“You look tired, Edward,” she finally managed to say.
“And you look like you swallowed the canary,” he smiled at her.
She looked away, trying to regain her composure. The flames were roaring now as she remembered his lips and his hot breath on her sweating skin. “Why did you have to come back?” she asked.
“You know why. I came back for you.”
“Even if that is true, you should not have.”
“It is true.”
“Perhaps, but you caused me many problems and much pain when you did,” she said sadly. “You will never know how much, Liebchen,” praying he did not know about the child she was carrying.
She turned her head and saw Major Von Lindemann standing there too, next to Edward. He appeared concerned, but no threat, not yet. His head was bandaged and he had a cane in one hand and a .45 caliber automatic dangling from the other. “I am very sorry I had to hurt you, Major," she said. “Nothing personal, you understand.”
“The fortunes of war, Fraulein Steiner,” he answered with a curt bow, keeping his eyes on her and his anger in check. “I understand completely. I was attempting to do my job, but you did yours far better. As you said, nothing personal — not yet anyway.”
“Good, but keep that .45 down by your side, if you please.” She knew he was a problem, but her eyes seemed to have a mind of their own. They turned back toward Edward, and nothing she could do would stop them.
“To the good times, Hanni,” he said. “When they were good, they were the best.”
“Yes, but they were doomed from the very start.”
“Back in Leipzig, in Dietrich’s office, I begged you to come with me; but you wouldn’t listen. Now, you have no choice. Give it up and come with me. Please.”
“Oh, Edward,” she groaned as she shook her head. “I cannot do that. I told you before; I told you a dozen times; I cannot.”
“It’s because of your father, isn’t it?”
She turned away. “Someday, I hope you can understand.”
“Moscow will never keep their part of the bargain, Hanni.”
“Probably not, but we do not know that, do we?” she insisted, as his eyes caressed her face, her neck, and her arms, making her glow even more brightly. She wanted him so badly, she almost screamed. “I know what the Russians are like, better than anyone. Even if you are right and I am all wrong, he is my father. I must take that chance, and you must understand.”
“All I understand is, if I let you leave I will lose you forever,” he said. “It is as simple as that. I don’t give a damn about them.” He made an off-handed gesture toward the Maybach across the road where Dietrich, Nossing, Raeder, and his daughter were hiding. “I never did. I came back for you. That is what this has been all about, ever since London, and ever since Leipzig. So, you can’t leave. I won’t let you.”
It was those damned gray eyes! “Edward, if you love me — if you truly love me — you must let me go,” she whispered. “I love you too, more than you can ever know, but you cannot keep me here, not like this. I will never forgive you if you do. So let me go, while there is still time.” She turned and looked at Dietrich and the two Raeders, and said, “I do not care about them either, but I cannot arrive in Moscow empty-handed. Please, Edward, stop tormenting me. I am begging you. If you do not let me go, you will be sentencing me to death — both me and my father — and I will never forgive you for that. Never.”
Scanlon stared at her, looking deep into her eyes, until he realized that nothing had changed. She was not the one who was trapped, it had always been him. Despite his carefully laid plans, and despite all he had said and done to find her and stop her; in the end, all he had accomplished was to chase himself into a different corner.
“If I let you go, I will lose you,” he pleaded.
“No. You will lose me if you do not let me go, Liebchen. I cannot stay here with you. So if you really do love me, let me go. There will be a next time and there will be another place for us, I promise.”
“No there won’t be," he insisted, “not if you go back to Moscow. You know that as well as I do.”
“I told you a long, long time ago, we each have a page in the Book of Life. It will take a lot more than Josef Stalin or Lavrenti Beria to fill mine. Trust me, Liebchen. Trust me, there will be a next time. You shall see.”
He stared at her and she could see from his face that she had won.
“Oh, go ahead and go. You know I can’t stop you,” he said in a thin, painful voice.
“I am taking them with me," she said, looking back at Dietrich and the other three.
“You aren’t in a real good position to be making any more demands, Hanni,” Scanlon said, trying to hide the hurt in his eyes.
“You do not need them. You have a whole truckload of blueprints back on that mountain. That is all you need. I will even throw in Emil Nossing, if that will make you happy — and the Major can have the Raeder girl, too. All I want is her father and Otto Dietrich." Hanni paused, looking for the slightest gap in his armor. “Please, Edward. You know I cannot return to Moscow empty-handed, so let me keep Raeder. He wants to go east anyway. You heard him say it a hundred times, so let me have him.”
“Raeder?" He shook his head. "I can’t do that, Hanni.”
“Don’t be greedy, Edward, or you shall end up with nothing. Half a loaf, for old times’ sake. Please.”
“Half a loaf? For old times’ sake?” He shook his head, thinking that those words coming from her lips sounded so bitter that he couldn’t look at her any longer. He turned his eyes away and stared up at the sky. Half a loaf? Without her? That was no-loaf, but what else could he do? Slowly, reluctantly, he agreed. "Let me speak with Paul for a moment.”
“Don’t be long, Liebchen,” she warned. “Time is a luxury I cannot afford.”
Scanlon turned and faced Von Lindemann. “You heard all that?” he asked. The German closed his eyes and nodded, but he offered no reply. “She wants that damned fool Raeder. Are you okay with that?”
“Let her have him,” Von Lindemann answered with a dismissive wave as he leaned heavily on his cane. “Wolfe Raeder is a disgusting fraud. It is his daughter Christina whom we must have — whom I must have.”
“A fraud?”
“It was Christina who did all the work, all of his work, ever since she was a little girl.”
“Do you mean the mathematics, and all those formulas?”
“Yes, apparently she was a child prodigy, a Mozart with numbers, if you will. That is why he hid her away, so he could take all the credit.”
Scanlon’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How do you know that?” he asked.
“Christina told me. I think it was her way of testing me,” he said with a thin, self-conscious smile. “Rudy Mannfried knew too. He may have been the only one who did, until I found out. Do you remember what he said the day he died? He knew the truth about her, and Raeder knew he knew. That is why Raeder hated him.” Von Lindemann shook his head in disgust. “He threatened to turn Rudy over to the Gestapo as a ‘degenerate’ and have them ship him off to one of the camps; but Raeder was afraid the fat man would talk and tell them all about him, so he didn’t dare.” The Major ran his sleeve across his forehead. The air was cool yet his face glistened with sweat. “It turns out the eminent Doktor Raeder is nothing but a charlatan with a monstrous ego, and he will do anything to protect himself. I suspect that is why her mother had that fatal ‘accident’ of hers in Berlin.”
“You think he killed her?”
“More or less. Remember all those not-so-subtle hints, which Herr Dietrich dropped when we were driving to Dachau. He was trying to aggravate Raeder at the time, assuming no one else understood what he was saying; but he as much as told us so, if we had listened. My guess is she would not go along with what he was doing with Christina. She probably threatened to stop it and tell the University; so in a fit of rage, he silenced her. That is how Hermann Göring got his hooks into him. The fat Reichs
marshal blackmailed Raeder into working for him. Otto Dietrich was involved too, or found out about it later. However, they were not as smart as they thought they were. They knew he killed her, but they never bothered to ask why. Later, if Göring had ever found out Raeder had made a fool out of him like that, he would have had him dancing at the end of a rope. Rudy knew that, and so did Raeder.”
Scanlon still found it all hard to believe. “But Christina was only a child back then.”
“She was perhaps ten years old, but she told me her advanced mathematical abilities took off years before that. She developed all of his theories, his formulas, algorithms, and equations, all of it. She is a genius and a prodigy, but a very naive one. Living in that strange world out in the woods, isolated by her father, it is easy to understand why. Those equations were merely the games that a lonely little girl played in her head to pass the time. Perhaps the most sophisticated mathematics anyone has crafted in a generation were literally child’s play.”
“And soon the awkward pupil became the master?”
“Precisely, so let Hanni have the arrogant bastard,” Von Lindemann answered with a wave of his hand. “Let her take him back to Moscow or off to hell for all I care. It serves him right. It is Christina we want.”
Scanlon nodded and walked back to Hanni. “Deal,” he told her. “You can have Raeder, but I want Christina… and Otto Dietrich.”
“No! You can have the girl, and I will throw in Emil Nossing; but Dietrich is mine,” she said emphatically. "And that is not negotiable, Liebchen.”
“I have an old score to settle with him, Hanni, a very old score.” His eyes flashed as he raised his gloved left hand in front of his face. "Remember? I owe him for me and for Will Kenyon. Or have you forgotten about him, too?”
“No, Edward. I have not forgotten anything, but you do not hate him nearly enough. You think you do, but you are a rank amateur in matters like this. If you truly hate him and want to see him punished, then do not take him back to your softhearted western justice. Give him to me. Your people will forgive and forget, and decide they need to use him for something else; but I will never forget, and neither will the Russians.”
“Who’s kidding whom, Hanni?” he said. “For all you know, they’ll throw you in jail and give him the keys to the Kremlin.”
There was a long silence between them. They were like two hungry dogs with their sharp teeth clamped around opposite ends of the same big bone, and neither of them could bring themselves to let go. Finally, it was Paul Von Lindemann who broke the silence. “Oh, do it, Captain,” he exclaimed. "Let her have the sadistic bastard.”
“Do what he says, Liebchen,” she asked. “Let me have Wolfe Raeder and Otto Dietrich. You will have Nossing, the girl, and that whole truckload of papers. Take the deal, Edward. Half a loaf — half is the best you’re going to get.”
He closed his eyes. “Deal,” he said in disgust.
“The Maybach, and a ten minute head start — that is all I ask.”
“Oh, get out of here, before I change my mind.”
She turned to walk away, then stopped and looked at him for a long minute as he stood there looking shattered and helpless. She walked back, put her hands on his chest, and let her lips softly brush his cheek. "Until the next time, Liebchen,” she whispered, barely able to say the words. “And I really do love you — until the next time.”
“There won’t be a next time, Hanni.”
“Yes there will, if you believe in me,” she said as the tears began to roll down her cheeks. “Because I love you, and they can never take that away from us,” she said, as she turned and ran back to the Maybach.
In seconds, she returned with Emil Nossing and Christina Raeder, pushing them into the road toward Scanlon and Paul Von Lindemann. Behind her, Otto Dietrich held back the now panic-stricken Wolfe Raeder as he watched Christina run to Major Von Lindemann’s waiting arms.
“Christina, you cannot leave me,” Wolfe Raeder screamed as he struggled with the much larger Chief Inspector, his worst fears coming to life before his eyes. “No, no!” he pleaded with Dietrich. “Do not let them do this. You do not understand!”
“All I understand, Doktor Raeder, is that you are going to Moscow — we are all going to Moscow,” Hanni said as she helped Dietrich handcuff Raeder’s arms behind him and shove him into the rear seat of the Maybach.
The Chief Inspector slammed the car door behind Raeder as Hanni got in the driver’s seat. Dietrich stood there on the roadside, slowly straightening himself to his full height, before he turned and looked back at Scanlon in triumph. He took a moment to adjust his badly disheveled suit coat and tie. “Auf Wiedersehen, Edward my boy. You are such a fool,” he laughed, chin up, with a thin, arrogant smirk on his lips, savoring the moment. “I told you they have not made the rope that could hang me, did I not? They all need a fellow who can keep order in the streets, even Beria. That is why he will love me. He will love me so much, I shall ask him for the lovely Fraulein Steiner as a reward. Won’t that will be nice?” he grinned. “Au revoir,” he said, with a dramatic flourish. “As usual, you lose and I win… and I ride off with the girl.”
It was as if the dumb bastard could not resist a parting shot. He had to get in that one last dig and grab that final curtain call, and that was the way Scanlon would always remember him. Unfortunately, antagonizing the young American at a highly emotional time like this was the very last thing the Chief Inspector should have done. Scanlon was less than thirty feet away. His right hand was a blur as he snatched the .45 caliber pistol from Paul Von Lindemann’s hand and raised the gun in one smooth, split-second motion. He didn’t aim. That was not necessary. His eye, his arm, and the .45 became one as he pulled the trigger.
It was odd, Scanlon later remembered. Various parts of the human brain react at different speeds, especially when facing stark terror. Otto Dietrich’s eyes took the lead. They grew round as they watched the muzzle of the .45 suddenly track up and point at them, because they knew exactly what was coming, even if the rest of his body did not. Case in point was the arrogant smirk on Dietrich’s lips and his confident laugh. The smirk never caught up with his eyes or his brain. It left him looking like a dimwit as the heavy bullet punched into the center of his chest. It snapped him upright as if he had touched a high voltage line and slammed him back against the rear door of the Maybach.
In that terrifying, wide-eyed instant, his confident laugh died in his throat. His eyes dropped to his chest and his expression changed to utter disbelief as he saw a black hole the size of a fifty-pfennig piece where the middle button should be. As he stood there, propped up by the car, a dark red stain spread across the front of his shirt. His fingers grabbed at it and tore the shirt open until his knees buckled. He looked back up at Scanlon and the smoking .45 in disbelief. His lips moved and he tried to say something, but it was far too late for that. Death, with all its awful implications, had finally seized the Chief Inspector by the throat as he slid down the Maybach’s fender, and toppled sideways onto the pavement, dead.
That silenced Dietrich, but it did not silence Hanni. “No!” she screamed as she looked out the car window and saw Otto Dietrich’s lifeless body lying in the road. “No, Edward, no!”
Every eye in the clearing was now on Ed Scanlon. Slowly, he lowered the still-smoking .45 to his side. Hanni could scream at him as much as she liked, but it was finished. There was nothing she could do about it.
“You said it yourself, Liebchen,” he reminded her, “half a loaf, and I just took mine. It’s the only justice the bastard ever deserved. You’ve still got Raeder, so get out of here before I change my mind.”
Hanni threw the Maybach into gear and jammed the accelerator to the floor. With all twelve cylinders firing, the rear wheels kicked up an angry cloud of gravel as the big car fishtailed down the shoulder, regained the paved surface, and roared away down the narrow road. As he watched it pass around the next bend and disappear from sight, Scanlon felt his shoulders sag. It rea
lly was over now. Hanni was gone. This was the last time he would ever see that damned car, and the last time he would ever see her. That left him numb; and for the life of him, he could not think of anything he could have done differently, or anything that would have made her stay.
When he turned around, he saw Christina Raeder standing by Paul Von Lindemann’s side. Slowly, the Major turned away and walked back to the jeep with one arm over the young girl’s shoulder and the other leaning heavily on his cane. Tall and short, young and old, brilliant and obstinate, they made the oddest of couples, but each had found something here. They had found each other and he could hardly deny them that after all they had been through.
The whole goddamned world had gone mad, Scanlon realized as he turned back and looked east again, toward the curve in the road where the Maybach had just disappeared. Tears began running down his cheeks. He could feel them, but they were not quite enough to quench the angry fires burning deep inside him. They would continue to smolder, and occasionally flare up for a long, long time to come. However, as the flames died down, the tears on his cheeks froze and turned to ice; leaving him colder and lonelier than he had been before. Hanni really was gone, forever.
PART SIX
MOSCOW
AUGUST 1959
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Moscow! It was the last place in the world that Ed Scanlon ever wanted to go. In all his years with the CIA, he had never set foot in the city; but he hated it sight unseen, nonetheless. Unfortunately, his boss, Allen Dulles, now Director of Central Intelligence, ordered him to make the trip, so he went. He arrived bone tired, having spent most of the previous thirty-six hours on a string of uncomfortable civilian and military flights from Washington to Halifax, to London, and to Berlin for a brief layover before that last, long leg into the Soviet capital itself.
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