by Greg Iles
being taken care of. TWO or @ days at the most."
"A lot could happen in thine days, Neville. We want every loose end
snipped, every @ erased.".
"It's being done," Shaw insisted.
"Are there any complications we should know aboutt' Shaw thought of
Jonas Stern, and of Swallow waiting just outside his door. "No," he
lied.
"Keep us posted, then." The caller rang off.
Shaw exhaled a great blast of air and began to massage his temples with
his fingertips. He badly needed sleep. He had spent five of the past
six hours on the telephone. Across London, in places like the India
Club, the House of Lords, and the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet
Clu@d across Britain in the ramshackle palaces and crumbling stone
castle outposts of the aristocracy-privileged men and women both young
and old were gathering in quiet councils.
Like ripples spreading outward from the epicenter of Buckingham Palace,
waves of apprehension rolled through this most rarefied level of
society; and all, Shaw reflected, because one little stone had dropped
far away in the atrophied heart of Berlin. Slowly but surely, those
frightened men and women were bringing a great deal of pressure to bear
on Sir Neville Shaw. For Shaw, like his predecessors before him, was
not only the possessor but also the protector of their dark secret. Most
of the calls had been like the previous one-a bit of carrot, bags of
stick. Shaw was about to rise and go to his liquor cabinet for a
medicinal Glenfiddich when his office door opened and Wilson ushered in
the woman code-named Swallow.
Sir Neville was stunned. The woman standing before him looked nothing
like the photo in the file he'd been studying.
"Ah ... Miss Gordon, isn't it?" he stammered as Wilson withdrew from
the office.
Swallow did not respond.
"I'm told you insisted on, seeing me personally," he tried again.
"Mind telling me why?"
Still Swallow held her silence. She obviously felt the burden of
explanation lay on the man who had called for her services. Thoroughly
discomfited, Shay looked down at the file. The woman in the photo
looked like a grandmother, a blue-rinsed clubwoman who spent her Sundays
baking biscuits for the church. The woman who stood before him now
looked like ... well, Shaw had never quite seen the analogue that would
describe her. Swallow had iron gray hair cropped &lose against her
skull, perfect for wearing wigs. She carried none of the excess fat
that weighted most women her age and there Shaw paused. For looking at
Swallow now, he couldn't quite get his mind round the fact that she had
been in the war. She'd been practically a child, of course, but It was
downright eerie. The file put her at sixty-one, but she looked nearer
fifty. As he stared, the scent of perfume wafted to him; this single
acknowledgment of femininity surprised him. He couldn't name the
fragrance, but it smelled expensive and vaguely French. To be honest,
Shaw mused, he might have been attracted to Swallow if it wasn't for
what he knew about her. No, he decided, even if he'd imown nothing of
her fiendish work, her eyes would have put him off. They were like
stones. Dull, flat stones. Not that they communicated intellectual
dullness-quite the contrary.
They were rather like slate lids on a blast furnace, protecting those
outside from the fierce hatred that burned behind them. That hatred had
probably served Swallow well through the years, Shaw reflected, for by
trade she was an assassin.
"Yes, well," he began again, "did Wilson tell you this regards Jonas
Stern?"
Swallow nodded soberly.
"What I'd like is for you to follow him, see what he's up to. His last
known location was Berlin, but he's probably on the move. He's
traveling under his own name, which seems odd, so he must not feel he's
in any danger."
Swallow smiled at that.
"As soon as we pick him up, we'll put you onto him. We think he's
trying to get hold of something ... something that we'd prefer the Jews
didn't get hold of. Understood?"
"Perfectly," said Swallow. She had, after all, done her part against
the Zionist terrorists of Palestine.
Shaw cleared his throat. "Yes, well, what kind of payment would you
want? Would twenty thousand pounds cover it?"
Swallow's eyes hooded over at this. It struck Shaw just then that, from
Swallow's perspective, they had come to the point of the meeting. "What
I want," she said in a toneless voice, "is Jonas Stern.
When your little operation is over, I want a free hand with him."
Shaw had no illusions as to what this meant. Swallow wanted official
permission to kill an Israeli citizen. He knew the answer to his next
question, but he asked it anyway.
"What was it, exactly, that Stern did to you?"
"Killed my brother," she replied in a voice that could have come from a
corpse.
"That was quite some time ago, wasn't it?" Shaw commented.
"And every year since, my brother has lain in his grave."
The furnace heat behind Swallow's eyes flashed at the edges.
"They scarcely found enough of him to bury. Bloody Jews."
Shaw nodded with appropriate solemnity. "Yes, well ...
your condition is accepted." He drummed his fingers on his desk.
"Tell me, what's your feeling about Stern as an agent?"
"He's the best I ever saw. If he wasn't, he'd have been dead long ago.
He's got the instincts of a bloody clairvoyant."
"Any ideas on his motive? Why he would leave Israel now?"
Swallow considered this. "To protect it," she said at length.
"Israel is his weakness. He must believe the country is in imminent
danger."
"I see."
"Is Israel in danger?"
"Not that I'm aware of," Shaw replied thoughtfully. "Not any more than
usual."
As Swallow stood thinking, Shaw noticed that she stood with a vaguely
military bearing-not tensely, but with a relaxed kind of readiness,
rather like some Special Forces types he had known. They had all been
men, of course.
"Is there anything else, then?" she asked.
Shaw flipped through the files on his desk with exaggerated casualness.
"There is, as a matter of fact. Another job.
A small one. Domestic job, actually. I thought you might take care of
it for us. But it's a rush job. It must be done by tonight."
Swallow's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Who is it?"
"Chap named Burton. Michael Burton. Retired. Lives in a cottage
outside Haslemere in Surrey. Raises orchids, I believe. I'm afraid he
knows too much for his own good." Sir Neville cleared his throat again.
"There is one possible complication. He's only forty-eight.
Retired Special Air Service."
At this Swallow seemed to withdraw into herself for consultation with
whatever demon sustained her startlingly youthful appearance. At
length, she asked, "Does he have any family?"
"Divorced. There's a brother. Why do you ask?"
"Is he SAS also?"
Shaw shook his head. "Regu
lar army. But he's out of the country
permanently. He lost his citizenship papers some years ago for
mercenary work. He won't be a problem."
"Would you want it to look like an accident?"
"Can you run up an accident in Haslemere by tonight?"
Swallow made a sound in her throat that Shaw heard as a dry chuckle. "I
doubt it. SAS men don't have accidents like that, as a rule. They're
trained not to. They can drive, swim, run, shoot@' "I don't care how
it's done, then," Shaw flared. "Just do it. What's your price?"
A satisfied smile touched the corners of Swallow's mouth.
She liked to see bureaucrats squirm. "My price is protection from the
Israelis after Stern is dead."
Christ!" Shaw exploded. "We can't babysit you forever. You kill Stern
at your own risk."
Swallow's eyes turned opaque. "Don't play coy with me, little knight.
Your hands are bloody too. By lulling Stern I'm only doing what you
want done. You picked me because you lmew if he had to be, liquidated,
you could- blame his death on my vendetta." She raised her chin
deflandy. "If you try @ the Israelis will certainly get me, but not
before I kill you." Shaw drew back unconsciously. "I'll kill your SAS
man for you," she went on, "but you'll cover for me on Stern.
Otherwise-I might warn this Mr. Burton instead."
"Condition accepted," Shaw snapped. "Now get out. All communication
from this point forward will be through cutouts. No further contact
between you and this office."
Swallow made a mock curtsey and backed out of the room.
That witch should have been code-named Medusa, Shaw thought angrily. She
makes my b@ skin crawl. When he closed Swallow's file, his eyes fell on
the Hess dossier lying open beneath it. He sighed heavily. There lay
the dreaded file, like a modern Domesday Book, a lexicon of heroism and
treason, the highest and lowest expression of the English soul. And
looking at it, Shaw's anger anger that had been building for a very long
time-finally boiled to the surface. For if the truth were told,
he'would prefer to turn Swallow loose on the smug quislings and their
moribund broods who for decades had cowered behind the shield of his
service. He had no part in their crimes, or their guilt, and he felt no
pity for them or their "honor." But what of England?
He did have a stake in her honor. He had been only a child during the
war, but in those heady years after Hitler was crushed, and all the
years since, he had allowed himself to feel a part of the grand
legend-what one British historian called the "Churchillian myth"-that in
the early desperate days of the war England, all alone, had stood
united, uncompromising, and unconquerable against the Nazis, and had
thus saved Western Civilization from the Hun and the Bolshevik.
But that, Shaw had learned to his eternal sadness, was not quite the
truth. Then the truth be damned! he thought bitterly. He understood
the protective urge of the aristocrats.
England had given the world so much; she deserved a little moral
charity. Part myth though Churchill's history might be, the craven
machinations of a few spineless lords (or, God forbid, a fool of a
prince) could not be allowed to tarnish it.
If a treacherous shadow dogged the House of Windsor, should it also
stain the legacies of Plantagenet and Tudor and Hanover? And what of
the good people in the war? The women who fought the fires in the
Blitz? The callow lads whose shattered Spitfires practically clogged
the Channel in 1940? The kids who crouched under the buzz bombs and the
V-2s? The martyred population of Coventry?
As he poured himself a large whiskey, Shaw recalled the famous quote
Churchill spoke after the Battle of Britain, but he twisted it to his
own secret knowledge: Never in the field of human conflict have so many
nearly lost so much because of so few. Shaw hated them! Hated them
all! Appeasers ...
knights without courage ... nobles without nobility. Because of them
good men had died, and more were soon to follow.
The man Swallow would kill tonight had but done his duty.
It was the familiar chorus of English history: the good men had died
while the scoundrels prospered. "Treason doth never prosper, what's the
reason?" Shaw muttered, quoting the old epigram, "For if it prosper,
none dare call it Treason." Yet in the midst of his furious meditation,
Shaw felt a glimmer of satisfaction. Because if all his Machiavellian
stratagems failed and the temple came tumbling down around his ears, the
Judases would finally be unmasked, and the most heroic chapter in the
history of his noble ser, would be brought to light at last.
Shaw drained his Scotch and fell instantly asleep with his head on his
desk blotter.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
6.-05 A.M. ThO N8if8rMB#7 Cabin.- Near Wollsbarg, FRG Hermann the forger
was gone. After forty nerve-racking minutes under the gaze of Professor
Natterman's shotgun, the bearish Hamburger had gathered up his equipment
and scampered out of the cabin without a word. The professor sat in his
chair, contemplating the night's events as the dawn filtered through the
shattered cabin door. He had never felt so impotent in his life. His
lifelong friend had been murdered, the Spandau papers had been taken
from him, his granddaughter had been kidnapped, and he had been unable
to prevent any of it from happening.
And now the two men who proposed to stop the madness had refused his
help!
Cradling the Mannlicher under one arm, he picked up his book satchel and
walked out of the cabin without looking back. His suitcase lay in the
slushy rut where the Audi had been parked. In their haste Hans and
Hauer had not even taken the time to bring it into the cabin.
The shot-riddled Jaguar waited behind the trunk of the old plane tree.
Natterman walked over and looked inside to make sure the keys were still
in the ignition. Tossing his satchel into the passenger seat, he
retrieved his suitcase, then wriggled into the car and turned the key.
In spite of the damage, the engine roared responsively.
He left the Jaguar idling and clumped through the snow to the rear of
the cabin. In the shade of a tall cedar, a juryrigged crucifix marked
the shallow grave of Karl Riemeck.
With bowed head Natterman laid the shotgun against the cross and softly
spoke a few lines from Heine over his friend. Then he shuffled back to
the rumbling Jaguar, jammed it into first gear, and sped up the access
road.
A
The morning sun had already transformed the twisted Iz into a morass of
slush and mud that threw the speeding car from one bank to another as it
approached the main road.
Two curves away from the intersection, the professor saw a black log
lying across the lane. When he swerved to avoid it, the Jaguar skidded
out of control and slammed nose first into some saplings. It rebounded
from their springlike trunks and coughed into silence.
He staggered out of the car and cautiously approached the log.
Just as
he bent to drag it out of the lane, he heard a crack in the
trees behind him. ke? he wondered. No. He stumbled back, thinking he
would get the Mannlicher from the car. Then he remembered dropping it
at Karl's grave.
With panic knotting inside his chest, he scrambled toward the Jag,
planning to drive around or even over the log to get to the main road.
He had one leg inside the car when a voice froze him motionless.
"Herr Professor?"
Natterman whirled, but saw nothing.
"Herr Professor! May I speak with you for a moment?"
Again! Where had the voice come from? The brush on the opposite side
of the road? The trees further on? Natterman tried to calm himself.
Might a neighbor have come out to investigate last night's shots in the
light of morning? These days even country people left such things to
the police.
Backing against the Jaguar, he called, "Who's out there?
What do you want?"
"Only to speak with you!" the voice replied. "I mean you no harm."
"Come out, then! Why do you hide yourselp."
A tall dark-skinned man stepped noiselessly from the trees twenty meters
up the road. "One has to be careful," he said, and then he smiled. "I
wouldn't want to wind up like your Afrikaner friend."
Natterman stared fearftilly at the stranger. He felt he knew the man
from somewhere. Suddenly he had it. "You're the man from the train!"
he cried. "Stern!"
The Israeli smiled. "You have an excellent memory, Professor."
"My God! Did you follow me here?" Natterman took a step back toward
the Jaguar. "Are you in league with the Afrikaner?"
I
7-284 "Yes, I followed you here. No, I'm not in league with the
Afiikaner. I'm here to help you, Professor."
Natterman pointed a finger at the Israeli. "What happened to your
British accent?"
Stern chuckled. "It comes, it goes."
"You must have been here last nigh.. Why didn't you help me?"
"I did help you. I stopped that Al-tikaner from going back inside the
cabin and killing you. By the time I'd finished dealing with him, your
Polizei friends had arrived."
"Why didn't you come forward then?"
"For all I knew, Professor, you had come here specifically to meet that
Afrikaner. The same holds true for your friends.
I needed certain assurances about your motives."
"You're mad," Natterman declared. "Who the devil are you?"
