The Rhinemann Exchange (48 page)

He jumped into the Renault and with his left hand he grabbed Leslie’s right leg above the knee, his grip a restraining vise, pressing on the nerve lines. He spoke softly but with unmistakable intensity.

“You back this car up as quietly as you can, and turn left down that street.”

“Let
go!
Let …”

“Do as I say or I’ll break your kneecap off!”

The Renault was short; there was no need to use the reverse gear. Leslie spun the wheel and the car veered into a sharp turn.

“Slowly!” commanded Spaulding, his eyes on Rhinemann’s car. He could see a head turn—two heads. And then they were out of sight.

David took his hand off the girl’s leg; she pulled it up and doubled her shoulders down in agony. Spaulding grabbed the wheel and forced the gears into neutral. The car came to a stop halfway down the block, at the curb.

“You bastard! You broke my leg!” Leslie’s eyes were filled with tears of pain, not sorrow. She was close to fury but she did not shout. And that told David something about Leslie he had not known before.

“I’ll break more than a leg if you don’t start telling me
what you’re doing here! How many others are there? I saw one; how many more?”

She snapped her head up, her long hair whipping back, her eyes defiant. “Did you think we couldn’t find him?”

“Who?”

“Your
scientist.
This Lyons! We found him!”

“Leslie, for Christ’s sake, what are you
doing?
”

“Stopping you!”

“
Me?
”

“You. Altmüller, Rhinemann. Koening! Those pigs in Washington.… Peenemünde! It’s all over. They won’t trust you anymore. ‘Tortugas’ is finished!”

The faceless name—Altmüller again. Tortugas.… Koening? Words, names … meaning and no meaning. The tunnels had no light.

There was no
time!

Spaulding reached over and pulled the girl toward him. He clutched the hair above her forehead, yanking it taut, and with his other hand he circled his fingers high up under her throat, just below the jawbone. He applied pressure in swift, harsh spurts, each worse than the last.

So much, so alien.

“You want to play this game, you play it out! Now tell me! What’s
happening? Now?
”

She tried to squirm, lashing out her arms, kicking at him; but each time she moved he ripped his fingers into her throat. Her eyes widened until the sockets were round. He spoke again.

“Say it, Leslie! I’ll have to kill you if you don’t. I don’t have a choice! Not now.… For Christ’s sake, don’t
force
me!”

She slumped; her body went limp but not unconscious. Her head moved up and down; she sobbed deep-throated moans. He released her and gently held her face. She opened her eyes.

“Don’t touch me! Oh,
God
, don’t touch me!” She could barely whisper, much less scream. “Inside.… We’re going inside. Kill the scientist; kill Rhinemann’s men.…”

Before she finished, Spaulding clenched his fist and hammered a short, hard blow into the side of her chin. She slumped, unconscious.

He’d heard enough. There
was
no time.

He stretched her out in the small front seat, removing
the ignition keys as he did so. He looked for her purse; she had none. He opened the door, closed it firmly and looked up and down the street. There were two couples halfway down the block; a car was parking at the corner; a window was opened on the second floor of a building across the way, music coming from within.

Except for these—nothing. San Telmo was at peace.

Spaulding ran to within yards of Terraza Amarilla. He stopped and edged his way along an iron fence that bordered the corner, swearing at the spill of the streetlamp. He looked through the black grillwork at Rhinemann’s car less than a hundred yards away. He tried to focus on the front seat, on the two heads he’d seen moving minutes ago. There was no movement now, no glow of cigarettes, no shifting of shoulders.

Nothing.

Yet there was a break in the silhouette of the left window frame; an obstruction that filled the lower section of the glass.

David rounded the sharp angle of the iron fence and walked slowly toward the automobile, his hand clamped on the Beretta, his finger steady over the trigger.
Seventy yards, sixty, forty-five.

The obstruction did not move.

Thirty-five, thirty
 … he pulled the pistol from his belt, prepared to fire.

Nothing.

He saw it clearly now. The obstruction was a head, sprung back into the glass—not resting, but wrenched, twisted from the neck; immobile.

Dead.

He raced across the street to the rear of the car and crouched, his Beretta level with his shoulders. There was no noise, no rustling from within.

The block was deserted now. The only sounds were the muffled, blurred hums from a hundred lighted windows. A latch could be heard far down the street; a small dog barked; the wail of an infant was discernible in the distance.

David rose and looked through the automobile’s rear window.

He saw the figure of a second man sprawled over the felt top of the front seat. The light of the streetlamps illuminated
the upper part of the man’s back and shoulders. The whole area was a mass of blood and slashed cloth.

Spaulding slipped around the side of the car to the front right door. The window was open, the sight within sickening. The man behind the wheel had been shot through the side of his head, his companion knifed repeatedly.

The oblong, leather-cased radio was smashed, lying on the floor beneath the dashboard.

It had to have happened within the past five or six minutes, thought David. Leslie Hawkwood had rushed down the street in the Renault to intercept him—at the precise moment men with silenced pistols and long-bladed knives were heading for Rhinemann’s guards.

The killings complete, the men with knives and pistols must have raced across the street into the gates toward Lyons’s house. Raced without thought of cover or camouflage, knowing the radios were in constant contact with those inside 15 Terraza Verde.

Spaulding opened the car door, rolled up the window, and pulled the lifeless form off the top of the seat. He closed the door; the bodies were visible, but less so than before. It was no moment for alarms in the street if it could be avoided.

He looked over at the gates across the way on each side of the townhouse. The left one was slightly ajar.

He ran over to it and eased himself through the opening, touching nothing, his gun thrust laterally at his side, aiming forward. Beyond the gate was a cement passageway that stretched the length of the building to some sort of miniature patio bordered by a high brick wall.

He walked silently, rapidly to the end of the open alley; the patio was a combination of slate paths, plots of grass and small flower gardens. Alabaster statuary shone in the moonlight; vines crawled up the brick wall.

He judged the height of the wall: seven feet, perhaps seven and a half. Thickness: eight, ten inches—standard. Construction: new, within several years, strong. It was the construction with which he was most concerned. In 1942 he took a nine-foot wall in San Sebastián that collapsed under him. A month later it was amusing; at the time it nearly killed him.

He replaced the Beretta in his shoulder holster, locking the safety, shoving in the weapon securely. He bent down
and rubbed his hands in the dry dirt at the edge of the cement, absorbing whatever sweat was on them. He stood up and raced toward the brick wall.

Spaulding leaped. Once on top of the wall, he held—silent, prone; his hands gripping the sides, his body motionless—a part of the stone. He remained immobile, his face toward Lyons’s terrace, and waited several seconds. The back door to Lyons’s flat was closed—no lights were on in the kitchen; the shades were drawn over the windows throughout the floor. No sounds from within.

He slid down from the wall, removed his gun and ran to the side of the kitchen door, pressing his back against the white stucco. To his astonishment he saw that the door was
not
closed; and then he saw why. At the base, barely visible in the darkness of the room beyond, was a section of a hand. It had gripped the bottom of the doorframe and been smashed into the saddle; the fingers were the fingers of a dead man.

Spaulding reached over and pressed the door. An inch. Two inches. Wood against dead weight; his elbow ached from the pressure.

Three, four, five inches. A foot.

Indistinguishable voices could be heard now; faint, male, excited.

He stepped swiftly in front of the door and pushed violently—as quietly as possible—against the fallen body that acted as a huge, soft, dead weight against the frame. He stepped over the corpse of Rhinemann’s guard, noting that the oblong radio had been torn from its leather case, smashed on the floor. He closed the door silently.

The voices came from the sitting room. He edged his way against the wall, the Beretta poised, unlatched, ready to fire.

An open pantry against the opposite side of the room caught his eye. The single window, made of mass-produced stained glass, was high in the west wall, creating eerie shafts of colored light from the moon. Below, on the floor, was Rhinemann’s second guard. The method of death he could not tell; the body was arched backward—probably a bullet from a small-caliber pistol had killed him. A pistol with a silencer attached. It would be very quiet. David felt the perspiration rolling down his forehead and over his neck.

How many were there? They’d immobilized a garrison.

He had no commitment matching those odds.

Yet he had a strange commitment to Lyons. He had commitment enough for him at the moment. He dared not think beyond that instant.

And he was good; he could—should—never forget that. He was the best there was.

If it was important to anyone.

So much, so alien.

He pressed his cheek against the molding of the arch and what he saw sickened him. The revulsion, perhaps, was increased by the surroundings: a well-appointed flat with chairs and couches and tables meant for civilized people involved with civilized pursuits.

Not death.

The two male nurses—the hostile Johnny, the affable, dense Hal—were sprawled across the floor, their arms linked, their heads inches from each other. Their combined blood had formed a pool on the parquet surface. Johnny’s eyes were wide, angry—dead; Hal’s face composed, questioning, at rest.

Behind them were Rhinemann’s two other guards, their bodies on the couch like slaughtered cattle.

I hope you know what you’re doing!

Johnny’s words vibrated painfully—in screams—in David’s brain.

There were three other men in the room—standing, alive, in the same grotesque stocking masks that had been worn by those in the Duesenberg who had cut short the few moments he’d had alone with Leslie Hawkwood high in the hills of Luján.

The Duesenberg that had exploded in fire in the hills of Colinas Rojas.

The men were standing—none held weapons—over the spent figure of Eugene Lyons—seated gracefully, without fear, at the table. The look in the scientist’s eyes told the truth, as Spaulding saw it: he welcomed death.

“You see what’s around you!” The man in the light grey overcoat spoke to him. “We will not hesitate further! You’re dead!… Give us the designs!”

Jesus Christ!
thought David. Lyons had hidden the plans!

“There’s no point in carrying on, please believe me,” continued the man in the overcoat, the man with the hollow
crescents under his eyes Spaulding remembered so well. “You may be spared, but only if you tell us!
Now!
”

Lyons did not move; he looked up at the man in the overcoat without shifting his head, his eyes calm. They touched David’s.

“Write it!” said the man in the light grey overcoat.

It was the moment to move.

David spun around the molding, his pistol leveled.

“Don’t reach for guns!
You!
” he yelled at the man nearest him. “Turn around!”

In shock, without thinking, the man obeyed. Spaulding took two steps forward and brought the barrel of the Beretta crashing down into the man’s skull. He collapsed instantly.

David shouted at the man next to the interrogator in the grey overcoat. “Pick up that chair!
Now!
” He gestured with his pistol to a straight-backed chair several feet from the table. “
Now
, I said!”

The man reached over and did as he was told; he was immobilized. Spaulding continued. “You drop it and I’ll kill you.… Doctor Lyons. Take their weapons. You’ll find pistols and knives. Quickly, please.”

It all happened so fast. David knew his only hope of avoiding gunfire was in the swiftness of the action, the rapid immobilization of one or two men, an instant reversal of the odds.

Lyons got out of the chair and went first to the man in the light grey overcoat. It was apparent that the scientist had observed where the man had put his pistol. He took it out of the overcoat pocket. He went to the man holding the chair and removed an identical gun, then searched the man and took a large knife from his jacket and a second, short revolver from a shoulder holster. He placed the weapons on the far side of the table and walked to the unconscious third man. He rolled him over and removed two guns and a switchblade knife.

“Take off your coats.
Now!
” Spaulding commanded both men. He took the chair from the one next to him and pushed him toward his companion. The men began removing their coats when Spaulding suddenly spoke, before either had completed their actions. “Stop right there! Hold it!… Doctor, please bring over two chairs and place them behind them.”

Lyons did so.

“Sit down,” said Spaulding to his captives.

They sat, coats half off their shoulders. David approached them and yanked the garments further—down to the elbows.

The two men in the grotesque stocking masks were seated now, their arms locked by their own clothes.

Standing in front of them, Spaulding reached down and ripped the silk masks off their faces. He moved back and leaned against the dining table, his pistol in his hand.