by Tom DeLonge
She checked behind her, then scanned the street, looking for a department store. She could have kicked herself for coming so far downtown. If she’d gone straight up Fifth Avenue, she would have had plenty of options, but down here … She spotted an Army-Navy store, next to a burger joint. It would have to do.
She crossed the street at a staggering jog, feigning exhaustion, looking anxiously over her shoulder. Cook was following, eyes locked on, talking into his radio again, his manner calm, deliberate. Unhurried. He probably figured he had her. She stumbled, playing up her all too real panic and uncertainty, dragging one foot as if she had twisted her ankle. As she did so, she discreetly unfastened her conspicuous red coat. She tried to see as much of the Army-Navy store’s interior through its plate glass windows as she could. Once inside, she was going to have to move fast.
She labored with the heavy door, like she was a hundred-years old, but as soon as she was inside, she bolted like a rabbit for the back, squeezing book and purse under her sweater as she shed her coat and snatched the ridiculous wig from her head, putting both on a manikin in the women’s section, its back to the main doors. Noting that the clerk was busy with another customer, she pulled a long Navy Officer’s coat—black wool with brass buttons—off a rack and shrugged into it. Without pausing, she returned to the front door, past a counter covered with folding knives and defused hand grenades, where she snatched a pair of cheap shades off a rack, her body language transforming as she pressed her phone against her ear. She’d been cowed and desperate when she came in, limping and scared, but now she was upright and purposeful, barking commands to an imaginary assistant over the phone in the thick New Jersey accent she’d long ago learned to turn off. Timika Mars stepped back out into the street another person entirely. It took all her strength not to look at him as she brushed against Cook in the doorway.
He looked right past her.
Then she was out, walking briskly, as if late for a meeting, looking up and down the street for a cab. Cook would be scanning the store for a woman with lustrous ringleted hair and a scarlet coat. She had bought herself a few seconds—a minute at most—but if he came looking for her now, she was just another sleek-headed black woman on the sidewalk, unrecognizable unless he looked her in the face.
She strode off, still barking into the phone.
“I told you I couldn’t make no four o’clock sales meeting, so you’d better unarrange it,” she said, improvising. “You hear what I’m saying? And if DeMarco doesn’t like it, he can kiss my shapely …”
And the Academy Award goes to …
A cab rounded the corner onto Macdougal, its roof light on. She stuck her arm out like she’d ordered the cab an hour ago, then slid into the back seat. She didn’t look back to the army surplus store doors until they were pulling away.
Timika had the cab circle the block where the Debunktion office sat, twice. As best she could tell, the coast was clear. Her new bridge officer’s coat looked pretty sharp too, she decided. When this was all over, she’d go back and pay for it. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. A part of her feared that was wishful thinking, but she was elated at her escape and pushed the thought away.
She paid and got out at the parking garage where she’d left Dion’s car. Nothing suggested anyone had been snooping around it. She doubted Cook and his buddies even knew which car was hers. The more she thought about it, the more she thought that while these men were serious and efficient, their search of her office and their attempt to recover the book from her—assuming that was indeed their mission—had been improvised. It felt unplanned, hasty. Clumsy, even. They may be building a file on her right now, but she might still have the advantage of them.
Once safely inside the Corolla and heading down Broadway, she called Marvin and he picked up on the first ring, sounding jittery. She asked if he and Audrey were okay and, satisfied on that score, told him to go to the coffee shop where they had intended to kill part of the morning. Then she called Dion and got his voice mail.
“Listen hon,” she said. “Can’t make Atlantic City after all. Something has come up at work and I’m gonna have to go out of town for a couple of days. I’ll try to look after the car.”
She hesitated, then hung up without saying anything more. The less he knew, the safer he would be. Then she scrolled through the phone and dialed a different number.
“Officer Brown,” said the voice at the other end.
“Hey, James, this is Timika Mars.”
“Mars?” he said. He sounded surprised. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“That case you were working when I saw you this morning,” she said. “You got a name for the victim?”
“Not yet. Whoever shot him took his wallet. Why?”
“Try Jerzy Aaron Stern,” she said, her eyes on the passenger seat where the battered book sat.
“Yeah?” he replied. “Why?”
“Just a hunch.”
“The city has eight and a half million people,” he said. “That’s quite a hunch.”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice edged with something like sadness. “He wasn’t from around here. I’ll check in, James.”
She turned the phone off and took the battery out. When she spotted a Radio Shack, she parked illegally, ducked inside and bought two burner phones with a hundred dollars on each. One, she pocketed. After she recorded the number for the second phone, she brandished it in her hand as she flagged down a cab. She moved alongside the driver’s window.
“Are you getting in or what?” said the turbaned driver.
She handed him the burner.
“You know Joe’s on Thirteenth?”
“This is a cab, not a courier service,” said the cabbie.
“And this is a fifty dollar bill,” she returned. It was turning into an expensive day. “Ask for Marvin or Audrey. No one else.”
The taxi pulled away and she returned to Dion’s vehicle. It was time to hit the road.
But the road to where?
She didn’t know, but it would be a good start if she put some distance between herself and the city. She took Canal Street to the Holland Tunnel and Interstate 78, heading west, her hands firm on the wheel her mind turning events over and over like a spade in dark earth. Jerzy Stern’s journey—and it had been a long and strange one—was over. Hers was just beginning.
14
JERZY
Poland, 1944
WITH ISHMAEL GONE AND THE MACHINE GUNS around the perimeter firing at me, it took no great courage to crawl through the fence and sprint blindly across the minefield. I went around the first mine I saw and leapt over another, but I barely cared. Inside, I was already dead. That I made it to the tree line was, I suppose, a matter of extraordinary good luck, but I felt no relief or satisfaction. My brother, my dearest companion, my sole friend in all the world, the final remnant of my family and last piece of what my life had been, was dead, and I could feel nothing but grief and rage and loss.
They came after me, but the woods were dense and the ground too hard for tracks. Once, I heard dogs, but for whatever reason, they did not pick up my scent, and after the first day, I never heard them again. Perhaps the strange experiments in the mine had confused the hounds’ senses, as old Aizinberg had said.
I escaped. A bleak triumph it was. I had nothing to wear but the clothes I’d woken up in, inadequate for a Polish winter. The best thing that could be said about my meager rations is that I was used to going hungry. For the first two days, I kept walking in what I thought was a straight line, just trying to get away from the camp. From time to time, I could hear the sounds of a train, but knew that trying to stowaway onboard would surely get me caught, and even if the trains didn’t go back to the camps, where was I to go? It was not as if I could take a locomotive to Switzerland. I was safer alone in the woods.
I slept in a hollow tree beside a frozen stream, that first night, and woke so weak for lack of food that I determined to find the village I had heard the guards talk of: Lud
wikowice. I dared not talk to anyone, since no one could be trusted not to turn me over to the Nazis merely for an increase of their butter rations, but I hoped to find larders or fields from which I might steal, or smokehouses I could plunder after dark. I walked for hours, disoriented by grief, hunger, and the strange uniformity of the forest. Eventually I realized that I had traced a broad circle, arriving back almost where I had begun. Demoralized to the point of despair, I lay down again and would have slept, were it not for a pair of rabbits not twenty yards away.
I had not eaten meat in over a year, and the thought of trapping and eating them gave me the energy to get up and stay awake. Looking back, I think those rabbits may have saved my life, though I had neither the skill nor the tools to catch them. I was succumbing to cold, hunger and exhaustion, and had I gone to sleep then, I think I would never have awoken. Instead, I ate some snow and ice, then followed the loping rabbits through the snow and came to a spot where I could smell wood smoke. A hundred yards ahead, the trees seemed to thin, and though I was almost crawling by then, I found myself looking down on the houses of a village.
One of them had a shed in the small field at the back. I was able to make my way down, fairly sure that I had not been seen. The door to the shed was unlocked, and I slipped inside, glad to get out of the wind.
Inside were rusty farm implements, old tools, bags of seeds and, to my astonishment and joy, a sack of potatoes. I rubbed the dirt off their skins and ate four uncooked, filling my belly as it had not been for years, then washed it down with bitter rainwater from a barrel and curled up on the shed’s wooden floor.
I don’t know how long I slept. When I awoke, it was dark, and there was an apple beside my head. For a long moment, I lay there looking at it, marveling not that I had food, but that someone had seen me and not killed me or turned me over to those who would. It was a gift from God, and it fed my bruised and broken soul. When I found a knife in one of the tool crates, I cut the apple in half, then in quarters. I ate one quarter, put two in my pockets, and left the fourth exactly where the apple had been, then crept out into the cold night, running bent over into the blackness of the forest.
For an hour, I wandered the woods, always keeping a sense of how close I was to the village, listening to the soft hoot of the big gray owls that haunted the forest. Then I found a hollow stick, and used the knife I had borrowed from the shed to peel off the bark. I whittled one end and made a few small holes, so that when you blew in one end, the pipe made a low, reedy note not unlike the owls. I ate what was left of my apple and then, when the moon sank and dawn was near, returned to the garden shed on the edge of the village. I left the pipe I’d made outside the door in payment for my lodging, then crept inside and went to sleep.
For ten days, this was how I lived, hiding out in the woods at night, sleeping in the shed during the day, leaving whatever meager tokens I could find or fashion in the forest, in the desperate hope that whoever owned the shed would not turn me in. Each day, I woke to some small gift of food, sometimes a piece of bread, sometimes a hunk of cheese, once a leg of cold goat meat, which was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. They never brought pork, and though I had peeled the yellow star off my jacket, its shape was still visible. Twice I considered lying awake to see who my secret benefactor was, but decided against it. I was in a fairy story, and spying would only break the spell. I had had enough reality for a lifetime.
One day, I woke to find a piece of candied fruit wrapped with a ribbon, and with it, a candle and matches. Hanukkah had passed uncelebrated. The memory of all I had lost was like a great weight on my chest, but I wept tears of gratitude for the candy and the candle, and the fact that someone wanted me to be happy.
Soon after that, as we crossed into the New Year, I started to hear the rumble of what I first thought was thunder, but which turned out to be guns. The Russians were coming. I didn’t know it yet, but much of Eastern Poland had already fallen before them, and though lower Silesia would fight on for another month or so, the Germans were pulling out of the Wenceslas mine. In spite of the harrying by allied bombers, the trains seemed to be running constantly. One day, as I wandered the edge of the woods, not so very far from the minefield and the fenced henge where Ishmael had died, I came across a work detail clearing an old airstrip of weeds. I kept my distance, fighting the urge to sprint headlong into the trees and never look back, and watched them work until a pair of trucks and a half-track came to collect them. Before they left, they inspected the strip, and when the officer in charge turned and squinted down the pale concrete, I saw his face and knew him.
It was Ungerleider, the handsome, blond captain who had ordered the guns to fire upon us when we had finished rigging the cables above the chamber with the bell. It was the man who killed my brother.
I got to my feet, trembling with a rage that left me incapable of thought. I stepped out of the trees, just as he turned away and clambered into the half-track. Shouting at him, I began to run blindly, stupidly toward him. The engines drowned out my cries, thank God, and by the time I had come to my senses, they were driving away, their wheels spitting snow. I stood staring after them, tears running down my cheeks.
Gradually, I realized how cold I was, and went back into the woods. I now knew its paths and hollows as well as any house I’d ever lived in, but as I walked back toward the village and the shed that had become my home, my outrage turned to grim determination. I did not know how, but I would find a way to strike back at that man for what he had done to my people and, most importantly, to my brother.
That night, instead of roaming the woods, I went quietly to the house by the shed where I had been sleeping. When I was sure there were no neighbors to see me, I went quickly to the back door and knocked. I had no idea who would answer. Still, I was surprised when an elderly lady in a housecoat and apron opened the door.
She looked not the least bit surprised or upset, her face neutral as she looked me up and down, and then she stood aside, peering over my shoulder as she admitted me to a stark, scrubbed kitchen. Satisfied we had not been seen, she closed the door behind me and looked me over again.
“Too cold for the woods tonight?” she asked in Polish.
“No,” I said. “I came to say thank you.”
She considered this.
“Sit,” she said. “I have cocoa. Powdered. No milk. But it is hot and sweet.”
I did as I was told.
“You were in the mine?” she said, not looking at me.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Just you, or you had family there?”
I opened my mouth to speak and found I could not. Since the moment my brother died, I had not spoken a word to another person. I stared at her, my eyes brimming with tears, shaking my head and stammering apologies.
She did not embrace me, but she laid her hands on my shoulders, and put her face close to mine and shushed me softly, as Ishmael might have done, so that for a long time I just sat there, weeping.
“What is your name, child?” she asked at last.
I hadn’t thought of myself as a child for a long time, and not only because I was now almost fifteen. That dried my tears.
“Jerzy,” I said.
“German?” she asked.
“Polish,” I said.
She managed a half smile then.
“Welcome, Jerzy,” she said. “I am Mrs. Habernicht, a name that has made the last five years a fraction easier around here, but you can call me Olga. My husband was German. Thank the Lord he died before all this,” she said, breaking from me and bustling about the kitchen as she prepared the cocoa.
“They are leaving,” I said.
“Soon,” she said, “yes.” Something in my face gave me away. She thrust the cup into my hands with a scowl. “And you want revenge before they go.”
“Yes,” I said, my former bitter anger returning so that the single word, “yes,” had a hardness and certainty I had not believed myself capable of.
She nodded,
thoughtfully.
“Understandable,” she concluded. “The army will be here soon.”
“The Russians?” I asked. I didn’t like the idea. The Russians scared me. Before the war, my father had said it was only a matter of time before they came, with or without the Germans’ support.
She shook her head dismissively.
“The Polish army!” she exclaimed. “They have been fighting in the East. They would have liberated Warsaw, if the Reds had delivered on their promises. They will be here soon. Then we shall see.”
“There are things in the mine,” I began, uncertain. “Dangerous things. The Germans will try to get them out.”
She sipped her cocoa, and I imitated her. It was the most delicious thing I had tasted in years.
“Planning a little sabotage, eh?” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed, though I hadn’t been until that moment.
She nodded again, and I wondered if she might be a little bit crazy.
“We shall have to see about that,” she said.
15
ALAN
Camp Leatherneck Marine, Helmund Province, Afghanistan
THE UNSIGNED RESIGNATION LETTER SAT IN HIS INSIDE pocket as the C-130J took off from Leatherneck. Hatcher hadn’t asked for it, but as they took their seats, Alan’s jacket had bulged, and the CIA man had smiled that distant, private smile of his and said nothing.
Alan had flown in C-130s modified to feel more like a civilian aircraft, with plush, forward facing seats, but this was a conventional troop flight operated by VMGR-252 that, in a series of hops, would eventually wend its way back to Cherry Point, North Carolina. The trip would refuel in Souda Bay, Greece. As long as they eventually made it stateside, or to wherever they had been FRAGG’d, the troops onboard didn’t seem to care. Alan was edgy. He didn’t like not knowing what was going on.
He sat in one of the red mesh troop seats that lined the bare fuselage walls, facing into the body of the aircraft where the luggage had been strapped to a plastic-wrapped pallet. The airplane was basic and functional, and if there was any question that they were in a military plane, in what was still technically a combat zone, the takeoff removed any doubt. Instead of the slow and graceful climb to altitude civilians enjoyed, the C-130J pulled up in a great stomach churning surge, like a roller coaster car clanking up to its highest point, but at 120 knots and accelerating. There had been no hostile fire on flights from Airbase NAIA in months, but the pilot was taking no chances. As the nose rose still higher, Alan tipped sideways in his seat. He gave Hatcher a sidelong glance, but if the gut-spinning climb was bothering the other man, he wasn’t letting it show.
