The Ultimate Secret (12 page)

Near the centre of villa, they’d had a stand-off with the gang’s general and a handful of his soldiers, which Jamie had eventually defused by pulling a pin on a grenade and holding it over his head.

When eventually they’d cleared the villa and found paved streets again, there was no sign of pursuit. Another steam cab took them to their destination, pulling into the lot across the road and a hundred yards up. They’d paid and climbed out, and stood for a moment, regarding the grim concrete tower they’d been sent to rob. Red, white and black banners fluttered from poles on either side of the entrance.

“Now, what do you suppose it is the East India Company wants from the Nazis?” asked Jamie.

T
HE GROWL CAME
again, and a shadow fell across the dim light coming in through the open door.

“What the–?” Tinks began, dropping the box and scrabbling for her carbine.

“Get
down!
” Jamie shouted, raising his pistol and stepping in front of her, just as the door was thrown open and a huge creature came crashing in, roaring in rage and frenzy.

Jamie’s pistol barked, deafening in the still, crowded space, and the thing’s great hairy arm battered it aside, smashing his arm against the shelf to his right. The pistol clattered to the floor. It followed up with its right, manlike hand stretched open, claws – talons, each a hand’s-width long – raking as it swung for the big mercenary’s belly. He stepped back, his curved, wickedly-serrated combat knife already in his left hand, and felt the tips of the claws tear the heavy jacket, nearly staggering him with the force of the near-miss.

It was in form like a human being, but terrible in aspect. Shrouded in shaggy black fur, it was nonetheless tatty, with bulging, unnatural muscles poking grotesquely through patches in its coat. A great, wolflike maw grinned and drooled as it inched towards him, and yet he made out a glint of human intelligence in its red, baleful eyes.

Jamie retreated before the beast, step for step, and felt his boot come up against the fallen archive box. He could hear Tinks, on the floor behind him, still bringing the rifle to bear. He would need to buy her a second’s more time, maybe more. Without another moment’s thought, he lunged, plunging the knife deep into its ribs, and felt a moment’s satisfaction as the blade bit and the creature gave a piercing, unearthly shriek.

His delight was short-lived. The thing – the werewolf, he supposed, although he’d not heard of such a thing actually
existing
– snatched his left wrist, even as he began to withdraw the knife again, and drove the claws of its own left hand into his side, filling his world with red light and blinding pain.

I’m dying, here. I can’t fight this thing at close quarters.
But he couldn’t escape; it was too strong, terribly strong. He could no more pull his arm free than tear down a stone wall.

Desperately, he kicked at the creature: at its knees, its shins, between its legs, assuming it even had anything there to kick.

Salvation came in the form of a deafening
crack
, and a flash of yellow light, as his partner’s carbine was set off alongside him. Blood sprayed from the thing’s neck, covering his face, and abruptly he was hurled to the floor at its feet. He had the presence of mind to keep hold of the knife. He lay dazed and half-delirious, watching the terrible beast stepping over his body, and briefly, hysterically reflected that he couldn’t tell one way or the other, in this light, if it
did
have anything to kick, up there.

A third shot echoed in the cramped room, another flash of light glimmered behind the spots in his eyes, and he came to his senses. He tried to sit up and roll forwards, to bring himself to his knees behind the monster, although the pain that flooded his body from his torn and bleeding side turned it into a flop and an inelegant scramble to his feet. He heard Tinks’ scream, bellowed himself in response, and turned to see the creature snatching the rifle from her hands.

Its back still to him, the werewolf slowly, deliberately snapped the rifle in half, the muscles in its arms and back – all misplaced, all causing his mind to rebel at their
wrongness
– bulging and straining. It threw the shards of metal and wood to its feet and reached out for the slight woman. Roaring his defiance, Jamie threw himself at the beast’s back, driving his knife in between its shoulder blades again and again. It reared in pain, shrieked again and spun around, swinging one great limb around to swat him away, and he was hurled out the door and into the hallway. His shoulder clipped the doorframe, spinning him as he flew; that would be a bruise, he idly thought. His back hit the opposite wall hard, awkwardly, and he felt a
crack
that shivered through him; no new pain, although that was perhaps unsurprising. A broken rib, he thought. Perhaps two. He heaved himself painfully to his feet – knife still, miraculously, gripped in his hand – as the thing advanced on him again.

“Come on...” Jamie murmured, swapping the knife to his right and beckoning with his left, showing a confidence he didn’t feel. The thing slowed as it approached, hunching as if to pounce, and he shouted in its face.
“Come on, you furry Kraut twat!”

With an answering roar, the werewolf lunged forward, claws outstretched, and he stepped forward, ducked, and drove the knife up into its armpit, trying for the axillary artery. Swinging wide, clumsily, it nevertheless scored a hit on his back, and two or three deep cuts opened up, sending lines of fire down him. He allowed himself to fall to his good shoulder, planning to roll out from under it before it could grab hold of him again, but the thing fell on top of him, crushing the air out of him.

For a moment or two, the silence in the clean, empty corridor returned, ringing in his ears.

“You going to get up, then, you lazy sod?” Tinks’ voice. In spite of the banter, her voice was tense, worried. He stretched, looked over the thing’s shoulder and saw his partner standing over him, his pistol still smoking in her hand. He hadn’t even heard her shoot.

“Well – frankly – I could use help. He’s a heavy bugger.” Jamie heaved himself up on one elbow and nearly passed out from the pain. He started to shove the thing off him, and Tinks stepped forward to help; between them, they eventually dropped the werewolf to the floor and got Jamie to his feet. Blood was pouring down his back and thigh. He staggered and leaned back on the wall.

Tinks looked up and down the corridor as she pulled a first aid kit from one of her pockets. “I don’t think we’ve raised the alarm, unbelievably, but I don’t think I’ve got time to do anything other than bandage you. We’ll get out of here, get Jen on the phone; he’s bound to have a tame doctor somewhere in BA that’ll patch you up.”

As she worked, staunching the bleeding, covering the wounds, the monstrous form on the floor gradually shrank, shed its hair, became a human woman. Short blonde hair, pale blue eyes, an athletic, tightly-muscled body: poster child for the Ultimate Reich. Naked, and horribly bent as she lay on the floor, the wounds – which showed all too clearly against her alabaster skin – were appalling. Her chest and side were a morass of knife wounds; bullet holes marred her head and throat. Jamie felt slightly sick, spat on the floor at his feet.

“Figures,” he said. “I tried to kick her in the bollocks. Wasn’t going to work, was it?”

Tinks cast her a fleeting look, before returning to her work. Smiled, tightly. “No, I suppose not.”

Then Jamie laughed, and then gasped with the pain, and Tinks looked quizzically at him. “No dogs,” he hissed. He took a deep breath, and started again. “No bloody dogs, didn’t we say?”

Tinks smiled, and touched his cheek. “Right. No dogs. Sorry.”

Once Jamie was bound to her satisfaction, they gathered the box and made their way out through the disabled lift shaft once more. It took them much longer going back.

I
N THE ABSENCE
of an infirmary, Obersturmführer Farlhaber lay on a couch in the rest room on the third floor, swathed in bandages. Not that it mattered; she’d be on her feet by the end of the day. Her kind healed quickly, and the foreigners had not used silver, that she could tell. Clerks and petty officials buzzed and fussed around her, unsure what to do.

“Just find me the file!” she shouted, heaving herself up to wave them away. “I’ll be fine! Just find out which file they took, and show me the
fucking manifest!
”

The clerks panicked, ran about, shouted at each other. Two of them ran back up to the Schwarzarchiv, and she fell back on the cushion. The secretary to the Consul walked in and took in the room briefly, before moving over to her.

“Obersturmführer. I came as quickly as I could. Before I contact the Consul, what has happened?”

Farlhaber hissed. “We’ve lost a fucking file, that’s what. From the Schwarzarchiv.”

Schmidt nodded, digesting. “From the... Which file? What does it relate to?”

“We don’t know yet. Some of your fatheads are finding out now. From Archive Four.”

Schmidt frowned. “Archive–? Those files date from the war! What could be in there that anyone would–”

“I would leave off your speculation right there, Herr Sekretär. The Führer has secrets that could be dangerous even to ask about.”

“I–” Schmidt stopped himself, cocked his head, then nodded. “Very well. Our concern, then, is to minimise the damage. We must reacquire the file as soon as possible – on the black market, if necessary – and avoid loss of face. Your failure could cost us both dearly, Obersturmführer.”

Farlhaber glared and spat. “
My
failure? It was
your
security systems they bypassed to get in here.”

The secretary smiled serenely. “Of course, Obersturmführer Farlhaber. But I was given to understand that the Schutzstaffel security expert I was issued would be able to–”

“You idiot! I’ll–”

“Herr Sekretär? Fraulein Obersturmführer?” One of the clerks had returned from the thirteenth floor, a document list in hand.

Farlhaber snatched it. “Give me that!” She pored through the list. “This one?” she said, pointing. “The underlined one? 4B-37-DZ?”

“Yes, Fraulein Obersturmführer.” The clerk was visibly trembling; his voice shook.

“Top secret...” murmured Schmidt, leaning over Farlhaber’s shoulder. “April 1942... What is this? This code name?” The box, and all the boxes on that row, were assigned to code name E
ndlösung
. “What does it mean?”

Farlhaber’s already fair skin had paled. “It means, Herr Sekretär, that our discussion is over. There is no avoiding loss of face, no reacquiring this file on the black market. You!” She jabbed a finger at one of the clerks, who stammered, saluted and flushed. “Get me something to write on. We must send a telegraph to Berlin, fast as you can.”

“What’s going on?” demanded Schmidt. “What’s Endlösung?”

“The end of our careers, Schmidt. Both of them. Our lives, too, if we do not act quickly.” Farlhaber shouted at the clerk again. “Hurry! We must contact an officer in the SS. Adler is his name. Obersturmbannführer Dietrich Adler.”

S
TANLEY,
T
HE
F
ALKLAND
I
SLES,
1999

S
TANLEY.
T
HE
‘H
ONG
Kong of South America,’ as it was sometimes known.

Since Perón had instituted the SAU, the Britannian outpost had become a thriving port, the centre of trade between the Empire and the Latin collective. In four decades, the city had grown and built upon itself, until there was no distinction between Stanley and the islands; one vast city, covering the whole of the landmass. Landfill had even joined the islands up and extended them around, until the colony was now several times its original size, and still it grew.

Towers of brass, and glass, and steel. The streets – good paved streets, cleaned and policed by Britannian automatons – were home to modern steam cars, and the trams, as they say, ran on time. The Stanley Stock Exchange was second only to London’s in terms of the wealth it carried every day, and was increasingly said to surpass it in terms of its influence on global stock prices. Any banker, inventor, investor or (increasingly) gentleman worth his salt had offices here.

The airfield, built on pontoons in the continental side of the artificial island, was surrounded by some of the tallest, newest and most luxurious hotels in the world. As Jamie and Tinks – battered, bandaged and bruised – limped off the airship and made their way to their pre-booked rooms at the Savoy, this was a profoundly-anticipated comfort.

Come lunchtime, washed, better dressed and – in Jamie’s case – his bandages replaced, they made their way to the terrace bar as agreed.

The maitre d’ took their names, nodded in recognition and ushered them to a table on the balcony, overlooking the busy road below. They joined a young Indian woman, who looked to be less than twenty years old, dressed in a smart Western skirt suit and drinking tea. She smiled as they approached, and stood.

“Jamie, I take it? And, if I have this right... Tinkerbell?”

Tinks smirked. “‘Tinks’ is fine. It’s an old nickname.”

“Quite. Please, take a seat. Is tea acceptable, or do you need anything else to drink? My treat, of course. Marcel?” She waved to the maitre d’.

“Tea’s fine, thank you,” protested Jamie, waving once and easing himself painfully into a seat. “And you’re...?”

“Call me Kim,” said the young woman, who waited for Tinks to join her partner before sitting again.

“We’ve got your box,” said Tinks. “As agreed. It’s in the safe in our room. Thought it wouldn’t be best sense to...”

“No, of course,” said Kim, pouring tea for the two of them. “I shall have a man come around to collect it. And here, as agreed” – she nodded to an envelope on the table between them – “is the fee. Five thousand pounds. Six, in fact. My employer was most distressed to learn of your injuries, and – aside from putting our medical staff here in Stanley at your disposal, for as long as you need it – asked me to pay you a bonus for your work. He is very pleased.”