‘. . . than for him to die knowing the truth.’
Sam didn’t blame her for deceiving him about her involvement with Johann. She’d had precious little dignity in her life, without being branded a traitor at the end of it.
He glanced around the café. The other customers were mostly twenty-somethings in office clothes, making a pit stop after work. Gabbing. Spinning the little untruths that made the world turn.
Hoffmann looked at his watch. Half-past six.
‘You like opera?’
‘Some . . .’
‘Tonight it is Traviata. The ticket I had bought for Ilse – if you would like . . .’
‘Why not,’ Sam murmured. He needed more time with Hoffmann. There was another pressing matter to pick his brains about. A matter of far greater significance to world security than the Packer menfolk’s unfortunate predilection for women who deceived them.
Brussels
19.10 hrs
Nina Klason arrived at the University Clinic of St Luc by taxi. She’d come straight from the airport, numbed by what had happened and with no idea what to expect. It had been early afternoon in Vienna before she’d learned about her husband’s sudden illness. The Commission staff had tried to reach her from mid-morning but she’d been out of the house taking her visiting mother shopping.
The hospital’s reception desk sent her to the tenth floor. When she stepped out of the lift she was met by a nurse, whose grim face spelled the worst. Suddenly it all became too much and Nina began to cry.
‘Please, the doctor will explain everything in a few minutes.’ The nurse addressed her in English and ushered her into a small consulting room. ‘Please wait here. He will not be long.’
Nina clung to her arm. ‘Is Anders dead?’
‘No, Mrs Klason. But he is very ill. The doctor will tell you.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘I’m sorry. You must wait for the doctor.’
The silence of the room after the nurse left was broken only by the sound of her heartbeat. She’d left Vienna in a panic, putting her reluctant mother in charge of the children. The Commissioner for Racial Affairs had told her Anders had an unidentified brain infection. Surely by now they’d know what it was.
A couple of minutes later the door opened again. She knew how long it had been, because she’d been staring at her watch from the moment the nurse left. She looked up to see a very white coat topped by a very black face.
‘Madame Klason, vous parlez Français?’
‘Non. But English.’
‘I’m Dr Gouari.’ They shook hands, then the medic sat down in the chair opposite her. ‘Your husband is very ill, Mrs Klason.’ He spoke clearly, but with a heavy African accent.
She knew Anders was very ill. Why did they keep repeating it?
‘At this moment we still don’t know what is causing his illness. His blood shows viral antibodies, but we haven’t been able to identify the virus yet.’
‘I don’t understand. Can’t you do tests?’
‘Tissue cultures take time. The laboratory is working on it.’
‘I want to speak with him.’
‘It’s not possible. His brain function has been severely impaired by the infection.’
‘I . . . I don’t understand,’ she stammered. ‘He will be all right?’
The Congolese doctor hesitated. ‘Until we know what the infection is . . .’
‘I want to see him now, please.’ She stood up, pushing back the hank of dark hair that had fallen across her thin, pale face.
‘Please, Mrs Klason. You can see him soon. But first you must understand some things.’ He held out his hand, indicating she should sit down again.
She complied, but reluctantly. Nina’s compelling desire to be out of that room was not simply because of her desire to see her husband. Although she espoused the idea of racial equality and was married to one of its champions, she felt deeply uncomfortable with black men. She’d been brought up to think of them as savages and had a physical fear of them. The fact that her husband’s fate depended on the competence of one of them was hard to come to terms with.
‘The first thing I should tell you is that you won’t be able to touch your husband, Mrs Klason.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he is being barrier nursed. Inside a plastic tent where the air is kept at negative pressure so that the infection is contained.’
‘But I’m his wife,’ she protested.
‘This disease may be dangerously infectious.’
Nina began to panic. Maybe she and the children had been infected already. ‘How . . . how could he have caught this illness?’
‘That’s what we must find out. As soon as possible. I’d like to ask you some questions.’
‘Of course.’
‘Has your husband been in contact with animals?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t have a dog at home?’
‘No pets at all. My son is allergic to cat hair.’
‘Your husband hasn’t been bitten by an animal recently?’
‘No.’
‘Or by some insect?’
‘I don’t think so. He is very thin and mosquito bites always show on his body. I would have seen. Why? What is it you think he has?’
The doctor clasped his hands together. ‘His symptoms are not consistent with any known illness, but some of them resemble rabies. And the rabies virus enters through a break in the skin. A bite or a cut, normally.’
Nina felt her face burning. ‘A cut,’ she whispered.
‘Yes.’
Her lips moved silently at first. Then the words came. ‘On . . . on Sunday he was cut.’
The doctor’s eyes widened. ‘By an animal? A scratch with a paw and then a lick perhaps?’
‘No, no. No animals. It was a little piece of glass.’
‘Glass . . .’ The doctor looked disappointed.
‘It was caught in his towel – we were at the lake, for swimming.’
‘There would have been animals around. The towel had been on the ground?’
‘Yes but there were no animals where we were. I am always so careful where we put our things, because of dog dirt. The children can get sick. So I looked carefully. The ground was clean and there were no animals that I saw. But there were two people who came and talked to us, a man and a woman. They said the children were too far out in the water. I was distracted by what they were saying, but I think they could have put the glass on Anders’s towel. When he came out of the water he cut himself when he dried his back.’
The doctor frowned. ‘I don’t understand. You mean this piece of glass was on the ground? It got caught in the towel when he picked it up?’
‘It’s what we also thought at first. Then after, we realised the glass piece must be on the top of the towel, not on the underside. We don’t understand it because the towel had just come out of the wash machine. Then we remembered the strangers. We wondered if they had put it there. Like crazy people, you know?’
The doctor sat very still, digesting what she’d told him. ‘I see. And this man and woman you mentioned, you don’t know who they were?’
‘No. We never saw them before. And after, they drove quickly away, like they were criminals.’
Dr Gouari rose slowly to his feet.
‘Please wait here, Mrs Klason. Just a little longer. There is a telephone call I need to make.’
London
‘Peter’ had said the next attack should be on Saturday, but that was the wrong day for what Rob Petrie had in mind. This time his target wasn’t to be blacks or Pakis but ZOG – the Zionist Occupation Government whose tentacles spread through the northern hemisphere controlling the white race’s lives in ways the average guy in the street would hardly credit. Sure, the Lucifer Network needed simultaneous action across Europe, but the Sabbath was a bad day for killing Jews.
It had crossed his mind to bomb a synagogue full of the bastards, but he’d ruled it out
. Attacks on religious sites were distasteful to the British, even to the right wing whose political voice the network needed to mobilise. So he would hit them at work. At the places where they wielded their power, where they accumulated their wealth. And for that it would have to be Friday.
His first thought had been to secrete the bomb on the directors’ floor at the Golding Brothers headquarters on Bishopsgate, revenge against the Zionists who’d sacked him eighteen months ago. But it was too obvious. Too personal. And anyway, it would have been impossible to get in and out of the building without being seen by someone who would recognise him.
This afternoon he’d dressed in a suit for the first time in months, camouflage for penetrating the streets of London’s financial centre. He exited from the tube at Bank, headed down Threadneedle Street, then into the courtyards where the wine bars were doing good business. It was the first time he’d been back here since the sacking and it hurt. They all looked so damned cocky, the peer group he’d been a part of, strutting to the bars with their wallets full of twenties and plastic.
He needed a target that was overtly Jewish. He walked on through the paved squares and narrow lanes to Bishopsgate, forcing himself to look up at the edifice of brown bricks and glass where he’d worked for eight years. Nearly a decade of bonus cheques – the sky the limit until it fell on his head. Sandra had been with him for the last of those years, impressed by his lifestyle as much as by him. Holidays in Phuket, dinners at Marco’s and loads of sex under a mirrored ceiling in a fifteenth-floor Docklands loft with river views and gold-coloured taps in the bathroom. Then he’d lost it all and Sandra had been forced on to night shifts because the pay was better.
Suddenly it became patently clear to him that he’d made a mistake. He was in the wrong place. A bomb in the City would be crazy. Yes, there were Jews and Asians here, but the majority were like him. The focus for the attack had to be sharper than that if the thick-heads in the press were to understand its meaning.
He quickened his pace away from the Golding Bros building, heading back to the tube. A new thought had occurred to him. He knew precisely where he needed to go.
Stepney
Sandra Willetts stepped out of the lift on the twelfth floor of Windsor Court carrying a couple of Tesco bags. It annoyed her that Rob was so useless about shopping for food. He spent most of the day hanging round with nothing to do, so why couldn’t he bloody well buy the groceries instead of leaving it to her to do on her days off? She walked along the concrete landing then dumped the bags on the ground while she stuck her key in the lock, psyching herself up to have a go at him when she got inside the flat.
‘Rob?’
No reply. She stepped into the tiny kitchen and put the bags down on the draining board. He’d left an empty beer can on the breakfast bar and a greasy lunch plate in the sink. The place stank of burnt fat.
There’d been times lately when she’d wondered why she stuck with him. The main reason was pity, she’d decided. He’d been a real turn-on when they first met, and she hadn’t forgotten it. She’d tried to convince herself that if he could only get a decent job he’d be his old self again. Relationships were like the stock market, he’d said to her once. You don’t dump your best shares when the price drops. You hang on in there until it goes up again.
But of late she’d begun to doubt whether it ever could. Being sacked had changed Rob into a bitter no-hoper, a change that felt permanent.
Sandra was five foot six. A few years back she’d had an all-over suntan she could afford to maintain right through the winter, which looked great with her blonde hair. In the Docklands days she’d gone to a gym three evenings a week. Rob used to say her tits were well up to page three and the sight of her bum could give a dead man an erection. But in the last eighteen months she’d put weight on in the wrong places, her skin had turned pasty and most of the time her roots showed. Rob used to take it for granted that she loved him; nowadays he kept needing to ask. She always said yes, but she didn’t really know any more.
And where the hell was he? They’d had breakfast together – a rare event with her shifts – and he’d said nothing about going out.
Listlessly she unpacked the groceries then went to the bedroom to change into trainers. She’d been on her feet all day, clothes shopping in Oxford Street. Just looking. The only place she could afford anything these days was at charity shops. Although it was nice to have a break from work, she almost dreaded these days off, tending to find reasons to go out because Rob got on her nerves if she stayed at home. He’d started playing heavy metal, which she couldn’t stand. And in the evenings they both drank. Not for pleasure, but so that when they went to bed they were too pissed to think about why they weren’t having sex any more.
She wandered into the living room and was about to switch on the TV when she noticed he’d left his computer on. She stared at it. The screen was black – it turned off automatically – but the power lights glowed on the tower. He never left it on when he was out normally. The computer was his private world. She never used it – couldn’t because you needed a password to start it up. She knew how computers worked, though. One of the girls who shared the night shift had a laptop which she brought in sometimes. Sandra walked over to the trolley, listening to the soft whirr of the machine’s cooling fan. Listening too for the sound of Rob’s key in the lock.
Timidly she reached out and touched the mouse. The screen hummed and came to life. She’d half expected to see pictures of girls showing their fannies – he spent hours on the Internet when she was out. She knew that, because whenever she rang to say hello, the line was engaged. But on the screen it was his e-mail program. Her friend on the ward had the same software on her laptop. One very quiet night they’d dialled into the net from the ward extension for a few minutes, totally against the rules, because her friend wanted to show her what it was all about.
The main window on the screen said Inbox. There was a list of e-mails he’d received, many from people called Peter. Different surnames, but always Peter. Odd. She turned away. This was wrong. Rob was entitled to his privacy. She thought of shutting the computer down, as he himself must have meant to do before going out, but there was so much about him she didn’t know now. Like that cupboard of his on the wall which he always kept locked.
She swallowed her fear, put her hand on the mouse and ran the cursor up the list of mail. The last one received had been two days ago. She glanced over her shoulder. Through the open living room door she could see into the hall and to the glass-panelled front door. Nobody there. Nobody about to come in.
It couldn’t harm. He’d never know.
She double clicked. The letter appeared in the bottom half of the screen.
Congratulations!
She began to read.
After she’d read it once she sat down, covering her mouth with her hands. It had to be a joke, this. Some game. Some piece of cyberspace role playing.
Then she read it again and began to feel sick. Sick at what it might mean and sick with guilt. Quickly she stood up, closed the screen window, then shut down the computer. She was finding it hard to breathe, as if she had a heavy weight on her chest.
Suddenly there was a shadow outside the front door. Metal grated on metal as the key went in. Rob . . .
Sandra ran for the bathroom. She locked the door behind her and turned on the taps.
Vienna
In the third act of La Traviata, as Violetta lay dying upon the stage, Sam became aware that Günther Hoffmann was overwhelmed by grief. He half turned and saw by the light spilling from the set that the old spy was holding a handkerchief to his face and his shoulders were shaking. A few minutes later as the final applause died and the audience got to their feet, Hoffmann remained where he was until a silk-gowned lady to his right made it rudely clear that she wanted to pass. It wasn’t until they’d filed out into the cream and gold lobbies that Hoffmann could bring himself to speak.
‘It was Ilse’s favourite opera,’ he
confided hoarsely.
The departing audience carried them through the main doors and out onto the Ring. Once in the fresh air Hoffmann shook his head like a dog.
‘Um Gottes willen! I need a drink.’
‘Better than that,’ said Sam, ‘I’ll buy you dinner.’ He’d begun to feel sorry for the old spymaster, but told himself to get a grip.
The night air was stickily warm. They squeezed onto a tram for a couple of stops to get away from the opera crowds, then found a restaurant which Hoffmann said was good for schnitzels. To a muzak track of Strauss waltzes they ordered food and a large carafe of Wachauer Riesling. Hoffmann said it was better than the usual Grüner Veltliner. The wine arrived quickly. When he took a mouthful he puckered his lips.
‘Ach. This is not so good.’
‘No, it’s pretty vile,’ Sam concurred.
‘You know, in German we have a name for such a wine,’ Hoffmann told him, a twinkle returning to his slate grey eyes.
‘Something like rats’ piss, you mean?’
‘Ja. Similar. We call it Hemdzieher. You know why?’
Sam frowned. ‘Shirt-puller?’
‘Ja. Because the wine is so sauer it suck the shirt up your backside.’ Hoffmann smirked at his own crudeness. ‘We would have been better with the Veltliner. We can change it.’
Sam shook his head. ‘As rats’ piss goes, I’ve tasted worse. The second mouthful was better than the first.’
He wanted to broach the subject of Vladimir Kovalenko, but decided it was wiser to do so obliquely. ‘Will you stay in Vienna now you’re on your own?’
Hoffmann ruminated for a moment. ‘It is too soon for such a question.’ He picked up a beer mat and tapped its edge on the table. ‘But . . . when it is my time to die, then I would like to be at home.’
‘Home?’
‘Greifswald. The house of my parents it is still there. Someone rents it now, but perhaps in a few years I will go back. It depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On how it is in Germany then. What sort of country it has become.’ His eyes flared for a moment, then he looked away as if to hide some secret passion. ‘But most of all when I die, I want to smell the sea,’ he added quickly. ‘Like Caspar David.’
The Lucifer Network Page 23
