The Amber Room Page 0,78

shoulder harness, then bolted for the door.

A strange feeling filled Suzanne. She stopped and glanced back. The street was crowded, a midday lunch crowd milling about in full force. Stod was a busy town. Fifty thousand or so inhabitants, she'd learned. The oldest part of town spread in all directions, the blocks full of half-timbered multistory stone and brick buildings. Some were clearly ancient, but most were reproductions built in the 1950s and 1960s, after bombers left their mark in 1945. The builders did a good job, decorating everything with rich moldings, life-size statues, and bas-reliefs, everything had been specifically created to be photographed.

High above her, the Abbey of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin dominated the sky. The monstrous structure had been erected in the fifteenth century in honor of the Virgin Mary's help in turning the tide of a local battle. The baroque building crowned a rocky bluff overlooking both Stod and the muddy Eder River, a clear personification of ancient defiance and lordly power.

She stared upward.

The abbey's towering edifice seemed to lean forward, curving slightly inward, its twin yellow towers connected by a balcony that faced due west. She imagined a time when monks and prelates surveyed their domain from that lofty perch. "The Fortress of God," she recalled one medieval chronicler proclaiming of the site. Alternating amber and white-colored stone walls lined the exterior, capped by a rust-colored tile roof. How fitting. Amber. Maybe it was an omen. And if she believed in anything other than herself, she might have taken notice. But, at the moment, the only thing she noticed was the feeling of being watched.

Certainly Wayland McKoy would arouse interest. Maybe that was it. Somebody else was here. Searching. Watching. But where? Hundreds of windows lined the narrow street, most up several stories. The cobblestones were crowded with too many faces to digest. Someone could be in disguise. Or maybe somebody was a hundred meters up on the balcony of the abbey gazing down. She could just make out tiny silhouettes in the midday sun, tourists apparently enjoying a grand view.

No matter.

She turned and entered the Hotel Garni.

She approached the front desk and told the male clerk in German, "I need to leave a message for Alfred Grumer."

"Certainly." The man pushed her a pad.

She wrote,I will be at the church of St. Gerhard, 10:00 p.m. Be there. Margarethe. She folded the note.

"I'll seeHerr DoktorGrumer receives it," the clerk said.

She smiled and handed him five euros for his trouble.

Knoll stood inside the Christinenhof's lobby and carefully parted the sheers for a ground-floor view of the street. He watched while less than a hundred feet away Suzanne Danzer stopped and looked around.

Did she sense him?

She was good. Her instincts sharp. He'd always liked Jung's comparisons of how the ancients viewed women as either Eve, Helen, Sophia, or Mary-corresponding to impulsive, emotional, intellectual, and moral. Danzer certainly possessed the first three, but nothing about her was moral. She was also one other thing-dangerous. But her guard was probably down, thinking he was buried under tons of rock in a mine forty kilometers away. Hopefully, Franz Fellner passed the word to Loring that his whereabouts were unknown, the ploy buying the time he'd need to figure out what was going on. Even more important, it would buy time to decide how to settle the score with his attractive colleague.

What was she doing here, out in the open, headed into the Hotel Garni? It was too much of a coincidence that Stod happened to be the headquarters for Wayland McKoy, that particular hotel where McKoy and his people were staying. Did she have a source on the excavation? If so, nothing unusual there. He'd many times cultivated sources on other digs so Fellner could have first crack at whatever might be uncovered. Adventurers were usually more than eager to sell at least some of their bounty on the black market, no one the wiser since everything they found was thought lost anyway. The practice avoided unnecessary government hassles and annoying seizures. The Germans were notorious for confiscating the best of what was pulled from the ground. Strict reporting requirements and heavy penalties governed violators. But greed could always be counted on to prevail, and he'd made several excellent purchases for Fellner's private collection from unscrupulous treasure hunters.

A light rain began to fall. Umbrellas sprouted. Thunder rolled in the distance. Danzer appeared back out of the Garni. He retreated to the window's edge. Hopefully, she wouldn't cross the street and