by Iles, Greg
Stern’s face burned red with anger. “Professor, I can’t even think about those days without feeling rage toward the British.”
Natterman was staring at Stern with strange intensity. “Tell me,” he said softly. “Were you part of the Stern Gang? Is that how you know all this? Or were you Irgun?”
Stern’s eyes bored in on Natterman. “Neither, Professor. A very long time ago—before LAKAM—I helped found the Haganah.”
Stern glanced past Natterman, to the small window-square of cerulean sky. “In the winter of 1935, I emigrated with my mother to Palestine. My father refused to leave our homeland, which happened to be Germany. Despite my youth, I did a bit of everything for the Haganah: fought Arabs, procured illegal arms, set up radio links across the Arabian peninsula, smuggled in Jews from Europe—but mostly I fought the British.” The Israeli’s face hardened. “But I was no terrorist. Haganah was a moral army, Professor. The moment Israel declared nationhood, we emerged as her legitimate defence forces. I’ve never believed in senseless violence to achieve political ends. I saw too many men start out as patriots and end up as criminals.” Stern’s eyes misted with some half-forgotten emotion. “Terror is a tempting tool in war, Professor. The easiest short-term solution is always to lash out—to murder. I know. I tried it once.”
He sighed deeply. “But ‘an eye for an eye’ is no road map to a better world.”
In her seat near the staircase, Swallow clenched her trembling hands. Jonas Stern’s voice—his hypocritical, Zionist voice—had hurled her back into the past, back to Palestine. Swallow knew all about Jonas Stern’s flirtation with revenge, and she had a very different opinion about the merits of the concept. She could no longer even think coherently about her pain. Her clearest memory was of her time as a mathematics prodigy studying at Cambridge, her time as Ann Gordon. She still remembered the stunned expressions of the dons as she soared through the nether reaches of theoretical calculus at age sixteen.
When the war broke out, British Intelligence had snatched her up with the rest of the savants and whisked her into cryptography. Her parents lived in London, but her two brothers were stationed abroad: the elder an RAF bombardier on Malta, the younger—Ann’s fraternal twin—a military policeman in Palestine. Ann and her twin brother, Andrew, had been inseparable as children, and they had danced with joy when fate landed them both in the same theatre of the war.
The family had a splendid war—right up until the end. In 1944 both of Ann’s parents were killed by one of the last V-rockets to fall on London. Then her elder brother was shot down over Germany and lynched by civilians while the Waffen-SS looked on. That left only Ann, decoding German signals in a stifling shed in Tel Aviv, and Andrew, caught in the escalating violence between Jews, Arabs, and the British in Palestine. With the rest of the family dead, the twins had grown closer than ever. They even shared a small apartment in the poor quarter of Tel Aviv—until the night Andrew was blown into small pieces as he sat on a toilet in the British police barracks. His brutal death finally shattered Ann’s English stoicism. During the long, desolate months of anguish that followed, her grief slowly metamorphosed into a dark, implacable fury. The war with Germany ended, but she had found a new war to fight.
With methodical fanaticism she set to work finding out who had killed her twin brother. It didn’t take long. The bomb that killed Andrew had been a Zionist reprisal attack, revenge for some filthy Jews who had died in a British deportation camp. And the name of the young firebrand who had planned and carried out that reprisal? Jonas Stern. It had taken Ann just two hours to learn everything the local authorities knew about Stern. He had apparently helped the British quite a bit during the war, but before and since, the young Zionist had killed enough Englishmen to earn an unofficial bounty of a thousand pounds on his head. Ann Gordon didn’t give a damn about the bounty. All she cared about was avenging her dead brother. The next day she volunteered for the operations side of British Intelligence, and they accepted her. She was brilliant, tough, and best of all an orphan. After rigorous training in England, they christened her Swallow and put her to work. As an assassin.
The trouble was, she had no say in her choice of assignments. She spent year after year luring IRA gunmen, Arab terrorists, African communists, anti-British mercenaries and other hard cases to their doom, instead of hunting down the Zionist demon from her past. In all the years Swallow worked for British Intelligence, not once did she manage to get within striking range of Jonas Stern. To her everlasting fury, the young Zionist fanatic had evolved into a singularly-gifted field agent. And long before Swallow was pensioned off, Stern himself had retired to a fortified haven in the Negev desert, apparently never to emerge.
Twice since then Swallow had attempted to breach the defences of Stern’s desert refuge. She had drawn Jewish blood on both occasions,. but she had failed to reach her hated target. After that, the Mossad had learned her identity and warned her off. For Swallow, crossing into the Holy Land meant certain death. And so she had returned to England. And waited. Until yesterday. Yesterday, like a call from Olympus, Sir Neville Shaw’s summons had come. Something had drawn Jonas Stern out of Israel at last. Out of his sanctuary …
Swallow’s eyes popped open as Professor Natterman’s voice crackled in her ear receiver, breaking her reverie. “Can’t you see it, Stern?” he said forcefully. “Somehow, for some unknown reason, the past and present are coming toward some mysterious meeting point … to completion. It’s like the Bible. The sins of the fathers, yes? Or as the Buddhists teach, karma.” The old professor raised a crooked finger and shook it slowly. “You still think my suspicions about Rudolf Hess are unfounded? If ghosts like Yitzhak Shamir can survive to haunt the present, so can Hess. I tell you, Stern, the man is alive.”
Stern closed a strong hand over Natterman’s upraised finger, hard enough to cause pain. It infuriated the professor, but it shut him up. Stern leaned back in his seat and sighed. “I do wonder sometimes who is pulling the strings of this invisible cabal. Is it Lord Grenville, the young Englishman? Is it some madman? Some would-be Aryan Messiah? Is it another ghost from the past? Your Helmut, perhaps?”
Natterman fixed the Israeli with a penetrating gaze. “Jonas,” he said gravely, using Stern’s first name for the first time. “What will you do if … if we find that I am right? If we find living men who bear direct responsibility for the Holocaust? Will you kill them?”
Stern ran a hand through his thinning hair. “If we were to find such men alive,” he said quietly, “I would take them back to Israel. Take them to Israel for a public trial. That is the only end from which justice can come.”
Natterman scratched at his gray wisp of beard. “You’re a strong man, Jonas. It takes great strength to show restraint.”
“I’m not that strong,” Stern murmured. “If I couldn’t get them back to Israel, I would kill them without hesitation.”
Glancing across the aisle for the first time in several minutes, Stern saw that his three young companions had awakened. They were listening wide-eyed, like children around a campfire. The Haganah years Stern had spoken of resonated like myths in the hearts of the young sabras, and they stared at him like a hero of another age. Beyond that, they now knew something about their mission. They were to be given the chance of a lifetime—the chance to strike back through the pages of history to punish men who had never been justly punished—men who had tried to make the State of Israel a stillborn nation! Stern’s commandos were lean and hard in body and spirit, and from that moment on they were as soldiers in a holy war.
Four rows ahead of them, another soldier also awaited her chance to strike. As the El Al jetliner soared southward through the glorious vault of sky, the woman code-named Swallow revelled in the knowledge that she could destroy Jonas Stern right now. Stern had at least part of the Spandau diary, but what did she care for papers? If she killed Stern here, of course, she would die. She thought of Sir Neville Shaw, the nerveless director general of MI-5. She certainly fe
lt no loyalty to that old serpent. Shaw and men like him had used her ruthlessly throughout her career, wielding her like a razor-sharp sword, all the while ignoring her quest for private justice.
But what of England, that hazy, increasingly obsolete concept? In spite of her coldness, Swallow had always possessed a strong, rather maudlin streak of patriotism. Was preserving British honour worth deferring her sweet revenge for one more day? Professor Natterman had spoken of ghosts from the past. Swallow knew that once she unmasked herself—today, tomorrow, whenever—she would be one ghost that Jonas Stern would be very surprised to see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
11.40 a.m. Pretoria
More than fifty knives of all types gleamed inside the brightly lit display case. Hauer leaned over until his nose touched the glass. This immediately drew the attention of a nearby salesman, a freckled, red-haired young man. “Any particular style you’re looking for, sir?“he asked in a British accent. “Are you looking for a souvenir, or might you be doing some hunting with it?”
“Good point,” Hauer said in English. “Could be doing some hunting. Still, we don’t want anything too big. Quality, that’s the thing.”
“Of course, sir. I believe I’ve got just what you need.”
When the young man moved down the row of display cases, Hans leaned close to Hauer. “What about a gun?” he whispered.
Hauer didn’t reply. This was their fifth stop of the day, and he was beginning to feel overexposed. After checking into the Burgerspark Hotel and changing their Deutsche marks for rand, they had slipped out the rear entrance of the hotel and into their taxi. They clung to the armrests of the Ford while Salil made short work of their British tall car. The loquacious Indian had shepherded them around the city while they purchased several changes of clothes and enough food to last two days without leaving whatever hotel room they finally settled into. Salil had also recommended the large sporting goods store.
“Here you are, sir,” the salesman said, proudly holding out a sleek six-inch knife for Hauer’s inspection. Hauer took the weapon and turned it in the light. He hefted it in his palm, feeling the balance. The knife had a plain varnished handle—not nearly so ornate as the engraved showpieces glinting in the display case—but Hauer’s approval was evident.
“I see you know your knives, sir,” said the salesman.
“Made in West Germany that was. Solingen steel, finest in the world.” Hauer flicked the knife back and forth with practised ease. “We’ll take two.”
The salesman’s smile broadened. Already these two tourists had purchased an expensive hunting rifle, scope, and a Nikon camera with mini-tripod and hand-held light metre. “I notice your accent, sir,” he said with a sidelong glance at Hans. “German, are you?”
“Swiss,” Hauer said quickly.
“Ah.” The salesman realized he had asked the wrong question. “I’ll just wrap these for you.” After another long look at Hans, he disappeared through a narrow doorway behind the counter.
“Why does he keep staring at you?” Hauer muttered. “Is he queer?”
“He thinks I’m a goddamn tennis star.”
After a moment, Hauer nodded with relief
“What about guns?” Hans asked again. “The rendezvous is tonight. Eight o’clock.”
“Hans, if the kidnappers are smart—and so far they have been—they’ll just sniff you out tonight. You didn’t take the plane they told you to. That will put them off balance. For all they know, a hundred Interpol agents are going to descend on the Burgerspark Hotel tonight. No, they’ll either send a drone or telephone you with further instructions. My, guess is they’ll call.”
Hans looked far from satisfied. “I’d feel a lot better if I had a pistol, and there are dozens right in that case.”
“True,” Hauer acknowledged. “But I don’t see any silencers, do you? We can’t go around Pretoria firing off pistols. Our badges are worthless here. Plus, I don’t want to subject our papers to even a cursory background check.”
While Hans sulked, Hauer glanced around the store. “All right,” he said resignedly. “You see that rack over there?” He pointed across the store to a large display of hunting bows. Hans nodded. “Go over and tell that salesman you want the smallest crossbow he has with a seventy-pound draw, and six of the sharpest bolts he has.” Hauer pulled a wad of bills from his trousers pocket and peeled off four hundred rand. Still looking longingly at the gun case, Hans took the money.
“Here you are, gentlemen.” The salesman had reappeared in the doorway with a small brown-wrapped parcel. “That comes to, ah …” He trailed off, looking past Hauer. Hauer turned and followed his gaze. The salesman was staring at Hans, who now stood with his hands on his hips, scrutinizing a rack of expensive tennis racquets with an expert’s disdainful eye. The salesman cleared his throat. “Could I show you something else, er … sir?” Hans continued to stare silently at the racquets.
The salesman reached out timidly and touched Hauer’s sleeve. “Pardon me, sir, but isn’t he … ?”
Slowly Hans turned to the salesman and smiled the confiding, slightly embarrassed smile celebrities use when they would prefer that no one make a fuss over them. “Could I possibly see a few racquets?” he asked. “Estusas? Preferably the N1000.”
The salesman almost tripped over his feet in his haste to get around the counter. “Why certainly, sir. I am at your complete disposal.” He blushed. “I’m a terrific fan, you know. We have just the racquet you want, and I’m positive that a very agreeable discount could be arranged.”
” As the gushing salesman led his prize across the store, Hans looked back over his shoulder and glared pointedly at Hauer, then at the gun case, talking all the way. “Normally my racquets are supplied directly from the factory,” he explained, “but the stupid airline put my bag aboard the wrong plane.”
Stunned by Hans’s boldness, Hauer took a look around the store for surveillance cameras, slipped quickly behind the gun case, dropped to his knees and went to work on the lock. When Hans stepped out of the store twenty minutes later, he saw Hauer waiting for him at the end of the block, surrounded by shopping bags. Stuffing a large, oblong parcel under his arm, he jogged awkwardly up the street.
“Don’t tell me,” said Hauer. “You bought the tennis racquet.”
“The crossbow,” Hans muttered. “I wasn’t sure you could break into the gun case.”
Hauer opened his jacket slightly. The handgrips of two gleaming black pistols jutted from his waistband. “Walthers. Matched pair. A child could have sprung the lock on that case.” He closed his jacket and laughed softly. “That was pretty good acting in there, Boris. You almost had me convinced.”
“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” Hans snapped. “I had to sign six autographs before they let me out of the store.”
At that moment Salil pulled his taxi smoothly up to the curb.
“Your carriage awaits,” said Hauer. He reached down and picked up the boxed rifle, scope, and camera, and loaded them into the trunk of the Indian’s Ford. “Let’s go shoot some pictures.”
11:44 a.m. MI-5 Headquarters, Charles Street, London, England
Sir Neville Shaw had not slept in his office for quite some time—not since the Falklands War, his deputy had reminded him. But now he lay sound asleep on a squeaky cot he had ordered brought to his office early this morning. When Deputy Director Wilson came barging into the office without even a perfunctory knock, Shaw came up off the cot like he had as a child during the Blitz. “What in God’s name is it?” he bellowed. “World War Three?”
Wilson was breathless. “It’s Swallow, sir. She’s picked up Stern.”
Shaw pounded his fist on his thigh. “By God, I knew that woman could do it!”
“She boarded his plane at Ben-Gurion. They’re airborne now, and Stern is definitely headed for South Africa. Not only did Swallow overhear Stern say that he had part of the Spandau papers, but she also heard him discussing the involvement of the Duke o
f Windsor in the Hess affair.”
“Good Christ! Discussing it with whom?”
“A German his professor. He’s a relative of one of the two Berlin policemen who found the Spandau papers. Swallow thinks Stern plans to use him to make contact with Hauer and Apfel. She called from the aircraft telephone. She used a verbal code from the nineteen sixties, sir. It took a crypto team two hours to dig the cipher key out of the basement.”
Shaw left his cot and walked toward his desk. “With Swallow on his tail, Stern’s as good as dead. We can count on getting whatever portion of the papers he’s carrying.”
Wilson looked uncomfortable. “If Swallow does kill Stern, sir, do you think the fact that she’s retired is enough to shield us from an Israeli protest?”
“Protest! What do we care about one scruffy Yid? You can bet Stern asked for it somewhere up the line. The Zionist terrorists in Palestine were a damned sight more ruthless than your Palestinian today, Wilson. A damned sight!” Shaw rubbed his hands together anxiously. “South Africa,” he murmured. “How in blazes did that old fox figure that out?”
Wilson looked puzzled. “I’m not sure what you mean, but Swallow overheard Stern discussing the wife of Sergeant Apfel. Frau Apfel seems to have been kidnapped by someone in South Africa who is demanding the Spandau papers as ransom.”
