Eagles fly, p.9
Eagles Fly, page 9
Elizabeth Norby, the Chicago Tribune reporter who had covered the Kiwanis lunch, was waiting for him in the reception hall, and when he emerged from the clinic wing, she jumped up from where she had been seated.
“How’d it go, Doc?” she said brightly. “Will Shelly Hope pose for a pinup picture again?”
Marion Bloggs came out of the office wing and stood at the entryway, a disapproving expression on her face.
“She’ll be fine. Maybe even a bit better than she was before the accident.”
“That good, huh?” the woman said, her right eyebrow rising.
Marion Bloggs came across the hall. “Mr. Locke has arrived, Doctor,” she said. “He’s waiting for you in your office.”
“Excuse me, Ms. Norby, but I have a patient to attend to,” Kelsey said graciously.
The woman shrugged. “I have a few more things to ask you, so if you don’t mind, I’ll stay awhile.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
“I can wait.”
“After Mr. Locke, you are open, Doctor,” Marion said sweetly, and Kelsey glanced sharply at her. She was being catty, and he didn’t like it when it was at his expense. But there was nothing he could do short of denying the reporter the continuation of the interview.
“When I’m finished I’ll talk with you.”
“Take your time, Doc,” the woman said, and Kelsey followed Marion back to his office.
Just outside his office door Marion stopped him a moment. “I’ve started an admission jacket on him, and they’re set up to receive him upstairs, but I thought you’d better take a look at him first.”
“I didn’t know he was ambulatory.”
“He shouldn’t be. He seems to be in considerable pain, but he’s stubborn. Said he wanted to talk to you personally.”
“All right,” Kelsey said. “Barbara should be about finished in postop, have her come down to the examining room right away. I’ll take a quick look at him and then he can go upstairs.”
“Yes, sir,” Marion said, and turned to go, but Kelsey stopped her.
“Don’t play games with me and Ms. Norby. I’m not in the mood.”
“A brassy little broad, isn’t she?”
“Almost as bad as you,” Kelsey said, smiling, then he went into his office.
Locke was seated in front of the desk, and when Kelsey came through the door, he looked up. His face and both hands were completely swathed in bandages, and Kelsey could immediately see from the way the man held himself that he was in considerable pain.
“My father told me that you were an employee of a friend of his,” Kelsey said, coming across the room, “He didn’t mention that you were a stubborn man, Mr. Locke.”
Locke coughed, the sound muffled by the bandages. “Before they give me any more happy pills, I wanted to talk to you, Doctor.” His voice was slurred. He was having difficulty talking.
“We can talk tomorrow,” Kelsey said. “I’d like to take a quick look under those bandages before we put you in your room and settle you down for the night.”
Locke got to his feet, careful to hold his head at a certain angle. He clumsily pawed a thick manila folder from the desk with his bandaged hands and handed it to Kelsey. “They sent my medical records with me,” he said as Kelsey took the thick package.
“I can look at these in the morning—” Kelsey started, but the man cut him off.
“Before you tuck me in for the night, Doctor, I want you to look in the envelope. I’ve brought some pictures of how I want my face to look.”
“It’s a little early for that.”
“No,” the man said insistently. “I want you to look at those pictures so that when you examine me, you can tell me immediately if you can do the work.”
“Why is this so important to you?” Kelsey asked.
Locke turned away a moment, and when he turned back, he held out his bandaged hands. “All my life, Doctor, I have been an ugly man. I’m not married, never have been, because there isn’t a woman alive who’d look at me.” He rocked his shoulders back and forth. “This … accident … it was a blessing in disguise.” He came a step closer to Kelsey and peered at him through the eye slits in his bandages. “I was pretty well banged up in the accident. My nose is crushed, my cheeks were broken, and my whole face is a mess.” He touched Kelsey’s arm with a bandaged hand. “All I want to know is if you can give me a nice face. I know it sounds kind of foolish, but I picked out the nose, the eyes, the cheeks, and the chin I’d like to have.”
Kelsey felt a compassion for the man. It was a familiar story he had heard over and over again. “I’ll see what I can do, Mr. Locke. I can’t promise you anything more than that at the moment.”
“Good enough, Doctor,” Locke said, a note of relief in his voice.
The examining room across the hall from Kelsey’s office was ready, and Barbara Courtland, the chief R.N., was waiting when he arrived with Locke.
They helped the man lie on the examining table, and as Kelsey washed his hands and donned a white coat, the nurse carefully cut away the bandages covering Locke’s face.
The man was a mess. There was substantial bruising and massive swelling of muscle tissue, but most of the skin was fairly well intact, so there would be no problem involving skin grafting to conceal scar tissue.
The nurse prepared a local anesthetic, and when Locke’s face was sufficiently numbed, Kelsey began probing with a delicate touch for damage to the bones and cartilage.
The nose was completely crushed, as was the left cheekbone just below the eye. The right cheekbone had been chipped, a large piece of it floating loose within the muscle. Massive swelling of the masseter and levator labii superior muscles on both sides of the face had occurred, giving some indication that the jaw, also heavily damaged, had been dislocated and reset. Miraculously, none of the teeth had been damaged. And yet it was a wonder to Kelsey that the man was able to talk at all, or in any way stand the pain.
“I want a full series of X rays first thing in the morning,” Kelsey said to the nurse. “Also work up a complete measurement profile on all features, as well as blood type, EKG, and the rest. We’ll have to go in for some preliminary work tomorrow afternoon. I want to relieve the nasal pressure, and it looks as if there might be a slight pressure on the nerves controlling the orbicularis oculi muscle, at least in the right eye.”
Kelsey stepped away from the examining table, and Locke pushed himself up on one elbow.
He couldn’t talk because of the anesthetic, but he pointed frantically with his right hand at the manila envelope Kelsey had laid on the counter.
“All right, I’ll take a look at your pictures,” Kelsey said, helping the man back down. “But first I want you to promise you won’t move. Every time you do, you risk the chance of severing nerves that I can’t do a whole lot with.”
Locke lay still, but he watched as Kelsey went across the room and opened the envelope.
Inside were Locke’s medical records from the hospital in London, which indicated that in addition to the facial injuries, the man’s fingers had been burned. There also was a series of what appeared to be photographs cut from magazines. There were several from different angles of a well-formed, if somewhat angular, nose, and others of cheeks, a chin, and eyelids. They all seemed to have come from the same, or at least a similar, face, and from what Kelsey had been able to see of Locke’s features, he could envision no difficulty in complying with the man’s wishes.
One thing he was certain of, however, and that was that Locke was either a liar, or was a man with some kind of a psychological problem. He had never been an ugly man. Kelsey could see that even though Locke’s face was now badly disfigured. In fact, the man had probably not looked too dissimilar to the photographs in the manila envelope. At least the basic features had been similar, so matching the photos would present little or no problem.
Kelsey went back to the table and smiled down at the man. “If these photos are what you want, what you really want, I can db it for you, although I’d prefer to see a photo of you as you were and match that.”
With great effort Locke managed to shake his head.
“All right,” Kelsey said. “We’ll start the preliminaries tomorrow. But you must know that this isn’t going to happen overnight. You’ll be here a couple of months, and then it will take another six months or so for you to heal.”
Locke managed a slight, off-center smile, and Kelsey washed up and left the examining room as the nurse rebandaged the man’s face.
Elizabeth Norby waited for him in the reception area, and he realized that again he had forgotten she was here. At this moment all he wanted to do was go home, take a hot shower, and go to bed. It had been a long, tiring day.
“You look fagged,” the reporter said.
“I am. You don’t suppose we can do this some other time?”
They were alone in the entry hall and the young woman smiled pleasantly. “Are you finished here for the day?”
“Finally,” Kelsey said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’d just like to go home, have a drink, and go to bed.”
“If you switch the order around, and have a drink first, I’ll buy. We can talk for a few minutes … I promise, only a few minutes … and then I’ll leave you alone.”
Kelsey looked at her. She was a good-looking woman, somewhat reminiscent of his wife.
“I’m from the old school,” he said, smiling. “I’ll have that drink with you, but I’m buying.”
10
It was six o’clock and already dark when Asheim left the Israeli consulate by a back door. The two FBI agents who had spoken with Bernstein had remained in plain view parked in front of the building all afternoon, and were still there.
They told Bernstein that they had received an anonymous tip from someone in Chicago, and that the intruder at the Kelsey Clinic was Asheim, which told him three things.
Despite his snooping over the past two years, and despite his intrusion at the clinic, the Odessa was not very worried about him.
If he was arrested, it would naturally be expected that he would tell the FBI everything. Who he was, what he had been doing over the past twenty-four months, and why.
But they knew that he would never be believed, simply because there was no proof of any of his allegations.
The second was a confirmation of Goldmann’s supposition that Locke was the man Spannau had talked about. Locke was coming to the clinic to get a new face. The Odessa had murdered Digman in such a way that Asheim’s arrest would be ordered, and with luck he would be taken out of the picture.
The third was that the Odessa not only knew his real name and who he worked for, but they had a fair idea of his movements. If that included his room in the shabby boardinghouse in Cicero, getting out of the United States would become difficult at best.
It was snowing lightly as Asheim slipped out the back door and jumped down into the alley from a loading dock. He had watched out a rear window for more than an hour, but as far as he could tell, no one was waiting. Evidently the FBI agents believed Bernstein when he told them that Asheim was not there. They were keeping a loose watch on the consulate on the off chance that Asheim might show up after all.
He hunched up his coat collar, pulled his hat low, and trudged through the snow to the end of the alley, where he turned right. Few people were on foot, but traffic was heavy, and at the corner one block away from the consulate, Asheim boarded a bus with three other people, paid his fare, and settled into one of the seats near the rear door.
Earlier today he had parked the rental car, leased under the name Forest Tanner, in a ramp just off State Street near sixtieth. Going to it now would be the first test of exactly how much the Odessa knew about his recent movements, and how much in turn the FBI had been informed,
He rode the bus for ten blocks, then got off, walked two blocks, and hailed a cab, ordering the driver to take him to Garfield and State, several blocks from the ramp.
Goldmann had done and said what he had to. From this moment on, Asheim would be on his own. The word would go out that he was a renegade. A criminal in his own country.
It was understandable, though. Begin was in the middle of new peace talks with Sadat, and the new American president, Barnes, and wanted no waves made anywhere.
Twenty-four hours ago Asheim might have agreed with his orders and returned home. But not now. He did not like being pushed, and he knew that if he did return home, there was a likelihood he would be handed back to the Americans to face murder charges.
Goldmann had evidently been told that Asheim was to be fed to the wolves. If any of them thought it would indicate Israel’s goodwill and cooperation, Asheim would be on the first plane back to the States to stand trial.
And yet, he asked himself as he settled back in the seat and lit a cigarette, what could he possibly hope to accomplish? He was going up against a powerful, well-financed worldwide organization who knew his name, his face, and his purpose, whereas he knew little about their plans.
He had one advantage, however, he told himself, a half smile forming on his face. Twenty-four hours ago he was playing by Goldmann’s rules: Watch, look, listen, but don’t touch. Now he was going to play this game by his own standards.
During the last two years he had done a lot of thinking about his son-in-law Benjamin, who in reality had been only one more death among millions directly the result of the Third Reich. Death was something they understood best of all.
Death, he told himself, was what they were going to get.
The cab pulled up at the curb; Asheim paid the driver, got out, and headed the remaining distance to the parking ramp on foot as he thought out his next moves.
Of the eleven surviving members of the Odessa leadership, three lived in Buenos Aires, including Kurt Stoeffel, who ran the Bank of Buenos Aires and maintained the jungle fortress Aerie; Dieter Schey, who owned the Missiones Province Hospital and twenty-five others across South America; and Sigmund Dortmund, who was a high-ranking member of the Argentine Ministry of Finance and Planning despite the power he had held in the early days as a Per-onista. So that city was his first logical step.
In Mexico City it was Louis Stebenfeld, a landowner; in Bonn it was Herman Mueller, a member of the German State Department; in London it was Alois Hartmann, a legitimate armaments dealer; in Cairo it was Walter Deering, a military adviser to the government; and in Paris it was Otto Bergholtz, who owned an aircraft engine manufacturing firm.
Which left the three here in the States: Thomas Heinzman, the assistant director of the school of medicine at Georgetown University; Ronald de Hoef, president of the All-America Insurance Corporation in Miami; and in Chicago, August Kelsey, head of Kelsey Electronics, Ltd.
After he talked with Goldmann, he had done some thinking while waiting for the opportunity to slip unnoticed out of the consulate.
At first he had considered remaining in the States and working on the three Odessa leaders there.
But he had rejected that plan because if he made too many waves this close to the Lake Geneva clinic, the plan—whatever it was—might be called off, and he would never know what they had intended.
There were risks in that kind of thinking, he knew. At this moment he had a chance to end the plan by returning to Lake Geneva and killing both Locke and Dr. Kelsey. The Odessa had worked on this scheme for two years or more, and such a move would eliminate any plans they might have, or at least seriously set them back.
By opting to go directly to Buenos Aires, to Stoeffel, he ran the risk of his own death before the plan could be stopped.
Goldmann’s hands were tied. If Asheim died, there would be no time for him to send another operative, and the Odessa would succeed.
Asheim paused a moment across from the parking ramp, studying the cars parked along the street and the people hurrying through the snow along the sidewalks.
Buenos Aires, it had to be, he told himself, taking a deep breath and starting across the street. It was the one place he was certain he could find out exactly what the plan was. If he could make it that far.
11
Kelsey picked up the Chicago and Minneapolis newspapers at a newsstand in town, as he did many mornings, and then headed around the lake on Highway 50 toward the clinic. The morning was cold, but the sun from the clear sky reflected brightly off the snow that had fallen most of the evening.
For the first night in a long time, he mused as he drove, he had not dreamed about his wife. Since her death he had been having a number of weird dreams about her. In one he was trying to save her from drowning but was held back by his own fear. In another he was the commander of a troop of riflemen who had lined his wife against a brick wall. At the moment he gave the command to fire, he would awaken.
Last night was different. He had dreamed, but this time it was about Liz Norby. In great detail, and in color, he had dreamed about moving to Chicago, where he had wooed and courted the young woman, finally taking her to bed.
Dreams, he had learned from the psychology courses he had taken in med school, were nothing more than the release of stifled or repressed thoughts and feelings.
In his dreams about his wife, it was his guilt feelings being released. If he had gone with her the night she’d had her automobile accident, he might have been able to prevent it.
And last night’s dream had been nothing more than a simple sexual fantasy. He had spent less than an hour with the young woman at the cocktail lounge, and during that time they had spoken only about Shelly Hope and about the clinic in general. But when they said their good-byes, he’d had the urge to ask if he could call her again soon, but had not.
He was horny. Nothing more, he told himself, smiling, as he turned off the highway and started down the entrance road to the clinic. He was attracted to the woman, and perhaps he would telephone her after all.
The driveway had not been plowed and was drifted over in spots, so Kelsey parked his car at the front entrance, not wanting to get stuck at the rear of the main building, and he mounted the steps and entered by the main doors.
