by Iles, Greg
In the hallway outside the apartment, Misha inserted a hair-thin tool into the door lock and picked it with ease. Eva had carelessly left the bolt unshot when her friends left but she had fastened the chain. Misha put his deceptively’ narrow shoulder against the door and leaned into it hard, yanking the chain’s anchor-plate from the doorjamb.
The noise of the screws pulling loose was minimal, but enough to wake the sleeping cabbie shift on the sofa.
Misha’s ears detected the rustle, and after his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he discerned the supine form. He crossed the room silently and stared down. Bruises and a badly blackened eye distorted Ernst’s face, but Misha recognized the old man who had fought so tenaciously outside his taxi on the previous night. As Misha stared, Ernst’s eyes fluttered open. With the dreadful clarity of nightmares the old cabbie recognized the Russian above him. He opened his mouth to scream a warning to Eva, but Misha snatched a threadbare pillow from the couch and slammed it over Ernst’s contorted face, pressing down with all his strength.
In the bathroom Eva heard nothing. The battle being fought in her front room was desperate but soundless. Just when Misha felt the old man’s struggles begin to subside, a hand shot upward and locked around his throat in a maniacal death grip. The Russian struggled to hold the smothering pillow in place, not believing the old man’s strength. The bony fingers clutching his throat seemed to be probing for some hollow place where they could gain sufficient purchase to crush his windpipe. Misha had had enough. The pillow had seemed a good idea at first, but it was obviously too slow for this old lion. Fighting to breathe, he held the pillow in place with his right hand and drew his stiletto from its ankle sheath with his left.
A veteran of the streets, Ernst the cabbie knew what the snick of spring and steel meant, but he could fight no harder than he was already. He felt the cold blade pierce his chest just below the sternum. Misha expertly twisted the blade across the midline marking the passage of the aorta; the old man felt ice turn to fire. He jerked spasmodically, then his wrinkled hands slipped from Misha’s throat.
The Russian gulped in huge lungfuls of air and shook his head to clear it. He had not expected this battle. Then suddenly, as the pillow slipped from the old man’s livid face, Ernst somehow summoned a last measure of energy and cried out—not loudly, but it was enough. Misha looked see Eva’s bedroom door slam shut and hear the click of the bolt shooting home. Cursing, he scrambled around the room’s baseboards until he found the telephone line running from the bedroom. He severed the black wire two seconds after Eva picked up the receiver in her room. Sheathing his knife with a grin, he charged the bedroom door. The bolt did not give.
He stepped back and examined the door. It had a heavy frame with two solid planks crossing in the middle, but it was panelled with four thinner sheets of wood. Aiming at a spot on the upper right panel—just above the knob—Misha kicked hard, splintering the brittle wood. A second kick opened the hole he wanted. He thrust his left hand through the jagged opening, groping for the bolt.
With the sure eye of a seamstress, Eva drove the point of a brass letter opener through the back of the Russian’s left hand. The shriek from the other side of the door did not even sound human. Misha’s spasming hand jerked back through the splintered door panel, taking the letter opener with it.
“Devil’s whore!” he bellowed, wrenching the blade from his punctured hand. “You’re dead!”
Eva did not own a gun, and she was now truly terrified. Her attacker launched his body repeatedly against the door in animal rage. Still the bolt refused to give. Then, suddenly, the bloody hand reappeared through the hole and probed for the bolt. The circular wound in its centre made Eva think of the hand of Christ. Hysterically, she screamed some part of a childhood, prayer and smashed a chair down on the bloody fingers. The crack of bones made her shudder, but it renewed her hope for survival.
Unbelievably, the hand tried for the bolt again. Again Eva brought the chair down, this time on the wrist. Misha howled like a madman. Enraged beyond feeling pain, he withdrew his shattered hand, backed up, and took a flying kick at the spot where he judged the bolt to be. This time the door crashed open.
With tears of terror streaming down her bandaged face, Eva backed toward the bedroom wall, holding the small wooden chair in front of her like a lion tamer. When she collided with her cluttered vanity table, she felt her bladder let go. She froze there, transfixed by the predatory gleam in the Russian’s eyes. Then he moved toward her, breaking the spell. Eva swung the little chair in desperation, but he parried it easily.
Laughing, he snatched the chair from her and tossed it aside. The killing fever was on him now. He closed on the shivering woman, his blood-slickened knife dancing like a cobra’s head. Moaning in mortal terror, Eva lunged blindly, hoping somehow to get past the Russian. She had no chance.
Misha expertly channelled her momentum downward and pinned her against the floor, his boot planted solidly between her shoulder blades. He snatched her hair and jerked her head back, pressing the knife blade to her throat. His fractured bones seared with agony, but he thought he could hold the blade steady long enough to drag it across the stubborn woman’s throat. He dangled the bright blade before her rolling eyes.
“You know whose blood that is, woman?” he rasped in Russian.
“Go on, you bastard!” she screamed. “Do it!”
Misha pressed the blade against her throat, trying for a firmer grip with his wounded hand.
Suddenly, a roar like that of a Black Forest bear filled the room. Misha looked up in surprise. A huge form blocked out the light as it charged toward him. It was Schneider. The big detective had just gotten off the elevator and started toward Ilse’s flat when he heard Misha kick down the bedroom door. He raced toward the noise, saw Ernst’s blood-soaked corpse on the sofa bed, and continued his headlong charge into the bedroom.
Misha flung his arm up and tried to hold his knife steady, but Schneider’s momentum bowled him over like a child. He tumbled back against the vanity and landed in a sitting position. Dazed, he transferred his knife to his good hand and got up onto his knees.
Schneider backed off slightly, crouching in a classic knife fighter’s stance.
Eva scrambled unsteadily to her feet and stood a few feet behind him. “Run!” she shouted. “Here’s the door behind you!”
“Get out!” Schneider ordered.
“I’ll call the police!” Eva cried, searching hysterically for her useless phone.
“Don’t call anyone!” Schneider snapped. “Go downstairs!”
Having regained some of his faculties, Misha rose into a low crouch and moved out from the vanity, smiling. “You should have brought a knife,” he taunted in German. Schneider snatched a sheet from the bed and twisted it quickly around his left arm, as he had been taught to do against an attacking dog. He circled carefully, waiting for the Russian’s lunge. He knew it would come soon. With a cry Misha feinted left, then struck hard, driving the point of the knife upward toward the German’s huge chest.
More like a mongoose than a bear, Schneider parried the outstretched blade with his sheet-wrapped arm and darted out of danger; in the same movement he rammed his mammoth right fist into Misha’s eye socket as the Russian’s body followed his knife thrust. The blow felled Kosov’s assassin like a rotted oak.
When Misha regained consciousness four minutes later, his right eye had swollen shut. A distant voice in his brain told him that he would soon have his vision back, but the voice was wrong. Schneider’s impacting fist had so suddenly increased the pressure inside the Russian’s eyeball that it literally exploded at its weakest point—in Misha’s case around the optic nerve—scrambling the delicate contents into jelly. With his good eye Misha saw the big German speaking into a telephone beyond an open door. He heard the name Rose, but it meant nothing to him.
A dishevelled blond woman with a white bandage on her face knelt beside a sofa, weeping softly. Misha tried to rise, but found that
his feet were tightly bound with telephone wire. His hands, too, were tied. That was really unnecessary, he thought distantly, since his mangled left hand and wrist had swollen to twice normal size. He heard the big man speak angrily into the phone, then slam it down.
Schneider strode through the splintered bedroom door and looked down. “You’ve got some friends coming to see you,” he said. Then he walked back to the woman and laid a comforting hand on her shoulder.
The next thing Misha would remember was four men in white medical coats lifting him onto a stretcher. He felt strangely comforted by this, until he spied the olive-drab of American army uniforms beneath the white. When he tried to rise, a strong hand pressed him firmly back onto the stretcher. The hand belonged to Sergeant Clary. Misha’s short, violent career was over.
Just over a mile to the east of Eva Beers’s apartment, Captain Dmitri Rykov sprinted up to a phone box and punched in the number of KGB headquarters in East Berlin. He got an answer after two rings.
“Is Colonel Kosov back yet?” he asked breathlessly.
“No. Who is this?”
“Rykov. Shut up and listen. Tell Kosov that Borodin followed Major Richardson to his apartment—not just to it but into it! I’m outside now, but I’m going back up. The building’s in Wilmersdorf, about three blocks north of the Fehrberliner Platz. Zahringerstrasse, I think. It’s a really expensive building. Kosov can trace it. Sixth floor. Have you got that?”
“I think so,” replied a nervous voice. “But would you repeat it on tape? I just got the recorder rolling.”
“Christ!” Rykov repeated his message for the tape; then he dashed back into the lobby of Harry Richardson’s apartment building.
7.23 P.m. Surrey, England
Swallow arrived at Michael Burton’s tile-roofed cottage just as it started to rain. She climbed out of the Ford Fiesta which she’d rented at Gatwick Airport and puttered up the walk carrying a bright blue umbrella. In her other arm was a clipboard and a large tin cup—the bona fides of a charity worker. She rang the bell, but there was no answer. Seeing no lights in the windows, she went round back, and there she spied the yellow-lit hothouse that Burton had constructed from second-hand lumber and thick sheets of clear painter’s plastic. The hothouse glowed like an island of summer in the chilly dusk.
Swallow walked right up to it and, finding the door open, stepped inside. It was incongruous somehow: the tall, rangy ex-commando standing among the fragile orchids; the artificial warmth of the hothouse after the bracing evening air. Humidifying heaters hummed somewhere out of sight. Rain pattered on the plastic above their heads. The cloying scent of orchids masked even Swallow’s distinctive perfume. Burton looked up suddenly, startled, but he relaxed when he realized that his visitor was a woman, a village matron by the look of her, probably collecting for the orphans or something. He watched her shake off her umbrella and lean it against a two-by-four stud.
“What can I do for you?” he asked in a kindly voice.
Swallow had meant to shoot him through her handbag, but when her hand went into her purse, the ex-SAS man perceived what almost no one else would, an involuntary narrowing of the eyes, a slight tensing of the arm that suggested a shooting posture.
Swallow was too far away for Burton to attack her—which his training told him to do—so he spun away toward the double-layered plastic wall of the hothouse. He snatched up a sharp spade in his right hand as Swallow fired, hitting him in the shoulder. He dropped behind the line of a planting table, slashed open the plastic wall with the spade, and plunged through it into the yard.
Swallow darted to the opening and knelt in a textbook shooting stance, preparing to fire again as Burton fled across the lawn. But Burton did not flee. Having judged it too long a run over open ground, the ex-commando stabbed the spade back through the plastic, missing Swallow’s throat by inches. Stunned, she aimed at his blurred silhouette and shot him again, this time in the chest. The impact blew Burton backward onto the glistening turf. Swallow stepped through the rent in the plastic wall and stood over him. He was gasping, and she could hear the pitiful wheeze of a sucking chest wound.
The last words Michael Burton spoke were not the names of his ex-wife, his children, his mother, or his brother. In the gathering dusk he raised his head, choked out, “Hess”; then he fell back and gurgled, “Shaw, you bloody bastard.” But only Swallow was there to hear him. Four seconds later she shot him in the forehead, turned, and walked calmly back across the lawn toward the cottage, leaving Burton lying in the rain with potting soil on his fingers and the smell of orchids seeping out of the little hothouse like a soul.
As she drove back toward Gatwick—where she had a seat reserved on the next flight to Tel Aviv—it struck Swallow why Sir Neville Shaw had wanted Michael Burton dead. No doubt it had been Burton who four weeks ago had slipped over the wall of Spandau Prison during the American watch month, stuffed a forged suicide note into Rudolf Hess’s pocket, and strangled him with an electrical cord. But Swallow had no interest in this, unless at some future date it might give her leverage over Shaw. To her the man who murdered Rudolf Hess was merely a way station on the road that led to Jonas Stern.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
7.30 P.m. Zahringerstrasse, West Berlin
Julius Schneider wished he’d taken the stairs. The elevator war, an old hydraulic model, slower than walking. When the doors finally opened, he hurried into the green carpeted hallway and toward the corner that led to apartment number 62. Colonel Rose had given him over the phone. The colonel had said little, no more than a choked command to appear at this address as soon as humanly possible.
When Schneider rounded the corner, he saw Sergeant Clary standing guard outside the door to apartment 62. Clary’s right hand rested on the butt of the .45 in his belt. His taut face revealed nothing. Schneider remembered the young man only an hour before at Eva Beers’s flat, grinning with satisfaction at taking a KGB killer into custody. Clary looked like he couldn’t grin now if he wanted to.
“Inside, sir,” he said as Schneider approached.
“Danke,” the German replied, and passed through the door.
Even if the corpse had not been lying in the foyer, Schneider would have felt the presence of death in the apartment. He smelled gunpowder, and burnt flesh. The overheated air hung with that foul stillness that Schneider had long ago learned to breathe only shallowly when exposed to it. Too much of that reek could poison a man’s soul. But the corpse was there, lying on its stomach. A small bullet hole—probably an entrance wound—stained a dark spot between the shoulder blades. Without hesitation Schneider rolled the body over. Dmitri Rykov stared up with sightless eyes.
“Well?” said a strained voice.
Schneider looked up at Colonel Godfrey Rose. The American had an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. His face was gray and haggard.
“Isn’t he the Russian from the Sonnenallee checkpoint?” Schneider asked.
“Yeah. Clary got a telephoto shot of him standing outside the customs booth.”
Schneider nodded. “Is this why you called me here?”
Rose shook his head, then turned and disappeared down a short dark hallway. The German followed, the familiar weight of mortality in his belly. When he saw what awaited in the bedroom, a cold dread began to seep outward from his heart.
Harry Richardson sat wide-eyed in a wooden chair, facing the bedroom door. He was naked. The chair sat in a pool of blood. Thin nylon ropes bound Harry’s arms and legs to the chair. A pair of navy blue dress socks had been stuffed into his mouth. Schneider immediately noticed the cluster of small red circular marks on Richardson’s chest. Cigarette burns. Schneider had worked his share of child abuse cases. Just below the burns, three lateral slashes trisected the abdomen, not deep, but bloody and probably unbearably painful. But the head was the worst. Carved into Harry Richardson’s high forehead was a jagged red swastika. Rivulets of sticky blood streaked down from the arms of the broken cross, into Harry’s open eyes, acro
ss his lips. Schneider had to remind himself to start breathing again.
“What happened?” he asked in German.
Colonel Rose stood in the far corner of the room, his legs slightly apart, planted as firmly as trees in the earth. He held his arms folded across his chest. “You tell me,” he said, his voice distant, almost nonhuman. “That’s why I called you.”
“Goddamn it,” Schneider muttered, “why haven’t you closed his eyes?”
“You’re the homicide detective. I wanted you to see the crime scene before we touched him. Maybe you’ll see something I don’t.”
Schneider looked around the room. It had been torn to pieces by someone who knew how to conduct a rapid search. “What about your people?”
Rose’s eyes narrowed. “You said you wanted to help me, Schneider. Here’s your chance.”
The German squinted at Rose, then shook his big head slowly. “Colonel, a homicide investigation is a team process. I need fingerprint men, photographers, forensic technicians—”
“I don’t care about all that crap,” Rose retorted. “I could have high-tech coming out the wazoo if I wanted it. I’m interested in your gut. Your trieb, remember?”
With a surreal sense of dislocation, Schneider walked a slow circle around the room, keeping his eyes on Richardson’s naked body all the time. He noted several facts at once—the obvious. But Schneider was a great mistruster of the obvious. Too often plain facts concealed more subtle truths. The cause of death seemed plain enough: a bullet hole in the back of the neck, small calibre, fired into the fragile bones of the cervical spine. An execution. That Harry had resisted death was also plain; his skin had been burned by the ropes that held him fast.
Schneider’s eyes found Harry’s lifeless gray orbs just once, and he looked away quickly. There was nothing to be found there but the frozen moment of stunned horror—more animal than human—that Schneider had seen more times than any man should. Last came the message—if message it was. Drawn in the pool of blood beneath Harry’s right foot, like a child’s finger painting, was a small but clear capital B. Harry’s right great toe was stained scarlet, like a blunt pen dipped in a well of blood. After the B came a curved line that could have been the start of another letter—perhaps a lower-case R—but in the midst of forming it Harry must have been shot, for a tangential line arced sharply outward, as if the foot drawing it had been flung wide in spasm.
