The summary of each was also similar. Would it not be better, they wrote, if the President stepped down in favor of Vice President Odell, giving Odell a clear twelve months in office to prepare for reelection in November ’92?
After all, reasoned Time, the main plank of Cormack’s foreign, defense, and economic policy, the shaving of $100 billion off the defense budget with a matching reduction by the U.S.S.R., was already dead in the water.
“Belly up” was how Newsweek described the chances of the treaty’s ratification by the Senate after the Christmas recess.
Easterhouse landed at Houston close to midnight, after twelve hours in the air and two in London. The headlines on the newsstands in the Houston airport were more overt: Michael Odell was a Texan and would be the first Texan President since Lyndon Johnson if he stepped into Cormack’s shoes.
The conference with the Alamo Group was scheduled in two days’ time in the Pan-Global Building. A company limousine took Easterhouse to the Remington, where a suite had been reserved for him. Before turning in, he caught a late news summary. Again, the question was being asked.
The colonel had not been informed of Plan Travis. He did not need to know. But he did know that a change of Chief Executive would remove the last stumbling block to the fruition of all his endeavors—the securing of Riyadh and the Hasa oil fields by an American Rapid Deployment Force sent in by a President prepared to do it.
Fortuitous, he thought as he drifted into sleep. Very fortuitous.
The small brass plaque on the wall of the converted warehouse beside the paneled teak door said simply: THOR SPEDITION AG. Lenzlinger apparently hid the true nature of his business behind the façade of a trucking company, though there were no rigs to be seen and the smell of diesel had never penetrated the carpeted privacy of the fourth-floor suite of offices to which Quinn mounted.
There was an intercom to seek admittance from street level, and another with closed-circuit TV camera at the end of the corridor on the fourth floor. The conversion of the warehouse in a side street off the old docks—where the river Weser pauses on its way to the North Sea to provide the reason for old Bremen’s existence—had not been cheap.
The secretary, when he met her in the outer office, seemed typecast. Had Lenzlinger had any trucks, she could easily have kick-started them.
“Ja, bitte?” she asked, though her gaze made plain it was he, not she, who was the supplicant.
“I would like the opportunity of speaking with Herr Lenzlinger,” said Quinn.
She took his name and vanished into the private sanctum, closing the door behind her. Quinn had the impression that the mirror set into the partition wall was one-way. She returned after thirty seconds.
“And your business, please, Herr Quinn.”
“I would like the chance to meet an employee of Herr Lenzlinger, a certain Werner Bernhardt,” he said.
She went backstage again. This time she was gone more than a minute. When she returned she closed the door firmly on whoever sat within.
“I regret, Herr Lenzlinger is not available to speak with you,” she said. It sounded final.
“I’ll wait,” said Quinn.
She gave him a look that regretted she had been too young to run a labor camp with him in it, and disappeared a third time. When she returned to her desk she ignored him and began to type with concentrated venom.
Another door into the reception area opened and a man came out. The sort who might well have been a truck driver; a walking refrigerator-freezer. The pale-gray suit was well enough cut almost to conceal the masses of beefy muscle beneath; the short, blow-dried hairstyle, aftershave, and veneer of civility were not cheap. Under all that he was pure knuckle-fighter.
“Herr Quinn,” he said quietly, “Herr Lenzlinger is not available to see you or answer your questions.”
“Now, no,” agreed Quinn.
“Not now, not ever, Mr. Quinn. Please go.”
Quinn had the impression the interview was over. He descended to the street and crossed the cobbles to where Sam waited in the car.
“He’s not available in working hours,” said Quinn. “I’ll have to see him at his home. Let’s get to Oldenburg.”
Another very old city, its inland port trading for centuries on the Hunte River, it was once the seat of the Counts of Oldenburg. The inner core, the Old Town, is still girdled by sections of the former city wall and a moat made up of a series of linked canals.
Quinn found the sort of hotel he preferred, a quiet inn with a walled courtyard called the Graf von Oldenburg, in Holy Ghost Street.
Before the shops closed he had time to visit a hardware store and a camping shop; from a kiosk he bought the largest-scale map of the surrounding area he could find. After dinner he puzzled Sam by spending an hour in their room, tying knots every twenty inches down the length of the fifty feet of rope he had bought from the hardware shop, finally tying a three-prong grapnel to the end.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I suspect, up a tree” was all he would say. He left her still asleep in the predawn darkness.