The Bourne Sanction

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “These signs,” Petra said. “Do you see any mention of how many Jews were tortured and lost their lives there? ‘One hundred and ninety-three thousand people lost their lives here,’ the signs say. There’s no expiation in this. We’re still hiding from ourselves; we’re still a land of Jew-haters, no matter how often we try to stifle the impulse with righteous anger, as if we have a right to be the aggrieved ones.”

  Bourne might have told her that nothing in life is as simple as that, except he deemed it better to let her fury burn itself out. Clearly, she couldn’t vent these views to anyone else.

  She took him on a tour of the ovens, which seemed sinister even so many years after their use. They seemed alive, appeared to shimmer, to be part of an alternate universe overflowing with unspeakable horror. At length, they passed out of the crematorium and arrived at a long room, the walls of which were covered with letters, some written by prisoners, others by families desperate for news of their loved ones, as well as other notes, drawings, and more formal letters of inquiry. All were in German; none had been translated into other languages.

  Bourne read them all. The aftermath of despair, atrocities, and death hung in these rooms, unable to escape. There was a different kind of silence here than the one on the Leitenberg. He was aware of the soft scuff of shoe soles, the whisper of sneakers as tourists dragged themselves from one exhibit to another. It was as if the accumulated inhumanity stifled the ability to speak, or perhaps it was that words—any words—were both inadequate and superfluous.

  They moved slowly down the room. He could see Petra’s lips move as she read letter after letter. Near the end of the wall, one caught his eye, quickened his pulse. A sheet of paper, obviously stationery, contained a handwritten text complaining that the author had developed what he claimed was a gas far more effective than Zyklon-B, but that no one at Dachau administration had seen fit to answer him. Possibly that was because the gas was never used at Dachau. However, what interested Bourne far more was that the stationery was imprinted with the wheel of three horses’ heads joined in the center by the SS death’s head.

  Petra came up beside him, her brows now knitted together in a frown. “That’s damn familiar.”

  He turned to her. “What do you mean?”

  “There was someone I used to know—Old Pelz. He said he lived in town, but I think he was homeless. He’d come down to the Dachau air raid shelter to sleep, especially in winter.” She pushed a stray lock of hair behind one ear. “He used to babble all the time, you know how crazy people do, as if he was talking to someone else. I remember him showing me a patch with that same insignia. He was talking about something called the Black Legion.”

  Bourne’s pulse began to pound. “What did he say?”

  She shrugged.

  “You hate the Nazis so much,” he said, “I wonder if you know that some things they gave birth to still exist.”

  “Yeah, sure, like the skinheads.”

  He pointed at the insignia. “The Black Legion still exists, it’s still a danger, even more so than when Old Pelz knew it.”

  Petra shook her head. “He talked on and on. I never knew whether he was speaking to me or to himself.”

  “Can you take me to him?”

  “Sure, but who knows whether he’s still alive. He drank like a fish.”

  Ten minutes later Petra drove down Augsburgerstrasse, heading for the foot of a hill known as Karlsburg. “Fucking ironic,” she said bitterly, “that the one place I despise the most is now the safest place for me.”

  She pulled into the lot outside the St. Jakob parish church. Its octagonal baroque tower could be seen throughout the town. Next door was Hörhammer’s department store. “You see there at the side of Hörhammer’s,” she said as they clambered out of the car, “those steps lead down to the huge air raid bunker built into the hill, but you can’t get in that way.”

  Leading him up the steps into St. Jakob, she led him across the Renaissance interior, past the choir. Adjacent to the sacristy was an unobtrusive dark wooden door, behind which lay a flight of stone stairs curving down to the crypt, which was surprisingly small, considering the size of the church above it.

  But as Petra quickly showed him, there was a reason for the size: Beyond it lay a labyrinth of rooms and corridors.

  “The bunker,” she said, flicking on a string of bare lightbulbs affixed to the stone wall on their right. “Here is where my grandparents fled when your country bombed the shit out of the unofficial capital of the Third Reich.” She was speaking of Munich, but Dachau was close enough to feel the brunt of the American air force raids.

  “If you hate your country so much,” Bourne said, “why don’t you leave?”

  “Because,” Petra said, “I also love it. It’s the mystery of being German—proud but self-hating.” She shrugged. “What can you do? You play the hand fate deals you.”

  Bourne knew how that felt. He looked around. “You’re familiar with this place?”

  She sighed heavily, as if her fury had left her spent. “When I was a child my parents took me to Sunday Mass every week. They’re God-fearing people. What a joke! Didn’t God turn his face away from this place years ago?

  “Anyway, one Sunday I was so bored I snuck away. In those days, I was obsessed with death. Can you blame me? I grew up with the stench of it in my nostrils.” She looked up at him. “Can you believe that I’m the only one I know who ever visited the memorial? Do you think my parents ever did? My brothers, my aunts and uncles, my classmates? Please! They don’t even want to admit it exists.”

  Seemingly weary again. “So I came down here to commune with the dead, but I didn’t see enough of them, so I pushed on and what did I find? Dachau’s bunker.”

  She put her hand on the wall, moved it along the rough-cut stone as caressingly as if it were a lover’s flank. “This became my place, my own private world. I was only happy underground, in the company of the one hundred and ninety-three thousand dead. I felt them. I believed that the soul of each and every one of them was trapped here. It was so unfair, I thought. I spent my time trying to figure out how to free them.”

  “I think the only way to do that,” Bourne said, “is to free yourself.”

  She gestured. “Old Pelz’s crash pad is this way.”

  As they picked their way along a tunnel, she said, “It’s not too far. He liked to be near the crypt. He thought a couple of those old folks were his friends. He’d sit and talk to them for hours, drinking away, just as if they were alive and he could see them. Who knows? Maybe he could. Stranger things have happened.”

  After a short time, the tunnel opened out into a series of rooms. The odors of whiskey and stale sweat came to them.

  “It’s the third room on the left,” Petra said.

  But before they reached it, the doorway was filled with a hulking body topped by a head like a bowling ball with hair standing up like the quills of a porcupine. Old Pelz’s mad eyes looked them over.

  “Who goes there?” His voice was as thick a fog.

  “It’s me, Herr Pelz. Petra Eichen.”

  But Old Pelz was looking in horror at the gun on her hip. “The fuck it is!” Hefting a shotgun, he yelled, “Nazi sympathizers!” and fired.

  Thirty-Four

  SORAYA ENTERED The Glass Slipper behind Kiki and ahead of Deron. Kiki had called ahead, and no sooner were they all inside than the owner, Drew Davis, came waddling over like Scrooge McDuck. He was a grizzled old man with white hair that stood on end as if it were shocked to see he was still alive. He had an animated face with mischievous eyes, a nose like a wad of chewed-up gum, and a broad smile honed to perfection on TV ops and stumping for local politicos, as well as his good works throughout the poorer neighborhoods of the district. But he possessed a warmth that was genuine. He had a way of looking at you when you spoke with him that made you feel he was listening to you alone.

  He embraced Kiki while she kissed him on both cheeks and called him “Papa.” Later, after the
introductions, when they were seated at a prime table that Drew Davis had reserved for them, after the champagne and goodies had been served, Kiki explained her relationship with him.

  “When I was a little girl, our tribe was swept by a drought so severe that many of the elderly and newborn grew sick and died. After a time, a small group of white people arrived to help us. They told us they were from an organization that would send us money each month, after they’d set up their program in our village. They had brought water, but of course there wasn’t enough.

  “After they left, thinking of broken promises, we fell into despair, but true to their word water came, then the rains came until we didn’t need their water anymore, but they never left. Their money went for medicines and schooling. Every month I, along with all the other children, got letters from our sponsor—the person sending the money.

  “When I was old enough, I started writing back to Drew and we struck up a correspondence. Years later, when I wanted to go on to higher learning, he arranged for me to travel to Cape Town to go to school, then he sponsored me for real, bringing me to the States for college and university. He never asked for anything in return, except that I do well in school. He’s like my second father.”

  They drank champagne and watched the pole dancing—which, much to Soraya’s surprise, seemed more artful, less crass than she had imagined. But there were more surgically enhanced body parts in that one room than she’d ever seen. For the life of her she couldn’t figure out why a woman would want breasts that looked and acted like balloons.

  She continued to drink her champagne, all too aware that she was taking tiny, overly dainty sips. She’d like nothing better than to take Kiki’s advice, forget about her problems for a couple of hours, kick back, get drunk, let herself go. The only trouble was, she knew it would never happen. She was too controlled, too closed in. What I ought to do, she thought morosely as she watched a redhead with gravity-defying breasts and hips that seemed unattached to the rest of her, is get smashed, pull off my top, and do some pole dancing myself. Then she laughed at the absurdity of the notion. She’d never been that kind of person, even when it might have been age-appropriate. She had always been the good girl—cool, calculating to the point of overanalysis. She glanced over at Kiki, whose magnificent face was lit up not only by the colored strobe lights but also by a fiercely experienced joy. Wasn’t the good girl’s life drained of color, of flavor? Soraya asked herself.

  This thought depressed her even more, but it was just the prelude, because a moment later she looked up to see Rob Batt. What the what? she thought. He’d seen her, all right, and was making a beeline right at her.

  Soraya excused herself, rose, and walked in the other direction, toward the ladies’ room. Somehow Batt managed to snake his way to a position in front of her. She turned on her heel, threaded her way around the tables. Batt, running up the waiters’ aisle from the kitchen, caught up with her.

  “Soraya, I need to talk to you.”

  She shook him off, kept going, out the front door. In the parking lot she heard him running after her. A light sleet was falling, but the wind had failed entirely, the precipitation coming straight down, melting on her shoulders and bare head.

  She didn’t know why she’d come out here; Kiki had driven them from Deron’s house, so she had no car to get into. Maybe she’d been disgusted by the sight of a man she’d liked and trusted, a man who’d betrayed that trust, who’d defected to the dark side, as she privately called LaValle’s NSA because she could no longer bear to utter the words National Security Agency without feeling sick to her stomach. The NSA had come to stand for everything that had gone wrong in America over the last number of years—the power grabs, the sense felt by some inside the Beltway that they were entitled to do anything and everything, laws of democracy be damned. It all boiled down to contempt, she thought. These people were so sure they were right, they felt nothing but contempt and perhaps even pity for those who tried to oppose them.

  “Soraya, wait! Hold on!”

  Batt had caught up with her.

  “Get out of here,” she said, continuing to walk away.

  “But I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “The hell you do. We have nothing to talk about.”

  “It’s a matter of national security.”

  Soraya, shaking her head in disbelief, laughed bitterly and kept on walking.

  “Listen, you’re my only hope. You’re the only one open enough to listen to me.”

  Rolling her eyes, she turned to face him. “You’ve got some fucking nerve, Rob. Go back and lick your new master’s boots.”

  “LaValle sold me out, Soraya, you know that.” His eyes were pleading. “Listen, I made a terrible mistake. I thought what I was doing would save CI.”

  Soraya was so incredulous she almost laughed in his face. “What? You don’t expect me to believe that.”

  “I’m a product of the Old Man. I had no faith in Hart. I—”

  “Don’t use the Old Man routine with me. If you really were his product you’d never have sold us out. You’d have hung in there, become part of the solution, rather than making the problem worse.”

  “You didn’t hear Secretary Halliday, the guy’s like a goddamn force of nature. I got sucked into his orbit. I made a mistake, okay? I admit it.”

  “There’s no excuse for your loss of faith.”

  Batt held up his hands, palms-outward. “You’re absolutely right, but, for God’s sake, look at me now. I’m being thoroughly punished, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t know, Rob, you tell me.”

  “I have no job, no prospect of getting one, either. My friends won’t answer my calls, and when I run into them on the street or a restaurant, they act like you did, they turn away. My wife’s moved out and taken the kids with her.” He ran his hand through his wet hair. “Hell, I’ve been living out of my car since it happened. I’m a mess, Soraya. What could be a worse punishment?”

  Was it a flaw in her character that her heart went out to him? Soraya wondered. But she showed no trace of sympathy, simply stood, silent, waiting for him to continue.

  “Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Listen—”

  “I don’t want to listen.”

  As she began to turn away again, he shoved a digital camera into her hand. “At least take a look at these photos.”

  Soraya was about to hand it back, then she figured she had nothing to lose. Batt’s camera was on, and she pressed the review button. What she saw was a series of surveillance photos of General Kendall.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  “That’s what I’ve been doing since I got canned,” Batt said. “I’ve been trying to find a way to bring down LaValle. I figured right away that he might be too tough a nut to crack quickly, but Kendall, well, he’s another story.”

  She looked up into his face, which shone with an inner fervor she’d never seen before. “How d’you figure that?”

  “Kendall’s restless and bitter, chafing under LaValle’s yoke. He wants a bigger piece of the action than either Halliday or LaValle is willing to give him. That desire makes him stupid and vulnerable.”

  Despite herself, she was intrigued. “What have you found out?”

  “More than I could’ve hoped for.” Batt nodded at her. “Keep going.”

  As Soraya continued to scroll through the photos her heart started to hammer in her chest. She peered closer. “Is that… Good God, it’s Rodney Feir!”

  Batt nodded. “He and Kendall met up at Feir’s health club, then they went to dinner, and now they’re here.”

  She looked up at him. “The two of them are here at The Glass Slipper?”

  “Those are their cars.” Batt pointed. “There’s a back room. I don’t know what goes on in there, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. General Kendall is a God-fearing family man, goes to church with his family and LaValle’s every Sunday like clockwork. He’s very active in the church, very visible the
re.”

  Soraya saw the light at the end of her own personal tunnel. Here was a way to get both her and Tyrone off the hook. “Two birds with one photo shoot,” she said.

  “Yeah, only trouble is how to get back there to snap ’em. It’s invitation only, I checked.”

  A slow smile spread across Soraya’s face. “Leave that to me.”

  For what seemed a long time after Kendall had kicked him until he vomited, nothing happened. But then, Tyrone had already taken note that time seemed to have slowed down to an agonizing crawl. A minute was made up of a thousand seconds, an hour consisted of ten thousand minutes, and a day—well, there were simply too many hours in a day to count.

  During one of the periods when his hood was taken off, he walked back and forth the narrow width of the room, not wanting to go near the far end with its ominous waterboarding tub.

  Somewhere inside him he knew he’d lost track of time, that this slippage was part of the process to wear him down, open him up, and turn him inside out. Moment by moment he felt himself sliding down a slope so slick, so steep that whatever he did to try to hold on to it failed. He was falling into darkness, into a void filled only with himself.

  This, too, was calculated. He could imagine one of Kendall’s underlings coming up with a mathematical formula for how far a subject should break down each hour of each day he was subject to incarceration.

  Ever since he had suggested to Soraya that he might be useful to her he’d been reading up on how to handle himself in the worst situations. There was a trick he’d come across that was useful to him now—he needed to find a place in his mind where he could withdraw when the going got really rough, a place that was inviolable, where he knew he’d be safe no matter what was done to him.

  He had that place now, he’d been there several times when the pain of kneeling with his arms locked high behind him became too much even for him. But there was one thing that frightened him: that damn trough on the other side of the room. If they decided to waterboard him he was done. For as far back as he could remember he’d been terrified of drowning. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t even float. Every time he’d tried to do either he’d choked, had to be hauled from the water like a three-year-old. He’d soon given up, figuring it didn’t matter. When was he going to go sailing or even lie on a beach? Never.