She hopped onto the sidewalk, bouncing a few times on her black Reeboks. Iyad lurched forward and grabbed the handlebars, while Martina recovered her black Cordura rucksack from his back with all the ceremony of stripping a battlefield corpse. She thrust the sleeves of her motorcycle jacket through the straps, then gripped the back of his neck as she flipped his helmet visor up.
His face was a bug-eyed mask of numbed flesh, frozen and frightened half to death by her lust for speed. She lifted her own visor and blew on him with her mouth a wide O, as if cleaning a pair of glasses. Iyad worked his cheek muscles and tried to smile.
“Ist es besser?” Martina asked.
He nodded, and their helmet visors clacked together.
“Gut. Now listen.” She kept her lips very close to his, yet no one would mistake her posture for affection. “If I return, fine. If not, or you see someone or something not right, take half a spill and lose the bag.” She patted the brown leather saddlebag draped across the gas tank. “And then, Iyad. If you are followed . . . lose them. Clear?”
He nodded again. Martina handed him her helmet, and walked away.
She forded the sparse traffic on Second Avenue, pulling a teal ski hat onto her head. She clipped along to bring the blood back into her legs, and when she reached First Avenue she turned right, continued a few meters, then stopped. She turned slowly, as if momentarily disoriented, yet she was far from lost.
A freezing night and a late hour were Martina’s favored choices for a risky rendezvous. Few pedestrians strolled the streets, and watchers would be easily spotted stepping quickly back between parked cars or into the shadows of buildings. Except for taxis, drivers would have no motive for a leisurely cruise, for even the irrepressible Manhattan prostitutes would be too chilled to ply their trade.
She looked at the corner of Eighty-fourth Street, but no man or woman stumbled out into her view, no vehicle slowed. She walked north now, turned left on Eighty-fifth Street, bending once to tie a lace that was not errant as she glanced back between her knees.
As she turned right again on Second, a pang of mourning struck her as she looked up at the gray facade of the Yorkville Savings Bank. Half of the steel letters above the clock were gone, the remaining characters spelling just KV LLE now. Manhattan’s proud old German colony was dead. It remained but for some kindly soul to please inform the patient.
Yorkville had once been the pride of the city’s German-born, its ten-block enclave on the Upper East Side a constant festival of Gemütlichkeit, where the food, music, and language of the Fatherland were abundant for homesick Berliners or budding Germanophiles. In Yorkville, you could always find a meal of Kartoffelsuppe and Schweinshaxen, wash it down with a Dunkel beer, and go on to hear a string quartet play Mozart at Our Lady of Good Counsel. On Steuben Day, the city’s bands marched proudly down Lexington Avenue, and during Oktoberfest, groups of men in lederhosen staggered from the Heidelberg to dance a drunken jig.
Martina had chosen New York City as her mother’s final residence because it lay at the hub of her travels. All of Katharina’s Buenos Aires friends had passed on, she had slipped into semi-dementia, and New York seemed the most practical and secure selection. The discovery of Yorkville was an added bonus, although Martina realized now that even in the early eighties she should have sensed its mortal decline.
She usually rode in a precautionary chain of taxis directly from the airport to the Edelweiss Rest Home on East Eighty-ninth. On foot now, she could see the effects of the gentrification virus. The Heidelberg Gasthaus was still there, but it was overpowered by an aluminum-and-glass copy center. Turning left onto Eighty-sixth, she was shocked. The Ideal Restaurant, where she had once smiled over a sizzling schnitzel as an old accordionist sang folk tunes, had been blown out by a boiler explosion. The Bremer House, where you could buy a Strudel, a case of Pils, or even an Iron Cross with oak leaf clusters, if you knew how to ask, was now a sprawling pizza parlor.
She stopped at the corner of Third Avenue as a roller of wind thundered down Eighty-sixth from Central Park, lifting swirls of crackling litter. Bending her head into it, she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to strike distracting melancholy from her brain. A yellow cab cruised by, the driver slowing as he inspected her optimistically, then sped away. She took her hands from her pockets, turned north on Third, and walked.
She was carrying $150,000 in a manila envelope, tucked inside her ruck along with a complete change of attire, full sweats in pink that she could don quickly in an alleyway. Ferrying such funds on the dark streets of Manhattan did not unnerve her, for inside her jacket and beneath her purple ski sweater, her P-38 rested in a waistband holster clipped to the band of her jeans.
She hoped that the money would last. If she was forced to stay away for as long as five years, it would be enough to cover her mother’s room and board. If she was killed, the retainers she paid to a wealthy Lebanese lawyer in London would be put to use. Mr. Farad had a sublime lock on a British police medical examiner, and the corpse of an appropriate homeless woman would be identified as that of Martina Oberst, while her mother would receive £200,000 sterling as a death benefit from a British insurance firm. But if she was captured, tried, and imprisoned . . .
That had happened only once. It would not happen again.
Yet the image of her mother sitting in her rocker, watching the window, waiting for a daughter who would never come, suddenly closed her throat. It surprised her, and she choked back the sob. Mutti, I will not abandon you, she promised silently, for the frail little form with her white curls, mottled cheeks, and large blue eyes of deceptive clarity could no longer comprehend the verbal assurances. She had been lost so very long ago, her mind frozen to the days when Otto, her beloved, lived and little Marti adored her, as she still did.
Martina had long ago forgiven her mother’s helplessness after Papa’s suicide. For even though she had felt equally widowed, her youthful gall made her survival a given, while her mother had no future without him. At first she had raged against the drink that allowed her mother to retreat into her dreams, and fearing that she, too, might be dragged into despair, she fled. Yet later on, as she grew and learned and reflected, and loved her father even more, she had refocused what she felt for him and given it to Mutti. Otto had adored Katharina so, and Martina had to keep his only legacy alive.
She smacked the corners of her eyes with the heels of her gloves, smudging the sentiment away. This would not be the last time she would ever see her mother. It would not.
She crossed the corner of Eighty-seventh, sidestepping the boots of a homeless man who was lying on a subway grating, trapping the rising heat inside a gray army blanket. Only the eyes in his black face and the top of a leather flying helmet poked out from the cuff of greasy wool.
Aaron Davis watched Martina pass, then he reached down to the Motorola tucked between his knees, clicked the mike button twice, waited a beat, then two more clicks. It was only a “heads up” signal, which he had already performed twelve times in the past four hours, whenever young women of a certain weight and height, with faces that might be dangerous, had passed his way. He had changed out of his suit in the surveillance van, taken his position, and declined offers to be relieved, except once to urinate and grab a slice of pizza. The rest of the squad thought he was loony, but the hot grate was the best spot on the “sit.”
Martina glanced once at the avenue as another cab cruised by. Nothing about the vehicle triggered any recognition that it was the same taxi that had passed by before.
She marched on, wanting to arrive already, to see Mutti and make her smile, to give her the small box of liqueur-filled chocolate bottles wrapped in colored foil, to hug her for as long as she dared and be gone. With her own mission running now, there was risk in every predictable encounter. Once this was finished, she could fret over a hundred other questions that remained unanswered.
Omar had not flagged her for another contact, but then she had made it clear that there was no need. She wondered if her anonymou
s employers had swallowed her decoy intention to snatch the missile from a European base. As a function of her operation, this was not key, although a deception was better for security.
Then there was the all-important issue of the real device, its movements and location. The portable antiship missile was still in prototype, although its tests had all been flawless. It was a concept based on the American TOW, the Tube-launched, Optically-sighted, Wire-guided antitank missile used with devastating effect by the United States and her allied infantry troops. In this case, the Hughes Corporation had adopted the design for use by elite naval commandos, such as the SEALs. Minnow One, as the prototype was coded, was relatively small, came attached to an inflatable skirt with an optional, propeller-driven sea sled, and could turn a single courageous frogman into a lethal submarine.
Martina paid a considerable annual stipend for information about such weapons systems. Her source was a man named Sam Tamil, the owner of a security and consulting firm called DDS. Tamil had an international reputation as the most spurious security con artist in the Western world, a charlatan who sold nonfunctional tracking devices to the families of kidnap victims and could reputedly market night-vision goggles to the blind. DDS did, however, possess a data bank of technical information whose purloined tidbits could be purchased at exorbitant prices. And Tamil himself had an Achilles’ heel—his own sacred skin. He never refused a cash down payment, even for top-secret, proprietary information, but once the money was in his account, you merely had to threaten his life and he would deliver.
In London, Tamil had shown Martina the forbidden specs for Minnow One. She had swallowed a gasp when she saw the drawings, for her father’s diary had mentioned his designs for a similar device he had called Der Fliegende Fisch—The Flying Fish. The Nazi weapon had never passed the blueprint stage, but when Tamil touted the Minnow, she knew that it would be her weapon of choice. She did not expect him to actually acquire one for her, so she offered him $50,000 for a year’s schedule, updated monthly, of the weapon’s depot sites and testing scenarios. Soon after the funds were transferred from her Swiss account, she warned Tamil that any informational error, or a leak to any authority, would be discussed with his son Abraham at the elder Tamil’s funeral. The schedules arrived in timely fashion at her private postal box in Manhattan.
Every aspect of her plan that could be ensured by guile, threat, money, or deception had been checked and double-checked. Yet she was only one woman, and for such a complex project she was forced into reliance on others. And all of them men.
In less than forty-eight hours, the first stage of her three-part plan would have to proceed flawlessly: the assembly of materials, rapid movement over long distances, precise timing, and a healthy dose of something whose existence she disdained—luck. Factors that were uncontrollable troubled her most. Was Lieutenant Delgado dead or alive? She realized now that she should have opted for his death, although her reasoning at the time seemed logical: a corpse begins quickly to emanate an alarming stench, while a heavily drugged man is less likely to succeed in summoning help. Yet it was possible that he had been found, and his life was a loose end.
Benjamin Baum provided the most insistent upset to her calm, for being again in the same city with him made her feel like a mouse locked in a boa constrictor’s cage. What was he really doing in New York? Had he come only as a result of the bombing? And if she was the object of his quest, how could he have known of her whereabouts? It was possible that Yadd Allah had been penetrated. Oh, yes, certainly she could bear witness to the Israeli’s ability to manipulate a doubt, to corrupt a conviction until the victim was turned, trapped. Yet who among her flock would risk treachery, when they knew full well how she would deal with them? And she was so cautious, so compartmentalized. None of her men save Mussa was aware of more than his own private assignments, not one would know the impact of the mission until they were all armed and on the road. Only Mussa realized that Martina’s mother still lived. And could he ever betray her? It was not possible. He was a religious man, and his deity bade him obey.
Near the corner of Eighty-ninth Street, she passed a white panel truck with Manhattan Cable TV stenciled on its flank. She glanced into the passenger window and saw the driver slumped against his headrest, a yellow hard hat tipping toward his snoring mouth. It was Detective Jerry Binder, stuffed into an MCTV coverall.
Across the corner, the Yorkville Deli was the only neighborhood concern still open at the late hour. Beyond its foggy glass, the backs of two men were hunched over paper cups that sent swirls of steam past their wool caps. The shorter figure triggered bitterness once more, but then she heard the thrum of Iyad’s motorcycle echoing closer as it ascended Third Avenue, and she quickly turned down Eighty-ninth, taking her emotion with her.
Benjamin Baum. If only she had never met him, who knew what might have been? If only she had seen him early on for what he was, not been weakened by his persuasive powers, had parried his psychological thrusts, his subtle, unrelenting hints at her guilt by association, which whittled her defenses, made her supple to his seductions and his promises. If only she had known then what she had learned through pain: that they were all the same, both sides, all sides, vicious dogs who served their masters while wearing shiny tags stamped patriotism, or loyalty, or love, when in fact they only lusted after the power that licensed them to bite and rend. What might have happened to her then? Would she have grown out of her radical youth, wearied of the fugitive life, retired on one blessed sunny day when she saw a toddler in his mother’s arms and realized her own true and simple desire? She would never know now. And Benjamin Baum had sealed it so.
She walked along the sidewalk of the cross-street, a dark and icy slope of muted cars parked among molehills of trampled snow. Passing a dull gray Fairlane, whose engine hummed and coughed, she peeked at the young woman huddled beneath a draped coat on the back seat, then hurried onward and downward. The row of five-story houses were packed together on the north side like old book spines on a shelf of black sky: tan, red, and gray rectangles. Each one wore a mask of rusting fire escapes, and the buildings butting up against the Edelweiss offered handholds and short leaps, for Martina had not chosen the rest home solely for its comforts.
She stopped at the foot of the cement steps rising up to the glass door of number 167, a building with a red-brick facade, a crisscross of iron fire balustrades, and a small brass shingle with Das Edelweiss engraved in script. She heard Iyad’s Suzuki pass behind her, as the boy, of questionable intelligence, hopefully heeded her instructions. He was to stop halfway down the block, park the bike, and enter the foyer of a building across the way, from which he could observe. It was not too much to ask, even of a simpleton. Yet had her manpower not been strapped, she would have utilized Jaweed or Fouad.
She unzipped her jacket, tugged once at the front of her sweater to be sure it was not snagged, took a long cold breath, and walked up the stairs.
The entrance cubicle of Das Edelweiss was like that of any moderate Manhattan residence. The second door was also glass, electronically locked, and to one side of the foyer was a long lime reception counter before an administrative office. An elderly night manager in a worn blue blazer completed the impression of a European pension gone to seed. He looked up from his newspaper, squinted at Martina, and buzzed her in.
From the moment she saw his face, she knew. He did not start, or leap for a telephone, but he smiled as he straightened up in his chair, and the expression was a touch too enthusiastic, the corners of his lips trembling over his dentures. An elderly Germanic watchman, upon seeing a young woman in leather regalia cross his threshold near to midnight of a Sunday, should have frowned with suspicion.
She felt the downy hairs along her spine arching and a hollow pop as her auditory canals yawned open in alarm. She pulled off her ski hat as the blast of overheated air hit her from the foyer, and as she crossed the strip of maroon carpet, her eyes quickly sought out every shadow in the ancient lobby, behind its green
armchairs and its drooping potted trees.
“Guten Abend,” she said as she placed her left hand on the lip of the reception counter. Her right thumb hooked under her sweater to the butt of her pistol as she bellied up close to the bar. Just push off with the left, draw as you roll, come up shooting.
“Willkommen, Fräulein,” said the night manager.
She waited a beat. Nothing happened. The old man continued to regard her through his heavy black spectacles, his gray hair wild as if he had been nervously finger-combing it. Yet his smile was in place, and she thought for a moment that she might have erred, until she saw the corners of the newspaper he held fluttering like butterfly wings in a breeze.
She looked along the darkened corridor toward the elevator, then back at the entrance doors. Nothing. She quickly slipped out of her rucksack.
“I am here to see my mother.”
The night man apparently felt an admonition appropriate. “It is very late.”
“She doesn’t sleep much.”
“Yes. None of them do.”
Martina waited for the next logical question, but he just looked at her.
“Katharina Oberst,” she said.
“Ach, ja.” He dropped the paper and pushed his chair back. “Five C?”
“Five A,” she corrected.
“Ja, das stimmt,” he said, as if she had unfortunately passed a trick quiz.
“But first I would like to put something in her box.”
The night manager sighed and Martina’s alarm increased. He clearly wished to be rid of her. She quickly opened her rucksack and placed the envelope on the counter.
The old man picked it up and extracted himself from his chair. He pulled open the office door and started inside.
“Der Schlüssel,” Martina said.
He stopped and turned. “Bitte?”
She was holding a small brass key in her gloved hand. He came back to retrieve it, and this time her cold gaze erased the chalky smile completely from his face. He muttered something as he hobbled into the office and found the numbered brass box, using his key in one hole and hers in the other. When the envelope was secured, he was startled to find her standing at his heel.
The Nylon Hand of God Page 20