As the agonizing seconds stretched into long minutes, Landau knew he could wait no longer. His time had run out. He carried a small flashlight and flicked it on. He rose and followed its thin beam as it probed the floor nearby. He saw big wooden crates, stacks of them, old airplane parts, several trucks, storage tanks, and two long workbenches lying in the center. Each was ten feet wide and perhaps sixty or seventy feet long. They were littered with tools and shiny metal parts and appeared to have been used recently. He looked up. Overhead ran the steel I-beam track of a heavy industrial crane, its empty hook dangling down over the workbenches. This is interesting, Landau thought.
The cavernous shed was far too high and wide for him to see beyond the closest objects. Slowly, he walked farther in toward the center, keeping his flashlight beam low on the floor. As he moved closer, he began to see the dim outline of a long, shrouded object in the darkness ahead. No, there were two of them resting side by side on the floor. They were at least fifty feet long and covered with tarpaulins. The front ends appeared tapered, and their rear ends angled up sharply toward the ceiling. He quickly moved closer and raised the corner of the tarpaulin. Beneath the edge, he saw heavy-duty rubber tires, and felt the old rage building within him. He pulled on the tarp and kept pulling until it fell on the floor, no longer caring if anyone knew he had been there. He found himself looking up at a long, flatbed truck carrying a complex, hydraulic rack upon which lay a rocket. A rocket! He was looking at mobile rocket launchers, two of them, and they were carrying medium-range military rockets that appeared to be horribly similar to old German V-2’s! Old? Perhaps, but they had been cruelly effective in 1945 when they struck London, Coventry, and Amsterdam in the War. Landau was no expert, but he knew a rocket of that size could easily reach Tel-Aviv from here.
In that instant, Landau understood everything. Getting away and warning Tel Aviv would not be enough now. It was those damned Germans again. This was their handiwork, all right. If the guards caught him on the way out, however, his warning would never be sent and the secret would die with him. No one would suspect anything until the rockets landed, and it would be too late. That thought terrified him more than the thought of dying; because death was relative. After the camps, he could never fear it. He actually would welcome it, which was why he made the perfect secret agent. To the Dead Man, it did not matter who dug the grave.
Suddenly, however, in this old dilapidated hangar, his life changed. It now had an unwanted value equal to their secret. That was much more than it had ever been worth in the past, so he could not die now. He must stay alive, at least long enough to warn Tel-Aviv, and that realization momentarily unnerved him. After seventeen years of not caring, the Dead Man was no longer certain he knew how to live.
Landau quickly looked around. To have any chance of escaping this place, he needed a diversion. A diversion? He smiled. Why not a very big one? Why not the biggest? Why not destroy all of this, before they can finish their evil work? That would stop the attack. It would set them back a few months, perhaps even years; and that would be a sweet bonus. Even if he did not get away and they killed him right here, it would not matter. Yes, Landau knew what he must now do, and quickly. He raked the narrow beam of light across the workbenches, desperately searching for something with which to destroy or at least damage the rockets. Unfortunately, he was traveling light tonight, so he had no explosives. He saw a large hammer lying on the bench. He picked it up and turned back toward the rockets but soon realized those damned things were far too big for him to put more than a few dents in them, and that would not be enough. Suddenly it came to him — fire! Yes! Find something that will burn, he thought. He spotted a pile of rags lying on the end of one of the workbenches. On the floor next to it sat a metal locker. He could only guess what was inside, but two sharp blows from the hammer made quick work of the cheap lock and hasp. He opened the top, and in the dim light of the flashlight he saw a half-dozen cans and smiled. It contained paint, rectangular cans of solvents, mineral spirits, and paint thinner in one-gallon cans. He pulled out one of the one-gallon cans and looked at the label. Benzene! Yes, that should do nicely, he thought.
Landau found a screwdriver on the closest table and quickly punched holes in the top of the can, grabbed the rags, and turned back toward the two trailers. The paint thinner would burn like Hell itself, and he smiled. How fitting. Where would be the best place to set it? The trailers themselves were metal and were not likely to burn very well unless they had been fueled and were ready to fire, which he doubted. As he turned, the thin flashlight beam crossed a large, concrete-block storeroom set against the hangar’s wall. A storeroom? It looked more like a bunker. How odd, he thought, as he let the light return and stop there. It looked new, newer than the surrounding building; but why would they build one in here? It made little sense to him. His brain wanted to ignore it, stick to the urgent task at hand, and start the fire; but his eyes kept returning to the storeroom and the flashlight beam followed.
“Forget it,” he argued with himself. “What does the storeroom possibly matter? Hurry and set the fire, you fool, before it’s too late,” he whispered to no one but himself.
Yet that storeroom continued to draw his attention like a magnet. Landau soon found himself walking toward it, the can and the rags hanging forgotten in his hands. As he got closer, he saw that the storeroom had a thick, reinforced-steel door and no windows. On the door was stenciled a yellow circle with alternating black and yellow quadrants. It was an international warning symbol and instantly registered deep inside his brain, sending an icy, terrified shiver running down his spine. He stepped closer, pointing the narrow flashlight beam at the words. They were in Arabic and in German, and he had to squint to make them out. The top line read ‘Achtung! Radioaktivitat!’ and he suddenly grasped the larger and infinitely more terrible secret this place held.
Radioactive! Landau stood frozen to the spot. Those bastards, he thought. He had assumed the worst, but he had not guessed the half of it. How could the Egyptians be this foolish? Then he remembered. The Egyptians? Never. They did not have a fraction of the technical competence something like this would require. No, it was his old enemies in the black death’s-head uniforms, probably with the help of the Physics Department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the University of Berlin. Landau had never been more certain of anything in his life.
He stepped back, his eyes still riveted on the door. A diversion? No! He must destroy all of this if it was the last thing he ever did. He turned and staggered back to the trailers. Tripping over his own feet, he fell and dropped the can, spilling the paint thinner all over himself and the floor. He rose to his knees. Shaking with anger, he grabbed the rags and threw them in the puddle, sopping up as much of the paint thinner as he could. He dropped that can, grabbed two others from the locker, and set them on top of the rags. If he could get the rags burning, the cans would create a raging inferno right here inside the hangar. They were close enough to the rockets to make sure they never flew and delivered their terrible packages to Israel.
Landau fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a book of matches. Forget the storeroom, he told himself, forget the hangar, forget the rockets, and forget about getting away, too. None of that mattered any longer. All that mattered was lighting a match and destroying this monstrous evil before it was too late. He opened the matchbook, tore one loose, and scratched it across the emery backing, but nothing happened. The head of the match crumbled under his fingertip. The emery paper was damp with benzene and sweat and he could not even get a spark. He tried again and watched in agony as the second match head crumbled. He tore at another, just as the blackness of the hangar exploded with a blinding white light. Someone had thrown the main breaker and the entire bank of overhead lights came on, burning bright and illuminating the interior of the hangar. Landau covered his eyes with his hand and began shrinking back, but it was too late. He could not see them, but he was certain they had seen him. At that moment, the Dead Man knew his grav
ediggers had arrived.
The match! Light the damned match and start it burning, Landau’s brain screamed! It would be his last, defiant gesture to a cruel world. His head turned and he saw a man standing inside the front door. It was one of the guards, and he was less than fifty feet away. Landau could have been little more than a black shadow in the dim clutter inside the hangar, but the guard saw him and reacted instantly. Landau pushed the tip of the next match across the back of the matchbook as the first fusillade of gunshots echoed through the cavernous hangar. The heavy slugs hit him in the chest and punched him backward across the concrete floor like a rag doll, until he came to rest in front of one of the rocket launchers.
How odd, Landau thought through the haze. He lay on his back with his eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling. He knew he had been shot, but he felt nothing — no pain, no anger, just a dull sadness washing over him. Slowly, he turned his head and saw the match lying near his hand. The match? Oh, yes, he remembered now. It was still burning, its pale orange flame resting only a few scant inches from the pile of solvent-soaked rags. It was so close, close enough to give him a glimmer of hope as he reached a shaking hand toward it.
That was when he heard the loud Thump! Thump! of jackboots coming toward him across the bare concrete floor, and voices shouting in German, “Major Grüber, I found him!” That was when Landau knew all hope was gone. A pair of brightly polished boots appeared next to him. He heard a soft, satisfied grunt, as one of them came down on the match, inches from his fingers, grinding out the flame and any remaining hope Landau had. A painful moan escaped his lips as he looked up. Towering over him was a large blond man in an Egyptian uniform. Egyptian? No, those were the same bright blue eyes and sadistic half-grin that Landau had seen in a thousand nightmares, but clad in black and silver.
“Ja, Ja,” the nightmare spoke, staring down at Landau as if he were a trophy elk he had just brought down in the Black Forest. Slowly, the man’s face, his bright blue eyes, and even that hateful smile grew hazy. The colors and shapes faded to a dull gray, then a deep and finally eternal black.
CHAPTER THREE
Thomson leaned forward on his elbow and continued drawing lazy circles on the greasy tabletop with the tip of his finger. Looking up, he glanced around the dark, nearly empty bar and sighed. This place truly was a dump, but it was well hidden on an obscure side street blocks from the embassy and his hotel, making it an excellent choice. The only person who knew him here was the bartender, and that was just the way Thomson preferred it. No one wanted him, no one was looking for him, and no one knew where to find him. He tossed down the last of his gin and tonic, raised the glass above his head, and dangled it back and forth until Jeremy, the bartender, could no longer ignore him. Jeremy frowned, but he finally relented and poured Thomson another drink. They both knew he was not drunk, not yet anyway; but that was not going to last much longer if Thomson kept pounding them down.
The first night after he returned from Syria he tried the big bar at the Nile Hilton and almost threw up. The crisp white tablecloths, the soft unobtrusive jazz, and the air conditioning were lovely after what he had just been through; but he could not stomach an entire room full of those smart-assed Harvard kids with their tortoise-shell glasses, button-down collars, pipes, and cute, condescending smiles. “So they packed you back to Cairo, did they?” That was how it usually began. “A lotta crap, that business in Damascus, wasn’t it? That news made all the papers here, of course; but don’t sweat. The Agency can’t lay all the blame on you, can they? After all, it could have happened to anyone.”
On the other hand, could it, he wondered. Everything looked so different when you were in your twenties. That was the age of immortality. How old was he now? Forty-two going on a broken-down seventy? Whatever, his tired old face just did not fit in the class picture anymore — not theirs, anyway. His had more lines and scars than an old oak tree; and he had earned every damned one of them the hard way, like the hash marks on an infantry sergeant’s sleeve. What did they call it? Character building? Well, he had all the character he could stand.
Damascus! It had been an Agency operation, his operation, and it ended badly. The KGB and Syrian Intelligence outplayed him, and he got two of his own men and a local killed in the process. That was bad enough, but Thomson’s cardinal sin was not being one of them. If he had gotten himself blown to pieces with the others, everything would have been just peachy back at headquarters. The Agency would have planted him in Arlington, added another star on the wall at Langley, and then mumbled a few nice words over him, whether they meant them or not. After all, better to have a dead hero they could lie about, than a live embarrassment walking about among them.
His plan had been so simple. “You see,” he could still hear his own words as he tried to explain it afterwards. “There was this Syrian Air Force Colonel with a sweet tooth for redheads and Switzerland. He offered us a bag of new Red Army tech manuals and some inside stuff on the government’s new arms deal for a bag of cash.” Unfortunately, the Colonel’s bag blew up and took what was left of Thomson’s career along with it. Lights, camera, action! The next thing he knew, the Syrian secret police, the Deuxième Bureau as they were then called, were all over him. They might be mustachioed clowns like almost everyone else in the al-Qudsi government; but they were Russian-trained and occasionally effective, especially with the annual Baath Party convention coming up. They rousted him good and grilled him for over two weeks in one of the basement interrogation cells conveniently left behind by the French when they pulled out in 1946. After bruised ribs, a concussion, and the half-dozen beatings they gave him just for fun, the only thing that made the sorry escapade even half-worthwhile was remembering the look on that dumb-ass Syrian Colonel’s face when he opened the bag.
Washington finally pried him loose, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. The last place they wanted to see him was back at Langley; so they patted him on the head, gave him two aspirins, and dumped him here in Cairo like last week’s garbage. Lord knows, he tried to fit in. He even donned the same company summer uniform the rest of them wore. It consisted of a tan Brooks Brothers suit and a bold school tie, but he wore them badly. After an hour or two in the Hilton bar that first night back, his shirt collar was open at the neck and his tie pulled down. His suit was too big now and hung limp on his awkward frame. He had not slept in two days, looked like hell, and could not care less. What did it matter, anyway? The Harvards had taken over the place. This was their time and they swarmed through the Agency like an army of carpenter ants. They were on their way up, all bright-eyed and eager, while Thomson and the other leftovers from the Dulles regime were on the express elevator back down. No, he was well past down. He had already hit bottom, and crashed through the floor, and was headed for the sub-basement. They really were not the ones to blame, however. As the illegitimate children of Washington’s new Camelot, they just did not know any better. Someone put them through a six-week spy school near Williamsburg and let them think they were super spooks who knew every trick and bit of tradecraft there was to learn from a book. To them, old hands like Thomson were quaint, dented antiques to be kept around for display purposes only. “Mark the fine craftsmanship, children, but for heaven’s sake, don’t touch.”
Shit! He swore he would not start feeling sorry for himself. He had a right to all the anger and frustration he could carry but not the self-pity.
Finally, Thomson looked up and saw Jeremy threading his way between the tables with the drink. A sly grin crossed Thomson’s lips. He dug into his pants pocket, found a fistful of quarters, and dumped them in the center of the table. Jeremy placed the drink on the table as Thomson greeted him with his broadest, friendliest smile.
“Wanna try another one?” Thomson dared him.
“Oh, not again, mate,” Jeremy groaned. “Look…”
“Double or nothing? I thought I’d give you a shot at earning some of it back?”
“Like hell you did. You’ve d
runk free three straight nights running, and I’m not making any money as it is.”
“Triple then,” Thomson smiled innocently, as he arranged the coins in a triangle. “It’s easy. There are ten quarters: four in the bottom row, three in the next, then two, and one at the top.” He raised his eyes and knew he had the Englishman hooked now. “The tip of the triangle is pointing toward you, right? You get to move three of the coins, no more; but when you’re done, the triangle has to be pointing toward me.”
Jeremy stared at the coins, then at Thomson, as his face took on an expression of grim determination. “All right, mate, but I’ll work on it back at the bar, if it’s all the same to you. Triple or nothing, but if I win, I keep your bloody quarters, too.”
“Ah, good man!” Thomson laughed and raised the fresh drink in mock salute. “To Jeremy Throckmorton and his gin, the Queen would be proud. You two are the only decent things she left behind in this sand trap.”
“Don’t bring her into it, now. You ain’t won yet,” the bartender growled as he scooped up the coins and walked away.
Thomson leaned back, took another sip, and frowned. Games. Even winning had become depressing. It was too damned easy, and a pathetic substitute for the real thing. In his prime, maybe ten years ago, he had been good. No, he had been the best. Now, he found himself sitting in a sleazy bar on a back street in Cairo, and there was not a damned thing he could do about it.
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