Spandau Phoenix (41 page)

Goltz stiffet".

"Tell you what," Harry went on, "get me something to drink, and I'll tell you boys part of a very interesting story."

Axel Goltz had compressed his muscles like steel springs.

Harry sensed it like a hunter senses his dog straining to break cover.

He rechecked everyone's position: Goltz stood by the table, Rykov still blocked the door. But Andrei stood only a single step from Harry's chair, his eyes smoldering.

He had to be moved.

"I'll take Scotch, if you have it," Harry said.

"Get him a vodka, Andrei," Rykov ordered.

Thank you God! Harry flexed his calf muscles. s th Andrei started to obey his captain, but after two step , e resentment he'd been nursing since the argument at Klaus's house finally surfaced. He stopped and turned back to his commander. "Get it yourself," he said deflandyRykov went pale at this public challenge to his authority.

He stood erect and laid a hand on the machine pistol in his belt.

"You mutinous bastard!" he said, stepping forward.

Harry's heart pounded. Jesus, this is it ... Andrei now stood five feet away from him, facing Rykov in fury. It's now or neverThen Harry saw something so unexpected that it froze him in his chair. Axel Goltz silently brought a Heckler & Koch PSP pistol out of his jacket and aimed it not at Harry, but at Dmitri Rykov's astonished face.

"Back against the wall, you Russian bastard!" he shouted.

"Throw your gun on the floor!"

Andrei whirled, then froze. Rykov dropped his Skorpion on the floor.

"Have you gone mad?" he asked, an incredulous smile on his face.

Goltz grinned scornfully. "Are you surprised, my little Russian puppies? Surprised that a German is about to blow your puny brains out?"

"You crazy fucking German," said Rykov, still unbelieving.

"You're a dead man. No matter what you do now, Kosov will hunt you down. That demon Misha will slice your throat like a bratwurst."

Goltz spoke over his shoulder. "Stand up, Major. You and I are going to take a short ride together. You're about to find out what a real interrogation is like. AGe.nnan interrogation."

"You won't get away with this," Rykov said uselessly.

Goltz laughed coldly. "Of course I will. Corporal Ivanov has already reasoned out my alibi. I left here to attend to other business, you two quarreled, and Major Richardson managed to kill you both and escape.

With two idiots like you, Kosov will be the first to believe it."

"But why?" asked Rykov, fascinated by Goltz's apparently suicidal impulse. "Do you work for the Americans?"

I'm afraid he doesn't, Harry thought with a sinking head.

Raising his chin proudly, Goltz spoke his next words in German.

"If I die," he said softly, "I die for Germany. For Phoenix."

His voice dropped still lower. "Der tag kommt. "

"The day approaches," Harry echoed softly. What the hell?

At that moment Corporal Andrei Ivanov chose to die a soldier's death.

With no weapon but his hands he charged a man who was pointing a semi-automatic pistol at him.

Stunned by this display of courage, Goltz hesitated for a split-instant, then fired. Andrei took a round in the chest, but he kept coming.

Rooted to his chair, Harry watched the doomed charge with hypnotic fascination. Goltz's third bullet killed the Russian, but the corporal's furious momentum bowled the Stasi agent over backward.

Shaken to the core, Harry wrenched his mind back to reality. He knew he couldn't beat a bullet to the door; with a cry he hurled himself from the chair and crashed headlong through the window, trailing the curtains after him into the darkness.

Axel Goltz heaved Andrei's bleeding body off him and wmmbled to his feet. Rykov was nowhere to be seen. Cursing, Goltz darted to the window and hit a switch that flooded the courtyard with light. He saw only a sparkling jigsaw.of shattered glass. Taking three steps back, he rushed the jagged window and leaped through. He tumbled across the glass-covered bricks in an expert parachutist's roll and came to his feet at a run. The glass cut him badly, but he uttered no sound as he disappeared into the darkness after Harry.

226 A.M. The NaHerman Cabin Near Wollsbiirg, FRG

"Stop tying to change my mind!" Hans shouted. He lashed out with his cuffed hands, missing Hauer's face by inches.

Hauer didn't flinch. They sat opposite each other on the cabin floor, Hans with his back set against the wan, the foil packet containing the Spandau papers in his lap. Behind Hans's eyes swirled a thousand currents of rage and tension.

"Listen," Hauer pressed, "you're reacting just like every relative of every kidnap victim I've ever seen. No one wants police involved-they'll try anything to get their loved one back. Anything but the right thing. You know better, Hans.

You know how many kidnap victims we get back alive: ninety percent of hostages are dead before the ransom call ever comes. You've already been lucicy-You can get Ilse back, but you're going to have to take her."

Hans glowered at the floor. Statistics meant nothing to him now.

All he could see was the nightmare image of the girl dredged from the Havel, leached gray by the oily river ...

Hauer watched him silently. For the fifteen minutes since Hans regained consciousness, Hauer had tried in vain to convince him that Ilse's only chance lay in rescue. In his mind there was no other option. Bitter experience had taught him that the real hostages in a kidnapping were the family members left behind, not the victim In @ years Hauer had seen them all: the shattered mothers who served coffee to the police in zombie-like traces of sedation; the raging fathers who refused to sleep until they collapsed from exhaustion; the wives who could not stop crying, or who could not cry at all; and the husbands, like Hans, who toughed it out in stoic silence until helplessness and despair finally unmanned them. Hans had to be saved from himself.

Hauer watched as, despite the handcuffs, Hans worked open the foil packet containing the Spandau papers. Hans examined the first page-the scrawled German that switched to carefully blocked Latin-md then, apparently satisfied that Natterman had not tried to steal the precious ransom, tie closed the packet and stuffed it into his trouser pocket.

He refused to meet Hauer's eyes, keeping his own focused on the handcuffs.

Hauer stood up. He st@ to speak again, to marshal the reasons Hans should set aside his fear and do what he himself would do. But as he stared, he began to see with different eyes. He saw that his son, though like himself in many ways, was profoundly different in others.

Hans was not yet thirty, still young enough that he defined himself more by his job and his friends than by his inner self. And with the family situation he had-a mother he despised and a father he had hated until tonight-Hans probably drew more emotional sustenance from his wife than he would ever understand. In the span of eight hours, he had seen his job unmasked as a travesty, his friend brutally murdered, and his wife torn from his side.

Little wonder, Hauer reflected, that he lacked the resolve to punch through the blinding red wall of emotion and act.

Hauer had seen this type of paralysis before, and inexperience was not always the root of it. Hans's internal compass, Ww that of so many Germans, gravitated toward a magnetic north-the gilded scaffolding of official authority. With that mffolding shattered and himself branded a fugitive, he was a man adrift. Hauer felt no such confusion. His internal compass pointed to the true nordi of his spirit. He had lost his illusions very young, and through the trials of finding his way in the world alone, he had learned to exalt the essence, not the trappings, of his work. He took a most un-German approach to his skill as a marksman: in unexpected moments he found himself viewing the world through his rifle scope-not in a limited, but a profoundly focused way.

All existence compressed into the tube-of polished lenses, the smallest movement magnified a hundredfold, melding him with the target a thousand yards away: the six-inch red paper circle, the tawny fur beneath the stag's shoulder, the pale forehead of a man. When he led men-in the army, on the GSG-9 firing range, in the streets'of Berlin-he led not by virtue of his rank, but by example. In situations like this one, cut off from command, the fire inside Hauer burned all the brighter, spurring him to action, driving him toward resolution.

As he watched Hans now, he felt an awful powerlessness.

What Hans needed was a new allegiance, a fixed star that the spinning needle in his soul could lock bnto. If Hauer could not provide that, if he could not ' lead the son who had returned to him like a prodigal, then he would truly have failed as a father, as all that he had believed himself to be.

He started suddenly. Professor Natterman was speaking.

"Your father is right," the old man was saying. "Give in to Nazis and they crush you. Exterminate you. We can't surrender the papers, we've got to take Ilse back."

"Nazis?" Hans groaned. "You're both crazy! Crazy old men! What does that have to do with getting Ilse back? With today? It's ancient history!"

You're right," Hauer said quickly. He squatted dow his haunches, his face a foot from Hans's own. "Forget all that crap. What matters is Ilse. But unless you force yourself to look at this objectively, Hans, your emotion is going to kill her. You have never faced this thing you are facing now.

You've seen brutality, and you've seen death. But you have never faced pure evil. That is what you are facing now. Call it Nazism or Phoenix or whatever you want, it's all the same. It is a thing as mindless and as ravenous as a cancer.

It perceives only what it wants, obstacles to getting what it wants, and threats to its existence. Right now it wants those papers.

The papers are a dream. You have them, Ilse has read them, so both of you are also threats. Killing her, killing you-this is less than nothing. Remember Weiss, Hans, think of Steuben. I tried to kid myself about it, but Steuben was a dead man the moment I saved your life."

Hans flinched at that. Already he blamed himself for Weiss, and for so much more. He looked up into his father's face, pleading silently for him to stop, but Hauer would not.

"If you get on that plane with those papers, you will never return to Germany. Phoenix's men can kill you on the plane, in the airport, anywhere. The South African police can murder you in jail. They do it all the time. If we have Der Bonderschaft in our department, what do they have diere?

The moment Phoenix has the papers, you will die. You'll die.

You'll, never see your wife again. You'll never see me again. 19

Hans scrambled to his feet. He slipped past Hauer to the shattered bedroom window and rested his cuffed hands on a knife-edge of glass.

Even in the bitter cold he was sweating.

Haner's words had pierced the fog of dread that surrounded him, yet the rush of nightmare images would not stop. They rifpped through him like a ragged strip of film, unspoofing from his heart, catching in his @

flashing behind his eyes. He tried to speak, to express the confusion he felt, but his voice broke. Tears pooled in his eyes as he stared out into the frozen forest.

Hauer couldn't see Hans's face, but he heard the sob and imew that his words had had their effect. He stood up slowly and took something from his pocket. A key. He walked to the window, removed the cuffs from Hans's wrists, and put them in his pocket.

"I don't think you understand," he said. "I want you to take the papers to South Africa."

Natterman cleared his throat. "Surely you can't mean that, Captain?"

Hauer snapped his head around and gave the old man a withering glare. "I mean to use the Spandau diary to draw the kidnappers into the open. To force them to expose Ilse."

Hans threw up his hands. "But what can you do then? You don't have one of your GSG-9 teams-no twenty-man unit with state-of-the-art weapons and communications."

Hauer spoke with cold-blooded confidence. "You know what I can do, Hans. You're all the team I need."

"And me," Natterman put in.

Hauer ignored him. He had no intention of taking the professor to South Africa, but now was not the time to tell him that.

Hans walked a few steps away from Hauer. It was almost impossible to argue with the man when he brought the power of his personality to bear.

Yet Hans feared so much more than Ilse's deadi. He sensed her terror like a snake twisted around his spine. Not terror for herself, but for the child she was carrying. Of course he remembered her doctor's appointment now. He'd fallen asleep after the Spandau detail and missed it. But why hadn't she told him about the baby when he got home? Yet he knew the answer to that too.

Because he had come home acting like a total lunatic, a money-crazed bastard. And hadn't she tried in spite of.him?

He could still hear her voice: I've got a secret too ... And then the phone call from Funk's man, Jiirgen Luhr. And then Weiss. And Steuben.

And Ilse ...

"Look, I don't have a passport," he said sharply. "The kidnappers were right about that. The only way I can get to South Africa is by the route they've set up."

"I can have a forger here in three hours," Hauer said quickly.