Early Warning (21 page)

The cop was his. He brought his weapon up into a firing position…

Byrne saw the AK: ghetto sideways, body out of alignment, weight on the wrong foot. His odds had just markedly improved. Closing fast, it wasn’t about firepower now, it was about marksmanship. And aside from blind luck, marksmanship was always the deciding factor in a firefight.

Like a .335 hitter watching a pitcher’s release point and picking up the rotation of the baseball, Byrne could see the shooter’s finger on the trigger, could follow as if in slow motion, every twitch of the muscle ordering the cartridge into position, the firing pin to engage, the powder to ignite, the bullet to shoot down the rifling, spinning, heading straight for him—

His hand on his piece, Byrne dropped to the ground, rolled…came up ready to fire—

As he did, somewhere in the distance, he heard a woman scream.

Ben Addison, Jr., knew that he’d gotten off at least twenty rounds at a single pull. Fuck that bullshit they tried to teach him at the range at the mujahideen camp upstate, the shit about the deep breath and the exhalation and the slow squeezing instead of pulling or jerking—this was a righteous piece he held in his hands, a thing that had never let him down, a death-dealer.

Which is why he missed the son of a bitch. That damn scream. Bitch threw him off. He’d take care of her right after he finished waxing this pig’s infidel ass.

Addison stumbled, caught himself. But he almost dropped his AK and, instinctively, he reached out with his right hand, his firing hand, his trigger finger, to grab the weapon before it clattered to the ground and, in so doing, he forgot another of the lessons the upstate Arabs had tried to teach him, which was never grab the gun barrel after you’d fired.

His voice joined the screams of the woman as the burning gun barrel flayed the skin off his palm.

Just as a parent also knows the sound of a child’s voice, a man can always hear a woman’s screams no matter what the surrounding auditory noise. Byrne had heard plenty of women scream in his life, of course, both privately and professionally, and it was the one sound that a cop, even a homicide dick as he had been for many years, could not abide. It meant a lot of things—pain, suffering, fear, anguish, torture, death—but more than anything it meant this: you were not doing your job. Cops knew that they could barely solve crimes, much less stop them, but they went out on the streets every day hoping to do the latter instead of having to do the former. You couldn’t tell how many people did not die today because of your presence, and you most certainly would never know them if you saw them, but they were there and you knew they were there. They were the good ghosts, the kind you hoped to meet someday, instead of the kind you actually did meet, every day, the ghosts of the people whose lives you were not there to save, the ghosts of the dead, their faces bloodied, their mouths open in agony, the ones who would haunt you, and rightly so, for the rest of your life. Until at last you joined them in whatever hell or purgatory was reserved for cops.

But one thing Byrne knew—the hot dog guy had put his last innocent victim in the grave.

Hope felt the dying building move, shift again. This was, she imagined, what it must be like to be in one of those California earthquakes. They were one of the reasons she and Jack had never gone to Disneyland, her fear of earthquakes. She’d seen enough movies, read enough books, seen enough articles in the
Post-Dispatch
to know that earthquakes shook buildings, sent the crockery flying, and worst-case scenario, split the ground asunder and swallowed up cars and houses and most certainly small children.

A voice in her ear: “There’s a fire escape out the back.” Danny. “Not on the AMC building itself, but on the one next door. You’re going to have to jump for it.”

Hope wasn’t sure how to process the information. “You mean in the building, right? One of those enclosed things.” In the distance she could hear the sound of gunfire, of wailing sirens, of explosions. This must be what hell is like, she thought.

“No, don’t use them. You won’t make it.”

“But—”

“Listen to me, Hope.” More formal now, the voice in command, in control. “You’re not going to make it. The building isn’t going to make it. It can’t withstand the fire down below. It’s going to collapse, and very soon. You’ve got to get off that roof or you’re all going to die.”

Hope looked around, trying to control her terror. Rory and Emma clung to her, hoping. “But—”

“Listen to me. It’s your only chance. How far is it?”

Hope drew as much breath as she could and looked at her son. “Rory,” she said as calmly as possible, “how far is that fire escape over there? You’re good at these things—tell me.” she whispered into her cell phone: “Hang on, Danny.”

“No, you hang on, Hope. Say a prayer, and don’t worry.” She could hear the concern in his voice, which she knew, at that moment, was starting to turn to love.

She hadn’t even realized that Rory had left her side when he was back. “That building next door, Mom?” he said, trying not to show his fear. “It’s wrecked.”

Across the country, Danny heard that. “Hope—listen to me. Listen to me. It’s an old building. I’m looking at the plans right now. All they did was add on to it. There’s an old fire escape, a few floors down. You know, the kind you see in the movies. Look for it.”

“Over here, Mom!”

“Rory sees something.”

“Hurry.” She could hear the worry, and the urgency in his voice.

Hope ran to the spot where Rory was staring down. Much of the other building had collapsed. But there, just as Danny had predicted, was an old fire escape that had managed to survive the restoration and retrofitting. It had vanished into a disused air shaft, like the ones in the old dumbbell flats that used to populate this area, and if Hope had had time to think about it, she might have realized that it made perfect sense.

Originally, it would never have reached this high. But, in a fit of building-code observance, somebody—or, more likely, somebody’s brother-in-law—had gotten a contract to extend the redundant fire escape up the side of the new addition, and then sealed it off. The contractor billed the owner for twice his costs, probably billed the city for some give-back that only a lawyer could love, kicked back to his relative, and walked away with some nice money for building something nobody would ever use.

Until now. Thank God for honest graft.

“I see it,” she breathed to Danny. There was a slight roar in the background of wherever he was calling from.

“Then use it.” His voice was raised, loud.

“What if it won’t hold us?”

“It’s got to. It’s your only chance. Now go.”

Hope looked at her children. They were braver than she; they knew what to do. “I’ll go first, Mom,” said Rory. “It’ll be just fine.”

And then he was over the side and gone. Hope looked at Emma. “Your turn, young lady,” she said.

Emma hesitated, but only for a moment. “Well, I guess I’ve been through worse,” she said, and then she, too, disappeared.

Now it was Hope’s turn. She threw one leg over the side. “Where are you, Danny?” she said. “Please, after this is over—”

“We’re on our way,” he said. “All you have to do is stay safe for a few more hours.”

Hope thought she would cry. But she didn’t. Instead, she went over the side and down, into the smoke and darkness.

Byrne was on his feet now. The hot-dog vendor was hopping around, open, vulnerable. Byrne ran toward him, closing the distance fast.

Byrne had learned a lot on the streets of New York, streets he had known practically since the day he was born, since the days when he and Tommy had crawled around in the sewers of Queens, under the streets of Woodside and Middle Village when they were kids, playing hide-and-seek, playing sapper, playing city-bombing bad guys, playing the cops that had to hunt them down, the cops of
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
. There was no scenario he had not rehearsed a million times in his mind, no spot no matter how tight in which he had not imagined himself, no moment that he could not rise to.

He fired as he ran, emptying his father’s .38 into the man in front of him. Every shot found its mark. Each one tore through the gunman’s body in a pattern that even Byrne would have been hard-pressed to duplicate at the firing range.

His first shot hit Ben Addison, Jr., in the side, not enough to kill but plenty enough to hurt. The second bullet hit him square in the chest, the center of mass, just like they taught you at the Academy, and just as Byrne had learned to do on the streets many years before. The third hit the shooter a little lower, in the groin, and Byrne knew from experience watching gut-shot men die that it would be the killing blow, only just not fast enough. The fourth shot took off most of Addison’s left hand, leaving only a single finger and half a palm, while the fifth slug caught him in the right shoulder, forcing him at last to drop the weapon. But not before he got off one last shot.

Byrne sensed it coming and threw his body to one side. He may not have been as fast as he once was, but his instincts were honed and his reflexes sharp. He felt the sear as the slug tore across his left shoulder, taking a chunk of flesh and a piece of his suit with it. That was what worried him—if he survived this encounter, he was going to have to get any material out of the wound quickly before it infected him. That was how 18th-century soldiers died, not necessarily from the ball or even the bloodshed, but from infection. That was why accounts of the old battlefields were always replete with the cries of the wounded, the screams of paralyzing agony, the gradual loss of the mental faculties, men being driven mad by the fever was that eating them alive from the inside.

He hit the pavement hard, landing on his wounded shoulder and striking his head against some of the rubble. He yearned for a breather, a brief respite from the shouts and screams and the din of war. But it was not to be.

Unbelievably, the hot dog man was still coming toward him.

“God is great,” the former Ben Addison, Jr., kept repeating to himself as he dragged himself toward the cop. Even surrounded by the stench of death, he could always smell a cop, and nothing spelled martyrdom to him more than this pig’s death. All his pent-up resentment—at the white man, at the law, at the Man—fueled him, fed his rage, and kept him moving. That and his faith. The Brothers had been right: this faith was more powerful than any drug, stronger than anything he had ever encountered on the streets. This was a thing of beauty, a synthesis of love and hatred, the nexus of life and death, the portal to paradise.

The killing blade was sharp, and if, Allah willing, he had the strength, he would carve the cop’s head off like the leg of a Thanksgiving turkey. Thanksgiving had always been Ben Addison, Jr.’s, favorite holiday and even after accepting the call to Islam, he had found no reason to change his opinion. Carving was fun.

Byrne tried to clear the cobwebs, but even with the adrenaline rush, it wasn’t going to be in time. His father’s .38 lay several feet away, out of reach, and he wouldn’t be able to get to it before the hot dog man would be upon him. Were he still a detective he would have carried an unauthorized piece in an ankle holster, or maybe even a drop 9 mm down the back of his pants, but Francis Byrne had been off the streets for nearly a decade. He was going to have to fight a wounded but crazed and still-powerful man, fight him long enough for his bullets to take effect, survive long enough that the man would finally die the way he was supposed to.

Funny what goes through your mind at a time like this. Everything was happening in slow motion, which gave Byrne plenty of time to think. His right hand reached out for a piece of brick or paving stone or whatever it was: this was the way his Irish ancestors had fought when they first came to the Island of the Manhattoes, with bricks and sticks and stones and lead pipes and beer bottles, whether they had been crooks or cops, pitched-battling on the west side, under the docks, in the railroad tunnels beneath the streets or on Death Avenue itself.

As shot up as the hot dog man was, something was still driving him forward, some combination of PCP and angel dust and religious fervor and God or Allah only knew what else, but whatever it was it was good enough, powerful juju, stronger than his God, and there was nothing left for Byrne to do but make a good act of contrition and get ready to meet his Maker.

The man was close to him now. Byrne rolled to face him. A knife had never looked so big. He gripped the piece of urban detritus tightly: get it over with, he thought.

He braced himself—

And then the man disappeared.

No valedictory, no trash talk, no last words. He simply vanished.

No time to think about the miracle; the whole point of miracles was that they were inexplicable, so there was no point in thinking about them. There would be plenty of time for reflection later, back in his flat at 50th Street and Tenth Avenue, assuming he got out of this alive. Which was still at this point not at all a sure bet.

Dresden, Germany, February 1945

As Emanuel Skorzeny awoke one morning from unquiet dreams, he found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous thing, unworthy of sacrifice but doomed nonetheless.

For a moment, he wasn’t quite sure where he was. Since July of last year, most of the beds he slept in were new to him, most of the houses unfamiliar. His life had been a series of courtrooms and judges, of soldiers and wardens, of prison cells. To find himself here, in Dresden, one of the most beautiful cities of the Reich, was like a dream. And yet he was having a nightmare.

The Elbe, the mighty river, was not far away, and perhaps in the summertime he might be able to smell it, but this was winter in Saxony, one of the coldest parts of Germany, and there was nothing to smell except his own breath before it froze upon exhalation. He dreaded getting out of bed, into the frigid morning air, the hot brick from the fire long since having cooled so that now he was snuggled up against something cold and unfeeling and indifferent. It was a feeling he would clutch to his breast for the rest of his life.

He fought for consciousness, trying to shake off the effects of the dream. But it stayed with him, and even though he knew it was inspired by Kafka, in a short story that he should not have been reading, in a place he should not have been reading it, he still found it hard to discriminate between fantasy and reality. His whole world, once so secure, was now one horrible, grotesque fantasy.

His father, his new father, stood in the doorway of the small attic room, looking at him with a mixture of obligation, fear, and disgust. “Get up, Kurt,” he said. “Today, we seek the enemies of the people. Of the
Volk
.”

Skorzeny arose and performed his ablutions as best he could. The chamber pot went back under the bed; the water with which he washed himself was practically frozen. He dressed and went downstairs, his hair plastered and stuck to the sides of his head like small brown icicles. He didn’t mind being called Kurt, even though that was not his real name. When they let him go, released him from the
Sippenhaft
burden and resettled him and some of the others in new families scattered across the Reich, they had told him to forget his real name as quickly as he could, never to mention it again upon pain of death, to adapt and change and molt to his new circumstances until he became not only a man—which was fast approaching—but a new kind of man.

He would take a new name when the time came. A name that would signify something. For now, though, he would answer to whatever name they gave him, and execute whatever task they assigned to him. They had spared him, after all. Which is more than he would do to them or anyone like them when he got older, and at the first possible opportunity. This he had sworn to himself on that day in front of Freisler in the
Volksgericht
, the day his real father was condemned to death…

“What have they done, Papa?” asked the boy. He was still young, not yet a teenager, but already was treated as the future man of the house. After all, although he was
Sippenhaft
, he was also one of the future leaders, accepted into the
Adolf-Hitler-Schule
, the school for the best and the brightest Germany had to offer. He would show them. He would show them what a terrible mistake they had been to accuse his real father, and what an even more terrible mistake they had made to antagonize the son.

“Nothing yet,” replied his new father. “That is for us to discover.”

Emanuel Skorzeny respected his new father for one simple reason: he had survived. That was good enough for him. After all, families came and went but allegiances were transferable.

Unternehmen Eiche
, whispered his father, and he knew what that meant. Every good German youth knew what that meant: Operation Oak. The rescue of comrade Mussolini from the red partisans and the revanchist forces of the King from the mountaintop hotel, Campo Imperatore, where
il Duce
was being held.

“And what did I say to
il Duce
?” his father asked. In just short time together, it already become a ritual with them. He liked rituals.

“
Duce
, the
Führer
has sent me to set you free!”

“To which
il Duce
replied?”

He only had to think for a moment: “I knew that my friend would not forsake me!”

His father smiled. They were out of the house, crossing the Elbe now. At times, Emanuel wondered why his father no longer resembled the photographs he had seen of him in his Waffen SS uniform, although from time to time he still wore the Iron Cross. After all, he was the man who had almost captured the NKVD headquarters in Moscow, before
den zweiten Dolchstuss
—the second stab in the back.

For Germany was finished, that he knew, even at his young age. Germany had given to him and Germany had taken away—the way of the world, for which he bore the country no ill will. This was war, and in war people did strange things, fought for strange goals, shifted alliances and allegiances, with only one purpose in mind—to survive. Whatever his father had done, whatever his stepfather had done, and whatever he would do in the future, would be as a consequence of this war. There was nothing he could do about it, and there were no tears he would shed over it. Let the dead bury the dead and the living go on, to extract their terrible revenge on the corpses of both friend and foe as best they could.

Vater Otto moved swiftly down the street. He knew exactly where he was going. And when they came to the door of No. 17 Marschnerstrasse, he didn’t wait for an answer to his knock, but instead as it half-opened, he kicked it in with one massive blow from his boot.

They caught the family unawares, still groping toward the fire for warmth, helpless when they should have been wary. Otto said nothing but walked smartly to the hearth, which had not yet begun to smolder, and brushed aside the embers. Then with one mighty wrench he pulled open the grate, the false grate, to reveal below a whole hidden room. “
Juden, raus,”
he barked.

And one by one they came up, with Otto lending a hand to haul them into the kitchen. One, two, three, four of them, a father and a mother and two children, the oldest not much older than himself, a boy and girl, standing there blinking in the light in the nightclothes, half-frozen and all dead.

That there were still Jews in Germany was an open secret. Despite the
Kristallnacht
and the Nuremberg Laws, despite the emigration of as many of the country’s half a million or so Jews to Britain and America and elsewhere, there were still Jews in the Reich, living hidden among the people, some protected by powerful men, as in the Bavarian countryside, some more or less living openly, as in Berlin, the capital city that had never taken to Hitler and his uncouth Bavarian and Austrian interlopers. But Dresden was still a small town, for all its accomplishment in music, porcelain, and the arts, and the few still here had been eking out a living as craftsmen and black-marketeers, while plotting their escape up the great river on one of the ships that still plied the waters, despite the Allied bombing.

“Enumerate,” said Vater Otto, and Emanuel knew what that meant. He gestured to the children, to the boy and the girl in their flannels, and without compunction asked them to turn over to him whatever fungible possessions they had. Even at this point in the war, when the sound of the British and the American planes overhead daily and nightly was an everyday occurrence, there was still business to conduct, and scores to settle.

The boy was about 15, the girl about 12.
“Wie heisst du?
” Emanuel asked them each in turn, and they replied: Heinrich and Eva. Good German names both, but there was no time for that now. He took their gold and their timepieces and their diamonds, because for some reason it was less humiliating for them to hand over the last things of value they had in the world to a boy rather than to a man. He could see by the looks on their faces that they knew they were done for, that no matter what the lies of the Reich about the mercy of Adolf Hitler, about the model camps at Theresienstadt, that somehow the word had filtered back, as it always does, to torment its future victims with fear as they struggled against the inevitable.

“Ihr Telefon
,” demanded Vater Otto, who made the call, and that was that. Security forces would round them up shortly, the German family who had been harboring them would be shot, and life for the rest of them would go on. Emanuel knew better than to ask why them and why now. No matter how hard the regime, there were always cracks not only in the facade but in the floorboards. No matter how deep the hatred, there were always tasks that needed to be done, preferably by slave labor but when that was not up to snuff, then by the black market. There were always things that could be overlooked, until they couldn’t. This family, obviously, had been one of them.

Which is what Skorzeny didn’t understand. Why stay? Why wait? When doom is imminent, why not flee? And even at that age, he already knew the answer:

Because for most people it is easier to refuse to believe than to confront the truth.

It was not weakness, not stupidity nor cowardice nor even indolence, but the ancient human fallacy of believing that tomorrow will be pretty much like today, different in only the particulars but never in the general. Until one day it is not. And today, this early morning, that day had come for both Jew and Aryan.

He didn’t care. That day had come for him seven months ago and, as far as he was concerned, it could come for the rest of humanity and he would not shed so much as a tear.

That evening, his father took him to a tavern, where they both drank beer
vom Fass
and dined as best one could under the circumstances. Despite the nightly air raids over German air space, Dresden had been largely untouched and every day that the people woke up to an intact city was another day that convinced them the Allies would leave them alone. There were no military targets here, he could hear the women say in the marketplace, we are far from the front and the fighting.

There was more worry about the advancing Soviets than there was about the Americans or the British. Dresden was safe; indeed, he suspected, that was one of the reasons his father was here, planning the next operation, the next counter-strike. Dresden was the only place left in Germany where you could think.

His father didn’t drink much, but on this evening he ordered a second
Mass
for both of them. Emanuel could feel the first already going to his head, but didn’t want to be thought a sissy or a coward. He was sent here to learn, and learning is what he was doing.

“
Also, Jungs,
” his father began. “
Wir müssen singen.”

Looking back on that moment, if you had asked to him to provide a suitable valedictory for his last moment with his father, that was hardly the one he would have chosen. Although Vater Otto was a man of almost no words—garrulousness was not a quality highly prized by the National Socialists—when he did speak he spoke to the point, so this notion of breaking into song was unusual.

At that moment the dream came back to him—that instant before thought and word, before his father could open his mouth in song, before the second beer had loosened his inhibitions just enough for him to hear the music. In that moment, instead of hearing the music, Emanuel saw the thing he had dreaded seeing since last summer, the thing that had been kept from his young eyes. The thing that, in his dream, had turned him into a monster unworthy even of ritual sacrifice:

Piano wire.

A more horrible way to die could hardly be imagined. Jesus on the Cross at Golgotha, writhing in His agonies, but on a wire. It was hanging, but worse. The garrote, but worse. Strangulation, but worse. It was Death, come calling, but worse, without the smiling face brimming with the false promise of surcease and repose, without—

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind

Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind

Er hat den Knaben wohl in den Arm

Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm

Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?

Siehst Vater Du den Erlkönig nicht?

Der Erlkönig mit Kron’und Schweif?

Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif

—the
Erlkönig
’s seductive lullaby.

Everyone knew the words, of course. This was Germany, and the words were by Goethe. This was the greater Reich, and the music was by Schubert. Next to
Gretchen am Spin-nrad
, this was the song by Schubert that everybody knew, and so it was no surprise when first one man, then another and then another picked up his father’s tune, and then someone went to the inevitable, ubiquitous piano in the corner and began pounding out the triplets in the right hand and fingering the ominous bass in the left, the bass line that had spawned a hundred, no a thousand, silent-movie scores, the motif that signaled danger, destruction, and death, as symbolized by the Erl-King himself: lethal but seductive, and always fatal.

It brought the ghosts. To everyone in the room, the song brought the ghosts, in the form of the pleading boy, who begs his father to ride faster and faster, to escape the lullaby of the Erl-King,

“Oh, father do you not hear what the Erl-King whispers so close to my ear?”

But he could hear it. Could hear it through the singing and alcoholic haze, through the cigarette smoke. That voice that whispered so smoothly and so sinuously in his ear, the voice of temptation. He could hear. He could always hear it. It never left him. But he would be damned if it would kill him.