of them told me if you couldn’t look into a man’s eyes and size him up you’d better find something else to do. He was right. You—the three of you—have all got the right look.”
Delchamps nodded at Fernando and Torine and walked out of the room.
When the door had closed, Fernando said, “So Lorimer’s dead. So now what, Gringo?”
“We don’t know that he’s dead,” Castillo said. “From what Delchamps said, if Lorimer was grabbed, it was around the twelfth of this month. They didn’t even abduct Mrs. Masterson until the twentieth, or blow Masterson away until the morning of the twenty-third. That’s several days. I think they would have heard, in that time, if somebody had blown Lorimer away.”
“Okay,” Fernando said. “Same question. What now?”
“Go get Sergeant Kranz out of bed,” Castillo said. “Tell him to get packed.”
Sergeant First Class Seymour Kranz, a Delta/Gray Fox communicator, had been one of the two communicators they’d picked up—together with their satellite communications equipment—at Fort Bragg. Colonel Torine had told Kranz he had been chosen to go with them to Europe, rather than the other communicator, who had set up at the Nebraska Avenue Complex, because Torine devoutly believed that when flying across an ocean every pound counted. Kranz was barely over the Army’s height and weight minimums. The real reason was that Kranz had been with Torine and Castillo when they were searching for the stolen 727 and proved that you don’t have to be six feet tall and weigh two hundred pounds to be a first-rate special operator.
“Where are we going?” Torine asked.
“We’re going to see my uncle Otto,” Castillo said, and walked to the couch and sat down and picked up the telephone on the coffee table in front of it.
[TWO]
Executive Offices Die Fulda Tages Zeitung Fulda, Hesse, Germany 0805 27 July 2005
Frau Gertrud Schröeder was a stocky—but by no means fat, or even chubby—sixty-year-old Hessian who wore her gray hair done up in a bun. She had been employed by the Tages Zeitung since she was twenty, and had always worked for the same man, Otto Göerner.
Otto Göerner had joined the firm shortly after he graduated from Philipps University in Marburg an der Lahn, in part because he was Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger’s best friend. Wilhelm was the son and heir apparent to Herman Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, the managing director and just about sole stockholder in Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H.
When Gertrud joined the Gossinger firm, it had been a medium-sized corporation, not nearly as large as it had been before World War II, or was now. The firm’s prewar holdings in Hungary and what had become East Germany—timber, farms, newspapers, breweries, and other businesses—had been confiscated by the communist East German and Hungarian governments.
By 1981, Otto Göerner had risen in the corporate hierarchy to become Herman Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger’s—the Old Man’s—assistant. The title did not reflect his true importance. He was the de facto number two man. But clearly stating this would have been awkward. Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger was supposed to be number two in the family firm.
It had been Gertrud’s very privately held opinion at the time that the issue would be resolved when Otto married Frau Erika von und zu Gossinger. Frau Erika had never married; she was called “frau” out of respect for the family’s sensitivities. As a very young girl, Erika had made a mistake, with an American aviator of all people, the result of which was a boy, Christened Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger. At the time, no one knew where the father was. Gertrud knew the Old Man could have found him if he wanted to, and concluded the Old Man had decided that no father at all was better, for the time being, than an American who might get his hands on Gossinger money.
The time being, in Gertrud’s judgment, meant until the Old Man could arrange a marriage between his daughter and his assistant. He—everyone—knew that Otto Göerner was extraordinarily fond of Frau Erika and Little Karlchen, and that the Old Man thought Göerner would be both a good husband to Erika and a good father to his only grandson, whom he adored.
And once they were married, of course, it would be entirely appropriate for Otto Göerner, now a member of the family, to hold any position within the family firm.
The issue was resolved that year—but not in the way Gertrud hoped—when a tire blew on Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger’s Mercedes as he and