Winner Lose All

by William F. Brown

  “Half a loaf? For old times’ sake?” He shook his head, thinking that those words coming from her lips sounded so bitter that he couldn’t look at her any longer. He turned his eyes away and stared up at the sky. Half a loaf? Without her? That was no-loaf, but what else could he do? Slowly, reluctantly, he agreed. “Let me speak with Paul for a moment.”

  “Don’t be long, Liebchen,” she warned. “Time is a luxury I cannot afford.”

  Scanlon turned and faced Von Lindemann. “You heard all that?” he asked. The German closed his eyes and nodded but he offered no reply. “She wants that damned fool Raeder. Are you okay with that?”

  “Let her have him,” Von Lindemann answered with a dismissive wave as he leaned heavily on his cane. “Wolfe Raeder is a disgusting fraud. It is his daughter Christina whom we must have — whom I must have.”

  “A fraud?”

  “It was Christina who did all the work, all of his work, ever since she was a little girl.”

  “Do you mean the mathematics, and all those formulas?”

  “Yes, apparently she was a child prodigy, a Mozart with numbers, if you will. That is why he hid her away, so he could take all the credit.”

  Scanlon’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “Christina told me. I think it was her way of testing me,” he said with a thin, self-conscious smile. “Rudy Mannfried knew too. He may have been the only one who did, until I found out. Do you remember what he said the day he died? He knew the truth about her, and Raeder knew he knew. That is why Raeder hated him.” Von Lindemann shook his head in disgust. “He threatened to turn Rudy over to the Gestapo as a ‘degenerate’ and have them ship him off to one of the camps but Raeder was afraid the fat man would talk and tell them all about him, so he didn’t dare.” The Major ran his sleeve across his forehead. The air was cool yet his face glistened with sweat. “It turns out the eminent Doktor Raeder is nothing but a charlatan with a monstrous ego, and he will do anything to protect himself. I suspect that is why her mother had that fatal ‘accident’ of hers in Berlin.”

  “You think he killed her?”

  “More or less. Remember all those not-so-subtle hints which Herr Dietrich dropped when we were driving to Dachau? He was trying to aggravate Raeder at the time, assuming no one else understood what he was saying, but he as much as told us so, if we had listened. My guess is she would not go along with what he was doing with Christina. She probably threatened to stop it and tell the University so in a fit of rage, he silenced her. That is how Hermann Göring got his hooks into him. The fat Reichsmarshal blackmailed Raeder into working for him. Otto Dietrich was involved too, or found out about it later. However, they were not as smart as they thought they were. They knew he killed her but they never bothered to ask why. Later, if Göring had ever found out Raeder had made a fool out of him like that, he would have had him dancing at the end of a rope. Rudy knew that, and so did Raeder.”

  Scanlon still found it all hard to believe. “But Christina was only a child back then.”

  “She was perhaps ten years old, but she told me her advanced mathematical abilities took off years before that. She developed all of his theories, his formulas, algorithms, and equations, all of it. She is a genius and a prodigy, but a very naive one. Living in that strange world out in the woods, isolated by her father, it is easy to understand why. Those equations were merely the games that a lonely little girl played in her head to pass the time. Perhaps the most sophisticated mathematics anyone has crafted in a generation were literally child’s play.”

  “And soon the awkward pupil became the master?”

  “Precisely, so let Hanni have the arrogant bastard,” Von Lindemann answered with a wave of his hand. “Let her take him back to Moscow or off to hell for all I care. It serves him right. It is Christina we want.”

  Scanlon nodded and walked back to Hanni. “Deal,” he told her. “You can have Raeder but I want Christina… and Otto Dietrich.”

  “No! You can have the girl, and I will throw in Emil Nossing; but Dietrich is mine,” she said emphatically. “And that is not negotiable, Liebchen.”

  “I have an old score to settle with him, Hanni, a very old score.” His eyes flashed as he raised his gloved left hand in front of his face. “Remember? I owe him for me and for Will Kenyon. Or have you forgotten about him too?”

  “No, Edward. I have not forgotten anything but you do not hate him nearly enough. You think you do, but you are a rank amateur in matters like this. If you truly hate him and want to see him punished, then do not take him back to your softhearted western justice. Give him to me. Your people will forgive and forget, and decide they need to use him for something else; but I will never forget, and neither will the Russians.”

  “Who’s kidding whom, Hanni?” he said. “For all you know, they’ll throw you in jail and give him the keys to the Kremlin.”

  There was a long silence between them. They were like two hungry dogs with their sharp teeth clamped around opposite ends of the same big bone, and neither of them could bring themselves to let go. Finally, it was Paul Von Lindemann who broke the silence. “Oh, do it, Captain,” he exclaimed. “Let her have the sadistic bastard.”

  “Do what he says, Liebchen,” she asked. “Let me have Wolfe Raeder and Otto Dietrich. You will have Nossing, the girl, and that whole truckload of papers. Take the deal, Edward. Half a loaf — half is the best you’re going to get.”

  He closed his eyes. “Deal,” he said in disgust.

  “The Maybach, and a ten-minute head start — that is all I ask.”

  “Oh, get out of here, before I change my mind.”

  She turned to walk away, then stopped and looked at him for a long minute as he stood there looking shattered and helpless. She walked back, put her hands on his chest, and let her lips softly brush his cheek. “Until the next time, Liebchen,” she whispered, barely able to say the words. “And I really do love you — until the next time.”

  “There won’t be a next time, Hanni.”

  “Yes, there will, if you believe in me,” she said as the tears began to roll down her cheeks. “Because I love you, and they can never take that away from us,” she said, as she turned and ran back to the Maybach.

  In seconds, she returned with Emil Nossing and Christina Raeder, pushing them into the road toward Scanlon and Paul Von Lindemann. Behind her, Otto Dietrich held back the now panic-stricken Wolfe Raeder as he watched Christina run to Major Von Lindemann’s waiting arms.

  “Christina, you cannot leave me,” Wolfe Raeder screamed as he struggled with the much larger Chief Inspector, his worst fears coming to life before his eyes. “No, no!” he pleaded with Dietrich. “Do not let them do this. You do not understand!”

  “All I understand, Doktor Raeder, is that you are going to Moscow — we are all going to Moscow,” Hanni said as she helped Dietrich handcuff Raeder’s arms behind him and shove him into the rear seat of the Maybach.

  The Chief Inspector slammed the car door behind Raeder as Hanni got in the driver’s seat. Dietrich stood there on the roadside, slowly straightening himself to his full height, before he turned and looked back at Scanlon in triumph. He took a moment to adjust his badly disheveled suit coat and tie. “Auf Wiedersehen, Edward my boy. You are such a fool,” he laughed, chin up, with a thin, arrogant smirk on his lips, savoring the moment. “I told you they have not made the rope that could hang me, did I not? They all need a fellow who can keep order in the streets, even Beria. That is why he will love me. He will love me so much, I shall ask him for the lovely Fraulein Steiner as a reward. Won’t that will be nice?” he grinned. “Au revoir,” he said, with a dramatic flourish. “As usual, you lose and I win… and I ride off with the girl.”

  It was as if the dumb bastard could not resist a parting shot. He had to get in that one last dig and grab that final curtain call, and that was the way Scanlon would always remember him. Unfortunately, antagonizing the young American at a highly emotional
time like this was the very last thing the Chief Inspector should have done. Scanlon was less than thirty feet away. His right hand was a blur as he snatched the .45 caliber pistol from Paul Von Lindemann’s hand and raised the gun in one smooth, split-second motion. He didn’t aim. That was not necessary. His eye, his arm, and the .45 became one as he pulled the trigger.

  It was odd, Scanlon later remembered. Various parts of the human brain react at different speeds, especially when facing stark terror. Otto Dietrich’s eyes took the lead. They grew round as they watched the muzzle of the .45 suddenly track up and point at them, because they knew exactly what was coming, even if the rest of his body did not. Case in point was the arrogant smirk on Dietrich’s lips and his confident laugh. The smirk never caught up with his eyes or his brain. It left him looking like a dimwit as the heavy bullet punched into the center of his chest. It snapped him upright as if he had touched a high voltage line and slammed him back against the rear door of the Maybach.

  In that terrifying, wide-eyed instant, his confident laugh died in his throat. His eyes dropped to his chest and his expression changed to utter disbelief as he saw a black hole the size of a fifty-pfennig piece where the middle button should be. As he stood there, propped up by the car, a dark red stain spread across the front of his shirt. His fingers grabbed at it and tore the shirt open until his knees buckled. He looked back up at Scanlon and the smoking .45 in disbelief. His lips moved and he tried to say something, but it was far too late for that. Death, with all its awful implications, had finally seized the Chief Inspector by the throat as he slid down the Maybach’s fender and toppled sideways onto the pavement, dead.

  That silenced Dietrich but it did not silence Hanni. “No!” she screamed as she looked out the car window and saw Otto Dietrich’s lifeless body lying in the road. “No, Edward, no!”

  Every eye in the clearing was now on Ed Scanlon. Slowly, he lowered the still-smoking .45 to his side. Hanni could scream at him as much as she liked, but it was finished. There was nothing she could do about it.

  “You said it yourself, Liebchen,” he reminded her, “half a loaf, and I just took mine. It’s the only justice the bastard ever deserved. You’ve still got Raeder, so get out of here before I change my mind.”

  Hanni threw the Maybach into gear and jammed the accelerator to the floor. With all twelve cylinders firing, the rear wheels kicked up an angry cloud of gravel as the big car fishtailed down the shoulder, regained the paved surface, and roared away down the narrow road. As he watched it pass around the next bend and disappear from sight, Scanlon felt his shoulders sag. It really was over now. Hanni was gone. This was the last time he would ever see that damned car, and the last time he would ever see her. That left him numb, and for the life of him, he could not think of anything he could have done differently or anything that would have made her stay.

  When he turned around, he saw Christina Raeder standing by Paul Von Lindemann’s side. Slowly, the Major turned away and walked back to the jeep with one arm over the young girl’s shoulder and the other leaning heavily on his cane. Tall and short, young and old, brilliant and obstinate, they made the oddest of couples, but each had found something here. They had found each other and he could hardly deny them that after all they had been through.

  The whole goddamned world had gone mad, Scanlon realized as he turned back and looked east again, toward the curve in the road where the Maybach had just disappeared. Tears began running down his cheeks. He could feel them but they were not quite enough to quench the angry fires burning deep inside him. They would continue to smolder, and occasionally flare up for a long, long time to come. However, as the flames died down, the tears on his cheeks froze and turned to ice, leaving him colder and lonelier than he had been before. Hanni really was gone, forever.

  PART SIX

  MOSCOW

  AUGUST 1959

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Moscow! It was the last place in the world that Ed Scanlon ever wanted to go. In all his years with the CIA, he had never set foot in the city; but he hated it sight unseen, nonetheless. Unfortunately, his boss, Allen Dulles, now Director of Central Intelligence, ordered him to make the trip, so he went. He arrived bone tired, having spent most of the previous thirty-six hours on a string of uncomfortable civilian and military flights from Washington to Halifax, to London, and to Berlin for a brief layover before that last, long leg into the Soviet capital itself.

  Scanlon had been fighting a long list of vicious little wars against the Russians since 1945. To him, their capital city had a well-deserved reputation as a dark, brooding center of paranoia and evil that stretched back to Ivan the Terrible. By 1959, Josef Stalin was already six years in his grave, as was Lavrenti Beria, his sadistic head of the secret police. Nikita Khrushchev was now in firm control. Fat, jovial, and ever smiling, he was supposed to be an improvement, but Scanlon did not care. His hatred of Moscow and the Russians was as much personal as historic or professional. All that this trip would do was dredge up more unpleasant memories of treachery, mind-numbing pain, and a love lost forever.

  World War II was long over, yet Ed Scanlon had been unable to sleep more than three or four hours a night since it ended. It was in the darkest early morning hours that the pain and the bad memories would rise out of their dark corners to nibble and gnaw on him again, made worse by the fact that he knew all too well they were all of his own making. Unfortunately, no sooner had that war ended with Hitler’s corpse lying half-burned in a pit outside the Führer Bunker in Berlin than the inevitable frictions between the western Allies and the Russians began to heat up. They soon flared into a rash of dirty little undeclared wars fought in a dozen different ways on a dozen different battlefields over a dozen years. They could call it a cold war if they liked, but every war was hot to the people fighting it. These undeclared battles required hard men with a range of unique skills which Ed Scanlon and a handful of others had acquired working undercover with the OSS inside Nazi Germany.

  He had always been one of Allen Dulles’s favorites and any good director knew how to use smart, damaged men with ice water in their veins — men who could kill or order men killed without hesitation. In a kinder, gentler time and place, one might ask what had happened to create men like that; but they were the heart and soul of any nation’s intelligence operation. Without question, Ed Scanlon was the best of them. When Patton’s tank columns roared across Bavaria in April 1945, the young Captain thought his work was over. Dulles’s intention was to bring him back and find a spot on his fledgling OSS operations staff in Washington, where Scanlon would have the time to heal and decompress. Unfortunately, by the fall and winter of 1945-46, while the US Army sent its troops home and demobilized, the Russians did exactly the opposite. They used the crushing weight of the Red Army and the indigenous Communist networks they controlled to impose their will on Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, the Baltic States, and Bulgaria, and have near misses in Greece, Austria, France, and Italy.

  Winston Churchill put it best, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” and Ed Scanlon found himself with a new job. He became “station chief” in Berlin and eventually all of West Germany, running strings of agents into the eastern zone and ferreting out Russian spy networks in the west. As the OSS evolved into the CIA in 1947, the missions grew more varied. They included quietly running old German guns to the Israelis during the first two Arab-Israeli Wars, aiding the Greek right-wing militias in their civil war, and penetrating the East German Intelligence services during the Berlin crisis and airlift in 1948 and 1949. The list went on and on, into a dozen other hot spots throughout eastern and southern Europe.

  Throughout those tense post-war years, Ed Scanlon exhibited an uncanny ability to communicate with and co-opt even the hardest-core German Socialist or Communist, while showing no mercy to any of the Nazi SD or Gestapo agents who tried to worm their way into his networks. Never one to pass the dirty work to others, it became known among those in
select circles that he had personally eliminated at least four double agents with his own hands. They included one of his own assistants, one of several double agents whose bodies mysteriously appeared on the front steps of KGB headquarters in East Berlin, each with a hundred ruble note stuck in his mouth and a perfectly centered bullet hole in his forehead.

  “I’d rather you didn’t tend to those things yourself,” came Dulles’s mild rebuke.

  “It was a message I needed to deliver,” he replied.

  Dulles knew he was right, even if he did not like it.

  In 1953, after Dulles became director of the new CIA, he finally pulled Scanlon out of the field to become his head of operations in Washington. He still had a near-photographic memory and an uncanny ability to read people, and was now fluent in five languages. His once-short black hair was now fashionably longer with a growing touch of gray at the temples. Even though his days in the field were over, he had been places and done things that the old hands still only whispered about, and he had the scars to prove them — the ones that could be seen, and the ones that could not.

  Despite his many Cold-War accomplishments, in the power corridors of Washington, it was common knowledge that Ed Scanlon’s most important contribution, the one that cemented his relationship with Allen Dulles, came in the spring of 1945. Like a reluctant Pied Piper, he was sent into Germany and came back out, battered and bruised, with several of Nazi Germany’s top jet airplane engineers and a truck-full of blueprints for their new ME-262 jet fighter. Lockheed, Northrop, and Grumman would never admit it, but those engineers and drawings gave the US a five-year head start on the Russians in post-war jet aircraft development. Like Werner Von Braun and the other German rocket scientists, the optical engineers from Zeiss, the chemists from Bayer, metallurgists from Krupp and Thyssen, weapons designers from Walther and Mauserwerke, physicists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and many, many others, they were snatched up and quickly surrendered to the west. It was called “Operation Paperclip” and it drastically altered the post-war balance of power, the outcome of the Korean War, and the lingering Cold War for decades to come.