by Greg Iles
into oblivion. If Alfred survives this night, he thought desolately,
what will Shaw give me?
Not afucking thing, that's what! He shook his head in wonder.
Not one member of the assault teaxn 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 Granville
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. Yetjust 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 paneled 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 meters
away stood Lord Granville.
He was gesticulating wildly with his hands.
"I told you, Alfred!" he shouted. "Smuts is insane! He knows nothin,9
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, Roberl,?"
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 mate 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 defenses had better turn out to be good,
Granville, 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 coul
d 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.
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 ran silently, swiftly through the house.
Ilse had described the triangular layout of Horn House to him, but from
inside, the myriad halls and passages seemed only to lead back upon
themselves. He had tried to always turn inward, toward the central
tower that Ilse had told him would lead to the basement, but each time
he was eventually stopped by the same obstacle-an impenetrable sheet of
black anodized metal. The heavy shields blocked every inward-facing
door and window he could find. The central tower and basement complex
had obviously been sealed for battle.
Stern paused for breath beside a wide metal door marked @NKENHAUS.
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 mot-to of the South African Army was "Thirty days to
Cairo"-meaning that the South African Defense 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 paneled 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 onthe green-shaded desk lamp and stared at the books lining
the library walls. They were standard volumeg, 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
switchplate. 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 center of each black sash
was a glittering white medallion, and crowning the center 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. Goring 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 prim
ordial 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 Egypti@n 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
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 Prisonthese 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
