Susan was still closing the door when acceleration threw her into the back seat.
Shrieve turned a couple bad looks the kid’s way. “Watch it, Junior. Don’t make me take the keys away.”
Bogen said, “Sorry,” and then after a thoughtful pause, he looked into the rearview mirror at Susan and said, “I’ve got my own hand grenade!” He nudged Charley. “Did you show her the hand grenade?”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
“Here. Let me.” He had it in the glove compartment. He offered it over the seat for Susan to admire.
Susan smiled politely. “That’s very nice.” She backed into the seat and put her hand on the door. “We’re a little close-quartered for hand grenades, aren’t we?” Trying to keep her voice from rising precipitously. She had no little brother of her own, but her friends all had one. Susan knew better than to show any signs of weakness.
No matter. Bogen was utterly oblivious. “I’m taking it home with me,” he said proudly. “I’m going fishing.”
“Fishing.” Susan peered close to see if he was kidding.
“Gotta beat cheese balls all to hell.”
“Bogen,” she said. “Fishing?”
Charley had his thumb and forefinger up under his glasses. A little headache? He took the hand grenade away. “Just drive,” Charley said.
Bogen cranked the wheel hard as they came up on the Four Winds Bar. He burned rubber all the way down Münterstrasse.
Shrieve bit back his irritation. Carefully, he spread Conrad Hartmann’s napkin on the back of the passenger’s seat.
“You think Carl Leder can tell us how this works?”
“He knows,” she said. “It’s just a question of getting it out of him.”
Leder had given her a thumbnail discourse on the workings of the Angle Web. They’d been waiting on a plane out of occupied Denmark at the time; Susan had her eye out for German patrols. She hadn’t particularly believed him. God, she wished she’d taken notes.
“If this Angle Web can take you anywhere, how come Leder needed you to come pull him out of Denmark?”
“I gathered it was not so easy as that. He said that traveling through the Web is mentally devastating. Carl Leder is not up to a whole lot of mental demands.” She did not elaborate. Shrieve, she figured, would meet Leder soon enough.
* * *
A couple of MPs met them at the curb. The three-story facade of the Agnes Dei Catholic Hospital loomed up behind them, as imposing in the darkness as an ocean liner appearing out of the fog.
Shrieve showed them a ream of permits from the office of General Eisenhower. They read down till they saw the name “Carl Leder,” and then they smiled.
“You’ll want to come this way.”
They wouldn’t explain what was funny. “You’ll see,” they promised.
They passed under a bas-relief from the 14th century—saints and martyrs, smiling at each other enigmatically. Susan heard the voice of one of her demolition instructors: “I love these old European buildings. The castles on the Rhine, the beautiful churches, the gracious hotels. Twenty thousand tons of unreinforced masonry and overhanging stone. Put a little fulminate of mercury at this keystone, a little plastique at that support structure, you can take out a whole platoon of Kraut soldiers and never fire a shot. . . .”
She clamped her eyes shut till colors blossomed behind her eyelids. Charley Shrieve asked her if she were all right. She told him she had a little headache.
They passed down corridor after corridor of empty rooms. The place had an eerie quiet that seemed to extend all the way from basement to penthouse suite.
“What happened to all the other patients?” Susan said. “You didn’t clear them all out for security reasons, did you?” She hoped not. She’d sat with Carl Leder for six hours beside that field in Denmark—knocked his hand off her knee a few times. Leder didn’t seem worth this sort of effort.
Their host and guide, a Sergeant Cardero of Patterson, New Jersey, shrugged a little deeper into his jacket. “Place was empty when we arrived,” he said. “There’s supposed to be three hundred mental patients here. Who knows what the Krauts did with them.”
In silence, they reached the basement high-security ward. This is where Susan realized what all the snickering had been about.
Leder’s door had been replaced with 100-millimeter armor plate off of a Tiger II tank. An array of locks went up the side of the wall, meshing with more armor plate scavenged from a German half-track, an American B-24 Liberator, and a British destroyer.
Paint crews were scheduled to come in and smooth over the kill stickers and competing decals and mismatched camouflage with a nice institutional shade of mint, but they were as backed up as everyone else. Meanwhile, Carl Leder was holed-up in a bunker designed by George Patton and Groucho Marx.