He tapped in the code to Effi’s front door and hustled Amira inside, supporting her dead weight with his free arm. He kicked the door shut behind him and heard the comforting click as the automatic security lock slid into place.
Effi was standing near the kitchen area in her nightgown. ‘Johnny. What’s happening? Who is this woman?’
‘I’ll explain later. I promise. But she’s badly hurt. You need to call the hospital first, and then the police.’
‘Was she in a road accident?’
‘She’s been shadowing Zirkeler, Effi. One of his men caught her and punched her in the head. My guess is that she crumpled like a rag doll and hit her head again going down. Either that or the bastard kicked her for good measure. She’s been out for well over an hour. She needs a doctor fast.’
‘Following Udo? Why was she following Udo?’
‘Because she thinks he killed her partner. Wesker, the man at the Alpenruh. Effi, please make the calls.’
‘Why don’t we drive her to the hospital ourselves? It’s just across the lake in Tegernsee. It will be quicker.’
‘No. Zirkeler is just behind us with about a dozen of his men in tow. We don’t have the time.’
‘Udo is coming here?’
‘They’ll be here any moment. Give me the keys to your father’s gun safe. Then we must go upstairs and barricade ourselves in. You told me all your windows are security glass, didn’t you? It’ll take them a hell of a time to break their way in through that. We should be okay.’
‘But Udo has the door code.’
‘He what?’
‘I told you. He organizes security here. He has all the codes for all my properties.’
‘Jesus. Can you override the codes?’
‘I don’t know how to. I’m sorry.’
‘Then make those calls.’
‘Of course.’
‘Where do you keep the gun-safe keys?’
‘In the top right-hand desk drawer. But there is only a squirrel gun left. And probably no ammunition. After my father died, I sent all his guns to an auction house in England. I have never shot at anything in my life. So there seemed no point in keeping them. They would only have needed cleaning.’
Hart stumbled across the drawing room with Amira pressed tightly against him. He could hear Effi talking urgently into the phone. At one point Amira’s knees buckled, causing both of them to lurch onto the floor. Hart was just able to throw out an arm and steady her before she struck her head for a third time.
He unlocked the gun case and looked inside. Effi had been telling the truth. There was an old .410 squirrel gun in there and nothing else. Hart scrabbled around for some cartridges. He found two, wedged tightly against the inside doorframe as if they had been overlooked – or as if the box had simply rotted away around them. Hart rolled the ancient wax-paper cartridge near his ear – it crackled. Not promising.
Hart took the gun and the cartridges out of the safe. He squatted down and allowed Amira to fold forwards across his shoulder. When she was safely in place, he started towards the stairs. Effi ran over to join him.
‘Have you made the calls?’
‘Yes. The police say they will be here in ten minutes. The ambulance is on its way too. The police know me, so they know it is no hoax.’
‘Good girl. We must get upstairs, then you must help me to push the spare bed across the stair opening. Zirkeler won’t know how much ammo I have for this thing. At a distance it’ll be less than useless. But close up it’s potentially lethal. Especially if we get a few of them clogging the staircase. With luck we can hold him and his people at bay until the police arrive.’
‘But I can’t believe he means this woman any harm, Johnny. It must be a misunderstanding. Maybe she fell over and hit her head? And why are you involved? I don’t understand. Do you know her?’
‘If Zirkeler didn’t mean her any harm, why was he intending to place her in a cage and use her as a human guinea pig at your factory? I got this information from two of his men. They didn’t seem too comfortable with the whole idea either.’
‘My factory? What was she doing at my factory? And what are you talking about? Human guinea pigs? Cages? Have you gone mad?’
Hart started up the stairs with Amira over his shoulder. ‘This woman is a journalist, Effi. For a major British newspaper. Wesker was too. They are preparing a story on extreme right-wing groups in Germany. Not mainstream parties like yours, but the offshoots of them. The crap adhering to the edges.’ Hart stopped and eased Amira into a better position on his shoulder. The past few hours had exhausted him. He was puffing like a shunt locomotive. ‘Zirkeler is seriously crazy, Effi. You must realize that by now. When I saw him at the factory he was running around dressed in a frigging SS uniform. As if the Second World War had never ended. The man is two pecks short of a bushel. Amira thinks he’s using the place to recreate some sort of nerve agent that Hitler’s scientists discovered at the end of the war. God alone knows who he intends to use it on. But he needs to be stopped now, before it goes too far.’
They reached the head of the stairs. Hart carried Amira into the main bedroom and laid her out on the bed. He piled a load of blankets on top of her to keep her body temperature up. Then he checked the .410. It had a single barrel with no obvious rust pits. So far so good. He loaded it. He prayed to God that it was set to full choke, because otherwise the squirrel shot would disperse after five yards and be worse than useless, despite what he had told Effi.
‘Effi, come here. You can help me with this spare bed. We need to drag it out into the hall and across the top of the stairs.’
‘Is Udo armed?’
‘I don’t know. I never got that close to him. I don’t think so. Otherwise he would have taken a shot at me when I stole the electro-boat.’
‘The electro-boat?’ Effi squinted at him. She seemed on the verge of saying something, but then visibly changed her mind. ‘What else has Udo done that you know of?’
Hart took hold of one side of the mattress and nodded at Effi to take the other. ‘He killed my father in Guatemala.’
‘Your father?’
‘Yes. My father suffered from bipolar disease. What they used to call manic depression. Part of the time he lived under the name of Roger Pope, and part of the time under the name he was given when he was picked up as a child by some GIs during the war – James Hart. Zirkeler crucified him. Then he returned a few days later and killed my father’s long-time mistress and her driver. That’s how your political party got hold of the Holy Lance. Zirkeler conjured up some bullshit for you about a man in Portland, Oregon, who had inherited the Holy Lance from his father, an ex-GI, and then felt guilty keeping it. But he actually stole it from my father, who got it directly from my grandparents after the plane they were on crashed. The bastard’s been hiding behind you and your political party all the time, Effi. And now you tell me he has the codes for all your buildings, the whole thing makes even more sense. How often do you visit your factory?’
Effi shook her head. The colour had started to return to her face. ‘Hardly ever. Maybe once a year. I have a manager there who runs it. I get reports. My accountants check the figures. I keep the factory more out of a sense of duty to my late father than as any ongoing concern. And because it employs a dozen people in an area of low employment. That’s the only reason I still have it. I’ve never been remotely interested in that side of my father’s work.’
‘Well, Zirkeler certainly has. He’s been using the factory under your nose, Effi. Employing his own people to work there. Amira must have stumbled in and found him.’
Hart and Effi finished manhandling the spare bed frame out into the hall. They could hear the arrival of Zirkeler’s phalanx of cars in the front drive. Hart estimated he had two minutes at the most, whilst Zirkeler’s men encircled the house and decided what to do next.
‘How long ago did you call the police?’
Effi shrugged. ‘Nearly ten minutes now. They will be coming in from Rott
ach. You will hear the sirens soon.’
‘Take this, then.’ Hart handed Effi the .410. ‘I’m going to check on Amira. She mustn’t fall asleep. That would be the worst thing for her. If Zirkeler comes through that front door, fire over his head. Here, this is the second cartridge. You break the gun like this, pick out the old cartridge, and slide the new one in here. You’d have to hit someone straight on in the face to kill them, so it’s really not that dangerous. It’ll just make Zirkeler and his men a little more cautious than they would otherwise have been, and maybe buy us a few more minutes. Hold the second cartridge back for when they get closer. But I’ll have returned by then.’
Effi turned the gun on Hart. She pointed it directly at his head. ‘You mean when they get closer like this? From this distance, Johnny? Then it would be dangerous?’ Effi’s blue eyes were as cold as ice. The shotgun was mounted tight against her shoulder. Her legs were slightly apart. It was the stance of an experienced shot – someone who has been stalking and shooting game all their lives. Not someone who was picking up a shotgun for the very first time and feeling uncertain how to use it.
‘For God’s sake, Effi.’ Hart started towards her. ‘You never, ever joke with guns.’ He stretched a hand out to turn the shotgun away.
Effi took a pace backwards. She motioned at him with the tip of the barrel. ‘You stand still. Don’t move.’
Hart could feel the first cold fingers of doubt encircle him. He took a deep breath. Effi was frightened and panicking. He had come back to her house in the middle of the night with a strange woman in tow, talking of viruses and violence. It was natural for her to have lost confidence in him. It had to be that. So he must shake her out of it. There was no other way.
‘I can hear Zirkeler and his men at the door. We need to pull together now, Effi, or we’re dead. Zirkeler has already murdered four people to my certain knowledge. Stop playing silly games and give me the gun.’ He took another step towards her.
Effi levelled the shotgun at Hart’s crotch. ‘If you move again, I will blow your precious cock and balls that you love so much to kingdom come. Will that convince you, Johnny? This is definitely not a game. Not any longer.’
SIXTY-ONE
Frau Erlichmann had finished translating the manuscript Hart had found hidden in the Holy Lance’s broken shaft. It had been less difficult than she expected. The message had been written in a script halfway between Old High German – what she knew of as Althochdeutsch or AHD – and Middle High German, with a bit of Latin and Greek thrown in for good measure. She had not been able to translate all the words, but she believed she had got the gist of it.
She knew that she ought to go back to sleep now, or else she would be exhausted by morning. But she found that she could not. From the moment Hart had left her house, she had begun worrying. Had it been a mistake to give him the pistol? An unnecessarily dramatic gesture, based on some absurd wartime regression? She had been tempted a number of times during the night to call the police, but surely if Hart felt he needed that sort of help, he would have told her?
Finally, when she could stand the tension no longer, she called her grandson. Thilo was a sensible boy. She had been so proud of him and his friends when Hart had recruited them to frighten the Rache woman at the Gasthof zur Hirschtal. He would know what to do.
‘Omi, why are you calling me in the middle of the night? I was asleep.’
‘I’m sorry, Thilo. But I am worried.’ Frau Erlichmann pressed the loudspeaker switch on her telephone. Suddenly she could hear her grandson sighing, throwing off the covers of his bed, plonking his feet on the floor. She refused to let embarrassment curb her tongue. She was far too old to stand on ceremony. ‘Very worried, in fact.’
‘What are you worried about?’ Thilo shuffled on his slippers and checked his alarm clock. The noise was magnified tenfold at the other end of the line. ‘You shouldn’t live alone in that old house. You should come and live with Papi, Mami and me. Do you want me to come over later and visit you?’
‘I want you to come over now. I think I have done something rather stupid. Two hours ago I gave the baron your great-grandfather’s pistol. And I lent him my car.’
‘You gave him a gun? And your car? In the middle of the night?’
Frau Erlichmann closed her eyes. She needed to concentrate. She owed it to the baron to get her point across without diluting its effect. Thilo was a sensible boy. She needed to treat him as such. ‘The baron thinks that the Zirkeler creature killed my guest, Herr Wesker. The woman he used to be with, Amira Eisenberger – the one he was involved with before he started this nonsense with the Rache woman – has gone to the Rache factory to investigate.’
‘Amira Eisenberger? The journalist?’
‘She is a journalist, I believe. Have you heard of her?’
Thilo sucked in his breath. ‘Do you know how famous Amira Eisenberger is, in our circle? She has been covering the civil war in Syria since the beginning. She was in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. In Europe she specializes in extreme right-wing politics and fascism. She is one of the best-known journalists on the planet.’
Frau Erlichmann sighed. ‘No, I did not know that. The baron can sometimes be a little reticent with the truth. I only know that he thinks she may be in trouble.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Quite serious, I think.’
There was a lengthy silence down the line. For a moment Frau Erlichmann thought Thilo might have been cut off. Then she heard crashing noises through the telephone loudspeaker as he stumbled around his bedroom gathering up his clothes.
‘I’m going to collect up a few of my friends, Omi. People who think the same way I do. Then we are coming down to see you. We will go to the factory first, as it is on our way, and then on to you. Meanwhile, you must call the police. Promise me you will do that? Sepp Unterbauer is a sergeant now. Ask for him by name. Papi says his mother used to work for you during the sixties, before she got married. Remember?’
‘How can I call the police? I have nothing whatsoever to tell them. And if I call them, they will stop the baron and imprison him for carrying an illegal weapon and we will both go to prison. And this may all be quatsch anyway. An old woman’s imaginings.’
Thilo laughed loudly down the phone. ‘You may be an old woman, Omi, but I have never known you to imagine anything.’
SIXTY-TWO
Udo Zirkeler’s men spread through the ground-floor level of Haus Walküre like a horde of locusts. Hart had a grandstand view of the bedlam from his position behind the makeshift barricade he and Effi had constructed at the top of the stairs. Thanks to the Z-bend construction of the staircase, they weren’t as yet visible to the men below.
Hart motioned at the shotgun Effi was pointing at his chest. Then he pointed towards the spare bed frame blocking the stairwell. ‘Shall I take this down for you? I might be tempted to kick it onto Zirkeler’s head otherwise. And I wouldn’t want you to shoot me for such a pathetic reason as that.’
‘Leave it where it is. I don’t want you moving.’ Effi’s concentration was fixed on Hart. She seemed entirely unmoved by the crashing and banging coming from downstairs as Zirkeler’s men quartered the house.
An unwanted mental image came to Hart of what it must have been like for Jewish families when the SS or the Gestapo came to round them up in the middle of the night. Or for the East German intelligentsia when the Stasi came to call. All thugs were alike, he decided. They clattered and shouted and wrecked things. They imposed themselves.
Hart turned his back on the chaos happening downstairs and faced Effi. They would reach the first floor soon. He wondered idly what form his death would take. A beating? A tumble down the stairs? Or would he and Amira be taken to another place entirely and involved in a fake road accident? He was sorry now that he had borrowed Frau Erlichmann’s vintage Auto Union. It was unlikely, given their present situation, that she would get it back in quite the same pristine condition as before. ‘You didn’t call the polic
e, did you, Effi? Or the ambulance service? You were just talking into a dead phone.’
‘You are joking, surely?’
Hart gave a hollow laugh. ‘Yes. The joke does seem to be on me, doesn’t it?’ He met Effi’s eyes directly for the first time since she had turned the shotgun on him. ‘I vanquished all my doubts about you, Effi. I suffocated them at birth. All my doubts about your party. About your politics. About your Nazi antecedents. I wouldn’t listen to my friends. I wouldn’t even listen to my own bloody instincts when every bone in my body was screaming “red flag” at me. How does it feel to pull the wool over someone’s eyes so categorically, Effi? Does it give you a sense of power? Of dominion? I was so desperate to believe you were who I wanted you to be that I steered my own people in the wrong direction in order to protect you. What a fool you must have thought me.’
‘That’s the understatement of the year. But you’ve got one thing wrong, Johnny. You weren’t desperate to protect me. You were desperate to get inside my pants. I’ve rarely met a man as cock-driven as you. Men like you ought to be made to carry a warning sign. “Idiot on the prowl.”’
Hart shook his head from side to side like a man who has been sucker-punched in a bar brawl. He used the movement to disguise a quick glance down the stairs. Udo Zirkeler was striding up the staircase towards them, a broad grin on his face. Hart knew that if he was to have any chance of getting his point across, he needed to do it in a hurry.
‘Amira Eisenberger may be bleeding internally, Effi. If you don’t get her to a doctor soon, it may be too late. She’s a world-famous journalist. You do realize that, don’t you? You might be able to duck out from under the other murders done in your name, but not this one. Her newspaper will crucify you if anything happens to her. You’ll never be let alone. They’ll bring you and your party down one way or the other. Don’t let Zirkeler destroy you. Do something decent for a change. You can still pull this back from the brink if you act now. Shoot the bastard.’
The Templar Prophecy Page 26
