The Apocalypse Watch

by Robert Ludlum

  “Beach Two to Beach One, what’s the scene like at the estate?”

  “I don’t think we missed anyone, but I can’t guarantee it. You know, a guy could’ve been taking a leak somewhere in the bushes—”

  “Then when he came out he’d find a few corpses, wouldn’t he?”

  “If so, he might have opted for getting the hell out of here and reaching some neos in Bonn.”

  “I think you’re better than that,” said Drew. “We’re moving forward.”

  “Just calm down, Cons-Op. Wait’ll we position ourselves between the house and the river. I’ll let you know when to come out.”

  “I’ll accept that, Captain. You’re the experts.”

  “You better believe it … sir,” said the voice of Lieutenant Anthony. “And please keep Mrs. de Vries on your river flank in case there’s a firefight.”

  “Naturally.” Latham covered the radio and spoke to Karin over Witkowski’s head. “You know, that kid’s beginning to annoy me.”

  “He’s okay,” said Witkowski.

  “He’s twelve years old.”

  “Please, the windows!” Karin urged.

  “When we get the word, young lady.” Unobtrusively, the colonel reached for De Vries’s trembling hand and gripped it. “Easy, girl,” he whispered. “Control, remember?”

  “You know …?”

  “I don’t know anything. Just a few unanswered questions from the past.”

  “Beach Two,” came Dietz’s quiet voice over the radio. “You’re clean, but stay low. There could be infrared trips waist-high until you reach the upper terrace.”

  “I thought you short-circuited the system,” Witkowski broke in.

  “The cameras and the fences, Colonel. They may be enough, but the trips could be wired underground and independent.”

  “Understood, Captain, we’ll stay close to the ground.”

  The trio crawled forward, Latham in the lead, the waves of the Rhine lapping over the path Drew created on the riverbank. Mud sticking to their wet suits, their weapons held directly over their heads, they reached the border of the estate’s sloping lawn. Coming side by side, each nodded to the other as they proceeded up through the grass to the first, lower patio overlooking the dock. Atop the ascending hill of manicured lawn was a second patioterrace, beyond which was the rear of the river mansion, a wall of sliding glass doors indicating an enormous interior, a ballroom or a banquet hall judging by the dimly lit chandeliers.

  “I’ve seen this place before!” whispered Drew.

  “You’ve been here?” asked Witkowski.

  “No. Pictures, photographs of it.”

  “Where?”

  “In one of those architectural magazines, I don’t recall which, but I remember the descending terraces and the row of glass doors.… Karin! What are you doing?”

  “I have to look inside.” As if in a trance, De Vries stood up and began walking like a robot across the grass toward the wall of huge glass panels. “I must!”

  “Stop her!” said the colonel. “Good Christ, stop her!”

  Latham shot forward, grabbing Karin around the waist and pulling her to the ground, rolling over and over to the right, away from the wash of light. “What’s wrong with you? Do you want to get yourself killed?”

  “I have to look inside! You can’t stop me.”

  “All right, all right, I agree with you, we all agree with you, but let’s be halfway bright about it.”

  Suddenly the two Special Forces commandos were on their knees, flanking them, Witkowski scrambling up from the terrace patio. “That wasn’t too smart, Mrs. de Vries,” said Captain Dietz angrily. “You don’t know who may be standing by one of those glass doors, and there’s a fair amount of moonlight tonight.”

  “I’m sorry, truly sorry, but it’s important to me, so important. You mentioned a priest, a blond priest … I must look at him!”

  “Oh, my … God!” whispered Drew, staring at Karin, seeing the panic in her eyes, the trembling of her head. “This is what you wouldn’t tell me—”

  “Ease off, chłopak!” ordered the colonel, interrupting and gripping Latham’s left arm.

  “You,” said Drew, turning his head and looking hard at the lined, stern face of the G-2 veteran. “You know what this is all about, don’t you, Stosh?”

  “I may or I may not. However, I’m not the issue. Stay with her, young fella, she may need all the support you can provide.”

  “Follow us,” said Lieutenant Anthony. “We swing to the right and reach the corner, then sidestep our way to the first door. We slip-tripped the latch and opened it an inch or two, enough to hear what’s going on beyond the drape.”

  Half a minute later the five-member unit was huddled by the corner of the estate’s ground floor, at the edge of the upper terrace. Witkowski tapped Latham’s shoulder. “Go with her,” he whispered. “Keep your hands free and quick. There may be nothing, but be prepared for anything.”

  Drew gently pushed Karin forward, holding her shoulders, until they reached the first sliding glass door. She peered around the edge of the inside drape and saw the man at the spotlighted lectern, heard the blond priest exhorting the crowd into hysterical shouts of Sieg Heil, Günter Jäger! Her mouth agape, her eyes wild, she started to scream. Latham clamped his hand over her mouth while the roars of Sieg Heil filled the ballroom, and spun her around back to the corner of the mansion.

  “It’s he!” choked De Vries. “It’s Frederik!”

  “Get her back to the boat,” the colonel fairly yelled. “We’ll finish up here.”

  “What’s to finish? Kill the son of a bitch!”

  “Now you’re not acting like an officer, lad. There’s always a follow-up.”

  “And we’re following up, Colonel,” said Captain Christian Dietz, gesturing at his lieutenant, who held a miniaturized video camcorder in his hands and was recording the frenzied event taking place inside.

  “Get her out of here!” repeated Witkowski.

  The ride back across the river was made mostly in silence, in deference to the shock sustained by Karin. For a long time she preferred to stand alone at the bow, staring in the moonlight at the opposite shoreline. Halfway across she turned and looked pleadingly at Latham, who got up from the gunwale and walked over to her.

  “Can I help?” he asked quietly.

  “You already have, but can you forgive me?”

  “For God’s sake, for what?”

  “I lost control, I could have killed us all. Stanley warned me about losing control.”

  “You had every reason to.… So this was your secret, that your husband was alive and—”

  “No, no,” interrupted Karin. “Or I should say, yes, but not this way, not what we saw tonight. I was sure he was alive and I believed he had turned and was part of the Nazi movement—willingly or unwillingly—but nothing like this!”

  “What did you think?”

  “So many things, so many possible explanations. Before East Berlin fell, I left him, telling him that we were finished unless he put his very odd life back together. His drinking was never a problem, for alcohol only made him pleasant, expansive, and full of fun. Then he changed, drastically, and became horribly abusive, striking me and throwing me into walls. He wouldn’t admit it, but he had gravitated to drugs, which was antithetical to everything he believed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He believed in himself, liked himself. Drinking sporadically was a now-and-then enjoyment, not an addiction. If it had been, your brother wouldn’t have tolerated him—for both personal and professional reasons.”

  “I’ll grant you that,” said Drew. “Harry liked good wine and a fine brandy, but he had no use for anyone who drank himself into a stupor. Neither do I, as a matter of fact.”

  “That’s my point, neither did Freddie. Anything that altered who he was for any length of time was abhorrent to him. Yet he changed, as I say, drastically. He became an enigma, a monster one minute, contrite the next.
Then one night in Amsterdam, having convinced myself that Harry was right, that Frederik was dead, I got an obscene phone call. It was the sort adolescents make showing off in front of their friends, disguising their voices by pitching them high or low and speaking through paper. There were the usual sexual demands and insults, so I started to hang up, when a particular phrase or series of words were used that stunned me. I’d heard them before—from Freddie! I shouted, ‘My God, is that you, Freddie?’ … I can still hear the agonizing scream that followed, and I knew I’d been right and Harry was wrong.”

  “What we saw tonight was a variation of that monster,” Drew said. “I wonder if he’s still on drugs.”

  “I have no idea. Perhaps a psychiatrist should be brought in to watch the tape Lieutenant Anthony made.”

  “I can’t wait to see it myself. That tape could be a gold mine.… Karin, what does Witkowski know?”

  “Again, I have no idea. All he said to me was that there were unanswered questions from the past. I don’t know what he meant.”

  “Let’s ask him.” Latham turned and addressed the colonel, who was sitting on the starboard gunwale with the two commandos. “Stan, can you come here a minute?”

  “Sure.” The colonel walked across the deck and stood between Drew and Karin.

  “Stosh, you knew more about tonight than you told either of us, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t know, I merely assumed the possibility. One of Freddie de V’s favorite personas when he went undercover was that of a priest, and, Lord knows, he was blonder than Marilyn Monroe when he didn’t dye his hair. When the captain described a blond priest around six feet tall, I was next to you, Karin, and watched you go ballistic. Suddenly memories came back to me.”

  “That doesn’t answer why you could even imagine it might be her husband up there,” said Latham.

  “Well, now you’re going back a few years. When G-Two got word of Frederik de Vries’s death at the hands of the Stasi, there were a few gaps we couldn’t fill, such as why they recorded his ‘interrogations’ and death in such detail. It wasn’t normal, not normal at all. Usually that stuff was buried, deep; the lessons of the concentration camps were learned.”

  “That’s what first struck me,” said Karin. “Harry, too, but he ascribed it to the mentality of Stasi fanatics who knew they were about to lose their power, lose everything. I couldn’t go along with that because Frederik talked about the Stasi so frequently, how brutal they could be, now manipulative, yet how basically insecure they were. Insecure men don’t condemn themselves with their own words.”

  “What did my brother say when you told him that?”

  “I never did. You see, Harry wasn’t just Frederik’s control, he was very fond of him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about our difficulties. There was no point, Freddie was dead—for the record.”

  “There were a couple of other things too,” said the colonel softly, “things you couldn’t know, Karin. In his last three penetrations, the information De Vries brought out was patently false. By that time we ourselves had compromised quite a few Stasi who knew they were soon going to be unemployed and indictable, so they were happy to cooperate. Several brought out proof that contradicted De Vries’s findings.”

  “Why didn’t you call him on it?” asked Drew. “Pull him out and put him on the grill?”

  “It was a lousy, fogged-up area,” replied Witkowski, shaking his head in the shadows. “Had he been duped, outsmarted? Was it burnout? He had been outstanding in the past, so were these simply lapses as a result of overwork? You figure, we couldn’t.”

  “You mentioned a ‘couple of things,’ Stanley,” said Karin. “What were they?”

  “Only one really, but it was confirmed by two of our turnarounds who didn’t know each other, and we confirmed that. The Stasi was an octopus with a hundred eyes and a thousand tentacles; in a sense it ran the underside of the country.… Your husband was flown twice to Munich and met with General Ulrich von Schnabe, later established to be one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi movement. He was assassinated while in prison by one of his own people before he could be interrogated.”

  “So the seed was planted and a poison flower called Günter Jäger bloomed,” said Karin, arching her head back in disbelief. “How? In the name of sanity, how?”

  “Maybe the tape will tell us something.” Latham gently shoved the colonel away and put his arm around her shoulders, then turned to Witkowski. “Use your fancy phone and call Moreau’s people here in Bonn. Tell them to get us a triple suite at the Königshof Hotel, one with a VCR that has duplicating equipment.”

  “Jawohl, mein Herr!” said the colonel, smiling appreciatively in the erratic darkness of the moonlight. “You sound like a real commander, chłopak.”

  “But how?” cried Karin de Vries suddenly, her pained face appealing to the rushing night clouds in the sky. “How could one man become such another?”

  “We’ll find out,” said Drew, holding her.

  The words, alternately muted and roared in German, took on a strange cadence of their own, an erratic flow of sound, both numbing and electrifying, a mixture of sermon and threat. The images on the screen were equally hypnotic despite the constant movement of the small camcorder that could not be held steady, or the frequent intrusions of a drape that kept blocking the lens. The blond priest spoke to an all-male audience of thirty-six men, a number, by the looks of their clothes, non-German, but each was expensively dressed, some less formal than others, yachting outfits and Dior jogging gear juxtaposed with business suits. They sat in mostly rapt attention, a few eyes straying in conceivable embarrassment when the fiery priest’s harangue became too violent, yet all rose as one during the frequent Sieg Heils. And the intense priest with the bright blond hair and piercing eyes was, indeed, mesmerizing.

  Before placing the tape in the VCR, Lieutenant Anthony had stood in front of the unit in the large suite at the Königshof Hotel and made an announcement. “The camera has a zoom lens and a high-impedance microphone, so you’ll hear everything, and I tried to get closeups of everyone in the place for identification purposes. Since Mr. Latham doesn’t speak German, Chris and I ordered up an English typewriter and did our best to translate what this Günter Jäger said—the text isn’t word perfect, but it’s clear enough.”

  “That was very thoughtful of you, Gerry,” said Drew, sitting between Witkowski and Karin.

  “It was more than that. It was very damned important,” interrupted Captain Dietz, kneeling in front of the television set and inserting the tape. “I’m still shook up,” he added enigmatically. “Okay, it’s magic time.” The screen was suddenly filled with sound and images, or, perhaps, sound and fury, as the poet wrote. Latham followed the English text.

  “My friends, my soldiers, you true heroes of the Fourth Reich!” began the man who called himself Günter Jäger. “I bring you magnificent news! A tidal wave of destruction is about to descend on the capitals of our enemies. Zero hour has been determined, and it is now precisely fifty-three hours away. Everything we have worked for, strived for, sacrificed for, has come to fruition. The end is not yet in sight, but the end of the beginning is upon us! It will be the omega, the final solution, of an international paralysis! As you who have come here tonight from across the borders and the seas are well aware, our enemies are in a state of chaos, so many accusing so many others of being part of our great cause. They curse us on the surface, but millions silently applaud us, for they want what we can provide! Rid the halls of power of the conniving Jews, who want everything for themselves and the loathsome Israel, deport the screeching inferior blacks, squash the Socialists who would tax us into productive oblivion and use our taxes to promulgate the unproductive—in a word, restructure! The world must take a lesson from the Romans before they grew indolent and let the blood of slaves infect their veins. We must be strong and completely intolerant of inferiority! One kills a deformed dog, why not the product of inferior parents?… Now to our tidal wave—
most of you know its name, some of you do not. Its code name is Water Lightning, and that’s precisely what it is. As lightning strikes and kills, so will be the water struck by it. In fifty-three hours the water reserves of London, Paris, and Washington will be polluted with such extraordinary toxicity that hundreds of thousands will die. The governments will be paralyzed, for it will take days, perhaps weeks, before the toxins are analyzed, and weeks after that before countermeasures are in place. By that time—”

  “I’ve heard enough!” said Latham. “Shut the goddamned thing off and make immediate duplicates. I don’t know how you do it, but wire that tape to London, Paris, and Washington! Also, fax this transcript to the number I give you. I’ll get on the phone to everyone I can think of. Christ, all we’ve got is two days!”

  38

  Wesley Sorenson listened as Latham spoke over the phone from Bonn; the director’s eyes were steady, intense, as beads of sweat formed at his white hairline. “The ‘water reserves,’ the reservoirs,” he said, barely audible with fear. “It’s the province of the Army Corps of Engineers.”

  “It’s the province of everyone at the Pentagon, Langley, the FBI, and the police around every water supply source in Washington, Wes!”

  “They’re fenced, guarded—”

  “Double, triple, and quadruple all the patrols,” insisted Drew. “This maniac wouldn’t have promised what he did unless he thought he could deliver, not with that crowd. I’m betting there was more money in there than in half of Europe. They’re hungry for power, salivating for it, and I suspect he’s got unlimited resources to pay the Nazi god. Jesus, barely two days!”

  “How are the identities of that crowd going?”

  “How the hell do I know? You’re the first call I’ve made. We’re wiring the tapes—the President of Germany gave us carte blanche through satellite feeds at the government studios—to French, British, and American Intelligence, in our case all questions and releases to be directed to you.”

  “There can’t be any public releases! The climate here and across the country is poisonous; it could get worse than the McCarthy period. There’ve been several riots, and a march on the state capital in Trenton. The crowds began shouting Nazi at the mention of politicians, bureaucrats, union leaders, and corporate executives even distantly associated with those openly being investigated. And this is only the beginning.”