Ghosts of the Past (27 page)

The maid literally jumped several inches in the air and nearly fell over, as she turned around and feigned a heart attack while recovering her composure.

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Sullivan continued in German.

“It’s okay,” she answered in Swiss German, visibly shaken.

“The young man and lady that were in this room last night, are they still here?”

“They’ve gone. I believe they checked out early this morning.”

“You’re sure. Absolutely certain,” pressed Sullivan.

“Quite,” with a touch of indignation in her voice.

Sullivan quickly exited the room, bumping into the cart on the way out the door, knocking a box of miniature soaps and shampoos to the floor. When he didn’t stop to pick them up, he could hear the maid cursing him as he turned down the hallway, nearly colliding with Paul Knabel, who was busy pretending to open the door to room 604 with an imaginary key.

It was another three minutes before Sullivan reached the lobby and found Bolivar back in the same chair he had left him in earlier just after breakfast. Bolivar saw him coming over the
Der
Spiegel
magazine he had found to replace the worn out
USA
Today
, and noticed the concern registered on Sullivan’s face.

Sullivan inhaled to catch his breath. “We’ve got a problem.”

“I can see that,” replied Bolivar having risen from the same chair again.

“They’re gone.”

“They’re what?” Bolivar yelled in response. Immediately realizing the intensity of his vocal outburst, he visually surveyed the lobby to see whose attention he had attracted. He casually grabbed Sullivan by the arm and escorted him toward the men’s bathroom opposite the bank of phones he had just visited. Once in the bathroom, Bolivar searched the stalls to make sure they were alone.

“How do you know they’re gone?” Bolivar asked.

“Their room was empty.”

“What do you mean empty? How did you get into their room?

“I walked in, it was open, and it’s fucking empty! I ran into the maid cleaning the room, she said they had left earlier this morning!”

“Shit!” Bolivar ignored Sullivan’s resentment, pulled out his cell phone, and stormed out of the bathroom with Sullivan reluctantly trailing him out several seconds later.

Bolivar pecked at the number pad on his phone and placed it next to his left ear as he headed for the front desk.

“Yeah?” Keitel answered his chirping cell phone, recognizing the number as Bolivar.

“You haven’t seen their car leave the garage this morning?” Bolivar asked.

“No, I haven’t seen them,” replied Keitel.

“Come on inside, they’re gone. We’ll be in the lobby,” said Bolivar.

Before Keitel could ask questions, the phone line went dead.

Bolivar approached the desk, Sullivan languishing several paces behind him, and inquired as to the couple in room 603, mentioning them by name as if to collaborate his assertion that they were friends of his. The response was of no help, and only served to anger him further. They had checked out early this morning and left no forwarding information.

Keitel met them as they retreated from the front desk. “What’s up?”

“They apparently left this morning, no trace of where they’re going,” replied Bolivar.

“I didn’t see their car leave the garage,” Keitel said defensively.

Bolivar nodded to the elevators. “Let’s go down to the garage. Maybe they just left the hotel and they’re coming back for their car.”

They reached the garage level and spread out in opposite directions, looking for the car as described again by Keitel on the trip down in the elevator. A minute later, a loud whistle signaled twice, attracted Bolivar and Sullivan to a waiting Keitel, who was staring at a Hertz service van parked in front of a silver Mercury Sable with a raised hood.

Keitel stepped forward and spoke to a service man that was head first in the engine compartment. After a few minutes of animated discussion, Keitel returned to Sullivan and Bolivar who were standing off to the side of the van.

“They’re definitely gone. They had a new car delivered very early this morning,” Keitel said, thumbing toward the mechanic. “This guy says one of the distributor lines was loose. He thought that was a little strange, but it’s possible it could have worked its way free. My guess is this was set up. They drove this car here, knowing someone might be following, and they did a little tampering with this on and pulled a bait and switch. The good news is we can find out what their new rental car is, but the bad news is we have no idea where they have gone.

“Shit,” Bolivar and Sullivan said in unison.

Knabel entered Suite 603 right after nearly being run down by the young man that had bolted the room in a hurry. A quick conversation with the same maid, confirmed the departure of Courtney and Ferguson that morning, but it revealed the same inquiry from the person who just urgently left.

He stepped into the hallway, and quickly hit the redial button on his cell phone.

“Marshall.” Horst Marshall answered the phone on the first ring. He adjusted his seat at the bar, so he could maintain his view of the hotel lobby past the couple that just sat in the open seats to his left.

“Horst, we’ve got problems,” said Knabel.

“Go ahead.”

“The girl and her boyfriend are gone. They’ve checked out… sometime this morning.”

“Damnit,” replied Marshall.

“That’s not all. We have another party that looks to be following the same two we are. He is probably headed your way.

He’s over six feet, thirty-ish, blond, he has an oatmeal colored turtleneck with a brown sweater vest. I think he had a pair of jeans on, but I’m not…”

“I see him now,” Marshall interrupted as he saw Sullivan emerge from the elevators. “Get down here as soon as you can.”

Marshall closed his phone, got to his feet, threw several francs on to the bar, and walked his drink into the lobby area. He watched as the man Horst described meet with another man, older with a dark complexion. As they spoke, the older one nearly screamed something, then caught himself and looked around the lobby in concern. Marshall followed discreetly as they marched off to the men’s room.

Several minutes later, after they had exited the bathroom and approached the front desk, he watched as a third man joined the other two. All three went to the elevators, and entered the first available headed down.

Knabel stepped out of an adjoining elevator, as the doors closed to the one manned by Bolivar, Sullivan and Keitel. Marshall met him as he reached the lobby.

“There’s more than just the one you saw,” said Marshall.

“Where are they? How many?”

“Three so far. They just went down to the garage.”

“You think they’re looking for their car?”

“Could be. They might be headed for their own.” Marshall reached into his black leather jacket and retrieved one of the receivers that were tracking the car. He looked at the repeating red lights, which indicated a strong signal, meaning the car was still in the immediate proximity.

“It’s still here?” Knabel asked incredulously.

“Yeah, it’s still here. Let’s go have a look ourselves, but be discreet, I don’t want them catching on to us. I’ll take the elevator, you take the stairs.” Marshall pointed at the door at the end of the elevator hall with the plaque that read “Autowerkstatt”.

Once they reached the garage, they were able to observe from a safe distances, equidistant from the three strangers in conversation over Ferguson’s car and a Hertz service truck. They waited until the three were finished in the garage and headed back upstairs via the elevators, before they rejoined each other. Marshall sent Knabel back up the stairs to keep tabs on their new friends, while he had a conversation with the same mechanic, who was decidedly curious as to why so many people were asking him questions… the same questions. Nevertheless, he gave the same answers.

“I think they’re in the hotel,” said Knabel.

“You’re sure?” Marshall inquired again for the second time.

“Look, I got upstairs no more than one or two minutes from the time they got on the elevators in the garage. I covered the lobby and every entrance almost immediately when I couldn’t find them. None of the staff saw then either, and I think I asked about everybody that’s working right now.” Knabel waved at the hotel lobby from the same seat at the bar Marshall had been in thirty minutes earlier.

Marshall was putting off the inevitable. He opened his phone and punched in Alden’s number.

Alden was lying in bed reading
Stern
magazine, when his phone nearly vibrated off the nightstand. “
Ja
,” he answered.

“Gerhard, it’s Horst. We’ve got a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

Horst Marshall told him the whole story. There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Gerhard, are you still there?” Marshall asked.

“So who are these other people? Any clues?” Alden asked.

“No, not right now. We’re going to hang around here to see if they surface. Rudi’s convinced they are in the hotel somewhere, maybe booked in a room or rooms. We’ll check on that next. It would help if you can put the word out on Ferguson’s new car. I know Hertz delivered a new one to them early this morning.”

“I’ll get on that, but you need to find out anything you can about where our two friends are headed, and who our new friends are. Check with everybody in the hotel, money is no object. It would help if you can track down who these three new monkeys are. They may have some clues. If you do find them again, try not to lose them.
You
dumbfucks!
They may be our only link to finding Ferguson and Lewis again.”

Before Marshall could say anything, the line went dead.

Marshall looked at Knabel. “He didn’t take it as bad as I thought he would.” They both swallowed their remaining beers. “Let’s get started.”

Alden sat on the edge of the bed rubbing his hands through his hair.
Who
the
hell
are
these
two
amateurs?
I’m
personally
going
to
cut
the
heads
off
of
both
of
you,
if
you
don’t
cause
my
death
in
the
meantime.
Where,
oh
where
could
you
be
going?

He looked at the cell phone still resting in his now sweaty palm, and contemplated updating Herr Leiter. He shook off the thought and set the cell phone down. He opened his wallet, took out his Hertz Gold card, and lifted the hotel phone. As he dialed the international number listed on the card, he retrieved his Daytimer from the same nightstand and looked up the number for a numeral 15 listed under the “P’s”. He wrote the number down on a notepad and began a mental decoding of the number by writing a different number under each of the original numbers.

He had hoped not to dip into the law enforcement portion of the organization, but this was starting to reach the status of an emergency… in fact his life depended on it. Hopefully, Leiter would understand.

The Pratt & Whitney PW207D engines on the Bell 427 helicopter were nearly maxed out as the Rocca International helicopter roared over the Cordillera Occidental range of the Andes Mountains, on its way from the La Paz-El Alto International airport to Ulloma, Bolivia. Constantine Rocca sat comfortably, as he and the two pilots cruised at a speed of 130 mph, with dawn forcing its way over the mountaintops to the east. They were only minutes from one of the company’s most productive silver mines south of the small Bolivian town.

It was noisy, but he managed to hear the chirping of his cell phone as it lay on the vacant leather seat next to him.

“Hello?” Rocca spoke loudly into the lower portion of the flip phone.

“Mr. Rocca, it’s Julio. I’m sorry to bother you sir, but we have a bit of a problem here in Lucerne.” Bolivar spoke equally as loud on the other end of the connection.

“Julio, you know I don’t like problems. What is it?”

“We’ve lost Lewis and Ferguson. They disappeared late last night, early this morning, we’re not sure.”

“Right out from under your noses?” Rocca asked sarcastically.

“We watched them right into their room sometime after midnight. It appears now, they were either aware of us, or guessed that someone was watching them. From what we found out so far, they went to great length to have a new car brought to them in the middle of the night, and they snuck out of their room sometime early this morning, without passing through the lobby. We were vigilant outside, but we weren’t looking for them leaving in a different car.”

“And do we know what car they left in?”

“Keitel is headed for the Hertz office now. We do know it came from them.”

“No idea of where they were headed?”

“Not right now, but we’re starting to go through everyone on the hotel staff they were in contact with last night. Most of them are off right now and won’t be back on the clock until this afternoon.”

“Fine,” said Rocca dispassionately. “Keep investigating. I have an alternative option that may bear fruit. Be ready to move when you hear from me.”

“We’re sorry Mr. Rocca. I cannot believe they know we are here. We have been very careful and Keitel is very professional. I don’t think any of us have compromised our situation.”

“Save it Julio. All is not lost. I’m pretty certain we’ll have Miss Lewis’ attention soon, and when we do she should be more than forthcoming with her whereabouts.” Rocca ended their conversation without waiting for a reply.

The engines slowed and the helicopter began it’s decent to the elevated concrete helo pad, cut out of the top of a hill next to the two story mining office.