The Black Gate (28 page)

He wanted to strangle the woman. He didn’t know what had happened to Peter in Germany, whether he had lost his way and betrayed his cause or not. Perhaps Connelly would never know. But Peter had been a good man and a good friend for as long as Connelly had known him, and he deserved better than this.
 

After a moment of uncomfortable silence, he excused himself before he could open his mouth and tell Elena what he really thought of her.
 

As he drove back across the Potomac toward D.C., trying to shed his anger at Elena against the backdrop of the beautiful April weather, he reflected on what had transpired over the last month. After American troops had swept through the Ruhr, Connelly had sent in a pair of agents to search for Peter and anything that remained of the Black Gate facility. They had found nothing but the ruins of the ancient Arnsberg castle atop the hill overlooking the Ruhr River, left standing just as it had for centuries. The RAF had done a commendable job of demolishing the massive viaduct northwest of the castle with their earthquake bombs, but of the facility itself, there was no sign. Aaron had wanted to pursue the matter further, but those above his pay grade were inundated with other concerns. The entire nation was in mourning over the death seven days before of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, fear was taking deep root in Washington’s power circles about what the Soviets might do once the Nazis finally surrendered, and as the war in the European Theater drew to a close, more and more resources, including those of the OSS, were being diverted to the bloody campaign in the Pacific Theater. Mounting a search for a destroyed Nazi facility in the Allied occupied Ruhr Valley had been dismissed by General Donovan, the head of OSS, as “something for archeologists to pick over.”
 

It had been frustrating, but there was nothing Connelly could do but say, “Yes, sir, three bags full, sir,” and carry on.
 

With the memory of the discussion with Elena still echoing in his head, he spent the rest of the afternoon tied up at meetings in which, thankfully, he was nothing more than a silent back-bencher.
 

It was well into the evening when the last of the meetings ended. Exhausted, he had just stepped through the door to his office when his secretary got to her feet from behind her desk, a haunted look on her face. “Mr. Connelly?”

With a frown, he said, “What is it, Iris?”

“Something…” She paused as she handed him a folded message slip. “Well, something strange happened. A woman called just a moment ago. She had a very thick accent — German, I think — and I could barely understand what she was saying. But I definitely recognized the name she mentioned.”

“What do you mean?” Connelly unfolded the small sheet of yellow paper.
 

And froze as he read the words written in Iris’s neat cursive script.
 

Peter Müller. Schwarze Tor diary. Kutz Bridge. 9PM. Come alone.

“Oh, my God,” he breathed.

“Is it…is it about our Peter?”

“Yes, it must be.” He looked up from the note. “And she said nothing else?”

“Only her name. Garbo.” She paused. “That was the name of his contact, wasn’t it?”

“Jesus,” Connelly breathed as an electric jolt of excitement coursed through him. He checked his watch. It was already eight-thirty.
 

Iris picked up the phone on her desk. “Should I call for a car?”

Connelly shook his head. “No. It’s only about a mile from here and I need some time to think.” She took his briefcase and put it in one of the safes in his office as he stepped around his desk and pulled open the top drawer. Reaching to the very back, he pulled out a .45 caliber pistol. Checking that the magazine was full and a round was loaded in the chamber, he slipped it into the rear waistband of his pants, where it would be concealed by his suit coat.

“You should take someone with you,” Iris said quietly.

He shook his head. “She said to come alone, and I don’t want to blow this. If Peter kept notes about the project, they could be priceless. And she might know what really happened to him.”

“If he’s still alive?”

Connelly stopped at the door and turned back to her as he put on his trench coat and hat. “And if he was really a traitor.”

***

Mina leaned against the railing on the south side of Kutz Bridge, gazing across the Tidal Basin at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, whose white marble gleamed under the lights that shone upon it. Wreathing the entire basin were Washington’s famous cherry trees, imported from Japan over thirty years before, now in full bloom. Each tree was a lovely cloud of white petals, and the hundreds of trees that ringed the waters of the Potomac were a symbol of beauty that lasted only a brief time each year. She closed her eyes and inhaled, savoring the sweet fragrance.

Opening her eyes again, she turned around, taking in the magnificent obelisk of the Washington Monument rising above more cherry trees lining Independence Avenue.

Her lips curled up in a smile laden with irony.
Independence
. Her first true day of independence, free of the abusive and manipulative people who had ruled her entire life, had been a month ago to the day. It had been a long, difficult journey.

She had covered the three hundred kilometers from Arnsberg to the port of Antwerp, Belgium in three nights, holing up during the day in the cool darkness of cellars beneath abandoned houses. She was able to wait until the second night before hunger drove her again to feed. While she could still appreciate the taste of human food, it held no nourishment for her. She could have eaten all day and still been ravenous. Draining the energy from animals, she found, would only barely sustain her. The only real sustenance for her body was what she took from other human beings. Armed with that bitter knowledge, she tracked down a group of German POWs being escorted to the rear, snatching one of them in the darkness and burying the remains. The Allied guards she left in peace.

In Antwerp, she was faced with a difficult proposition. She needed to board a ship to cross the Atlantic, but the passage would take at least a week and she had vowed not to take innocent lives. Moving across the docks and through the ships like a shadow in the darkness, she finally found what she needed: a ship bearing American soldiers who had been convicted of serious crimes and who were being returned to the United States for imprisonment. She took four of their lives, tossing the bodies overboard, before the ship docked at Newport News, Virginia.
 

Once in America, things became far more difficult. She was a stranger in a strange land, without money, able to speak only broken English, without any credentials or identity papers. With Peter gone, there was no one she could turn to, no one who might possibly comprehend what it was that she had become. The only thing that kept her from sliding into mortal depression was Peter’s journal, which she kept with her always. It had become the focus of her accursed life.

While she despised herself for doing so, she became a thief, stealing money, clothes and anything else she needed to survive. Working her way north to Washington, D.C., she spent some time becoming familiar with the capitol city before finally contacting Aaron Connelly of the OSS.

And now, here on the Kutz Bridge, she waited. Peter’s journal was in her purse, and her heart was torn at the thought of giving it up. It had given her a sense of purpose, and she wasn’t sure what she would do after she handed it over to Peter’s colleague. While she certainly didn’t want to die, living an immortal life as the thing she had become was a terrifying prospect. An eternity alone, feeding on the living.

A man in a black trench coat and matching Fedora hat strode purposefully along the sidewalk on the north side of the bridge from the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. Few pedestrians were on the bridge at this hour, which is one reason she had chosen the location for this meeting. The other was that it gave her a clear field of view and an easy escape over the railing into the Potomac River if things went wrong.
 

The man stopped directly across the street and, after a quick glance around, turned to look at her.
 

Holding his gaze, she withdrew Peter’s journal from her purse and held it up so the man could see it in the glow cast by the street lights. After giving a curt nod, he waited until there was a break in the car traffic before he stepped from the sidewalk into the street.

***

Connelly’s heart was hammering in his chest as he joined the woman on the south side of the bridge. She wore a black dress and shoes, with a black lace veil over her face. While certainly unusual dress for an evening walk, it was hardly remarkable to see a woman dressed for mourning, given the number of men still dying on the front lines. “
Guten Abend, Fräulein
,” he said quietly. He would never pass for a native German, but he could communicate well enough. “I’m Aaron Connelly.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said, also in German. “You know me as Garbo, Peter’s contact in Arnsberg.”
 

Connelly nodded and let out a slow breath. “He didn’t make it out, did he?”

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I am so very sorry.” With great reluctance, she handed him the journal. “He kept notes on the project. There were two journals, but I was only able to save this one.”

Holding his breath, Connelly flipped open the blood-stained soft bound journal, noting the bullet hole through it. “Except for these diagrams here, it’s all in numbers.”

“It is a book cipher Peter used. He was able to tell me that it was one in his home library, but did not have the chance to say which one. I am sorry.”

Connelly frowned. “That’ll make things a bit tricky, but we’ll see what we can do.” Closing the journal, he sighed. “Your last report said that Peter was working with the Germans. Was that true?”

Tears welled in her eyes as she slowly shook her head. “No. I was wrong, but was captured before I could tell what really happened. Peter sacrificed himself to save us, all of us.”

“Listen,” Connelly asked, “I’d like you to come back with me to OSS Headquarters to debrief you. We have so many unanswered questions about…”

The rest of his words were lost in the squeal of tires on asphalt.
 

***

One moment Connelly was standing there in front of Mina, asking her to go with him to OSS Headquarters. The next he was gone, his body hurled down the street by the car that had swerved onto the sidewalk and hit him, but missed Mina by the breadth of a finger.
 

“
Nein!
” In a flash she was beside Connelly’s broken body, but it was too late. He stared up at the night sky with dead eyes as a rivulet of blood flowed from his shattered skull.
 

Behind her, a car door opened. “Ah, shit,” someone muttered. It was the driver. He stumbled closer, and Mina could smell whiskey on his breath. With glazed eyes, he looked down at Connelly’s body. “Hey, you all right, Mac?”

Her face contorting in rage, Mina grabbed the driver’s neck with one hand and squeezed. He barely had time to raise his hands to defend himself before his vertebrae cracked and popped. Mina dropped him, still twitching, to the ground as onlookers, rushing to the scene, cried out in surprise and fear.

With one last look at Connelly, she scooped up the journal, which lay close to the OSS officer’s smashed body, and vanished into the night.

***

Pushing the boy away and gently but firmly removing his hand from her thigh, Marlena said, “I’m not sure about this.”

With a melodramatic groan, Ernst, her boyfriend, said, “What’s wrong?”
 

Even in the moonlight, she could see the pout on his face, and she had to put a hand over her mouth to keep from grinning. Ernst wouldn’t like that. He had a very prickly ego.
 

They were lying among the trees — saplings, really — beside the old viaduct that had been destroyed during the war. The Ruhr River burbled a few meters away. The old trees that had been uprooted during the bombings had been replaced, but the new ones were barely taller than Marlena. While the railroad tracks had been put back into service, the stone arches of the viaduct still hadn’t been fully repaired. Labor and material was still scarce in 1947 West Germany, and rebuilding the viaduct wasn’t exactly a top priority.

She had been down here before, of course, but only during the day. Coming down here tonight had been Ernst’s suggestion after their successful escape from their homes and unwitting parents.

“What’s wrong?” Ernst repeated, his hand slowly creeping up her thigh again.

“That tickles!” She giggled, putting her hand over his. Deciding that it would be all right to let him venture just a bit farther, she slowly moved his hand up until his fingers brushed her panties. “And that’s as far as…”

She broke off as the ground trembled and a geyser erupted from the moonlit waters of the Ruhr, drenching them with spray.

“Oh!” She got to her feet, with Ernst beside her.
 

“What was that?” Ernst moved to the edge of the water. “You felt it, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.” Marlena shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold. “Ernst, be careful. Remember how big those bomb craters were. Maybe they weren’t filled right. Or maybe there’s one that hasn’t gone off.” Unexploded bombs were an ever present hazard in much of post-war Germany.

“Stop worrying.” Ernst scanned the water and the ground around them. “We’re not sinking and we haven’t been blown up.”

“Look!” Marlena pointed at the water, just a meter or so from shore. Something had bobbed up to the surface amid the momentary turbulence in the river.

Ernst leaned forward, peering at the object. “Someone’s there!” He waded in, and was nearly waist deep before he could reach the body that was whirling slowly in the current.
 

“Be careful!” Marlena shouted. “Maybe we should get my father?” Her father was the head of the local Polizei.
 

“We can’t just leave him! He could still be alive!” Ernst took the man by the wrists and quickly hauled him back to shore.