Spandau Phoenix (51 page)

Professor Natterman had lied. The old man had held back after all ...

he'd kept some of the pages for himself! Hauer cringed as he recalled Natterman slipping into the bathroom before laying the foil acket on Hans's lap.

p Greedy bastard! he thought furiously. With yourfamily's lives at stake! Pulling the bottom page out again, Hauer stared with grim frustration. Angrily, he read the final note in German. The last bit caught his eye:

Phoenix wields my precious daughter like a sword of fire!

If only they knew! Am I even a dim memory to my angel?

No. Better that she never knows. I have lived a life of madness, but in the face of death I found courage ...

Better that she never knows. Those words resonated in Hauer's mind.

Better that you don't know, either he thought, looking at Hans's sleeping face. You'll find out soon enough.

Hans's lank blond hair hung down across eyelids that quivered in troubled sleep. Carefully, Hauer refolded the aluminum foil around the pages and slipped them back into Hans's pocket. And what will you do, he wondered, when you finally learn that your grandfather-in-law has condemned your wife to death? For without the Spandau papers to trade to the kidnappers, intact, Hauer knew the chance of bringing Ilse out of Africa alive dropped by at least 50 percent. How could that bastard do that to his ownflesh and blood?

And then Hauer knew. The old man had not stolen the missing pages-he'd lost them! Lost them to the Afrikaner who attacked him.

And the Afrikaner had lost them to whoever had attacked him! That was why Natterman had frantically searched the carcass that Hans dragked into the cabin; he'd been looking for the missing pages. And he had found nothing! My God, Hauer thought, feeling acid flood his stomach, someone else has those pages!

As the DC-10 roared south toward the bottom of the un world, Hauer wondered who could possibly have 0 Natterman's cabin before he and Hans.

Funk's men? Ilse had obviously been forced to give the cabin telephone number to her kidnappers. Had she also given them the cabin's location?

How early had she been captured? Who else was hunting for the papers now? Hauer had seen some rather English-looking young men hovering around the ticket d'Hans had slipped counters at Frankfurt Airport, but he an by them on the strength of their false passports.

If Hauer had only known-really known-who had the missing pages, he might have felt less like a shepherd leading a lamb to the slaughter.

But he didn't know. And as he closed his eyes to the sound of the roaring turbines, one word cycled endlessly through his mind.

Who?

7.40pm. E-35Motorway, Frankfurt, FRG Jonas Stern took his eyes from the motorway long enough to glare at Natterman in the passenger seat. "We're going to Israel to pick up some packages, and that's all I'll bloody say about it!"

"But what kind of packages?"

"You'll find out soon enough."

"But you were on the phone for hours," Natterman persisted. "You wasted a whole day."

"Klap kop in vant!" Stern snapped in Yiddish. "So the Messiah comes a day later! You don't order these packages like a pizza pie, Professor.

You told me yourself that the rendezvous with the kidnappers isn't until tomorrow night.

We'll make Pretoria in plenty of time."

Natterman sulked in his seat. "Why were you talking to an air force general?"

Stern exploded. "You were listening to my calls!"

"Only one," Natterman lied. "I just want to know what's going on.

Where's the harm in that?"

"You'll know all you need to know," Stern said, scowling.

"When you need to know it, not before. If you'd put your precious career aside for a moment and tell me all you know about Hess's mission, I might see fit to reciprocate."

Natterman put an age-spotted hand to his mouth and bit his thumbnail. He looked like a gold prospector deciding whether or not to reveal the location of his big strike to a stranger whose help he needs. With sudden gravity, he reached across the seat and took hold of Stern's arm.

"I'll tell you what I think about Hess's mission," he said excitedly. "I think Rudolf Hess is still alive. " Stern turned and caught Natterman's eye; then he looked back at the wide motorway.

He chuckled softly. "I know you do, Professor. And I wish it were so easy. But you watch too many movies."

"Then you don't think Hess is alive?" Natterman asked incredulously.

Stern grinned. "Sure. He's set up housekeeping with Martin Bormann and Josef Mengele. Amelia Earhart is the housemaid and Elvis Presley provides the dinner entertainment."

Natterman ignored the levity. "Then you're really not hunting Hess?" he said suspiciously.

-.'

Stern shook his head. "I told you, Professor, I'm no Nazihunter.

I'm more of a gamekeeper. And the preserve I protect is Israel."

"Hess is alive," Natterman insisted. "I know he is. It's completely conceivable. His double died only four weeks ago, and the medical care at Spandau was atrocious. "

Nattennan folded his arms defiantly. "Rudolf Hess is alive and I'm going to find him."

Stern grunted skeptically.

"Since you're not hunting him," Natterman said in a superior tone, "I suppose I can tell you how I know he's alive."

"Enlighten me, 0 Master," Stern said with mock gravity.

Natterman scowled. "Laugh if you like. I'll bet you don't laugh at this. Remember the tattooed eye that I showed you on the Afrikaner's head? That's the constant in this whole mess, the one unifying symbol.

The Spandau papers said the eye was the key, and the fascist members of the Berlin police have the eye tattooed on their scalps beneath the hair.

Hauer told me so. But what Hauer doesn't know, Stern, is what that symbol means. I do. It's an Egyptian symbol-the All-Seeing Eye, the Guarding Eye of God." Natterman nodded knowingly. "Hauer also told me that the police fascists protect something or someone called Phoenix.

Are you familiar with the Phoenix, Stern?"

"Of course. It's the mythological bird of flames that rises from its own ashes every five hundred years."

"Very good. Now, 'Phoenix' is a Greek word, but the Greeks did not invent the Phoenix myth. Phoenix is but the Greek name of the Egyptian god Bennu-the bird who rises from the ashes of its own destruction. Do you see?"

"What I see," said Stern irritably, "is a history professor who has lost touch with reality."

Natterman cackled. "That's because you're blind, Stern!

Blind like all the rest! Blind to history! I told Hauer that the key to this mystery lay in the past, but the arrogant fool didn't believe me!"

"What in God's name are you babbling about?"

"Egypt, Stern, Egypt. Don't you see? All these mystical signs and symbols, they lead ultimately to one man: Rudolf Hess!"

"How?" Stern snapped.

"Because," Natterman explained, "Rudolf Hess was born and raised in Egypt! He went to school in Alexandria until he was fourteen years old!"

Stern sat in stunned silence. "That's true," he murmured finally.

"I remember now."

Natterman was nodding with nervous energy. "I'm going to find him, Stern. I'm going to deliver that Nazi bastard into the modern world. It will be the academic coup of the century!"

"Take it easy, Professor. I think you're letting your imagination run away with you. That eye could mean any number of things. And the name Phoenix has been used to name everything from cities to cars to condoms.

You're stretching logic too far. So Hess was raised in Egypt ... I'

presume he attended a German school there, and he was still only a. boy when he emigrated to Germany."

"He did attend a German school," Natterman admitted.

"But fourteen is not so young. And childhood impressions are often the most vivid of our lives. The treasures and mysteries of Egypt's past would have fascinated any European boy. No, Stern, I don't think I'm stretching logic. It's simple deductive reasoning."

Stern looked thoughtful. "Think what you wish, Professor.

I will say this: I'm not so sure Hess's original mission is over yet"-he smiled-"I just don't think Hesr, is running it."

Natterman looked anxious. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that Hess flew to Britain to arrange an AngloGerman peace.

I accept that as fact. Whatever delusions Hess may have had, the strongest correction, the only real foundation for such a peace was the widespread belief in England that Germany represented the last and strongest possible barrier against an expansionist-minded Russia.

Against communism."

"That's freshman history," said Natteirinan. "What's your point?"

"My point is that things may not be so different now. The Soviet Union is disintegrating, Professor. The heart of the military colossus is economic chaos; the great warrior is starving inside his armor.

Russia's provinces and satellites seethe with resentment and sedition.

One day not so long from now, Professor, the Soviet Union could explode."

"And?"

"And I'm not the only fool who knows that! I'm saying

It

that some people may still believe that Germany represents the best natural barrier against Russia, the unstable colossus."

"Germany? As a barrier to Russia?"

Stern smiled coldly. "Not Germany as you know it. But a Germany reunited. Reunited and armed with nuclear weapons. Its own nuclear weapons."

"No," Natterman breathed. "That can't be true. If we Germans wanted nuclear weapons, we could have developed them ourselves long ago. We invented the ballistic missile, for God's sake!"

Stern snorted. "It's no more fantastic than your fairy tale about Rudolf Hess."

"Hess is alive!" Natterman insisted. "I know it!"

Stern's face hardened. "Whether he is or he isn't, Professor, I don't want you mentioning his name in front of anyone from this moment forward. You understand? No one. Not friends, not family. Fantasies like yours can produce hysterical responses in some people."

"But not in you," Natterman said, eyeing the Israeli closely.

"Since you think Hess is alive, Professor," Stern said gamely, "tell me this. If Hess survived his mission to England, why didn't he return to Germany? To his beloved Fuhrer?"

Natterman opened his mouth to speak, then realized that he did not have an answer. "I won't know that until I know what Hess's real mission was," he said. "Until we find Hess himself."

Stern swung onto the access road for Frankfurt-Main International Airport. "Professor," he said, "we are after two different things.

You're obsessed with the past, I fight in the present. But the Hess case links us. We're on a road we cannot see, and at the end of it, I fear, lies something as evil as human beings can devise. I believe that the danger that exists now came out of the past. But I can't rip away the curtain of time and see what ill-begotten proposition Rudolf Hess carried to England forty-seven years ago."

Stern flicked his lights and passed a slow-moving BMW. "So you know what I think? I think maybe having a German history professor along with me is the next best thing. Even if he is an ambitious, close-mouthed goyim who thinks he's Simon Wiesenthal."

Stern swung the car into the TICKETING/CHF-CK-IN lane.

When he had parked, Natterman climbed out and looked at him across the car's roof. "I just hope you're not condemning my granddaughter to death by making this stupid side nip to Israel," he growled.

Stern bunched his coat collar higher around his neck.

"This mystery has waited half a century to be solved, Professor.

It can wait one more day."

He turned and hurried into the terminal.

I wonder, Natterman asked himself, walking toward the huge glass doors.

I wonder if it can.

THE PLAN NAZI He is insane. He is the Dove of Peice. He is Messiah. He is Hitler's prince.

He is the one ckan honest man they've got He is the worst assassin of the la He has a mission to preserve mankind Hes non@ohouc. He was a "b@" He has been dotty since the age of ten.

But all the dine was top of Hitlers men ...

"Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer"

By A.P. HERBERT, 1.941

after Hess par"huted into England

CHAPTER TWENTY

January 7, 1941, The Berghot The Bavarian Alps Rudolf Hess stood alone before the great picture window of Adolf Hitler's Alpine headquarters and waited for his Fuhrer. Hess was a big man, with an addete's body-broad across the shoulders and, even at forty-seven, narrow through the waist-yet Hitler's window dwarfed him. Like all things designed by or for the Fuhrer, it was the largest in the world.

Silhouetted against its Olympian panorama, Hess looked like a tiny extra in the corner of a movie screen.

Deep in the valley below him, the village of Berchtesgaden slept peacefully. Beyond it the magnificent Untersberg rose skyward, covered with fresh January snow. Far to the north Hess could just see the rooftops of Salzburg. He could understand why the Fuhrer retreated to this mountain eyrie when the pressures of the war became too onerous.