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Drummond watched him walk across the terrace and vanish into the
hotel lobby. He picked up his cup, but found it empty. On reflection, he
decided that he didn't want any more anyway. Leaving the table, he went
up to his suite, already giving careful consideration to how much he dared
tell Eberle when they met for dinner.
As with his previous stay at Palais Schwarzenberg, Drummond found
that the hotel valet had already whisked away his suit, blazer, and slacks
to be pressed and laid out his shaving kit in the large tiled bathroom that
adjoined his bedroom. His leather trenchcoat was hanging in the antique
wardrobe that stood opposite the imposing brass bed, and all of his other
clothes had been neatly folded and placed in the nearby chest of drawers.
He decided that he could very easily get used to this kind of service.
He sighed and walked over to the French doors that led onto the
balcony, glancing down to the terrace below and below that, the spiked
black wrought iron railing that surrounded the Palais Schwarzenberg. The
railing onto which an attacker had impaled himself after being pitched
over the terrace and from which he had levered himself up and off with
the ease of a gymnast, though the fall alone should have killed any mortal
man. And to be impaled like that, with two spikes protruding through his
back&
Shaking his head, Drummond closed the balcony doors and pulled the
drapes. Despite having slept on the flight between Los Angeles and
London, and the infusion of caffeine in the form of strong Viennese
coffee, he could feel the edge of fatigue beginning to creep over him. He
had to be sharp when he dealt with Eberle later tonight. Stepping into the
bathroom, he turned on the taps in the center of the massive bathtub and
emptied the contents of a small sachet of foaming bath salts under the
splashing water. He went back into the bedroom and stripped while the
tub filled, leaving his rumpled gray suit tossed casually over the back of a
chair. Padding back into the bathroom, he eased himself into the hot bath
and wrestled with the problem of what to tell Eberle over dinner.
There was one other problem gnawing away at Drummond's
subconscious, however, and as he sat soaking in the deep tub, it managed
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to displace all other thoughts, it had come to him in mid-flight, and it
remained a growing question.
When the Mossad handed over their file on him to LAPD's Internal
Affairs Division, they had mentioned his visit to the Angel of Mercy
Sanatorium in New Hampshire. That meant it was possible in fact, it
was highly likely that they knew about his contact with Father Freise. If
they had traced Freise to the castle in Luxembourg&
He wondered whether they could move that fast, and suspected that
they could. It was obvious from his interview the night before they tried
to kill him that the Israelis knew about Kluge, and knew that he was a
vampire. How much more they knew was a matter of speculation, and
Drummond was willing to speculate that even if they didn't know about
Freise and the Order of the Sword, it wouldn't take them too long to find
out about them, once they were on the right track. Hopefully, he'd be able
to come up with a plan of action after dinner with Eberle if Eberle could
be convinced the whole thing was serious. And at this point, Drummond
still wasn't certain how much he wanted to tell him.
Sitting in the tub wasn't waking him up, though. If anything, it was
putting him to sleep. Drummond pulled the plug, stood up in the tub,
turned on the taps, and adjusted the temperature just on the cold side, then
switched the water from the faucet to the hand-held "telephone" shower
and rinsed off. He was feeling a bit more clear-headed as he turned off the
water and towelled off with a thick white towel the size of a small
bedspread.
Padding back into his bedroom, he noted that his gray suit was missing
from the back of the chair where he had tossed it and that his pin-striped
suit and blazer were back in the wardrobe, looking none the worse for
their hours crushed in his suit bag.
"Yes, indeed," he muttered to himself, as he lay down to catch a nap. "I
could get used to this kind of service."
At precisely seven-thirty, Drummond was dressed in his dark pin-
striped suit and waiting in the lobby when the bright red Corvette pulled
to a halt in front of the baroque tower in the center of Palais
Schwarzenberg. Picking up his leather trench coat, he stepped outside and
strode over to the car before Eberle had a chance to extricate himself from
the seat belts. The doorman, running after Drummond, managed to reach
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the Corvette's door handle a split second before Drummond would have
been obliged to open his own door.
Realizing that he had saved the hotel the embarrassment of having one
of their guests have to stoop to such a menial task, Drummond muttered a
profound, "Danke," to the doorman and slid into Eberle's car.
"Well, John, what do you think?" It was obvious from Eberle's tone of
voice that the red '63 Stingray was his absolute pride and joy.
"Markus, I cannot tell a lie. The car looks super."
Drummond looked across at the jukebox-styled dash of the Corvette
and realized for the first time just how cohesive a design the Stingray was.
It was as aggressively American as a John Wayne movie, and only a
perverted sense of Euro-snobbery would cause anyone to suggest that the
car wasn't in the same league as one of the so-called European "super
cars."
Eberle grinned as he twisted the ignition key and the Chevy V-8 roared
into life.
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