12 Drummers Drumming

by Diana Deverell

  Krüger reached past her to pick up a piece of firewood. He opened the stove door and tossed in the stick. “Of course, I cannot guarantee your father’s safety on a commercial flight.”

  The wood must have been dry. Immediately there was a crackle and light flared from the door. Krüger’s glasses blazed with the reflection.

  My eyes went to the cassette player. It was an older model, boxy with a shiny silver exterior. The brand name shimmered in the firelight: Toshiba. Same brand that had contained the bomb which blew apart Pan Am 103. Another unmistakable message for anyone who’d spent years following up on that explosion. The next incident was all arranged. And it would happen soon.

  I hadn’t expected that. Logic dictated that Krüger would prefer to be firmly on U.S. soil before the next bomb detonated. He’d be better able to distance himself from the disaster, physically and politically. I’d assumed his only real goal was self-preservation. I’d been wrong. Protecting himself was essential to Krüger. But so was making me suffer.

  A commercial airliner would blow up while my father was still his hostage. If I did nothing to prevent the explosion, I’d become an accomplice to the terror I’d spent my professional life fighting. Yet if I alerted anyone to the danger, Krüger would make sure my father died.

  Now, he closed the stove door and came back to the table. “A simple choice.”

  The muscles tightened in my chest. I struggled for air, suffocated by my dawning realization that I had no way out of his trap. His scheme wasn’t invulnerable—no intricate strategy was. But I wouldn’t quickly spot the points of weakness. He’d guaranteed that with his fanatic attention to detail. And the predatory patience with which he’d stalked me, waiting for this moment. He could predict my every move.

  He was watching me now, his face bland. He looked and acted like a dispassionate technician who might design pollution-free processes for the paper industry. But I’d heard his deceptively courteous voice. I’d looked into his muddy eyes. I knew Reinhardt Krüger was more than an inventive draftsman. He was a brilliant engineer of death. And he’d turned his evil genius on me.

  I felt it then, a rage so visceral I couldn’t speak. This man might not brutalize me physically. But he would destroy everything I held dear. No matter which awful choice I made.

  Then the rage faded, blotted out by anguish.

  He’d beaten me. Utterly. Exactly as he’d planned to do.

  I drew in a shuddering breath. “Give me something I can send to Washington,” I said. “Something good.”

  19

  I left Krüger’s cabin at seven. The Sunday evening temperature had dropped, though the air remained moist. Mist glazed the frozen roads. I drove with my hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock, as if my father were coaching from the seat beside me.

  “Got a film of ice on the asphalt tonight,” I said aloud in my imitation-airline-pilot voice. “We’ll hold to a steady pace, keeping an eye out for cross traffic. We’ll be looking to avoid your sudden moves on this trip.” I added a crinkly-eyed chuckle. “So don’t worry about a little turbulence up ahead. No danger we’ll be spinning out of control.” I imagined my father laughing, then tipping his hat brim down to cover his eyes, faking sleep. Only a too-firm grip on the right-hand armrest would give him away. I kept my bright chatter up for the next two hours, muscles tensed and mouth loose for periodic volleys at my nonexistent companion. It kept me from thinking about Stefan.

  For more than a decade, he’d been the love of my life. Yet I hadn’t known him at all. I’d deal later with that crippling truth. Now I had to stay strong to help my father. I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—think about Stefan.

  On the south side of Berlin, I followed airport signs to the long-term lot at Schönefeld and parked the Ford with the keys under the seat, as Krüger had instructed me to do. I found a pay phone in the terminal and called an answering machine to leave the signal for Erika with a coded reference to my location. If I’d had any other way to communicate safely with Harry, I would have used it. I would never have contacted Erika again. But I was out of options. I had to go through her. I went outside to wait for her to retrieve my message and dispatch someone to pick me up.

  I couldn’t linger inside the terminal. My photo might be posted in the gallery of wanted women terrorists. For sure the FBI would have passed my description to all airport personnel. Outdoors, I huddled in a bus shelter, while around me foulscented mist haloed the streetlights and dulled the sheen of passing cars. An interior fog seeped through me, dimming my vision, muffling sounds, coating my tongue with mud. It was as if Krüger’s malevolence had corrupted everything in the world. Including me. I knew he was going to kill more people. Yet I would do nothing to stop him.

  I shuddered, hugging the borrowed coat around me. The fur smelled rankly of moth crystals and the ancient pelts were too thin to keep out the damp chill. I stood there, growing colder and more exhausted each minute. When the Jetta eased up to the curb at nine-thirty, I collapsed into the passenger seat. Erika was behind the wheel. I kept my eyes straight ahead, my hands busy with my seat belt.

  She cut smoothly back into traffic. After a minute, she said, “We underestimated Krüger, I admit that.”

  “You can hardly deny it,” I said. “He knew Stefan wasn’t dead. And he knew everything about me.” My throat tightened, choking off my voice.

  “Clearly, he’s been interested in you since you became involved with Stefan.”

  “Interested? I guess he’s been ‘interested.’ If I’d known sooner . . .” I ran a hand over my scalp. “It didn’t occur to any of you that my father might need protection?”

  “As soon as Stefan realized you were going to meet with Krüger, he demanded a guard for your father. But by the time our man in the States got into position, your father had disappeared.”

  “Why are you surprised?”

  She glanced over at me. Awareness gleamed behind those cool eyes. “You can’t believe Stefan—”

  “They’re brothers, aren’t they? A fact Stefan failed to mention to me.” My voice was shrill and I turned away from her gaze. We were traveling west from the airport on a broad city street. Christmas decorations still hung from the lampposts, the season of Brotherly Love in Europe extending into the first week of the New Year. Glass storefronts shone below a rush of neon, the colored lights dancing off the icy sidewalks in front. I forced myself to breathe calmly, regain control.

  Erika got us northbound on the motorway. Then she said, “Did Krüger claim that Stefan was working with him?”

  I replied with undisguised sarcasm. “He pretended that he fears Stefan so much, he has to use me for a shield.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I’m taking you to our operations center.”

  “Operations center?” The phrase jarred me.

  “Nothing grand. A building that Stefan leased and stocked last month, before Global 500 exploded.” She negotiated an exit near Steglitz. “You and I need to sit down, review everything that happened. Then we can decide how best to handle it.”

  “We can decide? There’s no ‘we’ in this anymore. Krüger’s seen to that. There’s only him and me.”

  “You can’t deal with Krüger on your own,” she said.

  “You can’t help me.”

  “You called me.” Erika turned off the main road into an industrial park. The entryway was slick under the jaundiced streetlights. “Tell me what you want.”

  I pulled a crumpled paper from my pocket and waved it at her. “Get this message to Harry Martin.”

  She parked in front of a squat structure at the end of a row of rectangular storage facilities. The building was separated from its nearest neighbor by a graveled field, half of it covered by pallets filled with ornamental cinder blocks. She unlocked the entry door and I followed her into a warehouse. The only light drifted down from the skylights above, the faint yellow of the outside security lights reflected from the clouds to cast a ghostly glow on the concrete floor below. Off
to my left, I saw a pair of telephone poles lying like forgotten pick-up-sticks near a huge wooden spool empty of cable. The air smelled faintly of creosote.

  I trailed Erika toward a cluster of objects at the rear, the staccato sound of our footsteps disappearing into the emptiness. She snapped a switch and a trio of fluorescent shop lights on the back wall sluggishly blinked up to full power, illuminating a rudimentary kitchen. The only furniture was the metal-legged rectangular table in front of us and a half-dozen folding chairs. Erika draped her jacket over one, then sat.

  I sat, too, and slid my paper across the table to her.

  Erika picked it up. “Krüger wants a U.S. military flight from Templehof?”

  I nodded.

  Her eyes went back to the paper.

  Mine roved the shadows beyond our island of blue-white light. A pair of cubicles had been partitioned off in the back corner, leaving the rest of the enormous room virtually empty. Erika had referred to this place as their “operations center,” but it contained none of the snaky electrical cords and high-tech communications equipment usually associated with that term. The absence underscored with bold, black marker the one fact about this mission I tended to treat too lightly. Holger Sorensen was behind it.

  Holger’s strength was people, not electronics. He traded for any data he needed from the big-time spy agencies. And he’d proved long ago that a single gem from a field agent could buy a roomful of satellite photos. This “center” typified the way he structured his operations—low on technology, high on human intelligence, comfort irrelevant.

  Erika flattened the paper on the table and looked up at me. “In return for this information, they’ll send the plane.”

  It wasn’t a question. Krüger had named an Army intelligence analyst who’d spied for Department Nine while working in West Berlin from 1982 to 1984. He’d gone on to Fort Huachuca, where he copied classified Star Wars documents and passed them back to his HVA contact. Now he was happily retired, with a military pension and a secret stash from HVA. Just the type of guy the FBI loved to make miserable.

  And Krüger promised he’d give up more traitor Americans when he was safe there, collecting the high price in future security he’d demanded.

  I said, “If this is legitimate, Krüger can write his own ticket.”

  “Information like this will ultimately make him powerful,” Erika agreed. “And dangerous to you. I fear that getting him to the U.S. won’t end your problems.”

  “I can’t sacrifice my father.”

  “Of course not.” Erika kept her eyes on my face. “But you have reached one incorrect conclusion. Stefan did not betray you to his half brother.” Her last sentence echoed off the walls, it was so heavily powered by conviction.

  He’d made a fool of Erika, too. “Stefan’s a great lay,” I said, “but don’t let the sex blind you to the facts.”

  Erika leaned closer, her voice low and compelling. “Two incorrect conclusions. Stefan Krajewski has never been my lover. Don’t let that misconception blind you to the truth.”

  “The truth? If you weren’t sleeping with him, what was going on in my hotel room the first time I met you?”

  “When you showed up in Brussels, I resented the intrusion. I wanted you to feel excluded. I acted badly.”

  “Acted?” I repeated stupidly.

  “I apologize for misleading you then.” The bright light on her face washed the skin to pure white, without shadow. In that snowy expanse, her eyes glowed indigo, that bottomless shade of blue that the sky takes on at twilight.

  I looked for the duplicity that had to be there. But I couldn’t see it. Only her calm assessment of me.

  I’d been so certain about Stefan and Erika. And if Stefan had broken faith with me in that way, I had to assume he’d deceived me in every way.

  But if he and Erika hadn’t . . .

  I’d been holding my breath. I inhaled a huge draft of air through my mouth, my lungs expanding as if a weight had been lifted off me. She was telling the truth. I saw it in her eyes, knew it with my heart. Stefan hadn’t betrayed me.

  Erika made a sound, a delicate mutter of satisfaction. As if she’d seen something in my expression that pleased her. “Krüger was not pretending to fear Stefan,” she said, her voice intense. “Their enmity is a fact—one that can be verified. Krüger’s mother was a German Communist, forced by the Nazis to spend the war as slave labor in one of their Baltic factories. That’s where she met Tadeusz Krajewski, sent there from Poland for similar reasons. They were both sixteen years old and they quickly became close. When the war ended, Gerda Krüger was pregnant with Krajewski’s son, but she refused to go to Poland. She’d paid her dues and she saw a bright future for herself in the Communist GDR. Though Tadeusz Krajewski married someone else, he didn’t break contact with Gerda’s child. But no one who saw him with his two sons could doubt which one he loved more.”

  Lifelong hatred rooted in something so banal as a father’s preference for a younger son. For Stefan. I said slowly, “And that rivalry worsened as they became adults.”

  “Aggravated by events. The father launched both boys on careers in sister foreign intelligence agencies. For many years their adult relationship was cool, but not hostile.”

  Erika kept her eyes on me as I worked out what had to have happened next. After martial law was instituted in Poland in 1981, both Stefan Krajewski and his father had become disenchanted with the Party. It was then that Stefan began working with Holger Sorensen to end what he considered the greatest evil forced upon Poland by its Soviet masters—cooperation with international terrorism.

  “And then Stefan and Krüger became antagonists,” I concluded.

  “Yes,” Erika said. “You were there when Stefan changed sides. You know he held nothing back when he fought that battle.”

  “Why didn’t Stefan tell me about Krüger?”

  “Ask him.”

  “But you could have told me they were brothers. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Stefan insisted.”

  “And you went along with that?”

  “I objected. I was overruled.”

  “But keeping that information from me—”

  “Unwise. I agree. But now you know.” Erika leaned back and the metal chair complained. “It was in 1986, at about the same time that you met Stefan, that Reinhardt Krüger became embroiled in terrorist activities. Of course, Stefan didn’t know that then.”

  “How do you know it now?” I asked.

  “It’s all in the Stasi files.”

  I made a sound of disbelief. “Krüger’s too smart for that. He’d have cleaned out his files.”

  “True, he destroyed his personal files. But alert Germans preserved a two-hundred-kilometer shelf of Stasi records.” She laughed. “Such pedants in the Ministry of State Security. They wrote everything down. From the secondary files and expense reimbursement records, we’ve pieced together a clear picture of Krüger’s activities. His first terrorist action was the bombing of the LaBelle discotheque in Berlin. He was in on the planning from the beginning.”

  I spoke slowly. “What Stefan and I did in 1986 was instrumental in proving Qadhafi was behind the Berlin disco bombing.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And some people were certain that Stefan had first learned of that connection from his half brother. When the U.S. attacked Libya in retaliation—”

  I finished her sentence. “Krüger’s career was jeopardized.”

  “Not only his career,” Erika said. “His life. Libyan intelligence wanted a scapegoat.”

  “And they picked Krüger.”

  “Though in fact he wasn’t guilty. He had never revealed that information to Stefan.”

  “But Krüger assumed Stefan had set him up to look guilty.”

  “Because that’s what Krüger would have done.” Erika’s expression was grim. “He survived. He managed to implicate a young Libyan named Muhammed Asher. That one was assassinated in Berlin by Libyan intelligence—with obvious St
asi assistance. And Krüger became rabidly involved in terrorism.”

  “To prove his loyalty,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “Partly. And it’s his natural inclination. He likes to attack planes.” She held up three fingers of her left hand, then bent them, one by one, as she ran down the list. “The Pan Am hijacking at Karachi. The UTA flight from Brazzaville. Pan Am 103. And those are only the crimes we can prove conclusively.”

  “I don’t understand.” I rubbed my hand over my scalp again. “If there’s proof, why don’t the Germans arrest him?”

  “Their prosecutors build cases only against the living. The German investigators disregarded references to Reinhardt Krüger, who by 1990 was conveniently dead. It is my friends”— Erika paused so that I’d understand she meant the Mossad— “who scrutinized all evidence of institutional support for terrorism. They indicted the Stasi itself, and in so doing, they collected the clues which so dramatically implicate Krüger.”

  I said, “Harry discounted the idea of a single evil fiend within the Stasi, masterminding terrorist plots.”

  “Harry hasn’t met Reinhardt Krüger.”

  20

  Erika reached across the table. Her fingertips were cool on the back of my hand. “We must get to him. Before he kills more people.”

  The same gesture, the same intimate tones that Krüger had used only hours before. The contrast between them was electrifying. Erika’s fierce vitality made her touch galvanic, sending a hot rush to my brain. Get him. Get Krüger. Stop that bomb from going off.

  And then the rush vanished. “My father . . .” My voice faded away. I shivered. The creosote-tinged air had grown colder. I clenched my teeth to stop them from chattering. Stefan was on my side, not Krüger’s. But that was no help to me now. My situation was hopeless. I couldn’t escape from Krüger’s trap in time.

  Erika tapped the paper against the tabletop. “You must send this message. Order the jet for Wednesday at Templehof. It is likely that Krüger will know you’ve done that. He has people in the States reporting back to him. For at least the next forty-eight hours he won’t be worrying about you. We will have time to get your father out of there.”