Spandau Phoenix (44 page)

After a moment's hesitation, the old historian took Hauer's hand and squeezed hard. "You bring my granddaughter back, Captain."

"You have my word."

"And you bring back those papers!"

Hauer nodded once, then he ducked out of the cabin.

Natterman heard a car door slam, then the roar of the Audi as it raced up the access road. Hermann Rascher stared at the old man, mystified by the scene he had just witnessed.

"You know, Professor," he said, "there's really no reason for us to hang around here while@' Natterman jabbed the shotgun into the fat man's belly.

"Sit down, swine!"

Hermann sat.

5.00 A.Al. U.S. Army Headquarters. West Berlin Colonel Rose stared into the expectant faces of Sergeant Clary and Detective Schneider.

Clary nodded once, indicating that the tape reels were turning. Rose spoke into the telephone.

"This is Colonel Rose. Go ahead."

"Colonel, this is Blueblood calling. Repeat, Blueblood."

Rose gasped. "It's Harry! Where the hell are you?"

"Don't say anything, sir. Nothing. This call will terminate in fifty seconds. In our office,computer you'll find a file coded 'East'-that's Echo-Alpha-Sierra-Tango. In that file is a list of safe locations in the DDR. I am now at location four, repeat, four. I don't think I can get out on my own, Colonel, it's too tight. I suggest you threaten your opposite number here, and if that doesn't work, roll up network seven, repeat, seven, and make a trade. I was dead wrong about Hess. This does have something to do with him. Also with someone or something called Phoenix. But the key name is Zinoviev, repeat, Zulu-India-November-OscarVictor-India-Echo-Victor.

Find him and we'll be on track."

Harry took a deep breath. "You've got to get me out, Colonel.

This is big. If I don't hear from you in twenty-four hours, I'm going to try it on my own. That's all."

"Wait!" Rose shouted.

"He's disconnected, sir," Clary said in a monotone, his eyes on a voltage-measuring device.

Rose stood and pounded his fist on the desk. "Clary!"

"Sir!"

"You get a squad of uniformed MPs down here now!

Make sure every one has a rifle!"

"What are you going to do?" Schneider asked, alarmed by the American's hair-trigger temper.

"You heard the man, Detective! I'm rolling up network seven!"

"But he suggested that you threaten the KGB first@ Rose's face reddened.

"Schneider, I don't make threats unless I can back 'em up.

It's a ftiggin' waste of time. When I tell Ivan Kosov that I'll arrest one of his precious networks if he doesn't let my boy out, those slimy bastards will be in a holding cell in my stockade! Clary!"

"MPs on the way, sir!"

"Damn straight!" Rose bellowed, reaching into the bottom drawer for his bottle of Wild Turkey. "Damn straight."

He filled his Lenox shot glass and poured the whiskey down his throat, feeling his eyes water when it hit bottom.

"Friggin' Rudolf Hess," he muttered. "And Zinoviev. Who the hell is Zinoviev?"

"I beg your pardon, Colonel?" Schneider asked. "Who are you talking about?"

"Nobody," Rose mumbled. "Some commie sonofabitch."

He could not have been further from the truth.

5. 19 A. m. mI-5 Headquarters Charles Street, London, England The door to Sir Neville Shaw's office shook with the force of Wilson's knock.

"One moment, your lordship," Shaw said into the telephone. "What is it, Wilson?"

The deputy director stuck his head into the office. "It's that woman,"

he sniffed, meaning Swallow. "She said she'd wait one more minute and then she's leavin

I 9

"Tell her I won't be a moment."

Wilson sighed with exasperation and withdrew.

I'm sorry, your lordship," Shaw apologized. "Where were we?9?

"Your career," replied a deep voice with a vintage Oxbridge accent. Shaw was briefly reminded of Alec Guinness"It is felt, Neville, in some quarters, that you have bungled this whole affair from the beginning. It was nearly a year ago that some of us suggested that you act to prevent just this sort of mess."

Sir Neville bridled. "If they'd torn the bloody prison down last year, the very same thing would have happened. I couldn't control what the man wrote, for God's sake."

This riposte was met with ri-osty silence. "Yes," the voice said finally. "Well. What about the African end of the problemT' "It's being taken care of. TWO or @ days at the most."

"A lot could happen in thine days, Neville. We want every loose end snipped, every @ erased.".

"It's being done," Shaw insisted.

"Are there any complications we should know aboutt' Shaw thought of Jonas Stern, and of Swallow waiting just outside his door. "No," he lied.

"Keep us posted, then." The caller rang off.

Shaw exhaled a great blast of air and began to massage his temples with his fingertips. He badly needed sleep. He had spent five of the past six hours on the telephone. Across London, in places like the India Club, the House of Lords, and the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Clu@d across Britain in the ramshackle palaces and crumbling stone castle outposts of the aristocracy-privileged men and women both young and old were gathering in quiet councils.

Like ripples spreading outward from the epicenter of Buckingham Palace, waves of apprehension rolled through this most rarefied level of society; and all, Shaw reflected, because one little stone had dropped far away in the atrophied heart of Berlin. Slowly but surely, those frightened men and women were bringing a great deal of pressure to bear on Sir Neville Shaw. For Shaw, like his predecessors before him, was not only the possessor but also the protector of their dark secret. Most of the calls had been like the previous one-a bit of carrot, bags of stick. Shaw was about to rise and go to his liquor cabinet for a medicinal Glenfiddich when his office door opened and Wilson ushered in the woman code-named Swallow.

Sir Neville was stunned. The woman standing before him looked nothing like the photo in the file he'd been studying.

"Ah ... Miss Gordon, isn't it?" he stammered as Wilson withdrew from the office.

Swallow did not respond.

"I'm told you insisted on, seeing me personally," he tried again.

"Mind telling me why?"

Still Swallow held her silence. She obviously felt the burden of explanation lay on the man who had called for her services. Thoroughly discomfited, Shay looked down at the file. The woman in the photo looked like a grandmother, a blue-rinsed clubwoman who spent her Sundays baking biscuits for the church. The woman who stood before him now looked like ... well, Shaw had never quite seen the analogue that would describe her. Swallow had iron gray hair cropped &lose against her skull, perfect for wearing wigs. She carried none of the excess fat that weighted most women her age and there Shaw paused. For looking at Swallow now, he couldn't quite get his mind round the fact that she had been in the war. She'd been practically a child, of course, but It was downright eerie. The file put her at sixty-one, but she looked nearer fifty. As he stared, the scent of perfume wafted to him; this single acknowledgment of femininity surprised him. He couldn't name the fragrance, but it smelled expensive and vaguely French. To be honest, Shaw mused, he might have been attracted to Swallow if it wasn't for what he knew about her. No, he decided, even if he'd imown nothing of her fiendish work, her eyes would have put him off. They were like stones. Dull, flat stones. Not that they communicated intellectual dullness-quite the contrary.

They were rather like slate lids on a blast furnace, protecting those outside from the fierce hatred that burned behind them. That hatred had probably served Swallow well through the years, Shaw reflected, for by trade she was an assassin.

"Yes, well," he began again, "did Wilson tell you this regards Jonas Stern?"

Swallow nodded soberly.

"What I'd like is for you to follow him, see what he's up to. His last known location was Berlin, but he's probably on the move. He's traveling under his own name, which seems odd, so he must not feel he's in any danger."

Swallow smiled at that.

"As soon as we pick him up, we'll put you onto him. We think he's trying to get hold of something ... something that we'd prefer the Jews didn't get hold of. Understood?"

"Perfectly," said Swallow. She had, after all, done her part against the Zionist terrorists of Palestine.

Shaw cleared his throat. "Yes, well, what kind of payment would you want? Would twenty thousand pounds cover it?"

Swallow's eyes hooded over at this. It struck Shaw just then that, from Swallow's perspective, they had come to the point of the meeting. "What I want," she said in a toneless voice, "is Jonas Stern.

When your little operation is over, I want a free hand with him."

Shaw had no illusions as to what this meant. Swallow wanted official permission to kill an Israeli citizen. He knew the answer to his next question, but he asked it anyway.

"What was it, exactly, that Stern did to you?"

"Killed my brother," she replied in a voice that could have come from a corpse.

"That was quite some time ago, wasn't it?" Shaw commented.

"And every year since, my brother has lain in his grave."

The furnace heat behind Swallow's eyes flashed at the edges.

"They scarcely found enough of him to bury. Bloody Jews."

Shaw nodded with appropriate solemnity. "Yes, well ...

your condition is accepted." He drummed his fingers on his desk.

"Tell me, what's your feeling about Stern as an agent?"

"He's the best I ever saw. If he wasn't, he'd have been dead long ago.

He's got the instincts of a bloody clairvoyant."

"Any ideas on his motive? Why he would leave Israel now?"

Swallow considered this. "To protect it," she said at length.

"Israel is his weakness. He must believe the country is in imminent danger."

"I see."

"Is Israel in danger?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Shaw replied thoughtfully. "Not any more than usual."

As Swallow stood thinking, Shaw noticed that she stood with a vaguely military bearing-not tensely, but with a relaxed kind of readiness, rather like some Special Forces types he had known. They had all been men, of course.

"Is there anything else, then?" she asked.

Shaw flipped through the files on his desk with exaggerated casualness.

"There is, as a matter of fact. Another job.

A small one. Domestic job, actually. I thought you might take care of it for us. But it's a rush job. It must be done by tonight."

Swallow's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Who is it?"

"Chap named Burton. Michael Burton. Retired. Lives in a cottage outside Haslemere in Surrey. Raises orchids, I believe. I'm afraid he knows too much for his own good." Sir Neville cleared his throat again.

"There is one possible complication. He's only forty-eight.

Retired Special Air Service."

At this Swallow seemed to withdraw into herself for consultation with whatever demon sustained her startlingly youthful appearance. At length, she asked, "Does he have any family?"

"Divorced. There's a brother. Why do you ask?"

"Is he SAS also?"

Shaw shook his head. "Regular army. But he's out of the country permanently. He lost his citizenship papers some years ago for mercenary work. He won't be a problem."

"Would you want it to look like an accident?"

"Can you run up an accident in Haslemere by tonight?"

Swallow made a sound in her throat that Shaw heard as a dry chuckle. "I doubt it. SAS men don't have accidents like that, as a rule. They're trained not to. They can drive, swim, run, shoot@' "I don't care how it's done, then," Shaw flared. "Just do it. What's your price?"

A satisfied smile touched the corners of Swallow's mouth.

She liked to see bureaucrats squirm. "My price is protection from the Israelis after Stern is dead."

Christ!" Shaw exploded. "We can't babysit you forever. You kill Stern at your own risk."

Swallow's eyes turned opaque. "Don't play coy with me, little knight.

Your hands are bloody too. By lulling Stern I'm only doing what you want done. You picked me because you lmew if he had to be, liquidated, you could-blame his death on my vendetta." She raised her chin deflandy. "If you try @ the Israelis will certainly get me, but not before I kill you." Shaw drew back unconsciously. "I'll kill your SAS

man for you," she went on, "but you'll cover for me on Stern.

Otherwise-I might warn this Mr. Burton instead."

"Condition accepted," Shaw snapped. "Now get out. All communication from this point forward will be through cutouts. No further contact between you and this office."

Swallow made a mock curtsey and backed out of the room.