Cold War Trilogy - A Three Book Boxed Set: of Historical Spy Versus Spy Action Adventure Thrillers

by William Brown

  “Perhaps you are planning on staying, mein Herr?”

  “No, no, I was just saying…”

  “Captain, if we go in together, we come out together. I will not hear of doing it any other way. Is that perfectly clear?”

  Scanlon looked up at him and shrugged. “Okay, I guess we’re both nuts.”

  They retraced their steps to the car, and then drove back around to the rear door of the police station as if they had business there. Von Lindemann parked his car behind the Maybach, not five feet from the young sentry. Surprised to have still more visitors at this time of night, the boy held his rifle at the ready as he stepped forward and peered inside the car. When he saw the Luftwaffe uniforms, he relaxed a bit. Why shouldn’t he? The only enemies he had seen lately were the ones inside the B-17s flying high overhead.

  Von Lindemann jumped out of the car and strode around to the passenger side. “Get out, you swine!” he shouted as he yanked the passenger door open and pointed his Luger at Scanlon. “You, with the rifle,” he snapped at the guard. “Don’t just stand there, you idiot. Keep this fellow covered.” The Major sounded as rude and obnoxious as the other Nazi officers the sentry saw each day, so he did what he was told.

  “What did he do?” the guard asked as he strained to recognize their faces in the darkness.

  “Do? Why he is a British spy, of course,” Von Lindemann said as he pushed Scanlon toward the guard. “Now, open the door, you fool. The Chief Inspector is waiting to question this one personally.”

  The guard turned and banged his fist on the door. “Klaus… Klaus! Prisoner coming in. Open the…” He would have finished the sentence if Scanlon had not snatched the rifle from his hands and shoved him against the wall, while Von Lindemann pressed his Luger against the boy’s forehead.

  “Don’t be a hero," Scanlon warned him. “You are too young to die like this, aren’t you?" The sentry’s round eyes swung back and forth between the two men and he quickly shook his head. “Good, now tell your pal Klaus to open the door.”

  The sentry banged on the door, louder and more insistently this time. “Klaus!" he said as his voice cracked.

  “Ja, Ja, moment, Franz, moment, bitte,” came Klaus’s bored reply.

  The lock rattled and the bolt slid back. As the door opened, Scanlon shoved the young sentry through the gap and into the other guard, driving them both into the opposite wall. Klaus was big, but slow. Before he regained his balance, Scanlon cracked him in the forehead with the butt of the rifle and the big German dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

  “Drag him around the corner,” Scanlon told the younger sentry as Von Lindemann closed the door behind them and threw the bolt. Scanlon helped the sentry shove Klaus under the stairs and laid his rifle next to him as if he had fallen asleep. Scanlon drew his own Luger from inside his coat and jammed it in the younger guard’s back. “Now, let’s move,” he told him, pushing him ahead of them like a shield as they ran up the steep flight of stairs to the second floor. It was immediately obvious to Scanlon that very little inside the building was as he remembered it. The carpets were stained and torn, the walls were scuffed and marred, and the immaculate staircase and hallway were littered with trash and cigarette butts. It has gone to hell like everything else in this godforsaken country, he thought.

  Von Lindemann struggled gamely to keep up the pace. He limped badly, his face lined with pain. When they reached the second floor landing, Scanlon stopped. “Paul, check the hallway,” he whispered.

  “We are in luck,” he answered. “It is empty, no guards.”

  “Then follow me,” Scanlon said as he shoved the sentry down the hallway toward Otto Dietrich’s corner office. He counted on the young man to be too scared to think about resisting. Faster and faster, Scanlon drove him down the hall, not bothering with the doorknob or a knock. The other office doors had wooden panels, top and bottom; but the top panel in the Chief Inspector’s door was frosted glass, no doubt copied after Sam Spade’s in “The Maltese Falcon,” Scanlon realized. Instead of “Spade and Archer” painted in the lower right corner, his said “O. Dietrich, Chief Inspector in the same font used in the movie. This time, Dietrich’s Hollywood affectation would cost him dearly. Running full out now, Scanlon waited for the precise moment to shove the young sentry hard in the back and launch him into the frosted glass panel. The poor kid screamed as he crashed through it like a V-2 rocket and fell in a heap of wood and shattered glass in the middle of the Chief Inspector’s carpet.

  Heart pounding, Scanlon reached through the opening and swung the Luger back and forth across the room as he opened the door. He was reacting on pure adrenaline now, ready to put a bullet in anything that even hinted of a threat. However, as he took in the scene, his former feelings of fear, suffocation, and paralysis were quickly replaced by anger and an overpowering urge to kill. Across the room stood Wolfe Raeder, eyes wide open, mouth gaping, with his ever-compliant daughter, Christina, cowering at his side. The sentry lay sprawled on the floor in front of Otto Dietrich’s desk, and the chief bastard himself sat behind it in all his splendor. He wore one of his impeccably tailored Italian suits with blue pinstripes, a blood-red silk tie, and a matching handkerchief puffed out in his breast pocket. He sat tipped back in his rickety desk chair, feet propped on his desk, and mouth ajar as if frozen in mid-sentence. His expression of complete surprise turned to fear as he realized he was staring down the barrel of someone else’s gun for a change. It was an expression Scanlon had dreamed of painting on Otto Dietrich’s face for months.

  For Scanlon, however, the real surprise was in the far corner of the room. It was Hanni Steiner sitting on a large couch — no prison uniform, no handcuffs, and no blood or bruises. Their eyes met for the first time since that tearful farewell two months before on the dock in Denmark, and he could only stare in disbelief as his stomach leaped into his throat. There was no longer any need to search the basement interrogation cells for her, since she was sitting comfortably right in front of him. Her radiant blond hair was freshly combed, her clothes were clean, and the only pain he saw was in the expression on her face. His eyes burned holes in her, until she could not take it any longer. She looked away without saying a word. She did not need to. She was not Otto Dietrich’s prisoner; she worked for him now. In that instant of cruel recognition, Scanlon did not know whether to shoot Dietrich, shoot her, or shoot himself.

  “What a marvelous scene!” the Chief Inspector broke the spell as he clapped his hands together, loudly and sarcastically. “It is the look of love scorned. Cut and print, Scanlon. Cut and print. That is a wrap.”

  The American’s white-hot rage did not need much to flash over. In two long strides, he was at the desk. His bad hand grabbed the grinning Gestapo officer by the throat as best it could, while the other swung the heavy Luger and backhanded it across the side of his face, raking the pistol barrel across his cheek, and knocking him to the floor. Dietrich’s eyes rolled up in his head as he lay there stunned, but Scanlon was not finished. He went down after him and hit him again. He probably would have beat Dietrich to death right there, had not Paul Von Lindemann stepped in and caught his arm with the crook of his cane.

  “Enough, Captain,” the Major warned, “do not become one of them, not like this."

  “Easy for you to say, Paul,” Scanlon answered with a murderous edge on his voice. The two blows had left a gash and two big bruises on the left side of Dietrich’s face, and he was bleeding on the rug. “That isn’t half of what I owe him.”

  “His time will come; but we need him if we want to get out of here. Besides, saving him for the hangman is the worst punishment you can give.”

  Scanlon looked down and saw the chief bastard’s eyes blink and begin to open. Von Lindemann was right, he realized, as he saw fear on Dietrich’s face for the first time. There were small beads of sweat on the bridge of that grand nose, and this time he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

  “What’s wrong, Otto?” Scanlon taunted
him. “No clever comments now?” he asked as he ransacked the Chief Inspector’s pockets, pulling out his wallet, his identification papers, his car keys, and a small automatic pistol. “Well, what do we have here? A Mauser, a 6.5-millimeter Mauser,” he said as he tossed it to Von Lindemann. “Does that ring a bell, Paul?”

  The Major’s eyes narrowed as he caught the pistol and examined it. “He truly is a shit. Now, I am sorry I stopped you from beating him even more.”

  “You haven’t even scratched the surface,” Scanlon said as he got to his feet, storm flags flying. “You’re right, though, killing him here is too easy. He’s coming with us.”

  “No, he is mine!” Hanni called out to him from the far corner. “You have no right to take him anywhere.”

  “No right?” Scanlon turned and challenged her. “You’ve got a lot of nerve to tell me I have no right, Hanni.”

  “Not compared to what he did to me, to what he did to us!” She stood and jammed her fingers into her chest over and over again. “He belongs to the people of Leipzig, and he belongs to me. We are the ones who suffered the most at his hands and we are the only ones who have the right to judge him.”

  “Oh, get in line, Liebchen,” Scanlon answered bitterly. “You can all get in line. I’m taking him with me, and I’m taking you, too.”

  “Like hell you are!”

  “Like hell I’m not,” he countered, feeling angry and betrayed.

  They stood glaring at each other, neither backing down until Dietrich himself broke the spell. He sat up slowly, like a heavyweight fighter who had been dropped for the count and wasn’t so sure he wanted another go at it. Scanlon raised his Luger, pointed it at the bridge of Otto Dietrich’s nose, and let his finger tighten on the trigger. “Ding, dong, Otto," Scanlon said as the Chief Inspector cringed and leaned away from the muzzle of the gun. “Ding, dong, the Wicked Witch really is dead.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Dietrich’s voice faded to a hoarse whisper.

  “It means the Munchkins have taken over Oz, Otto, that’s what it means.” Scanlon looked at him with pure hatred. “What? No cute little song today? None of your movie quotes?” He saw Dietrich’s hand make a subtle move toward his jacket pocket. “Don’t bother looking for the Mauser. The bulge was ruining the lines of that lovely Italian suit, and you know how a gentleman should never look poorly dressed,” Scanlon said, his cold gray eyes devoid of any humor. He reached down and pulled the puffed silk handkerchief from Dietrich’s breast pocket, blew his nose in it, and stuffed it back in the Chief Inspector’s pocket. “There,” Scanlon said with a smile, “I’ve been waiting for months to do that. You have no idea how good it feels.”

  With that one meaningless gesture, the once-terrifying figure of Otto Dietrich shrank before Scanlon’s eyes like a balloon with a large leak. He shook his head at the disgusting sight sitting on the floor in front of him, which was probably the unkindest cut of all. Straightening up, Scanlon paused to look around at the Chief Inspector’s office. “So this is it, huh? The seat of your little empire. How pathetic.” It seemed so ordinary, small, and drab. The furniture was old, scratched and chipped. The walls were painted a sad, institutional green like a bookkeeper’s office. In the corner stood a rickety wooden file cabinet with an ancient hot plate and chipped teapot sitting on top. Typical cop, Scanlon thought, a little man with a gun and a big badge.

  One demon was down, but that still left the big one. Scanlon looked at Hanni and wanted desperately to understand. He felt angry, betrayed, and badly used; yet as much as he wanted to hate her, he could not. “I’d ask why, Hanni, but it wouldn’t make any difference, would it?”

  She looked away and said nothing.

  “Talk to me, damnit!” he screamed, pointing the Luger at her.

  "No, because you are right. It would not make any difference," she screamed back. "So, shoot me, if you want. It could not be any worse than living with your scorn."

  “I have a right to know.”

  “You would not understand, Liebchen.”

  “Wouldn’t understand,” he fumed. “I gave up everything for you, for God’s sake. Why do you think I came back?”

  “I truly do not know,” she answered as she buried her face in her hands.

  “You set me up at the bookshop, didn’t you?” he said as the awful truth caved in on him. “That’s it, isn’t it? Horstmann told you I was waiting there for you, so you sold me out to Dietrich, didn’t you? Why? Was it orders from Moscow again, or did you do it on your own this time?”

  She looked up, her eyes rimmed with red, but she refused to respond to the taunts.

  “Answer me, damn you!”

  “I had to do it. I had no choice, I never did, and you should understand that better than anyone. It had nothing to do with you, Liebchen, or with us. It never did.”

  “Nothing to do with us? I loved you.”

  “I never asked you for love, did I? And I warned you.”

  “Yes, you did,” he admitted as he lowered the gun. “They are lying to you, Hanni. All of them, Beria, Stalin, even this bastard Otto Dietrich, they’re all lying.”

  “And so are you. You all are, all of you.”

  “How touching,” the Chief Inspector sneered. “The two innocent victims tossing clods of guilt at each other to see who comes out the dirtiest.” He took his silk handkerchief from his jacket pocket, intending to press it against the side of his face to stop the bleeding. He looked at it, remembered what Scanlon had done to it, and tossed it in the corner.

  Scanlon pointed the Luger at Dietrich again. “Don’t push your luck, Otto,” he said.

  “We must go,” Von Lindemann reached out and laid another gentle hand on Scanlon’s shoulder.

  “You are right, Paul. We’re taking them with us, all of them,” Scanlon said with a look of angry determination as he helped the dazed sentry to his feet and motioned them all toward the door.

  “I am not going anywhere,” Wolfe Raeder puffed indignantly. “The countryside is entirely too dangerous to expect me to go traipsing about with a couple of malcontents like you two. My daughter and I are civilians. We choose to stay here.”

  Scanlon raised his pistol very off-handedly and pulled the trigger. In the small, closed room, the 9-millimeter handgun sounded like a howitzer, as the bullet smacked into the wall two inches from Raeder’s ear. His chin dropped and his face turned white as he found himself staring into the smoking black hole of the Luger’s barrel.

  “You are coming with us, Herr Doktor. After all, you are the guest of honor. And if you argue with me again, I’ll start shooting off body parts.”

  The chief engineer took a step backward and pulled his daughter in front of him, using her as a shield as Scanlon’s pistol tracked along after him.

  “Papa?” Christina asked in a confused, frightened voice, looking back over her shoulder at him; but her father made no reply.

  “That’s right,” Scanlon told him. “Hide behind your daughter, and don’t come out until I tell you.”

  Hanni stepped toward him and pleaded, “Liebchen, please, you cannot take me with you. You might as well kill me now. Can you not see that? You must leave me here, and you must leave me with something," she begged.

  She could read her reply in Scanlon’s cold, steel-gray eyes.

  “You do not need Raeder,” she said. “You have all the others and the blueprints. Share the wealth, Edward. Please let me have him for old time’s sake?”

  “For old time’s sake?” he repeated in disbelief. “You made your choice, Hanni. Now live with it.”

  “Please,” she cried. “Try to understand.”

  “I can’t, and I don’t have to. I’m taking Raeder, I’m taking Dietrich, I’m taking the blueprints, and I’m taking everything else I can get my hands on, including you.”

  “At least leave me Raeder. If you do not, you will be signing my death warrant.”

  “That’s right, isn’t it? If I leave you nothing, you will not be able t
o return to Moscow, will you? You’ll be forced to come with me.”

  “Greed does not become you, Edward.”

  “We’ll see,“ Scanlon said as he pushed Dietrich and the young sentry toward the office door. “You too, Hanni, you stay right here next to me where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “We cannot all fit in my little car, you know,” Von Lindemann warned.

  “No, we’re traveling in style this time, Paul,” Scanlon answered as he dug his hand in Dietrich’s coat pocket and tossed the keys to the Maybach to Von Lindemann. “Otto, if you do anything stupid, the Major will be sure to side-swipe a tree and ruin that pretty paint job.”

  Scanlon turned and looked through the shattered door into the hallway. It was still empty, so Scanlon herded them all to the top of the stairs. He took the lead, holding the German sentry by his collar as they took the first flight down. Hanni, the Raeders, and Dietrich followed behind in a tight little group, while Paul Von Lindemann brought up the rear. Bunched together, when the group made the turn on the final landing, Hanni leaned back and shoved Raeder and Otto Dietrich into Von Lindemann. She then pushed Scanlon into the sentry, knocking them both off balance long enough for her to jump over the banister and take off running down the first floor corridor.

  Scanlon regained his balance and ran down the last stairs to the first floor hallway. “Hanni, stop!” he shouted as he raised his pistol and took aim. For the briefest of moments, he had the Luger centered on her back before she turned a corner and disappeared; but he did not pull the trigger. Despite everything that had happened, he could not bring himself to do that.

  “Damn!” he swore as he reached back and grabbed Otto Dietrich by the collar. “Get outside,” Scanlon ordered as he shoved the Chief Inspector through the rear door and toward the long, black Maybach.