Das
Alte Schloss
Stuttgart,
Germany
Five days
ago
Conrad Veder stood in the shadows beneath
one of the arches in the courtyard of the Old Castle in Stuttgart.
He chewed cinnamon gum and watched a pigeon standing on the plumed
helmet of Eberhard I, Duke of Württemberg, a wonderful statue
sculpted by Ludwig von Hofer in 1859. Veder had read up on the Old
Castle before coming here, partly as research for this phase of the
job and partly out of his fascination with German history. He was a
man of few abiding interests, but Germany had intrigued him since
the first time he’d come here thirty-four years ago. This was his
first visit to Stuttgart, however, and this morning he had whiled
away a pleasant hour on the Karlsplatz side of the Old Castle in a
museum dedicated to the memory of Claus Schenk Graf von
Stauffenberg, a former resident of Stuttgart who attempted to
assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. A couple of years ago Veder had
seen the movie Valkyrie, based on the incident. He thought Tom
Cruise was a good fit for Stauffenberg, though Veder liked neither
the actor nor the traitor who had failed in what should have been
an easy kill.
After reviewing all the data, including
floor plans of the site of the attempted assassination, Veder
concluded that he would have done it differently and done it
correctly.
He checked his watch. Almost
time.
He took the gum from his mouth, wrapped it
in a tissue, and placed it in his pocket. Veder never left useful
traces behind. Veder had little respect for police intelligence,
but their doggedness was legendary.
A group of tourists came ambling past-fat
Americans in ugly shirts, English with bad teeth, haughty French.
It was no wonder stereotypes persisted. As they passed, Veder
melted into the crowd. He was dressed in jeans and a lightweight
hooded shirt with the logo of the VfB Stuttgart football club
embroidered on the right chest and the emblem of the Mercedes-Benz
Arena on the back. There were at least five other people in the
square with similar shirts. He wore sunglasses and a scruff of
reddish gold stubble on his jaw. His gait was slouchy athletic,
typical of the middle-aged ex-athlete who resented being past his
prime. It had taken Veder only a few days to identify the
personality subtype among the crowds in the city. He saw hundreds
of them and now he was indistinguishable from any of the others who
wandered in and out of the shops and museums around the Old
Castle.
He followed the crowd into the Stauffenberg
museum. Veder was not dressed this way when he had visited the
museum earlier that day. The other costume had been similarly based
on a common Stuttgart look, and like this one it was equally at
odds with Veder’s true appearance.
It was possible, even likely, that he could
have wrapped this job up during his early visit, but he liked the
distractions and confusion that a group would provide. Earlier the
attendance at the museum had been sparse. If someone very smart was
to have watched the security tapes from the morning they might have
been able to make some useful deductions about Veder’s true
physical appearance. But amid a sea of tourists he was virtually
invisible.
The crowd was made up of three different
tours, and the tour guides herded the people into one of the rooms
to await a brief lecture by Stellvertretender Direktor Jerome
Freund, the professor who was the assistant director of the museum.
Freund came out of the back, walking slowly and leaning on a
hardwood walking stick with a flowery silver Art Nouveau handle.
Veder knew that the limp had been created by a high-powered bullet
smashing Freund’s hip assembly. That shot had been one of the very
few misses Veder had ever made, and he disliked that he had failed
in the kill. That, at the time, he had been bleeding from two.22
bullets in his own chest did not matter. It was one of three
botched jobs-all related to the work he had done for his former
“idealistic” employers.
Freund was a tall man with a Shakespearean
forehead and swept-back gray hair. His spectacles perched on the
end of his nose and arthritis stooped the big shoulders, but Veder
could still see the wolf beneath the skin of a crippled old
man.
The speech Freund gave was the same one he
had given that morning. Even the professor’s gestures were the
same. Ah, Veder thought, there is nothing so useful as
routine.
He waited until the professor began
describing the day of the assassination attempt. If this was all
rote to the man, then he would raise his cane and use it to point
to the large photo that covered one wall, tapping the photo with
the cane tip to indicate where Stauffenberg and Hitler had each
stood. All throughout the talk Veder pretended to take photos with
his digital camera. Sure enough, the professor turned and began
tapping the wall.
If Veder was a different kind of man, he
might have either taken pleasure in how easy it was or been
disappointed that it did not challenge his skills, but Veder had
the cold efficiency of an insect. Insects are opportunistic and
they don’t gloat.
He pressed the button on the camera and the
tiny dart shot out of a hole beside the fake lens, propelled by a
nearly silent puff of compressed gas, traveling at a hundred feet
per second. Freund flinched and swatted the back of his
neck.
“Moskito,” he said with a laugh, and the
hot, sweaty tourists chuckled. It was hot and flies, gnats, and
mosquitoes were everywhere. The lecture continued, the moment
forgotten. Veder remained with the tourists until they finished the
tour, and as the crowd boiled out into the courtyard he detached
himself and strolled idly across to the opulent market hall. He
bought clothes in different stores, changed in a bathroom, and
became another kind of tourist who vanished entirely into the
crowd.
Veder had no desire to linger. He did not
doubt the efficacy of the pathogen on the dart, and he had no need
to see his victim fall. He would read about it in the papers. It
would make all of the papers. After all, how often does a German
scholar die of Ebola?
By the time the first symptoms appeared,
Conrad Veder was on a train to Munich. He was asleep within twenty
minutes of the train leaving the station. By then Jerome Freund was
already beginning to feel sick.