Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters (16 page)

Garin was suddenly there at her side. “Anything?” he asked.

“Nothing. He’s clean.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Garin reached down, tore the man’s shirt open and pulled one side down off his shoulder, revealing a tattoo.

It was a Nazi swastika.

“We have something Stuggart wants,” he said.

Neither of them had any doubt just what that something was.

“If we’re going to go, we need to do it now, folks,” Paul said.

He was right; the police were about to arrive.

They stood and began to walk from the scene as quickly as they could without drawing any more attention to themselves. They knew they’d been seen; half a dozen people were probably taking their picture with their cell phones right this very minute,
but it would still take time for the police to identify them. Between now and then they needed to get to the airport and get out of France as quickly as possible.

The research would have to wait.

Garin led the way, taking random turns at each intersection to throw anyone who might be following them off their track. Once they had gotten ten or so blocks away from the café, he flagged down a cab and told the driver to take them straight to the airport.

It wasn’t long before Annja and her two companions were back aboard the DragonTech helicopter en route to Munich.

* * *

I
T WAS NEARLY
midnight by the time they arrived at one of the town houses Garin maintained in the city. Despite the late hour, the three of them gathered in the den to continue their attempt to make some sense out of Hitler’s secret message.

Garin’s computer system, with its multiple monitors and touch screens, made Annja feel as if she was sitting in the command console of an alien spaceship, but after a few minutes she got the hang of it. She fired up a web browser on each screen, went to the search engine and typed a phrase into each.

The “list of places named Christmas” search returned over 60 million results. The “list of places named Phoenix” search returned slightly over 11 million results.

Annja decided to start with the later.

The very first result was an entry under the title “list of places named for the Phoenix.” Clicking on
it, she found two short lists: one for places in the United States named Phoenix and one for places in other countries with the same name.

Annja dismissed the first list automatically. As tempting as places like Phoenix, Arizona, and Phoenix, Maryland, sounded, she highly doubted that Hitler would have gotten within fifty miles of the US mainland in 1945.

That left her with a list of nine other possibilities, from Vacoas-Phoenix, Mauritius, to Camp Phoenix in Kabul, Afghanistan. She was immediately able to scratch off Camp Phoenix, followed quickly by Phoenix Park in Dublin, Ireland; the Phoenix Concert Theater in Toronto, Canada; Phoenix, British, Columbia; The Phoenix, an opera house in Venice, Italy; and the Phoenix Cinema in London, England.

Three possibilities remained: Vacoas-Phoenix on Mauritius, Phoenix in the Durban township of South Africa, and the Phoenix Islands in Kiribati.

Annja called up an online atlas and put a map of Mauritius on the screen for the three of them to see.

Mauritius, actually the Republic of Mauritius, was an island nation in the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles off the coast of Africa. The nearest large land mass was Madagascar.

The fact that it was an island excited Annja at first, since
Insel Wolf
meant Island of the Wolf or Wolf Island, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. Drawing a line straight east of Mauritius put them smack in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and there wasn’t anywhere
within four hundred miles that could even remotely be called Christmas.

They turned their attention to South Africa next. That Phoenix was an Indian settlement that officially became a township in 1976. Prior to that it had been associated with the Phoenix Settlement in nearby Durban, founded by Mohandas Ghandi in 1904 and used by him as a base for his nonviolent protests on behalf of Muslim Indians in South Africa.

“Ghandi and Hitler?” Paul said. “I’m not seeing that one.”

Annja and Garin agreed.

They turned their attention at last to the Phoenix Islands in Kiribati. The map told them that the Phoenix Islands were a small chain of islands in the central Pacific Ocean, just east of the Gilbert Islands. There wasn’t much to them—six atolls and a couple of sunken reefs.

But then came the surprise.

“Look! Christmas!” Paul said, pointing at the screen.

Northeast of the Phoenix Islands was another island named Kiritimati. Under the name, in parenthesis, was the subtitle “Christmas Island.”

Annja stared. “East of Phoenix…”

“…and southwest of Christmas,” Garin finished for her.

Eyeballing it, Paul stuck his finger on a spot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

This map showed nothing but water.

“We need a better map,” Annja said and hurriedly
searched for one. She was able to locate a much more detailed version relatively quickly and threw that up on the screen for everyone to see.

This time, when they followed the directions as closely as possible, they ended up with the tip of Annja’s finger sitting on a small rock of an island at the exact location the message suggested.

It might not have a name on the map, but everyone in that room knew exactly what it was called.

Insel Wolf
.

They had found the location of Hitler’s final headquarters!

They caught a few hours of sleep and were back at it early the next morning. Annja could feel the pace taking a toll on her both physically and mentally, but she didn’t dare let up. They were already two days into their new deadline, and they were most likely going to lose a third by flying halfway around the world to reach their destination. Paul summed up what they were all thinking over breakfast.

“Couldn’t he have built this thing a little closer to home?”

Annja laughed. She had to agree; it was most definitely in the middle of nowhere, though she supposed that was the point. When the whole world wanted you dead, it was probably best to find a nice deep hole to hide in, and Hitler had certainly seemed to do just that.

While the island’s location might have been advantageous for his needs, it certainly created a bit of a problem for Annja and her allies. It was roughly 800 miles from Samoa and just shy of 750 miles from
Tahiti, the two nearest staging points. That was a lot of open ocean, she thought.

“So how do we do this?” Paul asked, staring at the map Annja had spread out on the table.

“Fly into Tahiti and rent a boat, I guess.”

Paul seemed skeptical. “Do any of us know anything at all about boating across the open ocean? Because I can tell you right up front that I don’t.”

Annja didn’t either. She’d mostly had her feet firmly planted on the ground—or somewhere under it—for the last several years. The longest she’d ever spent near the open ocean was the time it took to fly from the United States to Australia, and even then she’d been 30,000 feet above sea level.

“I do,” Garin said quietly, surprising them both. “A number of years ago I made a solo journey around the world in my sailboat.”

Annja hadn’t known that. Of course, when it came to Garin, a “number of years ago” might mean he made the trip a century or more in the past, but if that was the case, it only made the feat more impressive in her eyes. She liked to be alone, but she didn’t think she could manage the two months or more that it would take to circumnavigate the globe. Her respect for his abilities went up a notch.

“That settles it, then,” Annja said. “We fly into Tahiti and then rent a boat. We make the journey to the island, find whatever the heck is hidden there, and then get Doug out of this jerk’s clutches once and for all.”

When put like that, it all sounds so easy
. But Annja knew the reality was going to be much different.

In order to get there, they were going to have to fly to Los Angeles, refuel, and then continue on to Papeete, Tahiti. Annja did the calculations in her head. The flight from Munich to Los Angeles would take approximately thirteen hours. One hour to refuel. Another eight and a half hours from Los Angeles to Papeete.

Practically an entire day of flight time.

From there, they would have to cross nearly 750 miles of ocean to reach the island. Figure an average speed of 30 knots and that added another sixteen, maybe seventeen hours of travel.

If they left right now, they wouldn’t arrive for at least a day and a half.

The ticking of the clock might just be their downfall. The kidnapper had given her a seven-day deadline. This was already day two. With a day and half of travel time, they would be down to roughly three days to find Hitler’s secret headquarters on the island and report back to the kidnapper.

There were so many things that could go wrong, from flight problems to weather delays, that Annja just wanted to scream in frustration.

Still, they had to try.

She turned to Garin. “How soon can the plane be ready?”

“Fifteen minutes after I call and give the crew the destination.”

“Tahiti by way of Los Angeles. The faster they can get us there, the better.”

“Got it.” Garin pulled out his cell phone and turned away to make the call.

“Don’t worry, Annja,” Paul said. “We’ll make it in time.”

She just hoped he was right.

* * *

T
HEY ARRIVED AT
the Munich International Airport an hour later. Their driver took them directly to the hangar where several of Garin’s jets were stored. Boarding the same plane that had taken them from Miami to Munich a week earlier, they prepared for the flight in the opposite direction now.

Not wanting the crew to know where they were headed, and being an accomplished pilot in his own right, Garin decided to fly the plane himself, dismissing the crew and giving them the next week off. Annja knew he could do it; whatever mystical process had extended his life had also given him extraordinary stamina. She’d seen him go days without sleep before. With that detail taken care of, Annja and Paul settled into the comfort and luxury of the passenger cabin.

The first part of the flight was used to nail down some of the finer details of the adventure ahead of them. Annja used the onboard satellite phone to hunt down a charter boat they could use once they arrived in Tahiti while Paul connected to the internet and dug up as much information on the nation of Kiribati so
that they would know what to expect when they arrived there.

By the time they were halfway across the Atlantic, both issues had been dealt with satisfactorily and the two of them were eating lunch, having prepared it in the plane’s well-stocked galley.

“I wanted to thank you,” Annja said, between bites of her filet mignon.

“Thank me for what?”

“Saving my life last night.”

Paul looked up from his sea bass. “He was going to shoot you.”

It was said so matter-of-factly that Paul could have been talking about filling a hole in his garden rather than the death of another human being, thug or not.

“You don’t seem all that torn up about it,” Annja said.

Paul put down his fork. “Of course I’m torn up, Annja. I killed a man. Even in self-defense that’s a difficult burden to carry. But I’d be damned if I sat around and did nothing while he gunned you down in cold blood!”

Ah, so he does feel something, after all
, she thought.

Annja inwardly sighed with relief. She had been starting to have her doubts, and a Paul who wasn’t upset by the taking of a human life was a Paul she didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

Since taking up the sword she’d been challenged by some of the most ruthless people on the planet, ones who would think as much about taking her down
where she stood as they would crushing a mosquito between their palms. She’d had to defend herself and others through the use of the sword, and sometimes the results weren’t pretty. Like the guy she’d been forced to kill the night before.

While she put on a hard face and got through it, the truth was that she regretted each and every man or woman she’d been forced to kill. Not enough that she’d do it differently if she had the chance to do it over again, but that wasn’t the point anyway. She’d been protecting either herself or some other innocent each time she’d killed, and she felt justified in what she had done. Even so, killing was hard; it left an indelible mark on her soul that never quite went away and she didn’t wish that on anyone.

Least of all the man she thought she might be falling for.

“You’ll get no argument from me,” she told him. “But I still appreciate what you did.”

He smiled at her and Annja felt him let go of some of the tension he’d been holding a moment before.

Still, she wondered about something.

“Have you been carrying that gun with you the whole time we’ve been together?”

He met her gaze, and she thought she saw a bit of anger flare in his eyes. It was there and gone so quickly, however, that she couldn’t be sure.

Probably my imagination
, she thought.

That belief was reinforced when Paul smiled at her. “Do I look like the type who regularly carries a gun around with him?”

Before she could answer, he went on. “Besides, how would I have gotten it into the country past Customs and all that, if I was? No, Garin gave it to me while you were, ah, indisposed for a few minutes, before we went to Paris. He said not to trouble you about it but to keep it handy in case it was needed. I’d learned to shoot while I was covering the Sudanese civil war a couple of years ago for the magazine, so I didn’t see it as a big deal.”

That sounded like something Garin would do, so she dropped it. There was no sense arguing about it. Paul obviously knew how to handle a weapon, and if she was honest with herself she would admit that his ability was more reassuring to her than anything else.

Who knew what might be waiting for them in the South Pacific? Knowing he could handle himself would let her focus on more important things, like finding Hitler’s last bolt-hole.