by Iles, Greg
Schneider crouched and examined the first letter. There was no mistaking it: it was a B or nothing. With a long last look at the second letter, the big German stood, carefully closed Harry’s eyelids, and walked back to the front room. The air was breathable there. Rose’s marching feet echoed behind him.
“What do you make of it?” Rose asked.
“Dead Russian, dead American,” Schneider replied. “None of my business.”
“I’m making it your business. Who do you think did it?”
“Someone in a hurry.”
“I’m not in the mood for games, Schneider.”
The German took a huge breath, exhaled. “All right. Someone broke in here, surprised Richardson, tortured him for information, and was surprised by the Russian in the front. The Russian tried to run; the killer shot him in the back. After getting his information—or not getting it—the killer executed Richardson and left.” Schneider sighed. “How did you find out about it?”
“Anonymous call. Guy had a British accent. Clary and I hauled ass over here, found Harry, and sealed the place off.”
Schneider digested this in silence.
“What about that swastika?” Rose asked.
Schneider shrugged.
“A bullet in the neck is a Dachau-style execution,” Rose pointed out.
“SS-style.”
“They do it the same way in Lubyanka.”
“Yeah,” Rose muttered. “So you don’t think it’s the Germans? Not Phoenix, or the Brotherhood, or whatever neo-Nazi wackos Harry pissed off when he killed Goltz?”
“Why would Germans do this?” Schneider asked. “Even Der Bruderschaft? Or if they did, why would they leave a swastika? Why not the red eye? Why leave anything at all? They would know you Americans would go mad with rage. How could that help them? If you implemented one-fourth of your reserve powers, Berlin would become Beirut.”
“Why this, why that’ Rose grumbled. ‘Why would the fucking Stasi kill a KGB officer and bring the whole weight of the KGB down on their heads? Nothing makes sense since yesterday, Schneider. Maybe they want us to crack down on Berlin. Maybe they think that would spark big protests against continued occupation.” Rose rubbed his forehead anxiously. “The scary thing is, I can’t do a damned thing about this. Five minutes before that anonymous call, I received an order to cease and desist all investigations pertaining to Spandau Prison or Rudolf Hess.”
A faint smile touched the corners of Schneider’s lips. “Who gave you that order, Colonel?”
“It came from on high, my friend. What we call Echelons Beyond Reality. If you ask me, Washington’s covering for the goddamn Brits.”
“You mean the letters on the floor?”
“Damn right. Harry was obviously trying to tell us who did this. And it seems to me that B and r are the first two letters of British.”
Schneider sucked in his breath. “Colonel, I’m not sure that second letter is an r It could be a c or even an o. If it is an r, Richardson could have been trying to write Bruderschaft—the Brotherhood. Phoenix.”
“Maybe, Rose admitted. “But you just told me you didn’t think Germans did it. Make up your mind, will you?” He paused in thought. “No, that swastika is just too goddamn obvious. This case revolves around Spandau, and Hess. We’ve got a dead Russian and a dead American. In my book that leaves the Brits, not the Germans.”
Schneider raised an eyebrow. “An anonymous caller using a British accent is just as obvious as that swastika. Also, we can’t discount the possibility that the murderer himself drew those letters in the blood. To mislead us.” The German sighed uncomfortably. “Colonel, is it possible that men from your own government could have done this?”
Rose looked up sharply. “Schneider, I’ve been in this man’s army all my life. But if I believed what you just suggested, I’d take this story straight to the fucking New York Times.”
Schneider believed him. “So what are you going to do? If your own people won’t help you on the Hess case, you’re stuck.”
“You ought to know me better than that by now,” Rose countered. He lifted an arm and pointed back down the hall. “I liked that man back there,” he said softly. “He served his country in war, and he served it in what the politicians like to call peace.” Rose’s cheek twitched with the intensity of his anger. “Whoever did that to him—Brit, German, whoever—he and his bosses are going to pay like they never dreamed in all their worthless goddamn lives. I won’t rest until they do.”
Just then Clary knocked twice quickly on the door, then opened it. Schneider’s mouth fell open. Silhouetted in Harry Richardson’s apartment door was the stocky, trench-coated figure of Colonel Ivan Kosov. The Russian took two steps into the foyer and bent over the body of, Dmitri Rykov. When he looked up, Schneider saw points of black fire flickering in his eyes. Fury crackled off him like static electricity.
Stunned, Schneider turned to Rose for an explanation.
“I called him,” Rose confessed. “if my own people won’t help me, by God, I’ll take help where I can find it.”
Schneider peered into Rose’s eyes. “Why am I really here, Colonel?” he asked quietly. And then suddenly he knew—Rose had been forbidden to pursue the Spandau case using his own men, so he had called Schneider here to pick up the torch Harry Richardson had dropped. It made Schneider angry that the American thought he needed cheap theatrics to motivate him. He had wanted to go to South Africa with Richardson all along. Funk, Luhr, Goltz: these men were minions, corrupt servants of an insidious power creeping into Germany from without. Stopping them would be a temporary victory at best. Whoever they served was the true enemy. To unite officers of the Stasi and the Polizei—sworn enemies—would take a truly monstrous power. And to kill a monster, Schneider knew, you cut off its head, not its hand. With a glance back at Kosov’s kneeling figure, he caught Rose by the arm and pulled him back into the room where Harry’s corpse sat baking in the dry heat.
“I’ll go to South Africa, Colonel,” he growled. “But I don’t like being
manipulated. You should have sent me in the first place. You want to find two German cops? Send a German cop.” Schneider jerked his thumb toward the front room. “But I report to you, not him. Understood? I trust you alone. Not your government, not Kosov, not his government. Just you.”
“Agreed, Detective.” Rose pulled Harry’s aeroplane ticket from his pocket and handed it to the German. “From now on, all expenses will be paid out of my personal bank account.” He lowered his voice. “Your flight leaves at two p.m. tomorrow. I’ll brief you just before you leave. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to talk a little shop with my new Russian friend.”
Schneider turned. Ivan Kosov stood motionless in the bedroom door, his eyes rivetted on Harry Richardson’s mutilated head. He made no sound. Schneider stuffed the plane ticket into his coat pocket and moved toward the door. At the last moment, Kosov stepped aside. Schneider paused, looked back at Harry, then looked into the Russian’s eyes long enough for Kosov to read the message there. I hate Russians as much as you hate Germans, it said. I blinded your little black assassin, and I haven’t ruled you out as a suspect in this either.
Schneider walked on. He understood Colonel Rose’s motives: this was a marriage of expediency, nothing more. Politics, as ever, made strange bedfellows. Rose didn’t trust his Russian counterpart any more than Schneider did, but the two professionals had much in common. They’re like a pair of fathers grieving over murdered sons, Schneider thought as he trudged down the stairs. A pair of very dangerous fathers. Kosov had looked even angrier than Rose, if that was possible. Schneider only hoped the two men realized what they—and he—were up against.
Eighteen hours ago Harry Richardson had practically scalped a Stasi agent in an East Berlin street. Tonight he was slated for a closed-casket funeral. The man who had done that to him, Schneider reflected, was a man to be taken very seriously indeed. Six floors below Harry’s apartment, Yuri Borodin smiled with satisfaction. His p
lan had worked after all. Ten minutes ago he’d been furious. Richardson hadn’t had the Spandau papers—as Borodin had thought he might—and he had refused to discuss the two German policemen, even under torture. Borodin hadn’t intended to kill Richardson, but the American had made him angry. And then Kosov’s bumbling footpad had blundered in during the interrogation. Borodin had shot Rykov from reflex, without even knowing who he was. That had sealed Richardson’s fate. Borodin couldn’t very well leave anyone alive to reveal what he had done. Even a Twelfth Department man could not kill a fellow KGB officer with impunity.
Yet in the midst of adversity, inspiration had struck. Before leaving Harry’s apartment Borodin had planted two micro-transmitters: one in the front room, one in the bedroom. Then he’d made an anonymous telephone call to Colonel Rose. The harvest had been bountiful. Now he knew not only the location of the two German policemen, but also the identity of Rose’s emissary to South Africa. The burly Kripo detective would lead him straight to Hauer and Apfel, and ultimately to the Spandau papers. And if that wasn’t enough, he was now listening to Kosov and Rose hatch a renegade operation that could smash both their careers. The only oversight, Borodin conceded to himself, had been the writing on the floor. The American had sneaked that past him. Richardson had been trying to write Borodin, of course, but a bullet through his spinal cord had apparently turned his o into something like an r. The Anglophobic Rose had already misread the one clue that could help him, though; and Ivan Kosov wasn’t likely to disabuse him of his fantasies!
As Schneider emerged from the front entrance of Harry’s building, Yuri Borodin laughed aloud. Even in the dog days of glasnost, his job was sometimes more fun than work.
7.31 P.m. Lufthansa Flight 417, Corsican Airspace
Dieter Hauer looked down at the shiny, wrinkled ball of aluminum foil in his hand. It had taken four minutes of his best pickpocket technique to remove the Spandau papers from Hans’s trousers, but he had finally done it. Hans sat in the aeroplane seat next to him, sleeping fitfully. Hauer removed the foil wrapping the thin sheets as if it concealed an archaeological treasure. Despite all that had happened, he had yet to actually see the papers.
The first page looked just as Hans had described it: a paragraph written in German, followed by a stream of unintelligible gibberish. Hauer scanned the German, but learned nothing new. Sighing, he pulled the bottom page from the stack and looked for the signature. There it was: Number 7. My God, he thought, to have been in prison so long that you didn’t even use your name. If the poor bastard remembered it at all …
On the last page Hauer saw the carefully drawn eye. It looked exactly like those he’d seen tattooed on at least a dozen scalps. Whoever wrote the Spandau papers, he decided, had obviously been visited at least once by someone with more than hair behind his right ear.
Hauer didn’t realize that three of the pages were blank until he began arranging them to repack them in the foil. He rubbed his eyes vigorously, unwilling to accept what he saw, but the truth was I plain to see. Three pages bore no ink at all. The paper wasn’t even the same! His first impulse was to shake Hans awake and demand to know what he had done with the missing pages. Yet as soon as he raised his hand, Hauer realized what had happened. The substituted sheets told the story. Professor Natterman had lied. The old man had held back after all … he’d kept some of the pages for himself! Hauer cringed as he recalled Natterman slipping into the bathroom before laying the foil packet on Hans’s lap. Greedy bastard! he thought furiously. With your family’s lives at stake! Pulling the bottom page out again, Hauer stared with grim frustration.
Angrily, he read the final note in German. The last bit caught his eye: 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 … Better that she never knows. Those words resonated in Hauer’s mind.
Better that you don’t know, either he thought, looking at Hans’s sleeping face. You’ll find out soon enough. Hans’s lank blond hair hung down across eyelids that quivered in troubled sleep. Carefully, Hauer refolded the aluminum foil around the pages and slipped them back into Hans’s pocket. And what will you do, he wondered, when you finally learn that your grandfather-in-law has condemned your wife to death? For without the Spandau papers to trade to the kidnappers, intact, Hauer knew the chance of bringing Ilse out of Africa alive dropped by at least 50 percent. How could that bastard do that to his own flesh and blood?
And then Hauer knew. The old man had not stolen the missing pages—he’d lost them! Lost them to the Afrikaner who attacked him. And the Afrikaner had lost them to whoever had attacked him! That was why Natterman had frantically searched the carcass that Hans dragged into the cabin; he’d been looking for the missing pages. And he had found nothing! My God, Hauer thought, feeling acid flood his stomach, someone else has those pages!
As the DC-10 roared south toward the bottom of the un world, Hauer wondered who could possibly have got to Natterman’s cabin before he and Hans. Funk’s men? Ilse had obviously been forced to give the cabin telephone number to her kidnappers. Had she also given them the cabin’s location? How early had she been captured? Who else was hunting for the papers now? Hauer had noticed some rather English-looking young men hovering around the ticket desk, and had told Hans to change counters at Frankfurt Airport—purely as precaution. Confident of the strength of their false passports, he had dismissed the possibility that the men might be a threat.
If Hauer had only known—really known—who had the missing pages, he might have felt less like a shepherd leading a lamb to the slaughter. But he didn’t know. And as he closed his eyes to the sound of the roaring turbines, one word cycled endlessly through his mind. Who?
7.40pm. E-35 Motorway, Frankfurt, FRG
Jonas Stern took his eyes from the motorway long enough to glare at Natterman in the passenger seat. “We’re going to Israel to pick up some packages, and that’s all I’ll bloody say about it!”
“But what kind of packages?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“But you were on the phone for hours,” Natterman persisted. “You wasted a whole day.”
“Klap kop in vant!” Stern snapped in Yiddish. “So the Messiah comes a day later! You don’t order these packages like a pizza pie, Professor. You told me yourself that the rendezvous with the kidnappers isn’t until tomorrow night. We’ll make Pretoria in plenty of time.”
Natterman sulked in his seat. “Why were you talking to an air force general?”
Stern exploded. “You were listening to my calls!”
“Only one,” Natterman lied. “I just want to know what’s going on. Where’s the harm in that?”
“You’ll know all you need to know,” Stern said, scowling. “When you need to know it, not before. If you’d put your precious career aside for a moment and tell me all you know about Hess’s mission, I might see fit to reciprocate.”
Natterman put an age-spotted hand to his mouth and bit his thumbnail. He looked like a gold prospector deciding whether or not to reveal the location of his big strike to a stranger whose help he needs. With sudden gravity, he reached across the seat and took hold of Stern’s arm. “I’ll tell you what I think about Hess’s mission,” he said excitedly. “I think Rudolf Hess is still alive.”
Stern turned and caught Natterman’s eye; then he looked back at the wide motorway. He chuckled softly. “I know you do, Professor. And I wish it were so easy. But you watch too many movies.”
“Then you don’t think Hess is alive?” Natterman asked incredulously.
Stern grinned. “Sure. He’s set up housekeeping with Martin Bormann and Josef Mengele. Amelia Earhart is the housemaid and Elvis Presley provides the dinner entertainment.”
Natterman ignored the levity. “Then you’re really not hunting Hess?” he said suspiciously.
Stern shook his head. “I told you, Profess
or, I’m no Nazi-hunter. I’m more of a gamekeeper. And the preserve I protect is Israel.”
“Hess is alive,” Natterman insisted. “I know he is. It’s completely conceivable. His double died only four weeks ago, and the medical care at Spandau was atrocious.” Natterman folded his arms defiantly. “Rudolf Hess is alive and I’m going to find him.”
Stern grunted skeptically.
“Since you’re not hunting him,” Natterman said in a superior tone, “I suppose I can tell you how I know he’s alive.”
“Enlighten me, 0 Master,” Stern said with mock gravity.
Natterman scowled. “Laugh if you like. I’ll bet you don’t laugh at this. Remember the tattooed eye that I showed you on the Afrikaner’s head? That’s the constant in this whole mess, the one unifying symbol. The Spandau papers said the eye was the key, and the fascist members of the Berlin police have the eye tattooed on their scalps beneath the hair. Hauer told me so. But what Hauer doesn’t know, Stern, is what that symbol means. I do. It’s an Egyptian symbol—the All-Seeing Eye, the Guarding Eye of God.” Natterman nodded knowingly. “Hauer also told me that the police fascists protect something or someone called Phoenix. Are you familiar with the Phoenix, Stern?”
“Of course. It’s the mythological bird of flames that rises from its own ashes every five hundred years.”
“Very good. Now, ‘Phoenix’ is a Greek word, but the Greeks did not invent the Phoenix myth. Phoenix is but the Greek name of the Egyptian god Bennu—the bird who rises from the ashes of its own destruction. Do you see?”
