“Of course not,” Scanlon agreed as the two men smiled politely at each other.
They drove along the country roads for several miles in silence until Scanlon asked a question that had been bothering him. “Tell me something, Major, what happens if some of your people don’t want to come with us?”
“My orders are quite specific. They all must come, because we shall not leave anyone behind for the Russians. No exceptions.”
“What if they refuse? What are you going to do, shoot them?”
“Me? Oh, of course, not,” Von Lindemann bristled at the mere thought. “You are the one who is supposed to do that if it becomes necessary, Captain. That should have been made abundantly clear in London. Why do you think we asked them to send someone?”
As the weeks passed and the Red Army drew inexorably closer to Leipzig, Hanni Steiner was given a freer and freer run of Otto Dietrich’s headquarters. No one had to tell the guards. They figured it out on their own, as did Dietrich’s assistants, none of whom dared utter a word. For the guards, this was not a good time to make trouble, not with the Eastern Front little more than a day’s drive away. It was obvious that she had the Chief Inspector’s protection, so they pretended she did not exist. It was perfectly logical; and in typically German fashion, the most logical solution is usually the best — for the time being.
Otto Dietrich had become increasingly uneasy about their evolving relationship, and knew it could not last. First, she was his prisoner, then a trustee, a parolee, and soon she would become his equal. The final, bitter twist would come when they crossed Russian lines and she would think she owned him. He could read it in her eyes. Every day they grew bolder and more vengeful, leaving him more vulnerable. He tried to project a confident front with his cute songs and little stories, pretending he feared nothing, least of all her. Keep the blonde bitch off balance and confused, he reasoned. That was his best defense, perhaps his only defense until he reached Moscow. Like his patience, though, it was wearing thin.
“I know what you are thinking, my dear,” he taunted her with his plastic and all-knowing smile. “I always know, because I can read minds; so, forget your thoughts of revenge. I will always know what you are thinking, what you are planning, and I will always be one step ahead of you, because I am invulnerable now. You shall see.”
He was not, however. He was a hollow fraud, and he knew it. Deep inside, he was terrified of what his future would bring — a Russian firing squad, an American hangman, or a vengeful blonde with a razor. For the moment, they needed each other; but in the end, he knew he must kill her. If he did not, she would surely kill him. Perhaps his men had been a bit rough on her. What did she expect? She chose this game of espionage, and it could be a rough one. The truth was in those blue eyes of hers, they were her Achilles’ heel. They told him she was not one to ever forgive or forget. Once she got those engineers in the waiting arms of the Red Army, she would kill him exactly as she vowed she would, with her bare hands.
So, his clock was ticking. It would only be a matter of days, two at most, before he could grab the engineers at Volkenrode and bolt east to Moscow. It would require some delicate timing. He had convinced Prinz-Albrecht Strasse that the Research Institute’s staff must be moved east to Leipzig. If he left too soon, however, and headed toward the Red Army lines and Berlin got wind of it, he would be a dead man. On the other hand, if he stayed in Leipzig and waited too long, the Reds would owe him nothing. It would require every trick in his bag to keep the Steiner woman under control until then. He would need her and her gold badge to pass through Red Army lines. After that, he would be dealing directly with Stalin and Beria. They knew what those jet airplanes meant; and they would give him the blonde bitch with a red bow tied around her neck, if that was what he wanted. She knew Stalin did not like loose ends any more than he did. Very soon now, she would be the one doing the begging. She would agree to be his whore, or she would spend the rest of her days in the Gulag.
It was a delicate game and he had everything under control, until that damned fool Scanlon had to show up. He was a wild card neither of them wanted. When the Gestapo manhunts failed to find him, Dietrich had come to believe that the American had actually died two months before. After all, his monkey soldiers had done a thorough job on the young fool — broken ribs, missing fingernails, a concussion, bruises, starved, dehydrated, and all the rest. Yet somehow, as if by a miracle, here he was back in Leipzig again. Perhaps he was part cat after all. If so, the last of Scanlon’s nine lives was about to come to a quick and bloody end. Amateur night was over, Edward, my boy, he thought. You have interfered in Oz one time too many.
Still, how can a man ever understand a woman, Dietrich wondered. He would never have suspected Scanlon was back in town, much less alive, if she had not told him, if she had not insisted he arrest Scanlon when Horstmann told her where he was. She truly was a black widow, he concluded. Dietrich knew that Scanlon had been her lover and that he was undoubtedly the father of her unborn child, yet here she was handing him over to the Gestapo, virtually signing his death warrant as if he meant nothing to her. How cold-blooded. The fact that she would choose two dwarfs like Stalin and Beria over the handsome, intelligent young American proved the incredible power Moscow held over their networks. The raid on the bookseller’s house was her idea, not Dietrich’s, because she knew better than anyone that Scanlon was quite capable of wrecking their plans. To top it all off, like a typically addle-brained woman; she made Dietrich swear he would take Scanlon alive and unharmed. The nerve of the little bitch! She was trying to salve her conscience at his expense. Amazing.
“The American should not be difficult to spot,” Dietrich told his hastily assembled squad of SS Storm troops. “Look for muddy boots, some old bruises, and a shortage of fingernails. And need I say, God help the man who misses him. He had better have warm boots and be able to speak Russian.”
The Steiner woman was more correct than she knew, he mused. The American would be far more dangerous to her on the outside, safely beyond her grasp, where he would continue to keep her off balance, muddle-headed, and vulnerable. However, she was the one Dietrich feared, not one lone American. The Chief Inspector needed her to get through the Red Army lines, so leaving Scanlon out there to keep her distracted and vulnerable was precisely the way to handle her. It was live and let live. Dietrich intended to live, so he would allow young Scanlon to stay alive, for the present anyway.
When the Chief Inspector slipped out of his Maybach that night, he carried a small-caliber Mauser automatic pistol in his coat pocket, as usual. It was the very type of small pocket gun favored by petty thieves, pimps, and police detectives. When he saw the American had gotten himself hopelessly trapped between the old brick shed and the fence, the Chief Inspector took careful aim at the wounded SS trooper blocking the American’s escape and pulled the trigger without a second’s hesitation. Not to worry, though, Scanlon’s day of reckoning would come soon enough.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Liebchen, Liebchen, she moaned, why did you come back? Why now? In two more days, it would no longer have mattered. With some guile, some lies, and some outright threats, the previous afternoon, she and Dietrich had finally convinced Wolfe Raeder that his smartest move was to travel east with them, not west. That was how they would pry that arrogant aeronautical engineer and the Me-262 drawings away from the tight grip of the Luftwaffe. “Promise the good Doktor anything, my dear,” Dietrich told her. “Stalin will not quibble, and neither will that fool Raeder once you get him to Moscow.”
So she went to work on him. “Only the Russians understand your unique talents, Doktor Raeder. You can have your own jet aircraft development program, your own factory, and build it from the ground up, with a huge salary, a car and driver, a dacha in the country, and the best test facilities money can buy. Best of all, you shall be the one in charge.” Flattery appealed to Raeder’s ego, but he continued to press for more details and guarantees. He was far more concerned about his
future status than any lingering concern he may have had for Germany. Still, Raeder refused to give them a final commitment. He continued to play coy.
“We shall see,” he said, “and we shall see what the Americans have to offer.”
In the end, it was the rapid advance of the Red Army that forced Raeder’s hand. When Otto Dietrich and Hanni Steiner went to see him earlier the day before, he agreed to leave with them. He said he needed two days to pack, so tomorrow morning she and the Chief Inspector would arrive with a half dozen trucks and a contingent of SS troops to evacuate the camp. She would then have the Hermann Göring Research Institute’s staff and their most important drawings in her firm grasp. Once she had them safely back in Leipzig, she could radio Beria and make arrangements to deliver it all to the rapidly advancing Red Army further east. Beria had a company of specially trained NKVD shock troops waiting for her call. Tomorrow, just one more day, that was all she would need. She told herself to block out the pain, block out the memories of Edward, block out the worse memories of Otto Dietrich, block it all out, and concentrate on the job at hand. It almost worked, too, until darling Edward popped back into her life, bringing with him all those memories and waves of guilt that were now exploding in her head.
After the abortive raid on the bookshop, Dietrich returned her to her makeshift cell on the top floor of Gestapo headquarters. If there was ever a lower point in her life, Hanni could not remember it. She hated herself, hated the terrible things she had done, and hated what she was about to do even more. Worse still, she was caught in a trap of her own making and could not do a damned thing about it. The next morning, she awoke to a loud knock on her door. “You have a visitor,” the guard said brusquely as he opened it and allowed Georg Horstmann to squeeze past him into the small room. Horstmann of all people, she thought. The old bastard was like the voice of her father, the voice of her own conscience, and the last person in the world she wanted to see, then or ever. She did not get up. She remained lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling as the guard closed the door behind him and left them alone.
She said nothing and neither did Horstmann. He stood there near the door, nervously fingering the brim of his battered felt hat as the long minutes passed. “If you have something to say to me, say it,” she finally demanded. “If not, get the hell out and leave me alone.”
“The Chief Inspector said I could see you, but all he gave me was five minutes,” the old man began, his words coming slowly. “After they let me talk to you last night, they locked me in the basement and have been questioning me ever since.”
“It comes with the territory.”
“I have been there before,” Horstmann shrugged. “They did not hurt me much.”
Still, she could not look at him. “If you want a medal, call Moscow. I am fresh out.”
“No, after they had their fun, they released me. I suppose I have you to thank.”
“I did nothing.”
“Nothing? You told Dietrich where he could find the boy, did you not?”
“It is none of your damned business what I did,” she said angrily as she swung around and sat up, her face pale and her eyes red. “I have my orders — and he is no boy.”
“Orders?” he asked in a painful whisper. “Well? Did they kill him?”
“No, he got away.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
“Thank God?” her voice cracked and her face turned angry. “You know what this means, old man? He will ruin everything.”
Horstmann looked at her for a long, painful minute before he laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “All I know is you, Hannelore. I know you and your family far better than you know yourself. That boy did not come back here to ruin anything. He came back to find you and to help you, because he is hopelessly in love with you.”
“You have grown soft in the head, Georg.”
“That is not you speaking. I know you too well to believe that,” he said as looked at her with those sad, forgiving eyes of his. “It is that terrible hold they have over you. I fought shoulder to shoulder with your father for forty years. We are like brothers. If he were here, he would tell you he is not worth the price you are paying, Hannelore.”
“Stop calling me that!”
“And he would not want that American boy on his conscience any more than I do.”
“What? First you find God and now you find a conscience,” she mocked him. “What are you? A Communist or a priest?”
“Neither, merely a tired, old man,” he replied sadly. “And if I have gotten a little soft in the head, I am entitled; but I will not let you harm him. He is a comrade of ours. He also fought at our side, as your father fought at my side in Spain, and that boy deserves better from both of us.”
“Shut up, old man. Don’t you think I know that? I have my orders.” She could not look at him, afraid of the power in those soft, accusing eyes. They made her feel dirty.
“Scanlon told me to tell you that he came here to get you out,” Horstmann whispered.
“And you believed him, you old fool? He came here to grab Raeder and the scientists at Volkenrode, not me.” She swung her legs over the side of the cot and put her head in her hands. “Does he think I am that stupid? Do you think I am that stupid?”
“That boy came back for you, Hannelore! You are all he asked about — you, nothing more. I can accept Otto Dietrich’s interrogation cells and all the rest of the filth we are forced to swim in these days, but I will not accept your scorn, or what you are doing to yourself.”
“I am sorry I cannot live up to your grand expectations, Georg.”
He saw her terrible pain and finally relented. “All right, but what will you do?”
“I do not know,” she answered in a sad voice. “I truly do not. All my life, I have been pushed and pulled by people and causes — live ones and dead ones. Do you know what that feels like, Georg? To be left with nothing for yourself — no parts, no pieces, not even a tiny corner, nothing.” Hanni shuddered, as if an icy chill had swept into the room.
“Yes, I know, and I can see it is killing you.” She was growing cold, remote, and desperately unhappy, but it was not her fault. It was Otto Dietrich’s and the rest of the sadists who worked in this building, as well as the equally sadistic ones in Moscow. Hanni had always been a creature of strong beliefs and ideals. They came from her father and her grandfather before him. These last few years, however, had turned those into dusty relics that were as useless as an old bookseller and a boarded-up bookshop in Nazi Germany. So, he wondered, would the book business be any better in Moscow? Horstmann doubted it.
“Someday, we shall make them pay for this, Hanni, for all of it,” he said as she sat up, threw her arms around his waist, and began to cry.
“No, Georg,” she answered as she looked up at him, her blue eyes gleaming as cold as ice through the tears. “I shall settle my own scores. They can take everything else away from me, but my revenge is the one thing I will never be denied, never!”
The door to the hallway suddenly swung open, and she heard Otto Dietrich’s smug voice. “Did I hear the word, ‘never’? I told you before, my dear; never can be a very, very long time.” The Chief Inspector sauntered into the room, his eyes moving back and forth between them, until he turned his attention to the old man. “Ah, Herr Horstmann, how goes the spy business these days? Even worse than the used book business, I expect.”
“Chief Inspector,” Horstmann mumbled as he bowed and backed away.
“Oh, do not leave on my account, Georg. It is so nice to see old friends,” he grinned with a mouth full of sharp white teeth. “Unfortunately, Fraulein Steiner and I have some unfinished business out of town; so the gentlemen in black in the hallway will escort you out — unless, of course, you would like another tour of the building. We have a few new toys in the basement, which I’m sure you would find of interest.”
Eyes lowered, Horstmann reached for the doorknob. “I was just leaving,” he mumbled as he dared one las
t, sympathetic glance back at Hanni.
“How forgetful of me; you had the one-Mark tour last night.” He laughed as he watched the old man scurry out the door and down the hall.
“Why do you enjoy tormenting people?” Hanni asked him.
“Why? Because I can, my dear. It is one of the few pleasures that come with this distasteful little job of mine.”
“Some day soon, someone will cut off your pleasures.”
His smile slowly faded. “A less charitable person would take that as a threat, my dear; but not I. To me, it is merely another delicious challenge, and a good challenge always arouses me. But, enough of that,” he said as he turned away. “It appears your ever-so-meddlesome American lover has eluded my slough-footed men in black once again. They tore the city apart all morning, all the usual places, and found nothing. Like the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel, he has disappeared; and as it was with Leslie Howard, it is obvious our boy could not have done it by himself. He had help.”
“Help? That is ridiculous. Who? There is no one left.”
“Oh, come, come, my dear,” he laughed derisively. “The list begins and ends with you. I could put the whip to old Horstmann again, but we both know where he was last night, do we not? What about your other henchmen, Johannes and Peter? Which one was it?”
“They are tired, broken old men. Do you have any idea how preposterous that sounds?”
He stepped closer, the humor now completely gone from his voice. “The stakes are very high, my dear, the highest of my life and yours. You see, there is only one reason why the OSS would send Scanlon back here, especially now. They want the jet airplane research out at Volkenrode, just as we do. They sent him here to find you, blow some sweet nothings in your ear, and talk you into helping him grab Raeder and his blueprints. Any fool can see that, even one as hopelessly in love as you are.”
She glared up at him, but his eyes were as cold as a grave.
“Do not think for a second that I would not throw you back in the basement if I thought you really were helping him,” he continued. “There is nothing like a long night in one of my interrogation rooms with my men to open the doors and windows into a man’s soul — or a woman’s, especially when they know exactly what is coming.”
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