Spandau Phoenix
Greg Iles
The New York Times No.1 bestseller delivers ‘a scorching read’ (John Grisham). One of the great unsolved mysteries of World War II is – to some people – a secret worth killing for…The greatest remaining mystery of World War II will be solved…West Berlin, 1987: Spandau Prison is being torn down. Amongst the rubble, the diary of enigmatic Nazi Rudolph Hess is found, and the secrets it reveals plunge the world into chaos.The Spandau Diary- what was in it? Why did the secret intelligence agencies of every major power want it? Why was a brave and beautiful woman kidnapped and assaulted to get to it? And why did a chain of deception and violent death lash out across the globe, from survivors of the Nazi past to warriors in the new conflict now about to explode?
GREG ILES
Spandau Phoenix
Dedication (#ulink_c2d66d22-0462-59e2-8daa-f1751dbfbbb5)
To Jerry W. Iles, M.D.
Table of Contents
Cover (#u89a48634-68cd-5486-a6b3-4d79f40abb1c)
Title Page (#u17b3eaf3-2546-5549-af3b-5cfae2a5e8d2)
Dedication (#u3b4c1d37-82c9-5a27-8c16-c1c63dc5a291)
Prologue (#uc7f523a7-a4f8-54b8-84e6-b895f78b7a2a)
Book One: West Berlin, 1987 (#u457d2cdd-f188-5763-b267-bcea9ddb3f42)
Chapter One (#u3f6ae0e3-ac62-54a3-8495-045c981f5b2f)
Chapter Two (#uc3d01575-316f-5cd8-845f-187afe4c02ff)
Chapter Three (#u76d91c14-9fec-58c7-8107-592e100c0aa1)
Chapter Four (#u82b09b1b-b315-5206-9188-b8d9dadbfa5f)
Chapter Five (#u630453ca-db6d-59ea-a6a2-5cf995ee7902)
Chapter Six (#u992ea13b-8c02-5f27-a9eb-28a05ddd70af)
Chapter Seven (#u3f6304fb-ddd3-5671-bafe-b19e42bfdb51)
Chapter Eight (#u9f9876bf-ddc9-5eee-9778-39fc0dd22ab7)
Chapter Nine (#u84c16f0d-8d60-50a5-bb7a-01430c6d0461)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
The Plan: Nazi Germany, 1941 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Book Two: South Africa, 1987 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Greg Iles (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_b97e61df-e1f1-5c83-8e11-b819823fd572)
What is history but a fable agreed upon?
—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
10 May 1941
The North Sea lay serene, unusual for spring, but night would soon fall on a smoking, broken continent reeling from the shock of war. From the bloody dunes of Dunkirk to the bomb-shattered streets of Warsaw, from the frozen tip of Norway to the deserted beaches of the Mediterranean—Europe was enslaved. Only England, beleaguered and alone, stood against the massed armies of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and tonight London was scheduled to die.
By fire. At 1800 hours Greenwich time the greatest single concentration of Luftwaffe bombers ever assembled would unleash their fury upon the unprotected city, and over seven hundred acres of the British capital would cease to exist. Thousands of incendiary bombs would rain down upon civilian and soldier alike, narrowly missing St. Paul’s Cathedral, gutting the Houses of Parliament. History would record that strike against London as the worst of the entire war, a holocaust. And yet …
… all this—the planning, the casualties, the goliathan destruction—was but the puff of smoke from a magician’s gloved hand. A spectacular diversion calculated to draw the eyes of the world away from a mission so daring and intricate that it would defy understanding for generations to come. The man behind this ingenious plot was Adolf Hitler, and tonight, unknown to a single member of his General Staff, he would reach out from the Berghof and undertake the most ambitious military feat of his life.
He had worked miracles before—the blitzkrieg of Poland, the penetration of the “impassable” Ardennes—but this would be the crowning achievement of his career. It would raise him at last above Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. In one stunning blow, he would twist the balance of world power inside out, transforming his mortal foe into an ally and consigning his present ally to destruction. To succeed he would have to reach into the very heart of Britain, but not with bombs or missiles. Tonight he needed precision, and he had chosen his weapons accordingly: treachery, weakness, envy, fanaticism—the most destructive forces available to man. All were familiar tools in Hitler’s hand, and all were in place.
But such forces were unpredictable. Traitors lived in terror of discovery; agents feared capture. Fanatics exploded without warning, and weak men invited betrayal. To effectively utilize such resources, Hitler knew, someone had to be on the scene—reassuring the agent, directing the fanatic, holding the hand of the traitor and a gun to the head of the coward. But who could handle such a mission? Who could inspire both trust and fear in equal measure? Hitler knew such a man. He was a soldier, a man of forty-eight, a pilot. And he was already in the air.
Two thousand feet above Amsterdam, the Messerschmitt Bf-110 Zerstörer plowed through a low ceiling of cumulus clouds and burst into clear sky over the glittering North Sea. The afternoon sun flashed across the fighter’s silver wings, setting off the black-painted crosses that struck terror into the stoutest hearts across Europe.
Inside the cockpit, the pilot breathed a sigh of relief. For the last four hundred miles he had flown a tiring, highly restricted route, changing altitude several times to remain within the Luftwaffe’s prescribed corridors of safety. Hitler’s personal pilot had given him the coded map he carried, and, with it, a warning. Not for amusement were the safety zones changed daily, Hans Bahr had whispered; with British Spitfires regularly penetrating Hermann Göring’s “impenetrable” wall of air defense, the danger was real, precautions necessary.
The pilot smiled grimly. Enemy fighters were the least of his worries this afternoon. If he failed to execute the next step of his mission perfectly, it would be a squadron of Messerschmitts, not Spitfires, that shot him into the sea. At any moment the Luftwaffe flight controllers expected him to turn back for Germany, as he had a dozen times before, test flying the fighter lent to him personally by Willi Messerschmitt, then returning home to his wife and child, his privileged life. But this time he would not turn back.
Checking his airspeed against his watch, he estimated the point at which he would fade from the Luftwaffe radar screens based on the Dutch island of Terschelling. He’d reached the Dutch coast at 3:28 P.M. It was now 3:40. At 220 miles per hour, he should have put forty-four miles of the North Sea behind him already. German radar was no match for its British counterpart, he knew, but he would wait another three minutes just to make sure. Nothing could be left to chance tonight. Nothing.
The pilot shivered inside his fur-lined leather flying suit. So much depended upon his mission: the fates of England and Germany, very possibly the whole world. It was enough to make any man shiver. And Russia, that vast, barbaric land infected by the cancer of communism—his Fatherland’s ancient enemy—if he succeeded tonight, Russia would kneel beneath the swastika at last!
The pilot nudged the stick, dipping the Messerschmitt’s left wing, and looked down through the thick glass canopy. Almost time. He looked at his watch, counting. Five … four … three … two …
Now! Like a steel falcon he swooped toward the sea, hurtling downward at over four hundred miles per hour. At the last instant he jerked the stick back and leveled out, skimming the wave tops as he stormed north toward Aalborg, the main Luftwaffe fighter base in Denmark. His desperate race had begun.
Fighting through the heavy air at sea level, the Messerschmitt drank fuel like water, but the pilot’s main concern now was secrecy. And finding the landing signal, he reminded himself. Two dozen training flights had familiarized him with the aircraft, but the detour to Denmark had been unexpected. He had never flown this far north without visual references. He was not afraid, but he would feel much better once he sighted the fjords of Denmark to starboard.
It had been a long time since the pilot had killed. The battles of the Great War seemed so vague now. He had certainly fired hundreds of rounds in anger, but one was never really sure about the killing. Not until the charges came, anyway—the terrible, bloody, heroically insane assaults of flesh against steel. He had almost been killed—he remembered that clearly enough—by a bullet in the left lung, one of three wounds he’d taken while fighting in the famous List regiment. But he had survived, that was the important thing. The dead in the enemy trenches … who knew, really?
He would kill tonight. He would have no choice. Checking the two compasses strapped to his left thigh, he took a careful bearing, then quickly returned his eyes to the horizon indicator. This close to the surface of the sea, the water played tricks on the mind. Hundreds of expert pilots had plowed into the waves simply by letting their concentration falter for a few moments. Only six minutes to Aalborg, he thought nervously. Why risk it? He climbed to one thousand feet, then leveled out and craned his neck to survey the sea below. Waveless, it receded before him with the gentle curve of the earth. Except … there … dead ahead. He could see broken coastline … Denmark! He had done it!
Feeling a hot surge of adrenaline, he scanned the clouds for fighter patrols. If one spotted him, he decided, he would sit tight, hold his course and pretend to be a straggler from an early raid. The hard, empty northern land flashed beneath him. His destination was a small ancillary strip just short of Aalborg air base. But where was it? The runway … his special cargo … where?
A thousand feet below, the red flash of railway flares suddenly lit up in parallel lines to his left. The signal! A lone green flare indicated the proper direction of approach. The pilot circled wide until he had come 180 degrees, then began nursing the Messerschmitt in. The strip was short—no margin for error. Altimeter zero. With bated breath he felt tentatively for the runway. Nothing … nothing … whump!—the wheels dropped hard onto concrete. The plane shuddered from the impact but steadied fast. Cutting his engines, the pilot rolled to a stop thirty meters beyond the last two flares.
Before he could unfasten his harness, two ground crewmen slid the canopy back over his head. Silently, they helped him with his straps and pulled him from the cockpit. Their rough familiarity startled him, but he let it pass. To them he was just another pilot—on a somewhat irregular mission perhaps, operating solo from a practically deserted strip south of the base—but just a pilot, all the same. Had he removed his flying helmet and goggles, the crewmen would have exhibited quite a different attitude, and certainly would not have touched him without permission. The pilot’s face was known to every man, woman, and child in Germany—indeed to millions across Europe and the world.
Without a word, he walked a little way off the strip and unzipped his suit to relieve himself. There were only the two crewmen, he saw, and they had been well briefed. From a battered tank truck one pumped fuel into the plane while the other toiled with special fittings beneath the Messerschmitt’s left wing. The pilot scanned the small runway. There was an old sock-type wind indicator, a pile of scrap parts left from pre-war days, and, several yards down the strip, a small wooden shack that had probably once housed some Danish mechanic’s tools.
It houses something quite different now, I’ll wager, he thought. Zipping up, he walked slowly toward the shack, alert for any sign of human occupation. The sleek black bonnet of a Daimler jutted from behind the ramshackle building, gleaming like a funeral hearse. The pilot slipped around the shack and peered through the windshield of the car. Empty. Remembering his instructions, he wound a long flying scarf around the lower half of his face. It made breathing difficult, but combined with his flying helmet, it left only his eyes visible to an observer. He entered the shack without knocking.
Darkness shrouded the interior, but the fetid air was pregnant with human presence. Someone, not the pilot, lit a lantern, and the room slowly revealed itself. A major wearing the smart black uniform of Himmler’s SS stood less than a meter from the pilot. Unlike most of his type, this representative of Himmler’s “elite corps” was quite fat. He looked more accustomed to the comforts of a soft billet like Paris than a battle zone. Behind him, a thinner man dressed in a leather flying suit sat rigidly in a straight-backed wooden chair. Like the pilot, his face was also draped by a scarf. His eyes darted nervously between the newcomer and the SS man.
“Right on time,” the SS major said, looking at his watch. “I’m Major Horst Berger.”
The pilot nodded, but offered no name.
“Drink?” A bottle appeared from the shadows. “Schnapps? Cognac?”
My God, the pilot thought. Does the fool carry a stocked bar about in his car? He shook his head emphatically, then jerked his thumb toward the half-open door. “I’ll see to the preparations.”
“Nonsense,” Major Berger replied, dismissing the idea with a flick of his bottle. “The crewmen can handle it. They’re some of the best from Aalborg. It’s a shame, really.”
It is, the pilot thought. But I don’t think you’re too upset about it. I think you’re enjoying all this. “I’m going back to the plane,” he muttered.
The man in the wooden chair stood slowly.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Major Berger barked, but the man ignored him. “Oh, all right,” Berger complained. He buttoned his collar and followed the pair out of the shack.
“They know about the drop tanks?” the pilot asked, when Berger had caught up.
“Ja.”
“The nine-hundred-liter ones?”
“Sure. Look, they’re fitting them now.”
Berger was right. On the far side of the plane, two ground crewmen attached the first of two egg-shaped auxiliary fuel containers to the Messerschmitt’s blunt-tipped wings. When they finished, they moved to the near side of the aircraft.
“Double-check the wet-points!” the pilot called.
The chief mechanic nodded, already working.
The pilot turned to Major Berger. “I had an idea,” he said. “Flying up.”
The SS man frowned. “What idea?”
“I want them to grease my guns before we take off.”
“What do you mean? Lubricate them? I assure you that the weapons are in perfect working order.”
“No, I want them to pack the barrels with grease.”
Behind Major Berger, the man in the flying suit stepped sideways and looked curiously at the pilot.
“You can’t be serious,” Berger objected. He turned around. “Tell him,” he said. But the man in the flying suit only cocked his head to one side.
“But that’s suicide!” Major Berger insisted. “One chance encounter with a British patrol and—” He shook his head. “I simply cannot allow it. If you’re shot down, my career could take a very nasty turn!”
Your career is over already, the pilot thought grimly. “Grease the guns!” he shouted to the crewmen, who, having fitted the empty drop tanks, now anxiously pumped fuel into them. The chief mechanic stood at the rear of the fuel truck, trying to decide which of the two men giving orders was really in charge. He knew Major Berger from Aalborg, but something about the tall, masked pilot hinted at a more dangerous authority.
“You can’t do that!” Major Berger protested. “Stop that there! I’m in command here!”
The chief mechanic shut off the fuel hose and stared at the three men at the edge of the runway. Slowly, with great purpose, the pilot pointed a long arm toward the crewman under the wing and shouted through his scarf: “You! Grease my guns! That’s a direct order!”
The chief mechanic recognized the sound of authority now. He climbed onto the fuel truck to get a grease gun from his tool box.
Major Berger laid a quivering hand on a Schmeisser machine pistol at his belt. “You have lost your mind, I believe,” he said softly. “Rescind that order immediately or I’ll put you under arrest!”
Glancing back toward the crewmen—who were now busy packing the Messerschmitt’s twenty-millimeter cannon with heavy black grease—the pilot took hold of his scarf and unwrapped it slowly from his head. When his face became visible, the SS man fell back a step, his eyes wide in shock. Behind him the man in the flying suit swallowed hard and turned away.
The pilot’s face was dark, saturnine, with eyes set deep beneath bushy black brows that almost met in the center. His imperious stare radiated command. “Remove your hand from that pistol,” he said quietly.
For several moments Major Berger stood still as stone. Then, slowly, he let his hand fall from the Schmeisser’s grip. “Jawohl, Herr … Herr Reichminister.”
“Now, Herr Major! And be about your business! Go!”
Suddenly Major Berger was all action. With a pounding heart he hurried toward the Messerschmitt, his face hot and tingling with fear. Blood roared in his ears. He had just threatened to place the Deputy Führer of the German Reich—Rudolf Hess—under arrest! In a daze he ordered the crewmen to speed their packing of the guns. While they complied, he harried them about their earlier maintenance. Were the wet-points clear? Would the wing drop tanks disengage properly when empty?
At the edge of the runway, Hess turned to the man in the flying suit. “Come closer,” he murmured.
The man took a tentative step forward and stood at attention. “You understand about the guns?” Hess asked.
Slowly the man nodded assent.
“I know it’s dangerous, but it’s dangerous for us both. Under certain circumstances it could make all the difference.”
Again the man nodded. He was a pilot also, and had in fact flown many more missions than the man who had so suddenly assumed command of this situation. He understood the logic: a plane purported to be on a mission of peace would appear much more convincing with its guns disabled. But even if he hadn’t understood, he was in no position to argue.
“It’s been a long time, Hauptmann,” Hess said, using the rank of captain in place of a name.
The captain nodded. Overhead a pair of Messerschmitts roared by from Aalborg, headed south on patrol.
“It is a great sacrifice you have made for your country, Hauptmann. You and men like you have given up all normality so that men like myself could prosecute the war in comparative safety. It’s a great burden, is it not?”
The captain thought fleetingly of his wife and child. He had not seen them for over three years; now he wondered if he ever would again. He nodded slowly.
“Once we’re in the plane,” said Hess, “I won’t be able to see your face. Let me see it now. Before.”
As the captain reached for the end of his scarf, Major Berger scurried back to tell them the plane was almost ready. The two pilots, enthralled in the strange play they found themselves acting out, heard nothing. What the SS man saw when he reached them struck him like a blow to the stomach. All his breath passed out in a single gasp, and he knew that he stood at the brink of extinction. Before him, two men with the same face stood together shaking hands! And that face! Major Berger felt as if he had stumbled into a hall of mirrors where only the dangerous people were multiplied.
The pilots gripped hands for a long moment, their eyes heavy with the knowledge that both their lives might end tonight over foreign soil in the cockpit of an unarmed fighter.
“My God,” Berger croaked.
Neither pilot acknowledged his presence. “How long has it been, Hauptmann?” Hess asked.
“Since Dessau, Herr Reichminister.”
“You look thinner.” Hess murmured, “I still can’t believe it. It’s positively unnerving.” Then sharply, “Is the plane ready, Berger?”
“I … I believe so, Herr—”
“To your work, then!”
“Jawohl, Herr Reichminister!” Major Berger turned and marched toward the crewmen, who now stood uncertainly against the fuel truck, waiting for permission to return to Aalborg. Berger unclipped his Schmeisser with one hand as he walked.
“All finished?” he called.
“Jawohl, Herr Major,” answered the chief mechanic.
“Fine, fine. Step away from the truck, please.” Berger raised the stubby barrel of his Schmeisser.
“But … Herr Major, what are you doing! What have we done?”
“A great service to your Fatherland,” the SS man said. “Now—step away from the truck!”
The crewmen looked at each other, frozen like terrified game. Finally it dawned on them why Major Berger was hesitating. He obviously knew something about the volatility of aircraft fuel vapor. Backing closer to the truck, the chief mechanic clasped his greasy hands together in supplication. “Please, Herr Major, I have a family—”
The dance was over. Major Berger took three steps backward and fired a sustained burst from the Schmeisser. Hess screamed a warning, but it was too late. Used with skill, the Schmeisser could be a precise weapon, but Major Berger’s skill was limited. Of a twelve-round burst, only four rounds struck the crewmen. The remainder tore through the rusted shell of the fuel truck like it was paper.
The explosion knocked Major Berger a dozen feet from where he stood. Hess and the captain had instinctively dived for the concrete. Now they lay prone, shielding their eyes from the flash. When Hess finally looked up, he saw Major Berger silhouetted against the flames, stumbling proudly toward them through a pall of black smoke.
“How about that!” the SS man cried, looking back at the inferno. “No evidence now!”
“Idiot!” Hess shouted. “They’ll have a patrol from Aalborg here in five minutes to investigate!”
Berger grinned. “Let me take care of them, Herr Reichminister! The SS knows how to handle the Luftwaffe!”
Hess felt relieved; Berger was making it easy. Stupidity was something he had no patience with. “I’m sorry, Major,” he said, looking hard into the SS man’s face. “I cannot allow that.”
Like a cobra hypnotizing a bird, Hess transfixed Berger with his dark, deep-set eyes. Quite naturally, he drew a Walther automatic from the forepouch of his flight suit and pulled back the slide. The fat SS man’s mouth opened slowly; his hands hung limp at his sides, the Schmeisser clipped uselessly to his belt.
“But why?” he asked quietly. “Why me?”
“Something to do with Reinhard Heydrich, I believe.”
Berger’s eyes grew wide; then they closed. His head sagged onto his tunic.
“For the Fatherland,” Hess said quietly. He pulled the trigger.
The captain jumped at the report of the Walther. Major Berger’s body jerked twice on the ground, then lay still.
“Take his Schmeisser and any ammunition you can find,” Hess ordered. “Check the Daimler.”
“Jawohl, Herr Reichminister!”
The next few minutes were a blur of action that both men would try to remember clearly for the rest of their lives—plundering the corpse for ammunition, searching the car, double-checking the drop tanks of the aircraft, donning their parachutes, firing the twin Daimler-Benz engines, turning the plane on the old cracked concrete—both men instinctively carrying out tasks they had rehearsed a thousand times in their heads, the tension compounded by the knowledge that an armed patrol might arrive from Aalborg at any moment.
Before boarding the plane, they exchanged personal effects. Hess quickly but carefully removed the validating items that had been agreed upon: three compasses, a Leica camera, his wristwatch, some photographs, a box of strange and varied drugs, and finally the fine gold identification chain worn by all members of Hitler’s inner circle. He handed them to the captain with a short word of explanation for each: “Mine, my wife’s, mine, my wife and son …” The man receiving these items already knew their history, but he kept silent. Perhaps, he thought, the Reichminister speaks in farewell to all the familiar things he might lose tonight. The captain understood that feeling well.
Even this strange and poignant ceremony merged into the mind-numbing rush of fear and adrenaline that accompanied takeoff, and neither man spoke again until they found themselves forty miles over the North Sea, arrowing toward their target. As the plan dictated, Hess had yielded the controls to the captain. Hess now sat in the radio operator’s seat, facing the twin tail fins of the fighter. The two men used no names—only ranks—and limited their conversation to the mechanics of the mission.
“Range?” the captain asked, tilting his head back toward the rear-facing seat.
“Twelve hundred and fifty miles with the nine-hundred-liter tanks,” Hess replied.
“I meant range to target.”
“The island or the castle?”
“The island.”
“Six hundred and seventy miles.”
The captain asked no more questions for the next hour. He stared down at the steadily darkening sea and thought of his family. Hess studied a sheaf of papers in his lap: maps, photographs, and mini-biographies secretly copied from SS files in the basement of the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. Ceaselessly, he went over each detail, visualizing the contingencies he could face upon landing. A hundred miles off the English coast, he began drilling the pilot in his duties.
“How much did they tell you, Hauptmann?”
“A lot. Too much, I think.”
“You see the extra radio to your right?”
“Yes.”
“You can operate it?”
“Yes.”
“If all goes well, you have only a few things to remember. First, the drop tanks. Whatever happens, you ditch them into the sea. Same with the extra radio. After my time is up, of course. Forty minutes is the time limit, remember that. Forty minutes.”
“Forty minutes I wait.”
“If you have not received my message within that time, the mission has failed. In that case—”
There was a sharp intake of breath from the pilot, quiet but audible. Hess knew what caused that sound—the unbanishable fear of death. He felt it too. But for him it was different. He knew the stakes of the mission, the inestimable strategic gain that dwarfed the possible loss of two human lives. Like the man in the pilot’s seat, Hess too had a family—a wife and young son. But for a man in his position—a man so close to the Führer—such things were luxuries one knew might be lost at any moment. For him death was simply an obstacle to success that must be avoided at all costs. But for the man in the pilot’s chair …
“Hauptmann?” Hess said, almost gently.
“Sir?”
“I know what frightens you now. I really do. But there are worse things than death. Do you understand me? Far worse.”
The pilot’s reply was a hoarse, hollow gurgle. Hearing it, Hess decided that empathy was not the proper motivator for this man. When he next spoke, his voice brimmed with confidence. “Dwelling on that is of no use whatsoever, Hauptmann. The plan is flawless. The important thing is, have you been studying?”
“Have I been studying!” The captain was obviously relieved to be talking about something else. “My God, some iron-assed SS Brigadeführer grilled me for two days straight.”
“Probably Schellenberg.”
“Who?”
“Never mind, Hauptmann. Better that you don’t know.”
Silence filled the cockpit as the pilot’s mind drifted back to the fate that awaited him should his special passenger fail. “Herr Reichminister?” he asked at length.
“Yes?”
“How do you rate your chances of success?”
“It’s not in my hands, Hauptmann, so I would be foolish to guess. It’s up to the British now.” My advice is to prepare for the worst, Hess thought bitterly. The Führer’s bankers have been since January. “Just concentrate on your part of the mission,” he said. “And for God’s sake, be sure to jump from a high enough altitude to destroy the plane. It’s nothing the British haven’t seen before, but there’s no need to make them a present of it. Once you’ve gotten my message, just jump and wait until I can get you released. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. If you don’t get the message—”
Verdammt! Hess cursed silently. There’s just no avoiding it. His next words cut with the brittle edge of command. “If you don’t get my message, Hauptmann, you know what must be done.”
“Jawohl,” the pilot murmured, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. He was sickeningly aware of the small, sticky cyanide capsule taped against his chest. He wondered if he could possibly go through with this thing that everyone but him seemed to consider simply business as usual.
“Listen to me, Hauptmann,” Hess said earnestly. “You know why your participation is necessary. British Intelligence knows I am coming to England …”
Hess kept talking, trying to fill the emptiness that would give the pilot too much time to think. Up here, with Germany falling far behind, the concept of duty seemed much more abstract than it did when one was surrounded by the reinforcing order of the army and the SS. The captain seemed sound—and Heydrich had vouched for him—but given enough time to consider his position, he might do anything. After all, what sane man wanted to die?
“Cut your speed!” Hess ordered, his voice quickening. “Hold at 180.”
The miles had melted away before the Messerschmitt’s nose. They were a mere sixty miles off the Scottish coast. On a clear evening like this, the RAF radar stations would begin to pick up reflections from the fighter at any moment. Hess tightened his parachute harness, then set aside his maps and leaned backward.
“Stay high and clear!” he shouted to the canopy lid. “Make sure they see us coming in!”
“Where are you going out?”
“We should make landfall over a place called Holy Island. I’ll jump there. Stay high over the mainland for a few miles, then dive and run like hell! They’ll probably scramble a whole squadron once they realize what you’re flying!”
“Jawohl,” the pilot acknowledged. “Herr Reichminister?”
“What is it?”
“Have you ever parachuted before?”
“Nein. Never.”
An ironic laugh cut through the drone of the twin engines.
“What’s so funny, Hauptmann?”
“I’ve never jumped either! That’s a pretty significant fact to have overlooked in the planning of this mission, don’t you think?”
Hess permitted himself a wry smile. “Perhaps that fact was taken into account, Hauptmann. Some people might even be counting on it.”
“Oh … my God.”
“It’s too late to worry about that now. We don’t have the fuel to make it back to Germany even if we wanted to!”
“What?” the pilot exclaimed. “But the drop tanks—”
“Are empty!” Hess finished. “Or soon will be!”
The pilot felt his stomach turn a somersault. But before he could puzzle out his passenger’s meaning, he spied land below.
“Herr Reichminister! The island! I see it!”
From sixty-five hundred feet Holy Island was a tiny speck, only distinguishable by the small, bright ribbon separating it from the mainland. “And … a flare. I see a flare!”
“Green or red?” Hess asked, his face taut.
“Red!”
“The canopy, Hauptmann! Move!”
Together the two men struggled to slide back the heavy glass. Parachuting from a Messerschmitt was not common practice—strictly an emergency measure—and quite a few aviators had died attempting it.
“Push!” the pilot yelled.
With all their strength the two men heaved their bodies against the transparent lid of the cockpit. Their straining muscles quivered in agony until all at once the frame gave way and locked in the open position. The noise in the cockpit was deafening now, the engines roaring, the wind a screaming, living thing that struggled to pluck the men from their tiny tube of steel. Above it all, the pilot shouted, “We’re over the gap now, Herr Reichminister! Go! Go!”
Suddenly Hess looked into his lap. Empty. He had forgotten to ditch his papers! No sign of them in the cockpit; they must have been sucked out the moment the canopy opened. He prayed they had found their way down to the sea, and not to the island below.
“Jump, Herr Reichminister!”
Hess struggled into a crouch and faced the lethal tail fins of the Zerstörer. The time for niceties had passed. He reached behind him and jerked the pilot’s head back.
“Hauptmann!” he shouted. “Heydrich only ordered those drop tanks fitted to make sure you came this far! They are empty! No matter what happens, you cannot turn back! You have no choice but to follow orders! If I succeed, your actions really won’t matter! But if I fail, you cannot! You know the price of failure—Sippenhaft! Never forget that! Sippenhaft binds us both! Now climb! Give me some draft!”
The Messerschmitt’s nose pitched up, momentarily creating a small space shielded from the wind. With a defiant yell Hess hurled himself up and backward. A novice, he pulled the ripcord the moment he cleared the plane. The tight-folded silk tore open with a ripping sound, then quickly blossomed into a soft white mushroom that circled lazily down through the mist toward the Scottish earth below.
Cursing, the pilot struggled to secure the canopy. Without help it was twice as difficult, but Hess’s final words had chilled him to the core. Only a sheet of curved glass could now separate him from the terrifying destiny he had been ordered to face. With the desperate strength of a condemned man, he slammed it shut.
He dipped his left wing and glanced backward. There was the descending chute, soft and distant and peaceful. Barring a catastrophic landing, the Reichminister would at least begin his mission safely. It heartened the pilot to know that a novice could actually clear the plane, but something deeper in him recoiled in dread.
They had tricked him! The bastards had lured him into a suicidal mission by letting him think he would have a way out! After all his training, they hadn’t even trusted him to carry out his orders! Empty auxiliary tanks. The swine! They had known he would have sole control of the plane after Hess jumped, and they had made sure he wouldn’t have enough fuel to turn back if the mission went bad. And as if that weren’t enough … Hess had threatened him with Sippenhaft!
Sippenhaft! The word caused the pilot’s breath to come in quick gasps. He had heard tales of the Nazis’ ultimate penalty for betrayal, but he hadn’t really believed them. Sippenhaft dictated that not only a traitor’s life but the lives of his entire family became forfeit when judgment was rendered against him. Children, parents, the aged and infirm—none were spared. There was no appeal, and the sentence, once decreed, was swiftly executed.
With a guttural scream the pilot cursed God for giving him another man’s face. In that moment, he felt it was a surer death sentence than a cancer of the brain. Setting his mouth in a grim line, he hurled the plane into a screaming dive, not pulling up until the rocky Scottish earth seemed about to shatter the nose of his aircraft. Then—as Hess had suggested—he ran like hell, opening the Zerstörer up to 340 miles per hour over the low stone villages and patchwork fields. In other circumstances, the heart-stopping, ground-level flight might have been an exhilarating experience. Tonight it felt like a race against death.
It was. A patrolling Boulton Paul Defiant had answered a scramble call from the RAF plotting room at Inverness. The Messerschmitt pilot never even saw it. Oblivious, he stormed across the darkening island like a banshee, sixteen feet above the earth. With the twin-engined Messerschmitt’s tremendous speed advantage, the pursuing British fighter was outpaced like a sparrow behind a hunting hawk.
Dungavel Hill rose in the distance. Height: 458 meters: the information chattered into the pilot’s brain like a ticker tape. “There it is,” he muttered, spying the silhouette of Dungavel Castle. “My part of this insane mission.” The castle flashed beneath his fuselage. With one hand he checked the radio set near his right knee. Working. Please call, he thought. Please …
He heard nothing. Not even static. With shaking hands he touched the stick and hopped over a line of trees bisecting a sheep pasture. He saw fields … a road … more trees … then the town of Kilmarnock, sprawled dark across the road. He swept on. A patch of mist, then fog, the sea!
Like a black arrow he shot out over the western coast of Scotland, climbing fast. To his left he sighted his turning landmark, a giant rock jutting 120 meters into the sky, shining pale in the moonlight. As if drawn by a magnet, his eyes locked onto the tiny face of his newly acquired watch. Thirty minutes gone and no signal. Ten minutes from now his fate would be sealed. If you receive no signal in forty minutes, Hauptmann, you will turn out to sea and swallow your cyanide capsule … He wondered if he would be dead before his plane plowed into the icy depths of the North Atlantic.
Christ in Heaven! his mind screamed. What mad bastard dreamed this one up? But he knew—Reinhard Heydrich—the maddest bastard of them all. Steeling himself against panic, he banked wide to the south and flew parallel to the coast, praying that Hess’s signal would come. His eyes flicked across the instrument panel. Altimeter, airspeed, compass, fuel—the tanks! Without even looking down he jerked a lever next to his seat. Two auxiliary fuel tanks tumbled down through the darkness. One would be recovered from the Clyde estuary the next day by a British drifter, empty.
The radio stayed silent. He checked it again. Still working. His watch showed thirty-nine minutes gone. His throat went dry. Sixty seconds to zero hour. Sixty seconds to suicide. Here you are, sir, one cyanide cocktail for the glory of the Reich! For the last time the pilot looked longingly down upon the dark mirror of the sea. His left hand crept into his flying suit and touched the cyanide capsule taped against his breast. Then, with frightening clarity, an image of his wife and daughter came into his mind. “It’s not fair!” he shouted in desolation. “It’s the fucking nobodies who do the dying!”
In one violent flash of terror and outrage, the pilot jerked the stick to port and headed the roaring fighter back inland. His tear-filled eyes pierced the Scottish mist, searching out the landmarks he had studied so long in Denmark. With a shudder of hope, he spied the first—railroad tracks shining like quicksilver in the night. Maybe the signal will still come, he hoped desperately. But he knew it wouldn’t. His eyes scoured the earth for his second landmark—a small lake to the south of Dungavel Castle. There …
The Messerschmitt streaked across the water. Like a mirage the small village of Eaglesham appeared ahead. The fighter thundered across the rooftops, wheeling in a high, climbing circle over Dungavel Castle. He had done it! Like an intravenous blast of morphine, the pilot felt a sudden rush of exhilaration, a wild joy cascading through him. Ignited by the nearness of death, his survival instinct had thrown some switch deep within his brain. He had but one thought now—survive!
At sixty-five hundred feet the nightmare began. With no one to fly the plane while he jumped, the pilot decided to kill his engines as a safety measure. Only one engine cooperated. The other, its cylinders red-hot from the long flight from Aalborg, continued to ignite the fuel mixture. He throttled back hard until the engine died, losing precious seconds, then he wrestled the canopy open.
He could not get out of the cockpit! Like an invisible iron hand the wind pinned him to the back panel. Desperately he tried to loop the plane, hoping to drop out as it turned over, but centrifugal force, unforgiving, held him in his seat. When enough blood had rushed out of his brain, he blacked out.
Unaware of anything around him, the pilot roared toward oblivion. By the time he regained consciousness, the aircraft stood on its tail, hanging motionless in space. In a millisecond it would fall like two tons of scrap steel.
With one mighty flex of his knees, he jumped clear.
As he fell, his brain swirled with visions of the Reichminister’s chute billowing open in the dying light, floating peacefully toward a mission that by now had failed. His own chute snapped open with a jerk. In the distance he saw a shower of sparks; the Messerschmitt had found the earth.
He broke his left ankle when he hit the ground, but surging adrenaline shielded his mind against the pain. Shouts of alarm echoed from the darkness. Struggling to free himself from the harness, he surveyed by moonlight the small farm at the edge of the field in which he had landed. Before he could see much of anything, a man appeared out of the darkness. It was the head plowman of the farm, a man named David McLean. The Scotsman approached cautiously and asked the pilot his name. Struggling to clear his stunned brain, the pilot searched for his cover name. When it came to him, he almost laughed aloud. Confused, he gave the man his real name instead. What the hell? he thought. I don’t even exist anymore in Germany. Heydrich saw to that.
“Are you German?” the Scotsman asked.
“Yes,” the pilot answered in English.
Somewhere among the dark hills the Messerschmitt finally exploded, lighting the sky with a momentary flash.
“Are there any more with you?” the Scotsman asked nervously. “From the plane?”
The pilot blinked, trying to take in the enormity of what he had done—and what he had been ordered to do. The cyanide capsule still lay like a viper against his chest. “No,” he said firmly. “I flew alone.”
The Scotsman seemed to accept this readily.
“I want to go to Dungavel Castle,” the pilot said. Somehow, in his confusion, he could not—or would not—abandon his original mission. “I have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton,” he added solemnly.
“Are you armed?” McLean’s voice was tentative.
“No. I have no weapon.”
The farmer simply stared. A shrill voice from the darkness finally broke the awkward silence. “What’s happened? Who’s out there?”
“A German’s landed!” McLean answered. “Go get some soldiers.”
Thus began a strange pageant of uncertain hospitality that would last for nearly thirty hours. From the McLeans’ humble living room—where the pilot was offered tea on the family’s best china—to the local Home Guard hut at Busby, he continued to give the name he had offered the plowman upon landing—his own. It was obvious that no one knew what to make of him. Somehow, somewhere, something had gone wrong. The pilot had expected to land inside a cordon of intelligence officers; instead he had been met by one confused farmer. Where were the stern-faced young operatives of MI5? Several times he repeated his request to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton, but from the bare room at Busby he was taken by army truck to Maryhill Barracks at Glasgow.
At Maryhill, the pain of his broken ankle finally burned through his shock. When he mentioned it to his captors, they transferred him to the military hospital at Buchanan Castle, about twenty miles south of Glasgow. It was there, nearly thirty hours after the unarmed Messerschmitt first crossed the Scottish coast, that the Duke of Hamilton finally arrived to confront the pilot.
Douglas Hamilton looked as young and dashing as the photograph in his SS file. The Premier Peer of Scotland, an RAF wing commander and famous aviator in his own right, Hamilton faced the tall German confidently, awaiting some explanation. The pilot stood nervously, preparing to throw himself on the mercy of the duke. Yet he hesitated. What would happen if he did that? It was possible that there had simply been a radio malfunction, that Hess was even now carrying out his secret mission, whatever it was. Heydrich might blame him if Hess’s mission failed. And then, of course, his family would die. He could probably save his family by committing suicide as ordered, but then his child would have no father. The pilot studied the duke’s face. Hamilton had met Rudolf Hess briefly at the Berlin Olympics, he knew. What did the duke see now? Fully expecting to be thrown into chains, the pilot requested that the officer accompanying the duke withdraw from the room. When he had gone, the pilot took a step toward Hamilton, but said nothing.
The duke stared, stupefied. Though his rational mind resisted it, the first seeds of recognition had been planted in his brain. The haughty bearing … the dark, heavy-browed patrician face … Hamilton could scarcely believe his eyes. And despite the duke’s attempt to conceal his astonishment, the pilot saw everything in an instant. The dizzying hope of a condemned man who has glimpsed deliverance surged through him. My God! he thought. It could still work! And why not? It’s what I have trained to do for five years!
The duke was waiting. Without further hesitation—and out of courage or cowardice, he would never know—the pilot stepped away from the iron discipline of a decade.
“I am Reichminister Rudolf Hess,” he said stiffly. “Deputy Führer of the German Reich, leader of the Nazi Party.”
With classic British reserve, the duke remained impassive. “I cannot be sure if that is true,” he said finally.
Hamilton had strained for skepticism, but in his eyes the pilot discerned a different reaction altogether—not disbelief, but shock. Shock that Adolf Hitler’s deputy—arguably the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany—stood before him now in a military hospital in the heart of Britain! That shock was the very sign of Hamilton’s acceptance!
I am Reichminister Rudolf Hess! With a single lungful of air the frightened pilot had transformed himself into the most important prisoner of war in England. His mind reeled, drunk with the reprieve. He no longer thought of the man who had parachuted from the Messerschmitt before him. Hess’s signal had not come, but no one else knew that. No one but Hess, and he was probably dead by now. The pilot could always claim he had received a garbled signal, then simply proceeded with his mission as ordered. No one could lay the failure of Hess’s mission at his door. The pilot closed his eyes in relief. Sippenhaft be damned! No one would kill his family without giving him a chance to explain.
By taking this gamble—the only chance he could see of survival—the desperate captain unknowingly precipitated the most bizarre conspiracy of the Second World War. And a hundred miles to the east, alive or dead, the real Rudolf Hess—a man with enough secrets in his head to unleash catastrophic civil war in England—disappeared from the face of the earth.
The Duke of Hamilton maintained his attitude of skepticism throughout the brief interview, but before he left the hospital, he issued orders that the prisoner be moved to a secret location and held under double guard.
BOOK ONE (#ulink_0d5c9d14-dffc-5a0d-bf28-a7c268247cd6)
West Berlin, 1987 (#ulink_0d5c9d14-dffc-5a0d-bf28-a7c268247cd6)
A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.
PROVERBS 11.13
ONE (#ulink_bb973656-6a33-5734-a8f6-211f041625ce)
The wrecking ball arced slowly across the snow-carpeted courtyard and smashed into the last building left on the prison grounds, launching bricks through the air like moss-covered mortar rounds. Spandau Prison, the brooding red-brick fortress that had stood for over a century and housed the most notorious Nazi war criminals for the past forty years, was being leveled in a single day.
The last inmate of Spandau, Rudolf Hess, was dead. He had committed suicide just four weeks ago, relieving the West German government of the burden of one million pounds sterling it paid each year to maintain the aged Nazi’s isolated captivity. In a rare display of solidarity, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—the former Allies who guarded Spandau by monthly turns—had agreed that the prison should be destroyed as quickly as possible, to prevent its becoming a shrine to neo-Nazi fanatics.
Throughout the day, crowds had gathered in the cold to watch the demolition. Because Spandau stood in the British sector of Berlin, it fell to the Royal Engineers to carry out this formidable job. At first light an explosives team brought down the main structure like a collapsing house of cards. Then, after the dust settled into the snow, bulldozers and wrecking cranes moved in. They pulverized the prison’s masonry, dismembered its iron skeleton, and piled the remains into huge mounds that looked all too familiar to Berliners of a certain age.
This year Berlin was 750 years old. All across the city massive construction and restoration projects had been proceeding apace in celebration of the historic anniversary. Yet this grim fortress, the Berliners knew, would never rise again. For years they had passed this way as they went about their business, rarely giving a thought to this last stubborn symbol of what, in the glow of glasnost, seemed ancient history. But now that Spandau’s forbidding battlements no longer darkened the Wilhelmstrasse skyline, they stopped to ponder its ghosts.
By dusk, only the prison heating plant still stood, its smokestack painted in stark relief against the gunmetal clouds. A wrecking-crane drew back its mammoth concrete ball. The stack trembled, as if waiting for the final blow. The ball swung slowly through its arc, then struck like a bomb. The smokestack exploded into a cloud of brick and dust, showering what had been the prison kitchen only minutes before.
A sharp cheer cut through the din of heavy diesel motors. It came from beyond the cordoned perimeter. The cheer was not for the eradication of Spandau particularly, but rather a spontaneous human expression of awe at the sight of large-scale destruction. Irritated by the spectators, a French corporal gestured for some German policemen to help him disperse the crowd. Excellent hand signals quickly bridged the language barrier, and with trademark efficiency the Berlin Polizei went to work.
“Achtung!” they bellowed. “Go home! Haue ab! This area is clearly marked as dangerous! Move on! It’s too cold for gawking! Nothing here but brick and stone!”
These efforts convinced the casually curious, who continued home with a story of minor interest to tell over dinner. But others were not so easily diverted. Several old men lingered across the busy street, their breath steaming in the cold. Some feigned boredom, others stared openly at the wrecked prison or glanced furtively at the others who had stayed behind. A stubborn knot of young toughs—dubbed “skinheads” because of their ritually shaven scalps—swaggered up to the floodlit prison gate to shout Nazi slogans at the British troops.
They did not go unnoticed. Every passerby who had shown more than a casual interest in the wrecking operation had been photographed today. Inside the trailer being used to coordinate the demolition, a Russian corporal carefully clicked off two telephoto exposures of every person who remained on the block after the German police moved in. Within the hour these photographs would find their way into KGB caserooms in East Berlin, where they would be digitized, fed into a massive database, and run through a formidable electronic gauntlet. Intelligence agents, Jewish fanatics, radical journalists, surviving Nazis: each exotic species would be painstakingly identified and catalogued, and any unknowns handed over to the East German secret police—the notorious Stasi—to be manually compared against their files.
These steps would consume priceless computer time and many man-hours of work by the East Germans, but Moscow didn’t mind asking. The destruction of Spandau was anything but routine to the KGB. Lavrenti Beria himself, chief of the brutal NKVD under Stalin, had passed a special directive down through the successive heads of the cheka, defining the importance of Spandau’s inmates to unsolved cases. And on this evening—thirty-four years after Beria’s death by firing squad—only one of those cases remained open. Rudolf Hess. The current chief of the KGB did not intend to leave it that way.
A little way up the Wilhelmstrasse, perched motionless on a low brick wall, a sentinel even more vigilant than the Russians watched the Germans clear the street. Dressed as a laborer and almost seventy years old, the watcher had the chiseled face of a hawk, and he stared with bright, unblinking eyes. He needed no camera. His brain instantaneously recorded each face that appeared in the street, making associations and judgments no computer ever could.
His name was Jonas Stern. For twelve years Stern had not left the State of Israel; indeed, no one knew that he was in Germany now. But yesterday he had paid out of his own pocket to travel to this country he hated beyond all thought. He had known about Spandau’s destruction, of course, they all did. But something deeper had drawn him here. Three days ago—as he carried water from the kibbutz well to his small shack on the edge of the Negev desert—something bilious had risen from his core and driven him to this place. Stern had not resisted. Such premonitions came infrequently, and experience had taught him they were not to be ignored.
Watching the bulwarked prison being crushed into powder, he felt opposing waves of triumph and guilt roll through his chest. He had known—he knew—men and women who had passed through Spandau on their way to the death factories of Mauthausen and Birkenau. Part of him wished the prison could remain standing, as a monument to those souls, and to the punishment meted out to their murderers.
Punishment, he thought, but not justice. Never justice.
Stern reached into a worn leather bag at his side and withdrew an orange. He peeled it while he watched the demolition. The light was almost gone. In the distance a huge yellow crane backed too quickly across the prison courtyard. Stern tensed as the flagstones cracked like brittle bones.
Ten minutes later the mechanical monsters ground to a screeching halt. While the senior British officer issued his dismissal orders, a pale yellow Berlin city bus rumbled up to the prison, headlights cutting through the lightly falling snow. The moment it stopped, twenty-four soldiers dressed in a potpourri of uniforms spilled into the darkening prison yard and broke into four groups of six. These soldiers represented a compromise typical of the farcical Four Power administration of Spandau. The normal month-long guard tours were handled by rota, and went off with a minimum of friction. But the destruction of the prison, like every previous disruption of routine, had brought chaos. First the Russians had refused to accept German police security at the prison. Then—because no Allied nation trusted any of its “allies” to guard Spandau’s ruins alone—they decided they would all do it, with a token detachment of West Berlin police along to keep up appearances. While the Royal Engineers boarded the idling bus, the NCO’s of the four guard details deployed their men throughout the compound.
Near the shattered prison gate, a black American master sergeant gave his squad a final brief: “Okay, ladies. Everybody’s got his sector map, right?”
“Sir!” barked his troops in unison.
“Then listen up. This ain’t gate duty at the base, got it? The Germs have the perimeter—we got the interior. Our orders are to guard this wreckage. That’s ostensibly, as the captain says. We are here to watch the Russians. They watch us; we watch them. Same old same old, right? Only these Ivans probably ain’t grunts, dig? Probably GRU—maybe even KGB. So keep your pots on and your slits open. Questions?”
“How long’s the gig, Sarge?”
“This patrol lasts twelve hours, Chapman, six to six. If you’re still awake then—and you’d better be—then you can get back to your hot little pastry on the Bendlerstrasse.” When the laughter died, the sergeant grinned and barked, “Spread out, gentlemen! The enemy is already in place.”
As the six Americans fanned out into the yard, a green-and-white Volkswagen van marked POLIZEI stopped in the street before the prison. It waited for a break in traffic, then jounced over the curb and came to rest before the command trailer steps. Instantly, six men wearing the dusty green uniform of the West Berlin police trundled out of its cargo door and lined up between the van and the trailer.
Dieter Hauer, the captain in charge of the police contingent, climbed down from the driver’s seat and stepped around the van. He had an arresting face, with a strong jaw and a full military mustache. His clear gray eyes swept once across the wrecked prison lot. In the dusk he noticed that the foul-weather ponchos of the Allied soldiers gave the impression that they all served the same army. Hauer knew better. Those young men were a fragmented muster of jangling nerves and suspicion—two dozen accidents waiting to happen.
The Germans call their police bullen—“bulls”—and Hauer personified the nickname. Even at fifty-five, his powerful, barrel-chested body radiated enough authority to intimidate men thirty years his junior. He wore neither gloves, helmet, nor cap against the cold, and contrary to what the recruits in his unit suspected, this was no affectation meant to impress them. Rather, as people who knew him were aware, he possessed an almost inhuman resilience against external annoyances, whether natural or man-made. Hauer called, “Attention!” as he stepped back around the van. His officers formed a tight unit beneath the command trailer’s harsh floodlamp.
“I’ve told anyone who’d listen that we didn’t want this assignment,” he said. “Naturally no one gives a shit.”
There were a few nervous chuckles. Hauer spat onto the snow. A hostage-recovery specialist, he plainly considered this token guard detail an affront to his dignity. “You should feel very safe tonight, gentlemen,” he continued with heavy sarcasm. “We have the soldiers of France, England, the United States, and Mother Russia with us tonight. They are here to provide the security which we, the West Berlin police, are deemed unfit to provide.” Hauer clasped his hands behind his back. “I’m sure you men feel as I do about this, but nothing can be done.
“You know your assignments. Four of you will guard the perimeter. Apfel, Weiss—you’re designated rovers. You’ll patrol at random, watching for improper conduct among the regular troops. What constitutes ‘improper conduct’ here, I have not been told. I assume it means unsanctioned searches or provocation between forces. Everyone do your best to stay clear of the Russians. Whatever agencies those men out there serve, I doubt it’s the Red Army. If you have a problem, sound your whistle and wait. I’ll come to you. Everyone else hold your position until instructed otherwise.”
Hauer paused, staring into the young faces around him. His eyes lingered on a reddish-blond sergeant with gray eyes, then flicked away. “Be cautious,” he said evenly, “but don’t be timid. We are on German soil, regardless of what any political document may say. Any provocation, verbal or physical, will be reported to me immediately. Immediately.”
The venom in Hauer’s voice made it plain he would brook no insult from the Soviets or anyone else. He spoke as though he might even welcome it. “Check your sector maps carefully,” he added. “I want no mistakes tonight. You will show these soldier boys the meaning of professionalism and discipline. Go!”
Six policemen scattered.
Hans Apfel, the reddish-blond sergeant whom Hauer had designated one of the rovers, trotted about twenty meters, then stopped and looked back at his superior. Hauer was studying a map of the prison, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. Hans started to walk back, but the American sergeant suddenly appeared from behind the police van and engaged Hauer in quiet conversation.
Hans turned and struck out across the snow, following the line of the Wilhemstrasse to his left. Angrily, he crushed a loose window pane beneath his boot. With no warning at all this day had become one of the most uncomfortable of his life. One minute he had been on his way out of the Friedrichstrasse police station, headed home to his wife; the next a duty sergeant had tapped him on the shoulder, said he needed a good man for a secret detail, and practically thrust Hans into a van headed for Spandau Prison. That in itself was a pain in the ass. Double shifts were hell, especially those that had to be pulled on foot in the snow.
But that wasn’t the real source of Hans’s discomfort. The problem was that the commander of the guard detail, Captain Dieter Hauer, was Hans’s father. None of the other men on this detail knew that—for which Hans was grateful—but he had a strange feeling that might soon change. During the ride to Spandau, he had stared resolutely out of the van window, refusing to be drawn into conversation. He couldn’t understand how it had happened. He and his father had a long-standing arrangement—a simple agreement designed to deal with a complex family situation—and Hauer must have broken it. It was the only explanation. After a few minutes of bitter confusion, Hans resolved to deal with this situation the way he always did. By ignoring it.
He kicked a mound of snow out of his path. So far he had made only two cautious circuits of the perimeter. He felt more than a little tense about strolling into a security zone where soldiers carried loaded assault rifles as casually as their wallets. He panned his eyes across the dark lot, shielding them from the snow with a gloved hand. God, but the British did their job well, he thought. Ghostly mountains of jagged brick and iron rose up out of the swirling snow like the bombed-out remnants of Berlin buildings that had never been restored. Drawing a deep breath, he stepped forward into the shadows.
It was a strange journey. For fifteen or twenty steps he would see nothing but the glow of distant street lamps. Then a soldier would materialize, a black mirage against the falling snow. Some challenged him, most did not. When they did, Hans simply said, “Versailles”—the code word printed at the bottom of his sector map—and they let him pass.
He couldn’t shake a vague feeling of anxiety that had settled on his shoulders. As he passed the soldiers, he tried to focus on the weapon each carried. In the darkness all the uniforms looked alike, but the guns identified everyone. Each Russian stood statue-still, his sharklike Kalashnikov resting butt-first on the ground like an extension of his arm. The French also stood, though not at attention. They cradled their FAMAS rifles in crooked elbows and tried vainly to smoke in the frigid wind. The British carried no rifles, each having been issued a sidearm in the interest of discretion.
It was the Americans who disturbed Hans. Some leaned casually against broken slabs of concrete, their weapons nowhere in evidence. Others squatted on piles of brick, hunched over their M-16 Armalites as if they could barely stay awake. None of the U.S. soldiers had even bothered to challenge Hans’s passage. At first he felt angry that NATO soldiers would take such a casual approach to their duties. But after a while he began to wonder. Their indifference could simply be a ruse, couldn’t it? Certainly for an assignment such as this a high-caliber team would have been chosen?
After three hours’ patrol, Hans’s suspicions were proved correct, when he nearly stumbled over the black American sergeant surveying the prison grounds through a bulbous scope fitted to his M-16. Not wishing to startle him, Hans whispered, “Versailles, Sergeant.” When the American didn’t respond, he tried again. “What can you see?”
“Everything from the command trailer on the east to that Ivan pissing on a brick pile on the west,” the sergeant replied in German, never taking his eyes from the scope.
“I can’t see any of that!”
“Image-intensifier,” the American murmured. “Well, well … I didn’t know the Red Army let its sentries take a piss-break on guard du—What—” The noncom wrenched the rifle away from his face.
“What is it?” Hans asked, alarmed.
“Nothing … damn. This thing works by light magnification, not infrared. That smartass flashed a spotlight toward me and whited out my scope. What an asshole.”
Hans grunted in mutual distaste for the Russians. “Nice scope,” he said, hoping to get a look through it himself.
“Your outfit doesn’t have ’em?”
“Some units do. The drug units, mostly. I used one in training, but they aren’t issued for street duty.”
“Too bad.” The American scanned the ruins. “This is one weird place, isn’t it?”
Hans shrugged and tried to look nonchalant.
“Like a graveyard, man. A hundred and fifty cells in this place, and only one occupied—by Hess. Dude must’ve known some serious shit to keep him locked down that tight.” The sergeant cocked his head and squinted at Hans. “Man, you know you look familiar. Yeah … you look like that guy, that tennis player—”
“Becker,” Hans finished, looking at the ground.
“Becker, yeah. Boris Becker. I guess everybody tells you that, huh?”
Hans looked up. “Once a day, at least.”
“I’ll bet it doesn’t hurt you with the Fräuleins.”
“I’d rather have his income,” Hans said, smiling. It was his stock answer, but the American laughed. “Besides,” he added, “I’m married.”
“Yeah?” The sergeant grinned back. “Me too. Six years and two kids. You?”
Hans shook his head. “We’ve been trying, but we haven’t had any luck.”
“That’s a bitch,” said the American, shaking his head. “I got some buddies with that problem. Man, they gotta check the calendar and their old lady’s temperature and every other damn thing before they can even get it on. No thanks.”
When the sergeant saw Hans’s expression, he said, “Hey, sorry ’bout that, man. Guess you know more about it than you ever wanted to.” He raised his rifle again, sighting in on yet another invisible target. “Bang,” he said, and lowered the weapon. “We’d better keep moving, Boris.” He disappeared into the shadows, taking the scope with him.
For the next six hours, Hans moved through the darkness without speaking to anyone, except to answer the challenges of the Russians. They seemed to be taking the operation much more seriously than anyone else, he noticed. Almost personally.
About four A.M. he decided to have a second look at his map. He approached the command trailer obliquely, walking backward to read by the glow of the single floodlamp. Suddenly he heard voices. Peering around the trailer, he saw the French and British sergeants sitting together on the makeshift steps. The Frenchman was very young, like most of the twenty-seven hundred conscripts who comprised the French garrison in Berlin. The Brit was older, a veteran of England’s professional army. He did most of the talking; the Frenchman smoked and listened in silence. Now and then the wind carried distinct words to Hans. “Hess” was one—“lefenant” and “bloody Russians” were others. Suddenly the Frenchman stood, flicked his cigarette butt into the darkness, and strode out of the white pool of light. The Englishman followed close on his heels.
Hans turned to go, then froze. One meter behind him stood the imposing silhouette of Captain Dieter Hauer. The fiery eye of a cigar blazed orange in the darkness.
“Hello, Hans,” said the deep, burnished voice.
Hans said nothing.
“Damned cold for this time of year, eh?”
“Why am I here?” Hans asked. “You broke our agreement.”
“No, I didn’t. This was bound to happen sooner or later, even with a twenty-thousand-man police force.”
Hans considered this. “I suppose you’re right,” he said at length. “It doesn’t matter. Just another assignment, right?”
Hauer nodded. “You’ve been doing a hell of a job, I hear. Youngest sergeant in Berlin.”
Hans flushed a little, shrugged.
“I lied, Hans,” Hauer said suddenly. “I did break our agreement. I requested you for this detail.”
Hans’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because it was busy work. Killing time. I thought we might get a chance to talk.”
Hans studied the slushy ground. “So talk.”
Hauer seemed to search for words. “There’s a lot that needs saying.”
“Or nothing.”
Hauer sighed deeply. “I’d really like to know why you came to Berlin. Three years now. You must have wanted some kind of reconciliation … or answers, or something.”
Hans stiffened. “So why are you asking the questions?”
Hauer looked hard into Hans’s eyes. “All right,” he said softly. “We’ll wait until you’re ready.”
Before Hans could reply, Hauer vanished into the darkness. Even the glow of his cigar had disappeared. Hans stood still for some moments; then, shaking his head angrily, he hurried into the shadows and resumed his patrol.
Time passed quickly now, the silence broken only by an occasional siren or the roar of a jet from the British military airport at Gatow. With the snow soaking into his uniform, Hans walked faster to take his mind off the cold. He hoped he would be lucky enough to get home before his wife, Ilse, left for work. Sometimes after a particularly rough night shift, she would cook him a breakfast of Weisswurst and buns, even if she was in a hurry.
He checked his watch. Almost 6:00 A.M. It would be dawn soon. He felt better as the end of his shift neared. What he really wanted was to get out of the weather for a while and have a smoke. A mountain of shattered concrete near the rear of the lot looked as though it might afford good shelter, so he made for it. The nearest soldier was Russian, but he stood at least thirty meters from the pile. Hans slipped through a narrow opening when the sentry wasn’t looking.
He found himself in a comfortable little nook that shielded him completely from the wind. He wiped off a slab of concrete, sat down, and warmed his face by breathing into his cupped gloves. Nestled in this dark burrow, he was invisible to the patrolling soldiers, yet he still commanded a surprisingly wide view of the prison grounds. The snow had finally stopped, and even the wind had fallen off a bit. In the predawn silence, the demolished prison looked like pictures of bombed-out Dresden he had seen as a schoolboy: motionless sentries standing tall against bleak destruction, watching over nothing.
Hans took out his cigarettes. He was trying to quit, but he still carried a pack whenever he went into a potentially stressful situation. Just the knowledge that he could light up sometimes calmed his nerves. But not tonight. Removing one glove with his teeth, he fumbled in his jacket for matches. He leaned as far away as he could from the opening to his little cave, scraped a match across the striking pad, then cupped it in his palm to conceal the light. He held it to his cigarette, drawing deeply. His shivering hand made the job difficult, but he soon steadied it and was rewarded with a jagged rush of smoke.
As the match flame neared his fingers, a glint of white flashed against the blackness of the chamber. When he flicked the match away, the glimmer vanished. Probably only a bit of snow, he thought. But boredom made him curious. Gauging the risk of discovery by the Russian, he lit a second match. There. Near the floor of his cubbyhole he could see the object clearly now—not glass but paper—a small wad stuck to a long narrow brick. He hunched over and held the match nearer.
In the close light he could see that rather than being stuck to the brick as he had first thought, the paper actually protruded from the brick itself. He grasped the folded wad and tugged it gently from its receptacle. The paper made a dry, scraping sound. Hans inserted his index finger into the brick. He couldn’t feel the bottom. The second match died. He lit another. Quickly spreading open the crinkled wad of onion-skin, he surveyed his find in the flickering light. It seemed to be a personal document of some sort, a will or a diary perhaps, hand-printed in heavy blocked letters. In the dying matchlight Hans read as rapidly as he could:
This is the testament of Prisoner #7. I am the last now, and I know that I shall never be granted the freedom that I—more than any of those released before me—deserve. Death is the only freedom I will know. I hear His black wings beating about me! While my child lives I cannot speak, but here I shall write. I only pray that I can be coherent. Between the drugs, the questions, the promises and the threats, I sometimes wonder if I am not already mad. I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth, not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England—of those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her existence for—
The crunch of boot heels on snow jolted Hans back to reality. Someone was coming! Jerking his head to the aperture in the bricks, he closed his hand on the searing match and peered out into an alien world.
Dawn had come. In its unforgiving light, Hans saw a Russian soldier less than ten meters from his hiding place, moving slowly forward with his AK-47 extended. The flare of the third match had drawn him. “Fool!” Hans cursed himself. He jammed the sheaf of paper into his boot, then he stepped boldly out of the niche and strode toward the advancing soldier.
“Halt!” cried the Russian, emphasizing the command with a jerk of his Kalashnikov.
“Versailles,” Hans countered in the steadiest voice he could muster.
His calm delivery of the password took the Russian aback. “What are you doing in there, Polizei?” asked the soldier in passable German.
“Smoke,” Hans replied, extending the pack. “Having a smoke out of the wind.” He waved his sector map in a wide arc as if to take in the wind itself.
“No wind,” the Russian stated flatly, never taking his eyes from Hans’s face.
It was true. Sometime during the last few minutes the wind had died. “Smoke, comrade,” Hans repeated. “Versailles! Smoke, tovarich!”
He continued to proffer the pack, but the soldier only cocked his head toward his red-patched collar and spoke quietly. Hans caught his breath when he spied the small transmitter clipped to the sentry’s belt. The Russians were in radio contact! In seconds the soldier’s zealous comrades would come running. Hans felt a hot wave of panic. A surprisingly strong aversion to letting the Russians discover the papers gripped him. He cursed himself for not leaving them in the little cave rather than stuffing them into his boot like a naive shoplifter. He had almost reached the point of blind flight when a shrill whistle pierced the air in staccato bursts.
Chaos erupted all over the compound. The long, anxious night of surveillance had strained everyone’s nerves to the breaking point, and the whistle blast, like a hair trigger, catapulted every man into the almost sexual release of physical action. Contrary to orders, every soldier and policeman on the lot abandoned his post to converge on the alarm. The Russian whipped his head toward the noise, then back to Hans. Shouted commands echoed across the prison yard, rebounding through the broken canyons.
“Versailles!” Hans shouted. “Versailles, Comrade! Let’s go!”
The Russian seemed confused. He lowered his rifle a little, wavering. “Versailles,” he murmured. He looked hard at Hans for a moment more; then he broke and ran.
Rooted to the earth, Hans exhaled slowly. He felt cold sweat pouring across his temples. With quivering hands, he pocketed his cigarettes, then carefully refolded his sector map, realizing as he did so that the paper he held was not his sector map at all, but the first page of the papers he had found in the hollow brick. Like a fool he had been waving under the Russian’s nose the very thing he wanted to conceal! Thank God that idiot didn’t check it, he thought. He pressed the page deep into his left boot, pulled his trouser legs down around his feet, and sprinted toward the sound of confusion.
In the brief moments it took Hans to respond to the whistle, a routine police matter had escalated into a potentially explosive confrontation. Near the blasted prison gate, five Soviet soldiers stood in a tight circle around two fortyish men wearing frayed business suits. They pointed their AK-47s menacingly, while nearby their commander argued vehemently with Erhard Weiss. The Russian was insisting that the trespassers be taken to an East German police station for interrogation.
Weiss was doing his best to calm the shouting Russian, but he was obviously out of his depth. Captain Hauer was nowhere in sight, and while the other policemen stood behind Weiss looking resolute, Hans knew that their Walthers would be no match for the Soviet assault weapons if it came to a showdown.
The sergeants of the NATO detachments kept their men well clear of the argument. They knew political dynamite when they saw it. While the Soviets kept their rifles leveled at the wide-eyed captives—who looked as if they might collapse from shock at any moment—the Russian “sergeant” bellowed louder and louder in broken German, trying to bully the tenacious Weiss into giving up “his” prisoners. To his credit, Weiss stood firm. He refused to allow any action to be taken until Captain Hauer had been apprised of the situation.
Hans stepped forward, hoping to interject some moderation into the dispute. Yet before he could speak, a black BMW screeched up to the curb and Captain Hauer vaulted from its rear door.
“What the hell is this?” he shouted.
The screaming Russian immediately redirected his tirade at Hauer, but the German brusquely raised his hand, breaking the flood of words like a wave against a rock.
“Weiss!” he barked.
“Sir!”
“Explain.”
Weiss was so relieved to have the responsibility of the prisoners lifted from his shoulders that his words tumbled over themselves. “Captain, five minutes ago I saw two men moving suspiciously inside the perimeter. They must have slipped in somewhere between Willi and me. I flashed my light on them and shouted, ‘Halt!’ but they were startled and ran. They charged straight into one of the Russians, and before I could even blow my whistle, every Russian on the lot had surrounded them.”
“Radios,” Hauer muttered.
“Captain!” the Soviet “sergeant” bellowed. “These men are prisoners of the Soviet government! Any attempt to interfere—”
Without a word, Hauer strode past the Russian and into the deadly circle of automatic weapons. He began a rapid, professional interrogation of the prisoners, speaking quietly in German.
The black American sergeant whistled low. “That cop’s got balls,” he observed, loudly enough for all to hear. One of his men giggled nervously.
The terrified civilians were elated to be questioned by a fellow countryman. In less than a minute, Hauer extracted the relevant information from them, and his men relaxed considerably during the exchange. It revealed a familiar situation—distasteful perhaps, but thankfully routine. Even the Russians holding the Kalashnikovs seemed to have picked up on Captain Hauer’s casual manner. He patted the smaller of the two trespassers on the shoulder, then slipped out of the circle. A few of the rifles dropped noticeably as he stepped up to the Russian officer.
“They’re quite harmless, Comrade,” he explained. “A couple of homos, that’s all.”
Misunderstanding the slang, the Russian continued to scowl at Hauer. “What is their explanation?” he demanded stiffly.
“They’re homosexuals, Sergeant. Queers, Schwüle … golden boys, I think you call them. Looking for a temporary love nest, that’s all. They’re all over Berlin.”
“No matter!” the Russian snapped, grasping Hauer’s meaning at last. “They have trespassed on Soviet territory, and they must be interrogated at our headquarters in East Berlin.” He motioned to his men. The rifles jerked back up instantly. He barked an order and started marching toward the parking area.
Hauer had no time to consult his superiors as to legalities, but he knew that allowing Russian soldiers to drag two of his fellow countrymen into the DDR without any semblance of a trial was something no West Berliner with an ounce of pride would do without a fight. Glancing around, he tried to gauge the sympathies of the NATO squads. The Americans looked as if they might be with him, but Hauer knew he couldn’t rely on that if it came to a fight. Force would probably be counterproductive in any case, he thought; it usually was. He’d have to try a different tack.
Five steps carried him to the departing Russian. He grasped the burly man by his tunic and spun him around. “Listen, Sergeant,” he whispered forcefully, “or Major or Colonel or whatever the hell you are. These men have committed no serious offense and they certainly pose no threat to the security of this site. I suggest we search them, then book them into one of our stations just like anybody else. That way we keep the press out of it, understand? Pravda? Izvestia? If you want to make an international incident out of this, you’re quite welcome to do it, but you take full responsibility. Am I clear?”
The Russian understood well enough, and for a moment he considered Hauer’s suggestion. But the situation was not so simple now. He had gone too far to back down in front of his men. Ignoring Hauer, he turned to his squad.
“These men are suspected enemies of the Soviet Union! They will remain in Soviet custody until the objective of their mission has been determined! Corporal, put them aboard our bus!”
Furious but outgunned, Hauer thought quickly. He had dealt with Russian officers for more than twenty-five years, and all his experience had taught him one lesson: the communist system, inefficient as it was, had grown proficient at breeding one thing out of its citizens—individual initiative. This Russian had to be reminded that his actions could have serious international implications. With two fingers Hauer removed his Walther from its holster and handed it to an astonished Weiss with a theatrical flourish. Again, the Soviet riflemen paused uncertainly, their eyes riveted on the unpredictable policeman.
“We have a stalemate, Comrade!” Hauer declared loudly. “You wish to keep these men in Soviet custody? Very well! You now stand on the only plot of Russian soil in West Berlin—an accident of history that will soon be rectified, I think. You may keep the prisoners here for as long as you wish—”
The Russian slowed his march.
“—however, crossing into the DDR with two citizens of the Federal Republic is an entirely different matter—a political matter—and quite beyond my power or yours to authorize. The prisoners must remain here until we have contacted our superior officers! I shall accompany you to the command trailer, where we can make the necessary calls.” Hauer looked over his shoulder. “I would also suggest to the British sergeant that he join us, as we are in the British sector of the city.”
Hauer started toward the trailer. He didn’t intend to give the Russian time to argue. “Apfel!” he shouted. “Weiss! Drive everyone back to the station, then go home! I’ll handle the paperwork on this!”
“But Captain!” Weiss protested.
“Go!”
Hans grabbed Weiss’s sleeve and pulled him toward the van. The dazed recruits followed, their eyes on Hauer as he marched toward the trailer. The British sergeant, suddenly made aware of his responsibility, conferred with his men, a couple of whom restlessly fingered their Browning Hi-Power pistols.
Bristling with fury, the Russian ordered his men to follow Hauer with the prisoners. It made a strange parade. Hauer, unarmed, strode purposefully toward the command trailer, while the Russians—looking a bit sheepish in spite of being armed to the teeth—herded their rumpled prisoners along behind. The British brought up the rear.
The American master sergeant stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head in amazement. “That Kraut is one smooth son of a bitch, gentlemen. I hope y’all were paying attention. He may be wearing a cop’s uniform, but that man is a soldier. Yes, sir, I’d bet my stripes on it!”
The American was right. As Hauer marched toward the trailer, every inch of his ramrod bearing bore the indelible stamp of military discipline. Nothing betrayed the turmoil he felt knowing that the only thing stopping the angry Russian from taking control of the prisoners was the ring of men and steel at the checkpoints leading out of the city—certainly not one headstrong police captain just six weeks from retirement.
Inside the police van Hans calmed down a little. He pulled into the Wilhelmstrasse, then wheeled onto the Heerstrasse, heading east. For a time no one spoke. Hauer’s actions had unnerved them all. Finally Weiss broke the silence.
“Did you see that, Hans?”
“Of course,” he said tersely. The sheaf of papers felt like a kilo of heroin strapped to his leg.
“Old Hauer stepped in front of those machine guns like they weren’t even there,” said one of the younger men.
“I kind of got the feeling he’d done it before,” mused Weiss.
“He has,” Hans said flatly.
“When?” asked a chorus of surprised voices.
“Quite a few times, actually. He works Hostage Recovery for Special Tasks Division.”
“How do you know so much about him?”
Hans felt his face flush; he shrugged and looked out the window to cover it.
“I’m glad it happened,” Weiss said softly.
“Why?” asked one of the recruits.
“Showed those Russians what for, that’s why. Showed them West Berlin’s not a doormat for their filthy boots. They’ll have quite a little mess on their hands now, won’t they, Hans?”
“We all will, Erhard.”
“Hauer ought to be prefect,” suggested an old hand of twenty-one. “He’s twice the man Funk is.”
“He can’t,” Hans said, in spite of himself.
“Why not?”
“Because of Munich.”
“Munich?”
Hans sighed and left the question unanswered. How could they understand? Every man in the van but him and Weiss had been toddlers at the time of the Olympic massacre. Turning onto the Friedrichstrasse, he swung the van into a space in front of the colossal police station and switched off the engine. He sensed them all—Weiss especially—watching him for a clue as to what to do next. Without a word he handed Weiss the keys, climbed out of the van, and started for his Volkswagen.
“Where are you going?” Weiss called.
“Exactly where Hauer told me to go, my friend! Home!”
“But shouldn’t we report this?”
“Do what you must!” Hans called, still walking. He could feel the papers in his boot, already damp with nervous sweat. The sooner he was inside his own apartment, the better he would feel. Again he prayed silently that Ilse would be home when he got there. After three unsuccessful attempts, he coaxed his old VW to life, and with the careful movements of a policeman who has seen too many traffic fatalities, he eased the car into the morning rush of West Berlin.
The car that fell in behind him—a rental Ford—was just like a thousand others in the city. The man at the wheel was not. Jonas Stern rubbed his tired eyes and pushed his leather bag a little farther toward the passenger door. It simply would not do for a traffic policeman to see what lay on the seat beneath the bag. Not a gun, but a night-vision scope—a third-generation Pilkington, far superior to the one the American sergeant had been toying with. Definitely not standard tourist equipment.
But worth its weight in gold, Stern decided, following Hans’s battered VW around a turn. In gold.
TWO (#ulink_022e2869-0f74-5c56-9fee-0dcd47a7692c)
5:55A.M.Soviet Sector: East Berlin, DDR
The KGB’s RYAD computer logged the Spandau call at 05:55:32 hours Central European Time. Such exactitude seemed to matter a great deal to the new breed of agent that passed through East Berlin on their training runs these days. They had cut their too-handsome teeth on microchips, and for them a case that could not be reduced to microbits of data to feed their precious machines was no case at all. But to Ivan Kosov—the colonel to whom such calls were still routed—high-tech accuracy without human judgment to exploit it meant nothing. Snorting once to clear his chronically obstructed sinuses, he picked up the receiver of the black phone on his desk.
“Kosov,” he growled.
The words that followed were delivered with such hysterical force that Kosov jerked the receiver away from his ear. The man on the other end of the phone was the “sergeant” from the Spandau guard detail. His actual rank was captain in the KGB, Third Chief Directorate—the KGB division responsible for spying on the Soviet Army. Kosov glanced at his watch. He’d expected his man back by now. Whatever the flustered captain was screaming about must explain the delay.
“Sergei,” he said finally. “Start again and tell it like a professional. Can you do that?”
Two minutes later, Kosov’s hooded eyes opened a bit and his breathing grew labored. He began firing questions at his subordinate, trying to determine if the events at Spandau had been accidental, or if some human will had guided them.
“What did the Polizei on the scene say? Yes, I do see. Listen to me, Sergei, this is what you will do. Let this policeman do just what he wants. Insist on accompanying him to the station. Take your men with you. He is with you now? What is his name?” Kosov scrawled Hauer, Polizei Captain on a notepad. “Ask him which station he intends to go to. Abschnitt 53?” Kosov wrote that down too, recalling as he did that Abschnitt 53 was in the American sector of West Berlin, on the Friedrichstrasse. “I’ll meet you there in an hour. It might be sooner, but these days you never know how Moscow will react. What? Be discreet, but if force becomes necessary, use it. Listen to me. Between the time the prisoners are formally charged and the time I arrive, you’ll probably have a few minutes. Use that time. Question each of your men about anything out of the ordinary they might have noticed during the night. Don’t worry, this is what you were trained for.” Kosov cursed himself for not putting a more experienced man on the Spandau detail. “And Sergei, question your men separately. Yes, now go. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Kosov replaced the receiver and searched his pocket for a cigarette. He felt a stab of incipient angina, but what could he expect? He had already outfoxed the KGB doctors far longer than he’d ever hoped to, and no man could live forever. The cigarette calmed him, and before he lifted the other phone—the red one that ran only east—he decided that he could afford sixty seconds to think this thing through properly.
Trespassers at Spandau. After all these years, Moscow’s cryptic warnings had finally come true. Had Centre expected this particular incident? Obviously they had expected something, or they wouldn’t have taken such pains to have their stukatch on hand when the British leveled the prison. Kosov knew there was at least one informer on his Spandau team, and probably others he didn’t know about. The East German Security Service (Stasi) usually managed to bribe at least one man on almost every KGB operation in Berlin. So much for fraternal socialism, he thought, reaching for a pencil.
He jotted a quick list of the calls he would have to make: KGB chairman Zemenek at Moscow Centre; the Soviet commandant for East Berlin; and of course the prefect of West Berlin police. Kosov would enjoy the call to West Berlin. It wasn’t often he could make demands of the arrogant West Germans and expect to be accommodated, but today would be one of those days. The Moscow call, on the other hand, he would not enjoy at all. It might mean anything from a medal to expulsion from service without a word of explanation.
This was Kosov’s fear. For the past ten years, operationally speaking, Berlin had been a dead city. The husk of its former romance clung to it, but the old Cold War urgency was gone. Pre-eminence had moved to another part of the globe, and Kosov had no Japanese or Arabic. His future held only mountains of paperwork and turf battles with the GRU and the Stasi. Kosov didn’t give a damn about Rudolf Hess. Chairman Zemenek might be obsessed with Nazi conspiracies, but what was the point? The Soviet empire was leaking like a sieve, and Moscow was worried about some intrigue left over from the Great Patriotic War?
The Chairman’s Obsession. That’s what the KGB chiefs in Berlin had called Rudolf Hess ever since the Nuremberg trials, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau. Four weeks ago Kosov had thought he had received his last call about Spandau’s famous Prisoner Number Seven. That was when the Americans had found the old Nazi dead, a lamp cord wrapped around his neck. Suicide, Kosov remembered with a chuckle. That’s what the Allied board of inquiry had ruled it. Kosov thought it a damned remarkable suicide for a ninety-three-year-old man. Hess had supposedly hanged himself from a rafter, yet all his doctors agreed that the arthritic old Nazi couldn’t lift his arms any higher than his shoulders. The German press had screamed murder, of course. Kosov didn’t give a damn if it was murder. One less German in the world made for a better world, in his view. He was just grateful the old man hadn’t died during a Soviet guard month.
Another sharp chest pain made Kosov wince. It was thinking about the damned Germans that caused it. He hated them. The fact that both his father and his grandfather had been killed by Germans probably had something to do with it, but that wasn’t all. Behind the Germans’ arrogance, Kosov knew, lurked a childish insecurity, a desperate desire to be liked. But Kosov never gratified it. Because beneath that insecurity seethed something else, something darker. An ancient, tribal desire—a warlike need to dominate. He’d heard the rumors that Gorbachev was softening on the reunification issue, and it made him want to puke. As far as Kosov was concerned, the day the spineless politicians in Moscow decided to let the Germans reunite was the day the Red Army should roll across both Germanys like a tidal wave, smashing everything in its path.
Thinking about Moscow brought Kosov back to Hess. Because on that subject, Moscow Centre was like a shrewish old woman. The Rudolf Hess case held a security classification unique in Kosov’s experience; it dated all the way back to the NKVD. And in a bureaucracy where access to information was the very lifeblood of survival, no one he had ever met had ever seen the Hess file. No one but the chairman. Kosov had no idea why this was so. What he did have was a very short list—a list of names and potential events relating to Rudolf Hess which mandated certain responses. One of those events was illegal entry into Spandau Prison; and the response: immediate notification of the chairman. Kosov felt sure that the fact that Spandau now lay in ruins did not affect his orders at all. He glanced one last time at the scrawled letters on his pad: Hauer, Polizei Captain. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and lifted the red phone.
6:25A.M.British Sector: West Berlin
The warm apartment air hit Hans in a wave, flushing his skin, enfolding him like a cocoon. Ilse had already left, he knew it instinctively. There was no movement in the kitchen, no sound of appliances, no running shower, nothing. Still jumpy, and half-starved, he walked hopefully into the kitchen. He found a note on the refrigerator door, written in Ilse’s hurried hand: Wurst in the oven. I love YOU. Back by 18:00.
Thank you, Liebchen, he thought, catching the pungent aroma of Weisswurst. Using one of his gloves as a potholder, he removed the hot dish from the oven and placed it on the counter to cool. Then he took a deep breath, bent over, rolled up his pants leg and dug the sheaf of onionskin out of his boot. His pulse quickened as he unfolded the pages in the light. He backed against the stove for heat, plopped a chunk of white sausage into his mouth, and picked up reading where the Russian soldier had surprised him.
… I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England—of those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her existence for a chance to sit at Hitler’s blood-drenched table. The facts are few, but I have had more time to ponder them than most men would in ten lifetimes. I know how this mission was accomplished, but I do not know why. That is for someone else to learn. I can only point the way. You must follow the Eye. The Eye is the key to it all!
Hans stopped chewing and held the paper closer to his face. Sketched below this exhortation was a single, stylized eye. Gracefully curved, with a lid but no lashes, it stared out from the paper with a strange intensity. It seemed neither masculine nor feminine. It looked mystical somehow. Even a little creepy. He read on: What follows is my story, as best I can remember it.
Hans blinked his eyes. At the beginning of the next paragraph, the narrative suddenly switched to a language he could not understand. He didn’t even recognize it. He stared in puzzlement at the painstakingly blocked characters. Portuguese? he wondered. Italian maybe? He couldn’t tell. A few words of German were sprinkled through the gibberish—names mostly—but not enough to get any meaning from. Frustrated, he walked into the bedroom, folded the pages, and stuffed them underneath the mattress at the foot of his bed. He switched on the television from habit, then kicked his mud-caked boots into an empty corner and dropped his coat on top of them. Ilse would scold him for being lazy, he knew, but after two straight shifts he was simply too exhausted to care.
He ate his breakfast on the bed. As much as the Spandau papers, the thought of his father weighed on his mind. Captain Hauer had asked him why he’d come to Berlin. Hans often wondered that himself. Three years it had been now. He hardly thought of Munich anymore. He’d married Ilse after just five months here in Berlin. Christ, what a wedding it had been. His mother—still furious at him for becoming a policeman—had refused to attend, and Hauer had not been included in the plans. But he’d shown up anyway, Hans remembered. Hans had spied his rigid, uniformed figure outside the church, standing alone at the end of the block. Hans had pretended not to notice, but Ilse had waved quite deliberately to him as they climbed into the wedding car.
Angry again, Hans wolfed down another sausage and tried to concentrate on the television. A silver-haired windbag of a Frankfurt banker was dispensing financial advice to viewers saddled with the burden of surplus cash. Hans snorted in disgust. At fifteen hundred Deutschemarks per month, a Berlin policeman made barely enough money to pay rent and buy groceries. Without Ilse’s income, they would be shivering in a cold-water flat in Kreuzberg. He wanted to switch channels, but the old Siemens black-and-white had been built in the dark ages before remote control. He stayed where he was.
He took another bite of sausage and stared blankly at the screen. Beneath his stockinged feet, the wrinkled sheaf of papers waited, a tantalizing mystery beckoning him to explore. Yet he had already hit a dead end. The strange, staring eye hovered in his mind, taunting him. After breakfast, he decided, he would take a shower and then have another go at the papers.
He never made it off the bed. Exhaustion and the warm air overcame him even before he finished the sausage. He slid down the duvet, the unfinished plate balanced precariously on his lap, the Spandau papers hidden just beneath his feet.
10:15A.M.French Sector: West Berlin
Ilse hated these visits. No matter how many times she saw her Gynäkologe, she never got used to it. Ever. The astringent smell of alcohol, the gleaming stainless steel, the cold table, palpating fingers, the overly solicitous voice of the physician, who sometimes peered directly into her eyes from between her upraised legs: all these combined to produce a primal anxiety that solidified like ice in the hollow of her chest. Ilse knew about the necessity of annual checkups, but until she and Hans had begun trying to have a child, she’d skipped more exams than she would care to admit.
All that had changed eighteen months ago. She had been up in the stirrups so many times now that the stress of the ordeal had almost diminished to that of a visit to the dentist—but not quite. Unlike many German women, Ilse possessed an extreme sense of modesty about her body. She suspected it was because she had never known her mother, but whatever the reason, being forced to expose herself to a stranger, albeit a doctor, for her required a considerable act of will. Only her strong desire to have children allowed her to endure the interminable series of examinations and therapies designed to enhance fertility.
“All done, Frau Apfel,” Doctor Grauber said. He handed a slide to his waiting nurse. Ilse heard that hard snap as he stripped off his surgical gloves and raised the lid of the waste bin with his foot. It crashed down, sending gooseflesh racing across her neck and shoulders. “I’ll see you in my office after you’ve dressed.”
Ilse heard the door open and close. The nurse started to help her out of the stirrups, but she quickly raised herself and reached for her clothes.
Dr. Grauber’s office was messy but well-appointed, full of books and old medical instruments and framed degrees and the smell of cigars. Ilse noticed none of this. She was here for one thing—an answer. Was she pregnant or was she sick? The two possibilities wrestled in her mind. Her instinct said pregnant. She and Hans had been trying for so long now, and the other option was too unnatural to think about. Her body was strong and supple, lean and hard. Like the flanks of a lioness, Hans said once (as if he knew what a lioness felt like). How could she be sick? She felt so well.
But she knew. Exterior health was no guarantee of immunity. Ilse had seen two friends younger than she stricken with cancer. One had died, the other had lost a breast. She wondered how Hans would react to something like that. Disfigurement. He would never admit to revulsion, of course, but it would matter. Hans loved her body—worshipped it, really. Ever since their first night together, he had slowly encouraged her until she felt comfortable before him naked. Now she could turn gracefully about the room like a ballerina, or sometimes just stand silently, still as alabaster.
“That was quick!” Dr. Grauber boomed, striding in and taking a seat behind his chaotic desk.
Ilse pressed her back into the tufted leather sofa. She wanted to be ready, no matter what the diagnosis. As she met the doctor’s eyes, a nurse stepped into the office. She handed him a slip of paper and went out. Grauber glanced at it, sighed, then looked up.
What he saw startled him. The poise and concentration with which Ilse watched him made him forget the slip of paper in his hand. Her blue eyes shone with frank and disarming curiosity, her skin with luminous vitality. She wore little or no makeup—the luxury of youth, Grauber thought—and her hair had that transparent blondness that makes the hands tingle to touch it. But it wasn’t all that, he decided. Ilse Apfel was no film star. He knew a dozen women as striking as she. It was something other than fine features, deeper than the glow of youth. Not elegance, or earthiness, or even a hint of that intangible scent Grauber called availability. No, it was, quite simply, grace. Ilse possessed that rare beauty made rarer still by apparent unconsciousness of itself. When Grauber caught himself admiring her breasts—high and round, more Gallic than Teutonic, he thought—he flushed and looked quickly back at the slip of paper in his hand.
“Well,” he coughed. “That’s that.”
Ilse waited expectantly, too anxious to ask for the verdict.
“Your urine indicates pregnancy,” Grauber announced. “I’d like to draw some blood, of course, confirm the urine with a beta-subunit test, but I’d say that’s just a formality. Would you like to bring Hans in? I know he’ll be excited.”
Ilse colored. “Hans didn’t come this time.”
Grauber raised his eyebrows in surprise. “That’s a first. He’s got to be the most concerned husband I’ve ever met.” The smile faded. “Are you all right, Ilse? You look as though I’d just given you three months to live.”
Ilse felt wings beating within her chest. After all her anxiety, she found it hard to accept fulfillment of her deepest hope. “I really didn’t expect this,” she murmured. “I was afraid to hope for it. My mother died when I was born, you know, and it’s … it’s just very important to me to have a child of my own.”
“Well, you’ve got one started,” said Grauber. “Now our job is to see that he—or she—arrives as ordered. I’ve got a copy of the standard visiting schedule, and there’s the matter of …”
Ilse heard nothing else. The doctor’s news had lifted her spirit to a plane where no mundane detail could intrude. When the lab technician drew her blood, she felt no needle prick, and on her way out of the office the receptionist had to call her name three times to prevent her leaving without scheduling her next visit. At the age of twenty-six, her happiness was complete.
11:27A.M.Pretoria, The Republic of South Africa
Five thousand miles to the south of Germany, two thousand of those below the equator, an old man sentenced to spend half his waking hours in a wheelchair spoke acidly into the intercom recessed into his oaken office desk.
“This is not the time to bother me with business, Pieter.”
The man’s name was Alfred Horn, and though it was not his native language, he spoke Afrikaans.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the intercom replied, “but I believe you might prefer to take this call. It’s from Berlin.”
Berlin. Horn reached for the intercom button. “Ah … I believe you’re right, Pieter.” The old man let his finger fall from the button, then pressed it again. “Is this call scrambled?”
“Sir, this end as always. I can’t say for certain about the other. I doubt it.”
“And the room?”
“Swept last night, sir.”
“I’m picking up now.”
The connection was excellent, almost noiseless. The first voice Horn heard was that of his security chief, Pieter Smuts.
“Are you still on the line, caller?”
“Ja,” hissed a male voice, obviously under stress. “And I haven’t much time.”
“Are you calling from a secure location?”
“Nein.”
“Can you move to such a location?”
“Nein! Someone may have missed me already!”
“Calm yourself,” Smuts ordered. “You will identify yourself again in five seconds. Answer any questions put to you—”
“You may remain on the line, Guardian,” Horn interrupted in perfect German.
“Go ahead, caller,” Smuts said.
“This is Berlin-One,” said the quavering voice. “There are developments here of which I feel you should be apprised. Two men were arrested this morning at Spandau Prison. West Berliners.”
“On what charge?” Horn asked, his voice neutral.
“Trespassing.”
“For that you call this number?”
“There are special circumstances. Russian troops guarding the prison last night have insisted that these men be charged with espionage, or else transferred to East Berlin for such action.”
“Surely you are joking.”
“Does a man risk his career for a joke?”
Horn paused. “Elaborate.”
“I don’t know much, but there is still Russian activity at the prison. They’re conducting searches or tests of some sort. That’s all I—”
“Searches at Spandau?” Horn cut in. “Has this to do with the death of Hess?”
“I don’t know. I simply felt you should be made aware.”
“Yes,” Horn said at length. “Of course. Tell me, why weren’t our own men guarding Spandau?”
“The captain of the unit was one of us. It was he who prevented the Russians from taking the prisoners into East Berlin. He doesn’t think the trespassers know anything, though.”
“He’s not supposed to think at all!”
“He—he’s very independent,” said the timid voice. “A real pain in the neck. His name is Hauer.”
Horn heard Smuts’s pen scratching. “Was there anything else?”
“Nothing specific, but …”
“Yes?”
“The Russians. They’re being much more forceful than usual. They seem unworried by any diplomatic concerns. As if whatever they seek is worth upsetting important people. The Americans, for example.”
There was a pause. “You were right to call,” Horn said finally. “Make sure things do not go too far. Keep us informed. Call this number again tonight. There will be a delay as the call is re-routed north. Wait for our answer.”
“But I may not have access to a private phone—”
“That is a direct order!”
“Jawohl!”
“Caller, disconnect,” Smuts commanded.
The line went dead. Horn hit the intercom and summoned his security chief into the office. Smuts seated himself opposite Horn on a spartan sofa that typified its owner’s martial disdain for excessive comfort.
With his wheelchair almost out of sight behind the desk, Alfred Horn appeared in remarkably good health, despite his advanced years. His strong, mobile face and still-broad shoulders projected an energy and sense of purpose suited to a man thirty years his junior. Only the eyes jarred this impression. They seemed strangely incongruous between the high cheekbones and classical forehead. One hardly moved—being made of glass—yet the other eye seemed doubly and disturbingly alive, as if projecting the entire concentration of the powerful brain behind it. But it wasn’t really the eyes, Smuts remembered, it was the eyebrows. Horn had none. The bullet wound that had taken the left eye had been treated late and badly. Despite several plastic surgeries, the pronounced ridge that surmounted the surviving eye was entirely bare of hair, giving an impression of weakness where in fact none existed. The other eyebrow was shaved to prevent an asymmetrical appearance.
“Comments, Pieter?” Horn said.
“I don’t like it, sir, but I don’t see what we can do at this point but monitor the situation. We’re already pushing our timetable to the limit.” Smuts looked thoughtful. “Perhaps Number Seven’s killer left some evidence that was overlooked.”
“Or perhaps Number Seven himself left some hidden writings which were never found,” Horn suggested. “A deathbed confession, perhaps? We can take no chances where Spandau is concerned.”
“Do you have any specific requests?”
“Handle this as you see fit, but handle it. I’m much more concerned about the upcoming meeting.” Horn tapped his forefinger nervously on the desktop. “Do you feel confident about security, Pieter?”
“Absolutely, sir. Do you really feel you are in immediate danger? Spandau Prison is one thing, but Horn House is five thousand miles from Britain.”
“I’m certain,” Horn averred. “Something has changed. Our English contacts have cooled. Lines of communication are kept open, but they are too forced. Inquiries have been made into our activities in the South African defense program. Ever since the murder of Number Seven.”
“You don’t think it could have been suicide?”
Horn snorted in contempt. “The only mystery is who killed him and why. Was it the British, to silence him? Or did the Jews finally kill him, for revenge? My money is on the British. They wanted him silenced for good. As they want me silenced.” Horn scowled. “I’m tired of waiting, that’s all.”
Smuts smiled coldly. “Only seventy-two hours to go, sir.”
Horn ignored this reassurance. “I want you to call Vorster at the mine. Have him bring his men up to the house tonight.”
“But the interim security team doesn’t arrive until noon tomorrow,” Smuts objected.
“Then the mine will just have to work naked for eighteen hours!”
Horn had wounded his security chief’s pride, but Smuts kept silent. His precautions for the historic meeting three nights hence, though unduly rushed, were airtight. He was certain of it. Situated on an isolated plateau in the northern Transvaal, Horn House was a veritable fortress. No one could get within a mile of it without a tank, and Smuts had something that could stop that, too. But Alfred Horn was not a man to be argued with. If he wanted extra men, they would be there. Smuts made a mental note to retain a contract security team to guard Horn’s platinum mine during the night.
“Tell me, Pieter, how is the airstrip extension proceeding?”
“As well as we could hope, considering the time pressure we’re under. Six hundred feet to go.”
“I’ll see for myself tonight, if we ever get out of this blasted city. That helicopter of mine spends more time in the service hangar than it does on my rooftop.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I still don’t like those aircraft, Pieter. They look and fly like clumsy insects. Still, I suppose we can’t very well put a runway on the roof, can we?”
“Not yet at least.”
“We should look into something like the British Harrier. Wonderfully simple idea, vertical takeoff. There must be a commercial variant in development somewhere.”
“Surely you’re joking, sir?”
Horn looked reprovingly at his aide. “You would never have made an aviator, Pieter. To fight in the skies you must believe all things are possible, bendable to the human will.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“But you are excellent at what you do, my friend. I am living proof of your skill and dedication. I am the only one left who knows the secret. The only one. And that is due in no small part to you.”
“You exaggerate, Herr Horn.”
“No. Though I have great wealth, my power rests not in money but in fear. And one instrument of the fear I generate is you. Your loyalty is beyond price.”
“And beyond doubt, you know that.”
Horn’s single living eye pierced Smuts’s soul. “We can know nothing for certain, Pieter. Least of all about ourselves. But I have to trust someone, don’t I?”
“I shall never fail you,” Smuts said softly, almost reverently. “Your goal is greater than any temptation.”
“Yes,” the old man answered. “Yes it is.”
Horn backed the wheelchair away from the desk and turned to face the window. The skyline of Pretoria, for the most part beneath him, stretched away across the suburbs to the soot-covered townships, to the great plateau of the northern Transvaal, where three days hence Horn would host a meeting calculated to alter the balance of world power forever. As Smuts closed the door softly, Horn’s mind drifted back to the days of his youth … the days of power. Gingerly, he touched his glass eye.
“Der Tag kommt,” he said aloud. “The day approaches.”
THREE (#ulink_295b0866-92cf-5b74-a98f-d4c20a1151da)
3:31P.M.British Sector: West Berlin
Hans awoke in a sweat. He still cowered inside a dark cave, watching in terror as a Russian soldier came for him with a Kalashnikov rifle. The illusion gripped his mind, difficult to break. He sat upright in bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Still the wrecked compound hovered before him. His soiled uniform still chafed, still smelled of the dank prison yard. He shook his head violently, but the image would not disappear. It was real …
On the screen of the small Siemens television two meters in front of Hans, a tall reporter clad in the type of topcoat favored by West Berlin pimps stood before a wide shot of the wasteland that yesterday had been Spandau Prison. Hans clambered over the footboard of the bed and turned up the volume on the set.
“… Deutsche Welle broadcasting live from the Wilhelmstrasse. As you can see, the main structure of Spandau Prison was destroyed with little fanfare yesterday by the British military authorities. It was here early this morning that Soviet troops in conjunction with West Berlin police arrested the two West German citizens whom the Russians are now attempting to extradite into East Berlin. There is virtually no precedent for this attempt. The Russians are following no recognized legal procedure, and the story that began here in the predawn hours is rapidly becoming an incident of international proportions. To the best of Deutsche Welle’s knowledge, the two Berliners are being held inside Polizei Abschnitt 53, where our own Peter Müller is following developments as they occur. Peter?”
Before switching to the second live feed, the producer stayed with the Spandau shot for a few silent seconds. What Hans saw brought a sour lump to his throat. A hundred meters behind the reporter, dozens of uniformed men slowly picked their way across the ruined grounds of Spandau. They moved over the icy rubble like ants in search of food, some not far from the very mound where Hans had made his discovery. A few wore white lab coats, but others—Hans’s throat tightened—others wore the distinctive red-patched brown uniforms of the Soviet infantry.
Hans scoured the screen for clues that might explain the Soviet presence, but the scene vaporized. Now a slightly better-dressed commentator stood before the great three-arched doorway of the police station where Hans reported to work every morning. He shifted his weight excitedly from one foot to the other as he spoke.
“Thank you, Karl,” he said. “Other than the earlier statement by the police press officer that a joint investigation with the USSR is under way, no details are forthcoming. We know that an undetermined number of Soviet soldiers remain inside Abschnitt 53, but we do not know if they are guests here, as is claimed, or if—as has been rumored—they control the station by force of arms.
“While the Spandau incident occurred in the British sector of the city, the German prisoners were taken by a needlessly lengthy route to Abschnitt 53, here in the American sector, just one block from Checkpoint Charlie. Informed sources have speculated that a quick-witted police officer may have realized that the Soviets would be less likely to resort to violence in the American-controlled part of the city. We have received no statements from either the American or the British military commands. However, if Soviet troops are in fact inside this police station without the official sanction of the U.S. Army, the Allied occupational boundaries we have all by familiarity come to ignore may suddenly assume a critical importance. This small incident could well escalate into one of the most volatile crises of the post-glasnost era. We will update this story at 18:00 this evening, so please stay tuned to this channel. This is Peter Müller, Deutsche Welle, live …”
While the reporter solemnly wrapped his segment, he failed to notice the huge station door open behind him. Haggard but erect, Captain Dieter Hauer strode out into the afternoon light. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. He surveyed the sidewalk like a drill sergeant inspecting a barracks yard; then, apparently satisfied, he gave the reporter a black look, turned back toward the station door, and dissolved into a BMW commercial.
Hans fell back against the footboard of the bed, his mind reeling. Russian troops still in his home station? Who had leaked the Spandau story to the press? And who were the men in the white lab coats? What were they searching for? Was it the papers he’d found? It almost had to be. No one cared about a couple of homosexuals who happened to trespass public property in their search for a love nest. The realization of what he had done by keeping the papers hit Hans like a wave of fever. But what else could he have done? Surely the police brass would not have wanted the Russians to get hold of the papers. He could have driven straight to Polizei headquarters at Platz der Luftbrücke, of course, but he didn’t know a soul there. No, when he turned in the papers, he wanted to do it at his home station. And he couldn’t do that yet because the Russians were still inside it! He would simply have to wait.
But he didn’t want to wait. He felt like a boy who has stumbled over a locked chest in a basement. He wanted to know what the devil he’d found! Anxiously, he snapped his fingers. Ilse, he thought suddenly. She had a gift for languages, just like her arrogant grandfather. Maybe she could decipher the rest of the Spandau papers. He lifted the phone and punched in the first four digits of her work number; then he replaced the receiver. The brokerage house where Ilse worked did not allow personal calls during trading hours. Hans would break a rule quicker than most Germans, but he remembered that several employees had been fired for taking this rule lightly.
A reckless thought struck Hans. He wanted information, and he knew where he could get some. After sixty seconds of hard reflection, he picked up the telephone directory and looked up the number of Der Spiegel. Several department numbers were listed for the magazine. He wasn’t sure which he needed, so he dialed the main switchboard.
“Der Spiegel,” answered a female voice.
“I need to speak to Heini Weber,” Hans said. “Could you connect me with the proper department, please?”
“One moment.”
Thirty seconds passed. “News,” said a gruff male voice.
“Heini Weber, please. He’s a friend of mine.” A bit of an exaggeration, Hans thought, but what the hell?
“Weber’s gone,” the man growled. “He was just here, but he left again. Field assignment.”
Hans sighed. “If he comes back—”
“Wait, I see him. Weber! Telephone!”
Hans heard a clatter of chairs, then a younger male voice came on the line. “Weber here. Who’s this?”
“Hans Apfel.”
“Who?”
“Sergeant Hans Apfel. We met at—”
“Right, right,” Weber remembered, “that kidnapping thing. Gruesome. Listen, I’m in a hurry, can you make it fast?”
“I need to talk to you,” Hans said deliberately. “It’s important.”
“Hold on—I’m coming already! What’s your story, Sergeant?”
“Not over the phone,” Hans said, knowing he probably sounded ridiculous.
“Jesus,” Weber muttered. “I’ve got to get over to Hannover. A mob of Greens is disrupting an American missile transport on the E-30 and I need to leave five minutes ago.”
“I could ride with you.”
“Two-seater,” Weber objected. “And I’ve got to take my photographer. I guess your big scoop will have to wait until tomorrow.”
“No!” Hans blurted, surprised by his own vehemence. “It can’t wait. I’ll just have to call someone else.”
A long silence. “All right,” Weber said finally, “where do you live?”
“Lützenstrasse, number 30.”
“I’ll meet you out front. I can give you five minutes.”
“Good enough.” Hans hung up and took a deep breath. This move carried some risk. In Berlin, all police contact with the press must be officially cleared beforehand. But he intended to get information from a reporter, not to give it. Without pausing to shower or shave, he stripped off his dirty uniform and threw on a pair of cotton pants and the old shirt he wore whenever he made repairs on the VW. A light raincoat and navy scarf completed his wardrobe.
The Spandau papers still lay beneath the rumpled mattress. He retrieved them, scanning them again on the off chance that he’d missed something before. At the bottom of the last page he found it: several hastily written passages in German, each apparently a separate entry:
The threats stopped for a time. Foolishly, I let myself hope that the madness had ended. But it started again last month. Can they read my thoughts? No sooner do I toy with the idea of setting down my great burden, than a soldier of Phoenix appears before me. Who is with them? Who is not? They show me pictures of an old woman, but the eyes belong to a stranger. I am certain my wife is dead.
My daughter is alive! She wears a middle-aged face and bears an unknown name, but her eyes are mine. She is a hostage roaming free, with an invisible sword hanging above her head. But safe she has remained. I am strong! The Russians have promised to find my angel, to save her, if I will but speak her name. But I do not know it! It would be useless if I did. Heydrich wiped all trace of me from the face of Germany in 1936. God alone knows what that demon told my family!
My British warders are stern like guard dogs, very stupid ones. But there are other Englanders who are not so stupid. Have you found me out, swine?
And a jagged entry: Phoenix wields my precious daughter like a sword of fire! If only they knew! Am I even a dim memory to my angel? No. Better that she never knows. I have lived a life of madness, but in the face of death I found courage. In my darkest hours I remember these lines from Ovid: “It is a smaller thing to suffer punishment than to have deserved it. The punishment can be removed, the fault will remain forever.” My long punishment shall soon cease. After all the slaughtered millions, the war finally ends for me. May God accept me into His Heaven, for I know that Heydrich and the others await me at the gates of Hell.
Surely I have paid enough.
Number 7
A car horn blared outside. Strangely shaken, Hans folded the pages into a square and stuffed them back under the mattress. Then he tugged on a pair of old sneakers, locked the front door, and bounded into the stairwell. He bumped into a tall janitor on the third floor landing, but the old man didn’t even look up from his work.
Hans found Heini Weber beside a battered red Fiat Spyder, bouncing up and down on his toes like a hyperactive child. A shaggy-haired youth with a Leica slung round his neck peered at Hans from the Fiat’s jump seat.
“So what’s the big story, Sergeant?” Weber asked.
“Over here,” said Hans, motioning toward the foyer of his building. He had seen nothing suspicious in the street, yet he could not shake the feeling that he was being watched—if not by hostile, at least by interested eyes. It’s just the photographer, he told himself. Weber followed him into the building and immediately resumed his nervous bouncing, this time against the dirty foyer wall.
“The meter’s running,” said the reporter.
“Before I tell you anything,” Hans said carefully, “I want some information.”
Weber scowled. “Do I look like a fucking librarian to you? Come on, out with it.”
Hans nodded solemnly, then played out his bait. “I may have a story for you, Heini, but … to be honest, I’m curious about what it might be worth.”
“Well, well,” the reporter deadpanned, “the police have joined the club. Listen, Sergeant, I don’t buy stories, I track them down for pay. That’s the news game, you know? If you want money, try one of the American TV networks.”
When Hans didn’t respond, Weber said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s your story? The mayor consorting with the American commandant’s wife? The Wall coming down tomorrow? I’ve heard them all, Sergeant. Everybody’s got a story to sell and ninety-nine percent of them are shit. What’s yours?”
Hans looked furtively toward the street. “What if,” he murmured, “what if I told you I’d got hold of something important from the war? From the Nazi period?”
“Something,” Weber echoed. “Like?”
Hans sighed anxiously. “Like papers, say. Like a diary.”
Weber scrutinized him for some moments; then his eyebrows arched cynically. “Like the diary of a Nazi war criminal, maybe?”
Hans’s eyes widened in disbelief. “How did you know?”
“Scheisse!” Weber cursed. He slapped the wall. “Is that what you got me over here for? Christ, where do they find you guys? That’s the oldest one in the book!”
Hans stared at the reporter as if he were mad. “What do you mean?”
Weber returned Hans’s gaze with something akin to pity; then he put a hand on his shoulder. “Whose diary is it, Sergeant? Mengele’s? Bormann’s?”
“Neither,” Hans snapped. He felt strangely defensive about the Spandau papers. “What the hell are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that you probably just bought the German equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Hans blinked, then looked away, thinking fast. He clearly wasn’t going to get any information without revealing some first. “This diary’s genuine,” he insisted. “And I can prove it.”
“Sure you can,” said Weber, glancing at his watch. “When Gerd Heidemann discovered the ‘Hitler diaries’ back in ’83, he even had Hugh Trevor-Roper swearing they were authentic. But they were crap, Sergeant, complete fakes. I don’t know where you got your diary, but I hope to God you didn’t pay much for it.”
The reporter was laughing. Hans forced himself to smile sheepishly, but what he was thinking was that he hadn’t paid one Pfennig for the Spandau papers. He had found them. And if Heini Weber knew where he had found them, the reporter would be begging him for an exclusive story. Hans heard the regular swish of a broom from the first-floor landing.
“Heini,” he said forcefully, “just tell me this. Have you heard of any missing Nazi documents or anything like that floating around recently?”
Weber shook his head in amazement. “Sergeant, what you’re talking about—Nazi diaries and things—people were selling them ten-a-penny after the war. It’s a fixed game, a scam.” His face softened. “Just cut your losses and run, Hans. Don’t embarrass yourself.”
Weber turned and grabbed the door handle, but Hans caught him by the sleeve. “But if it were authentic?” he said, surprising himself. “What kind of money would we be talking about?”
Weber pulled his arm free, but he paused for a last look at the gullible policeman. The swish of the broom had stopped, but neither man noticed. “For the real thing?” He chuckled. “No limit, Sergeant. Stern magazine paid Heidemann 3.7 million marks for first rights to the ‘Hitler diaries.’”
Hans’s jaw dropped.
“The London Sunday Times went in for 400,000 pounds, and I think both Time and Newsweek came close to getting stung.” Weber smiled with a touch of professional envy. “Heidemann was pretty smart about it, really. He set the hook by leaking a story that the diaries contained Hitler’s version of Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain. Of course every rag in the world was panting to print a special edition solving the last big mystery of the war. They shelled out millions. Careers were ruined by that fiasco.” The reporter laughed harshly. “Guten Abend, Sergeant. Call me next time there’s a kidnapping, eh?”
Weber trotted to the waiting Spyder, leaving Hans standing dumbfounded in the doorway. He had called the reporter for information; and he had gotten more than he’d bargained for. 3.7 million marks? Jesus!
“Make way, why don’t you!” croaked a high-pitched voice.
Hans grunted as the tall janitor shouldered past him onto the sidewalk and hobbled down the street. His broom was gone; now a worn leather bag swung from his shoulder. Hans followed the man with his eyes for a while, then shook his head. Paranoia, he thought.
Looking up at the drab facade of his apartment building, he decided that a walk through the city beat waiting for Ilse in the empty flat. Besides, he always thought more clearly on the move. He started walking. Just over a hundred meters long, the Lützenstrasse was wedged into a rough trapezoid between two main thoroughfares and a convergence of elevated S-Bahn rail tracks. Forty seconds’ walking carried Hans from the dirty brown stucco of his apartment building to the polished chrome of the Kurfürstendamm, the showpiece boulevard of Berlin. He headed east toward the center of the city, speaking to no one, hardly looking up at the dazzling window displays, magisterial banks, open-air cafes, art galleries, antique shops, and nightclubs of the Ku’damm.
Bright clusters of shoppers jostled by, gawking and laughing together, but they yielded a wide path to the lone walker whose Aryan good looks were somehow made suspect by his unshaven face and ragged clothing. The tall, spare man gliding purposefully along behind Hans could easily have been walking at his shoulder. The man no longer looked like a janitor, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered; Hans was lost in heady dreams of wealth beyond measure.
He paused at a newsstand and bought a pack of American cigarettes. He really needed a smoke. As he sucked in the first potent drag, he suddenly remembered something from the Spandau papers. The writer had said he was the last … The last what? The last prisoner? And then it hit Hans like a bucket of water in the face. The Spandau papers were signed Prisoner Number Seven … and Prisoner Number Seven was Rudolf Hess himself!
He felt the hand holding the cigarette start to shake. He tried to swallow, but his throat refused to cooperate. Had he actually found the journal of a Nazi war criminal? With Heini Weber’s cynical comments echoing in his head, he tried to recall what he could about Hess. All he really knew was that Hess was Hitler’s right-hand man, and that he’d flown secretly to Britain sometime early in the war, and had been captured. For the past few weeks the Berlin papers had been full of sensational stories about Hess’s death, but Hans had read none of them. He did remember the occasional feature from earlier years, though. They invariably portrayed an infantile old man, a once-powerful soldier reduced to watching episodes of the American soap opera Dynasty on television. Why was the pathetic old Nazi so important? Hans wondered. Why should even a hint of information about his mission drive the price of forged diaries into the millions?
Catching his reflection in a shop window, Hans realized that in his work clothes he looked like a bum, even by the Ku’damm’s indulgent standards. He stubbed out his cigarette and turned down a side street at the first opportunity. He soon found himself standing before a small art cinema. He gazed up at the colorful posters hawking films imported from a dozen nations. On a whim he stepped up to the ticket window and inquired about the matinee. The ticket girl answered in a sleepy monotone.
“American western film today. John Wayne. Der Searchers.”
“In German?”
“Nein. English.”
“Excellent. One ticket, please.”
“Twelve DM,” demanded the robot voice.
“Twelve! That’s robbery.”
“You want the ticket?”
Reluctantly, Hans surrendered his money and entered the theater. He didn’t stop for refreshments; at the posted prices he couldn’t afford to. No wonder Ilse and I never go to movies, he thought. Just before he entered the screening room, he spied a pay phone near the restrooms. He slowed his stride, thinking of calling in to the station, but then he walked on. There isn’t any rush, is there? he thought. No one knows about the papers yet. As he seated himself in the darkness near the screen, he decided that he might well have found the most anonymous place in the city to decide what to do with the Spandau papers.
Six rows behind Hans, a tall, thin shadow slipped noiselessly into a frayed theater seat. The shadow reached into a worn leather bag on its lap and withdrew an orange. While Hans watched the titles roll, the shadow peeled the orange and watched him.
Thirty blocks away in the Lützenstrasse, Ilse Apfel set her market basket down in the uncarpeted hallway and let herself into apartment 40. The operation took three keys—one for the knob and two for the heavy deadbolts Hans insisted upon. She went straight to the kitchen and put away her groceries, singing tunefully all the while. The song was an old one, Walking on the Moon by the Police. Ilse always sang when she was happy, and today she was ecstatic. The news about the baby meant far more than fulfillment of her desire to have a family. It meant that Hans might finally agree to settle permanently in Berlin. For the past five months he had talked of little else but his desire to try out for Germany’s elite counterterror force, the Grenzschutzgruppe-9 (GSG-9), oddly enough, the unit whose marksmen his estranged father coached. Hans claimed he was tired of routine police work, that he wanted something more exciting and meaningful.
Ilse didn’t like this idea at all. For one thing, it would seriously disrupt her career. Policemen in Berlin made little money; most police wives worked as hairdressers, secretaries, or even housekeepers—low-paying jobs, but jobs that could be done anywhere. Ilse was different. Her parents had died when she was very young, and she had been raised by her grandfather, an eminent history professor and author. She’d practically grown up in the Free University and had taken degrees in both Modern Languages and Finance. She’d even spent a semester in the United States, studying French and teaching German. Her job as interpreter for a prominent brokerage house gave Hans and her a more comfortable life than most police families. They were not rich, but their life was good.
If Hans qualified for GSG-9, however, they would have to move to one of the four towns that housed the active GSG-9 units: Kassel, Munich, Hannover, or Kiel. Not exactly financial meccas. Ilse knew she could adapt to a new city if she had to, but not to the heightened danger. Assignment to a GSG-9 unit virtually guaranteed that Hans would be put into life-threatening situations. GSG-9 teams were Germany’s forward weapon in the battle against hijackers, assassins, and God only knew what other madmen. Ilse didn’t want that kind of life for the father of her child, and she didn’t understand how Hans could either. She despised amateur psychology, but she suspected that Hans’s reckless impulse was driven by one of two things: a desire to prove something to his father, or his failure to become a father himself.
No more conversations about stun grenades and storming airplanes, she told herself. Because she was finally pregnant, and because today was just that kind of day. Returning to work from the doctor’s office, she’d found that her boss had realized a small fortune for his clients that morning by following a suggestion she had made before leaving. Of course by market close the cretin had convinced himself that the clever bit of arbitrage was entirely his own idea. And who really cares? she thought. When I open my brokerage house, he’ll be carrying coffee to my assistants!
Ilse stepped into the bedroom to change out of her business clothes. The first thing she saw was the half-eaten plate of Weisswurst on the unmade bed. Melted ice and dirt from Hans’s uniform had left the sheets a muddy mess. Then she saw the uniform itself, draped over the boots in the corner. That’s odd, she thought. Hans was as human as the next man, but he usually managed to keep his dirty clothes out of sight. In fact, it was odd not to find him sleeping off the fatigue of night duty.
Ilse felt a strange sense of worry. And then suddenly she knew. At work there had been a buzz about a breaking news story—something about Russians arresting two West Berliners at Spandau Prison. Later, in her car, she’d half-heard a radio announcer say something about Russians at one of the downtown police stations. She prayed that Hans hadn’t got caught up in that mess. A bureaucratic tangle like that could take all night. She frowned. Telling Hans about the baby while he was in a bad mood wasn’t what she had had in mind at all. She would have to think of a way to put him in a good mood first.
One method always worked, and she smiled thinking of it. For the first time in weeks the thought of sex made her feel genuinely excited. It seemed so long since she and Hans had made love with any other goal than pregnancy. But now that she had conceived, they could forget all about charts and graphs and temperatures and rediscover the intensity of those nights when they hardly slept at all.
She had already planned a celebratory dinner—not a health-conscious American style snack like those her yuppie colleagues from the Yorckstrasse called dinner, but a real Berlin feast: Eisben, sauerkraut, and Pease pudding. She’d made a special trip to the food floor of the KaDeWe and bought everything ready-made. It was said that anything edible in the world could be purchased at the KaDeWe, and Ilse believed it. She smiled again. She and Hans would share a first-class supper, and for dessert he could have her—as healthy a dish as any man could want. Then she would tell him about the baby.
Ilse tied her hair back, then she took the pork from the refrigerator and put it in the oven. While it heated, she went into the bedroom to strip the soiled sheets. She laughed softly. A randy German woman might happily make love on a forest floor, but on dirty linens? Never! She knelt beside the bed and gathered the bedclothes into a ball. She was about to rise when she saw something white sticking out from under the mattress. Automatically, she pulled it out and found herself holding a damp sheaf of papers.
What in the world? She certainly didn’t remember putting any papers under the mattress. It must have been Hans. But what would he hide from her? Bewildered, she let the bedclothes fall, stood up, and unfolded the onionskin pages. Heavy, hand-printed letters covered the paper. She read the first paragraph cursorily, her mind more on the circumstances of her discovery than on the actual content of the papers. The second paragraph, however, got her attention. It was written in Latin of all things. Shivering in the chilly air, she walked into the kitchen and stood by the warm stove.
She concentrated on the word endings, trying to decipher the carefully blocked letters. It was almost painful, like trying to recall formulas from gymnasium physics. Her specialty was modern languages; Latin she could hardly remember. Ilse went to the kitchen table and spread out the thin pages, anchoring each corner with a piece of flatware. There were nine. She took a pen and notepad from the telephone stand, went back to the first paragraph of Latin, and began recording her efforts. After ten minutes she had roughed out the first four sentences. When she read straight through what she had written, the pencil slipped from her shaking hand.
“Mein Gott,” she breathed. “This cannot be.”
Hans exited the cinema into the gathering dusk. He couldn’t believe the afternoon had passed so quickly. Huddling against the cold, he considered taking the U-Bahn home, then decided against it. It would mean changing trains at Fehrbelliner-Platz, and he would still have some distance to walk. Better to walk the whole way and use the time to decide how to tell Ilse about the Spandau papers. He started west with a loping stride, moving away from the crowded Ku’damm. He knew he was duty-bound to hand the papers over to his superiors, and he felt sure that the mix-up with the Russians had been straightened out by now. Yet as he walked, he was aware that his mind was not completely clear about turning in the papers. For some irritating reason, when he thought of doing that, his father’s face came into his mind. But there was something else in his brain. Something he soon recognized as Heini Weber’s voice saying: “Three point seven million Deutschemarks …”
Hans had already done the calculations. At his salary it would take 150 years to earn that much money, and that represented the offer of a single magazine for the “Hitler diaries.” That was a powerful temptation, even for an honest man.
As Hans reached the mouth of the side street, a dark shape disengaged itself from the gloom beneath the cinema awning and fell into step behind him. It neither hurried nor tarried, but moved through the streets as effortlessly as a cloud’s shadow.
FOUR (#ulink_444534f2-3bfe-5df8-a510-e1649affd983)
5:50P.M.American Sector: West Berlin
Colonel Godfrey A. “God” Rose reached into the bottom drawer of his mammoth Victorian desk, withdrew a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, and gazed fondly at the label. For five exhausting hours the U.S. Army’s West Berlin chief of intelligence had sifted through the weekly reports of his “snitches”—the highly paid but underzealous army of informers that the U.S. government maintains on its shadow payroll to keep abreast of events in Berlin—and discovered nothing but the usual sordid list of venalities committed by the host of elected officials, bureaucrats, and military officers of the city he had come to regard as the Sodom of Western Europe. The colonel had a single vice—whiskey—and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation.
Pouring the Turkey into a Lenox shot glass, Rose glanced up and saw his aide, Sergeant Clary, silhouetted against the leaded glass window of his office door. With customary discretion the young NCO paused before knocking, giving his superior time to “straighten his desk.” By the time Clary tapped on the glass and stepped smartly into the office, Colonel Rose appeared to be engrossed in an intelligence brief.
Clary cleared his throat. “Colonel?”
Rose looked up slowly. “Yes, Sergeant?”
“Sir, Ambassador Briggs is flying in from Bonn tomorrow morning. State just informed us by courier.”
Rose frowned. “That’s not on my calendar, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well?”
“Apparently the Soviets have filed some sort of complaint against us, sir. Through the embassy.”
“Us?”
“The Army, sir. It’s something to do with last night’s detail at Spandau Prison. That’s all I could get out of Smitty—I mean the courier, sir.”
“Spandau? What about it? Christ, we’ve watched the damned coverage all day, haven’t we? I’ve already filed my report.”
“State didn’t elaborate, sir.”
Rose snorted. “They never do, do they.”
“No, sir. Care to see the message?”
Rose gazed out of his small window at the Berlin dusk and wondered about the possible implications of the ambassador’s visit. The American diplomatic corps stayed in Bonn most of the time—well out of Rose’s area of operations—and he liked that just fine.
“The message, Colonel?” Sergeant Clary repeated.
“What? No, Sergeant. Dismissed.”
“Sir.” Clary beat a hasty retreat from the office, certain that his colonel would want to ponder this unpleasant development over a shot of the good stuff.
“Clary!” Rose’s bark rattled the door. “Is Major Richardson still down the hall?”
The sergeant poked his head back into the office. “I’ll run check, sir.”
“Can’t you just buzz him?”
“Uh … the major doesn’t always answer his pages, sir. After five, that is. Says he can’t stand to hear the phone while he’s working.”
“Who the hell can? Don’t people just keep on ringing the damned thing when he doesn’t answer?”
“Well, sir … I think he’s rigged some type of switch to his phone or something. He just shuts it off when he doesn’t want to hear it.”
Rose stuck out his bottom lip. “I see.”
“Checking now, sir,” said Clary, on the fly.
Since 1945, Berlin has been an island city. It is a political island, quadrisected by foreign conquerors, and a psychological island as insulated from the normal flow of German life as a child kidnapped from its mother. Berlin was an island before the Wall, during the Wall, and it will remain so long after the Wall has fallen. Kidnapped children can take years to recover.
The American community in Berlin is an island within that larger host. It clusters around the U.S. Military Mission in the affluent district of Dahlem, a giant concrete block bristling with satellite dishes, radio antennae, and microwave transmitters. In this city of hastily built office towers, bomb-scarred churches, and drab concrete tenement blocks whose color accents are provided mostly by graffiti, the American housing area manages to look neat, midwestern, suburban, and safe. Known as “Little America,” it is home to the sixty-six hundred servicemen, their wives, and children who comprise the symbolic U.S. presence in Berlin. These families bustle between the U.S. Mission, the Officers’ club, the well-stocked PX, the private Burger King and McDonald’s, and their patio barbecues like suburbanites from Omaha or Atlanta. Only the razor wire that tops the fences surrounding the manicured lawns betrays the tension that underpins this bucolic scene.
Few Americans truly mix with the Berliners. They are more firmly tied to the United States than to the streets they walk and the faces they pass each day in Berlin. They are tied by the great airborne umbilical cord stretching from Tempelhof Airport to the mammoth military supply bases of America. Major Harry Richardson—the man Colonel Rose had sent Sergeant Clary to find—was an exception to this pattern. Richardson needed no umbilical cord in Berlin, or anywhere else. He spoke excellent German, as well as Russian—and not with the stilted State Department cadence of the middle and upper ranks of the army. He did not live in Dahlem or Zehlendorf, the ritzy addresses of choice, but in thoroughly German Wilmersdorf. He came from a moneyed family, had attended both Harvard and Oxford, yet he had served in Vietnam and remained in the army after the war. His personal contacts ranged from U.S. senators to supply sergeants at distant Army outposts, from English peers to Scottish fishing guides, from Berlin senators to kabob-cooks in the Turkish quarter of Kreuzberg. And that, in Colonel Rose’s eyes, made Harry Richardson one hell of an intelligence officer.
Harry saluted as he sauntered into Rose’s office and collapsed into the colonel’s infamous “hot seat.” The chair dropped most people a head lower than Rose, but Harry stood six feet three inches without shoes. His gray eyes met the stocky colonel’s with the self-assured steadiness of an equal.
“Richardson,” Rose said across the desk.
“Colonel.”
Rose eyed Harry’s uniform doubtfully. It was wrinkled and rather plain for a major. Harry had won the silver star in Vietnam, yet the only decoration he ever wore was his Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Rose didn’t like the wrinkles, but he liked the modesty. He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
“Bigwig Briggs is flying in from Bonn tomorrow,” he announced.
Harry smiled wryly. “I thought he might.”
“You did. Why’s that?”
“Stands to reason, doesn’t it? With the ham-fisted way the Soviets have handled the Spandau mess so far, I figured the negotiations would have to be bumped up a notch on both sides. Sir.”
“Can the ‘sir’ crap, Harry. Just what do you think did happen last night?”
“Do you have anything that wasn’t on TV?”
“Nothing substantive. Master Sergeant Jackson pretty much confirmed the press accounts of the incident, and the German police aren’t saying squat. Christ, you’d think if the Russians wanted to file a complaint against the Army, they’d give it to us and not the goddamn State Department.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “If it’s got anything to do with Spandau, the State Department doesn’t trust us, and you know why.”
“Bird,” Rose muttered. He sighed wearily. In 1972 the first U.S. commandant of Spandau Prison, Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Bird, had been relieved of his duties for secretly bringing a tape recorder and camera into Spandau over a period of months and compiling a book on Rudolf Hess, which was published in 1974. The colonel’s entrepreneurial spirit hadn’t exactly improved the relationship between the Army and the State Department.
“The point,” Rose went on, “is that the ambassador will be here in the morning, and he’ll want to grill me for breakfast. I want you with me when I talk to him, and I want to know everything he’s going to say before he says it.”
“No problem, Colonel.”
“Okay, Harry, what’s your read on this thing?”
“I’m not sure yet. I was over at Abschnitt 53 for a few minutes this morning—”
“You what?”
“I’ve got a friend over there,” Harry explained.
“Naturally.” Rose opened his bottom drawer and set the bottle of Wild Turkey between them on the desk. “Drink?” he asked, already pouring two shots.
Harry accepted the glass, raised it briefly, then drank it off neat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “As I was saying, Colonel, I dropped by there just to get a feel for what was going on. The problem was, I couldn’t even get near my guy’s office. I got through the reporters okay, but inside the station it was wall-to-wall cops. There was a squad of Russian soldiers guarding the cellblock, and they weren’t ceremonial roosters. One guy was wearing a sergeant’s uniform, but he was no noncom. Wasn’t even regular army. KGB down to his BVDs.”
Rose groaned. “Is this the Hess thing again?”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think so, Colonel. They’ve run Hess into the ground already. Pardon the pun, but it’s a dead issue.”
“So, what is it?”
“I think this is a Russian territorial thing. Spandau was a Soviet foothold in West Berlin—small maybe, but they don’t like giving it up.”
“Hmm. What about the Russian accusations that someone murdered Hess?”
Harry sighed. “Colonel, I don’t think the Russians ever believed Prisoner Number Seven was Hess. But if this is about Hess, I think we should stay out of it. Let the Russians knock themselves out. They’ve been obsessed with the case for years. But I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s Russian paranoia, plain and simple.”
“Jesus,” Rose grumbled, “I thought the goddamn Cold War was over.”
Harry smiled wryly. “The reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Which reminds me, Colonel, I caught a glimpse of Ivan Kosov at that police station this morning.”
“Kosov! What the hell was that old bear doing in our sector?”
Harry shrugged. “We’d better find out.”
“Okay, what do you need?”
“Do you have a list of all personnel with access to the Spandau site last night? Ours and theirs?”
“I’ll have Clary get Ray down here to crack the computer file.”
“Don’t bother, I’ll get it.”
“Ray’s the only one with the codes, Harry. He buries that stuff deep.”
Harry smiled thinly. “Just get me into his office.”
Rose cocked an eye at Richardson, then pushed on. “There’s something else. I know you’re pretty chummy with some of the Brits over here. Been fishing in Scotland with a few ministers and such. But on this thing—the Spandau thing—I’d like to keep the Brits out of it. Just for the time being. It’s a matter of—”
“Understood, Colonel. You’re not sure they’ve always played straight with us on the Hess affair.”
“Exactly,” Rose said, relieved. “Even if you’re right about this not having anything to do with Hess, I’d feel better keeping it in-house for a while.”
“No problem.”
Rose smiled humorlessly. “Right. I’ll just—”
“Shit,” Harry muttered. “There is one problem. I’ve got a racquetball date this evening with a girl from the British embassy.”
“Cancel it.”
Harry looked thoughtful. “Colonel, I understand your thinking on this, but don’t you think breaking the date might call more attention—”
“I’ll tell you what I think!” Rose cut in with surprising force. “I think the goddamn Brits killed Hess! And during our goddamn guard month! How about that?” His face flushed. “You think I’m crazy, Major?”
Harry swallowed his surprise. “No, sir. I wouldn’t say that scenario was outside the realm of possibility.”
“Possibility! Ever since Gorbachev came out with the goddamn glasnost, the limeys have been quaking in their boots thinking the Russians would go soft and let Hess out to spill his guts to the world. The Russians were the only ones vetoing his release those last few years, you know. The Brits knew if they ever had to step in and veto it, all the old questions would start again.” Rose nodded angrily. “I think those smug sons-of-bitches slipped one of their ex-SAS killers over the wall last month, strangled that old Nazi, and left us holding the goddamn bag! That’s what I think about the British, Major! And you will cancel your racquetball date as of now. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely, Colonel.”
“I want your report on my desk by oh-eight-hundred,” Rose growled.
Harry stood, saluted, and marched out.
“Clary!” Rose’s gruff baritone boomed through the open door.
“Yes, sir?”
“Let Major Richardson into Captain Donovan’s office. He’s got a little work to do on the computer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Clary?”
“Sir?”
“I want one of those phone gadgets like Richardson’s got.”
Grinning, Sergeant Clary backed out and pulled the door shut.
Rose looked longingly at the Wild Turkey bottle, then slipped it back into his bottom drawer. He closed his eyes, leaned his chair all the way back and propped his legs up on the huge desk. That Richardson is one strange bird, he thought. Damn near insubordinate sometimes. But he gets the job done. Rose congratulated himself on a fine piece of human resource management. Harry can handle the fairies from State, he thought with satisfaction, and I’ll take care of the friggin’ Russians. And if the Brits stick their stuffy noses into it, the devil take the hindmost.
6:10P.M.MI-5 Headquarters: Charles Street, London, England
Sir Neville Shaw looked up from the report with anger in his eyes. As director general of MI-5, he had witnessed his share of crises, but the one he now faced was one he had long prayed would remain buried in the ashes of history.
“This cock-up started almost twelve hours ago!” he snapped.
“Yes, Sir Neville,” admitted his deputy. “The unit on the scene reported it to General Bishop in Berlin. Bishop informed MI-6 but saw no reason to apprise us. The Russian complaint went to the Foreign Office, and the F.O. apparently felt as the general did. We’ve got one contact on the West Berlin police force; he’s the only reason we got onto this at all. He can’t tell us much, though, because he’s stationed in our sector. These German trespassers were taken to a police station in the American sector. The thing’s been on the telly over there since this afternoon.”
“Good God,” Sir Neville groaned. “One more bloody week and this would have been nothing but a minor flap.”
“How do you mean, sir?”
Shaw rubbed his forehead to ease a migraine. “Forget it. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Damned journalists and curiosity hounds poking at the story for years. Matter of time, that’s all.”
“Yes, sir,” the deputy director commiserated.
“Who did we have at Spandau, anyway?”
“Regular military detail. The sergeant in charge said he knew nothing about any papers. He didn’t have the foggiest idea of the implications.”
“What monumental stupidity!” Shaw got to his feet, still staring at the report in his hands. “Can this Russian forensic report be relied upon?”
“Our technical section says the Soviets are quite good at that sort of thing, sir.”
Sir Neville snorted indignantly. “Papers at Spandau. Good Christ. Whatever has turned up over there, ten to one it’s got something to do with Hess. We’ve got to get hold of it, Wilson, fast. Who else was at Spandau?”
“The Americans, the Frogs, and the Russians. Plus a contingent of West Berlin police.”
Sir Neville wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I could hang for this one, that’s sure. What do we have in Berlin?”
“Not much. What we do have is mostly on the commercial side. No one who’s cleared for this.”
“I didn’t think anyone was cleared for this rot,” Shaw murmured. “All right, you get me four men who are cleared for it—men who can quote me the bloody Official Secrets Act—and get them here fast. Arrange air transport to West Berlin straightaway. I want those lads airborne as soon as I’ve briefed them.”
“Yes, sir.”
After an almost interminable silence, Shaw said, “There is a ship, Wilson. I want you to locate her for me.”
“A ship, sir?”
“Yes. A freighter, actually. MV Casilda, out of Panama. Get on to Lloyd’s, or whoever keeps up with those things. Talk to the satellite people if you have to, just find out where she is.”
Perplexed, the deputy director said, “All right, sir,” and turned to go. At the door he paused. “Sir Neville,” he said hesitantly. “Is there anything I should know about this Hess business? A small brief, perhaps?”
Shaw’s face reddened. “If there was, you’d know it already, wouldn’t you?” he snapped.
Wilson displayed his irritation by clipping out a regimental “Sir!” before shutting the door.
Shaw didn’t even notice. He walked to his well-earned window above the city and pondered the disturbing news. Spandau, he thought bitterly. Hess may stab us in the back yet. In spite of the ticklishness of his own position, Sir Neville Shaw smiled coldly. There’ll be some royal arses shaking in their beds tonight, he thought with satisfaction. Right along with mine.
He reached for the telephone.
6:25P.M.#30 Lützenstrasse, West Berlin
Hans reached the apartment building too winded to use the stairs. He wriggled into the elevator, yanked the lever that set the clattering cage in motion, then slumped against the wrought-iron grillwork. Despite his frayed nerves, he was smiling. Heini Weber could joke all he wanted, but in the end the joke would be on him. Because Hans knew something Weber didn’t: where he had found the papers. And that single fact would make him rich, he was certain of it. He jerked back the metal grille and trotted to the apartment door.
“Ilse!” he called, letting himself in. “I’m home!”
In the kitchen doorway he stopped cold. Wearing a white cotton robe, Ilse sat at the table holding the papers Hans had found at Spandau.
“Where did these come from?” she asked coolly.
Hans searched for words. This was not the way he’d planned to explain the papers.
“Your night duty was at Spandau Prison, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but Liebchen, give me a chance to explain. It was a secret detail. That’s why I couldn’t call you.”
She studied him silently. “You haven’t told anyone about this, have you?”
Hans remembered his conversation with Heini Weber, but decided that would be best kept private for now. “No,” he lied, “I didn’t have time to say anything to anyone.”
“Hans, you’ve got to turn these papers in.”
“I know.”
She nodded slowly. “Then why am I so worried about you?”
He took a deep breath, exhaled. “We have a chance here, Ilse. If you looked at those papers, you know that as well as I do. Finding those papers … it’s like winning the lottery or something. Do you realize what they might be worth?”
Ilse closed her eyes. “Hans, what is going on? You could lose your job for this.”
“I’m not going to lose my job. So I found some old papers. What was I supposed to do?”
“Turn them in to the proper authorities.”
“The proper authorities?” Hans snorted. “And who are the proper authorities? The Americans? The British? The French? This is Berlin, Ilse. Every person, every company, every nation here is looking after its own interests—nobody else’s. Why shouldn’t I look after ours for once?”
Ilse rubbed her throbbing temples with her fingertips.
“Liebchen,” Hans insisted, “no one even knows these papers exist. If you’d just listen for five minutes—if you heard how I found them—you’d see that they’re a godsend.”
She sighed hopelessly. “All right, tell me.”
Four floors below the apartment, in the cold wind of the Lützenstrasse, Jonas Stern accepted a thick stack of files from a young man wearing a West Berlin police uniform.
“Thank you, Baum,” he said. “This is everyone?”
“Everyone from the Spandau patrol, yes sir. I couldn’t get the file on the prefect. It’s classified.”
Stern sighed. “I think we know enough about dear Herr Funk, don’t we?”
Shivering from the wind, the young policeman nodded and looked up at the suntanned old man with something near to awe in his eyes.
“You’ve done well, Baum.” Stern flipped through the computer printouts. He stopped at Apfel, Hans but saw little of interest. Hauer, Dieter, however, told a different story. Stern read softly to himself:
“Attached to Federal Border Police 1959. Promoted sergeant 1964, captain in 1969. Sharpshooter qualification 1963. National Match Champion 1965, ’66 … Decorated for conspicuous bravery in ’64, ’66, ’70 and ’74. All kidnapping cases. Transferred with rank to the West Berlin civil police January 1, 1973. Hmm,” Stern mused. “I’d say that’s a demotion.” He picked up further down. “Sharpshooting coach and hostage recovery adviser to GSG-9 since 1973—”Stern paused again, memorizing silently. Credentials like those made Dieter Hauer a match for any man. Stern read on. “Member of International Fraternal Order of Police since 1960 … Ah,” he said suddenly, “Member of Der Bruderschaft since 1986. Now we learn something.”
The Israeli looked up, surprised to see his young informant still standing there. “Something else, Baum?”
“Oh—no, sir.”
Stern smiled appreciatively. “You’d better get back to your post. Try to monitor what’s going on in Abschnitt 53 if you can.”
“Yes, sir. Shalom.”
“Shalom.”
Stern cradled the files under his arm and stepped back into the apartment building. He reclaimed his broom and dustpan, then started noisily back up to the fourth floor. This role of custodian isn’t half-bad, he thought. He had certainly known much worse.
Ilse’s eyes flickered like camera lenses; they always did when she was deep in thought. Hans had ended his account of the night at Spandau with Captain Hauer’s facing down the furious Russian commander. Now he sat opposite Ilse at the kitchen table, staring down at the Spandau papers.
“Your father,” she said softly. “Why did he pick last night to try to talk to you, I wonder?”
Hans looked impatient. “Coincidence … what does it matter? What matters right now is the papers.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“I read what I could,” he said breathlessly. “But most of it’s written in some strange language. It’s like …”
“Latin,” she finished. “It’s Latin.”
“You can read it?”
“A little.”
“What does it say?”
Ilse’s lips tightened. “Hans, have you told anyone about these papers? Anyone at all?”
“I told you I didn’t,” he insisted, compounding the lie.
Ilse twisted two strands of hair into a rope. “The papers are about Rudolf Hess,” she said finally.
“I knew it! What do they say?”
“Hans, Latin isn’t exactly my specialty, okay? It’s been years since I read any.” She looked down at her notes. “The papers mention Hess’s name frequently, and some others—Heydrich, for instance—and something called the SD. They were signed by Prisoner Number Seven. You saw that?”
Hans nodded eagerly.
“The odd thing is that Prisoner Number Seven was Rudolf Hess, yet these papers seem to be talking about Hess as if he were another person.” She pushed her notes away. “I’ve probably got it all wrong. The writer describes a flight to Britain, but mentions a stop somewhere in Denmark. It’s crazy. There seem to be two men in the plane, not one. And I do know one thing for certain—Rudolf Hess flew to Britain alone.”
Hans blinked. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that the man who died in Spandau Prison might not have been Rudolf Hess?”
“No, I’m saying that the papers say that. I think. But I don’t believe it for a minute.”
“Why not?”
Ilse got up, went to a cupboard, and removed a beer, which she placed on the counter but did not open. “Think about it, Hans. For weeks the newspapers have run wild with speculation about Prisoner Number Seven. Was he murdered? Why did he really fly to Britain? Was he really Hess at all? Now you find some papers that seem to indicate that the prisoner wasn’t Hess, just as some of the newspapers have been speculating?” She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “It’s too convenient. This has to be some kind of press stunt or something.”
“My God,” he said, coming to his feet. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter if the papers are real or not. The fact that I found them in Spandau is enough. They could be worth millions of marks!”
Ilse sat down carefully and looked up at Hans. When she spoke her voice was grave. “Hans, listen to me. I understand why you didn’t turn in the papers immediately. But now is the time for clear thinking. If these papers are fakes, they’re worthless and they can only get us into trouble. And if they are genuine …” She trailed off, glanced up at the clock on the kitchen wall. “Hans, I think we should call my grandfather,” she said suddenly. “I could only read part of this … diary, I guess you’d call it, but Opa will be able to read it all. He’ll know what we should do.” She pushed her chair away from the table.
“Wait!” Hans cried. “What business is this of his?”
Ilse reached out and hooked her fingers in Hans’s trouser pocket. “Hans, I love you,” she said gently. “I love you, but this thing is too deep for us. I heard some of the news bulletins at work today. The Russians have gone crazy over this Spandau incident. Imagine what they might think about these papers. We need some good advice, and Opa can give it to us.”
Hans felt a hot prickle of resentment. The last thing he wanted was Ilse’s arrogant grandfather strutting around and telling him what to do. “We’re not calling the professor,” he said flatly.
Ilse started to snap back, but she checked herself. “All right,” she said. “If you won’t call Opa, then call your father.”
Hans drew back as if struck physically. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“For God’s sake, Hans. Three years without more than a nod to the man. Can’t you admit that he’s in a position to help you? To help us? He obviously wants to—”
“Three years! He went twenty years without talking to me!”
There was a long silence. “I’m sorry,” Ilse said finally. “I shouldn’t have said that. But you’re not acting like yourself.”
“And what’s so wrong with that? Liebchen, people get a chance like this once in their lives, if they’re lucky. I found these papers, I didn’t steal them. The man they belonged to is dead. They’re ours now. Imagine … all the things you’ve ever wanted. All the things I could never afford to buy you. Your friends from work are always flaunting their fine houses, their clothes, the best of everything. You never complain, but I know you miss those things. You grew up with them. And now you can have them again.”
“But I don’t care about those things,” Ilse countered. “You know that. You know what’s important to me.”
“That’s what I’m talking about! Children aren’t cheap, you know. When you finally get pregnant, we’ll need all the money we can get.” He snatched up one of the Spandau pages. “And it’s right here in our hands!”
For the first time since finding the papers, Ilse remembered the baby. She had been so happy this afternoon, so ready to celebrate their blessing. She’d wanted everything to be perfect. But now …
“Hans,” she said solemnly, “I wasn’t being honest, okay? I probably would prefer driving to work in a Mercedes rather than riding the U-Bahn.” Suddenly Ilse laughed, flirting momentarily with the idea of easy money. “I wouldn’t turn down a new wardrobe or a mansion in Zehlendorf, either. But if these papers are real, Hans, they are not our ticket to getting those things. Finding these papers isn’t like finding a lottery ticket. If they are genuine, they are a legacy of the Nazis. Of war criminals. How many times have we talked about the Hitler madness? Even almost fifty years after the war, it’s like an invisible weight dragging us backward. When I spent that semester in New York, I made some friends, but I also saw the looks some people gave me—Jews maybe, I don’t know—wondering about the blond German girl. ‘Does she think she’s better than we are? Racially superior?’ Hans, our whole generation has paid the price for something we had nothing to do with. Do you want to profit from that?”
Hans looked down at the papers on the table. Suddenly they looked very different than they had before. In a span of seconds their spell had been broken. Ilse’s laugh had done it, he realized, not her impassioned speech. Her musical, self-mocking laugh. He gathered up the loose sheets and stacked them at the center of the table. “I’ll turn them in tonight,” he promised. “I’ll take them downtown right after supper. Good enough?”
Ilse smiled. “Good enough.” She stood slowly and pulled Hans to her. He could feel the swell of her breasts through the cotton robe. She laughed softly. “You see? Doing the right thing sometimes has its rewards.” She stood on tiptoe and nuzzled into his neck, at the same time pressing her bare thigh into his groin. Hans laughed into her hair. He wanted her, and his want was obvious, but he sensed something more than desire behind her sudden affection. “What are you up to?” he asked, pulling away a little. Ilse’s eyes glowed with happiness. “I’ve got a secret too,” she said. She reached up and touched her forefinger to his lips—then the telephone rang.
With a curious glance, Hans tugged playfully at her robe and walked into the living room. “Hans Apfel,” he said into the phone. He looked back toward the kitchen. Standing in the doorway, Ilse opened her robe with a teasing smile. He forced himself to look away. “Yes, Sergeant Apfel. Yes, I was at Spandau last night. Right, I’ve seen the television. What? What kind of questions?” Sensing Ilse behind him, he motioned for her to keep quiet. “I see. Formalities, sure.” His face darkened. “You mean now? What’s the hurry? Is everyone to be there? What do you mean, you can’t say? Who is this?” Hans’s jaw tightened. “Yes, sir. Yes, I do realize that, sir. Don’t worry, I’ll be there. I’m leaving now.” Slightly dazed, he returned the phone to its cradle and turned around.
Ilse had retied her robe. “What is it?” she asked, her eyes troubled.
“I’m not sure.” He looked at his watch. “That was the prefect’s aide on the phone, a Lieutenant Luhr. He said the Russians are still in the station. They’re making some kind of trouble, and the prefect wants to satisfy them before the Allied commandants get too involved. He wants to ask everyone from the Spandau detail some questions.”
Ilse felt a tremor in her chest. “What do you think?”
He swallowed hard. “I think I don’t feel so good about that call.” He slipped into the bedroom to change into a fresh uniform.
“Are you going to take the papers with you?”
“Not with the Russians still there,” he called. “I’ll pull somebody aside when I get a chance and explain what happened. Maybe even the prefect.”
“Hans, don’t be angry with me,” she said. “But I really think you should talk to your father first. He’d cover for you on this, I know he would.”
“Just let me handle it, okay?” Hans realized he had spoken much louder than he’d meant to. He buttoned up the jacket of a freshly pressed uniform and went back into the living room. He was reaching for his gloves when the telephone rang again.
Ilse practically pounced on it. “Who is this, please? What? Just a moment.” She covered the mouthpiece with her palm. “It’s someone named Heini Weber. He says he’s a reporter for Der Spiegel.”
Hans moved toward the phone, then stopped. “I’m not here,” he whispered.
Ilse listened for a few moments, then hung up. Her eyes showed puzzlement and fear. “He said to tell you he made a mistake before,” she said slowly. “He wants to meet you as soon as possible. He … he said money’s no object.” Little crimson moons appeared high on Ilse’s cheeks. “Hans?” she said uncertainly. “He knows, doesn’t he?”
She stepped forward hesitantly, her face flushed with fear and anger. She tried to summon harsh words, but her anger faltered. “Hans, take the papers with you,” she said. “The sooner we’re rid of them, the better.”
He shook his head. “If I let the Russians get those papers, I really could lose my job.”
“You could slip them under somebody’s door. Nobody would ever have to know they came from you.”
He considered this. “That’s not a bad idea,” he admitted. “But not while the Russians are there. Besides, our forensic lab might still be able to link me to the papers. It’s scary what those guys can do.”
Ilse reached out, hesitated. The tendons in her neck stood out. “Hans, don’t go!” she begged. “There’s something we need to talk about.”
He kissed the top of her head. Ilse’s hair smelled of flowers, a scent he would remember for a long time. “I don’t have any choice,” he said tenderly. “Everything will be fine, I promise. We’re just jumpy because of the papers. Don’t worry. I’ll be back in an hour.” Before Ilse could say anything else, he slipped through the door and was gone.
Ilse sagged against the wood, holding back tears. Hans, I’m pregnant. The words had been right on her tongue, yet she’d been unable to force them out. The lie had done it. First Hans’s crazy idea about selling the papers—then the lie. She wanted badly to call her grandfather, yet she hesitated. He would probably take an “I told you so” attitude when Ilse admitted that Hans’s behavior had shaken even her. He had been against her marrying Hans to begin with. Ilse’s doubts made her think back to when she had first met Hans. Three years ago, at a traffic accident. An old Opel had broadsided a gleaming Jaguar right before her eyes on the Leibnizstrasse, smashing the Jaguar’s door and trapping its driver. There’d been a police patrol car behind the Opel. Two officers had jumped out to help, but as they tried to free the trapped driver, the Jaguar had burst into flame. All they could do was hold back the crowd and wait for the fire police to arrive. Suddenly a young foot patrolman had bulled his way through the crowd—right past Ilse—and dashed to the Jaguar. Shouting at the driver to get down in the seat, he drew his Walther, fired several shots through the stuck window and kicked out what was left of the glass. He dragged the stunned driver to safety only moments before the gas tank exploded.
The handsome young officer with singed eyebrows had taken Ilse’s slightly awestruck statement, then accepted her invitation to go for coffee afterward. Their romance, like the newspaper accounts of Hans’s heroism, had been brief and fiery. He was promoted to sergeant, and they were married as his splash of celebrity faded from the picture magazines.
Ilse had always believed she made a good choice, no matter what her snobby friends or her grandfather said. But this madness from Spandau was no traffic accident. Hans couldn’t summon a burst of physical courage to stop the danger she felt tightening around them now. The papers lying on her kitchen table were like a magnet drawing death toward them—she knew it. She did not believe in premonitions, but as she thought of Hans driving anxiously toward a situation he knew nothing about, her heart began to race. A wave of nausea rolled inside her. The pregnancy …? Afraid she might throw up, she hurried into the kitchen and leaned over the sink. She managed to choke down the nausea, but not her terror. With tears blurring her eyes, Ilse lifted the phone and dialed her grandfather’s apartment.
FIVE (#ulink_cf05be75-3a36-5b79-b7aa-df2f9b75fc65)
7:30P.M.Polizei Abschnitt 53
A stubborn group of reporters huddled on the sidewalk in the freezing wind, hoping for a break in the Spandau Prison story or the weather. As Hans idled his Volkswagen past the front steps of the police station, he saw klieg lights and cameras leaning against a remote-broadcast truck, evidence of how seriously the Berlin media were taking the incident. He felt a nervous thrill when he realized that even now the press was driving up the asking price of the Spandau papers for him. He accelerated past the journalists before they could get a decent look at him or the car and swung into the rear lot of the station.
The unexpected summons had taken him by surprise, but upon reflection he wasn’t really worried. It made sense for the police brass to try to defuse the crisis before the Allied commandants got too involved—if they weren’t already. Nobody liked the Four Powers poking about in German affairs, even if Berlin still technically belonged to them.
As he unlocked the rear door of the station, he spied Erhard Weiss’s red coupe parked against the wall. A good sign, Hans thought. At least he hadn’t been singled out for questioning. He flicked his cigarette onto the snow and walked inside. The back hallway was usually empty, but tonight a pinch-faced young man he didn’t know waited behind a rickety wooden table. The unlikely sentry leapt to attention when he saw Hans.
“Identify yourself!” he ordered.
“What?”
“Your identification!”
“I’m Hans Apfel. I work here. Who are you?”
The little policeman shot Hans an exasperated look and reached for a piece of paper on his desk. It was apparently a list of some sort; he ran his finger down it like a prim schoolmaster.
“Sergeant Hans Apfel?”
“That’s right.”
“Report immediately to room six for interrogation.”
Under normal circumstances Hans would have challenged the man’s authority on general principles alone. Officers from other districts—especially snotty bureaucrats like this one—were treated coolly at Abschnitt 53 until they had proved their competence. Tonight, however, Hans didn’t feel quite confident enough to push. He walked on toward the stairs without comment.
The oppressive block of interrogation rooms lay on the second floor, out of the main traffic of the station. At least they chose number six, he thought. Slightly larger than the other questioning rooms, “six” held a long table on a dais, some straight-backed chairs and, mercifully, an electric heater. Emerging from the stairwell on the second floor, Hans saw another unfamiliar policeman standing guard between rooms six and seven. A silent alarm sounded in his head, but it was too late to turn back.
Suddenly a door further down the hall burst open. Two uniformed men with heavy beards bustled Erhard Weiss out of the room and down the hall away from Hans. Weiss’s feet seemed to be dragging behind him. He turned and gave Hans a dazed look; then he was gone. Hans slowed down. Something odd was happening here.
“Interrogation?” the guard queried, noticing him.
Hans nodded warily.
“Wait in room seven.”
Hans looked for a name tag on the man’s chest but saw none. “You from Wansee?” he asked. When the man didn’t answer, he tried again. “What’s going on in there, friend?”
“Room seven,” the man repeated.
“Seven,” Hans echoed softly. “All right, then.”
Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the door. There was only one man inside the smoky room—Kurt Steger, one of the four recruits from the Spandau assignment. Kurt jumped to his feet like a nervous puppy when he saw Hans.
“Thank God!” he cried. “What’s going on, Hans?”
Hans shook his head. “I’ve no idea. It looks like the whole place has been taken over by strangers. What have you seen?”
“Nichts, almost nothing. We started in here together—all of us from Spandau except you. One by one they call us into room six. Nobody comes back.”
Hans frowned. “They were practically dragging Weiss down the hall when I walked up. It didn’t look right at all.” He hated to ask the next question, but he needed the information. “Have you seen Captain Hauer, Kurt?”
“No. I think the prefect’s handling this.”
Hans considered this in silence.
“I haven’t been on the force very long,” said Kurt, “but I get the feeling Captain Hauer and the prefect aren’t too fond of each other.”
Hans nodded thoughtfully. “To say the least. They’ve been at each other’s throats since Funk took over eight years ago.”
“What’s the problem?”
“The problem is that Funk is an ass-kissing bureaucrat with no real police experience, and Hauer reminds him of it every chance he gets.”
“Can’t the prefect fire whoever he wants?”
“Firing Hauer isn’t worth the controversy it would start.” Hans felt himself coloring as he went to the defense of the father he had accused of terrible things in the silence of his own mind. “He’s a decorated hero, one of the best cops in the city. He also works with GSG-9, the counterterror unit. Connections like that don’t hurt. Plus he’s only got one month before retirement. Funk’s been waiting for that day a long time. Now he’s almost rid of him.”
“What a bastard.” Kurt snapped his fingers anxiously. “You got any cigarettes? We smoked all we had.”
Hans handed over his pack and matches. “Have they said who’s handling the questions?”
Kurt’s hands shook slightly as he lit up. “They haven’t said anything. We’ve tried to listen through the wall, but it’s useless. They could beat a man to death in there and you’d never hear him scream.”
“Thanks a lot. I’ll remember that while I’m in there. What about the Russians?”
Kurt cut his eyes toward the door. “Weiss said he saw the very same bastard who tried to take the prisoners from us—”
The door banged open, silencing the young recruit. A bearded man wearing captain’s bars stared back and forth between Hans and Kurt, then pointed to Hans. “You,” he growled.
“But I’ve been here for two hours,” Kurt protested.
The captain ignored him and motioned for Hans to follow.
In the hall Hans saw another young officer being led around the corner toward the elevators, his arms pinned to his sides by two large policemen. Fighting a growing sense of unreality, Hans stepped into room six.
The scene unnerved him. The sparsely furnished interrogation room had been transformed into a courtroom. A single wooden chair faced a long, raised table from which five men stared solemnly as Hans entered. At the center of the table sat Wilhelm Funk, prefect of West Berlin police. He eyed Hans with the cold detachment of a hanging judge. A young blond man wearing lieutenant’s bars hovered at Funk’s left shoulder. Hans guessed he was Lieutenant Luhr, the aide who had summoned him by telephone. To the prefect’s right sat three men wearing Soviet Army uniforms. Hans recognized one as the “sergeant” who had bullied Weiss at Spandau, but the others—both colonels—he had never seen before. And to Funk’s left, a little apart from Lieutenant Luhr, sat Captain Dieter Hauer. Dark sacs hung under his gray eyes, and he regarded Hans with a Buddhalike inscrutability.
“Setzen sie sich,” Funk ordered, then looked down at a buff file open before him.
As Hans turned to sit, he saw more men behind him. Six Berlin policemen stood in a line to the left of the door. He knew them all slightly; all were from other districts. On the right side of the door stood the Russian soldiers from the Spandau detail. Their bloodshot eyes gave the lie to their freshly shaven faces, and the mud of the prison yard still caked their boots. Hans looked slowly from face to face. When his eyes met those of the Russian who had caught him in the rubble pile, Hans looked away first. He did not see the Russian nod almost imperceptibly to the “sergeant” at the table, nor did he see the “sergeant” softly touch the sleeve of one of the colonels as Funk began his interrogation.
“You are Sergeant Hans Apfel?” the prefect asked, still looking at the file before him. “Born Munich 1960, Bundeswehr service 1978 to 1980, two-year tour Federal Border Police, attached Munich municipal force 1983, transferred Berlin 1984, promoted sergeant May of ’84?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Speak up, Sergeant.”
Hans cleared his throat. “I am.”
“Better. I want you to listen to me, Sergeant. I have convened this informal hearing to save everyone—yourself included—a great deal of unnecessary trouble. Because of the publicity surrounding this morning’s events, the Allied commandants have scheduled a formal investigation into this matter, to commence at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. I want this matter cleared up long before then. The problem is that our Soviet friends”—Funk nodded deferentially to his right—“Oberst Zotin and Oberst Kosov, claim to have uncovered something rather disturbing at Spandau today. Their forensic people say they have evidence that something was removed from the area of the cellblocks last occupied by the Nuremberg war criminals.”
Hans’s stomach rolled. For a moment the room seemed to spin wildly. It righted itself when he focused on the immobile mask of Captain Hauer.
“Of course I denied their request to question our officers directly,” Funk went on, “but for the sake of expediency I’ve agreed to act as the Soviets’ proxy. That way they can be quickly satisfied as to our lack of complicity in this matter. Thus, the whole mess is over before it really begins, you see, Sergeant? It’s really better all around.”
For the first time Hans noticed another man in the room. He had been hunched out of sight behind Hauer, but when Funk spoke again he moved.
“By the way, Sergeant,” Funk said casually, “in the interest of veracity I’ve agreed to monitor all responses by polygraph.”
Hans felt a jolt of confusion. Polygraph test results were inadmissible as evidence in a German court. The Berlin Polizei were not even permitted to use the polygraph as an investigative tool. Or almost never, anyway. Buried in the budget of the Experimental Section of the Forensics Division was a small cadre of technicians devoted to the subtle art of lie detection. They were used only in crisis situations, where lives were at stake. The only explanation Hans could come up with for the use of a polygraph tonight was that the Russians had requested it.
“We’ll be using our own man, of course,” Funk said. “Perhaps you know Heinz Schmidt?”
Hans knew of Schmidt, and what he knew made his heart race. The ferretlike little polygrapher took perverse pleasure in wringing secrets out of people—criminals or not—no matter how trivial. He even moonlighted to sate his fetish, screening employees for industrial firms. Funk’s inquisitor padded around Hauer’s corner of the table, pushing his precious polygraph before him on a wheeled cart like the head of a heretic. Ilse had been right, Hans realized. He should never have come here.
“I said is that all right with you, Sergeant?” Funk repeated testily.
Hans could see that both Hauer and Lieutenant Luhr had suddenly taken a keen interest in him. It took all his concentration to keep his facial muscles still. He cleared his throat again. “Yes, sir. No problem.”
“Good. The procedure is simple: Schmidt asks you a few calibration questions, then we get to it.” Funk sounded bored. “Hurry it up, Schmidt.”
As the polygrapher attached the electrodes to his fingers, Hans felt his earlier bravado draining away. Then came the blood-pressure cuff, fastened around his upper arm and pumped until he could feel his arterial blood throbbing against it like a tourniquet. Last came the chest bands—rubber straps stretched around his torso beneath his shirt—to monitor his respiration. Three separate sensing systems, cold and inhuman, now silently awaited the slightest signals of deception.
Hans wondered which vital sign would give him away: a trace of sweat translated into electrical resistance? His thudding heart? Or just his eyes? I must be crazy, he thought wildly. Why keep it up anyway? They’ll find me out in the end. For one mad moment he considered simply blurting out the truth. He could exonerate himself before Schmidt even asked the first stupid control question. He could—
“Are you Sergeant Hans Apfel?” Schmidt asked in a high, abrasive voice.
“I am.”
“Yes or no, please, Sergeant. Is your name Hans Apfel?”
“Yes.”
“Do you reside in West Berlin?”
“Yes.”
Hans watched Schmidt make some adjustments to his machine. The ferret’s shirt was soiled at the collar and armpits, his fingernails were long and grimy, and he smelled of ammonia. Suddenly, Schmidt pulled a red pen from his pocket and held it up for all to see.
“Is this pen red, Sergeant?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Schmidt made—or seemed to make—still more adjustments to his machine.
Nervously, Hans wondered how much Schmidt knew he knew about the polygraph test. Because Hans knew a good deal. The concept of the “lie detector” had always fascinated him. He had taken the Experimental Interrogation course at the police school at Hiltrup, and a close look at his personnel file would reveal that. As Schmidt tinkered with his machine, Hans marshaled what he remembered from the Hiltrup course. The first tenet of the polygrapher was that for test results to be accurate, the subject needed to believe the machine infallible. Polygraphers used various methods to create this illusion, but Hans knew that Schmidt favored the “card trick.” Schmidt would ask his subject to pick a playing card at random from a deck, then to lay it facedown on a table. Schmidt’s ability to name the hidden card after a few “yes or no” questions seemed to prove his polygraph infallible. Of course the subject always chose his card from a deck in which every card was identical, but he had no way of knowing that. Many skilled criminals had confessed their crimes immediately after Schmidt’s little parlor show, certain that his machine would eventually find them out.
Hans saw no deck of cards tonight. Maybe Schmidt thinks his reputation is enough to intimidate me, he thought nervously. And maybe he’s right. Already perspiring, Hans tried to think of a way to beat the little weasel’s machine. Some people had beaten the polygraph by learning to suppress their physiological stress reactions, but Hans knew he had no hope of this. The suppression technique took months to master, and right now he could barely hold himself in his chair.
He did have one hope, if he could keep a cool head: picking out the “control” questions. Most people thought questions like “Is this pen red?” were the controls. But Hans knew better. The real control questions were ones which would cause almost anyone asked them to lie. “Have you ever failed to report income on your federal tax return?” was a common control. Most people denied this almost universal crime, and by doing so provided Schmidt with their baseline “lie.” Later, when asked, “Did you cut your wife’s throat with a kitchen knife?” a guilty person’s lie would register far stronger than his baseline or “control” reference. Questions like “Is this pen red?” were asked simply to give a person’s vital signs time to return to normal between the relevant questions.
Hans knew if he could produce a strong enough emotional response to a control question, then an actual lie would appear no different to the polygraph than his faked control responses. Schmidt would be forced to declare him “innocent.” The best method to do this was to hide a thumbtack in your shoe, but Hans knew that an exaggerated response could also be triggered by holding your breath or biting your tongue. He decided to worry about method later. If he couldn’t pick out the control questions, method wouldn’t matter.
Schmidt’s voice jolted him back to reality.
“Sergeant Apfel, prior to discharging your Spandau assignment, did you communicate with any person other than the duty sergeant regarding that assignment?”
“No,” Hans replied. That was true. He hadn’t had time to discuss it with anyone.
“Is Captain Hauer a married man?”
Irrelevant question, Hans thought bitterly. To anyone except me. “No,” he answered.
Schmidt looked down at the notepad from which he chose his questions. “Have you ever stopped a friend or public official for a traffic violation and let them go without issuing a citation?”
Control question, Hans thought. Almost any cop who denied this would be lying. Keeping a straight face, he bit down on the tip of his tongue hard enough to draw blood. He felt a brief flush of perspiration pass through his skin. “No,” he said.
When Schmidt glanced up from the polygraph, Hans knew he had produced an exaggerated response. “Am I holding up two fingers?” Schmidt asked.
Irrelevant, thought Hans. “Yes,” he answered truthfully.
Schmidt came a step closer. “Sergeant Apfel, you’ve made several arrests for drug possession in the past year. Have you ever failed to turn the entire quantity of confiscated drugs over to the evidence officer?”
Control ques—Hans started to bite his tongue again; then he hesitated. If this was a control question, Schmidt had upped the stakes of the game. Giving an exaggerated response here would not be without serious consequences. Police corruption involving drugs was an epidemic problem, with accordingly severe punishment for those caught. The men at the table gave no indication that they saw this question as anything but routine, but Hans thought he detected a feral gleam in Schmidt’s eyes. The dirty little man knew his business.
“Sergeant?” Schmidt prodded.
Hans fidgeted. He did not want to appear guilty of a drug crime, but the Spandau questions still awaited. If he intended to keep the papers secret, he would have to give at least a partially exaggerated response to this question. In silent desperation he held his breath, counted to four, then answered, “No,” and exhaled slowly.
“Is your wife’s maiden name Natterman, Sergeant?”
Irrelevant. “Yes,” Hans replied.
Schmidt wiped his upper lip. “Were you the last man to arrive at the scene of the argument over custody of the trespassers at Spandau Prison?”
Relevant question. Hans glanced up at the panel. All eyes were on him now. Stay calm … “I don’t remember,” he said. “Things were so confused then. I really didn’t notice.”
“Yes or no, Sergeant!”
“I suppose I could have been.”
Exasperated, Schmidt looked to Funk for guidance. The prefect fixed Hans with his imperious stare. “Sergeant,” he said curtly, “one of your fellow officers told us you were the last man there. Would you care to answer the question again?”
“I’m sorry,” Hans said sheepishly, “I just don’t remember.” He looked at the floor. The Russian soldier who had caught him in the rubble pile could call him a liar right now, he knew, but for some reason the man hadn’t spoken up. Funk appeared satisfied with Hans’s answer, and told Schmidt to move along. There can’t be many more questions, Hans thought. Just a little longer—
“Sergeant Apfel?” Schmidt’s voice cut like slivers of glass. “Did you remove any documents from a hollow brick in the area of the cellblocks last occupied by the Nuremberg war criminals?”
Holy Mother of God! Hans choked down a scream. Every eye in the room burned upon his face. For the first time Hauer’s steely mask cracked. His probing eyes fixed Hans motionless in his chair, stripping away the pathetic layers of deception. But it was too late to come clean.
“No,” Hans said lamely.
“Specifically,” Schmidt bored in, “did you discover, remove, see, or even hear of documents pertaining to or written by Prisoner Number Seven—Rudolf Hess?”
Hans felt cold sweat running down his spine. His heart became an enemy within his chest, thumping out the tattoo of his guilt. And there stood Schmidt, lie-hungry, watching each centimeter of paper unspool from his precious machine. Looking at him now, Hans fancied he saw a mad doctor reading an electrocardiograph, a diabolical quack watching each fateful squiggle in the hope of witnessing a fatal heart attack. Hans felt his willpower ebbing away. The truth welled up in his throat, beyond his control. Just tell the truth, urged a voice in his head, tell it all and take whatever consequences come. Then this insanity will focus elsewhere. Yet as Hans started to do just that, Schmidt said:
“Sergeant, have you ever omitted an important piece of information from a job application?”
Hans felt like a spacewalker cut loose from his tether. Schmidt had asked another control question! Hadn’t he? But why hadn’t he triumphantly proclaimed Hans’s guilt to the tribunal? Hans had expected the little demon to dance a jig and scream: Him! Him! There is the liar!
“No—no, I haven’t,” Hans stammered.
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
While Hans sat stunned, Schmidt turned to Funk and shook his head. The prefect closed the file before him, then turned to the Soviet colonels and shrugged. “Any questions?” he asked.
The Russians looked like sleeping bears. When one finally shook his head to indicate the negative, the gesture seemed the result of a massive effort. Hans even sensed the soldiers in the back of the room relaxing. Only Captain Hauer and Lieutenant Luhr remained tense. For some reason it struck Hans just then that Jürgen Luhr was the kind of German who made Jews nervous. He was a racial type—the proto-Germanic man, tall and broad-shouldered, thin-lipped and square-headed—a mythical Aryan fiend passed down in whispered tales from mother to daughter and father to son.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Sergeant,” Funk said wearily. “We’ll contact you if we need any further details.” Then over Hans’s shoulder, “Bring in the last officer.”
Hans floundered. They had drawn him into the trap, yet failed to pounce for the kill. “Am I free to go?” he asked uncertainly.
“Unless you wish to stay with us all night,” Funk snapped.
“Excuse me, Prefect,” Lieutenant Luhr cut in. All eyes turned to him. “I’d like to ask the sergeant a question.”
Funk nodded.
“Tell me, Sergeant, did you notice Officer Weiss acting in a suspicious manner at any time during the Spandau assignment?”
Hans shook his head, remembering Weiss being dragged down the hall. “No, sir. No, I didn’t.”
Luhr smiled with understanding, but he had the watchful eyes of a police dog. “Officer Weiss is a Jew, isn’t he, Sergeant?”
One of the Russian colonels stirred, but his comrade laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“I believe that’s right,” Hans said tentatively. “Yes, he’s Jewish.”
Luhr gave a curt nod of the head, as if this new fact somehow explained everything.
“You may go, Sergeant,” Funk said.
Hans stood. They were telling him to go, yet he sensed that some unspoken understanding had passed between the men in the room. It was as if several decisions had been taken at once in some language unknown to him. He turned toward the soldiers and police at the back of the room and shuffled toward the door. No one moved to stop him. Why hadn’t Schmidt called him a liar? Why hadn’t the Russian who’d caught him searching called him a liar? And why did he feel compelled to keep lying, anyway?
Because of the Russians, he realized. If the prefect—or even Hauer—had only questioned him alone, he could have told them. Just as Ilse wanted him to. He would have told them …
A burly policeman held open the door. Hans walked through, hearing Funk’s tired voice resume behind him. He quickened his pace. He wanted to get out of the building as soon as possible. He entered the stairwell at a near trot, but slowed when he saw two beefy patrolmen ascending from the first floor. Nodding a perfunctory greeting, he slipped between the two men—
Then they took him.
Hans had no chance at all. The men used no weapons because they needed none. His arms were immobilized as if by steel bands; then the men reversed direction and began dragging him down the stairs.
“What is this!” Hans shouted. “I’m a police officer! Let me go!”
One of the men chuckled quietly. They reached the bottom of the stairs and turned down a disused hallway, a repository of ancient files and broken furniture. When the initial shock and disorientation wore off, Hans realized that he had to fight back somehow. But how? In the darkest part of the corridor he suddenly let his body go limp, appearing to lose his will to resist.
“Scheisse!” one man cursed. “Dead weight.”
“He soon will be,” commented his partner.
Dead weight? With speed born of desperation Hans fired his elbow into a rib cage. He heard bone crack.
“Arrghh!” The man let go.
With his free hand Hans pummeled the other attacker’s head, aiming for his temple. The policeman held him fast.
“You bastard …” from the darkness.
Hans kept pounding the man’s skull. The grip on his arm was loosening—
An explosion that seemed to detonate behind his right eye paralyzed him.
Darkness.
Less than sixty feet away from Hans, Colonels Ivan Kosov and Grigori Zotin stood outside an idling East German transit bus in the central parking lot of the police station. Inside the bus, the Soviet soldiers from the Spandau patrol waited for their long-delayed return to East Berlin. Most were already fast asleep.
Zotin, a GRU colonel, did not particularly like Kosov, and he was deeply offended at the KGB colonel’s effrontery in donning the uniform of the Red Army. But what could he do? One couldn’t keep the KGB out of something this big, especially when higher powers wanted Kosov involved. Rubbing his hands together against the cold, Zotin tested the KGB man’s perception.
“Can you believe it, Ivan? They gave them all clean reports.”
“Of course,” Kosov growled. “What did you expect?”
“But one of them was certainly lying!”
“Certainly.”
“But how did they fake the polygraph readouts?”
Kosov looked bored. “We were six meters from the machine. They could have shown us anything.”
Grigori Zotin knew exactly which policeman had lied, but he wanted to keep the information from Kosov long enough to initiate inquiries of his own. He was aware of the Kremlin’s interest in the Hess case, and he knew his career could take a giant leap forward if he cracked it. He made a mental note to decorate the young GRU officer who had caught the German policeman searching and showed enough sense to tell only his immediate superior. “You’re right, of course,” Zotin agreed.
Kosov grunted.
“What, exactly, do you think was discovered? A journal perhaps? Do you think they found some proof of—”
“They found a hollow brick,” Kosov snapped. “Our forensic technicians say their tests indicate the brick held some type of paper for an unknown period of time. It could have been some kind of journal. It could also have been pages from a pornographic magazine. It could have been toilet paper! Never trust experts too much, Zotin.”
The GRU colonel sucked his teeth nervously. “Don’t you think we should have at least mentioned Zinoviev during the interrogation? We could have—”
“Idiot!” Kosov bellowed. “That name isn’t to be mentioned outside KGB! How do you even know it?”
Zotin stepped back defensively. “One hears things in Moscow.”
“Things that could get you a bullet in the neck,” Kosov warned.
Zotin tried to look unworried. “I suppose we should tell the general to turn up the pressure at the commandants’ meeting tomorrow.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffed Kosov. “Too little, too late.”
“What about the trespassers, then? Why are you letting the Germans keep them?”
“Because they don’t know anything.”
“What do you suggest we do, then?” Zotin ventured warily.
Kosov snorted. “Are you serious? It was the second to last man—Apfel. He was lying through his Bosche teeth. Those idiots did exactly what we wanted. If they’d admitted Apfel was lying, he’d be in a jail cell now, beyond our reach. As it is, he’s at our mercy. The fool is bound to return home, and when he does”—Kosov smiled coldly—“I’ll have a team waiting for him.”
Zotin was aghast. “But how—?” He stifled his imprudent outburst with a cough. “How can you get a team over soon enough?” he covered.
“I have two teams here now,” Kosov snapped. “Get me to a damned telephone!”
Startled, the GRU colonel clambered aboard the bus and found a seat.
“And Zotin?” Kosov said, leaning over his rival.
“Yes?”
“Keep nothing from me again. It could be very dangerous for you.”
Zotin blanched.
“I want everything there is on this man Apfel. Everything. I suggest you ride your staff very hard on this. Powerful eyes are watching us.”
“How will you approach this policeman?”
“Approach him?” Kosov cracked a wolfish smile. “Break him, you mean. By morning I’ll know how many times that poor bastard peeked up his mother’s skirts.”
Hans awoke in a cell. There was no window. He’d been thrown onto a stack of damp cardboard boxes. One pale ray of light filtered down from somewhere high above. When he had focused his eyes, he sat up and gripped one of the steel bars. His face felt sticky. He put his fingers to his temple. Blood. The familiar slickness brought back the earlier events in a throbbing rush of confusion. The interrogation … his father’s stony silence … the struggle in the hallway. Where was he?
He tried to rise, but he collapsed into a narrow space between two boxes. Rotting cardboard covered almost the entire concrete floor. A cell full of boxes? Puzzled, Hans reached into one and pulled out a damp folder. He held it in the shaft of light. Traffic accident report, he thought. Typed on the standard police form. He found the date—1973. Flipping through the yellow sheaf of papers, he saw they were all the same, all traffic accident reports from 1973. He checked the station listed on several forms: Abschnitt 53 every case. Suddenly he realized where he was.
In the early 1970s, Abschnitt 53 had been partially renovated during a citywide wave of reform that lasted about eighteen months. There had been enough money to refurbish the reception area and overhaul the main cellblock, but the third floor, the basement, and the rear of the building went largely untouched. Hans was sure he’d been locked in the basement.
But why? No one had accused him of anything. Not openly, at least. Who were the policemen who had attacked him? Funk’s men? Were they even police officers at all? They had said he would soon be dead weight. It was crazy. Maybe they were protecting him from the Russians. Maybe this was the only way the prefect could keep him safe from them. That’s it! he thought with relief. It has to be.
A door slammed somewhere in the darkness above. Someone was coming—several people by the sound—and making no effort to hide it. Hans heard clattering and cursing on the stairs; then he saw who was making the noise. Outlined in the fluorescent light streaming down from the basement door, two husky uniformed men were wrestling a gurney off the stairs. Slowly they cleared a path to the cell through the heaps of junk covering the basement floor. Hans closed his eyes and lay motionless on the boxes where he’d been thrown.
“Looks like he’s still out,” said one man.
“I hope I killed the son of a bitch,” growled the other.
“That wouldn’t go over too well upstairs, Rolf.”
“Who gives a shit? The bastard broke my ribs.”
Hans heard a low chuckle. “Be more careful the next time. Come on, we’ve got to clear a space in there for this thing.”
“Fuck it. Just throw this filthy Jew in on top of that one. Not much left of him, anyway.”
“Apfel isn’t a Jew.”
“Jew-lover, then.”
“The doctor said leave this one on the gurney.”
“Make him clear a space,” said Rolf, pointing in at Hans.
“Sure. If you can wake him up.”
Rolf picked up a rusted joint of pipe from the floor and rankled the bars with it. “Wake up, asshole!”
Hans ignored him.
“Get up or we’ll kill you.”
Hans heard the metallic click of a pistol slide being jerked back. Christ … Slowly he rose to his feet.
“See,” said Rolf, “he’s not dead. Clear out a space in there, you. And be quick about it.”
Hans tried to see who lay on the gurney, but Rolf smashed the pipe against the bars near his face. It took him forty seconds to clear a space wide enough to accept the gurney.
“Get back against the wall,” Rolf ordered. “Go on!”
Hans watched the strange policemen roll the man on the gurney feet-first into the cleared space, then slam the door behind him.
“You stay away from this Jew-boy, Sergeant,” Rolf warned. “Anything happens to him, it’s on your head.”
The pair hurried up the stairs, taking the shaft of light with them. Hans couldn’t make out the face of his new cellmate. He felt in his pocket for a match, then remembered he’d given them to Kurt in the waiting room upstairs. He put his hands on the unconscious man’s shoulders and stared downward, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the blackness, but they didn’t. Moving his hand tentatively, he felt something familiar. Shoulder patches. Surprised and a little afraid, Hans felt his way across the man’s chest like a blind man. Brass buttons … patch … collar pins … Hans felt his left hand brush an empty leather holster. A police officer! Shutting his eyes tight, he put his right hand on the man’s face and waited. When he opened his eyes again, he could just make out the lines of the face.
My God, he thought, feeling a lump in his throat. Weiss! Erhard Weiss! For the second time tonight Hans felt cut loose from reality. Gripping his friend’s body like a life raft, he began trying to revive him. He spoke into Weiss’s ear, but heard no answer. He slapped the slack face hard several times. No response. Groping around in desperation, Hans crashed into the back wall of the cell. His palms touched something moist and cold. Foundation stones. Condensation. Rubbing his hands across the stones until they were sufficiently wet, he returned to Weiss and laved the cool liquid over his forehead. Still Weiss lay silent.
Alarmed, Hans pressed both forefingers against Weiss’s carotid arteries. He felt pulse beats, but very faint and unbelievably far apart. Weiss was alive, but just. The jailers had mentioned a doctor, Hans remembered. What kind of doctor would send a man to a cell in this condition? The obscenity of the situation drove him into a rage as he stood by the cadaverous body of his friend. Someone would answer for this outrage! Lurching to the front of the cell, Hans began screaming at the top of his lungs. He screamed until he had no voice left, but no one came. Slipping to the floor in exhaustion, he realized that the stacks of boxes in the basement must be deadening the sound of his voice. He doubted anyone upstairs had heard even a whimper.
Suddenly Hans bolted to his feet in terror. Someone had screamed! It took him a moment to realize that the scream had come from inside the cell. He shivered as it came again, an animal shriek of agony and terror. Erhard Weiss—who had lain like a corpse through all Hans’s attempts to revive him—now fought the straps that held him as if the gurney were on fire. As Hans tried to restrain the convulsing body, the screaming suddenly ceased. It was as if a great stone had been set upon Weiss’s chest. The young policeman’s right arm shot up and gripped Hans’s shoulder like a claw, quivered desperately, then, after a long moment, relaxed.
Hans checked for a pulse. Nothing. He hadn’t expected one. Erhard Weiss was dead. Hans had seen this death before—a heart attack, almost certainly. He had seen several similar cases during the last few years—young, apparently healthy men whose hearts had suddenly stopped, exploded, or fibrillated wildly and fatally out of control. In each case there had been a common factor—drugs. Cocaine usually, but other narcotics too. This case appeared no different. Except that Weiss never used drugs. He was a fitness enthusiast, a swimmer. On several occasions he and his fiancée had dined with Hans and Ilse at a restaurant, Hans remembered, and once in their apartment. In their home. And now Weiss was dead. Dead. The young man who had argued so tenaciously to keep two fellow Berliners—strangers, at that—out of the clutches of the Russians.
In one anguished second Hans’s exhaustion left him. He sprang to the front of the cell and stuck his arm through the bars, frantically searching the floor with his right hand. There—the iron pipe Rolf had brandished! Steadily Hans began pounding the pipe against the steel bars. The shock of the blows rattled his entire body, but he ignored the pain. He would hammer the bars until they came for Weiss—until they came for his friend or he dropped dead. At that moment he did not care.
SIX (#ulink_ff709ac0-9f81-59a0-a605-56c429af14b5)
8:12P.M.#30 Lützenstrasse, British Sector: West Berlin
Seated at the kitchen table in apartment 40, Professor Emeritus of History Georg Natterman hunched over the Spandau papers like a gnome over a treasure map. His thick reading glasses shone like silver pools in the lamplight as he ran his hand through his thinning hair and silver beard.
“What is it, Opa?” Ilse asked. “Is it dangerous?”
“Patience, child,” the professor mumbled without looking up.
Knowing that further questions were useless until her grandfather was ready to speak, she opened a cupboard and began preparing tea. Perhaps Hans would get back in time to have some, she hoped; he’d been gone too long already. Ilse had told her grandfather as little as possible on the telephone, and by doing so she had failed to communicate the depth of her anxiety. Professor Natterman lived only twelve blocks away, but it had taken him over an hour to arrive. He understood the gravity of the situation now. He hadn’t spoken a word since first seeing the Spandau papers and brusquely questioning Ilse as to how they came into her possession. As she poured the tea, he stood suddenly, pulled off his reading glasses, and locked the nine pages into his ancient briefcase.
“My dear,” he said, “this is simply unbelievable. That this … this document should have come into my hands after all these years. It’s a miracle.” He wiped his spectacles with a handkerchief. “You were quite right to call me. ‘Dangerous’ does not even begin to describe this find.”
“But what is it, Opa? What is it really?”
Natterman shook his head. “In terms of World War Two history, it’s the Rosetta stone.”
Ilse’s eyes widened. “What? Are you saying that the papers are real?”
“Given what I’ve seen so far, I would have to say yes.”
Ilse looked incredulous. “What did you mean, the papers are like the Rosetta stone?”
“I mean,” Natterman sniffed, “that they are likely to change profoundly the way we view the world.” He squinted his eyes, and a road map of lines crinkled his forehead. “How much do you know about Rudolf Hess, Ilse?”
She shrugged. “I’ve read the recent newspaper stories. I looked him up in your book, but you hardly even mentioned his flight.”
The professor glanced over to the countertop, where a copy of his acclaimed Germany: From Bismarck to the Bunker lay open. “I didn’t feel the facts were complete,” he explained, “so I omitted that part of the story altogether.”
“Was I right about the papers? Do they claim that Prisoner Number Seven was not really Hess?”
“Oh, yes, yes indeed. Very little doubt about that now. It looks as though the newspapers have got it right for once. The wrong man in prison for nearly fifty years … very embarrassing for a lot of people.”
Ilse watched her grandfather for any hint of a smile, but she saw none. “You’re joking with me, aren’t you? How could that even be possible?”
“Oh, it’s quite possible. The use of look-alikes was standard procedure during the war, on both sides. Patton had one. Erwin Rommel also. Field Marshal Montgomery used an actor who could even imitate his voice to perfection. That’s the easiest part of this story to accept.”
Ilse looked skeptical. “Maybe during the war,” she conceded. “From a distance. But what about the years in Spandau? What about Hess’s family?”
Natterman smiled impishly. “What about them? Prisoner Number Seven refused to see Hess’s wife and son for the first twenty-eight years of his captivity.” He savored Ilse’s perplexed expression. “The factual discrepancies go on and on. Hess was a fastidious vegetarian, Prisoner Number Seven devoured meat like a tiger. Number Seven failed to recognize Hess’s secretaries at Nuremberg. He twice gave the British wrong birth dates for Hess, and he missed by two years. And on and on ad nauseam.”
Ilse sat quietly, trying to take it all in. Beneath her thoughts, her anxiety for Hans buzzed like a low-grade fever.
“Why don’t I let Number Seven speak for himself?” Natterman suggested. “Would you like to hear my translation?”
Ilse forced herself not to look at the kitchen clock. He’s all right, she told herself. Just wait a little longer. “Yes, please,” she said.
Putting his reading glasses back on, the professor opened his briefcase, cleared his throat, and began to read in the resonant tones of the born teacher:
I, Prisoner Number Seven, write this testament in the language of the Caesars for one reason: I know with certainty that Rudolf Hess could not do so. I learned Latin and Greek at university in Munich from 1920 to 1923, but I learned that Hess did not know Latin at the most exclusive “school” in the world—Reinhard Heydrich’s Institute for Practical Deception—in 1936. At this “institute”—an isolated barracks compound outside Dessau—I also learned every other known fact about Hess: his childhood; military service; Party record; relationship with the Führer; and, most importantly, his personal idiosyncrasies. Ironically, one of the first facts I learned was that Hess had attended university in Munich at the same time I had, though I do not remember meeting him.
I did not serve as a pilot in the First World War, but I joined one of Hermann Göring’s “flying clubs” between the wars. It was during an aerial demonstration in 1935 that the Reichsmarschall first noticed my remarkable resemblance to Deputy-Führer Hess. At the time I did not make much of the encounter—comrades had often remarked on this resemblance—but seven months later I was visited at the factory where I worked by two officers of Heydrich’s SD. They requested me to accompany them on a mission of special importance to the Reich. From Munich I was flown to the “Practical School” building outside Dessau. I never saw my wife and daughter again.
During the first week at the school I was completely isolated from my fellow students. I received my “orientation” from Standartenführer Ritter Graf, headmaster of the Institute. He informed me that I had been selected to fulfill a mission of the highest importance to the Führer. My period of training—which would be lengthy and arduous, he said—was to be carried out in total secrecy. I soon learned that this meant total separation from my family. To alleviate the stress of this separation, Graf showed me proof that my salary from the factory had been doubled, and that the money was being forwarded to my wife.
After one week I met the other students. I cannot express the shock I felt. In one room in one night I saw the faces of not only famous Party Gauleiters and Wehrmacht generals, but also the most celebrated personalities of the Reich. At last I knew what my mission was. Hermann Göring had not forgotten my resemblance to Rudolf Hess; it was Göring who had given my name to Reinhard Heydrich, the SD commander responsible for the program.
There were many students at the Institute. Some completed the program, others did not. The unlucky ones paid for their failure in blood. We were constantly reminded of this “incentive.” One of the most common causes for “dismissal” from the school was the use of one’s real name. Two slip-ups were forgiven. The third guaranteed erschiessen (execution). We were known by our “role” names, or, in situations where these were not practical, by our former ranks—in my case Hauptmann.
I trained in an elite group. There were eight of us: “Hitler” (3 “students” studied him); “Göring”; “Himmler”; “Goebbels”; “Streicher”; and myself—“Hess.” The training for our group lasted one year. During that year I had four personal interviews with Deputy-Führer Hess. The rest of my training was accomplished through study of newsreels and written records. During our training, several of the “doubles” for the Party Gauleiters left the school to begin their duties. Apparently their roles did not require so much preparation as ours.
At the end of the training period my group was broken up and sent to various locations to await duty. I was sent first to Gronau, where I was kept in isolation, then later to a remote airfield at Aalborg, Denmark. I repeatedly requested to be allowed to see my wife and daughter, but by this time Germany was at war and my requests were summarily rejected. I spent my time in solitude, reviewing my Hess materials and occasionally being visited by an SD officer. I did have access to newspapers, and from them I deduced that Hess’s position in the Nazi hierarchy seemed to have declined somewhat in favor of the generals since the outbreak of war. I took this to be the reason I had not yet been assigned a mission.
I must admit that, in spite of the hardship of the duty, I was very proud of the degree to which I could impersonate the Deputy Führer. During my final interview with Hess at the school, he was so shocked by my proficiency that his reaction verged on disorientation. Actually, a few of the other “students” had honed their skills to a finer edge than my own, but what happened to them I have no idea …
Natterman removed his spectacles, put the papers back into his briefcase, then closed and locked it. “A rather detailed story to be made up out of thin air, wouldn’t you say? And that’s only the first two pages.”
Ilse was smiling with satisfaction. “Very detailed,” she agreed. “So detailed that it destroys your earlier argument. If this ‘double’ was so meticulously trained to imitate Hess, he certainly wouldn’t make factual mistakes as obvious as missing Hess’s birthday, or eating meat when Hess was a vegetarian. Would he?”
Natterman met his granddaughter’s triumphant smile with one of his own. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that since I first translated the papers. You’re quite right: a trained double wouldn’t make factual mistakes like that—not unless he did so on purpose.”
Ilse’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Just this. Since the double remained silent for all these years, he could only have done so for one of two reasons: either he was a fanatical Nazi right up until the end, which I don’t accept, or—and this is supported by the papers—the fear of some terrible retribution kept him from speaking out. If we accept that scenario, Number Seven’s ‘mistakes’ appear to me to be a cry for help—a quiet but desperate attempt to provoke skeptics to investigate his case and thus uncover the truth. And believe me, that cry was heard. Hundreds of scholars and authors have investigated the case. Dozens of books have been written, more every year.” Natterman held up an admonishing finger. “The more relevant question is this: Why would the real Hess make such mistakes?”
“Because he was crazy!” Ilse retorted. “Everyone’s known that for years.”
“Everyone has said that for years,” Natterman corrected. “Hitler and Churchill started that rumor, yet there’s not one scrap of evidence suggesting that Hess was unbalanced right up until the day he flew to Britain. He trained months for that mission. Can you seriously believe Hitler didn’t know that? Hess was eccentric, yes. But mad? It was the men he left behind who were mad!”
“Hess could have written those papers himself,” she argued. “If Hess didn’t know Latin when he went into Spandau, he certainly could have learned it during his years of imprisonment.”
“True,” Natterman admitted. “But unlikely. Did you note the quote from Ovid? High-flying language for a self-taught student. But that’s verifiable, in any case.”
Ilse tasted her tea. It had gone cold. “Opa, you can’t really believe that the Allies kept the wrong man in prison all these years.”
“Why not? Ilse, you should understand something. These papers do not exist in a vacuum. They merely confirm a body of evidence which has been accumulating for decades. Circumstantial evidence, testimonial evidence, medical evidence—”
“What medical evidence?”
The professor smiled; he loved nothing more than a willing student. “Evidence unearthed by a British army surgeon who examined Number Seven while he was in Spandau. He’s the man who really cracked this case open. My God, he’ll be ecstatic when he finds out about these papers.”
“What evidence did he discover?”
“A war wound. Or a lack of one, I should say. This surgeon was one of Hess’s doctors in Spandau, and in the course of his duties he came across Hess’s First World War record. Hess was wounded three times in that war—the worst wound being a rifle bullet through the lung. Yet when the surgeon examined Number Seven, he found no scars on the chest or back where that wound should have been. And after looking into the matter further—examining the prisoner’s X rays—he found no radiographic evidence of such a wound. There should have been scarring of the lung, caused by the force of the bullet and other organic particles tearing through it. But the surgeon found none. He had quite a bit of experience with gunshot wounds, too. He’d done a tour of duty in Northern Ireland.”
Natterman chuckled at Ilse’s bewildered expression. “You’re surprised by my knowledge? You shouldn’t be. Any German or British historian could tell you as much.” He laughed. “I could give you twice as much speculation on who started the Reichstag fire!”
“But the details,” she said suspiciously. “Dates, medical evidence … It’s almost as if you were studying the case when I called you.”
The professor’s face grew grave. “My dear, you have obviously failed to grasp the monumental importance of this find. These papers could shake the world. The time period they describe—the forty-four days beginning with Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain and ending with Hitler’s invasion of Russia—represents the turning point of the entire Second World War, of the entire twentieth century. In the spring of 1941, Adolf Hitler held the future of the world in his hands. Of all Europe, only England still held out against him. The Americans were still a year from entering the war. German U-boats ruled the seas. If Hitler had pressed home the attack against England with all his forces, the British wouldn’t have stood a chance. The Americans would have been denied their staging post for a European invasion, and Hitler could have turned his full might against Russia with his flanks protected.” Natterman held up a long, crooked finger. “But he didn’t invade England. And no one knows why.”
The professor began pacing the kitchen, punctuating his questions by stabbing the air with his right forefinger. “In 1940 Hitler let the British Army escape at Dunkirk. Why? All through the fall of 1940 and the spring of ’41 he delayed invading Britain. Why? Operation Sea-Lion—the planned invasion of Britain—was a joke. Hitler’s best generals have admitted this. Churchill publicly taunted Hitler, yet still he delayed. Why? And then the core of the whole mad puzzle: On May tenth, Rudolf Hess flew to Britain on a secret mission. Scarcely a month later”—Natterman clapped his hands together with a crack—“Hitler threw his armies into the icy depths of Russia to be slaughtered. Ilse, that single decision doomed Nazi Germany. It gave Churchill the time he needed to rearm England and to draw Roosevelt into the war. It was military suicide, and Hitler knew it! For twenty years he had sworn he would never fight a two-front war. He had publicly proclaimed such a war unwinnable. So why did he do it?”
Ilse blinked. “Do you know?”
Natterman nodded sagely. “I think I do. There are dozens of complex theories, but I think the answer is painfully simple: Hitler had no choice. I don’t believe he ever intended to invade England. Russia was his target all along; his own writings confirm this. Hitler hated Churchill, but he had tremendous respect for the English as a people—fellow Nordics and all that. I think Hitler put off invading Britain because he believed—right up until it was too late—that England could be neutralized without firing a shot. I think certain elements of the British government were prepared to sign a peace treaty with Hitler, so that he would be free to destroy Communist Russia. And I believe Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s secret envoy to those Englishmen. The moment Hess’s presence in England was made public, Joseph Stalin accused the British of conspiring with Hitler. I think Stalin was right.”
The professor’s eyes blazed with fanatical conviction. “But neither Stalin, nor all his spies, nor a thousand scholars, nor I have ever been able to prove that! For nearly fifty years the truth has lain buried in the secret vaults of the British government. By law the relevant Hess files are to remain sealed until the year 2016. Some will never be opened. What are the British hiding? Whom are they protecting? A secret cabal of highly placed British Nazis? Were there powerful Englishmen—even members of the royal family—who were so afraid of communism that they were ready to climb into Hitler’s bed for protection, no matter how many Jews he slaughtered?” Natterman punched a fist into his palm. “By God, if these Spandau papers end up proving that, the walls of Parliament will be hard put to withstand the firestorm that follows!”
Ilse stared at her grandfather with astonishment. His passion had infected her, but it could not blot out the worry she felt for Hans. Yet somehow she couldn’t bring herself to confess her fears to the old man. At least debating the fine points of conspiracy theories helped to pass the time quickly.
“But if the prisoner was a double,” she said, “how could he fool his Allied captors? Even an actor couldn’t hold out under interrogation.”
Natterman snorted scornfully. “The British claim they never professionally interrogated him. And why should they? They knew Hess was a double from the beginning. They held him incommunicado in England for the first four years of his captivity, and they’ve been playing this ridiculous game ever since to cover up the real Hess’s mission. The American government supports Britain’s policy right down the line. And the French have never made a fuss about it. They have their own skeletons to hide.”
“But the Russians,” Ilse reminded him. “You said Stalin suspected a plot from the beginning.”
“Perhaps the double didn’t fool them,” Natterman suggested.
“Then why wouldn’t they expose him!”
Natterman frowned. “I don’t know. That’s the conundrum, isn’t it? It’s the key to this whole mystery. There are reasons that the Russians wouldn’t have talked in the early years. One is that certain alleged Anglo-Nazi intrigues—between Hess and the Duke of Windsor, for example—took place on Spanish and Portuguese soil. If such meetings did actually occur, Moscow would have known all about them”—Natterman grinned with glee—“because the MI-6 officer responsible for the Spanish desk at that time was none other than Kim Philby. What irony! The Russians couldn’t reveal the Windsor-Hess connection without exposing the Philby-KGB connection! Of course that only explains the Russian silence up until 1963, the year Philby fled England. The real mystery is what kept the Russians quiet during the remaining years.”
Ilse was shaking her head. “You make it sound so plausible, but it’s like a huge house of cards… . It’s just too complex.”
“I’ll give you something simple, then. Why did the British never use ‘Hess’ for propaganda during the war? They locked him away from the world and refused even to allow him to be photographed. Think about that. England and Germany were locked in a death struggle. Even if ‘Hess’ had refused to cooperate, the British could easily have released statements criticizing Hitler that were supposedly made by Hess. Think of the boost that would have given English morale. And the negative effect on the German people! Yet the British never tried it. The only possible reason I can see for that is that the British knew they didn’t have the real Hess. They knew if they tried to use ‘Hess’ against the Nazis, Joseph Goebbels could jump up and say, ‘Fools! You’ve got a bloody corporal in your jail!’ or something similar.”
“If that’s true, why wouldn’t the Nazis have said that from the beginning?”
Natterman smiled enigmatically. “Hitler’s reasons I cannot divine. But as for the other top Nazis—Göring, Himmler—they were only too glad to be rid of Hess. He was their chief rival for Hitler’s favors. If the Führer, for his own reasons, was content to let the world believe that his lifelong friend and confidant had gone insane, and was a prisoner of the British, Hess’s chief rivals would have been only too glad to go along.” Natterman rubbed his hands together. “Yes, it all ties up rather neatly.”
“So says the great professor,” Ilse said dryly. “But you’ve missed one thing. Even if the Allies had reasons to keep quiet, why in God’s name would the double—even if he had agreed to such a mission—keep silent for nearly fifty years? What could anyone threaten him with? Solitary confinement in Spandau Prison must have been a living death.”
Natterman shook his head. “You’re a clever girl, Ilse, but in some ways frighteningly naive. Soldiers aren’t asked to agree to missions; they’re ordered. In Hitler’s Reich refusal meant instant death. You saw the word Sippenhaft in the papers?”
She nodded. “What does it mean? ‘Clan punishment’?”
“That’s close enough. Sippenhaft was a barbaric custom that Himmler borrowed from the ancient Teutonic tribes. It mandated that punishment be visited not only upon a traitor, but upon his ‘clan.’ After Graf von Stauffenberg’s abortive attempt on Hitler’s life, not only the count but his entire family was executed. Six of the victims were over seventy years old! That is Sippenhaft, Ilse, and a more effective tool for ensuring the silence of living men has yet to be devised.”
“But after five decades … who would be left to carry out such a sentence?”
Natterman rolled his eyes. “How about one of those bald neo-Nazi psychopaths who roam our streets at night with brickbats? No? Then how about these ‘soldiers of Phoenix’ that Number Seven mentions? He certainly seems terrified of them. And don’t forget this: at the end of the war, close to forty divisions of Waffen SS remained under arms throughout the world. That’s more than a quarter of a million men! I don’t know how many Death’s-Head SS survived, but what if it were only a few hundred? Just one of those fanatics could wipe out a man’s family, even today. I fought in the war, and I could easily shoot someone down in the street tonight.” Natterman glanced at his watch. “And that is my final word on the subject,” he announced. “I must go.”
“Go?” Ilse said uneasily. “Where are you going?”
Natterman picked up his briefcase. “To do what must be done. To show the arrogant, self-righteous British for what they were during the war—no better than we Germans.” His eyes sparkled with youthful excitement. “Ilse, this could be the academic coup of the century!”
“Opa, what are you saying? Those papers are affecting you just like they did Hans!”
Natterman looked sharply at his granddaughter. “Where is Hans, by the way?”
“At the police station … I guess.” Ilse tried to summon a brave face, but her mask cracked. Hans had been gone far too long. “Opa, what if they know what Hans did … what he found? What would they do?”
“I don’t know,” he answered frankly. “Why don’t you call the station? If Hans’s superiors don’t know about the papers, it can’t hurt. And if they do, well … they’ll be expecting your call anyway, won’t they?”
Ilse moved uncertainly toward the phone in the living room, then snatched it up.
“Listen very closely,” Natterman cautioned. “Background voices, everything.”
“Yes, yes … Hello? May I speak to Sergeant Hans Apfel, please? This is his wife. Oh. Do you know where he is now?” She covered the mouthpiece with her palm. “The desk sergeant says he knows Hans but hasn’t seen him tonight. He’s checking.” She pulled her hand away. “I beg your pardon? Is this the same man I spoke to earlier? Yes, I’ll be home all evening.” Natterman shook his head violently. “I’m sorry,” Ilse said quickly, “I have to go.” She dropped the phone into its cradle.
“What did he tell you?” Natterman asked.
“Hans stopped in to answer a few questions, but left soon after. The sergeant said he wasn’t there longer than twenty minutes. Opa?”
Natterman touched his granddaughter’s quivering cheek. “Ilse, is there some place in particular Hans goes when he is under stress?”
Ilse held out for a moment more, then the words poured out of her. “He talked about showing the papers to a journalist! About trying to sell them!”
“My God,” said Natterman, his face white. “He wouldn’t!”
“He said he wouldn’t. But—”
“Ilse, he can’t do that! It’s crazy! And far too dangerous!”
“I know that … but he’s been gone so long. Maybe that’s where he is, meeting a reporter somewhere.”
Natterman shook his head. “God forgive me, I hope that’s it. He’ll probably turn up any minute. But I’m afraid I can’t wait.” He held up his hand. “Please, Ilse, no more questions. I’m going to the university to get some things, then I’m leaving the city.”
“Leaving the city! Why?”
Natterman donned his long overcoat, then picked up his briefcase and took his umbrella from the stand by the front door. “Because anyone could find me in Berlin, and eventually they would. People are searching for these papers now—I can feel it.” He laid a hand on Ilse’s shoulder. “We have stumbled into a storm, my child. I’m trying to do what is best. It’s nine o’clock now. You wait here until midnight. If Hans hasn’t returned by then, I want you to leave. I’ll be at the old cabin.”
“On the canal? But that’s two hundred kilometers from here!”
“I just hope it’s far enough. I’m serious, Ilse, if Hans hasn’t arrived by midnight, leave. The cabin telephone’s still connected. I always pay the bill. You have the number?”
She nodded. “But what about Hans?” she asked, her voice trembling.
The professor set down his briefcase and hugged his granddaughter. “Hans is a grown man,” he said gently. “A policeman. He knows how to take care of himself. He’ll find us when he’s ready. Now I must go. You do exactly as I said.” He patted his briefcase. “This little discovery is going to make a lot of people very nervous.”
Too dazed to argue, Ilse kissed him on the cheek. “You be careful,” she said. “You’re not a young bull anymore, you know.”
“No,” said Natterman softly, his eyes glittering. “I’m a wise old serpent.” He grinned. “You haven’t forgotten your patronymic, have you? ‘Natter’ still means snake. Don’t worry about me.”
With that the professor kissed Ilse’s forehead and slipped outside the door. He looked disdainfully at the old elevator; then he stepped into the stairwell and, despite his excitement, started down with an old man’s careful tread. He did not hear the stairwell door open again behind him, or the whisper of Jonas Stern’s stockinged feet descending the concrete steps.
Stern knew the game now. It was a simple one. Follow the papers. Strange how the peaceful present could be shattered by a few strokes from an old pen, he reflected. Cryptic telegrams from an unquiet past. For in the Israeli’s pocket nestled another scrap of paper—the seed of the premonition that had brought him to Germany after so many years. One hour before he’d driven out of the Negev desert headed for Ben-Gurion Airport, Stern had dug it out of the little chest he’d saved from Jerusalem—his unfinished-business chest, an old cherry box containing the musty collection of loose ends that would not leave a man in peace. On this scrap of paper was a brief note written in Cyrillic script, unsigned. A Russian Jew had translated it for Stern on the day it arrived in his office, June 3, 1967.
People of Zion Beware! The Unholy Fire of Armageddon may soon be unleashed upon you! I speak not from hatred or from love, but from conscience. Fear of death stays my hand from revealing the secret of your peril, but the key awaits you in Spandau. God is the final judge of all peoples!
Stern’s colleagues had not been impressed. In Israel, such warnings were common as dust. Each was routinely investigated, but rarely did any prophesy real danger. But Stern had had a feeling about that particular note. It was vague, yes. Was the author referring to Spandau Prison in West Berlin? Or the district of Spandau, which covered over five square miles of the city? Stern never found out. Two days after the “Spandau note” arrived, the ’67 war erupted. Shells were falling on Jerusalem, and the note was brushed aside like junk mail. Israel was in peril, but from Egyptian tanks and planes, not the “Unholy Fire of Armageddon,” whatever that meant.
Later, when the smoke had cleared and the dead were buried, Stern’s superiors decided the note had merely been a warning of Egypt’s imminent war plans. After all, the note was in Russian, and it was the Russians who had been supplying Egypt with weapons. “A communist with a religious conscience,” they’d said, “a common enough breed.” But Stern had never accepted that. Why would the note have mentioned Spandau, of all things? And so he’d kept the note.
At the foot of the stairs, he slipped his shoes back on and glided out into the frigid darkness. Forty meters up the Lützenstrasse stood Professor Natterman, clinging to his briefcase like a diamond courier. He flagged down a speeding yellow taxi and climbed inside. Stern smiled and climbed into his rental car.
Four floors above the street, Ilse sat cross-legged on the floor behind her triple-bolted door, fixed her eyes on the wall clock, and waited with both hands on the telephone.
9:40P.M.Polizei Abschnitt 53
The clang of the pipe apparently carried much farther than a human voice. Hans had been smashing it against the bars for less than a minute when the basement door crashed open and a powerful flashlight beam sliced down through the darkness.
“Stop that goddamn banging!” shouted a guttural voice.
Rolf again, Hans thought. The profanity was a dead giveaway. The same bearded man trailed behind him, but this time the pair stayed well back from the cell and aimed the flashlight in.
“Well?” said Rolf from behind the glare. “What the hell do you want? The facilities not up to your high standards?”
Hans flexed his fists in rage. If he could only lure one of them into the cell … “This man’s dead,” he said, pointing to the gurney.
Neither guard responded.
“Come in here and check his pulse, if you don’t believe me.”
“If he’s dead, what can we do?” said Rolf, chuckling at his logic.
“Get him out of here!” Hans cried.
“Sorry,” said the other guard, with a trace of sympathy. “We can’t come in. Orders.”
In desperation Hans shoved the gurney to the front of the cell and thrust his friend’s lifeless arm through the bars. “Feel it, damn you!”
“Take it easy,” said the second man. “I’ll do it.” He pinched Weiss’s wrist expertly between his thumb and middle finger and counted to thirty. “The man’s dead, all right.”
Rolf checked Weiss’s pulse himself. “So he is. Well, you just stay right here with him, Sergeant. We’ll send somebody down for him. Eventually.”
Hans turned to the wall in despair. Obviously these two thugs weren’t going to be lured into the cell. When he finally turned back around, they had gone. He picked his way to the rear of the cell and sat down on a box of files. I can wait, he told himself. Someone’s got to come in here eventually, and when they do …
Fifteen minutes later the basement door crashed open again. This time Hans heard no cursing or stumbling from the stairs. The tread of boots was loud and regular. Whoever was coming knew his way around down here.
“This way, idiot,” muttered a disembodied voice.
Nothing could have prepared Hans for the next few seconds. When the boots stopped in front of his cell, the flashlight beam arced in and blinded him completely. He squinted in pain. Then, out of the blackness behind the dazzling light came a voice that froze his heart.
“Hans? Are you okay?”
Oh God … Slowly his contracting pupils filtered out the glare. He saw the hand gripping the flashlight through the bars. Then, just above it, Captain Dieter Hauer’s mustached face coalesced in the darkness. The leering grin of Rolf floated above and behind him.
Hans felt a caustic wave of bile rising into his throat. Whatever was going on, Hauer was part of it! His mind reeled, fighting the realization that his own father had helped murder his friend. He felt a knifelike pain in his chest, as if his very heart had cracked. Come in here, you bastard! he thought savagely. Just come right in …
Apparently, Hauer intended to do just that. He turned to Rolf. “Give me the key,” he said.
“But we’re not supposed to go in,” Rolf objected. “Lieutenant Luhr said—”
Hauer snatched the key from Rolf’s hand and opened the cell door. “Hans, listen,” he said softly, “I need to ask—”
“Aaaaaarrgh!” With every ounce of strength in his body, Hans drove himself off the back wall and into Hauer’s midsection. The flying tackle crushed Hauer against the steel bars, driving the breath from his lungs. He collapsed in a heap on the floor, sucking for air. Hans grabbed his neck and began throttling him in blind hatred. Here was the man to pay for Weiss’s life, and so much more …
It was a simple matter for Rolf to pick up the lead pipe and knock Hans unconscious. Having done so, he viciously kicked the limp body off of Hauer and revived the captain by taking hold of his belt and lifting him repeatedly off the floor. Slowly Hauer sat up and looked at Hans lying motionless on the cell floor.
“Thanks,” he coughed.
“You owe me for that,” said Rolf. “That prick meant to kill you!”
“I don’t blame him,” Hauer muttered.
“What?” Rolf’s eyes narrowed. “What were you trying to say to him, anyway?”
Hans moaned and rolled over. His head banged against the bars.
“Shit,” Rolf grumbled, “why don’t we just kill this Klugscheisser?”
“We need him. Help me get him up on one of these boxes.”
Focusing his eyes slowly, Hans sat up. He’d vomited a little on his shirt front. “Fa …” he moaned. “Father? You can’t be part of this—”
“What did he say?” Rolf asked.
“He’s delirious.”
“Weiss is dead!” Hans screamed suddenly.
“So are you,” Rolf spat. “You pathetic fuck.”
The next four seconds were a blur of motion. Hauer’s lips flattened to a thin line. Quicker than thought he whirled on Rolf and shattered his jaw with a killing blow from his right fist. Almost simultaneously he snatched the pipe away with his left hand and brought it down on Rolf’s skull, fracturing his cranium with a sickening crunch. Rolf died before he hit the floor.
Hans had been stunned by the blow to his head, but even more by this sudden reversal. But there was no time to think. Hauer knelt over him. “Don’t ask me anything!” he snarled. “Don’t say anything! I don’t know how you got involved in this, but you’re in way over your empty head. I don’t know if Weiss was in it, but he paid the price tonight. You’re hiding something—I saw that at Funk’s little hearing, and so did anyone else who was paying attention. You can’t lie for shit, Hans, you’re too honest for it.”
“Wait—I don’t understand,” Hans stammered. “Why?”
“Quiet! We’re about to take the most dangerous walk of our lives. If someone finds this shitbag before we get out of the station, we’re dead. Can you move?”
Hans tried to rise, but his legs buckled.
“Get up!”
“I can’t. It’s my head … my balance.”
“Christ!” With a sudden violence Hauer shoved Weiss’s corpse off the gurney and onto the floor.
“Captain!”
“Listen, Hans, he’s gone! We’re alive. You just be ready when I get back.”
With startling speed Hauer battled the gurney through the dark basement, then collapsed its legs and dragged it up the stairs. In two minutes he was back in the cell, leaning over Hans.
“I’m going to carry you up to that gurney and wheel you out the back door. Can you hang on?”
Hans nodded dully.
“I want you to see something before we go.”
Hauer picked up the flashlight and held it to the right side of Rolf’s smashed skull. He dug in the blond hair until he found what he wanted, then lifted the head slightly and leaned back to make room for Hans. “First this,” he said. “Look.”
Hans looked. At first he saw nothing. Only the bloody roots of Rolf’s flaxen hair. Then Hauer’s thick fingers scratched against the dead man’s scalp, scraping some of the blood away. Hans saw it now, behind the right ear. It was a tattoo. Bloodred ink had been injected into Rolf’s scalp by a very talented needle. The design itself was less than two centimeters long, but very detailed. It was an eye. A single, gracefully curved red eye. With a lid but no lashes. Hans felt his stomach turn a slow somersault. The eye was identical to the one sketched on the opening page of the Spandau papers! You must follow the Eye … The Eye is the key to it all!
“See it?” Hauer grunted.
Hans nodded dumbly.
Rolf’s head thudded against the cement floor. Hauer stepped across the cell and dragged Weiss’s corpse over to where Hans sat against the wall. “You won’t forget this for a while,” he said. He put his hands into Weiss’s shirt and ripped it open down the front. Then he pulled up the under-shirt.
“What are you doing?” Hans asked, offended by this further indignity visited upon the dead.
Hauer picked up the flashlight and shone it onto Weiss’s almost hairless chest. Hans leaned over, straining his eyes, then he froze. Weiss’s chest was awash in blood.
“Take a deep breath,” Hauer advised. He wiped away most of the blood with Weiss’s undershirt. “Now,” he said. “See it?”
Hans felt dizzy with horror. Gouged deep into Erhard Weiss’s flesh by some unspeakable instrument was a large, six-pointed star. The Star of David. The edges of the linear wounds looked so ragged that whoever had inflicted them must have done it with a screwdriver, or a long nail. Hans felt vomit coming up like a geyser. He gagged and turned away.
“No!” Hauer snapped, grabbing his shoulder. “Get up!”
Choking down bile, Hans tried to stand. With a stifled groan, Hauer caught hold of him, slung him over his shoulder like a sack, and plodded out of the cell. Twice Hauer stumbled as they crossed the cluttered basement floor, but both times he regained his balance. The stairs took longer. Each successive step required increasing amounts of time and energy from Hauer’s sleep-deprived body.
“Stop!” Hans begged, fearing they would both fall. “Put me down. I can make it.”
Just as he felt Hauer’s broad back sag under the strain, he saw a crack of light in the darkness. The basement door. They had made it. Grunting, Hauer kicked open the door and heaved Hans onto the gurney. “Don’t even breathe,” he said, wheezing like a draft horse. “If anyone stops us, I take him out. You stay on this cart! As far as anyone knows, you killed Rolf, then I killed you. Period.”
Hauer shoved the gurney into motion and veered right, rolling his human contraband toward the rear entrance Hans had used when he arrived. Hans opened one eye to orient himself, but Hauer promptly struck him on the head. Rounding the last corner, Hauer saw the pinch-faced young policeman who had questioned Hans earlier. The guard rose from his desk before Hauer reached him.
“Where are you taking this man?” he challenged. “No one leaves the building without written orders from the prefect.”
“This man’s dead,” Hauer said, slowing to a stop. “He was alive when he walked in here. The prefect doesn’t write orders that tie him to embarrassing corpses. Now, let me pass.”
For a moment the officer looked uncertain. Then he cocked his chin up and resumed his arrogant tone. “There’s no one back here but us. It won’t hurt to ring Lieutenant Luhr upstairs.”
He lifted the phone from its cradle, then leaned over Hans’s face and stared. Hans lay completely still, but it would not have saved them. Hauer could see what was coming. The policeman’s left hand was moving up to Hans’s wrist, searching for a pulse …
Hauer brought his right fist down like a hammer on the man’s temple. Hans’s eyes shot open when the body landed on him, but he stayed on the gurney. Hauer quickly wrapped the telephone cord several times around the stunned guard’s wrists, then, spying a cloth napkin on the desk, stuffed it into his mouth and let him fall to the floor. “Hang on!” he bellowed. He slammed the gurney through the heavy door that led to the rear parking lot.
The cold hit them like a wall of ice.
“Get up!” Hauer said. “We’ve got to steal a car. Mine’s parked in front of the station.”
“Mine’s back here,” Hans groaned, trying to rise.
“You’ve still got your keys?”
“No one took them.”
“Idiots! Give them to me!”
Hans fished the keys out of his pocket and handed them over. Hauer helped him off the gurney and into the car, then climbed into the driver’s seat and fired the engine. Incredibly, the Volkswagen kicked over without grumbling.
“This is our lucky day,” Hans croaked, still a bit silly from the blow to his head.
Hauer drove slowly out of the lot, turning south on the Friedrichstrasse to avoid the reporters, then shot down the first side street he came to. He had to make some decisions very fast, but he could think of nowhere safe to make them. Just drive, he thought. Head for the seedy section of the city and let my mind clear. Instinct would guide him. It always had. Maybe Hans could give him a direction. He reached over and jerked Hans’s chin up.
“Wake up! It’s time to talk.”
“My God,” Hans mumbled. “Weiss … what did they do to him?”
Hauer cruised past the Anhalter Banhof, then wrenched the VW into another side street. “That was play time,” he growled, “compared to what they’ll do if they find us. You’d better have some answers, Hans. I just threw away my badge, my reputation, my pension, and probably my life. If you mention our stupid agreement now, I’ll brain you myself. Now make yourself useful. Start watching for patrol cars.”
Praying that he would awaken from this nightmare, Hans slid up in his seat, put a hand to his throbbing head, and peered out into the icebound Berlin darkness.
SEVEN (#ulink_0ecb0ecb-b8a8-5240-aaf0-e9e541dc93f7)
9:55P.M.British Sector: West Berlin
As Captain Hauer wheeled Hans’s Volkswagen out of Polizei Abschnitt 53, Professor Natterman stepped out of a taxi thirty blocks away, paid his cabbie, and hurried into the milling throngs of Zoo Station. He tried to walk slowly, but found it difficult. Missing his train would mean standing around the station for hours with nothing to do but worry about the nine sheets of onionskin taped into the small of his back. Sighting a ticket window with a short queue, he got into line and set down his heavy suitcase.
Ten minutes later Professor Natterman was safely berthed in a first-class car, poring over a short volume by Dr. J. R. Rees, the British Army psychiatrist who had supervised the first extensive examinations of “Rudolf Hess” after his famous flight. It made for tedious reading, and Natterman had trouble concentrating. His mind kept returning to the Spandau papers. He had no doubt that Prisoner Number Seven had told the truth—if only because, to date, the man had provided the only possible version of events that fit all the known facts.
The Rudolf Hess case, Natterman believed, shared one major similarity with the assassination of the American president John F. Kennedy. There was simply too much information. A surfeit of facts, inconsistencies, myth, and conjecture. Everyone had his pet conspiracy theory. If one accepted the medical evidence that “Number Seven” was not Hess, then two general theories held popular sway. Natterman dismissed them both out of hand, but like most farfetched theories, each was based upon a tantalizing grain of truth.
The primary theory—put forward by the British surgeon who first uncovered the medical evidence—held that one of the top Nazis (either Heinrich Himmler or Hermann Göring) had wanted to supplant Hitler and had decided to use Hess’s wartime double to do it. To accomplish this, either Göring or Himmler (or both) would have to have ordered the real Hess shot down over the North Sea, then sent his double rushing on to England. There the double would supposedly have asked the British government if it might accept peace with Germany, if someone other than Hitler reigned in Berlin. Natterman considered this pure fantasy. Both Nazi chieftains had possessed the power to give such orders, of course. And there was quite a body of evidence suggesting that both men had prior knowledge of Hess’s plan to fly to Britain. But the question Natterman could not ignore was why Himmler or Göring should have elected to murder Hess, then use his double for such a sensitive mission in the first place. It was a harebrained scheme that would have carried tremendous risk of discovery by Hitler, and thus was totally out of character for both the prudent SS chief and the flamboyant but wily Luftwaffe commander. Only a week before Hess’s flight, Himmler had sent a secret envoy to Switzerland to discuss the possibility of an Anglo-German peace, with himself as chancellor of the Reich. That might not be so exciting as murder in the skies, but it was Himmler’s true style.
The other popular theory held that the real Hess had reached England alive, but that the British government—for reasons of its own—had wanted him silenced. They supposedly killed Hess, then searched among German prisoners of war for a likely double, whom they brainwashed, bribed, or blackmailed into impersonating the Deputy Führer. Natterman considered this tripe of the lowest order. His researches indicated that a “brainwashed” man was little more than a zombie—certainly not capable of impersonating Hess for more than a few hours, much less for forty-six years. And as far as British bribes or blackmail, Natterman didn’t believe any German impersonator would sacrifice fifty years of his life for British money or even British threats.
Yet this theory, too, was partially based on fact. No informed historian doubted that the British government wanted the Hess affair buried. They had proved it time and again throughout the years, and Professor Natterman did not discount the possibility that the British had murdered Hess’s double just four weeks ago. It was also true that only a native German could have successfully impersonated Hess for so long. Not just any German, however, it would have to have been a German trained specifically by Nazis to impersonate Hess, and whose service was either voluntary, or motivated by the threat of some terrible penalty. A penalty like Sippenhaft.
Natterman felt a shiver of excitement. The author of the Spandau papers had satisfied all those requirements, and more. For the first time, someone had offered a credible—probably the only—answer to when and how the double had been substituted for the real Hess. If the papers were correct, he never had been. Hess and his double had flown to Britain in the same plane. It had been the double in British hands from the very first moment! Natterman recalled that a prominent British journalist had written a novel suggesting that, since the Messerschmitt 110 could carry two men, Hess might not have flown to Britain alone. But no one had ever suggested that Hess’s double could have been that passenger!
Natterman drummed his fingers compulsively as his brain shifted up to a higher plane of analysis. Facts were the province of history professors; motives were the province of historians. The ultimate question was not how the double had arrived in England, but why. Why was it necessary for both the double and the real Hess to fly to Britain, as the Spandau papers claimed they had? Whom did they fly there to meet? Why was it necessary for the double to remain in Spandau? Had he been murdered for the same reason? If so, who murdered him? Circumstantial evidence pointed to the British. Yet if the British killed the double, why had they done it now, after all these years? Publicly they had joined France and the United States in calling for Number Seven’s early release (though they knew full well they could rely on the Russians to veto it, as they had done every year before)—
My God, Natterman thought suddenly. Was that it? Had Mikhail Gorbachev, in the spirit of glasnost, proposed to release Hess at last? As Natterman scrawled this question in the margin of Dr. Rees’s book, the huge, bright yellow diesel engine disengaged its brakes with a hiss and lurched out of the great glass hall of Zoo Station, accelerating steadily toward the benighted fields of the DDR. In a few minutes the train would enter the narrow, fragile corridor linking the island of West Berlin to the Federal Republic of Germany. Natterman pulled the plastic shade down over his small window. There were ghosts outside—ghosts he had no wish to see. Memories he thought long laid to rest had been violently exhumed by the papers he now smuggled through communist Germany. God, he wondered, does it ever end? The deceit, the casualties? He touched the thin bundle beneath his sweater. The casualties … More were coming, he could feel it.
Yet he couldn’t give up the Spandau papers—not yet. Those nine thin sheets of paper were his last chance at academic resurrection. He had been one of the lions once, an academic demigod. A colleague once told Natterman that he had heard Willy Brandt quote from Natterman’s opus on Germany no less than three times during one speech in the Bundestag. Three times! But Natterman had written that book over thirty years ago. During the intervening years, he had managed to stay in print with “distinguished contributor” articles, but no publisher showed real interest in any further Natterman books. The great professor had said all he had to say in From Bismarck to the Bunker—or so they thought. But now, he thought excitedly, now the cretins will be hammering down my door! When he offered his explosive translation of The Secret Diary of Spandau Prisoner Number Seven—boasting the solution to the greatest mystery of the Second World War—they would beg for the privilege of publishing him!
Startled by a sharp knock at the compartment door, Natterman stuffed Dr. Rees’s book under his seat cushion and stood. Probably just Customs, he reassured himself. This was the very reason he had chosen this escape route from the city. Trains traveling between West Berlin and the Federal Republic did not stop inside East Germany, so passport control and the issue of visas took place during the journey. Still more important, there were no baggage controls.
“Yes?” he called. “Who is it?”
Someone fumbled at the latch; then the door shot open. A tall, wiry man with a dark complexion and bright eyes stared at the professor in surprise. A worn leather bag dangled from his left hand. “Oh, dear!” he said. “Dreadfully sorry.”
An upper-class British accent. Natterman looked the man up and down. At least my own age, he thought. Strong-looking fellow. Thin, tanned, beaked nose. Looks more Jewish than British, come to think of it. Which is ridiculous because Judaism isn’t a nationality and Britishness isn’t a religion—although the adherents of both sometimes treat them as such—
“I say there,” the intruder said, quickly scanning the room, “Stern’s my name. I’m terribly sorry. Can’t seem to find my berth.”
“What’s the number?” Natterman asked warily.
“Sixteen, just like it says on the door here.” Stern held out a key.
Natterman examined it. “Right number,” he said. “Wrong car, though. You want second class, next car back.”
Stern took the key back quickly. “Why, you’re right. Thanks, old boy. I’ll find it.”
“No trouble.” Natterman scrutinized the visitor as he backed out of the cabin. “You know, I thought I’d locked that door,” he said.
“Don’t think it was, really,” Stern replied. “Just gave it a shove and it opened right up.”
“Your key fit?”
“It went in. Who knows? They always use the oldest trains on the Berlin run. One key probably opens half the doors on the train.” Stern laughed. “Sorry again.”
For an instant the tanned stranger’s face came alive with urgent purpose, so that it matched his eyes, which were bright and intense. It was as if a party mask had accidentally slipped before midnight. Stern seemed on the verge of saying something; then his lips broadened into a sheepish grin and he backed out of the compartment and shut the door.
Puzzled, and more than a little uncomfortable, Natterman sat down again. An accident? That fellow didn’t seem like the type to mix up his sleeping arrangements. Not one bit. And something about him looked familiar. Not his face … but his carriage. The loose, ready stance. He’d been unseasonably tanned for Berlin. Impossibly tanned, in fact. Retrieving Dr. Rees’s book from beneath the seat cushion, the professor tapped it nervously against his leg. A soldier, he thought suddenly. Natterman would have bet a year’s salary that the man who had stumbled into his compartment was an ex-soldier. And an Englishman, he thought, feeling his heart race. Or at least a man who had lived among the English long enough to imitate their accent to perfection. Natterman didn’t like the arithmetic of that “accident” at all if he was right. Not at all.
10:04P.M.MI-5 Headquarters: Charles Street, London, England
Deputy Director Wilson knocked softly at Sir Neville Shaw’s door, then opened it and padded onto the deep carpet of the director general’s office. Shaw sat at his desk beneath the green glow of a banker’s lamp. He took no notice of the intrusion; he continued to pore over a thick, dog-eared file on the desk before him.
“Sir Neville?” Wilson said.
Shaw did not look up. “What is it? Your hard boys arrived?”
“No, sir. It’s something else. A bit rum, actually.”
Sir Neville looked up at last. “Well?”
“It’s Israeli Intelligence, sir. The head of the Mossad, as a matter of fact. He’s sent us a letter.”
Shaw blinked. “So?”
“Well, it’s rather extraordinary, sir.”
“Damn it, Wilson, how so?”
“The letter is countersigned by the Israeli prime minister. It was hand-delivered by courier.”
“What?” Sir Neville sat up. “What in God’s name is it about?” His ruddy face slowly tightened in dread. “Not Hess?”
Wilson quickly shook his head. “No, sir. It’s about an old intelligence hand of theirs. Chap named Stern. Seems he’s been holed up in the Negev for the past dozen years, but a couple of days ago he quietly slipped his leash.”
Shaw looked exasperated. “I don’t see what the devil that’s got to do with us.”
“The Israelis—their prime minister, rather—seem to think we might still hold a grudge against this fellow. That there might be a standing order of some type on him. A liquidation order.”
“That’s preposterous!” Shaw bellowed. “After all this time?”
The deputy director smiled with forbearance. “It’s not so preposterous, Sir Neville. Our own Special Forces Club—which the Queen still visits occasionally, I’m proud to say—still refuses to accept Israeli members. They welcome elite troops from almost every democratic nation in the world, even the bloody Germans. Everyone but the Israelis, and they’re probably the best of the lot. And all because the older agents still hold a grudge for the murder of an SAS man by Zionists during the Mandate—”
“Just a minute,” Shaw interrupted. “Stern, you said?”
“Yes, sir. Jonas Stern. I pulled his file.”
“Jonas Stern,” Shaw murmured. “By God, the Israelis ought to be concerned. One of our people has been after that old guerilla for better than thirty years.”
Wilson looked surprised. “One of our agents, sir?”
“Retired,” Shaw explained. “A woman, actually. Code name Swallow. A real harpy. You’d better pull her file, in fact. Just in case she’s still got her eye on this fellow.” Shaw nodded thoughtfully. “I remember Stern. He was a terrorist during the Mandate, not even twenty at the time, I’ll bet. He swallowed his vinegar and fought for us during the war. It was the only way he could get at Hitler, I suppose. Did a spot of sticky business for us in Germany, as I recall.”
Wilson looked at Shaw in wonder. “That’s exactly what it says in the file!”
“Yes,” Shaw remembered, “he worked for LAKAM during the ’sixties and ’seventies, didn’t he? Safeguarding Israel’s nuclear development program.” Shaw smiled at his deputy’s astonishment. “No strings or mirrors, Wilson. Stern was a talented agent, but the reason I remember him so clearly is because of this Swallow business. I think she actually tried to assassinate him a couple of times. That’s why the Mossad sent that letter.”
“Do you really think this woman might pose a danger to him?”
Shaw shook his head. “I doubt Stern’s in England. Or even in Europe, for that matter. He’s probably sunning himself on Mykonos, or something similar. Which reminds me—did you find that freighter for me?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Lloyd’s puts her off Durban; she rounded the cape three days ago.”
Shaw rummaged through the stack of papers on his desk until he found a map of southern Africa. “Durban,” he murmured, running his finger across the paper. “Twenty knots, twenty-five … two days … yes. Well.”
Shaw brushed the map aside and thumped the stack of papers before him. “This is the Hess file, Wilson. No one’s cleared to read it but me—did you know that? I tell you, there’s enough rotted meat between these covers to make you ashamed of being an Englishman.”
Wilson waited for an explanation, but Shaw provided none. “About the Israeli letter, sir?” he prompted. “It’s basically a polite request to leave this Stern alone. How should I reply?”
“What? Oh. The Israeli prime minister is an old terrorist himself, you know.” Sir Neville chuckled. “And still looking after his own, after all these years.” His smile turned icy. “No reply. Let him sweat for a while, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And hurry those hard boys along, would you? I thought I had it tough with the P.M. climbing my back. An hour ago I got a call from the bloody Queen-Mother herself. She makes the Iron Lady sound like a French nanny!”
As Wilson slipped out, Sir Neville huffed and went back to the Hess file. On top lay a very old eight-by-ten glossy photograph. Scarred and faded, it showed a man in his late forties with dark hair, a strong jaw, and a black oval patch tied rakishly across his left eye. Shaw jabbed his heavy forefinger down on the eye patch.
“You started it all, you sneaking bastard,” he muttered. He slammed the file closed and leaned back in his chair. “Sometimes I wonder if the damned knighthood’s worth the strain,” he said. “Protecting skeletons in the royal bloody chest.”
10:07P.M.#30 Lützenstrasse
Outside the apartment another car rattled down the street without slowing. Number twelve. Ilse was counting. Wait until midnight, her grandfather had told her. If Hans isn’t home by then, get out. Sound advice, perhaps, but Ilse couldn’t imagine running for safety while Hans remained in danger. She fumed at her own obstinacy. How could she have let a stupid argument keep her from telling Hans about the baby? She had to find him. Find him and bring him to his senses.
But where to start? The police station? The nightclub district? Hans might meet a reporter anywhere. Rising from her telephone vigil, she went to the bedroom to put on some outdoor clothes. Outside, a long low groan built slowly to a rattling roar as a train passed on the elevated S-Bahn tracks up the street. During the day trains passed every ten minutes or so; at night, thank God, the intervals were longer. As Ilse tied a scarf around her hair, yet another automobile clattered down the Lützenstrasse, coughing and wheezing in the cold. Unlike the others, however, this one sputtered to a stop near the front entrance of the building. Please, she prayed, rushing to the window, please let it be Hans.
It wasn’t. Looking down, she saw a shiny black BMW sedan, not Hans’s Volkswagen. She let her forehead fall against the freezing pane. The cold eased the throb of the headache that had begun an hour earlier. She half-watched as the four doors of the BMW opened simultaneously and four men in dark business suits emerged. They grouped together near the front of the car. One man pointed toward the apartment building and waved in a circle. Another detached himself from the group and disappeared around the corner. Curious, Ilse watched the first man turn his face toward the upper floors and begin counting windows. His bobbing arm moved slowly closer to her window. How odd, she thought. Who would be out counting apartment windows at midnight in—?
She jumped back from the window. The men below were looking for her. Or for Hans—for what he’d found. She groped for the light switch to turn it off, then thought better of it. Instead she ran into the living room, opened the door, and peered cautiously down the hall. Empty. She dashed down the corridor and around the corner to a window that overlooked the building’s rear entrance. Three men huddled there, speaking animatedly. Ilse wondered if they might be plainclothes police. Suddenly two of them entered the building, while the third took up station in the shadow of some garbage bins near the exit.
The metallic groan of the ancient elevator jolted Ilse from the window. Too late to run. They would reach her floor in seconds. With her back to the corridor wall, she inched toward the corner that led back to her apartment. She felt a tingling numbness in her hands as she peeked around it. A tall young man in a dark suit stood outside her door. Remembering the fire stairs, she started in the other direction, but the echo of ascending steps made her thought redundant.
Hopelessly trapped, she decided to try to bluff her way out. Feeling adrenaline suffuse her body, she stepped around the corner as if she owned the building and marched toward the man outside her apartment. She cocked her chin arrogantly upward, intending to walk right past him and into the lift that would take her to the lobby. After all, she had appeared from another part of the floor—she might be anybody. If she could only reach the lobby …
The man looked up. He began to stare. First at Ilse’s legs, then at her breasts, then her face.
I can’t do it! she thought. I’ll never make it past him—
In a millisecond she saw her chance. Stay calm, she told herself. Steady … Fifteen feet away from her apartment she stopped and withdrew her apartment key from her purse. She smiled coolly at the guard, then turned her back to him and bent over the door handle of apartment 43. Be here, Eva! she screamed silently. For God’s sake, be here! Ilse scratched her key against the knob to imitate the sound of an unlocking door, then she said one last prayer and turned the knob.
It opened! Like a reprieved prisoner, she backed into her friend’s apartment, smiling once at the guard before she shut and locked the door. After shooting home the bolt, she sagged against the door, her entire body quivering in terror. For an unsteady moment she thought she might actually collapse, but she forced down her fear and padded up the narrow hall to her friend’s bedroom door. A crack of light shone faintly beneath it. Ilse knocked, but heard no answer.
“Eva?” she called softly. “Eva, it’s Ilse.”
Too anxious to wait, she opened the door and stepped into the room. From behind the door a hand shot out and caught her hair, then jerked her to the floor. She started to struggle, but froze when she felt a cold blade press into the soft flesh of her throat. “Eva!” she rasped. “Eva, it’s me—Ilse!”
The hand jerked harder on her hair, drawing her head back. The blade did not relent. Then, suddenly, she was free.
“Ilse!” Eva hissed. “What the hell are you doing here? I might have killed you. I would have. I thought you were a rapist. Or worse.”
The remark threw Ilse off balance. “What’s worse than a rapist?”
“A faggot, dearie,” Eva answered, bursting into laughter. She folded the straight razor back into its handle.
Ilse’s panic finally overcame her. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she sobbed as her middle-aged friend hugged her wet face to a considerable bosom and stroked her hair like a mother comforting her child.
“Ilse, darling,” Eva murmured. “What’s happened? You’re beside yourself.”
“Eva, I’m sorry I came here, but it was the only place I could go! I don’t know what’s happening—”
“Shh, be quiet now. Catch your breath and tell Eva all about it. Did Hans do something naughty? He didn’t hit you?”
“No … nothing like that. This is madness. Crazy. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!”
Eva chuckled. “I’ve seen things in this city that would drive a psychiatrist mad, if you could find one who isn’t already. Just tell me what’s wrong, child. And if you can’t tell me that, tell me what you need. I can at least help you out of trouble.”
Ilse wiped her face on her blouse and tried to calm down. Despite the presence of the men outside, she felt better already. Eva Beers had a way of making any problem seem insignificant. A barmaid and tavern singer for most of her fifty-odd years, she had worked the rough-and-tumble circuit in most of the capitals of western Europe. She had returned home to Berlin three years ago, to “live out my days in luxury,” as she jokingly put it. Hans sometimes commented that Eva was only semiretired, for the frequent pilgrimage of well-dressed and ever-changing old gentlemen to her door seemed to indicate that something slightly more profitable than conversation went on inside number 43. But that was Eva’s business; Hans never asked any questions. She was a cheerful and discreet neighbor who often did favors for the young couple, and Ilse had grown very close to her.
“Eva, we’re in trouble,” Ilse said. “Hans and I.”
“What kind of trouble? Hans is Polizei. What can’t he fix?”
Ilse fought the urge to blurt out everything. She didn’t want to involve Eva any more than she already had. “I don’t know, Eva, I don’t know. Hans found something. Something dangerous!”
“It’s drugs, isn’t it?” Eva wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Hashish or something, right?”
“I told you, I don’t know. But it’s bad. There’s a man in the hall right now and he’s waiting for Hans to get home. There are three more men outside by the doors!”
“What? Outside here? Who do you mean, child? Police?”
Ilse threw up her hands. “I don’t know! All I know is that Hans’s station said he left hours ago. I’ve got to get out of here, Eva. I’ve got to warn Hans.”
“How can you warn him if you don’t know where he is?”
Ilse wiped a wet streak of mascara from her cheek. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to stop her tears. “But first I’ve got to get past those men outside.”
As the old barmaid watched Ilse’s mascara run, a hot wave of anger flushed her cheeks. “You dry those tears,” she said. “There hasn’t been a man born to woman that Mama Eva can’t handle.”
10:10P.M.Europa Center, Breitscheid Platz: West Berlin
Major Harry Richardson stared curiously at the receding back of Eduard Lenhardt, his contact in Abschnitt 53. In seconds the policeman disappeared into the crush of bodies crowding the bar of the imitation Irish pub in the basement of the Europa Center, West Berlin’s answer to the American megamall. This twenty-two-story tower housed dozens of glitzy shops, bars, restaurants, banks, travel agencies, and even a hotel—all of whose goods and services seemed to be priced for the Japanese tourist. Harry had chosen it for its crowds.
He swallowed the last of an excellent Bushmill’s and tried to gather his thoughts. Eduard Lenhardt was only the third in a chain of personal contacts Harry had spoken with tonight. Contrary to Colonel Rose’s orders, Harry had kept his racquetball date. And by so doing, he had learned that Sir Neville Shaw, director of Britain’s MI-5, had ordered British embassy personnel to burn the midnight oil in West Berlin. Shortly after that, Harry had called a State Department contact in Bonn, an old college buddy, who had let it slip that the Russian complaint filed against the U.S. Army specified papers taken from Spandau Prison as the primary object of Soviet concern. The British and the French had received the same complaint. Harry could well imagine the British consternation at such an allegation. After the phone call, Harry had finally gained an audience with his reluctant contact from Abschnitt 53—Lieutenant Eduard Lenhardt.
Lenhardt had revealed information to Harry in three ways: by what he’d said, by what he hadn’t said, and simply by how he’d looked. In Harry’s professional opinion, the policeman had looked scared shitless. What he had not said was anything about papers found in Spandau Prison. What he had said was this:
That the prefect of police, Wilhelm Funk, had moved out of the Police Presidium and set up a command post in Abschnitt 53, after which the station had taken on the demeanor of an SS barracks after Graf Stauffenberg’s briefcase exploded in Hitler’s bunker. That two Berlin policemen had been detained in a basement cell, then had either escaped or been killed. And that while the Russians had pulled out of Abschnitt 53 at eight, they had acted as if they might return at any time with T-72 tanks. All this in breathless gasps from a veteran policeman whom Harry had never seen get excited about anything other than the piano quartets of Brahms.
Harry dropped ten marks on the table and hurried out of the pub. Sixty seconds later he was on the Ku’damm, where he flagged down a taxi and gave the driver an address near the Tiergarten. The man who occupied the house there was one of Harry’s “private assets,” a rather high-strung German trade liaison named Klaus Seeckt. During Harry’s first year in Berlin, he had spotted Klaus at the Philharmonie, in the company of an arrogant and well-known KGB agent named Yuri Borodin. It hadn’t taken Harry long to establish that Klaus was using his semi-official cover to funnel restricted technology to Moscow. That had not interested Harry much; what had interested him—after a thorough investigation of Seeckt—was that while Klaus dealt directly with the KGB, he had no ties, voluntary or otherwise, to the East German secret police, the Stasi. And that was a very rare combination in Berlin.
Rather than arrest Klaus for the high-tech ripoff, Harry had opted to use his leverage whenever he needed a direct line into KGB operations. He never even filed a report on Klaus. Colonel Rose might have insisted that Harry push the German too hard, which would only have spooked him into fleeing the city. Men like Klaus had to be treated delicately. Harry cultivated the man’s ego, pretending to share with him the fraternal enjoyment of superior intellect, and applied pressure only when necessary.
Tonight was different. Eduard Lenhardt’s apprehensions were worming their way into Harry’s gut, and the checks he normally kept on his imagination began to erode as his mind raced through the possible implications of the events at Abschnitt 53. When the taxi reached the Tiergarten house, Harry tipped its driver enough to satisfy, but not enough to draw attention. And as he reached Klaus’s door, he decided that his sensitive East German would have to pay the remainder of his debt tonight.
10:10P.M.The Bismarckstrasse
“Captain!” Hans warned. “Motorcycle patrol, three cars back!”
“I see him.” Hauer swung the Volkswagen smoothly around a corner just as the traffic signal changed, stranding the police cycle in the line of vehicles stopped at the light. “We’ve got to get off the street.”
“Where do we go? My apartment? Your house?”
“Think, Hans. They’ll be covering both places.”
“You’re right. Maybe—” He grabbed Hauer’s sleeve. “Jesus, Ilse’s at the apartment alone!”
“Easy, Hans, we’ll get her. But we can’t walk in there like lambs to the slaughter.”
“But Funk could have men there already!”
“Hold your water. Where are we, Bergstrasse? There should be a hotel four blocks south of us. The Steglitz. Just what we need.”
“A hotel?”
“Get in the backseat,” Hauer ordered, and stepped on the accelerator.
“What are you going to do?”
“Do it!”
As Hans climbed into the backseat, Hauer ripped the police insignia from his collar and spurred the VW into the Steglitz garage. The violent turn threw Hans against the side door. They squealed down the curving ramp to the parking sublevels below and into a tiny space between two large sedans.
“All right, Hans,” Hauer said. “Out with it. Everything. What really happened at Spandau this morning?”
Hans climbed awkwardly through the narrow gap between the seats. “I’ll tell you on the way to my apartment.”
Hauer shook his head. “We don’t move one meter until you talk.”
Hans bridled, but he could see that Hauer would not be swayed. “Look, I would have reported it if it hadn’t been for those damned Russians.”
“Reported what?”
“The papers. The papers I found at Spandau.”
“Christ, you mean the Russians were right?”
Hans nodded.
“Where did you find these papers? What did they say?”
Hauer looked strangely hungry. Hans looked out the window. “I found them in a pile of rubble. In a hollow brick, just like Schmidt asked me. What does it matter? I started reading them, but one of the Russians stumbled on me. I hid them without even thinking.” He turned to Hauer. “That’s it! That’s all I did! So why has everyone gone crazy?”
“What did the papers say, Hans?”
“I don’t know. Gibberish, mostly. Ilse said it was Latin.”
“You showed them to your wife?”
“I didn’t intend to, but she found them. She understood more of it than I did, anyway. She said the papers had something to do with the Nazis. That they were dangerous.” He looked down at his lap. “God, was she right.”
“Tell me everything you remember, Hans.”
“Look, I hardly remember any of it. The German part sounded bitter, like a revenge letter, but … there was fear in it, too. The writer said he had written because he could never speak about what he knew. That others would pay the price for his words.”
Hauer hung on every syllable. “What else?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“It was Latin, I told you! I couldn’t read it!”
“Latin,” Hauer mused, leaning back into his seat. “Who wrote the papers? Were they signed?”
Hans shrugged uncomfortably. “There wasn’t any name. Just a number.”
“A number?” Hauer’s eyes grew wide. “What number, Hans?”
“Seven, goddamnit! The lucky number. What a fucking joke. Now can we get out of here?”
Hauer shook his head slowly. “Hess,” he murmured. “It’s impossible. The restrictions, the endless searches. It can’t be.”
Hans ground his teeth angrily. “Captain, I know what you’re talking about, but right now I don’t care! I just want to know my wife is safe!”
Hauer laid a hand on his shoulder. “Where are these papers now?”
“At the apartment.”
“No! You made copies?”
“No, damn it! I don’t care about the papers anymore! We’re going to get Ilse now!”
Hauer pinned him against the seat with an arm of iron. “You saw Weiss, didn’t you? If you go charging into your apartment, the same thing could happen to you. And to Ilse.”
The memory of Weiss’s mutilated corpse brought a strange stillness over Hans. “What did happen to Weiss?”
Hauer sighed. “Someone got too impatient, pushed the doctor too far. Probably Luhr, Funk’s personal stormtrooper.” He shook his head. “Later tonight they’ll shoot his body full of cocaine and dump him in the Havel.”
“My God,” Hans breathed. “You saw it. You were there.” He balled his hands into fists.
“Hans! Get hold of yourself! I did not see Weiss tortured.”
“You knew about his chest!”
Hauer grimaced. “I overheard someone talking about it. It’s … it’s sort of a specialty of theirs. With certain Jews. Why did that boy join the department at all? You’d think a Jew would know better.”
Hans’s mouth fell open. “You’re saying it was Weiss’s fault someone mutilated him?”
“I’m saying if you’re a lamb you don’t run with the wolf pack!”
The memory of Weiss brought back the mark on Rolf’s head, the haunting eye from the Spandau papers. “What about the tattoo?” Hans asked quietly. “What does that mean?”
Hauer shook his head. “It’s complicated, Hans. The eye is a mark some people use—some very dangerous people. I’m not one of them. I just wanted you to remember the design.” He leaned his head across the seat. “Look behind my right ear. In the hair. If I had the tattoo, it would be there.”
Hans studied Hauer’s close-cropped scalp, but he saw no tattoo.
“I’m not one of them,” said Hauer, straightening up. “But until five minutes ago, they thought I was. We’ve got to find somewhere safe to hide, Hans, somewhere with a phone. Before we can get your wife, we’ve got to know what Funk and Luhr are up to. I’ve got a man inside the station I can call—”
“So let’s go upstairs! There are probably a dozen phones up in the lobby. I can call Ilse, warn her to get out!” Hans reached for the door handle, but Hauer stopped him again.
“We can’t, Hans. We’re in uniform. Everyone will be staring at the two beat-up cops using the pay phones. Funk’s men would find us in no time.”
Hans jerked his arm free. “Where, then? A friend’s house?”
“No. No friends, no family. It’s got to be untraceable. An empty house or … something.”
Slowly, almost mechanically, Hans removed his wallet from his pants pocket and took out a tattered white business card. He stared at it a moment, then handed it to Hauer.
“What’s this?” Hauer read aloud: “‘Benjamin Ochs, The Best Tailor in Berlin.’ You want to go to your tailor shop?”
“He’s not my tailor,” Hans said tersely.
“Eleven-fifty Goethestrasse. No one can trace you to this place?”
“Trust me.”
Hauer looked skeptical.
Hans turned away. The stress of being treated like an animal, caged and hunted, was congealing into something cold and hard in the pit of his stomach. With a guttural groan he slammed his open hand against the dashboard. “Get this fucking car moving!”
Hauer looked hard into Hans’s eyes, gauging the mettle there. “Right,” he said finally. He fired the engine and roared out of the hotel garage with tires squealing, making for the Goethestrasse.
EIGHT (#ulink_8d3fdbbb-6cba-5ba2-bdc0-52083f91e2b1)
10:25P.M.Lützenstrasse: West Berlin
The men waiting within and without Ilse’s apartment building were not police. They were KGB agents sent to the Lützenstrasse by Colonel Ivan Kosov. Kosov himself waited impatiently in a second BMW parked at the end of the block. Kosov hated stakeouts. Long ago he had foolishly thought that once he attained sufficient rank he would be spared the monotony of these endless vigils. And perhaps one day he would. But tonight was one more in an endless series of proofs to the contrary. Exasperated, he reached for the radio microphone mounted on the auto’s dash.
“Report, One,” he said.
“The lobby’s clear,” crackled a metallic voice.
“Two?”
“Nothing in the hall. The door’s locked, no sound from inside.”
“Four?”
“Three’s with me. No sign of Apfel or the wife.”
“Stay awake,” Kosov said gruffly. “Out.”
Shit, he thought, how long will it take? Sitting in this ball-freezing cold, chattering over the short-range radios as if simply alternating frequencies could mask the Russian-accented commands ricocheting through the Berlin audio net like lines from a bad movie. He wished there were another way. But he knew there wasn’t.
Three floors above Kosov, the door to apartment 43 opened and two garishly made-up redheads stepped into the hallway. One locked the door while her young companion stared invitingly at the man standing at attention outside apartment 40. The young woman nudged her middle-aged companion, who chuckled and led the way over to the silent man.
“Na, mein Süsser,” Eva flirted in a husky voice. “All alone up here tonight?”
Taken aback by her directness, the Russian stared back in silence. She’s at least fifty, he thought, much too old for my taste. But you’re something else altogether, he thought, hungrily eyeing the younger woman’s cleavage. With a flash of surprise, he realized that she was the demure blonde he had seen enter apartment 43 twenty minutes earlier. He barely recognized her beneath the heavy makeup and wig. She can’t be more than twenty-five, he guessed, and breasts like a Georgian goddess …
“Guten Abend, Fräulein,” he said to the younger woman. “I think you looked much better before.”
Ilse felt her throat tighten.
“I think he’s set on you, Helga,” Eva said, laughing. She patted the Russian on his rear. “Too bad, dearie, little Helga’s booked for tonight. But you’re in luck. I know a dozen tricks this child’s never even heard of. What do you say?”
Abashed by the old tart’s boldness, the Russian went temporarily blank.
“Oh, forget it,” Eva said, pulling Ilse down the hall. “If you don’t know what you want, we don’t have time to wait.”
Kosov’s young agent watched the middle-aged redhead follow her shapely companion into the elevator cage. Eva yanked the lever that started the slow descent and then, still holding eye contact with the guard, pumped her fist lewdly up and down the iron rod. When the Russian colored in embarrassment, she hiked her bright skirt over a well-preserved thigh and burst into laughter.
As soon as the cage sank below the line of the floor, Eva cut her voice to a whisper. “Here comes the hard part. We were lucky that time. The odds just went down.”
Ilse clutched her friend’s arm. “You shouldn’t have come with me!”
“You’d never have made it by yourself, darling.”
“But you’re in danger too!”
Eva plucked a gob of mascara out of her eye. “I’m glad to do it. If I hadn’t had you to talk to for the last three years, I’d have gone mad in that tiny apartment.”
“But all your men friends—”
Eva’s heavily rouged face wrinkled in disgust. “Don’t even mention those bums. Don’t act like you don’t know what I do. You and Hans have always known, and you’ve never treated me any different than family. So shut up and take some help. We’re not out of this yet.”
The elevator screeched to an uncertain stop. Eva yanked open the screen and stormed through the lobby, cursing the elevator and every other mechanical device ever invented. With Ilse struggling along behind on a pair of Eva’s four-inch heels, the old barmaid clacked past the two Russians at the building’s entrance as if they did not exist.
“Halt!” yelled one of Kosov’s men as Ilse hurried past.
Ilse’s heart thudded in her chest.
The Russian caught hold of her elbow. “Hey, Fräulein,” he said, leaning close to her. “Why the hurry?”
Eva paused impatiently at the curb. She looked up and down the street, then walked back to the door. “Next time, sweetie,” she snapped, stepping protectively in front of Ilse. “We’ve got a party to go to.”
“It can wait,” said the young man, leering at his companion. “Stay here and keep us warm for a while. It’s cold out.”
“Colder by the minute, Arschloch,” Eva spat. “If we don’t get out of this wind in thirty seconds our tits will snap off.”
The Russian shed his smile like a snakeskin. His eyes glazed with a reptilian sheen. He took a step toward Eva.
“Forget it, Misha,” urged his companion. “They’re just whores.”
“Fucking filth,” the Russian muttered.
“Misha,” said his partner anxiously. “Remember Colonel Kosov.”
Misha took a long look at Eva as if to mark her for future retribution, then snorted and walked into the lobby. When he next looked outside, the two women were already across the street and halfway down the block, moving toward Colonel Kosov’s BMW.
Kosov had just lifted the microphone from the dash when he spied two prostitutes walking quickly up the Lützenstrasse.
“Report, One,” he said, half-watching them.
“Lobby still clear.”
“Two?”
“No movement inside the apartment.”
“Damn. Three and Four?”
“All clear here. No sign of him.”
The prostitutes reached the hood of the BMW, passed it.
“All positions,” said Kosov, “I have two women passing me from your direction. Anyone see where they entered the street?”
The radio squawked as three signals competed for reproduction. “Four here, sir. They came from the apartment building. Looked like two whores to us.”
Kosov felt a tic in his cheek. He turned away as the headlights of a passing car shone through the BMW. When he looked again he saw one of the women raise an arm and flag the car to a stop. That’s odd, he thought, a taxi here at this hour. And picking up a couple of streetwalkers …
“Two here,” crackled the radio. “Those prostitutes came from number forty-three, this floor. Opposite my position. One of them even propositioned me.”
Kosov struck the dash with his fist. “One of them is the wife! Misha, to the car! Two, enter number forty and proceed!” Kosov looked frantically for an alley in which to turn the BMW around. With cars parked both sides of the street he had no room to make a U.
Inside the taxi, Eva spoke rapidly. “Perfect timing, Ernst darling. Now zoom around the corner and stop as fast as you can.” She looked back over her shoulder. “Ilse, when he stops, you jump right out and get into the alley there. If they keep after me, you’ve made it. If they don’t—”
“Who were those men, Eva? Police?”
“Stinking Russians, sweetie. Didn’t you catch the name Misha?”
The taxi jounced onto the curb. “Eva, how can I thank—”
“Go!” Eva cried, squeezing Ilse’s hand. “Jump! Go!”
The screech of tires drowned Ilse’s reply as the taxi sped down the Gervinusstrasse. Ilse ducked into the alley just as Kosov’s BMW careened around the corner and surged after Eva and her cabbie friend. She collapsed against the cold concrete wall of an office building, her heart beating wildly.
Ten seconds later a second BMW raced after the first.
Turning her back to the icy wind, Ilse doffed the sluttish clothes Eva had given her and tossed the wig into an overflowing garbage bin. Now she wore the conservative casuals she’d had on when she first spotted the BMW. Habit made her hang on to one costume accessory Eva had thrust into her hand—a large plastic purse. As she debated whether to keep Eva’s flashy coat, Ilse heard the rumble of a heavy automobile engine. Seconds later a pair of headlights nosed into the far end of the alley.
Ilse snatched up the discarded clothes and climbed into the only hiding place she could see—the garbage bin. The smell was terrible, cloyingly sweet. She held her nose with one hand and covered her eyes with the other. The powerful purr of the BMW edged closer, a tiger trying to spook its prey. Ilse knotted herself into a tight ball and prayed. It took little imagination to guess how ruthless the men in the black autos must be. The young man who had propositioned her at the front door—the one called Misha—his eyes had glazed almost to sightlessness when Eva insulted him. Like fish eyes, Ilse thought. She shuddered.
The BMW picked up speed as it approached the garbage bin, weaving occasionally to probe every inch of the alley with its halogen eyes. The walls of the trash bin vibrated from the noise. Ilse shivered from terror and bitter cold. She had no doubt that if the car engine were shut off, the Russians would find her by the chattering of her teeth.
Suddenly, with a scream of protesting rubber, the big black sedan roared out of the alley. Ilse scrambled up out of the garbage and dug into Eva’s purse for her shoes. Her hand closed over something soft and familiar. She peered into the bag. Folded into a thick wad at its bottom were three hundred Deutschemarks in small bills. Scrawled across the top banknote in red lipstick were the words: ILSE, USE IT!
Stuffing the bills back into the purse, Ilse climbed out of the bin and edged a little way down the alley. Damn all of this, she thought angrily. If Eva can get me this far, I can do the rest. In less than fifteen seconds she had analyzed her options and made a decision. She kicked off the stiletto heels Eva had loaned her, pulled on her own flats, and started running toward the hazy glow at the opposite end of the alley.
10:30P.M.Tiergarten District: West Berlin
The moment Harry Richardson raised his hand to knock on Klaus Seeckt’s door, the door jerked open to the length of the chain latch. “Go away, Major!” said a voice from the dark crack.
The door slammed shut. Harry moved to the side of the door, out of the light. “Open the door, Klaus.”
“Please go away, Harry!”
More puzzled than angry, Harry flattened himself against the wall. Normally he telephoned Klaus before coming over, but tonight he hadn’t wanted to give the East German a chance to postpone the meeting. Feeling exposed on the lighted stoop, he pounded his fist against the heavy oak. “I’m not in uniform, for God’s sake! Open up! Now!”
The bolt shot back with a bang. Klaus pulled the door open but remained out of sight in the dark foyer.
“Take it easy,” Harry said. “We’ll play it as an official visit. However you want.”
Klaus’s voice dropped in volume but doubled in urgency. “Harry, get out of here! They’re watching us!”
As Harry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he recognized the stubby barrel of a Makarov pistol in Klaus’s hand. The East German wore only his bathrobe, but his ashen face and the quivering pistol gave him a frighteningly lethal aspect. Harry glanced back at the street to try to spot watchers. He saw none, but he knew that didn’t mean anything.
“I tried to keep you out,” Klaus said resignedly. “Remember that.”
Writing off Klaus’s pistol to paranoia, Harry slipped past the East German and started toward the living room. With a hopeless sigh Klaus shut the door and locked it behind them.
When Harry reached the living room, he saw that Klaus was indeed being watched—but from inside the house, not out. Five men wearing dark business suits sat leisurely on sofas and chairs arranged around a glass-topped coffee table. Harry looked back over his shoulder at Klaus. The German hovered ghostlike in the shadows of the foyer, the Makarov slack against his leg. Harry considered bolting, but Klaus hadn’t tried it, so perhaps things weren’t so bad. Or perhaps, Harry thought uneasily, Klaus didn’t run because he knows the front door is covered from the outside.
Harry turned back to the living room. None of the men around the table looked older than thirty, and no one had said anything yet. Was that good or bad? Suddenly the oldest-looking of the group stood.
“Good evening, Major,” he said in heavily accented English. “What can we do for you?”
The young man’s accent was unmistakably Russian. There would be no attempt to pass these men off as other than what they were, Harry realized. A very bad sign. He cleared his throat. “And by what rank do I address you, Comrade?” he asked in flawless Russian.
The Russian smiled, seeming to relish the idea of a cat-and-mouse game. “You speak excellent Russian, Major. And I am but a lowly captain, to answer your question. Captain Dmitri Rykov.”
“What are you doing so far from home, Captain?”
“Am I so far from home?” Rykov asked gamely. “A debatable point. But I’m protecting the interests of my country, of course.”
The young man’s candor was an unveiled threat. “I see,” Harry said warily. “I also note that we have a mutual friend,” he observed, trying to shift the focus away from himself.
In the foyer Klaus turned deathly pale.
“Yes,” Rykov agreed, giving Klaus a predatory glance. “This is proving to be an enlightening evening. Take his gun, Andrei. No foolish heroics please, Klaus. It’s not your style.”
The East German slumped against the foyer wall, his pistol hanging slack. He looked broken, already resigned to the grisly fate that undoubtedly awaited him in Moscow. Corporal Andrei Ivanov moved to disarm him.
“As you can see, Major,” Rykov continued, “you’ve stumbled upon us at a most inopportune time. I’ll certainly speak to my superiors about it, but I suspect that your unfortunate timing may cost you your life—”
Before Andrei could reach the unfortunate Klaus, the East German raised the Makarov to his own temple and fired.
The sheer madness of the act stunned everyone, causing a moment of confusion. In desperation Harry bolted for the door. He had his fingers on the brass door handle when someone peppered the wall beside him with a burst from a silenced machine pistol.
“Don’t move, Major!” Captain Rykov ordered, his voice strained but even.
Harry let his fingers fall from the handle. He turned around slowly. In the time it had taken him to reach the door, the Russians behind him had been transformed from a quiet group of social acquaintances into a squad of paramilitary soldiers moving in concert to control the unexpected emergency. Two men knelt over Klaus’s body, checking for signs of life; two others covered the front and rear windows of the house. Rykov issued orders.
“Yuri, get the car. Major, move back into the room. Now!” Rykov tapped the shoulder of a young man leaning over Klaus’s corpse. “Leave him, Andrei. Touch nothing. Klaus was a traitor; he deserved a coward’s death. Leave the gun in his hand. We couldn’t have set this up better ourselves.”
“Shouldn’t we take him along?” Andrei asked. “The Kriminalpolizei aren’t stupid.”
Rykov’s eyes gleamed. “Ideally, I suppose. But we won’t have room for him.”
“What about the weapons compartment?”
“The major will be in there.” Rykov turned to Harry. “You don’t want to spend the next hour hugging a corpse, do you, Major?”
Harry’s mind raced. If this Russian intended to kidnap an American army officer from the heart of tightly controlled West Berlin, something very big indeed was going on. And to Harry’s mind, that something could only be the events at Spandau Prison.
“Kosov won’t like this,” he said, remembering seeing the Russian colonel at Abschnitt 53 this morning. “You better take some time to think, Captain.”
Rykov smiled. “You’re very clever, Major.”
The sound of an engine rumbled through the front door.
“That’s Yuri,” said Rykov. “All right, Major, let’s go.”
Harry didn’t move.
“Conscious or unconscious, I don’t care. But I must tell you, it’s never quite as clean as the movies when you bash someone in the back of the head with a pistol.”
Harry moved. He couldn’t warn Colonel Rose if he was dead.
It was only a few steps from the front door to the car, a black Mercedes 190. The Russians crowded close around him all the way. There’s got to be a way out, thought Harry. Got to be. I’ve got to warn—
Dmitri Rykov slammed the butt of his Skorpion machine pistol into the base of Harry’s skull. He heard a dull thud but no crunch. “Americans are so gullible,” he said, laughing. “Lucky for this one he has a wooden head.”
Corporal Ivanov looked distressed. “Are you sure we shouldn’t just kill him here?” he said anxiously. “Make it look like some illegal business, perhaps a homosexual tryst?”
“I’m in command here,” Rykov snapped, losing a bit of his earlier control. “I’ll do the thinking.”
“Yes, sir. I was only thinking of Colonel Kosov. If he doesn’t approve—”
“I know what Kosov wants, Corporal. Did he not choose me for command? We may need this American later as a bargaining chip.” Rykov’s voice softened. “Andrei, the other team is running down Sergeant Apfel’s wife as we speak. Kosov is with them. Do you want us to return to East Berlin empty-handed?”
Ivanov did not look entirely convinced, but he said no more.
Lying half-conscious at their feet, Harry slipped a hand into his inside coat pocket, fished out a white business card, and let it fall. There was no name on it—only a telephone number. As the Russians lifted him into the Mercedes, he glanced down. He saw his own blood, but the white card had already vanished against the snow.
10:31P.M.Lietzensee Park, British Sector
“Once again,” Ivan Kosov said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “Where did the girl get out?”
Pressed into the corner of the taxi’s rear seat, Eva Beers scowled and said nothing. Her hands were tied behind her head with her own stockings. The young Russian called Misha had twice smashed her right cheek with his gloved fist, but so far Eva had refused to speak.
“Misha,” Kosov growled.
The interior of the taxi echoed with the force of the third blow. A large purplish bruise was already visible beneath the thick patina of makeup Eva wore. In the front seat beside Kosov, Ernst the cabbie slumped unconscious over the wheel of his old Mercedes.
“I have no time for your stupid loyalty, woman,” Kosov said. “If you don’t answer this time, this zealous young man will have to slit the throat of your sleepy old hero. You don’t want that, do you?”
Misha drew a long-bladed stiletto from an ankle sheath and brandished it under Eva’s chin.
“I think he’s quite eager to use that,” observed Kosov. “Aren’t you, Misha?”
Eva saw feral eyes glinting in the dark.
“Now, where did Frau Apfel get out?”
Eva struggled to think through the pain of the blows and her growing apprehension that she would not survive the night. How long had Ernst evaded the black sedan? Two minutes? Three? With his taxi finally trapped in the dead-end lane beside the Lietzensee lake, the old cabbie had done his best to fend the Russians off, but the young KGB agents had simply been too agile for him. How far could Ilse have gotten in that time?
Without warning Misha savagely thrust his knee into Eva’s left breast, crushing it—
“All right!” she gasped.
The pressure eased a little. “You have regained your memory?” Kosov asked.
Perhaps they’ll spare Ernst, Eva thought. Swine. “We stopped two or three blocks back,” she whispered. “When we rounded a corner. Ilse jumped out there.”
“Sko’lka?” asked Kosov. “Two blocks or three? Which is it?”
Again Misha jabbed his knee forward. “Stop!” Eva begged. “Please!” She could fight no more, but she could fire a last covering shot. “Three blocks,” she lied, laboring for breath. “The Seehof Hotel … by the lake. She ran inside.”
Kosov nodded. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
Eva gulped air like a landed fish.
Kosov sighed angrily, debating with himself. How in hell was he supposed to find the Spandau papers? Three times Moscow had signaled him, each time telling him just a little more about the Hess case, doling out information like scraps of meat to a dog. Names without physical descriptions, dates of events Kosov had never heard of. And at the center of it all, apparently, a one-eyed man who had no name. Kosov could make no sense of it. And of course that was how Moscow wanted it.
“Now that you’re talking,” he said amiably, “I have one more question. Did Frau Apfel mention any names in connection with what her husband found?”
“No,” Eva groaned. “She told me someone was after her, that’s all. I didn’t ask—”
Unbelievably, Misha’s knee buried itself still deeper into Eva’s chest. The pain was excruciating. She felt as if she were going to vomit. “Please!” she choked.
The pressure relented just enough for her to take a shallow breath. Kosov heaved a bearlike shoulder over the front seat and bellowed, “Names, woman! Names are what I want! Did Frau Apfel mention the name Zinoviev to you? Do you hear me? Z-I-N-O-V-I-E-V. It’s a Russian name. Did she mention it?”
Eva shook her head violently. She had passed the point of being able to lie, and something in her eyes must have shown it. After several moments Kosov nodded, and Misha removed his knee from her chest. The old colonel’s face softened.
“Unlike my young friend,” he murmured, “I do not believe in needless killing. However, if you are lying—that is, if we do not find Frau Apfel, or if you feel the sudden urge to speak to the authorities—well, quite obviously we know where to find you. And we will find you. I would send Misha personally. Do you understand?”
Eva lay as still as she could. The animals were going to let her live. “Ja,” she breathed.
“Good.” Kosov climbed out of the old taxi. “Misha, a reminder.”
With an expert flick of his stiletto, the young KGB agent opened a two-inch gash along Eva’s left cheek. Eva shrieked in pain. Misha grinned, watching her struggle in vain to reach the wound and stop the bleeding. As the young Russian backed out of the taxi, Kosov’s hard face appeared in the front window.
“Free her hands,” he ordered.
Cursing quietly, Misha slashed the stockings over Eva’s head. But instead of getting out of the car, he thrust his hand viciously beneath Eva’s skirt and clenched her pubic mound in a clawlike fist. With flashing eyes he leaned close so that Kosov couldn’t hear. “When I find your little friend,” he snarled, “the pretty one—she’s going to bleed, old woman. Everywhere.” He wrenched his hand away, tearing hair and skin as he backed out of the taxi.
Shaking like an epileptic, Eva turned away and tried to stanch the flow of blood from her lacerated face. She heard Kosov’s BMW skid around and speed down the Lietzensee-Ufer in the direction of the Seehof Hotel. “Screw you,” she spat. “Swine. You’ll never find her.” Slowly she leaned forward and put her bloody hand to the old cabbie’s forehead. “Ernst, are you all right? Poor darling, you fought well for an old soldier. Wake up for Eva.”
The old man didn’t move.
If only some of my old friends were here, Eva lamented. That young pig’s balls would be meat for the dogs.
Ernst groaned and jerked forward in his seat. “Wo sind sie!” he cried, flailing his arms.
“They’re gone,” Eva said, soothing his forehead with a knowing hand. “All gone. You can take me home now, my brave knight. We’ll mend our scratches together.”
10:33P.M.South African Airspace: 100 km Northeast of Pretoria
The JetRanger helicopter stormed northward beneath a moonless African sky, startling flocks of black heron, spooking herds of impala and zebra gathered around the waterholes on the veld below. Inside the chopper’s luxurious cabin, Alfred Horn sat gripping the arms of his wheelchair, which was bolted to the carpeted deck by specially designed fittings. Pieter Smuts, Horn’s Afrikaner security chief, leaned closer to his master and spoke above the low beating drone of the rotor blades.
“I wanted to wait until we were airborne to tell you, sir.”
The old man nodded slowly. “What is so important that you don’t even trust your own security?”
“We’ve received the new figures from Britain, sir. The American figures. They were delivered by courier just an hour ago.”
“The Bikini figures?”
“More than that. Sixty-five percent of American test data from Eniwetok Atoll in ’fifty-two up to the test ban in ’sixty-three.” The Afrikaner shook his head. “Sir, you can’t imagine what a one megaton surface blast will actually do.”
“Yes, I can, Pieter.”
“It leaves a crater one mile across and sixteen stories deep. Christ, we’ve got the design, the plants … If we had six months, we could probably divert—”
“I’ll be dead in six months!” Horn snapped. “What do these figures tell you about our current resources?”
“The blast effects will be greater than we predicted. Using round figures, a forty-kiloton air burst should vaporize everything within three kilometers of ground-zero. Intense heat will incinerate anything for a five-kilometer radius beyond that. And the resulting winds and fires will wreak havoc for a considerable distance beyond those already mentioned.”
“And the fallout?” Horn asked.
“Twenty percent higher than we predicted.”
Horn digested this without emotion. “And these figures … you believe they are more reliable than our own?”
“Sir, except for the secret Indian Ocean test, all South African figures are purely theoretical. By definition they are predictions. The American figures represent verified data.”
Horn nodded thoughtfully. “Apply them to our scenario.”
“Everything depends on the target, sir. Obviously, ground-zero at the center of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem would obliterate either city. But if the weapon were used at the right time, its effects could be greatly enhanced, possibly even doubled, by a collateral factor: the weather.”
“How?”
“By the wind, sir. At this time of year the prevailing winds in Israel blow southeast. If the weapon were detonated in Jerusalem, the fallout would probably dissipate over Jordan. But if it were detonated in Tel Aviv, not only would it obliterate the city, but it might well spread a lethal blanket of strontium-90 over Jerusalem within one or two hours.”
Horn closed his eyes and sighed with satisfaction. “And if we get the cobalt-seeded bomb case in time?”
The Afrikaner turned his palms upward. “We won’t, sir. Not sooner than twenty days. The technical problems are formidable.”
“But if we did get it?”
Smuts pursed his lips. “With a cobalt-seeded bomb case and the revised yield figures, I’d say … sixty percent of the Israeli population would be dead within fourteen days, and Palestine would be rendered uninhabitable for at least a decade.”
Horn let out a long sigh. “Increase the bounty, Pieter. Five million rand in gold to the team that delivers a cobalt bomb case within seven days.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do we have any further information on the Israeli doctrinal response?”
Smuts shook his head. “Our London source dried up after we requested the American satellite photos. Frankly, I don’t even trust his initial reports on that subject.”
“Why?”
“Do you really think Israel would target Russian cities?”
Horn smiled. “Of course. It’s the only way the Jews could win a war against a united Arab force. They must be able to prevent Soviet resupply of the Arabs, and the only way they can do that is to blackmail the Soviets. What do they have to lose by doing so?”
“But the deployment plan for Israel’s nuclear arsenal is the most closely guarded secret in the world. How could our London source know what he claims to know?”
Horn smiled. “Not the most closely guarded secret, Pieter. No one has yet proved that South Africa’s nuclear arsenal even exists.”
“Thanks in no small part to us,” Smuts observed. The Afrikaner began cracking his knuckles. “The Russian matter aside, I think we can safely assume that if Tel Aviv or Jerusalem were destroyed, Israel would go beyond a measured response. If they knew the source of the attack, they would respond with a significant portion of their ‘black’ bomber and missile forces.”
“They will know the source of the attack,” Horn rasped.
“There is one unpredictable factor,” Smuts said carefully. “If our clients were to detonate the weapon at Dimona, Israel’s weapons-production plant, there is a slight chance that the rest of the world might believe the explosion to be a genuine Israeli accident. The Americans might coerce the Jews into waiting until an outside investigation was completed. By that time cooler heads might prevail.”
Horn made a dismissive gesture with his skeletal arm. “Don’t worry. I’m relying on Arab impatience, not stupidity. Hussein, Assad, these men might have the self-control to wait and try to develop a cohesive plan. Not our friend. He will strike swiftly. Consider how quickly he agreed to our meeting. He won’t purposefully hit Jerusalem—there are too many sacred Muslim sites there. And the security around Dimona is airtight. We needn’t worry on that score. The target will be Tel Aviv.”
Horn’s one living eye focused on the Afrikaner. “What of the Spandau matter, Pieter? Have they captured the traitor? Have they found the papers?”
“Not yet, sir. Berlin-One assures me it is only a matter of time. However, I received a call from his immediate subordinate, Berlin-Two. He’s a lieutenant, I believe. Jürgen Luhr.”
“And?”
“Lieutenant Luhr doesn’t feel the prefect is up to the job. He’s moved some of our German assets into play without the prefect’s knowledge. He checked the files on the two missing officers and dispatched men to all locations they might possibly run to. I approved his action. Who knows what those Bruderschaft clowns are really doing. A little competition might speed up the capture.”
“I’m surprised that these policemen were able to escape at all,” Horn remarked.
Smuts shifted uncomfortably. “I did a little checking on my own, sir. The man who betrayed us—Hauer—he’s quite an officer, it seems. An ex-soldier. Even the young man with him was decorated for bravery.”
Horn raised a long, crooked finger in Smuts’s tanned face. “Never underestimate the German soldier, Pieter. He is the toughest in the world. Let this be a lesson to you.”
Smuts colored. “Yes, sir.”
“Keep me posted hourly. I’m anxious to see how this ex-soldier does.”
“You almost sound as if you want them to escape.”
“Nonsense, Pieter. By getting hold of the Spandau papers, we might well buy ourselves extra time. At least we can keep the Russians and the Jews out of our business, if not the British. But that’s it, you see. At this moment MI-5, the KGB, and the Mossad must be scouring Berlin for our two German policemen, yet so far they have failed to capture them. If these men live up to their racial heritage, I suspect they will manage to evade their pursuers. In the end we will have to find them ourselves.”
The Afrikaner nodded. “I’ll find them.”
Horn smiled coldly. “I know you will, Pieter. If this Hauer but knew you as I do, he would already have given himself up.”
NINE (#ulink_3ed549a4-a6e3-5a67-96c2-2e816ab80a90)
10:35P.M.Goethestrasse: West Berlin
“There,” Hauer grunted. He had wedged Hans’s Volkswagen so tightly between two parked cars that the one behind would have to be moved to reveal the license plate. “All right, where’s the house?”
“I’m not sure,” Hans replied, peering through his window. “I’ve never been here before.”
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
Hauer stared in disbelief. “So why are we here?”
“Because it’s just what you asked for—a place we can’t be traced to.”
Hans climbed out of the VW and started up the deserted street, skirting the pools of light from the street lamps. “That’s it,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder. Hauer followed a few paces behind. “See it? Eleven-fifty.”
“Quiet!” said Hauer. “You’ll wake the whole block.”
Hans was already halfway up the walk. He rapped loudly on the front door, waited half a minute, then knocked again. Finally, a muffled voice came from behind the wood.
“I’m coming already!”
Someone fumbled with the latch, then the door opened wide. Standing in a pair of blue silk pajamas, a tiny man with silver hair and a tuft of beard squinted through the darkness. He reached for a light switch.
“Please leave the light off, Herr Ochs,” Hans said.
“What? Who are you?” Finally the uniform registered in the old man’s brain. “Polizei,” he murmured. “Is there some problem?”
Hans stepped closer. He took the tattered business card from his pocket and handed it to the old man. “I don’t know if you remember me, Herr Ochs, but you said that if I ever needed a favor—”
“Gott im Himmel!” Ochs cried, his eyes wide. “Sergeant Apfel!”
Hans nodded. “That’s right. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but there’s an emergency. My captain and I need to make some telephone calls. We can’t use the station just now—”
“Say no more, Sergeant. Come inside. Did I not tell you? Ben Ochs knows how to return a favor. And what a favor! Bernice!”
An even tinier gray-haired woman appeared behind Ochs. She stared at the uniforms with trepidation. “What is it, Benjamin?”
“It’s young Hans Apfel! He needs our help. Get your slippers, Bernice. We’ll need some tea and …” Ochs trailed off, noticing the large bruise at the base of Hans’s skull, a souvenir of Rolf’s lead pipe. “Something stronger, I think.”
“Please,” said Hans, following the old man inside, “all we need is a telephone.”
“Nonsense, you look terrible. You need food, and something to calm your nerves. Bernice?”
Frau Ochs bustled into the kitchen, talking all the way. “There’s chicken in the refrigerator, boys, and cabbage too. It’s no feast, but this is very short notice.”
The old tailor pulled two chairs from beneath the kitchen table; Hans immediately collapsed into one. The Ochses’ kindness seemed otherworldly after the events of the past four hours. Hans felt as if he’d been running for days.
Hauer had been too amazed by the warm reception to say anything. Summoning a smile, he extended his hand to Ochs. “Guten Abend, Herr Ochs. I’m Captain Dieter Hauer.”
Ochs nodded respectfully.
“I’m afraid Hans is right. A rather special situation has arisen. I myself believe it’s just another of the endless exercises they put us through, but of course we never know for sure. If we could just use your telephone for a few minutes, we would be gone before you know it.”
Ochs nodded again, slower this time. “You are a poor liar, Captain. But I count that in your favor. Most honest men make poor liars. If you’re anything like your young friend, you are always welcome in my house. This boy”—Ochs grinned and patted Hans on the shoulder—“this boy saved my life. Three years ago I was trapped in a burning car, and Hans was the only man who had the nerve to get me out.”
The light of realization dawned on Hauer’s face. Only now did he notice the old man’s left hand; it was withered and covered with scar tissue from a deep burn.
Ochs shook his head in wonder. “I thought he was trying to kill me! He blasted out the window right over my head!” The old man laughed and stepped over to the counter. “Here is the chicken,” he said. Then he held up a dark bottle his wife had pulled from a high cabinet. “And here is some bromfn—brandy—for the nerves. We’ll leave you to your business now. Come along, Bernice.” Taking his wife under his silk-covered arm, Benjamin Ochs left the kitchen without looking back.
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