Karin continued to stare at Jody. "I don't like killing women," the woman said at last, "but I cannot take hostages. They slow me down."
That was it. Jody was going to die. She went numb. She began to sob. She had a flashback to being a little girl, to wetting her pants in first grade when the teacher had yelled at her, to crying and not being able to stop, to the other children laughing at her. Every scrap of confidence and accomplishment and dignity flooded away.
With the trickle of poise that remained to her, Jody fell to the floor. Facing the back of the bathroom, seeing the toilet and sink from the sides of her foggy eyes, she pleaded for her life.
But instead of shooting her, the woman ordered another man, an older man, to remove the uniforms. Then she closed the bathroom door. The girl waited, surprised, half-expecting gunfire to tear through the door. She stood sideways, on the toilet, to make as small and removed a target as possible.
But instead of gunfire, all she heard was a scraping sound followed by a loud whump.
Something had been pushed against the door.
She isn't going to kill me, Jody thought. She's only going to lock me in here.
Perspiration soaked her clothes as she waited. The three hijackers finished quickly in the trailer, and then were gone. She listened. Nothing.
Then one of the hijackers was outside the window. Jody leaned her ear to the wall, and listened. Something metal was turning, followed by clanking, and then the sound of metal being punctured once, twice, and then a third time. Then she heard fabric being ripped and she smelled gas.
The fuel tank, she thought with horror. They've opened it.
"No!" Jody screamed as she leapt off the toilet. She threw herself against the door. "You said you don't like killing women! Please!"
A moment later Jody smelled smoke, heard footsteps running from the van, and saw the orange of the flame reflected against the frosted glass of the window. They were going to burn the trailer with her in it.
The woman isn't killing me, Jody realized then. She's just letting me die....
The girl threw herself against the door. It wouldn't budge. And as the orange grew brighter she stood in the middle of the small room screaming with fear and despair.
TEN
Thursday, 5:47 A.M., Washington, D.C.
Liz Gordon had just finished grinding up coffee beans and was lighting her first cigarette of the day when the phone rang.
"I wonder who that can be?" the thirty-two-year-old said to herself as she took a long pull on her cigarette. Ashes fell on her Mike Danger nightshirt and she brushed them off. Then she absently scratched her head through her curly brown hair as she listened to see where she'd left the cordless phone.
Since rising at five, Liz had been going over some of the things she might say when she visited the Striker team later this morning. At their third group session two days before, the elite but very young soldiers were still in shock as they mourned the loss of Charlie Squires. Rookie Sondra DeVonne was taking his death especially hard, sad for Charlie's family and also for herself. Through tears, the Private had said that she'd hoped to learn so much from him. Now all that wisdom and experience was gone. Not passed on.
Dead.
"Where is the freakin' phone?" Liz snarled as she kicked aside the newspapers by the kitchen table.
Not that she was afraid the caller would hang up. At this hour it could only be Monica calling from Italy. And her roommate and best friend would not go away until she got her messages. After all, she'd been gone nearly an entire day.
And if Sinatra calls, thought Op-Center's Staff Psychologist, you want to be able to get right back to him.
For the three years they'd been living together, Liz's workaholic freelance musician friend had done all the nightclubs and weddings and Bar Mitzvahs she could get. She'd been working so hard, in fact, that Liz had not only ordered her to take a vacation, but had kicked in half the money to make sure she could go.
Liz finally found the phone sitting on one of the kitchen chairs. Before picking it up, Liz took a moment to change worlds. The dynamics between Liz and each of her patients were such that she created separate worlds in her mind for each of them, and inhabited those worlds fully in order to treat them. Otherwise, there would be spillover, lack of focus, distractions. Though Monica was her best friend, not a patient, it was difficult sometimes to make a clear distinction between the two.
As Liz slipped into her Monica world, she checked the message list from under the Chopin magnet on the refrigerator door. The only ones who had called were Monica's drummer, Angelo "Tim" Panni, and her mother, both of whom wanted to make sure she got to Rome okay.
"Pronto, Ms. Sheard!" she said as she clicked on the phone. A telephone hello was one of the two Italian words she knew.
The decidedly masculine voice on the other end said, "Sorry, Liz, it isn't Monica. It's Bob Herbert."
"Bob!" Liz said. "This is a surprise. What's happening in the land of Freud?"
"I thought Freud was Austrian," Herbert said.
"He was," Liz said, "but the Germans had him for a year. The Anschluss was in 1938. Freud died in 1939."
"That's almost not funny," Bob said. "It looks like the Fatherland may be flexing its muscles for a new era of empire-building."
She reached for her cigarette. "What do you mean?"
"Have you watched the news this morning?" Herbert asked.
"It doesn't come on till six," she said. "Bob, what the hell happened?"
"A bunch of neo-Nazis attacked a movie set," Herbert said. "They killed some of the crew, stole a trailer filled with Nazi memorabilia, and drove off. Although no one's heard from them, they appear to have taken an American girl hostage."
"Jesus," Liz said. She took several short puffs.
"It appears as if the group was led by a woman named Karin Doring. Heard of her?"
"The name is familiar," Liz said. She took the phone from the kitchen and began walking toward the study. "Give me a second and I'll see what we've got." She switched on the computer, sat down, and accessed the database in her office at Op-Center. In less than ten seconds, the file on Doring had been downloaded.
"Karin Doring," she said, "the Ghost from Halle."
"The Ghost from where?" Herbert asked.
"Halle," Liz said. She scanned the report. "That's her hometown in East Germany. They call her the Ghost because she's usually gone from the scene before anyone can catch her. She doesn't go in for ski masks and disguises, wants people to know who's behind things. And get this. In an interview last year with a newspaper called Our Struggle, she describes herself as a Nazi Robin Hood, striking a blow for the oppressed majority of Germany."
"Sounds like a psycho," Herbert said.
"Actually, she doesn't," Liz said. "That's the problem with people like this." Liz coughed, continued to draw on her cigarette, and spoke as she scanned the file. "In high school, in the late 1970s, she was briefly a member of the Communist Party."
"Spying on the enemy?"
"Probably not," Liz said.
"Okay," Herbert said, "why don't I just shut up?"
"No, what you just said would be a logical assumption, though it's probably a wrong one. She was obviously looking for herself, ideologically speaking. The Communist left and the neo-Nazi right are very much alike in their rigidity of thought. All radicals are. These people can't sublimate their frustrations so they externalize them. They convince themselves, usually subconsciously, that others are causing their miseries--'others' meaning anyone who's different from them. In Hitler's Germany, they blamed unemployment on the Jews. Jews held a disproportionately high number of positions in banks, universities, medicine. They were visible, obviously prosperous, and very clearly different. They had different traditions, different sabbaths, different holidays. They were an easy target. The same was true of Jews in Communist Russia."
"Gotcha," Herbert said. "Have you got anything on this woman's contacts, hideouts, habits?"
Liz scanned the document. It was broken into sections labeled "vital statistics," "biography," and "modus operandi."
"She's a loner," Liz said, "which in terrorist terms means she always works with a small group. Three or four people, tops. And she never sends anyone on a mission she wouldn't undertake."
"That's a match with today's attack," Herbert said. "Any known hits?"
Liz said, "They never claim credit--"
"Also a match with today."
"--but witnesses have tied them to the firebombing of an Arab-owned shopping mall in Bonn and the delivery of a grenade-rigged liquor carton to the South African Embassy in Berlin, both last year."
"Ruthless too," Herbert said.
"Yes," Liz said. "That's part of her appeal to the hardcore neo-Nazis. Though it's strange. The store she attacked was a men's shop, and the liquor was delivered to a bachelor party."
"Why is that strange? Maybe she hates men."
"That doesn't fit in with Nazi ideology," Liz said.
"True," Herbert agreed. "In war and genocide, they were equal-opportunity killers. This may be good news for the American kid, if she is a hostage. Maybe they won't kill her."
"I wouldn't bet the ranch on that," Liz said. "Sparing women isn't likely to be a commandment, just courtesy. It also says here that two of those witnesses who tried to I.D. her personally died within days of talking to the authorities. One in a car crash, one after a mugging. The crash victim was a woman. One woman who tried to quit her group Feuer--Fire--was also killed."
"Watched and whacked," Herbert said. "Just like the mob."
"Not quite," Liz said. "The retiree was drowned in a toilet after being beaten and slashed. This is one sick little schatze. Anyway, so much for sparing women."
Liz scanned back to Karin's biography.
"Let's see if we can see where Ms. Doring is coming from," Liz said. She began reading, then said, "Here we are. Her mother died when she was six and she was raised by her father. Bet you dollars to pesos there was some nasty business going on there."
"Abuse."
"Yeah," Liz said. "Again, it's a classic pattern. As a girl, Karin was either beaten, sexually abused, or both. She sublimated like crazy as a kid, then looked for a place to put her anger. She tried Communism, didn't like it for whatever reason--"
"It was dying," Herbert contributed.
"Then she found the neo-Nazi movement and assumed the role of father figure, something her own father never did."
"Where is Papa Doring now?" Herbert asked.
"Dead," said Liz. "Cirrhosis of the liver. Died when Karin was fifteen, just about the time she became a political activist."
"Okay," said Herbert, "so we think we know who our enemy is. She's happy to kill men, willing to kill women. She assembles a terrorist group and roams the country attacking foreign interests. Why? To scare them off?"
"She knows she can't do that," Liz says. "Nations will still have embassies, and businesses will still come. More likely it's the equivalent of a recruitment poster. Something to rally other aggressive misfits around her. And by the way, Bob, it obviously works. As of four months ago, when this file was updated, Feuer had thirteen hundred members with an annual growth rate of nearly twenty percent. Of those members, twenty active, full-time soldiers move with her from camp to camp."
"Do we know where any of these camps are?"
"They keep changing," Liz said. "We've got three photographs in the file." She accessed them in turn and read each caption. "One was taken at a lake in Mecklenburg, the second was shot in a forest in Bavaria, and the third was in mountains somewhere along the Austrian border. We don't know how they travel, but it looks to me like they pitch tents whenever they get there."
"They probably move around in a bus or van," Herbert said. He sounded dejected. "Guerrilla groups that size used to travel in patterns to establish regular supply lines. But with cellular phones and overnight parcel delivery, they can arrange for pickups just about anywhere now. How many camps do we know about?"
"Just those three," Liz said.
The phone beeped. It had to be Monica calling for her messages. Her roommate would be frantic, but Liz wasn't going to answer.
"What about lieutenants?" Herbert asked. "Who does she rely on?"
"Her closest aide is Manfred Piper. He joined her after they graduated from high school. Apparently, she handles all the military matters and Piper does the fund-raising, runs checks on aspiring members, that sort of thing."
Herbert was silent for a moment, then said, "We don't really have very much here, do we?"
"To understand her, yes," Liz said. "To catch her, I'm afraid not."
After a moment, Herbert said, "Liz, our German host thinks she may have pulled this heist off so she could pass out trinkets for Chaos Days, the little Mardi Gras of hate they have here. Considering her record of striking political targets, does that make sense?"
"I think you're looking at this the wrong way," Liz said. "What was the movie?"
Herbert said, "Tirpitz. About the battleship, I guess."
Liz tapped into Pictures in Motion, a Web site listing movies in production around the world. After locating the film, she said, "The set was a political target, Bob. It was an American co-production."
Herbert was silent for a moment. "So either the memorabilia was a bonus, or the American crew was."
"You got it."
"Look," Herbert said, "I'm going to have a chat with the authorities here, maybe pay a visit to one of these Chaos Days celebrations."
"Watch it, Bob," Liz said. "Neo-Nazis don't hold doors for people in wheelchairs. Remember, you're different--"
"You bet I am," he said. "Meanwhile, give me a buzz on the cellular if you come up with anything else on this lady or her group."
"Will do," Liz said. "Take care and ciao," she added, using the other Italian word she knew.
ELEVEN
Thursday, 11:52 A.M., Toulouse, France
The wood-paneled room was large and dark. The only light came from a single lamp which stood beside the massive mahogany desk. The only items on the desk itself were a telephone, fax machine, and computer, all of them collected in a tight semicircle. The shelves behind the desk were barely visible in the shadows. On them were miniature guillotines. Some were working models, made of wood and iron. Others were made of glass or metal, and one was a plastic model sold in the United States.
Guillotines had been used for official executions in France until 1939, when murderer Eugen Weidmann was beheaded outside St. Peter's Prison in Versailles. But Dominique didn't like those later machines: the guillotines with the large, solid buckets to collect the heads, screens to protect the executioners from the spray of blood, shock absorbers to cushion the thunk of the blade. Dominique liked the originals.
Across from the desk, lost in the ghostly dark, was an eight-foot-tall guillotine which had been used during the French Revolution. This device was unrestored. The uprights were slightly rotted and the trestle was worn smooth from all the bodies that "Madame La Guillotine" had embraced. Drawn nearly to the cross-beam on top, the blade was rusty from rain and blood. And the wicker basket, also the original, was frayed. But Dominique had noticed particles of the bran which had been used to soak up blood, and there were still hairs in the basket. Hairs which had snagged the wicker when the heads tumbled in.
It all looked exactly as it did in 1796, the last time those leather straps were fastened under the armpits and over the legs of the doomed. When the lunette, the iron collar, had held the neck of its last victim--held it within a perfect circle so the victim couldn't move. However much fear possessed them, they couldn't squirm from the ram and its sharp blade. Once the executioner released the spring, nothing could stop the eighty-pound deathblow. The head dropped into its basket, the body was pushed sideways into its own leather-lined wicker basket, and the vertical plank was ready to receive the next victim. The process was so quick that some bodies were still sighing, the lungs emptying throug
h the neck, as they were removed from the plank. It was said that for several seconds, the still-living brains in decapitated heads enabled the victims to see and hear the ghastly aftermath of their own execution.
At the height of the Reign of Terror, executioner Charles Henri-Sanson and his aides were able to decapitate nearly one victim every minute. They guillotined three hundred men and women in three days, thirteen hundred in six weeks, helping to bring the total to 2,831 between April 6, 1793, and July 29, 1795.
What did you think of that, Herr Hitler? Dominique wondered. The gas chambers at Treblinka were designed to kill two hundred people in fifteen minutes, the gas chambers at Auschwitz designed to kill two thousand. Was the master killer impressed or did he scoff at the work of relative amateurs?
The guillotine was Dominique's prize. Behind it, on the wall, were period newspapers and etchings in ornate frames, as well as original documents signed by George Jacques Danton and other leaders of the French Revolution. But nothing stirred him like the guillotine. Even with the overhead lights off and the shades drawn he could feel it, the device which was a reminder that one had to be decisive to succeed. Children of nobles had lost their heads to that sinister blade, but such was the price of revolution.
The telephone beeped. It was the third line, a private line which the secretaries never answered. Only his partners and Horne had that number.
Dominique leaned forward in the fat leather chair. He was a lanky man with a large nose, high forehead, and strong chin. His hair was short and ink black, a dramatic contrast to the white turtleneck and trousers he was wearing.
He hit the speaker button. "Yes?" he said quietly.
"Good morning, M. Dominique," said the caller. "It's Jean-Michel."
Dominique glanced at his watch. "It's early."
"The meeting was brief, M. Dominique."
"Tell me about it," he said.
Jean-Michel obliged. He told him about the lecture he had been given under torture, and about how the German considered himself M. Dominique's equal. Jean-Michel also told him about what little he had picked up about Karin Doring.
Games Of State (1996) Page 7
