TWENTY-FOUR
“Mr. Teller, to check in,” Horst whispered.
“Could you repeat it, please?” The pretty young receptionist was doing her best to deal with the morning’s chaos. She leaned across the counter in order to catch Horst’s words the second time around.
“Mr. Teller,” he repeated softly. The girl cocked her head and gave him a quizzical look.
“I’m sorry … ?”
I had coached Horst to keep his voice down so that no one would pick up his accent, but the din in the lobby was making it impossible for the poor girl to hear him at all. There was nothing I could do about it, though. I was in the middle of my zombie act. After a third attempt Horst finally pushed my passport across the counter, open to the attached sheet with the reservation number typed on it. The girl looked at the paper briefly, then turned to the photo page.
“But you are not Mr. Teller,” she observed.
“That’s right,” Horst answered, gesturing toward me as we had rehearsed. “Mr. Teller is my employer, who has asked me to check in for him.” I could feel her glance over at me even though I was facing into the lobby. I wanted to make it easy for the spotters who were bound to be hanging around to see me, hoping they’d assume that Horst’s back belonged to Chase. It helped that the place was so chaotic.
I couldn’t help speculating about who was in the game with us. The man hiding behind the newspaper was the obvious choice, but good operatives don’t make obvious choices. It was more likely to be the skinny lady with the barking poodle on her lap or the busy young bellhop. It didn’t really matter. Even if they’d been wearing a sign across their back saying SPY, it wouldn’t have changed anything.
The receptionist checked her reservation book, found my name, and turned her attention back to Horst. “I must have Mr. Teller’s signature on the registration card,” she said, pushing a pen and a three-by-four index card across the counter.
“Yes, of course,” Horst nodded, relaxing into his role once he realized that she wasn’t going to give him a hard time. “I’ll have him sign it.” He ambled over, waited for the girl to look away, then quickly forged my signature on the card, as I’d shown him. It was far from perfect, but I couldn’t very well be seen signing autographs when I was supposed to be riding a Cosmic Cocktail.
“So far, it’s so good,” Horst whispered.
“If you say another word, I’m gonna stab you in the eye with that pen,” I whispered back. “Hurry up and get the key.”
He nodded and returned to the desk, where the girl was already involved with her next customer, an obese gentleman wearing a tweed jacket over a sweater vest with a raincoat slung over his arm. He was sweating profusely and I wondered why anyone would dress like that on a day like this, and then I realized that he was English. He claimed to have a reservation, she claimed he didn’t, and he was ready to fight the war all over again if he didn’t get a room. Horst stood back and waited patiently while I started to boil over. I wanted to pummel both of them. Finally, after running out of steam, the jumbo Brit went away angry and Horst stepped up to the counter. He handed the receptionist the signed registration card.
“Yes, Mr. Teller’s room,” she sighed, sounding a bit frazzled now. Retrieving a key from the board, she handed it to Horst, along with the piece of paper with our confirmation number. “Room 417,” she said, and I was starting to feel like we were gonna make it through phase one. Then the bottom dropped out.
“Mr. Teller was expected some time ago,” she scolded. “We were told it was essential to have his room ready by eight o’clock.”
“We were detained,” Horst explained offhandedly. “I apologize.” He clearly didn’t get the implication of her statement, but I did. The implication was that we were f*cked. Completely and utterly f*cked …
DAMN!
If they’d been watching the lobby at eight o’clock, they knew Chase was missing in action. How could I be so f*cking dense?! I had even wondered what he was supposed to be doing with the spare time! Why didn’t I check it with the hotel?!
What would the move be? Damage control, that’s what. But how? A disposal team waiting in room 417? Whether they aborted or not, they needed to make me disappear.
But something didn’t fit. … I hadn’t checked with the hotel because the reservation sheet attached to my passport had read “11 A.M. check-in.” Why would it say that if Chase was supposed to check in at eight?
Jesus Christ, I was an idiot. … I looked at the clock behind the reception counter: 11:04. I needed that f*cking password, like now! The girl was asking Horst if we had any luggage.
“Just this,” he replied, holding the black briefcase up for her to see.
“The lift is to your right,” she said, ready to move on to the next person in line. Horst thanked her and stepped away, forgetting to do the one thing I had told him not to forget. But my drug act didn’t matter anymore—if anyone had been waiting for Chase, they’d be long gone by now, so I stepped up to the desk, pushed a startled customer aside with enough force that he wouldn’t ask questions, and smiled at the receptionist.
“Could you check messages for room 417?” She froze, startled at first, then angry. “If you could wait—”
I couldn’t wait, so I jumped the counter and checked the box. Empty. I hopped back over, telling the startled girl, “Nope, no messages!” as I walked away.
There was no time to explain to Horst, so I grabbed the room key and the briefcase from him. “Stay here,” I said, then headed for the elevators, elbowing my way through the crowd.
“Why have you blown our cover?” he fretted, following in my wake.
“Forget it,” I said curtly. “Just wait for me down here.” The elevators were mobbed with people, so I went for the stairs. Horst stayed with me as I took the steps two at a time.
“What has happened?” he puffed when we hit the top floor.
“The ‘ll A.M. check-in’ had nothing to do with the hotel. …” I said, trying to figure out which direction the room was in. “Chase is supposed to check in on the radio at eleven!”
He looked at his watch.
“Don’t say it, Horst!” I barked.
“So then we must find the password….”
“That’s right,” I said, trying to sound calm even though my heart was racing and I was gulping air. “We need the password.” I took a deep breath and had a last shot at getting rid of Horst. “I’m gonna check the room out. … You head back to the lobby. There’s a lady with a poodle in her lap down there. … She’s been watching us.”
His look said he wasn’t buying it, but I’d committed to the story. “Watch her,” I said. “If she leaves the lobby, stay with her.”
“A lady with a poodle?” he said skeptically. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
“What about—?”
“For Christ’s sake, Horst, do what I tell you!”
It did the trick. He hesitated but he started back down the stairs, tail between his legs. It was for his own good. If there were people waiting for me, they wouldn’t know about Horst unless we walked in together. Anyway, his job was to get me past the lobby and he’d done that. The rest was up to me.
I found the room and stood at the door for a moment, gathering my thoughts. The strange thing was that if I had second-guessed Harvey King correctly, and one of his shooters had been waiting in the room, then I’d be as good as dead when I opened the door. But if they knew, I was as good as dead whether I opened the door or not, so there was nothing to lose. There was a thin ray of hope—and it was toilet-paper thin—that I’d been wrong and the room would be empty.
I dug into my pocket to retrieve the pack of Lucky Strikes, thinking the least I could do was take one of the bastards with me. I was about to slip the key into the door when I realized that I hadn’t reloaded after putting one in Chase’s neck. I took a step back, leaned against the wall, and twisted the bottom of the pack open. After carefully removing the molded Styrofoam container that held the cyanide missiles, I flipped the top of the pack open and, holding my breath, removed one of the pellets. I carefully dropped it down the barrel, as Sam had demonstrated. After replacing the Styrofoam holding the last two shots, I stepped up to the door again, slipped the key into the lock, took a deep breath, and turned it. The door swung open and I stepped into a completely empty room.
I had to laugh because I realized that as relieved as I was, I was also a little bit disappointed that I’d got it wrong about Harvey’s game plan.
“Can we make a deal?”
I spun around and almost fired a cyanide pellet into Horst, who was standing behind me in the doorway.
“Jesus Christ, Horst! If you keep sneaking up on people like that, you’re gonna get yourself killed!”
He stepped in and closed the door.
“What kind of deal?” I said.
“That you don’t bullshit me again.”
“What’s the other half?”
“Other half?”
“There are usually two sides to a deal. I don’t bullshit you again is one side, what’s the other side?” He looked quizzically at the pack of Luckys I was aiming at him and I put them back in my pocket.
“I’m not stupid,” he said.
“I don’t think you’re stupid, Horst. Just a little inexperienced.”
“Is this why you have tried to get rid of me?”
I started the search with a basket of fruit that was sitting on the table. The note said “Welcome to the Victoria Hotel” in German, English, and French.
“Look, Horst,” I said, “the only thing I want right now is to find the goddamned password….”
“I can help,” he said. I gave him a look. He wasn’t going to go away, so I suggested he check the bathroom.
“Of course!” he said enthusiastically, and went in.
“Look for anything unusual or out of place,” I called after him. “Writing on a bar of soap or a bottle of shampoo … Look in the bath, on the mirror, unroll the toilet paper, open up all the towels and washcloths, check the pockets of the bathrobes. … Check it all! If there’s a shit floating in the goddamn toilet, see if it spells anything!”
I started going through the desk—hotel stationery, envelopes, room-service menu. … I flipped through a Welcome to West Berlin magazine and turned the ink blotter inside out in case something was written on the back. The clock by the side of the bed read 11:18. If it wasn’t too late already, it would be soon. I pulled the sheets off the mattress and was taking the pillows out of their cases when Horst walked in, absorbed in a piece of paper he was reading.
“Did you find something?” I asked.
“No …” he said slowly. “I was just thinking—”
“Don’t think, look!”
“I was thinking,” he repeated, “that if this instruction referred not to an eleven o’clock check-in at the hotel, perhaps this number of confirmation is also not for the hotel. …”
He handed me the typewritten page that had been folded into my passport. I reread it:
VICTORIA HOTEL, SCH?NEBERG
11 A.M. check-in
confirm EZECH13V10
“Can it be that it has something to do with the password?” he speculated.
“Horst,” I said. “I think you might be a genius.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” he smiled. I picked up the phone and dialed reception. It rang several times before the girl’s harried voice came on the line.
“Reception.”
“This is Mr. Teller.”
“Yes, Mr. Teller,” she said wearily.
“Did you get the confirmation number for my reservation?”
“I’m sorry?”
“My employee gave you a piece of paper with the confirmation number for my reservation. Did you use it?”
“We have no confirming numbers in our reservation system, Mr. Teller.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said, and hung up. I heard a sarcastic “You’re very welcome” as I put the receiver down.
“You get a gold star, Horst,” I said, sitting down at the desk, picking up a pen and a piece of hotel stationery.
“It’s a strange password,” Horst said, studying the page. “Quite difficult to say.”
“It’s not the password, but it just might tell us what the password is.” I wrote the letters and numbers down as they were configured:
EZECH13V10
“It makes no sense,” Horst said, looking over my shoulder.
“It’s not supposed to make sense,” I said. “It’s a code. The whole point is that it doesn’t make sense unless you know how to read it.” I started writing the digits down in every possible combination.
Backward:
01V31HCEZE
Dropping alternate letters:
EEH31 or ZC1V0
Replacing letters for their numerical equivalent in the alphabet and vice versa:
5–26–5–3–8-M-21-J
None of it helped. The only word I could squeeze out of the letters was CHEZ but that didn’t go anywhere, so I tried different groupings:
EZ/ECH/13/V10
EZ could be EASY … ECH could be ECHO. … That gave me the idea to try the marine radio alphabet. It would read:
ECHO-ZULU-ECHO-CHARLIE-HOTEL
Hotel. Now I was getting somewhere. … And V would be VICTOR in radio speak, which might as well be VICTORIA, so you had HOTEL VICTORIA. … But what about the rest of it? I didn’t like it, it was too f*cking sloppy. I crumpled the paper, tossed it aside, grabbed a fresh sheet, and started over:
EZECH13V10
“Perhaps he had a book with the key to the puzzle,” Horst said. “A codebook of some sort.”
“He didn’t have any books on him.”
“Perhaps it’s here, in this room somewhere.”
“If you can find a book—” I stopped short, looked back at the letters. I wrote out what I was thinking:
EZE CH13 V10
“That’s it,” I said, reaching across the bed, pulling the side-table drawer open.
“I don’t understand,” Horst said, examining my writing.
I grabbed the book that was in the drawer, sat on the bed, and flipped through it.
“Know your Old Testament, Horst?”
“Not so well,” he confessed.
“It’s a good thing I do, then. How about Ezekiel, chapter 13, verse 10?” I found the passage. “Ever read that one?”
I displayed the book for Horst. Across the page was scribbled the word:
BABYSITTER