk to say that I was checking out, and noted that the clerk sounded curt, tense. I packed my bags, then tried Harper's number one more time. She still wasn't home. I picked up my bags, went to the door, and was startled to find Inspector Pierre Moliere and a Zurich policeman standing out in the hallway. Moliere, who had been about to knock, lowered his hand. The faces of both men looked grim, and I assumed it had to have been Moliere in the helicopter that had flown past the window. I had left him only a few hours before, and I wondered what could have happened in the interim to cause him to fly to Zurich to see me, as opposed to just picking up the telephone.

"I would like to speak with you, Dr. Frederickson," the gaunt Interpol inspector said in a tone that was decidedly less friendly than the one he had been using with me earlier.

"Of course, Inspector," I said, glancing at my watch. "But I had planned to go home, and I have a flight to catch. Would it be presumptuous to ask for a ride out to the airport, and we could talk on the way?"

"It is better that we talk here, Dr. Frederickson," Moliere said coldly.

So much for the flight into Newark. "Come in," I said, setting my bags to one side and stepping out of the way. "What's the problem?"

Moliere and the policeman stepped into the room, stopped just inside the doorway. Moliere was actually frowning as he looked at me, and his tone had grown even colder. "Do you have anything to tell me, Dr. Frederickson?"

I took some time to think about it-probably a mistake in itself, but I had to consider the implications of an Interpol inspector and a Zurich cop showing up on my doorstep barely ten minutes after a veritable chatterbox of a CIA operative had left after giving me a large store of highly sensitive information that I had neither needed nor wanted to know. I wondered if Moliere was waiting for me to tell him about Insolers' visit, and if so, what I was expected to say. But if Moliere wanted to know what I had been doing with the operative, he could have simply asked, and so I decided that Insolers probably wasn't the issue, and it might only muddy the waters to bring him up.

"Look, if you're talking about the nasty business in New York, I only just found out about it, and-"

"How did you find out about it?"

"I tried to call Neuberger to give him a report on my conversation with you people, and I got a cop who's a friend of mine. He told me."

"I am not talking about the nasty business in New York. I am asking about your business here in Switzerland."

"You know about my business in Switzerland."

"We have reason to believe you have not been completely forthcoming with us, Dr. Frederickson."

"Look," I said, half turning and gesturing toward the large room beyond the foyer, "maybe we should go in and sit down."

Moliere ignored my suggestion. Now I noticed that beneath his suddenly cold and hostile demeanor, there seemed to be an air of disappointment, resentment, and perhaps betrayal. "Two hours ago a message for you was telephoned to the desk of this hotel. I would like you to explain it."

"Two hours ago I was having lunch with my chauffeur in a quiet little restaurant in a quiet little town between here and Geneve. And the desk clerk hasn't informed me of any message."

"No, she did not, because she was instructed not to. When the call came in, she quite properly called the police. The police called me, which is why I am here."

"What did this message that I wasn't given say, Inspector?"

"The caller said you should be told that you had been warned. He identified himself as John Sinclair."

Suddenly, I felt slightly dizzy. I sat down on my suitcase and stared at the floor, trying to think, searching for a link between the message and anything else that had happened, perhaps Duane Insolers' visit or the things he had told me. I suspected now I should have mentioned Insolers to my current visitors at once, but felt that bringing him up at this juncture could only make matters worse. "I don't understand what it means," I said at last, looking up to meet Moliere's accusing gaze.

"Have you ever been in contact with John Sinclair, Dr. Frederickson, either before or after your current visit to Switzerland? This is a gravely serious matter, and I advise you to think very carefully about your answer."

"I know it's a gravely serious matter, Inspector, and I don't have to think about my answer. No, I have never been in touch with John Sinclair, nor with anybody representing him, which is why I don't understand what the message could mean."

"I see your bags are packed, and you yourself told me you were on the way to the airport. Yet, earlier today you cheerfully informed me that you were looking forward to the arrival of a lady friend and a vacation in Zermatt. Then a message for you is received from a man identifying himself as John Sinclair; the message says that you have been warned-and now you are on your way to the airport. If you have not spoken with Sinclair or his agents, how do you explain this?"

"I see your point," I said with a small sigh, and I knew that it was no longer possible to avoid the subject of Duane Insolers. "I had a visit from a CIA man just before you arrived, and he made me very nervous."

The Zurich policeman spoke for the first time, in perfect English. "Why did you not tell us this before?"

"I didn't think it was important," I replied lamely. "It was Duane Insolers, whom I believe you know, Inspector. He was interested in what I might know about John Sinclair. I told him I didn't know anything but what I'd read in the newspapers or seen on television. Nothing of what he said made any real sense to me, but the conversation convinced me that I was in danger of becoming involved in something here that was way over my head. That's why I was leaving."

"Indeed," Moliere said archly, drawing himself up very straight. "I do not believe you, Dr. Frederickson. I believe you came to Switzerland under false pretenses."

"Look, Inspector-"

"Something important has happened in the short time since you left my office, sir. Two corpses have been found on a riverbank just outside the city. Both men were murdered, and maimed, in the same manner as Inspector Wahlstrom and Nicholas Furie. Both men are unidentified, but a note was found on one of the bodies. The note said that Robert Frederickson would be meeting with the man and his partners at the prearranged time and place and that you would have the money with you." The tall man paused, sighed, passed a hand over his eyes. "What have you involved yourself with here, Dr. Frederickson? What was your real reason for coming to Switzerland? Why did Bo Wahlstrom, Nicholas Furie, and these other men have to be tortured and killed by this monster, Sinclair?"

"I want you to listen to me very carefully, Inspector," I said, getting up off the suitcase and standing very straight, my arms at my sides. My voice was steady, and my legs no longer felt wobbly. I was certainly still very confused, but I had willed the confusion to contract, back off, and sit quietly in a corner of my mind while I struggled to straighten things out. What was perfectly clear to me, the only important thing at the moment, was that, whether I liked it or not, I had become one of Duane

Insolers' "players" in a game where I had no rule book. I did not want to be run over and crushed by events over which I had no control, leaving as my legacy a final case where I had ended up pawn and village idiot. "I have not, repeat not, lied to you at any time. I came to Zurich for the express purpose I explained to you, and for none other. I do not know about any meeting or any money. I do know that somebody has set me up; they're using me, or my name, and I don't know why. I propose that we help each other find out the answers. Let me work with you."

"I simply do not believe you, Dr. Frederickson," Moliere replied coldly. "I find it incomprehensible how a man of your professional stature could have allowed himself to become gratuitously-if you are to be believed-involved in a matter such as this in the first place. Now you choose to lie in an attempt to cover your tracks. I would ask my colleague from the Zurich police to arrest you right now, but I don't care to deal with the furor and distracting attention of the international media I'm sure that would cause. There are already far too many foreign interests meddling in this affair." He paused, knit his brows, and glared at me. "What I will do is take steps to make certain you will remain available should you have a change of heart and choose to cooperate."

It was the policeman who put out his hand. "I will take your passport, sir. And you will please confine your movements to the city of Zurich. If you do not, you will be arrested, despite Interpol's wishes."

Interpol and the Zurich police weren't the only disgruntled campers in Switzerland. I was seething as I made my way to the elevator. Even another village idiot would have been able to figure out that this village idiot had been set up by the man for whom I had been so willing to stand vigil only a short time before. At the moment I wanted nothing more than to get my hands on Emmet P. Neuberger, but, since John Sinclair had apparently beat me to him, I was going to have to settle for a substitute. It was time for another chat with Hyatt Pomeroy, and if he didn't have some of the answers I wanted, he was going to wish he did.

I strode through a spacious, marble-floored lobby crowded with American tourists filing off a fleet of gleaming silver and red buses lined up at the curb just outside the entrance. As I headed for the desk to order up a cab, I was surprised-and not displeased-to see a familiar figure in a ridiculously ill-fitting chauffeur's uniform, only partially hidden by a huge potted plant, sitting very erect in a straight-backed chair set against a wall near the main desk. Carlo spotted me, bounced up from his chair, and limped over to me, his untipped wooden cane tapping loudly on the stone floor.

"Forgive me, signor," he said, gasping for breath as he reached me. "I know you told me I should go, but I was ordered to stay with you until Saturday. I was hoping you wouldn't mind if I just sat here in the lobby during the day in case you needed me after all. I hope you're not angry."

"I'm not angry with you, Carlo," I said, stepping to one side to avoid being crushed by a large knot of people elbowing their way toward the main desk. "In fact, I'm glad to see you. I have to go back to the Cornucopia offices."

The big, crippled Italian nodded eagerly. "I have the car parked in back. You wait outside. I won't be a minute."

As Carlo hobbled off toward a rear exit, I pushed through the glass revolving doors at the entrance, picked my way through more men, women, and children who were standing by their luggage as they waited for the crush inside to ease, and took up a position at the curb behind the last bus in line. Suddenly, a hand roughly gripped my shoulder and yanked me around, nearly pulling me off my feet. I found myself staring up into the craggy, unshaven face of a man, probably American, who looked to be in his early thirties. He also looked as if he hadn't slept in days, and he smelled terrible. There was a look of desperation, even terror, in his wide, bloodshot eyes.

"What have you done?!" he screamed at me, his foul-smelling spittle flying in my face. "Why didn't you meet us like you said you would! Furie, Henry, and Jacques are dead! Why weren't-?!"

The terrified man with the haunted eyes stopped in midsentence as he suddenly looked up at something behind me in the driveway. His mouth dropped open and he gagged, as if he wanted to scream but couldn't. The expression on his face had climbed a notch or two above terror; this was a man looking at his own death-and maybe mine. It seemed a good time to part company. Without wasting time to turn to see what had attracted his attention, I dropped to the sidewalk and rolled to my left a split second before a swarm of bullets from a sputtering automatic weapon ripped through the space where my head had been and into the chest of the American I had left behind. The deadly steel spray also cut into the flesh of the men, women, and children from the tour group who had been standing nearby, and my own howl of disbelief and horror mingled with their screams. I stopped rolling, looked back in the direction from which death had so suddenly appeared.

A gray Peugeot was stopped in the center of the driveway, and a man wearing a black hood and wielding an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol was standing, legs slightly apart, by the open door on the passenger's side.

"Nooo!" I screamed as the man swung the machine pistol in my direction, knowing that a single squeeze of the trigger would mean the extinguishing of even more lives in the crowd of hysterical, terrified people milling around on the sidewalk to my sides and behind me, still in the line of fire.

I rolled again as the gunman fired, howled again with horror, rage, and dismay as the spray of bullets ricocheted off the area of concrete sidewalk where I had been and into more of the screaming people around me.

Horror upon horror; the cost of my trying to stay alive was the rising death toll of the people around me-including, I had to assume, at least one infant I had seen being carried in its mother's arms.

I kept rolling until there was a bus between the gunman and me, then sprang to my feet and darted into the narrow space between that bus and the one parked in front of it. The space might well turn out to be a death trap, but I felt I had no choice but to stay there; the logical thing to do was to keep moving in and around the buses until I could make a break for the lobby of the hotel, but that would only make me an elusive target moving against a backdrop of dozens of not-so-elusive targets, and I could not bear the thought of any more innocent people being killed or maimed because of me, simply because they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I inched forward in my narrow, open-ended steel coffin and peered out from between the buses. The gunman immediately saw me, brought the machine pistol around, and pulled the trigger. I dropped to the ground as bullets smacked against the buses, some penetrating the steel skin, others ricocheting back and forth above my head. When the firing stopped, I looked up; the gunman had ejected an empty clip and was reaching into the baggy pocket of his jacket for another.

The odds were heavily against my being able to get to the man before he inserted the second clip, but that was the only acceptable option I had. I got to my feet and was about to sprint forward when I heard the screech of tires off to my left. An instant later my huge, black limousine with a grim-faced Carlo at the wheel came careening around a corner of the service driveway leading to the back of the hotel. The car hit a speed bump, sailed into the air, landed in a shower of sparks as its frame scraped the concrete. It kept gathering speed as it approached. The assassin's driver must have seen the oncoming juggernaut in his rearview mirror, for the Peugeot suddenly shot forward and veered sharply to the left, bouncing up over a curb and chewing up sod as it sped across the hotel's spacious lawn toward the street beyond, abandoning the gunman.

The assassin realized his peril a moment too late. He had just finished inserting the fresh clip into his machine pistol and was preparing to resume firing when his driver had sped away. Confused, he started to wheel around, and managed to squeeze off one brief burst of fire that went harmlessly into the air just before the limousine hit him. There was a sound like a ripe melon bursting, and then the gunman, minus his gun, shoes, and jacket, was thrown through the air a hundred feet or more, landing down the driveway with a dull thump, shattered limbs pointing in all directions at odd angles.

Feeling both numb and cold, with the screams of the dead, dying, and terrified echoing in my ears, I slowly walked forward to examine the corpse of the man who had been willing to kill so many others in his effort to kill me.

The articles of clothing not left behind in the driveway had been shredded by the forces of impact and scraping on the concrete. The man appeared to be Japanese, or perhaps Korean. On his bare back, clearly visible even among the framing carnage of bloody flesh and splintered bone, was what appeared to be a large tattoo that had been applied not only with needles and ink but perhaps with a branding iron as well. The combination of tattooed skin and scar tissue formed a grisly picture of tongues of jet-black flame erupting over his back and across his shoulders.

And then Carlo was beside me. He laid one huge hand on my shoulder, as if he sensed that I needed some steadying. "Signor, are you all right? I heard the gunfire while I was bringing the car around. I saw what was happening, and … I did not know what else to do but what I did."

"You saved my life, and probably the lives of a lot of others," I said in a hoarse stranger's voice as I looked up into the soulful black eyes of the Italian. "I owe you."

I glanced once more at the assassin's corpse with its burn-tattoo of black flame, then turned around and started back toward the sidewalk to see if there was anything I could do to help the gunman's real victims. The air was filled with a cacophony of wails, both mechanical and human. There was a blur of movement all around me, but off to my right I glimpsed Pierre Moliere and the policeman who had been with him urgently directing the driver of the first ambulance that had arrived toward the bodies that were strewn on the sidewalk near the spot where I had been standing when the gunman had first opened fire on me. I headed toward the two men, suddenly feeling oddly distanced from the horror that was all around me, although I was filled with a bitter sorrow for the people who had died this day simply because they had been standing too close to me. But beneath the sorrow was a deep, white-hot core of abiding rage I knew would now govern my every action, consume every waking moment, and which would not be extinguished until I found a way to do what I now knew had to be done.