Spandau Phoenix (50 page)

Here's your chance."

The German squinted at Rose, then shook his big head slowly. "Colonel, a homicide investigation is a team proce I need fingerprint men, photographers, forensic technicians.

"I don't care about all that crap," Rose retorted. "I could have high-tech coming out the wazoo if I wanted it. I'm interested in your gut. Your trieb, remember?"

With a surreal sense of dislocation, Schneider walked a slow circle around the room, keeping his eyes on Richardson's naked body all the time. He noted several facts at once-the obvious. But Schneider was a great mistruster of the obvious. Too often plain facts concealed more subtle truths. The cause of death seemed plain enough: a bullet hole in the back of the neck, small caliber, fired into the fragile bones of the cervical spine. An execution. That Harry had resisted death was also plain; his skin had been burned by the ropes that held him fast.

Schneider's eyes found Harry's lifeless gray orbs just once, and he looked away quickly.

There was nothing to be found there but the frozen moment of stunned horror-more animal than human-that Schneider had seen more times than any man should.

Last came the message-if message it was. Drawn in the pool of blood beneath Harry's right foot, like a child's fingerpainting, was a small but clear capital B. Harry's right great toe was stained'scarlet, like a blunt pen dipped in a well of blood. After the B came a curved line that could have been the start of another letter-perhaps a lower-case rebut in the midst of forming it Harry must have been shot, for a tangential line arced sharply outward, as if the foot drawing it had been flung wide in spasm.

Schneider crouched and examined the first letter. There was no mistaking it: it was a B or nothing. With a long last look at the second letter, the big German stood, carefully closed Harry's eyelids, and walked back to the front room.

The air was breathable there. Rose's marching feet echoed behind him.

,what do you make of it?" Rose asked. "Dead Russian, dead American,"

Schneider replied.

"None of my business."

"I'm making it your business. Who do you think did it?"

"Someone in a hurry."

"I'm not in the mood for games, Schneider."

The German took a huge breath, exhaled. "All right.

Someone broke in here, surprised Richardson, tortured him for information, and was surprised by the Russian in the front. The Russian tried to run; the killer shot him in the back.

After getting his information@r not getting it-the killer executed Richardson and left." Schneider sighed.

"How did you find out about it?"

"Anonymous call. Guy had a British accent. Clary and I hauled ass over here, found Harry, and sealed the place off."

Schneider digested this in silence.

"What about that swastika?" Rose asked.

Schneider shrugged.

"A bullet in the neck is a Dachau-style execution," Rose pointed out.

"SS-style."

"They do it the same way in Lubyanka."

"Yeah," Rose muttered. "So you don't think it's the Germans? Not Phoenix, or the Brotherhood, or whatever neoNazi wackos Harry pissed off when he killed Goltz?"

"Why would Germans do dais?" Schneider asked. "Even Der Bruderschaft?

Or if they did, why would they leave a swastika? Why not the red eye?

Why leave anything at all?

They would know you Americans would go mad with rage.

How could that help them? If you implemented one-fourth of your reserve powers, Berlin would become Beirut."

"Why this, why that' Rose grumbled. 'Why would the fucking Stasi kill a KGB officer and bring the whole weight of the KGB down on their heads?

Nothing makes sense since yesterday, Schneider. Maybe they want us to crack down on Berlin. Maybe they think that would spark big protests against continued occupation." Rose rubbed his forehead anxiously. "The scary thing is, I can't do a damned thing about this.

Five minutes before that anonymous call, I received an order to cease and desist all investigations pertaining to Spandau Prison or Rudolf Hess."

A faint smile touched the corners of Schneider's lips.

"Who gave you that order, Colonel?"

"It came from on high, my friend. What we call Echelons Beyond Reality.

If you ask me, Washington's covering for the goddamn Brits."

"You mean the letters on the floor?"

"Damn right. Harry was obviously trying to tell us who did this.

And it seems to me that B and r are the first two letters of British."

Schneider sucked in his breath. "Colonel, I'm not sure that second letter is an r It could be a c or even an o. If it is an r, Richardson could have been trying to wr Bruderschaft-the Brotherhood. Phoenix."

"Maybe, Rose admitted. "But you just told me you didn't think Germans did it. Make up your mind, will you?"

He paused in thought. "No, that swastika is just too goddamn obvious.

This case revolves around Spandau, and Hess. We've got a dead Russian and a dead American. In my book that leaves the Brits, not the Germans."

Schneider raised an eyebrow. "An anonymous caller using a British accent is just as obvious as that swastika. Also, we can't discount the possibility that the murderer himself drew those letters in the blood.

To mislead us." The German sighed uncomfortably. "Colonel, is it possible that men from

your own government could have done this?" is

Rose looked up sharply. "Schneider, I've been in this man,s army all my life. But if I believed what you just suggested, I'd take this story straight to the fucking New York Times."

Schneider believed him. "So what are you going to do? If your own people won't help you on the Hess case, you're stuck."

,you ought to know me better than that by now," Rose countered.

He lifted an arm and pointed back down the hall.

"I liked that man back there," he said soffly- "He served his country in war, and he served it in what the politicians like to call peace."

Rose's cheek twitched with the intensity of his anger.

"Whoever did that to him-Brit, German, whoever-he and his bosses are going to pay like they never dreamed in all their worthless goddamn lives. I won't rest until they do."

Just then Clary knocked twice quickly on the door, then opened it.

Schneider's mouth fell open. Silhouetted in Harry Richardson's apartment door was the stocky, trenchcoated figure of Colonel Ivan Kosov. The Russian took two steps into the foyer and bent over the body of, Dmitri Rykov.

When he looked up, Schneider saw points of black fire flickering in his eyes. Fury crackled off him like static electricity.

Stunned, Schneider turned to Rose for an explanation.

"I called him," Rose confessed. "if my own people won't help me, by God, I'll take help where I can find it."

Schneider peered into Rose's eyes. "Why am I really here, Colonel?" he asked quietly. And then suddenly he knewRose had been forbidden to pursue the Spandau case using his own men, so he had called Schneider here to pick up the torch Harry Richardson had dropped. It made Scfineider angry that the American thought he needed cheap theatrics to motivate him. He had wanted to go to South Africa with Richardson all along. Funk, Luhr, Goltz: these men were minions, corrupt servants of an insidious power creeping into Germany from without. Stopping them would be a temporary victory at best. Whoever they served was the true enemy. To unite officers of the Stasi and the Polizei-sworn enemies-would take a truly monstrous power. And to kill a monster, Schneider knew, you cut off its head, not its hand.

With a glance back at Kosov's kneeling figure, he caught Rose by the ar-rn and pulled him back into the room where Harry's corpse sat baking in the dry heat.

"I'll go to South Ahica, Colonel," he growled. "But I don't like being manipulated. You should have sent me in the first place. You want to find two German cops? Send a German cop." Schneider jerked his thumb toward the front room. "But I report to you, not him.

Understood? I trust you alone. Not your government, not Kosov, not his government.

Just YOU."

"Agreed, Detective." Rose pulled Harry's airplane ticket from his pocket and handed it to the German. "From now on, all expenses will be paid out of my personal bank account." He lowered his voice. "Your flight leaves at two Pm.

tomorrow. I'll brief you just before you leave. Now, if you don't mind, I need to talk a little shop with my new Russian friend."

Schneider turned. Ivan Kosov stood motionless in the bedroom door, his eyes riveted on Harry Richardson's mutilated head. He made no sound.

Schneider stuffed the plane ticket into his coat pocket and moved toward the door. At the last moment, Kosov stepped aside.

Schneider paused, looked back at Harry, then looked into the Russian's eyes lohg enough for Kosov to read the message there. I hate Russians as much as you hate Germans, it said. I blinded your little black assassin, and I haven't ruled you out as a suspect in this either Schneider walked on. He understood Colonel Rose's motives: this was a marriage of expediency, nothing more. Politics, as ever, made strange bedfellows. Rose didn't TRUSt his Russian counterpart any more than Schneider did, but the two professionals had much in common. They're like a pair of fathers grieving over murdered sons, Schneider thought as he trudged down the stairs. A pair of very dangerous fathers.

Kosov had looked even angrier than Rose, if that was possible.

Schneider only hoped the two men realized what they and he-were up against. Eighteen hours ago Harry Richardson had practically scalped a Stasi agent in an East Berlin street. Tonight he was slated for a closed-casket funeral. The man who had done that to him, Schneider reflected, was a man to be taken very seriously indeed.

Six floors below Harry's apartment, Yuri Borodin smiled with satisfaction. His plan had worked after all. Ten minutes ago he'd been furious. Richardson hadn't had the Spandau papers-as Borodin had thought he might-and he had refused to discuss the two German policemen, even under torture. Borodin hadn't intended to kill Richardson, but the American had made him angry. And then Kosov's bumbling footpad had blundered in during the interrogation. Borodin had shot Rykov from reflex, without even knowing who he was. That had sealed Richardson's fate. Borodin couldn't very well leave anyone alive to reveal what he had done.

Even a Twelfth Department man could not kill a fellow KGB officer with impunity.

Yet in the midst of adversity, inspiration had struck. Before leaving Harry's apartment Borodin had planted two microtransmitters@ne in the front room, one in the bedroom. Then he'd made an anonymous telephone call to Colonel Rose. The harvest had been bountiful. Now he knew not only the location of the two German policemen, but also the identity of Rose's emissary to South Africa. The burly Kripo detective would lead him straight to Hauer and Apfel, and ultimately to the Spandau papers.

And if that wasn't enough, he was now listening to Kosov and Rose hatch a renegade operation that could smash both their careers. The only oversight, Borodinconceded to himself, had been the writing on the floor. The American had sneaked that past him. Richardson had been trying to write Borodin, of course, but a bullet through his spinal cord had apparently turned his o into something like an r The Anglophobic Rose had already misread the one clue that could help him, though; and Ivan Kosov wasn't likely to disabuse him of his fantasies!

As Schneider emerged from the front entrance of Harry's building, Yuri Borodin laughed aloud.

Even in the dog days of glasnost, his job was sometimes more fun than work.

7'31 Pm. Lufthanso Flight 417, Corsican Airspace

Dieter Hauer looked down at the shiny, wrinkled ball of aluminum foil in his hand. It had taken four minutes of his best pickpocket technique to remove the Spandau papers from Hans's trousers, but he had finally done it. Hans sat in the airplane seat next to him, sleeping fitfully. Hauer removed the foil wrapping the thin sheets as if it concealed an archaeological treasure. Despite all that had happened, he had yet to actually see the papers.

The first page looked just as Hans had described it: a paragraph written in German, followed by a stream Of unintelligible gibberish.

Hauer scanned the German, but learned nothing new. Sighing, he pulled the bottom page from the stack and looked for the signature.

There it was: Number 7. My God, he thought, to have been in prison so long that you didn't even use your name. If the poor bastard remembered it at all ... On the last page Hauer saw the carefully drawn eye. It looked exactly like those he'd seen tattooed on at least a dozen scalps.

Whoever wrote the Spandau papers, he decided, had obviously been visited at least once by someone with more than hair behind his right ear. Hauer didn't realize that three of the pages were blank until he began arranging them to repack them in the foil.

He rubbed his eyes vigorously, unwilling to accept what he saw, but the truth was I plain to see. Three pages bore no ink at all.

The paper wasn't even the same! His first impulse was to shake Hans awake and demand to know what he had done with the missing pages. Yet as soon as he raised his hand, Hauer realized what had happened. The substituted sheets told the story.