The Apocalypse Watch (77 page)

Lieutenant Anthony looked across the table at Drew and Colonel Witkowski. Reluctantly, imperceptibly, he shook his head. His superiors, in like manner, did the same. Karin de Vries suddenly spoke in German, her tone frivolous, insouciant, very much unlike her. “I believe I see an old friend who’s going to powder her nose, and so will I.” She got up from the table and walked across the terrace, following another woman.

“What did she say?” asked Drew.

“The ladies’ room,” replied Dietz.

“Oh, that’s all.”

“I doubt it,” said the equally fluent Anthony.

“What do you mean?” pressed Latham.

“The woman she’s tailing is obviously Traupman’s date for the evening,” explained Witkowski.

“Is Karin
crazy
?” exploded Latham, whispering intensely. “What does she think she’s
doing
?”

“We’ll know when she comes back,
chłopak
.”

“I don’t like it!”

“You don’t have a choice,” said the colonel.

Twelve frustrating minutes later, De Vries returned to the table. “To use the American vernacular,” she said in English quietly, “my new young friend hates the ‘stinking pervert.’ She’s twenty-six years old and Traupman takes her out to show her off, pays her money, and demands kinky sex when they return to his apartment.”

“How did you
learn
that?” asked Drew.

“It was in her eyes.… I lived in Amsterdam, remember? She’s a cocaine addict and desperately needed a dose to get through the evening. I found her giving herself one—also supplied by the good doctor.”

“He’s such a beautiful man,” said Captain Christian Dietz contemptuously. “One day the story will be told how many Iraqis were supplied a daily diet of that crap. Hussein made it part of the military diet!… Can this lead us to something?”

“Only if we can get into his apartment,” answered Karin, “which could give us an enormous advantage.”

“How so?” asked Witkowski.

“He makes videotapes of his sexual encounters.”

“
Sick!
” spat out Lieutenant Anthony.

“Sicker than you think,” said De Vries. “She told me he has a whole library, everything from alpha to zed, including little girls and boys. He claims he needs them to get properly excited.”

“They could be awesome artillery,” interjected the colonel.

“Embarrassment and public disgrace,” said Latham. “The most powerful weapons ever invented by man.”

“I think we can
do
it,” said Dietz.

“I thought you said we couldn’t,” whispered Anthony.

“I can change my mind, can’t I?”

“Sure, but your first assessments are usually right, Ringo.”

“
Ringo?
”

“He likes that movie, forget it, sir.…
How
, Chris?”

“First, Mrs. de Vries, since you learned about the tapes, I can only assume you made subtle inquiries about the apartment itself. Am I correct?”

“Of course you are. The three guards divide their duties, alternating to give each other breaks, I gather. One remains outside the door at a table with an intercom while the other two, as you described before, Captain, patrol the hallways, the lobby, and the exterior of the building.”

“What about the elevators?” asked Witkowski.

“They don’t really matter. Traupman has the penthouse, which is the entire top floor, and to reach it my disturbed young friend says you either enter a code, which is the normal procedure, or you’re cleared by the building’s own security desk after they’ve ascertained that you’re expected.”

“Then you’re talking about two barriers,” said Drew. “Traupman’s guards
and
the apartment building’s in-house security.”

“Try three,” interrupted Karin. “The guard outside the penthouse door has to punch in a series of numbers for the door to open. If he punches in the wrong ones, all hell breaks loose. Sirens, bells, that sort of thing.”

“The girl told you that?” said Lieutenant Anthony.

“She didn’t have to, Gerald, it’s standard procedure. My husband and I had a variation of that system in Amsterdam.”

“You
did
?”

“It’s a complicated story, Lieutenant,” Latham broke in curtly. “No time for it now.… So if we manage somehow—which is highly doubtful—to bypass the guards and the elevator-programmed security desk, we’re stymied and probably shot outside the penthouse. It’s not exactly an attractive scenario.”

“Do you concede that we could possibly overcome the first two obstacles?” Witkowski asked.

“
I
do,” replied Dietz. “The drunk and the scratchy-crotch,
Gerry and I can take care of. The inside desk could probably be handled by a couple of very official types showing
very
official IDs.” The captain settled his gaze on Latham and Witkowski. “
If
they’re really experienced at this kind of exercise, which the lieutenant and I went through twice in Desert Storm,” he added.

“Say we do,” said an increasingly irritated Drew, “how is anyone going to handle the penthouse robot?”

“There you’ve got me, sir.”

“Perhaps not me,” interrupted Karin, getting up from the table. “If things work out, I’ll be quite a while,” she continued, speaking softly, enigmatically. “Please order me a double espresso, it may be an exhausting night.” With those words, De Vries took the long way out of the garden restaurant toward the entrance, and in case anyone was watching her, she doubled back along the walls beyond the crowded tables to the ladies’ room.

A full five minutes later the young blond woman sitting beside Dr. Hans Traupman had a mild sneezing fit, the sympathetic conversation at the table ascribing it to Nuremberg’s summer pollen and the breezes. She left the table.

Eighteen minutes later, Karin de Vries returned to her American scholars. “Here are the conditions,” she said. “And neither she nor I will accept any less.”

“You met the girl in the ladies’ room.” Witkowski did not ask a question, he made a statement.

“She understood that if I left the table and walked toward the entrance, she was to make some excuse and meet me there in three or four minutes.”

“What are the conditions and how does she earn them?” asked Latham.

“Second question first,” said Karin. “Once inside with Traupman, give her an hour and she’ll deactivate the alarm and release the lock on the door.”

“She can be our first woman president,” said Captain Dietz.

“She asks far less. She wants, and I agree with her, a permanent visa to the United States and enough money to see her through rehabilitation, as well as sufficient funds
to live in relative comfort for three years. She doesn’t dare stay here in Germany, and after three years, while polishing her English, she believes she’ll be able to find work.”

“She’s got it and then some,” said Drew. “She could have demanded a lot more.”

“In all honesty, my dear, she may very well, later. She’s a survivor, not a saint, and she
is
an addict. That’s her reality.”

“Then it’ll be someone else’s problem,” the colonel interrupted.

“Traupman just signaled for the check,” said Lieutenant Anthony.

“Then, as your German guide, I shall also, in several minutes.” De Vries leaned down over her chair as if to retrieve her purse or a fallen napkin. Three tables away the blond woman did the same, picking up a gold cigarette lighter that had slipped from her fingers. Their eyes met; Karin blinked twice, Traupman’s escort once.

The night’s agenda was set.

T
he apartment complex—
house
did not do it justice—was one of those cold steel and tinted-glass structures that made a person long for stone walls, spires, arches, and even flying buttresses. It was not so much the work of an architect as it was the product of a robotic computer, the aesthetics found in vast wasted space and stress tolerances. However, it was imposing, the front windows literally two stories high, the lobby made of white marble, in the center of which was a large reflecting pool with a cascading fountain illuminated by underwater floodlights. As each floor ascended, the inside corridors were bordered by an interior, fifty-four-inch wall of speckled granite that permitted all but the shortest people to observe the opulence below. The effect was less of beauty than of triumphant engineering.

On the left of the white-marbled lobby was the untinted, sliding glass window of the security office, behind the glass a uniformed apartment guard whose job it was to admit visitors who identified themselves over the entrance intercom after ascertaining their welcome by those in residence. Further, in the interest of privacy and safety, the security desk had at a guard’s fingertips the alarms for
Fire, Forced Entry
, and
Police;
the last, stationed approximately a half mile away, could be at the building in no more than sixty seconds. The complex was eleven stories high, the penthouse occupying the entire eleventh floor.

The exterior, as might be expected, was in keeping with the establishment’s prices. A circular drive led from tall hedgerow to hedgerow, between which was a landscaper’s semi-annuity: sculptured foliage, flowering gardens, five concrete goldfish ponds—aerated naturally, and with flagstone
paths for those who cared to stroll outside amid nature’s beauty. In the rear of the complex, in sight of the medieval Neutergraben Wall, was an Olympic-size swimming pool, complete with cabanas and an outside bar for the summer months. Everything considered, Dr. Hans Traupman, the Rasputin of the neo-Nazi movement, lived very well.

“This is like breaking into Leavenworth without an army pass,” whispered Latham behind the greenery of sculptured bushes in front of the entrance. Alongside him was Captain Christian Dietz, who had previously reconnoitered the area. “Every access back by the pool is electronically sealed—you touch a screen with a human hand and the sirens go off. I know those fibers. They’re heat sensitized.”

“I’m aware of that, sir,” said the Ranger from Desert Storm. “It’s why I told you the only way was to take out the two roving bodyguards, get past the house security, and reach the eleventh floor.”

“Can you and Anthony really get rid of the guards?”

“That’s not the problem … sir. Gerry will take the big guy with the flask, and I’ll deep-six the scratch merchant. The problem, as I see it, is whether you and the colonel can talk yourselves through the apartment security.”

“Witkowski was on the phone with a couple of the Deuxième agents. He says it’s under control.”

“How?”

“Two or three names from the Polizei. They’ll make calls to the in-house security guard and pave the way. Top secret and all the rest of that mumbo-jumbo.”

“The Deuxième works with the Nuremberg
police
?”

“They may, but that’s not what I said. I said ‘names,’ not people. I presume they’ll be important names whether they’re real people or not.… What the hell, Chris, it’s well after midnight, who’s going to check? When the Allies stormed Normandy, no one dared wake up Hitler’s chief aides, much less the man himself.”

“Is the colonel’s German really good? I’ve heard him speak only a little bit of it.”

“He’s totally fluent.”

“He’s got to be authoritative—”

“Can you doubt it? Witkowski doesn’t speak, he barks.”

“Look—he just struck a cupped match from the bushes on our right flank. Something’s happening.”

“He and the lieutenant are nearer. Can you see what it is?”

“Yes,” replied Captain Dietz, peering through the foliage. “It’s the big Kraut with the juice. Gerry’s scrambling around to the far right; he’ll take him in the shadows halfway down the building’s path.”

“Are you fellas always so confident?”

“Why not? It’s simply a job and we’re trained to do it.”

“Has it occurred to you that in hand-to-hand the other guy might be tougher?”

“Oh, sure, that’s why we specialize in the dirtiest tricks on record. Don’t you? A friend of mine at the Paris embassy saw you play hockey in Toronto or Manitoba or someplace; he said you were the mother ship of body-check techniques.”

“This subject is over,” ordered Latham. “What happens if whisky-boy doesn’t come back? Will the other guard be waiting for him?”

“They’re German, they go by the clock. Any deviation is unacceptable. If one soldier is derelict, another can’t be influenced by the dereliction. He continues the march, the watch. There,
see
! Gerry’s got him.”

“What?”

“You weren’t looking. Gerry struck a match and arched it to his left. Mission accomplished.… Now I’ll crawl straight forward while you join the colonel on the flank, sir.”

“Yes, I know that—”

“It’ll be a while, maybe as long as twenty minutes or so, but be patient, it
will
happen.”

“From your mouth to God’s ear.”

“Yeah, Gerry said you’d probably say something like that. See you later, Mr. Cons-Op.” The Special Forces captain wormed his way toward the canopied entrance of
the condominium complex as Drew crawled between the stalks of the flowers of the English-style garden to the hedgerow where Stanley Witkowski lay prone.

“Those sons of bitches are
outstanding
!” pronounced the colonel, a pair of infrared binoculars at his eyes. “They’ve got ice water in their veins!”

“Well, it’s simply a job they’re trained to do, and they do it well,” said Drew, hugging the ground.

“From your mouth to God’s ear,
chłopak
,” erupted Witkowski. “Here goes the
other
one … hell, they’re magnificent! Go for the kill, nothing less!”

“I don’t think we want kills, Stanley. We’d rather have captives.”

“I’ll take either one. I just want to get in there.”

“Can we do it?”

“The setup’s in place, but we won’t know until we try. If there’s a problem, we blast ourselves in.”

“The guard will alert the police the moment he sees a weapon.”

“There are eleven stories, where do they start?”

“Good point. Let’s go!”

“Not yet. The captain’s target hasn’t arrived yet.”

“I thought you just said ‘here he goes.’ ”