by Iles, Greg
Four floors below the observatory, Robert Stanton, Lord Grenville, watched the weapons he had known nothing about blast his dreams of power into oblivion. If Alfred survives this night, he thought desolately, what will Shaw give me? Not a fucking thing, that’s what! He shook his head in wonder. Not one member of the assault team remained standing! Unbelieving, Stanton pressed his palm against the windowpane, watching in horror as the Vulcan’s terrible tracer beam climbed the slope, then disappeared over the ridge. Seconds later a fireball mushroomed into the sky. Probably a helicopter, he realized. Stanton could bear no more. He knew he had but one chance now: to find Horn and allay any suspicion that he was connected with the attack. If Burton is killed, he thought hopefully, I might just bring it off. He dashed into the dark hallway and made for the study, almost sure that Horn would be closeted there.
Scurrying through the vast reception hall, he saw Ilse jerk back into one of the corridors, but she meant nothing to him now. In seconds he would be fighting for his life. A quick sprint brought him to the study door, which he found unlocked. He burst through it like a man in blind panic. A green-shaded lamp burned at Horn’s desk, but the old man was not there. Then, slowly, Stanton made out the wheelchair, silhouetted against the rain-spattered picture window. Scarlet tracers sliced through the darkness outside, giving the room a surrealistic sense of drama, like the bridge of a ship during battle.
“Alfred!” Stanton cried with exaggerated relief. “Thank God you’re safe!”
Slowly Horn rotated his wheelchair until he faced the young Englishman. His face was haggard, but his solitary eye burned with black contempt. “So, Robert,” he rasped, “you would be my Judas.”
Ilse tore through the halls like a madwoman. She had searched every unlocked room and pounded on every locked door in the house, but she’d found no sign of Hans. Nor had she seen Stern since they parted at the bedroom door. She had found one useful thing. In a spartan bedroom decorated only by an eight-by-ten photograph of a younger, uniformed Pieter Smuts, she’d found a Beretta 9mm semi-automatic pistol in a holster hanging from the bedpost. She wasn’t sure she could use it, but she had no doubt that Stern could. Or Hans, if she could find him. Approaching the reception hall at a full run, she saw Lord Grenville sprint across it in another direction. She skidded and tried to backpedal into the narrow corridor, but she was, too late—Stanton had seen her. Yet just as she turned to flee, she heard the Englishman’s footsteps echoing down one of the main passageways—away from her.
Carefully she crossed the reception hall and peered down the corridor into which Stanton had vanished. What’s he after? she wondered. What is so important that he would ignore me running loose? Another prisoner, perhaps? Hans?
Ilse darted down the hallway after Stanton. Toward the far end of the dark corridor she saw a vertical crack of light. As she neared it, she heard voices. One was unmistakably Stanton’s, the other … she couldn’t be sure. Pulling off her shoes, she slipped quietly through the door. She pressed herself flat against the panelled wall of the study. Alfred Horn sat hunched in his wheelchair before a large picture window, barely discernible in the shadows. Beside an ornate desk four metres away stood Lord Grenville.
He was gesticulating wildly with his hands. “I told you, Alfred!” he shouted. “Smuts is insane! He knows nothing of my loyalty! I’m your partner for God’s sake!”
“You are a liar and a coward,” Horn said evenly. “And you care for nothing but money.” He swept a hand toward the window, where sporadic tracer fire still illuminated the grounds in short bursts. “You see how your greed ends, Robert?”
Stanton raised his arms in supplication. “But I know nothing of that! It’s another of Smuts’s schemes to discredit me! He’s always been jealous of me, you know that!”
Horn shook his head sadly. “Dear Robert. How is it that great men produce heirs such as you? It is the bane of the world.”
“Please!” Stanton begged. “What proof is there against me?”
Horn rubbed his wizened forehead. “Reach beneath the desktop, Robert.”
Stanton did. His fingers touched a toggle switch. He flipped it reflexively. A male voice boomed from speakers on the bookshelf: “Good Christ, are you mad?”
Stanton felt faint.
“Shut up and listen!” snapped a voice he recognized as his own. “I had to call from here. They won’t let me go anywhere else. Look, you’ve got to call it off.”
“What?” asked the incredulous voice, the British accent unmistakable.
“He knows, I’m telling you. Horn knows about Casilda—I don’t know how, but he does.”
“He can’t know.”
“He does!”
“There’s no stopping it now,” said Sir Neville Shaw. “And your information on Horn’s defences had better turn out to be good, Grenville, or—”
Alfred Horn’s bitter voice rose above the recording. “You don’t even make a good Judas, Robert! You’re pathetic!”
“But … but it’s not what you think!” Stanton wailed. “That call was about the gold we’re expecting!”
“Liar! You’ve betrayed me! I will coddle you no more!”
With a sudden straightening of his body, Stanton pulled a .45 caliber pistol from his belt. “You’re the fool!” he cried, his eyes burning with maniacal hatred. “Doddering around this carnival house, clinging to your rotting fortune like a sick lion. Blubbering your idiotic racial philosophies through these empty halls. You’re daft! Your day is past, old man! It’s my turn now!” Stanton aimed the pistol at Horn’s head.
“Put down the gun, Robert,” Horn said quietly. “I will forgive you. Please, for your grandfather’s sake.”
“Shut up! You’d never let me live now!”
“I will forgive you, Robert. But first you must tell me all about your friends from London.”
Stanton shook his head like a terrified child. “I can’t! I tried to protect you, you know. They wanted me to kill you myself, but I refused. They offered me the bloody moon! They threatened to blackmail me, to expose some horrible secret about my grandfather “—Stanton grinned wildly—“but then I realized they were more afraid of the secret than I was!” The petulant scowl returned. “But they mean to kill you, Alfred. One way or the other. Don’t you see? I had no choice. London will only send someone else for you.”
“Perhaps,” Horn said wearily. “Perhaps I made a mistake, Robert. Because you are … like you are, I never revealed to you my true identity. My true mission. Even your father kept it from you—wisely, I thought. But the time has come for you to know. I will forgive your treachery, but first you must put down the gun. Put it down, and learn the true story of your noble heritage.”
“You bastard!” Stanton screamed. He charged forward and kicked Horn’s wheelchair over, spilling him onto the parquet floor. Drawn inexorably forward by the madness of the scene, Ilse edged along the wall until she could see Horn lying on his back. Erratic flashes through the picture window fell on his gaunt face, contorted with pain and confusion.
Above him, Stanton, his eyes alight with maniacal fury, held the gun in his quivering right hand. “You talk of forgiveness!” he shouted. “Who are you to forgive?” He jerked back the slide of the .45 and aimed at Horn’s glass eye. “What did you make my grandfather do?”
“Nothing!” Horn said pleadingly. “You have it all backward! Please, Robert! I do not fear death, but I fear for my mission. For your grandfather’s mission. For mankind!” Horn’s voice rose in desperation. “Do not end the work of half a century!”
Stanton laughed wildly, then he tightened his mouth into a grimace and steadied the gun with both hands. “At last, Alfred!” he cried. “It’s long overdue!”
As if in a dream, Ilse raised Smuts’s Beretta and pulled back the slide, just as she had seen Hans do a hundred times in their apartment. Stanton heard the metallic click. He whirled, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound … Ilse fired.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Stern paused for breath beside a wide metal door marked KRANKENHAUS. He had yet to find a telephone, and even if he found one, he could only give Hauer the most general idea of where he was being held. He needed a map. Who is attacking this house? he thought angrily. The Arabs come for their damned bomb, if it even exists? In any other country, the idea that a private citizen had gained possession of a nuclear weapon would be ludicrous. But Stern knew that in South Africa no normal rules applied. In a nuclear-capable state that had developed beyond the scrutiny of any regulatory entity, anything was possible. A man of Horn’s wealth might well have been instrumental in South Africa’s nuclear weapons program, and God alone knew what price he would have exacted for his aid.
And if he does have the bomb? Stern asked himself. What then? Visions of Israeli commandos parachuting into the courtyards of Horn House made his pulse race, but he knew that such a raid would not happen here. When he finally found a telephone, he would not have time to make the six or eight calls it would take to reach the proper members of the Israeli General Staff—if they weren’t out playing golf somewhere. And even if he did reach them, what action could they take? South Africa wasn’t Lebanon or Iraq. Violating South African airspace would be a dangerous act of war. The unofficial motto of the South African Army was “Thirty days to Cairo”—meaning that the South African Defence Forces could fight their way up the entire length of Africa in a month. Few experts argued the point.
No, Stern realized, Hauer was his only chance. Hauer was in South Africa, he was one phone call away, and he was ready to act. Stern wondered what the mandarins in Jerusalem would say if they knew the future of Israel might depend on a single German. Stern pushed open the infirmary door and looked for a telephone.
He saw an EKG machine, an IV stand, several laboratory instruments—but no telephone. There were two doors set in the far wall. One was marked INTENSIVE CARE, the other bore the international warning symbol for radiation. Behind the first Stern found a plethora of life-support equipment, but no telephone. Behind the second he found an X-ray machine and table, a panelled door marked DARKROOM, fluorescent screens for examining printed X-ray films, and shelves of manila folders for stoning them. No telephone.
Stern hurried back into the hallway. After trying another half-dozen rooms, he found himself standing in the library where he had initially confronted Horn. Though empty now and shrouded in darkness, the room seemed to retain some residue of human presence. Stern saw no one, yet he felt something, a strange aura of awareness. Was someone watching him from a corner? Uneasy, he moved toward the desk from which Horn had interrogated him. His common sense told him to get out of the library fast, yet his intuition told him he was close to something important. He switched on the green-shaded desk lamp and stared at the books lining the library walls. They were standard volumes, the generic fare that adorns the shelves of gentlemen of great wealth but little culture.
Driven by a vague premonition, he stepped closer to the shelves. He touched the books first, then the wood between them, working his way to the corner of the library, probing with his long fingers. As he neared the corner he felt cool metal graze his fingertips. He peered between the shelves. Just where the wood met the wall was a tiny brass knob. He closed his thumb and forefinger over it, then gently pulled. The resulting snick made him jump, but instantly a thin crack appeared around a three-by-six-foot section of shelving. He pushed forward slowly, slipped his arm into the dark cavity, and felt for a switch plate. There. After ten silent seconds, he flipped the switch and lunged through the secret door.
Stern recoiled in dread as blood red and black assaulted his senses. The room beyond the door was small but high-ceilinged, like an upended coffin. Great scarlet drapes fell from the vaulted ceiling, to be gathered chest-high by black silk sashes. He felt an involuntary shudder pass through his body. Sewn into the centre of each black sash was a glittering white medallion, and crowning the centre of each medallion—a black-painted swastika! From the wall opposite Stern, a grouping of black-and-white photographs leaped out like phantoms from a mass grave. Thousands of gray uniforms stood in endless rigid ranks; hundreds of jackboots goose-stepped down a depopulated Paris boulevard; dozens of young lips smiled beneath eyes that had witnessed the unspeakable.
As Stern stared, individual faces emerged from the collage of depravity. Göring and Himmler … Heydrich … Stretcher … Hess and Bormann … Goebbels … they were all here. Fighting a growing sense of dislocation, Stern turned, only to confront still another demon from his past. Rearing high above him, its enormous bronze wings stretching from one corner of the red-draped wall to the other, was an imperial Nazi eagle. Speer’s eagle, he thought with a chill, risen again. Yet the great bird was not an eagle. For its legs were engulfed in bronze flames, and clutched in its talons like a world snatched from the primordial fire was a blood red globe emblazoned with a swastika. The Phoenix! exulted a voice in Stern’s brain. Professor Natterman’s voice.
Stern stared in wonder. The head of the mythical bird was turned in profile. Its sharp beak was stretched wide in a defiant scream, its solitary eye blazed with fury. Stern felt his knees tremble. Here is your Egyptian eye, Professor. The exact design! The tattoo used by the murderers of Phoenix … the mark sketched on the last page of the Spandau papers. With dreamlike clarity Stern remembered Natterman’s explanation of Rudolf Hess’s Egyptian connection. This Phoenix looked almost identical to the old Nazi eagle, but the Egyptian character of its eye could not be denied. The eye did not match the rest of the sculpture at all. Neither did the flames at the bird’s feet. They had been added long after the original sculpture was cast. But by whom? Stern wondered. By a man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in Egypt? By a man who lost one eye sometime after 1941? By Rudolf Hess?
Under other circumstances, Stern reflected, this strange sanctum might pass for a private trophy room—a perverted version of the narcissistic shrines one often found in the homes of vain old generals. But here—hidden in a fortress at the end of a twisted trail that began at Spandau Prison—these relics suggested something else altogether. This room was no museum, no maudlin monument to the past. It was a time warp, a place where the past had not been merely preserved, but reanimated by a personality bent on resurrecting it. Stern felt a wild urge to leap up and tear the effigy down, like Marshal Zhukov’s Russians atop the Reichstag. He stretched up on tiptoe, then froze.
Mounted on the wall beneath the huge Phoenix he saw what he had come looking for: maps. And not only maps, but a telephone! The map on the left—a projection of the African continent—Stern ignored. But the other—a topographic survey of the northern Transvaal—was just what he’d wanted. Quickly orienting himself to Pretoria, he slid his finger northeast toward the splash of green that represented the Kruger National Park. His fingernail stopped an inch short of the park border. “There you are,” he said aloud.
Just as on the radar screen in the turret high above, the location of Horn House had been clearly marked with a large red H. Stern figured the distance from the H to Pretoria at just under three hundred kilometres. Roughly three and a half hours overland, making allowances for what appeared to be trackless wilderness surrounding Horn House itself He snatched up the telephone from the desk, his heart pounding.
As he punched in the number of the Protea Hof Hotel, heard muted voices. He dropped into a crouch behind the desk, taking the phone with him. The voices were not coming from the telephone. No
r were they getting any closer. Stern got cautiously to his feet. By moving to different parts of the room, he soon located the source of the sound. The voices were coming from behind the wall of photographs. He flattened his ear to the wood.
Both voices were male, one much stronger than the other. The stronger voice spoke with a British accent. Feeling his way across the wall to get closer to the voices, Stern touched cold metal with his right hand. Another knob. Now he understood. This unholy shrine adjoined the library and study by means of two hidden doors. Horn had made sure that his secret sanctuary had two routes of egress. Taking a deep breath, Stern turned the knob. He heard the familiar snick of metal, but the voices went on talking. He pushed open the door.
The study beyond was dim but not lightless. Flashes from the picture window intermittently lit the room. Stern could hear the rattle of small arms fire outside, punctuated by the occasional burp of some heavier weapon. He edged into the room and pressed himself against the panelled wall. By the greenish light of a desk lamp he picked out the man with the British accent. He was pointing a large pistol across the desk at a shadow seated before the window. Stern jumped when he heard the voice of the man in the chair, a gravelly rasp, full of contempt. It was Horn.
He couldn’t make out all the words, but the old man—despite his vulnerable position—seemed to be offering the Englishman mercy. This only infuriated the younger man. With a cry of rage he charged the wheelchair, kicked Horn over, then raised his pistol and jerked back the slide. By God, he means to kill him, Stern realized. He started forward instinctively, then he stopped. A broken fork was not much good against a semi-automatic pistol. Yet beyond that, something deep in Stern’s soul, something angry and crusted black, told him to do absolutely nothing. If the old man lying helpless on the floor actually had gained possession of a nuclear weapon, Stern could neutralize him now by simply allowing the enraged Englishman to blow his brains out. Perhaps that was best … The next moments passed like chain lightning. Stern heard Horn mutter something from behind the sofa. The young Englishman, driven beyond his limit of endurance, steadied his gun with both hands and prepared to fire. “Death at last, Alfred!” he cried. “It’s long overdue!”
