The Seventh Secret (49 page)

"Absolutely," said the major. "I'll have one of my men call the Palast Hotel. Taxis should be there looking for a return fare to West Berlin."

Major Janz called back to a guard, instructing him to phone for a taxi for Herr Foster.

Foster thanked the major and resumed his vigil at the wire fence. Again the forbidding darkness gave him no clue to Eva Braun's whereabouts.

Suddenly he was aware of Major Janz at his elbow. "No problem," the major was saying. "A taxi will be here in ten or fifteen minutes."

"I certainly appreciate this," Foster said.

The major lingered a moment, eyes on Foster. "Now everything is all right?"

"Quite all right, thank you."

But turning away from the fence, Foster wasn't sure everything was all right—for himself or for any of them, yet. It depended on what was happening far below ground in the secret bunker. Because if Schmidt and his fanatics had escaped extermination, it meant that they would be rising soon to hunt down Emily and himself, and Tovah and Kirvov as well, to extract vengeance and to kill.

B
ehind the wheel of Foster's Audi, Emily headed for West Berlin. Once more, there was the delay at Checkpoint Charlie, longer than usual because of the hour of her appearance, but soon she was cleared and she stepped on the gas pedal, speeding the compact through the empty streets toward her destination.

By the time she reached Askanischer Platz, and sought a parking place beyond it, her mind was on only one thing. Fervently she prayed that Tovah had been able to contact Golding, that Golding had been able to summon up help from Mossad's fighters, and that they had been successful in liquidating the insanity hidden beneath the city.

Was it over, she kept asking herself, was it done?

I
n the stillness of the bunker suite beneath Berlin, there was a movement.

Slowly, slowly, the door from Hitler's bedroom was opening.

A meaty hand pulled the door further. Wolfgang Schmidt, shaking his blood-encrusted head, was crawling out.

Upon recovering consciousness, he had tried to reconstruct what had happened. He had returned to the bunker to be sure that the Ashcroft woman was still prisoner, and to learn whether Eva was all right. He had not found the Ashcroft woman where he had left her, and had gone to Eva's bedroom to check. There he had come upon that son of a bitch Foster, and Eva tied to the bed.

There had been a fight, Foster and himself, and somehow he had been knocked out. His head was split-ting with pain, and he was sure he had been hit on the head by something heavy and suffered a concussion. Only his superb physical condition, his natural strength, had enabled him to survive.

Bracing himself against the hallway wall opposite, weakened though he was, Schmidt managed to lift him-self to his feet.

Reeling, he made his way to Eva's bedroom. She was not there. The bed was empty. And Foster, he was gone too. On rubbery legs, Schmidt turned toward the sitting room. He entered it. Also empty.

On the floor he saw his Walther P-38. He picked it up.

He tried to imagine what had happened.

Foster had probably taken Eva hostage, and some-how got away by whatever means he had used to get in. All of them down here had been discovered, and they would be exposed and destroyed forever.

Wavering, Schmidt tried to reason. Foster could not have gone to the police after seeing their chief in the hideout. To whom, then, would Foster have turned for help? Possibly the commanders of the four powers occupying Berlin. Possibly to reveal the secret of the bunker and to seek their military help.

Somehow, this gave Schmidt a glimmer of hope. He knew the leaders of the four powers, knew them personally, and he knew how impossible it would be to make them move swiftly on anything, no matter how critical. They were always entangled in red tape, and hearing what sounded like a fantastic cock-and-bull story would not impel them to mobilize for action quickly.

Before anything could happen, there still might be hope, real hope.

Even though his head throbbed ceaselessly, despite the pain in his skull, Schmidt tried to reason further. Surely, while Foster sought help, he had left his allies above ground to keep an eye on the Café
 
Wolf exit. But there could not be many of these. They could easily be overcome.

There was still a chance to escape, Schmidt decided. He need only alert the trusted guards and other occupants of the bunker down here. Heavily armed with their latest weaponry—their machine guns and portable rocket launchers—they could easily make their way out of the bunker, through the Café Wolf, cutting down any feeble resistance with a hail of bullets.

Their breakout could succeed. They could escape, and be free, and scatter to hide away for another day.

Alert the guards, alert the rest of the Nazis in the bunker, get them on the move, and fast.

There was time, there was time. They could overcome and win.

Schmidt staggered through the sitting room, through the reception room, and stumbled out of the suite.

He made for the corner, turned it, and a short distance off he saw one of the Hitler Youth on duty.

He opened his mouth to call to him, to alert him and everyone, and as he opened his mouth he gagged.

His hands went to his throat. There was a foul acrid stench, and he was suffocating. His hoarse voice was trapped in his throat. A vise was closing on his throat, strangling him, and uncontrollably he was beginning to tremble.

He tried to shout to the young sentry, but there was no sentry.

Through his blurred vision, he saw that the sentry had fallen to the ground, and was writhing there, and then was lifeless.

Choking, Schmidt became dimly aware that something terrible was happening.

There were amethyst-blue crystals filtering through the ventilator shaft, covering the floor.

Then Schmidt knew. He had been to Auschwitz. He had seen the crystals before. And he knew what they did.

He felt himself sinking, felt himself gasping for air as he lay outstretched on the floor. He tried to inhale air.. But there were only these fumes.

And then he closed his eyes in death.

P
arking the Audi, hastily leaving it, Emily saw Tovah running from the Café
 
Wolf toward her.

"Emily, Emily!" Tovah called and came alongside her, breathless. "We were so relieved when we heard from you. What an experience! And to have really found their hideout!" She looked about. "Where's Rex?"

"He'll be along in a little while. I'll tell you about the whole thing later. What I want to know is—did Golding and his people actually deliver?"

Tovah was nodding her head enthusiastically. "They did it, they certainly did. But not with Speer's Tabun nerve gas. No, something more poetically appropriate. They found the camouflaged ventilator shaft on Rex's blueprint of the secret bunker. They dropped in an endless quantity of Zyklon B crystals—prussic acid—the same substance the Nazis used in the death chambers at Auschwitz to kill eight thousand Jews a day. Our agents just dropped enough of those deadly crystals into the underground hideout to exterminate a thousand Nazis in minutes. How many did you say were down there? Fifty or more?"

"Something like that."

"Well, they're all dead now, Emily, every single one of them. I had word from Chaim Golding. His men are finished by now and packing up their equipment. In a day or two, the city can clear out the gas fumes, then the army will go in and remove the corpses. Too bad there isn't a survivor to tell us what it was all about."

"Rex did save one," Emily said.

"He did?"

"He brought Eva Braun up with him."

"Eva Braun! I can't believe it! He has her?"

Emily hesitated. "He does and he doesn't. While we're waiting for Rex, let me explain. Let's take a walk and I'll tell you what happened."

As she put her arm in Tovah's and they started off, Emily wondered once more what had happened to Hitler's wife and what she was doing this very moment .. .

F
rom the moment that the American man called Rex had rushed off in the darkness to give help to his fellow conspirator, the girl called Emily, Eva Braun had acted upon instinct. A lapse by her captor had given her an opportunity to be free, and she had taken it.

Snatching the flashlight that he had left on the grass, Eva had ducked inside the black hole that had once been the
Führerbunker
's emergency exit. She had stumbled past the timbers that shored up the dug-out passage until she touched its deepest recess near the top of the stairwell. There she had tried to hide in the darkness, wondering whether she was really free and if so how she might escape this East German no-man's-land.

Then she had heard them returning, the conspirators Emily and Rex, and she had realized that they had halted short of the exit. They had been speaking to one another excitedly, especially the man, in English, which Eva understood fairly well from her language classes in school and her long acquaintance with the sound tracks of Hollywood films that her loved one had always permitted her to enjoy in the Berghof.

The one named Rex had spoken clearly with knowledge about their secret political plans, their timetable to revive and reconstruct the Germany that the Feldherr had given his life to establish and that she and Schmidt had sought to preserve. In her hiding place, Eva had puzzled at how Rex could know so much. Certainly she had not revealed this to him at any time, unless she had been drugged. Yet, she had no memory of drugs. Perhaps he had seen some notes on this in her desk, or even learned of it elsewhere.

But the most frightening news had been what she had overheard Rex tell the woman Emily. Schmidt has been taken care of.
I left him unconscious down below
.

Then, continuing to listen, Eva had overheard something that was immediately more shocking. Someone—"Mossad," she had heard Rex and Emily say—the terrible Jews themselves—were releasing deadly gas in her underground home of so many years. They were in the barbaric process of exterminating all the loyal ones, the good ones, Schmidt and all the others, the ones who had worshiped her husband and cared about her. An impossible savage act, but there was no doubt it was being done.

Abruptly, she had heard her name spoken outside, and Eva had listened and overheard that the two of them had just realized she was missing. They had become aware that she had slipped away. She had trembled in the darkness, fearful that they would guess where she had gone, and come with their lantern in search of her and find her. She had shuddered at the thought of being captured and put on public display, mocked and reviled and tortured, the one thing her beloved husband had always feared and swore he would never permit to happen.

And then she had heard the voices again from out-side, and had understood that they were leaving, both hastening to get to the Café Wolf to reveal Eva's disappearance and to learn whether the effort to massacre all her followers with gas had been concluded.

Soon, she had become aware of the fact that the voices of the two were receding, and after that there had been silence, and she had finally determined that they were gone.

Huddled there in the dark, Eva had still been afraid to move. She had to be sure that she was safe, and she needed time to think.

She had remained huddled there in the blackness of the excavation, and realized that only one obsessive concern clung to her, dominated her mind. It was no longer the party's future. Nor was it Schmidt, her husband's perfect heir, the ultimate Aryan, faithful to their ideals and devoted to their cause. Like the party, he too was lost.

It was something else that obsessed her.

It was the atrocity that was being committed by the foreign conspirators and their Jewish gangster collaborators on her comrades and followers in their underground home. Poison gas was infiltrating their sealed catacomb, and in minutes they would all be dead, and there would be no one to inherit the earth after the Soviets and the United States destroyed each other one day.

Eva's first thought had been to try to save them, warn them down below and rescue them. She could use the flashlight, might be able to remove the cement block, find her way back alone to the tunnel that led to the secret bunker, and sound the warning.

But then she knew it was too late, far too late. Time had passed since she had overheard that the poison gas was being poured in, and by now the mass execution had taken place and her subterranean home had be-come a mass grave.