“And not just some tawdry job like sitting by a phone. A real, active part. I want to do something meaningful. Even if it kills me.”
“You will have a real, active role in the plan.”
She nodded, wearing a decidedly triumphant expression.
There was an hour left before their meeting—plenty of time. Neil carefully relayed his plan and everything he knew to Gabi. She asked profound questions, bringing up several points, from angles he would have never considered.
Thirty minutes later, they departed. They were headed to meet the forger at the festival on the east end of town, in the largest beer tent, southernmost section.
~~~
Earlier that afternoon, still shaken by the veterinarian’s brutal slaying, Thomas Lundren had eased to a halt under the large shade tree outside of the Heinz farmhouse. Most of the leaves were still green, with only a few beginning to display hints of their grand autumnal transformation. Chickens scurried to him, expecting to be fed. He shooed them back and removed his hat, rapping on the screen door. He noticed that the upper portion of the screen was ripped. It had not been ripped when he had been here only a few days prior. Thomas waited, hearing nothing inside. He knocked again, louder this time.
Nothing.
Ambling to the eastern edge of the upper yard, the old policeman stared out over the fields where the now dead veterinarian had said the airplane had crashed. The warmish day baked the normally damp earth in the Indian summer sunlight. There was no one to be seen, only a flock of blackbirds eating the remnants of thresh from one of the tilled sections. Thomas walked to the barn, calling out several times. He patted a whinnying horse on its muzzle, stopping at the middle stall, his heart sinking into his stomach.
In the back of the stall was a trap door. It was wide open, the hay bunched around the top. They hadn’t seen it on their previous visit. He grabbed a lantern, hanging from a sixteen-penny nail, using a match from his pocket to light it. Thomas knelt over the cellar space, holding the light down inside. Crates of jarred foods were stored in there and nothing else. There was sufficient space to easily hide a man.
After extinguishing the lantern, he walked back to the house. With the screen open, he peered through the wavy glass, seeing no one. He walked around the entire house, scanning the windows and surrounding areas, but the only life nearby were the chickens clamoring at his feet. At the back porch, Thomas walked up the three steps and cupped his hands over the glass as he looked into the back room of the darkened house, seeing someone.
The lady who lived there, Frau Heinz, was flat on the floor. There was blood all around her.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
THIS WAS THE EXACT SAME ROUTE NEIL HAD TAKEN when he walked into Austria. Preston Lord sat shotgun in the rattletrap DKW while the constable drove. They hadn’t spoken once since leaving the Heinz farm. When they had finished there, as they had walked back to the car, Lord had seen the trepidation in Sauer’s eyes. He’d been fine with the murder of the sleazy veterinarian, but he’d blanched as Lord had worked on the tough old Heinz woman. Lord could see where killing a woman might be a shock for even the most hardened man. But it was of no matter. Like that fat old kraut woman, the constable had now served his purpose—if he was hurting, he wouldn’t be for long.
They were nearing the crest of the road, less than a kilometer from where Neil and Schatze had weathered the icy evening a week before. Lord shifted several times in his seat, feigning discomfort. He kept peering through the rocky formations for just the right place and, when he saw it, he asked Sauer to pull off the road.
“Why?” It was the first thing Sauer had mumbled since they had left.
“Gotta take a piss.”
Sauer eased off the side of the road. The right side had a short wooden guardrail, and beyond it, a steep alpine drop of at least a thousand feet. Lord twisted in the seat, snatching the keys from the ignition.
“The hell you doing?” the constable yelled.
“Just so we trust each other,” Lord answered, jiggling the keys before dropping them in his pocket. “I don’t want you leaving me up here.” He lurched from the car, crossed the road and walked through a small passage between two tall rock formations. Behind the rocks, he found a number of crevices and loose stones. It was the perfect spot. True to his word, he relieved himself while peering through a crevice, only able to see the back of the dusty black DKW.
Lord retrieved his Beretta from his jacket pocket and tucked it in his waistband behind him. Just as he began to walk back to the car, he stuck his hands in each side coat pocket, his right wrapping around the textured bone of his razor-sharp flip knife, the one he used on the veterinarian and the Heinz woman. His left hand gripped the cold steel of one of his contingency items, courtesy of the asylum-like weapons laboratory back in Maryland.
When he stepped through the two rock formations, he saw that the DKW was empty. Lord spun, looking all around. Perhaps the constable was relieving himself as well, but there was no sign of him. Lord sensed danger. Suddenly the frigid, rarefied air made an earthquake of a shiver go through him. He whipped out his pistol, moving behind the auto in case the constable was hidden, scanning the rock formations on the far side of the road where he’d just been.
“Drop the gun,” came the constable’s ragged voice from behind him. Lord stiffened, realizing what the sneaky bastard had done. He had eased over the edge, behind the guardrail. Without even turning around, Lord could picture the constable, standing on a precipice, aiming his long Mauser revolver at him. This was a bad situation.
“Drop it now or I’ll shoot you dead, you skinny bastard,” the constable warned, his voice rising. “I just watched you kill two people in cold blood, so don’t think for a second that I’ll even hesitate.”
Lord sucked crisp air in through his nose and dropped his pistol onto the gravel. He turned, seeing Sauer coming over the rail, just as he had pictured.
“The knife, too.”
Lord obeyed, wincing as his prized Boker rattled on the battered macadam.
“Move over there. Move!” The constable motioned Lord to the other side of the road. He gathered up Lord’s Beretta and the knife, dropping them in the pockets of his barn coat.
“How much money you got in that case of yours?”
“Are you going to arrest me, or just kill me?” Lord asked.
“If I was gonna kill you, why would I ask?”
“About fifty thousand in reichsmarks, large bills.”
“Counterfeit?”
Lord let out an exasperated breath. “How stupid do you think we are? No, not counterfeit. We have many ways of obtaining your soon-to-be worthless money.”
“I’d be damn careful ‘bout letting your mouth outtalk your ass,” the wily constable warned.
Preston Lord was a trained field psychologist, an expert in understanding motivations and inclinations. The constable wasn’t book-smart by any means, but did possess raw intelligence and street smarts, not unlike a wild animal that had survived many years through cunning alone.
And the constable knew the type of man Lord was, knew who he worked for, and definitely knew Lord had no qualms about killing. Knowing these things, the constable would know if he left Lord alive, it would likely be a fatal mistake.
Despite what he’d just said about the money.
And that was why, Lord decided, that the constable was going to shoot him, right here and now. If Lord had the time and the sense of humor, he would have laughed at the irony. Both men had been secretly plotting to kill the other, their reasons completely opposite. Lord’s was simply for convenience. The constable had served his purpose and was now an additional, and incredibly irritating, liability. The constable, on the other hand, wanted the windfall that awaited him in the trunk. And he wanted to live.
It was a classic standoff, and the German thought he had the upper hand.
“Despite what you said, you are going to shoot me,” Lord stated.
“Walk over ‘tween
those rocks, back to where you pissed. Slow. Try to run, you’re gonna receive seven-point-six-three millimeters square in your back.”
Lord eyed his adversary, running through his own narrow list of options. The “contingency” was in his left pocket. The man in engineering had warned him that it wasn’t yet ready for the field. If it didn’t work, Lord knew he would soon become a part of this mountain. But what other choice did he have?
After a few realistic protestations, Lord acquiesced to the constable’s demand and swiveled around to his left. When his body had rotated ninety degrees, this shielded his left hand from the constable’s eye. With an artful sleight of hand, Lord retrieved the item from his pocket.
Using the item was incredibly easy. Just one thing to do.
As the constable began to move behind him, Lord heaved the item up in the air so that it arced over his head, traveling behind him. He was aiming blindly, but felt the item would hit close enough to do its work.
He heard the constable shout something as his head went up to track the olive-colored object flying through the air. It was perfectly round, not quite as big as a baseball but heavier. The constable probably didn’t sense danger until he saw Lord diving to his right, behind a mossy boulder.
By that point it was too late.
The grenade which, after several more improvements, would later become known as a Beano, struck the gravel at the edge of the road, six feet in front of the constable. It exploded. Jagged shards of shrapnel and rock impacted Sauer’s puffy body, ripping into his flesh and knocking him backward, skidding onto the pavement as instant death enveloped him.
Preston Lord emerged from behind the boulder, sniffing the sulfurish smell of explosives and the slaughterhouse aroma of freshly butchered meat. He touched both of his ears, slowly working his jaw, idly wondering if his eardrums were blown. The engineering technician who’d given him the impact grenade had told Lord about the testing that had been done with chimpanzees. Many had been blown to bits because of the grenade’s tricky fuse. While the grenade was supposed to arm itself from a harsh throwing motion, some of the test grenades had been known to arm during simple jostling, resulting in a chimp in a million pieces. But the beauty of the new grenade, which outweighed the danger, was its trademark impact detonation. A man needn’t worry about cooking off the fuse, as he would be forced to do with a standard grenade. The state-of-the-art weapon had worked perfectly. It had saved Preston Lord’s life. He might even give a rare commendation to the technician nerds upon his return to D.C.
But, for now, time was of the essence. He dragged the heavy constable’s leaking corpse behind the car, quickly rifling through each of his pockets. Lord retrieved his own pistol and knife, finding them both nicked and scarred, but still in working order. There was a badge and a wallet, as well as the wad of money Lord had bribed the man with. All of these items, plus matches and a cigar, Lord kept. He then struggled to heft the constable over the wooden guardrail after dragging him twenty feet up the hill. That spot would be the perfect release point to allow the corpse to build enough momentum to tumble out of sight.
Lord patted the constable on his back, told him to burn in hell, then used his foot to send him rolling. He watched in fascination as the massive, obese body slowly spun, gaining speed and taking rocks with it. Before it came to a rest in a crevice far below, blood and brain could be seen hurtling outward with each cartwheel of the falling side of beef. And, with it being so close to winter, Preston Lord felt certain no one would find the body until spring, if ever.
A car approached from the Austrian direction. It was a man and a woman, dressed to the nines. Lord had just opened the driver’s door of the car, giving the couple a wave and a smile. They waved back to him, probably assuming that he had stopped to take in the view, or relieve himself. They didn’t seem to notice the smattering of debris, or the smeared blood, on the worn pavement of the Aachener Pass road.
Once he’d eased into the driver’s seat of the DKW, Lord took the constable’s tattered cigar, bit off the tip, and lit it. His first order of business would be to purchase some black paint to cover the lettering on the doors of the constable’s car. After that, before he thought about locating Neil Reuter, Lord was going to use some of the reichsmarks to splurge on the best hotel room in Innsbruck. He was going to gorge himself on every decadent food the hotel offered, and then he was going to get laid by Innsbruck’s finest whore.
Tomorrow, after he slept until at least noon, his work could resume.
~~~
Thomas jiggled the doorknob at the back of the Heinz house. Locked. There was no time to try to preserve evidence. He stepped backward, firing three shots into the dingy brass knob with his revolver, kicking the door open. Holding his pistol at the ready, he cleared each room of the small farmhouse before coming back and standing over the Heinz woman. Her chest and stomach were black with blood; the injuries appeared to be hours old. Thomas removed his hat, holding it over his heart. Murders were never easy, especially when they involved a woman or a child.
After a moment of silence, his mind went to the woman’s children. Children in the familial sense, but the girl was certainly no child. The boy had been nearing the age of accountability. Thomas was stricken as he pondered what might have happened to them. After seeing all he had seen in the span of a few hours, he felt he might be sick, moving away in his need of fresh air.
Thomas stopped.
The woman had made a sound.
He turned and knelt beside her, taking her hand. The resiliency of the human spirit never ceased to amaze him. This woman, surrounded by a bucket of her own blood, was still clinging to a shred of life.
“Frau Heinz, can you hear me?”
She mouthed a yes.
“Where are your children?”
The woman’s lined eyes squeezed shut as she appeared to be fighting her emotions. She opened them and clenched his hand with stunning strength. “Help Peter,” she rasped. “Get him before they do.”
“They?”
“They’ll kill him.”
“Who?” He wanted to press harder, but didn’t want to exacerbate her situation any more than it already was. Her mouth was parched and her dry tongue poked through her cracked lips as she murmured her answer.
“An American man.”
“An American? The man from the airplane? The one I questioned you about?”
She managed to shake her head back and forth. “No,” she whispered forcefully. “This was a bad man.”
“What did he look like?”
“Thin. Fancy. Vicious. A German man was with him…a constable…a Hinterwäldler. They did this to me.”
Thomas narrowed his eyes, briefly looking away. “A constable?”
She nodded. And her use of the word Hinterwäldler indicated that he was from the country and uncultured.
Thomas stared into the front room, his mind racing. He turned his head back to Frau Heinz, hearing her breathing change. It sounded as if there was blood in her lungs, and her breaths were now coming in quick succession.
“Frau Heinz,” he said. “Please listen to me. Did you know the man from the airplane?”
She managed to nod as she mouthed yes.
“Why was he here?”
“Gabi,” she whispered.
“Your daughter.” He knelt closer, fearing the woman would fall unconscious any second.
Her voice was a whisper. “They’re in Innsbruck.”
“Innsbruck? The man from the airplane took your daughter there?”
She nodded.
“But he’s not the man who did this to you?”
The woman’s eyes opened wide and bored into his. “No,” she said in her loudest voice yet. “The man with Gabi is a good man. Neil…” She wheezed for a moment. “Neil Reuter.” After a thick swallow, she continued. “The two men who did this to me are after him…after my Gabi.” She closed her eyes again, her voice reducing to a whisper. “Go get Peter…school. Please…”
&n
bsp; “I will, ma’am. I’ll find your Peter for you.” Thomas gripped both her hands in his. “Frau Heinz, what is Reuter’s plan?”
“Jewish children.”
“Jewish children?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Hundreds of them. He had a letter.”
Thomas nearly lost equilibrium as his world spun. Peter could presumably fill him in on everything else, if he was still alive, but there was one critical piece of information he would have no way of knowing. Thomas shook the woman’s hands, his voice rising an octave. “Frau Heinz, one more thing. Did you tell the men who did this to you that the man from the airplane and your daughter are in Innsbruck?”
There was no sound, but her lips opened enough that any German could see she mouthed the word “Ja.” Her grip loosened, her eyes narrowed, and she uttered the final words of her life. “Help Peter. Help Gabi.”
Thomas held her hand for five more minutes, crouched beside the tough old farm woman as her life ended in a spate of ragged, wet breaths. He was frozen, not by fear, but by his own ethics as he pondered how to handle the situation. When Thomas found himself in the midst of a complex problem, and that was an understatement in this case, he preferred to be alone, with a pad of paper, so he could sketch out every angle of the puzzle and address each individually. And while he didn’t have that luxury at the moment, Thomas decided that, if he could locate Peter Heinz, he would not call in the murders of the veterinarian and this woman. He would let them be found by others, and by that time, he would be over the political border, again inside the now-German territory of Austria.
In the rational part of his mind, he knew his not disclosing everything about the initial killing of Wilhelm Kruger might have been what caused this woman’s murder. However, his instinct told him otherwise. There was an undercurrent of something sinister at play. If Frau Heinz wasn’t out of her mind, and he didn’t think she had been, then the men who had done this, and who had sliced and diced Hörst Baldinger, weren’t standard thugs. He had a strong feeling that Sauer, the Velden constable, was one of them. He also knew Sauer certainly wasn’t the brains of the outfit. Sauer was likely recruited by the vicious, fancy American who seemed to be seeking this other American named Reuter—Neil Reuter.
Final Mission: Zion - A World War 2 Thriller Page 48