by David Khara
At top speed, I use a stool, then the table to launch myself at the guy. In the movies it looks great. The baddie doesn’t see you coming and politely lets you land on him. In real life, the baddie hears you coming and ducks. I land in a heap on the ground. He hauls me up by the collar and rams the cold steel of his gun against the side of my head.
“Hands up! Now!” he hisses. I obey. I take a rabbit punch to the kidneys—an unpleasant way to get me moving toward the store I left at a sprint. I stagger back. Eytan on his cloud. Jackie MIA. Bernard dead. I feel very alone. I drag my feet because that’s what you do. My escort shoves me because he’s enjoying this. He didn’t kill me, so they must want to talk to me. That’s reassuring. The prospect of our upcoming chat, less so. I hope he’s not as persuasive as Eytan.
We take a shortcut through the now empty doorframes into the cafeteria.
Broken glass crunches underfoot. No more Aerosmith. At the far end of the hallway, the corpse of the porniac clerk is sprawled among the sandwiches and candy. Standing next to the body, another goon waits for me. Outside, a BMW SUV idles, passenger door open. We pass the bathrooms. I hope they haven’t found my favorite Israeli.
“Hit the deck, Jay!” I don’t need to be told twice, dropping to the tiled floor immediately. Glancing around, I see my escort with a knife sticking out of his neck. Behind him, Eytan holds him tight. The poor guy tries to grab the knife with one hand. In vain. The agent seizes the other hand holding the gun and forces his prisoner’s arm up. Pulling hard on the finger of the frantic puppet, Eytan opens fire. Once. The crashing sound in the store confirms a hit. Twice, to finish the job. The giant turns toward me. A sudden thrust of the knife drives the blade straight through the reluctant gunman’s neck. Blood spurts from his mouth.
Tires squealing, the SUV speeds up. Eytan spins toward the back door and pulls out of his pocket a puck identical to the one he used in the Zurich hotel. The roaring engine gets louder, and the BMW hurtles past, the passenger door still open. The little black puck sails through the air and sticks to the back of the SUV. A shadowy figure hurries out of the trees and dives into the moving van. Eytan takes out his remote and hits the button. A ball of flames engulfs the rear of the BMW. The combination of the powerful explosion and its speed makes the SUV lift off like a rocket, as if swiped upward by a titanic force. The SUV flies up, flips over backward and lands on its roof.
Eytan’s impressive build and bald head are silhouetted against the smoke and flames as he heads for the blazing vehicle after drawing a pistol equipped with a silencer as long as bounty hunter Josh Randall’s sawed-off Winchester. I run after him, but the giant is totally oblivious to me. He keeps going, both hands on the gun held out in front of him.
Somebody squirms out the passenger door. I’d recognize that body anywhere. “Eytan, don’t shoot! It’s Jackie!”
He keeps going. Twenty paces ahead, Jackie crawls on all fours on the asphalt. She looks badly shaken, but not obviously wounded. She gets up with some difficulty and turns toward us. I can’t really see her face, but her size and shape put the issue beyond doubt.
“Eytan?” Why won’t he lower his gun, the jerk? Jackie backs up toward the wreckage of the car, staring incredulously at us. Eytan fires off a whole magazine. I can’t breathe. Buffy instinctively ducks. Behind her, near the trees, a badly limping man has taken aim and is about to shoot her in the back. The volley of bullets blasts him through the branches and into a tree trunk.
“Jeremy, try shutting up when I’m taking aim. You distract me,” he says with a wink in my direction. I gasp for breath. Jackie likewise. She comes over, covered in mud and soaked in sweat. Her leather jacket is singed.
“I honestly thought you were going to blow me away.” She’s been doing acrobatics in a burning car, and she laughs it off. This girl blows me away.
“Would I do a thing like that? Situation?” Eytan asks, deadly serious.
“Three enemy operatives. One shot in the trees. Another winged in the foot and finished off by you just now, kind sir. Plus the driver, whom I had knocked out prior to interrogation, but he’s unlikely to be very talkative now. You two?”
Eytan holsters his impressive pistol. “They shot the clerk. One enemy dead in the store. Another outside the bathroom. Plus the car knocked out. Thank Christ, no civilians showed up. It would have been carnage.”
I glance around me. A hundred-thousand-dollar car parked on its roof and smoking like a sausage on a barbecue. A few yards away, a corpse riddled with bullets hugging a tree. In the cafeteria, another body on a carpet of broken glass with a knife sticking out of its throat. Down the hallway, the sad sack who was working in the wrong place at the wrong time is sprawled side by side with the last of the commandos on a bed of chips and candy.
And the giant wacko thinks that’s not carnage.
CHAPTER 29
We’re making good time. The GPS estimates arrival in four hours. I didn’t see anything of Switzerland. Shame, it’s supposed to be pretty. I’d like to think I’ll take in the sights next time. If there is a next time.
Jackie’s asleep in the backseat, still dazed from Bernard’s killing and the shootout. We’re all taking it bad. Even Eytan Morg. They knew each other better than he’s letting on. Maybe he’ll tell us about it in his own sweet time. I hope so. His bathroom break hasn’t made things simpler. He drives, eyes staring at the road ahead. Tough shit, I need to talk. “Besides work and getting high, what do you do all day?” No answer. You’re out of luck, pal. I’m pigheaded. “The journey will seem shorter if we talk, don’t you think?”
He sighs. “When I’m not on an assignment, I paint.” I can’t help laughing. “You think that’s funny?”
“I’m picturing you on a stool with your palette and brush, gazing at a green valley or a snowy mountaintop. Sorry, but with your look and build, it’s funny!”
“If you’re just going to make fun of me, the trip is going to seem very, very long.” He clams up.
“There’s no harm in a little fun. OK, I’ll stop,” I snort, laughing even louder. Why do giggling fits always hit at inappropriate times?
“What about you? Besides driving home from clubs dead drunk, what do you do?”
Bastard. That’s below the belt. On second thought, I guess I deserved it. “I try to survive. I thought about blowing my brains out, but I’m too much of a coward. So I drink. I smoke like a chimney. Every day, I destroy myself a little bit more.”
“Suicide isn’t a sign of bravery, but of giving up. We all make mistakes. You don’t judge somebody by the number of blows they can give.”
“What do you judge somebody by, Mr. Freud?”
“The number of blows they can take.”
His words hit home. “You’ve taken a lot, right?” I ask. A long, long beat.
“More than you can ever imagine.”
Why am I not surprised? This guy’s been around the block. I’d bet my life on it. “How do you do it?”
“Pardon me?”
“Blowing guys away like that. How do you do it?”
“Who said it was easy?” He sighs heavily. A long awkward silence. My questions seem to carry Eytan onto a stormy sea whose crashing waves he’d do anything to avoid. I plow on.
“I saw you kill two guys in my building. Jackie told me you eliminated two more who ambushed her. And now the rest-stop massacre. No trembling, no hesitation. By my calculations, you’ve wasted eight guys in under twenty-four hours.”
“I suspect the total is closer to ten—one every three hours since we met.”
He glances at the dashboard clock. “Another hour, and I’ll have to kill somebody else to keep up my batting average.” Maybe Eytan thinks he can laugh this off. My frown disabuses him of the notion.
“Don’t try to worm your way out of it. I repeat, how do you do it? I want an answer.” Unintentionally, I raise my voice. “I need an answer!”
“Why? How will knowing help you? Am I your fantasy? Does death fascinate you
or the idea of killing turn you on? Maybe it revolts you. Whatever. What do you expect me to say? Yes, I kill. Killing is my job. Watching over you is my mission. Count yourself lucky you’re not my enemy.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“For Christ’s sake, what the hell is it to you?”
“I want to understand who you are. Are you surprised?”
Eytan suddenly steers the Lexus onto the shoulder, screeches to a halt and spins toward me. “Listen up, doofus. I lied when I told Jackie I work alone. I carry centuries of oppression on my shoulders. I have an army behind me. One hell of an army! Six million men, women and children exterminated in a few short years. Not to mention the gays, gypsies and other victims of hatred and ignorance. I stand between the wackos and the innocent. I kill so nobody will have to die. That’s why I never tremble, I never hesitate, and I never regret. If I fail in my mission, the martyrs of the Shoah will have died in vain. Wolves lurk in the shadows. I smoke them out. If they still want to fight, I annihilate them. You want to know who I am, Jeremy? I am a rampart.”
Silence. I’m impressed by the huge effort he has made to express himself calmly, without raising his voice. The gravity of his argument is enough. I fiddle awkwardly, head down, staring at my feet. Put in my place.
The car pulls away again. Jackie’s still asleep. Imperturbable. Beautiful.
“What if Mossad had its own in-house Pettygrow?”
The question is provocative but not as dumb as it might seem. He nods. “Considering the apparent links between our enigmatic opponents and the Nazis, I can’t imagine any of our people allying themselves with them.”
“Of course. You’re one big family, and you stand united against aggression, right?”
“I couldn’t put it any better. Do you have any idea of the number of enemies the state of Israel has? Without unfailing solidarity, our country would lie in ruins,” Eytan retorts with a hint of irony, trotting out the official line.
But I’m not a total chump. “Remind me, Agent Morg. Who killed Yitzhak Rabin?”
Got him! Eytan shoots me a sidelong glance. His jaw twitches. “In World War II,” I add, “didn’t some Jews willingly collaborate with the Nazis?” Slowly and painfully, he turns toward me. His features are drawn.
“They did, Jeremy. I know that better than anyone.”
DAY 4
CHAPTER 30
Berlin. May, 1945.
Andrei Kourilyenko couldn’t believe his eyes. The typically laconic intelligence reports claimed thirty to seventy percent of Berlin had been destroyed, depending on the neighborhood. But where were the parts of the city that were intact? The German capital was like a film set with only the facades of bombed-out buildings still standing. The streets were littered with the stinking, rotting corpses of members of the Volkssturm, the last line of resistance composed of civilians and children.
The convoys trucking in Soviet administrative units traveled by night. In the headlights, Andrei glimpsed shadowy figures fleeing the Red Army uniforms. He heard gunshots in the ruins as indiscriminate punishment was wrought on the German people. They were paying a heavy, painful price. The millions killed by Operation Barbarossa would not be resuscitated by flattening Berlin and massacring its population. As if war were not sufficiently absurd already. As if the savagery of the victors could erase the barbarity of the defeated.
Sheer stupidity, he mused. Expressed out loud, the thought would have seen him hauled before a firing squad within the hour. Like many of his comrades, he recalled that Stalin shared Hitler’s penchant for repression. Under both regimes, silence was the only method for extending one’s life expectancy. Germany had its führer, the Soviets had a vozhd, a guide. The difference between them was a question of semantics.
Andrei lived hidden in the hushed corridors of scientific administration. All Sonya, his wife, and their young daughter knew of the conflict was what state propaganda wanted them to know. In Moscow, Andrei’s job was to compile lists of scientists and translate their works into layman’s language. Ten years at university and drawers full of diplomas ensured him a job. Losing an eye to a neurological disease spared him active participation in the war. His handicap advanced his career. In a terrifying world, he looked the part. Always immaculately dressed, his graying hair cropped short, he wore glasses with smoked glass concealing his missing right eye. He scared his colleagues. It was the ideal cover for a shy man and passionate lover of classical music and French literature. Such notoriously tsarist hobbies had to be kept absolutely secret.
Hunched in his seat in the black car, Andrei jumped when a woman ran frantically across the road, only just avoiding the speeding vehicle. He glimpsed her torn clothes and bare breasts. Two men chased after her. Rape on top of plunder and summary executions. Defeating the Nazis was one thing, but the blood spilled here wouldn’t bring back the millions of Russian victims. As ever, the propaganda machine would gloss over the atrocities and turn reality into a hymn to Stalin’s glory.
Andrei understood the thirst for revenge but had no desire to witness or be an accomplice to it. His presence here reflected another dimension of the war. The rout and scattering of Nazi dignitaries marked the beginning of an international bidding war. The British, using MI6’s extensive contacts in the Abwehr, were offering German scientists gilt-edged contracts, but they were nothing compared to the Americans’ massively funded Operation Paperclip. For months, Andrei had tracked American attempts to spirit away leading German brains. Their biggest success so far had come three weeks earlier with the acquisition of Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist, who left for the New World with much of his research team. Frothing with rage, Stalin had ordered Department 7 of the NKGB, the Soviet secret service, to round up the remaining scientists or face serious reprisals. Quite simply, for the unit’s chiefs, failure would lead at best to a stay in Siberia, at worst, to the firing squad.
So that’s how Andrei found himself in hell, amid mostly illiterate peasant soldiers. The Soviet Union wanted a coordinator with a scientific background. Why did they have to pick him? The convoy of three cars and two trucks continued through the ruins until it came within sight of the German parliament. Powerful spotlights stood on heaps of rubble, sweeping the ground and sky. The architectural splendor of the Reichstag proved no defense against the Red Army’s shells. Andrei spotted a charred tree emerging from a mass of stone and steel. Glancing around, he saw the wreckage of a Messerschmitt, of which only the engine and propeller remained intact. He looked up and noticed the shell of the building’s bombed-out dome. Unfortunately, approaching from the south, they couldn’t see the flag raised there a few days earlier as a symbol of total victory. Three huge tanks were parked on the cratered plaza, which was covered with shards of glass from the gigantic windows blown out by the shelling.
The convoy pulled up behind the tanks. Andrei got out, relieved to get away from the taciturn driver, who had added to his boredom in the last few hours. Six men in uniforms, his personal escort, got out of the other two cars. Fifteen seconds later, seven cigarettes were lit almost simultaneously. A few minutes after that, the butts bounced off the ground at the soldiers’ feet. Vulgar jokes about the fall of the Nazi regime were shared. Laughing at other people’s problems helped them avoid issues closer to home that might provoke unease and suspicion.
Andrei thought back to the terms of his mission. The secret service would meet about twenty scientists and engineers at night outside the Reichstag. Salaries and perks would depend on the classifications that he alone would establish. His priorities, at the specific request of top brass, were rocket engineers, followed by armament specialists and the rest, who would be offered less comfortable packages. But in the current climate, less was better than nothing. The annihilation of Germany would, at least, compel the survivors to accept not very much at all, allowing the victors to sign people up cheaply. The recruits’ level of implication in the Nazi regime or possible misdeeds mattered little. The thought chilled Andrei’s
blood. Revenge, liberty and ideals were already being sacrificed for potential profit. Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, de Gaulle—none of them escaped the hollow pragmatism of economic and military interests. A new world order would soon emerge. The battle for top spot would be fierce and technology-based.
Yelling cut short the commissar’s musings. Outside the ravaged parliament building, about fifty armed soldiers were barking orders and brutally herding a huddled group of about twenty men, some of whom wore lab coats over SS or Wehrmacht uniforms, while others were in rags. All were trembling with fear. Except one, the youngest. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. His impeccable civilian suit stood out in the desolation. Hands in pockets, the incongruous character stared at the gathering with surprising haughtiness.
Andrei and his escort climbed the steps toward the terrified group. “Gentlemen, please excuse our soldiers’ rough manners. Rest assured that no harm will come to you. From today on, you are working for the Soviet Union. We will erase your relationship with the Nazi regime. You and your families will be accorded comfortable living conditions, as long as you perform your duties without complaint.”
Andrei spoke nearly flawless German. Only a slight Russian accent betrayed his lack of practice. It was one of the advantages of childhood years spent in the Bavarian branch of his cosmopolitan family. His deliberately affable tone and fluent language had the desired effect. The captives relaxed.
“I will call out your names, and you will join the three cars parked at the bottom of the steps. An agent of the NKGB will inform you of the terms and conditions of your employment, remuneration and location. Each group will be taken by truck to a Soviet base. I must emphasize the exceptional nature of the opportunity being offered to you. Refusal to comply will result in your arrest, and you will have to answer for your acts before a court of law. Do I make myself clear?”
