Prime Target

by Hugh Miller

  ‘It looks like a well organized collection.’

  ‘It is brilliantly done. The method of accumulation and cataloguing was devised by Emily Selby’s father, Johannes Lustig.’

  ‘Your father’s cousin.’

  ‘Yes. To me he was Uncle Johannes. He also carried out the early research work. As time passed and we became more organized, the research was co-ordinated by myself and the other members of Juli Zwanzig. We only became a group with a name after Uncle Johannes died. It was his wish.’

  ‘I know.’

  Erika sighed. ‘I suppose I should have guessed.’

  ‘Are you all activists? Or are you mainly fundraisers and co-ordinators?’

  ‘I am an activist against Nazis in general,’ Erika said. ‘Journalism is my chosen means of attack. The others raise money, as you surmised. They fund lectures and publications to keep alive the truth of what happened to whole generations of Jews, and they do what they individually can to give our movement shape and spirit. But at the core, Juli Zwanzig has physical aims -’

  ‘To kill off the surviving members of the Jugend von Siegfried.’

  ‘That is correct. Uncle Johannes insisted nothing less would do. We lacked the stomach, individually and collectively, for such a course of action, but that didn’t mean it was wrong. We needed to find a person who could consummate our aims.’

  ‘You had no moral problem with that? Hiring a killer?’

  ‘No problem at all,’ she said defiantly. ‘Just remember, we live with the knowledge that year in, year out, the Jugend von Siegfried systematically undermine, sabotage and actually kill Jews as a matter of policy. They do it subtly, without even communicating directly with each other. Unopposed, they would never stop. Somebody has to stop them, somebody has to punish their iniquity.’

  ‘They’re not bomb-proof. You have evidence here that the police can use against them.’

  ‘Uncle Johannes did not want them handed over to the law. To extract the kind of justice he called for, we needed someone who hated the Nazis as much as we do, and who was capable of killing.’

  ‘So who does that? Who’s the mysterious young man with fair hair and blue eyes?’

  For a moment Erika looked as if she would not say. But the understanding between them was clear, and she had given her word. Sabrina watched her head bow a fraction, the only sign that this was capitulation.

  ‘He is Einar Ahlin. A Norwegian.’

  ‘Why him?’

  ‘Two years ago he came to Germany vaguely intending to do harm to the new Nazis. We diverted his attention to the old Nazis instead.’

  ‘Norwegians have no fond memories of the Third Reich.’

  ‘This Norwegian especially. Einar has a troubled history. Very troubled. He is an epileptic with personality problems who just happened to be born into a family touched by tragedy. His grandparents were tortured to death by the occupying Germans in Oslo during the war. Their daughter’s life, as a consequence, was shadowed until the day she died.’

  ‘Einar’s mother.’

  Erika nodded. ‘She committed suicide in 1989. For nearly fifty years she kept her hatred of the Nazis burning and the fire passed into Einar at an early age. Many people would regard his obsession with punishing Nazis as pathological.’

  ‘But you found it convenient.’

  ‘Read the facts any way you wish,’ Erika said. ‘He believes in what he does. I believe in it too. I am happy to fund work which achieves an end we both passionately seek.’

  ‘These records could probably put the remaining Siegfried boys in jail for the rest of their lives,’ Sabrina said.

  ‘You think that now I should hand them over to the police?’

  ‘It would be the civilized thing to do.’

  ‘That brings us back to retribution,’ Erika said. ‘Is a desire for proper redress so uncivilized? Justice on the biblical scale is the only real kind. These bastards have spent their lives from childhood working against Jews. They have wreaked misery, calamity and death on people they did not know. They have to pay for that. The enlightened liberal answer, life imprisonment, does not meet the bill. They have to pay with their lives.’

  Sabrina noticed that the passion was gone from Erika’s voice. She was spouting the words, but now there was no force of conviction behind them.

  ‘Where is Einar Ahlin?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ A spark of defiance still flared, demonstrating once more the passion of Erika’s commitment to her cause.

  ‘Come on, Erika.’

  ‘I promised to co-operate, I didn’t promise to deliver anyone’s head on a plate. Besides, it’s true, I don’t know where he lives. When we meet it’s on neutral ground. He works from an address list Emily put together, and picks his targets from the order they appear in the picture.’

  ‘What picture?’

  Erika opened the album and pressed it flat at a ten-by-eight sepia-toned enlargement. It showed Adolf Hitler, standing on a rain-swept, bombed-out street, saluting a group of young boys.

  ‘The Jugend von Siegfried,’ Erika said. ‘Photographed in 1945, on the very day they were inaugurated.’

  Names had been entered in white ink next to everyone in the picture. The first boy on the left was Karl Sonnemann. The next one was Stefan Fliegel; beside him was Uli Jürgen.

  ‘Einar broke the pattern when the American showed up.’

  ‘Harold Gibson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did he know about him?’

  ‘Emily sent me e-mail about the man and his organization, all gathered from notes she’d found - they were for a paper Uncle Johannes had been preparing at the time of his death, about Americans providing financial support to a Nazi organization in Berlin.’

  ‘And you showed the e-mail to Einar?’

  Erika nodded. ‘He is like a ferret with anything like that. He took the information to himself, worked on his own research.’

  ‘Did you know he was planning to eliminate Harold Gibson?’

  Erika shook her head.

  ‘You don’t have any control over this guy at all, do you?’ Sabrina said.

  Erika said nothing. Sabrina looked at the picture again. ‘Uli Jürgen,’ she said. ‘That name rings a bell.’

  Erika nodded. She pointed to the radio on the corner of the worktop. ‘Uli Jürgen. There was a bulletin. He was found dead earlier today.’

  Sabrina caught Erika’s gaze and held it, trying to communicate to her the seriousness of the situation. ‘Listen, Erika, I want you to understand something. This situation that you have created has got much bigger than just your personal vendetta. Other people’s lives are at risk and that could have serious implications for world security. So I’m going to ask you again, and I want a straight answer this time: what do you do if you need to contact Einar Ahlin?’

  Erika paused, searching Sabrina’s face. Apparently impressed with her gravity, she said reluctantly, ‘He has a girlfriend. She passes messages between us, both ways.’

  ‘What’s her address?’

  Erika took down a pad and pencil from a shelf above the worktop. ‘Her name is Magda Schaeffer.’

  ‘Remember,’ Sabrina said, ‘if the address is wrong, I’ll be back.’

  ‘It’s correct, you have my word.’ Erika scribbled an address in Oranienstrasse. ‘It’s a one-room flat above a little nightclub. Magda works there, she’s a stripper.’

  Sabrina put the paper in her pocket. She looked at the photograph again. The name of the boy standing next to Uli Jürgen was Andreas Wolff.

  ‘Do you have a scanner?’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For these records.’ Sabrina slapped the book. ‘I want copies. Quickly.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s any part of our deal.’

  Again there was no conviction. Sabrina felt the protest was a token.

  ‘Why did you let me know they exist, Erika? Why did you have them brought here?’

  ‘I wanted you to see them, t
o understand their part in what we do.’

  Sabrina shook her head. ‘You wanted me to force an issue. You still want the Siegfried gang attacked, but you know damn well Einar’s going to get caught long before he gets around to killing them all. And your chances of finding another Einar must be one in a million.’

  ‘I know nothing of the sort.’

  ‘Please, Erika, credit me with a little intelligence. Your killer is an extrovert, he puts on the high profile every time he makes a hit. He’ll get taken out before he’s halfway through Emily’s list.’

  ‘We have a mission -’

  ‘You know that pretty soon your only hope will be to let the law do the job for you, because your assassin will be a goner. And I think that after the fright you got today with Gregor, you want to draw back from the physical stuff sooner rather than later.’

  Erika was silent for a moment, then jerked a thumb at the door. ‘There is a scanner in my office along the hall.’

  ‘Come and help me.’

  Erika set up a word-processing program on the computer and Sabrina used the flatbed scanner to transfer copies of the book pages on to the screen. The completed copy file was very large.

  ‘How do you plan to get all that on to a disk?’ Erika said. ‘The high-capacity removable drive is broken.’

  ‘I won’t take a copy away with me,’ Sabrina said. ‘I’ll send it to a safe box. Let me use the keyboard.’

  She called up the modem, made contact with her communications area and tapped in her UNACO password for Mailbox Access. The padlocked box came up. She put in her personal access code. The lid of the box opened. She addressed the Jugend von Siegfried file to C.W. Whitlock and uploaded it. The transfer took three minutes. When it was complete, she typed out a terse note, labelled it MOST URGENT, and addressed it also to Whitlock.

  ‘And now I get out of your life,’ she said.

  ‘Can you guarantee that?’

  ‘No. But I’ve no desire to have anything more to do with you. Barring any sidewash, we’re through with each other.’

  At the door she said, ‘I understand your mission, Erika. But you haven’t been cheated out of anything. It’s true what I said, your executioner’s luck can’t hold.’

  Erika flapped her hand, perhaps accepting that. ‘My feelings about what has happened are -’ She hesitated. ‘They’re complex. Mingled. To know how I feel, maybe you would have to be a German

  Jew.’

  C.W. Whitlock was in the corridor outside UNACO’s copy room. As he punched the red button on his mobile and dropped it in his pocket Philpott stepped up behind him.

  ‘There’s a communication for you from Berlin,’ Philpott said, pointing to the door of the Secure Communications Suite. ‘Shall we look at it?’

  They went in and Whitlock sat down by the console. When he had ascertained the Mailbox file was from Sabrina, he punched in DIRECT PRINT and stood by to wait for the printout.

  ‘Can you give me a running translation of the stuff coming out of the printer?’ Philpott asked.

  Whitlock nodded. For ten minutes without pause, he sight-translated from the sheet of paper unreeling on to the carpet. He read summaries of fraudulent transactions which had resulted in Jewish businessmen being ruined. He read gloating descriptions of evictions, midnight batterings, a gang rape of a Jewish woman and two murders. After the description of the second killing, Whitlock stopped.

  ‘I think I want to take this stuff in smaller doses from here on,’ he said.

  ‘Quite.’ Philpott started rolling up the ribbon of paper. ‘Our dear girl has struck gold of a particularly nauseating yellow. Let’s get translators down here to deal with this. I’ll fix a meet with the Federal German Legation.’

  He glanced at the monitor. ‘Why is that blinking, C.W.?’

  Whitlock looked up. ‘Damn.’ He hit the button marked READ. ‘It’s a separate communiqué. She probably meant us to read it first.’

  Sabrina’s message flashed on to the screen, short and to the point: Wolff may be next on the list.

  ‘Talk to her as soon as you can,’ Philpott said. ‘Then alert Mike.’

  25

  ‘Uli Jürgen,’ Wolff said, repeating the name, his voice husky on the telephone. ‘I heard about the murder on the radio, and the name rang a bell then. Now you mention it, I believe a member of a group I met at a restaurant on Leipziger Strasse was called that. It was one of those occasions I was being shown off by Rudolf Altenberg. Jürgen was talkative, something of a showman as I recall.’

  ‘He was on the list,’ Mike said. ‘He was also standing next to someone with your name on an old photograph that the assassin works with. That’s what I called to tell you. It’s a picture of all the people on the list taken when they were boys.’

  ‘It occurs to me,’ Wolff said, ‘that maybe that group I met were the people on this list. All about the same age as myself, all acting as if they weren’t a group. They didn’t sit together, and they said nothing about being connected in any way, but at the same time they acted as if they hadn’t seen each other in ages and were having trouble concealing their pleasure. It’s odd how a thing like that shows.’

  ‘Do you remember anything else?’

  ‘Lots of photographs were taken. It was a charity affair, I think.’ Wolff paused. ‘My God.’ He snapped his fingers, making a cracking sound on the line. ‘I had forgotten it completely…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two different people, members of that coterie - if it was a coterie - told me I had the same name as a boyhood friend of theirs, now sadly dead.’

  Mike groaned. ‘Good old mistaken identity.’

  ‘Oh no, they didn’t think I was their friend.’

  ‘No, but the person who made up the list did.’ Mike had no doubt Wolff was telling the truth. ‘You’re the right age to have been in the Hitler Youth.’

  ‘Only just.’

  ‘These men were the last of the chosen,’ Mike said. ‘You’ve been seen in their company and by a nasty coincidence you’ve got yourself lumped with them. That’s bad for your reputation, but it’s worse for your long-term prospects.’

  ‘I find it hard, accepting that I am at risk.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to. You could be high on the list by now. I want you to stay put and don’t move far from the guys looking after you.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  Mike rang off, then he put through a call to Philpott in New York and told him about his conversation with Wolff.

  ‘We’ve been digging in the news archives since we got the records from Sabrina,’ Philpott said. ‘We found that a Berlin businessman called Andreas Wolff, born in Munich in 1934, died in a motoring accident in 1982. Significantly, a newspaper account of his funeral reported that among the pallbearers were Erich Bahr and Klaus Garlan.’

  ‘Who are both on the list.’

  ‘So the real Wolff is dead and our man is being mistaken for him.’ Mike heard muffled voices in the background. ‘C.W. is in the process of suggesting to the Austrian police that they double their efforts to protect Wolff,’ Philpott said. ‘Have you contacted Sabrina yet - I assume you are in Berlin?’

  ‘I’m in Berlin, but I haven’t been in touch with Sabrina. I’m about to do that.’

  ‘As soon as anything happens, for good or ill, let me know.’

  Mike went directly to a bar off Kantstrasse, near the Kurfürstendamm. Sabrina was waiting, sitting alone at a table by the door. Her hair was combed down, touching her shoulders. She wore a dark blue linen dress with a flared skirt; around her shoulders she wore a silk shawl.

  ‘Going somewhere special?’ Mike said, sitting down.

  ‘I made an effort to look civilized, that’s all.’ Sabrina poured him a glass of wine from the carafe on the table. ‘That’s Scheurebe Kabinett. Not bad.’

  ‘Why did they want you to stay in Berlin?’ he said. ‘Did somebody think maybe I couldn’t cope on my own?’

  ‘Keeping me here is like parki
ng a car handy to where you might need it. C.W. thinks Philpott wants the case resolved within the next twenty-four hours. If it comes to a showdown rather than a routine arresting of guilty parties, I suppose it makes sense to have us both where the action’s likely to break out.’ She sipped her wine. ‘Care to bring me up to speed?’

  Mike told her about his conversation with Wolff. ‘What’s the lead you have on the assassin?’

  ‘It’s his girlfriend. Magda Schaeffer. She’s a stripper at a club in Oranienstrasse. I’ve bought you temporary membership. The show doesn’t start until eleven.’

  ‘Even if we corner this guy, he isn’t going to throw up his hands and tell us we’ve got him fair and square,’ Mike said. ‘That’s way too low key. If he goes down, he’ll be fighting all the way.’

  ‘He won’t be the first one.’

  ‘I had a dream about him,’ Mike said. ‘It was jumbled, but he had just blown away somebody, in a fairground. I was going right up to him and he was standing there with the gun still smoking in his hand. I was getting ready to put an armlock on him. He turned and he had this terrific smile. I smiled back, completely won over in spite of myself, and he brought up the gun and shot me in the heart. The pain woke me up.’

  ‘This is no time to talk about death-dreams,’ Sabrina said.

  ‘Are there good and bad times?’

  ‘It’s what my friend Pratash believes.’

  ‘Pratash. I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.’

  ‘He’s a mystic. Or I think he is. I met him in Calcutta. He told me he was drawn to my emanations.’

  ‘Which always look nice when you wear light clothing.’

  ‘He wasn’t coming on to me, he was serious. A little, old, deeply serious man. He believes the world is a great big mistake and that the Creator will one day realize this and start it all over again from scratch. In the meantime, we should keep our heads below the parapet. One way of doing that, he told me, is never to think of danger, or dwell on dreams of jeopardy or death, at a time when real danger is likely to occur. He says such behaviour stimulates disaster.’