by John Meaney
"I heard."
"Snatching foreign citizens from their homes was too much. We shouldn't have been using neos for that."
"Tell Schröder."
"I did. But it was your doing, Wolf."
"Balls."
The rain was a solid sheet of grey. Zeev halted the car, unable to safely drive.
"I'm surprised," he said, "that you didn't ask to get involved in the questioning."
"Mindbending is not my thing. Not like that."
"I know, but the Schenck woman was... Never mind."
This made me frown. I had a memory of reaching for a phone in Boston, knowing that what Moshe had done, what we had set in motion.
Schröder would have had no choice.
Moshe had stopped Crossman stone dead. At that moment, or soon afterwards when Crossman or an observer was due to report JFK's death, Black Path would have known that someone was onto them. They'd have gone to ground. Because of me, there was only one thing for Schröder to do.
Zeev had led the biggest team, but practically every katsa had been involved. The action took place on foreign soil: violent, illegal action. Even in Outer Germany, where Black Path membership is against the law, snatching citizens off the street is known as kidnapping.
Large scale kidnapping.
Phoning...
Yes. In Boston, I'd been going to phone Hilde Schenck, in order to... to... to warn her? Was that possible?
And then I didn't, did I?
Have you ever gone into a room to do something, then forgotten what you were there for? That's a trick of the human mind. And any mental trick that's interesting, you can bet that Manny Silverberg knows how it works...
No. He couldn't have.
...and can reproduce it in trance, or as a post-hypnotic command.
"I haven't thought about Hilde," I said now, "since debriefing after Munich."
"Which I wasn't part of." Zeev was watching the rain.
"No, but Manny Silverberg was."
"I heard that was because... Oh."
Zeev turned away from the windscreen, focusing on me. Silver reflected highlights shimmered down his eyes. At that angle, he looked like an android from a sci-fi book.
"You mean," he continued, "there was a woman you were involved with, but you haven't thought about her at all during the months since. Not since you happened to have a chat with Manny. Is that what you're telling me?"
"Yeah, pretty much."
"Shit. That Manny."
"Yeah."
Zeev continued to look at me with that metallic gaze.
"And how do you feel about that? Pissed off?"
"Strangely, no. I think he did me a favour."
The rain was lessening. Soon it was merely threads of silver, falling through the night.
"Has Manny been involved in the interrogations?" I asked.
"Not that I know of." Zeev got the car back into motion. "But if I were Schröder, I'd be making use of every resource."
"Me, too."
"And I'd be getting really worried that we've still not uncovered the bomb. The only good news was the African thing."
"I agree."
Following up on the South African connection – the visas that Appleton and Crossman had used to enter the US – had uncovered a cell that we hadn't known existed, operating out of Johannesburg.
The big success had been when a strike team led by Druyan had taken out a paramilitary squad, with zero casualties on our side and one hundred percent fatality among the opposition. It wasn't the killing that was the success: it was the recovery of reprocessed uranium that had been sealed in a lead box inside a suitcase, ready for a certain Klaus Eisenmenger to take on a passenger ship bound for New York.
I remembered Eisenmenger from Munich, playing tennis with what's-her-face.
Hilde.
With Hilde, yes.
Anyway, Eisenmenger had escaped, but the paramilitaries all died. Good enough.
"Here we are. Look up ahead."
Zeev turned on to an open dock. This was nowhere near the canal where Pinchas and I had taken that seaplane, an entire year ago. The water here was deep-channel all the way to open sea. A small destroyer was moored alongside, massive hawsers fastening it to land.
There were crates stacked here and there, beneath silver-white cones of brightness shed by arc-lamps: a haphazard ciaruscaro geometry.
Zeev brought the car to a halt.
"Here we are. You might want to..."
Figures materialized on either side. One of them tapped on the glass beside me.
"...wind down your window."
I did so. Zeev did likewise.
"Hello, sir," said a bright young voice. "It's good to see you."
"Isser," I said. "Having fun out there in the rain?"
"Could be worse. I could have a normal life."
I laughed.
"There's no chance of that, my friend."
"No, sir. Thank God."
Zeev was already climbing out.
"Let's go for a walk."
Isser strolled alongside us, his attention on the environment, not looking at us as he talked.
"Hannah's team went off duty an hour ago," he said. "They're out of sight, behind those crates."
"Couldn't find anywhere warm and dry to go to?"
"They've got somewhere lined up. But they wanted to loosen up and get warm here, before bedding down."
Zeev smiled.
"Let's see."
In a hollow square defined by metal shipping containers the size of railway carriages – designed to fit on freight cars – a violent scenario was playing out. In the soft rain, two men were creeping forward with knives drawn, careful of their footing. A young woman faced away from them, her arms folded, but not with her hands tucked in: not an amateur.
Hannah heard a footfall, or perhaps it was an atavistic sense: scenting danger, feeling subtle shifts in air pressure or the geomagnetic field. Reflex-fast, she spun, wrapping up the first attacker's arm, tucking her elbow close in to her body, ramming three rapid knee-strikes into the man's groin.
When I sparred with Jean-Paul, a lifetime ago, he used to call these coups de genou direct aux parties. I presumed he still did.
Hannah finished the guy off with a hook-punch to the throat, and stripped the knife from his grasp. She went for the second attacker. There was another flurry, while I looked at Zeev and grinned. Then we both watched as Hannah spun around, alert, looking in all directions for danger, then sprinted off.
"Oh," I said. "Nice touch."
There was a white cross marked out on the ground with dust sheets, and it was meant to symbolize a place of safety. Reaching it, Hannah stuffed her hands down inside her waistband, then up inside her sweater, and checked around her throat. Then she held her hands out to look at, searching for the red wetness that would tell her she'd been wounded.
"Good training," I told Zeev. "Very good."
Because when you face a knife, it's highly probable that if you've been wounded, you won't feel it. You can walk away from a confrontation and then collapse from blood loss, not realizing why, and then your world will ebb out of existence because you hadn't known you needed help. The only way to know whether you're unwounded is to check visually.
"We're upgrading the syllabus," Zeev said. "I'd appreciate your thoughts."
"If we don't find out what Black Path are up to, we won't be recruiting any more neos."
"Understood. Come on, Wolf. Let's say hello."
We did. We also told Hannah and the others that they were doing a good job.
"Thank you," she said. "The Peace Globe is on board. We checked it for radioactivity, as suggested. Nothing."
"As expected." I remembered looking inside the thing, in Moskowitz's studio. "Purely a precaution."
"Yes, sir."
Because Albrecht Reinhard had that touch of flamboyance. There was something melodramatic about using a sculpture from New Jerusalem as the placeholder for an atomic bomb, u
nnecessary though it was. I mean, you could just park a truck anywhere in Manhattan, and set the thing off on a timer. Or were we mistaken in our assumptions about Reinhard's plans? As far as I knew – and we operate on need-to-know, so I could be mistaken – we'd learned nothing from the Black Path people we'd kidnapped from Outer Germany and half a dozen other countries, and buried out of sight in our own covert institutions.
Where the hell was the bloody bomb?
The elder Reinhard, the public face of right-wing totalitarian sentiment, had complained in public about Zionist terrorism, which our government had denied. The 'great' man himself now went around in public with a phalanx of bodyguards. He'd declared that his son was in hiding because of the threat from radical Jewish extremists. Maybe this was all some kind of massive deception set up by Colonel Arkady Ignatieff: a KGB master-stroke, spreading paranoid distrust among Western powers.
"We're also testing the crate," said Hannah, "with the radio-trigger device. But that's going to be on open water, just in case."
"What device is that?" I asked.
Hannah glanced toward Zeev, then said: "It's American, sir. They probably don't know we've got it. The apparatus cycles through every frequency imaginable, checking for resonance. It's supposed to pick up any radio trigger at all, regardless of how it's set. The problem is..."
"You might detonate the thing," I said. "A minor drawback."
"Just a little, sir."
So they were going to accompany the sculpture for the whole voyage. A good thing.
Going to the States...
I might not have thought about Hilde Schenck for months, but Fern Segal? Her, I'd thought about every single day, maybe every hour.
Oh, Fern.
Shaking my head, I turned to Hannah, intending to make some wisecrack about keeping young men like Isser away from Times Square. Just then, two of the neos jerked their heads up to the sky, and drew their handguns.
Zeev frowned, but I said: "Frequencies. The young ones can hear something we—"
Then the pitch altered, and we heard it too. The dark sky was vibrating.
"Move it," said Hannah. "Dispersal pattern three."
The neos shifted.
"Shit shit shit," I heard Hannah mutter.
I followed. Zeev moved beside me, keeping pace.
Then we were out of the enclosing square of shipping containers, able to see up into the sky, trying to assess the threat. The noise grew. The entire night began to pulse with sound.
A winged shadow moved within the darkness, impossibly massive and slow.
The neos were crouched, weapons trained upwards in double-handed grips, squinting against the rushing wind and sound. Only Zeev stood upright, holding his ground.
"No!" he called, trying to make himself heard.
He put his weapon away.
"What...?"
"It's one of ours!" he shouted.
The thing moved like some titanic vulture, some black demon out of myth. Its roar shook the world and liquefied the guts of any small, soft human being unlucky enough to be near. Then it drifted sideways, with its nose and its weaponry still angled downwards and pointed at us: an ugly vulture with armaments, plus the ability to hover.
And then it was lowering itself to the ground, on an open expanse of dock.
The plane was VTOL, a fighter that could behave like a helicopter. Zeev was right: it bore a Star of David decal. One of our own. It settled on its sprung undercarriage, but did not power down. Instead, after a few moments, there was a movement on top, then a section of the cockpit slid back. A helmet-and-shoulders profile presented itself.
The pilot's gauntleted hand stabbed a forefinger towards us.
"Oh, my God," said Hannah.
The pilot pointed once more.
"Wolf." Zeev thumped my shoulder. "That means you."
"You're kidding."
But when I walked forward, the pilot's helmet glinted in reflected arc-lights, nodding agreement. So this was for me. As I drew near, the pilot gestured to the wing, and to slender rungs built into the side of the fuselage below the cockpit.
I stopped, and the pilot waved upwards, telling me to climb inside. Shaking my head, I looked back at Zeev, who raised his hands and shrugged. Big help. Then he gave me a V-for-Victory salute.
I gave him a two-fingered reply, the kind I'd learned in an English schoolyard.
Then I climbed aboard.
The jet-wash and fuel-stink were incredible. Fighting against sensory overload, I hauled myself down into the passenger seat in front of the pilot, and pulled on the waiting helmet. As I fastened the safety buckles, the pilot slammed the cockpit shut.
The engine noise was growing thunderous.
Sweet bleeding hell.
Then the world dropped away beneath us.
Human figures were tiny on the dockyard as it wheeled out of sight, then acceleration flattened my chest as the night-sky swung past, and the pilot kicked in the afterburner, punching the breath from me.
What's the hurry for?
In seconds, we were screaming through the darkness, high above the River Elbe, heading for Berlin.
We made a howling touchdown.
Trees stood all around, skeletal silhouettes against darkness. The parkland seemed to vibrate as I climbed down, then walked away from the aircraft. Its engines continued to growl as its massive weight touched only lightly on the ground. The pilot kept her visor down.
She raised one hand, and I waved back.
Then the air hammered against me in percussive waves, as the thundering plane began to rise, higher and higher into the night sky. In moments it was flying away, some incredible hallucination that was finally fading.
Police officers in uniform were waiting for me. Beyond a set of iron gates, three patrol cars had their engines idling. They sounded soft, almost burbling, after the jet. I realized this was David Park, the old Preussenpark.
"This way, sir," said one of the officers.
"Yes. All right."
I was shaking, soaked with sweat, as I climbed into the nearest car. Officers got in with me, and soon all the cars were in motion. Then we were accelerating hard along the Berlin streets. The drivers used their sirens. We passed through two junctions where other patrol cars had simply swung across the carriageway and stopped, halting the night-time traffic.
Something's gone wrong.
We stopped before an old building at the city's edge. It rose high and dark-grey, and every window was barred. The main double doors swung open, and a wide-shouldered man with buzz-cut hair stepped out. He was wearing a suit, the jacket open, with an automatic in a shoulder holster. He opened the car door for me.
"We're in a bit of a rush, sir."
"That's a surprise."
I followed him into the building – waved through by more guards – and upstairs to a fourth-floor landing, then along a stone-walled corridor: institutional paint, most recently pink, revealing green and blue layers underneath where it had been chipped. Through an iron door, we entered a room that smelled of disinfectant. Pinchas and Manny Silverberg were sitting at a plain wooden table, enamelled mugs of tea before them.
"Wolf."
Both of them stood up. The man who'd led me here gave a nod, then went out into the corridor, taking up station.
"What's going on?"
"It's a matter of... delicacy," said Pinchas.
"Excuse me? I've just come hurtling across the sky from fucking Hamburg. Do you have any idea—? "
"Sorry, Wolf. Of course I arranged..."
But Manny was already gesturing for me to sit. His eyes were big and dark-brown and seemed almost to glow.
"It's interesting how you can relax after such a journey now you've come down to Earth, so easily relaxing as you descend—"
"Don't play those. Games." My eyelids had begun to flutter. "With. Me."
Manny was dangerous, but he was on my side.
All right. Let go.
I allowed my eyes to close.
"—feeling calm as Pinchas describes—"
"Yes."
"—what you want to do."
All by itself, my breathing became slow and shallow. My muscles softened.
Relax...
Then I came fully awake.
"All right," said Pinchas. "This is what we need..."
I understood his words, though not the earlier urgency.
Or why, since Manny had helped me to forget her, they wanted me to talk to the beautiful Hilde Schenck.
Three guards threw me into her cell. I hit the stone floor shoulder-first, and it hurt.
"Bastards." My lip had already been bleeding. ""Jesus fuck."
There was an iron-framed bed. On it, the blonde woman's wrists were enclosed in leather bracelets attached to broad straps.
"Larry?"
She knew me as Larry Brown.
Remember that.
"What...? No. Hilde? I don't believe—"
"Oh, my God, Larry. Larry. I love you."
It was Hilde Schenk, beautiful as ever.
Hilde...
She'd been sobbing, and the bedclothes were bunched up around her, concealing something... something ... No need to look... that would make all the difference if I... Can look later, it will be all right, relax...
I squinted, trying to focus on her face.
"Hilde. I've found you. You've been missing for months."
I rolled, came up to a kneeling position on the floor. I kissed Hilde's bound hand. Then I got up on one knee, and began to force myself upwards.
"Larry, oh my darling. They killed him."
"What? Who? Killed who?"
I pushed myself into a leaning position against the bed. Hilde's beautiful flecked eyes were surrounded by pink: bloodshot with weeping.
What had the bastards done to her?
"They shot Jürgen. His head... Oh God."
"Hilde."
"His head just sprayed."
"Christ."
This had created the overwhelming urgency.
("Her brother's died," Pinchas had said. "And her mind is disintegrating. If she goes all the way into madness, we'll get nothing."
That hadn't sounded right, until Manny added: "Her unconscious mind is filled with commands laid down by that bastard Strang. It's why we've not been able to get anything out of her so far. Try too hard, and we'll trigger genuine amnesia.")