The Maya Codex (36 page)

42

MAUTHAUSEN

O
’Connor parked the car outside Mauthausen’s forbidding stone walls behind which, during the war, over 120 000 people had been murdered by the Nazis. With the exception of some of the cramped, squalid barracks, which had been torn down, the camp had remained as it was when Aleta’s family was interned in 1938. The camp was maintained now as a memorial to the innocent souls who had been taken.

It was early, and a Sunday, so the car park was empty. The tourist buses would come later. O’Connor and Aleta walked towards the main gate in silence. Aleta’s long dark hair trailed over her shoulders, moving gently in the light morning breeze.

Rusted iron bars protruded from the granite archway, the big eagle which they had once supported torn from its mount by prisoners when the camp was finally liberated by the US 11th Armored Division in May of 1945. The heavy wooden doors in the centre of the archway were closed. O’Connor and Aleta entered through a side arch beneath the observation towers and passed into the SS assembly compound, where the prisoners had been stripped naked and left for hours in the hot sun or freezing snow while their clothes were disinfected.

Aleta had researched the camp thoroughly before arriving in Austria, but even that had not prepared her for the grisly reality that confronted her when she entered the gas chambers. The chambers at Mauthausen could accommodate up to 120 prisoners and the Nazis had disguised them as shower rooms. Aleta choked back tears as she walked through the white tiled rooms, the shower heads and water pipes still in place. Each room had its entry through a heavy iron bulkhead door. The doors, now rusting, were made to be sealed and locked from the outside and were equipped with a centre peep-hole. The SS guards would observe the prisoners falling to the tiles and fighting for their lives, blood streaming from their ears and other orifices as deadly Cyclone-B hydrogen cyanide was vented into the room.

O’Connor and Aleta walked silently into the adjacent rooms, which contained the ovens used to incinerate the bodies the SS guards dragged from the ‘shower rooms’.

‘I need some air,’ Aleta said finally, her face pale. They climbed the steps that led out of the gas chambers and walked past the barrack blocks and the brothel that had been set up for prisoners who collaborated with the Nazis. They passed through the massive granite ‘prisoners’ gate’ and walked towards the quarry, where thousands of prisoners had died, whipped and worked to exhaustion digging out rocks with their bare hands.

The car park now hidden from view, neither O’Connor nor Aleta saw the Audi pull in and park at the far end. The CIA asset noted the blue strip with the white ‘D’ for Deutschland beneath the twelve gold stars of the European Union on the registration plate of the rental Volkswagen Passat. He transmitted the number to the chief of station in Berlin in a secure burst from his cell phone. Ten minutes later he received his instructions. ‘Car hired in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe by male fitting description of Tutankhamen. Nefertiti likely to be with him. Once confirmed, follow and terminate both targets at first opportunity.’

‘Given what happened here,’ Aleta said thoughtfully, ‘it’s surprising Israel doesn’t show more compassion towards the Palestinians.’

‘Some might argue the Israelis have the right to defend themselves against rocket attacks.’

‘Yes. But the Israeli attacks in Gaza and Lebanon have been ruthlessly disproportionate: they’ve even bombed schools and UN posts.’

‘That can hardly be compared to the Holocaust,’ O’Connor suggested gently.

‘Every life is precious. When you flatten places like Gaza, the most populated area on the planet – where one and a half million people are crowded into a tiny area that even the Vatican calls a concentration camp – you’ve made a decision to kill innocent civilians. If it were any other nation raining cluster bombs and white phosphorous on women and children, your people in Washington would be outraged.
White phosphorous!
A compound that clamps to the skin and keeps burning deep into the body. How do the Israelis justify that?’

O’Connor didn’t reply, surprised by the ferocity of Aleta’s views. Was it an Arab or a Jew, he wondered, who had said, ‘A man without a country is a man without dignity. And our dignity is more important to us even than our life.’ O’Connor was convinced the awful killing would continue on both sides until the Arab Islamists recognised Israel’s unequivocal right to exist, and the Israelis withdrew from their illegal settlements and returned the land they had occupied since 1967 so a Palestinian state could become a reality.

They reached the ‘staircase of death’ and Aleta looked towards the cliff. ‘There are 186 steps to the top,’ she said. ‘The prisoners were made to carry huge rocks up these stairs on their shoulders, as punishment.’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I think if my grandfather were alive today, he’d be urging the Israeli government and people to take a different course. I’m not blaming the Israeli people – they want peace just as much as the ordinary Palestinians – but the hardliners in the Israeli government will never rest until all Palestinian land is taken by force, and the Islamists will never rest until Israel is wiped off the map. It’s madness, the same mindless madness that gave birth to von Heißen and Mauthausen.’ She wiped her eyes and looked at O’Connor. ‘It’s time we went. There’s less than three weeks to the winter solstice. If we’re going to have any chance of finding the third figurine, let alone lining them up by 21 December, we’ll need to move quickly.’

O’Connor nodded. It would be touch and go. Together, they walked in silence across the deserted quarry, a quarry where Jews and others had been murdered in their thousands. Their hands touched briefly, and Aleta made no effort to pull away.

‘The big question now, I suppose, is how we get to Guatemala?’ she asked as O’Connor pulled out of the car park.

‘You’ve just won the job of navigator,’ he said, handing the road map to Aleta. ‘We’ll head back along the Danube to Mauthausen town proper, then north on Route 123 to link up with the E55 into the Czech Republic.’

‘Why the Czech Republic?’

‘Wiley trusts no one, so he’ll resist taking the German and Austrian police into his confidence, but he’ll still have CIA assets watching the major border crossings. The Czech Republic won’t be high on his agenda as he’ll expect us to exit from either Vienna or one of the big German cities like Frankfurt.’

‘So, Prague?’

O’Connor shook his head. ‘The airports and train stations will be under heavy surveillance, and the CIA chief of station in Prague will have mobilised his own assets. But even the CIA doesn’t have the resources to watch all the docks, and I have a contact in Hamburg. If we can bypass Prague and head back across the border through Dresden and on to Hamburg undetected, we’ve got a chance.’ O’Connor glanced in the rear-view mirror. He’d mentally photographed the cars in the parking lot, and the black Audi that had been parked at the far end was now following at a discreet distance. ‘We’ve got company again.’

The driver of the Audi waited until the road disappeared into a series of small hills before he closed the gap and lined up the Passat in the sights of his Brügger & Thomet MP9.

‘Get down!’ O’Connor yelled. The rear windscreen of the Passat shattered under a withering burst of sub-machine-gun fire. O’Connor swerved from side to side and another burst of fire crackled past the offside of the car into the pine forest. O’Connor floored the Passat, racing up the narrow twisting road, but the black Audi was gaining. Whoever he was, he wasn’t leaving any doubt about his intentions, O’Connor thought, drifting sideways into the next corner, only to be confronted by a massive B-double tanker coming the other way. The mountains reverberated to the blast from the truck’s triple air horns as O’Connor spun the wheel, missing the tanker by centimetres.

‘Hang on!’ he yelled as he swerved past the rear end of the tanker and onto the other side of the road. O’Connor hit the brakes and the Audi shot past. He dropped the Passat into second and tramped the accelerator, the squealing tyres leaving a line of smoking rubber on the road. O’Connor waited until the valley to the north dropped away sharply before he closed in on the rear of the Audi. In a precision high-speed move, O’Connor veered to the right and tapped the rear fender of the Audi. The Audi spun, and O’Connor and Aleta ducked as the assassin let fly with another wild burst of gunfire. The Passat shot past and O’Connor glanced in the rear-view mirror in time to see the Audi hit a guide post. The car flipped and rolled down the steep embankment in a shower of sparks. O’Connor skidded the Passat to a halt and leapt out of the car. The Audi bounced off a rocky outcrop and dropped another twenty metres, exploding in a fiery ball beside the creek below.

Aleta’s face was white. ‘Who
are
these people?’

‘When the CIA wants someone assassinated, they usually use one of their field officers, but if they want it done in a hurry, or if the target’s a high enough priority, they employ what’s known in the trade as an “asset”, or, in our case, several assets.’

‘And that guy is one of their
assets
?’

‘Was. We’ve gained a little time, but not much,’ O’Connor replied, thinking out loud. ‘They’ve got our licence plates, but if I’m right, and Wiley hasn’t asked the Austrian and German police for help yet, that might prove the difference.’

‘And what are customs and immigration going to say at the border when we turn up in a car that’s riddled with bullet holes, not to mention a back window that’s been shot out?’

O’Connor smiled at her. ‘You’re learning. We’ll graduate you as a spy yet!’

‘No, thanks.’

‘We’ll need to pick up another car before we cross the Czech border.’

‘Hire another one, you mean?’

‘Only if we have to. Wiley seems to have the hire-car agencies tapped. We’ll, ah, borrow one.’

Aleta shook her head.

O’Connor slowed on the outskirts of the Austrian town of Freistadt and turned west off the E55 towards the Bahnhof. The station was deserted but as he pulled into the car park, he counted six other cars.

‘Keep a look out,’ he said to Aleta, as he got out and walked over to an older model nondescript Toyota. He picked the door lock in an instant and tried a small flat-bladed screwdriver in the ignition. ‘Sometimes it works, but not today,’ he muttered as he snapped the plastic cover from the bottom of the steering column, exposing the ignition wiring: three pairs of wires running into the back of the ignition cylinder. O’Connor glanced at the
ACC OFF ON START
positions on the ignition switch and quickly went through a process of elimination. The green-and-yellow pair would probably provide the battery and accessories, he thought, and he punted on the red pair being power to the car and the brown pair providing the connection to the starter. Within thirty seconds he’d disconnected the green-and-yellow pair, as well as the red pair, bared the wires and twisted them together.

‘
Und jetzt, das thema von
… ’

O’Connor smiled to himself as the radio burst into action with the theme from the old war movie,
The Great Escape.
He quickly disconnected the brown wires and stripped them as well. The ends sparked as he touched them together and the engine fired.

‘Follow me,’ he said to Aleta, waiting until she’d got into the driver’s seat of the Passat before heading out of the car park.

O’Connor pulled off the E55 and drove into a small forest to the north of Freistadt. There they transferred their luggage, containing the precious figurines, to the Toyota, and O’Connor hid the Passat amongst a thick clump of bushes.

‘Just in case the owner reports his car stolen,’ he said as he attached the Passat’s registration plates to the Toyota.

‘I’m curious …’ Aleta said as they turned back on to the E55 and headed north towards the quiet Austrian–Czech border crossing.

‘How I did that?’ O’Connor grinned. ‘Secret men’s business.’

‘No – although one day you can show me how – it’s more that there were two BMWs and a late-model Mercedes in that car park. Why did you go for the old Toyota? Less likely to attract attention?’