Echo of the Reich

by James Becker

  The car had picked up speed, and Bronson guessed it was traveling at fifty or sixty miles an hour as the road continued straight. Just over four minutes after turning onto the road, he felt the BMW begin to slow down, the driver shifting down two gears as he applied the brakes, and then the vehicle steered to the left at a Y-junction.

  Without appearing to do so, Bronson shifted his gaze and just caught a glimpse of a small sign that presumably indicated the name of the road the car had turned into. It was too dark for him to read the entire name, but he did see—and, more important, he made sure he remembered—the first part of the word: “Kaupt.” And he couldn’t swear to it, but he thought the second part of the name was the German word for street: straße or strasse.

  A few seconds after it had turned onto the other road, the car drove past a group of buildings on the left-hand side. At first sight Bronson thought it might be a farm, but then changed his mind because, through his very restricted aperture, it looked more like a small estate of upmarket houses, though it could also, he supposed, have been a small industrial park. He was having to use only his peripheral vision and that, along with the fading light, made discerning anything clearly very difficult.

  A few moments later, the car again slowed down almost to a crawl but continued moving in a straight line, and it was soon obvious that the BMW was joining a major road. Bronson could hear the sound of other vehicles passing in both directions in front of them before the car pulled out onto the road. The driver swung left to cross the lane handling opposite-direction traffic, and then to the left, to continue in more or less the same direction that he’d been driving before.

  Then Bronson had a stroke of luck as the car drove onto a bridge that spanned either a river or a canal, most probably the latter because the waterway seemed to have a very consistent width. That was an identification feature that should help narrow his search markedly. And almost before that thought had fully registered, the car slowed again as it entered a built-up area.

  Bronson vainly searched for a village name, but saw nothing useful. The road appeared to continue more or less straight, but then he felt the car enter a sweeping curve to the left and a few seconds later begin a turn to the right that was almost as sharp. Moments after that, they were back in the open countryside. He didn’t know how many villages or suburbs there were around Berlin that were near a canal and that had a main road running through them with an S-bend in the middle, but he hoped there wouldn’t be too many.

  He continued trying to build a picture of the remainder of the journey, but within a few minutes of leaving the village, the car turned onto an autobahn that was, like most German main roads, devoid of unusual features. So Bronson just concentrated on making sure that what he had seen remained locked in his memory.

  When the car finally turned off the autobahn, he guessed he was near his journey’s end, and a couple of minutes later the BMW drew to a halt.

  “You can get out now,” the driver said, his English heavily accented.

  Bronson nodded, took the sunglasses off his face and reached for the door handle. As he stepped out of the car, he recognized the station car park once again, and saw his Hyundai parked a few yards away. He didn’t look back, just strode across to his car, feeling in his pocket for the keys, and when he did finally glance behind him, he saw the BMW driving away from him toward the exit.

  Bronson sat down in the driver’s seat, turned on the interior light, then reached across to open the glovebox and took out a small notebook and a pencil. He flicked through the book until he found a blank page and then swiftly wrote down the identification features that he had remembered: a straight road with woods on one side; the street name Kaupt, possibly followed by strasse or straße; a canal or river that ran under the road at right angles, followed by a village in which the main road followed an S-shaped path. Then, on the following page, he drew a rough sketch of the house to which he had been taken.

  When he’d finished, Bronson looked over what he’d written, and added the two times that the journeys had taken. It was little enough to go on, but it was all he had, so it would have to do.

  But before he even started trying to locate the house and track down Marcus, there was something else he needed to do. He was alone in Germany, without easy access to the Internet unless he visited a cyber café or bought a laptop computer or netbook and found somewhere offering Wi-Fi facilities and, in truth, he didn’t really know where his search should start.

  What he was sure was that the word Marcus had used—it had sounded to Bronson like laterntrager—was significant for some reason, just because of the way the German had reacted when he let it slip. Perhaps it was the code name for the operation the Germans appeared to be mounting against London, or possibly even the name of a weapon they intended to use to disrupt the Olympic Games.

  He shook his head. Actually, disrupting the Olympic Games was probably only a bonus as far as Marcus was concerned. When Bronson had looked into his eyes, he’d seen the pale and dispassionate stare of a true fanatic. Whatever the Germans had planned, he was quite certain that it would involve a massive loss of life, not just some attention-grabbing interruption to the Games.

  Bronson shivered involuntarily. There wasn’t, at that stage, too much he could do to investigate the meaning of the word—his first priority had to be to locate the house—but he had high hopes that Angela would not only know where to look, but would be able to find out its true significance.

  Always assuming, of course, that he’d heard and remembered it right.

  23

  23 July 2012

  “Chris! I’ve been worried sick. Where the hell are you? Your phone’s been switched off for days.”

  “That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” Bronson replied. “I’m just using a different mobile; that’s why you couldn’t call me.”

  “Well, why didn’t you give me the number? So where are you now? Berlin?”

  “Yes,” Bronson replied. “I’m still in Germany, and I’m in trouble.”

  “And you need my help.” It was a statement, not a question. “Do you want me to fly out there?”

  “No. Or not yet, at least. Everything’s a bit confused here at the moment.” As he said the words, Bronson knew how lame that sounded, and just how big an understatement it was. But he had enough to contend with in Berlin without having to worry about Angela as well. The last thing he wanted was for her to get involved with Marcus and his gang of German thugs.

  “So what can I do?”

  “I just need you to do some research for me. The leader of the gang I’m trying to infiltrate used a German word that seems to be important. I’ve no idea what the word means, or even if I’ve remembered it correctly, but I’m sure it’s something to do with this plot, because he talked about sending whoever, or whatever, this word means to London. And then he seemed to realize that he’d said too much.”

  “Okay. Go ahead then. What was the word?”

  “I think it was Laterntrager.” He spelled the word to her, or what he guessed was the spelling.

  “It sounds German, I’ll give you that,” Angela replied, “but I don’t recognize it. Of course, that’s probably because I don’t speak German, but luckily I know somebody who does. Have you tried looking in a dictionary?”

  “I don’t have a dictionary. Could you please just see what you can find out, and I’ll call you again in the morning. Don’t try to call me on this number, because I don’t know where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing. In fact, I’ll probably have the phone switched off most of the time.”

  “Okay. Leave it with me. And, Chris,” she added, “whatever you’re doing over there, just be careful, will you?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Bronson said, then ended the call.

  For a minute or so he sat in silence, his mind racing, then he came to a decision. He had no idea how seriously the British police were trying to trace him, but it was conceivable that they might have put an intercept on Angela’s home an
d work telephone numbers, and on her mobile, just in case he called her.

  They wouldn’t know that Bronson was the person ringing Angela, but they might well guess it was him because she was being called from an unregistered British pay-as-you-go mobile phone located in Germany. That would probably be enough for them to request the assistance of the German police in finding out the identity and location of her caller. And Bronson was keenly aware that as long as a mobile phone was switched on, its position could be determined by finding out which radio masts it was in contact with.

  It wasn’t worth taking the chance. He unclipped the back panel of the mobile, took out the battery and put all three pieces of the phone in the car’s glovebox. And, just in case he was right and the German police had been contacted by somebody in the Met, he started the car, drove out of the car park and back through Rangsdorf to the main road. There, he turned right and headed south until he reached a smaller settlement named Groß Machnow, where he took the first major junction on the left, following a road sign that directed him toward Mittenwalde. He had no particular destination in mind, and was working on the reasonable basis that if he didn’t know where he was going, it would be extremely difficult for anyone else to predict his route.

  The countryside was dominated by rich agricultural land, fields and patches of woodland extending on both sides of the road. A short distance outside Groß Machnow, the road—he knew he was driving along the Mittenwalder Strasse—bisected a wood where there were pull-offs on both sides of the road. He’d seen almost no traffic since he drove out of Groß Machnow, and could see no other cars parked in the wood. It was probably as good a place to stop as anywhere else he’d seen.

  Bronson swung the car right, bouncing off the tarmac and on to the hard-packed earth of one of the turnoffs, and tucked the Hyundai behind a group of shrubs, where it would be virtually invisible from the road. He opened the two front windows, then switched off the engine and for a few moments just sat and listened. The only sound he could hear was birdsong—the evening equivalent of the dawn chorus—and the buzz of insects. He knew he would hear any approaching vehicles easily enough, and the chances of him being spotted were extremely slim. And even if somebody did see him, sitting there in the car, he wasn’t actually doing anything illegal. Unless they found the Llama pistol under his seat, that is.

  Bronson opened up the map book of Germany that he’d purchased en route from Calais to Berlin, and began studying the area to the southeast of the city, the area where he guessed the house was located. The problem, he saw immediately, was that there were a lot of waterways—rivers, canals and lakes—around Berlin. He remembered reading in a German tourist brochure on the cross-Channel ferry that the area was known to be marshy from the very earliest days of the settlement, and that the word “berl,” which formed the first part of the city’s name, actually meant “swamp” in some archaic European language. The terrain shown on the map to the southeast of Berlin was splashed with blue, and the rivers and canals were crossed at frequent intervals by roads, almost always at right angles. In many cases settlements had sprung up near the junction of the road and the waterway—rendering two of Bronson’s remembered identifying features essentially useless.

  And there was a further irritation because the map book was intended for motorists and so most of the roads were identified by numbers, not by names, and he could see no sign of a road named Kauptstrasse anywhere in the area. He knew he would need to buy more detailed maps, more like the British Ordnance Survey sheets, to find what he was looking for.

  The only other option was the satnav unit, but before he could ask it to find Kauptstrasse, he had to be able to identify the town, village or district in which the road was located. He switched on the unit anyway, waited until it had locked onto the satellites, then selected Berlin as the city and typed in Kauptstrasse, but the result was more or less what he’d expected: the unit couldn’t locate it, simply because the road wasn’t in Berlin itself, but in some suburb or outlying village.

  He glanced at his watch. It was already after nine, and Bronson was hungry and thirsty, but also physically exhausted and emotionally drained, wrung out by the events of the evening. He needed food and drink, and then somewhere to stay for the night.

  But for now he needed to get some sleep.

  24

  23 July 2012

  Just over an hour after Angela ended the call to Bronson, the entry-phone in her apartment buzzed, and a couple of minutes after that she opened the door in response to a double knock. A tall, dark-haired man stood waiting outside on the landing, wearing an open-necked shirt, a light-colored pullover and a knee-length leather coat. He was strongly built, with the powerful arms and broad shoulders of a committed sportsman—he looked like a swimmer, or maybe a rugby player.

  “Steven,” she said, opening the door wide and ushering her guest inside. “I’m so glad you could make it. I really didn’t know who else I could call.”

  Steven Behr stepped forward and gave Angela a kiss on each cheek. They’d known each other for years, ever since first meeting at university, and had always remained good friends. But they rarely saw each other simply because of their hectic but very different lifestyles. Angela knew Steven had a high-powered job in IT but had never really been sure exactly what it was. She just knew he was somebody she could rely on and, more important to her at that precise moment, his German was fluent.

  The giveaway was his unusual surname. Angela knew that Steven had done a little research into its origins, and had discovered that it had most probably been derived from Bähr, and that name from the nickname Bär, meaning a “bear.” And, she had often thought, rarely had any surname been more appropriate: Steven Behr was in many ways remarkably like his animal namesake. He was strong and courageous, but blessed—or perhaps cursed—with an impatient and highly competitive streak that meant he didn’t suffer fools gladly. In fact, she knew he didn’t suffer them at all, which was probably one reason for his success in business.

  “You know you can call me anytime,” Steven said. “I’m always pleased to help if you need a shoulder to lean on.”

  Angela led the way into the sitting room, where her laptop was open on the coffee table in front of the sofa. In the opposite corner of the room, her TV was switched on and displaying one of the satellite news channels, but with the sound muted.

  “Take a seat, and I’ll get you a coffee.”

  “Thanks. A cappuccino would be great. Got any biscuits?”

  Angela smiled. Steven Behr’s appetite was legendary, but he never seemed to put on any weight because of his incredibly active lifestyle.

  “I thought you knew me better than that,” she said. “The best I can do is instant with a dash of milk.”

  “Pretty much what I expected, actually.”

  Steven walked across to the leather recliner by the side of the sofa and sat down, drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair.

  A minute or so later Angela reappeared, put the mug of coffee down on the table, along with a plate of assorted cookies, and resumed her seat in front of the laptop.

  “I gather you’ve got a bit of a problem?” Steven asked, picking up a digestive.

  Angela nodded.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s not so much me as Chris. I don’t pretend to know anything like the full story, but he’s had to go over to Germany. Something to do with his work, with the police, but I really don’t know what.”

  “The ideal choice, I suppose,” Steven said, “because he doesn’t speak a word of German, as far as I know. Typical of the bureaucrats who run the police these days. So what’s his problem? Does he need a translator? I could go over there for a couple of days if that would help.”

  Angela shook her head. “Not a translator so much as a translation. The problem is that he overheard a German word, a word that could be important because of the circumstances in which he heard it, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, it’s not in any of the dictionaries I’
ve looked at so far. That’s why I thought of you, because you’re fluent.”

  Steven nodded.

  “So you think he might have misheard it, and I might recognize what the word should actually be?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m all ears. What did he hear?”

  “He thought it was ‘Laterntrager,’” Angela replied.

  For a few seconds Steven didn’t reply, just finished the biscuit and took a sip of coffee before replacing the mug on the table. Then he glanced across at Angela.

  “You’re right—he probably did mishear it. That’s a fairly uncommon proper name in Germany, but as far as I’m aware it doesn’t have any other meaning. Could it just have been someone’s surname?”

  “I don’t think so. Because of the context, Chris seemed to think that it referred to an object of some sort, perhaps to a kind of weapon or even a machine. Something physical, anyway.”

  Steven nodded, and mouthed the words a few times. Then he nodded again and looked back at Angela.

  “That changes the dynamic,” he said. “I can think of one word that sounds quite like ‘Laterntrager’ and it probably does refer to some kind of a mechanical device. But it’s not ‘Laterntrager;’ it’s ‘Laternenträger.’”

  Angela looked puzzled for a moment.

  “I see what you mean,” she said, “because the words are very similar. But what do you mean when you say it might ‘probably’ mean a mechanical device? If you know the word, surely you know what it means?”

  Steven smiled and shook his head.

  “It’s not quite as simple as that, Angela, and it’s a long and pretty confusing story. The easy bit is what the word means. ‘Laternenträger’ doesn’t really have an exact translation in English, but I suppose the closest would be ‘lamplighter.’”

  Angela’s face reflected the confusion she was feeling.

  “‘Lamplighter?’” she repeated. “What on earth could that have to do with what Chris is investigating?”