Spandau Phoenix

by Iles, Greg

  Hans flinched at that. Already he blamed himself for Weiss, and for so much more. He looked up into his father’s face, pleading silently for him to stop, but Hauer would not. “If you get on that plane with those papers, you will never return to Germany. Phoenix’s men can kill you on the plane, in the airport, anywhere. The South African police can murder you in jail. They do it all the time. If we have Der Bruderschaft in our department, what do they have there? The moment Phoenix has the papers, you will die. You’ll die. You’ll, never see your wife again. You’ll never see me again.”

  Hans scrambled to his feet. He slipped past Hauer to the shattered bedroom window and rested his cuffed hands on a knife-edge of glass. Even in the bitter cold he was sweating. Hauer’s words had pierced the fog of dread that surrounded him, yet the rush of nightmare images would not stop. They ripped through him like a ragged strip of film, unspooling from his heart, catching in his throat and flashing behind his eyes. He tried to speak, to express the confusion he felt, but his voice broke. Tears pooled in his eyes as he stared out into the frozen forest.

  Hauer couldn’t see Hans’s face, but he heard the sob and knew that his words had had their effect. He stood up slowly and took something from his pocket. A key. He walked to the window, removed the cuffs from Hans’s wrists, and put them in his pocket. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “I want you to take the papers to South Africa.”

  Natterman cleared his throat. “Surely you can’t mean that, Captain?”

  Hauer snapped his head around and gave the old man a withering glare. “I mean to use the Spandau diary to draw the kidnappers into the open. To force them to expose Ilse.”

  Hans threw up his hands. “But what can you do then? You don’t have one of your GSG-9 teams—no twenty-man unit with state-of-the-art weapons and communications.”

  Hauer spoke with cold-blooded confidence. “You know what I can do, Hans. You’re all the team I need.”

  “And me,” Natterman put in.

  Hauer ignored him. He had no intention of taking the professor to South Africa, but now was not the time to tell him that.

  Hans walked a few steps away from Hauer. It was almost impossible to argue with the man when he brought the power of his personality to bear. Yet Hans feared so much more than Ilse’s death. He sensed her terror like a snake twisted around his spine. Not terror for herself, but for the child she was carrying. Of course he remembered her doctor’s appointment now. He’d fallen asleep after the Spandau detail and missed it. But why hadn’t she told him about the baby when he got home? Yet he knew the answer to that too. Because he had come home acting like a total lunatic, a money-crazed bastard. And hadn’t she tried in spite of him? He could still hear her voice: I’ve got a secret too … And then the phone call from Funk’s man, Jürgen Luhr. And then Weiss. And Steuben. And Ilse …

  “Look, I don’t have a passport,” he said sharply. “The kidnappers were right about that. The only way I can get to South Africa is by the route they’ve set up.”

  “I can have a forger here in three hours,” Hauer said quickly. “I’m not giving those bastards a shot at you on the plane.”

  “Damn it, they said any deviation from the instructions and they’d kill her.”

  Sensing Hans’s growing resolve, Hauer pressed down his exasperation. “Hans, there are no absolutes in these situations. You’re like a doctor who must operate on his own wife. She has terminal cancer. She’s going to die unless you go in and cut out the tumour. But there are risks. The knife, among other things. You pick up the scalpel, then you hear a voice in your ear saying, ‘Hey, you give me what I want, and I’ll make this woman as healthy as the day she was born.’” Hauer shook his head. “It’s a fucking lie, Hans. That voice is the devil, and he doesn’t play by your rules. He feels no obligation. It’s your call, but no matter how badly you want to believe that voice, there’s only one option. Surgery.”

  Hans’s cheek twitched involuntarily. He searched the depths of his father’s eyes, but he saw neither subterfuge nor hope of gain—only the indomitable will of a man ready to die in a quest he had made his own. And from somewhere deep within himself, from a place he never knew existed, a voice edged with steel rose into his throat. “I’ll do it.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  2.35 AM Soviet Sector. East Berlin, DDR

  Harry picked himself up out of the shattered glass and sprinted for the courtyard wall. He heard no shooting yet, but that didn’t reassure him. The rough stone wall was high. Without breaking stride he planted his right shoe three feet up the face of the wall and leapt. His fingers dug into the rough ledge. He pulled with all his strength, both feet pedalling against the stone, and scrambled over the top.

  He found himself in a narrow walking space between two houses. Dashing down the dark corridor, he paused where it opened onto a narrow street. He saw no street signs nor any other landmarks he knew. Unsure of where to run, he flattened his back against the wall outside the alley’s mouth, locked his hands together in a deadly double fist, and waited.

  Axel Goltz was fast, intelligent, and well-trained, but his desperation made him careless. He came barrelling down the narrow alley at top speed, and rather than pause at its mouth as Harry had done, he leaned into his sprint, blindly pursuing the man he thought to be at least a block ahead of him by now. Harry’s locked fists struck the, East German in the centre of the forehead and skidded down the right side of his head.

  Goltz went down like an ox under the slaughterhouse hammer. Harry heard the metallic ring of a gun hitting the concrete, but he saw no gun. Goltz must have fallen on it. The Stasi agent lay motionless on his stomach. As Harry stared down, he caught the dark glint of metal protruding from beneath Goltz’s waist. Cautiously he leaned down and, snatched up the pistol. Goltz didn’t move.

  Seeing no one else on the street, Harry decided to question him. He held the pistol to Goltz’s head with his left hand and probed beneath the jaw with his right. There was a pulse—weak, but steady. As Harry opened his mouth to speak, he caught sight of the strange spot behind Goltz’s right ear. Harry’s blow had torn the bandage away. He expected to see stitches, but instead he saw a perfectly round moon of white flesh shining under the streetlight, marked at the centre by what looked like a spot of blood. Leaning closer, he saw what it was—a small tattoo. A tattoo of an eye. A single, blood red eye, inked into the scalp by a very talented needle. it reminded him of the eye on the pyramid on the back of a one-dollar bill, but only a little. This eye was less defined somehow, yet more piercing, more mystical.

  As Harry stared, Axel Goltz flicked his head up from the pavement like a slingshot and cracked him across the bridge of the nose. The next thing Harry saw through stinging tears was the East German on his feet, moving forward with a gleaming knife extended in his right hand. Harry fired Goltz’s pistol without thinking. The explosion of the unsilenced weapon reverberated through the empty streets like a cannon shot. The bullet blew Goltz off his feet. He landed on his back in the street, sucking for air, a tiny hole in his chest, a gaping hole in his back. Harry knelt quickly beside him and said into his ear, “Why did you shoot the Russian? Why?”

  Wide-eyed in shock, Goltz made a gurgling noise in his throat.

  Harry lifted him roughly by his shirt front. “What is Phoenix?” he asked sharply. “Goltz! What is Phoenix?”

  The German couldn’t speak. A froth of blood spilled over his lower lip. Harry racked his memory for the Stasi man’s rank. Lieutenant? “Was ist Phoenix, Herr Leutnant?” he barked in the voice of a sergeant major.

  A faint smile touched the corners of Goltz’s mouth. “Der Tag kommt,” he croaked. “For the Jews … for the world.” He sighed once, then went limp.

  Harry heard sirens in the distance. “Damn!” he cursed. He dropped Goltz to the concrete and forced his head to the side. The blood red eye stared upward. Harry didn’t know what the mark meant, but he knew that it was somehow important. Goltz had obviously been hiding it f
rom Rykov and his men; Harry saw no reason to let them find it now. He laid the pistol barrel against the German’s skull, muzzle against the tattoo. He pulled against the trigger, then stopped. Without pausing to think, he jammed the pistol into his belt and pried the knife from Goltz’s clenched fist. He tried to grasp the bald circle of Goltz’s scalp between his thumb and forefinger, but it was impossible. There was no hair to pull, and the skin was stretched too tightly around the skull. Ignoring the wailing sirens, Harry braced his knee firmly against the right side of the Stasi man’s head. He grasped the hair at the lower edge of the shiny circle and tugged up a little hummock of flesh. Then he jabbed the knifepoint into the scalp beneath the tattoo, deep into the fascia. Goltz’s body jerked when the point struck bone—from reflex, Harry hoped.

  But then the bleeding started: little pulsing waves that shimmered black-red beneath the streetlight. Goltz was unconscious, but alive. Gritting his teeth together, Harry levered the knife blade up, using the point as the fulcrum, and worked his left thumb under the raised scalp. This accomplished, it took only a few seconds of sawing to excise the half-dollar-sized swatch of skin that bore the tattoo.

  The sirens were much closer now. Harry stood and shoved the fragment of scalp deep into his trouser pocket. Then he sprinted toward the nearest intersection, wiping the blood from his hands as he ran. There were street signs at the intersection, but he didn’t recognize the names. With no better option, he began running toward the brightest lights he could see. He soon saw a sign he knew: Rosenthaler Strasse. High in the sky to his left hovered the shining observation sphere of the great Fernsehturm, the 1,215-foot television tower that rises needle-like from the Alexanderplatz to dominate both East and West Berlin. Using the tower as point zero, Harry visualized East Berlin from the air, estimating distances and comparing the times it would take him to reach different destinations.

  Twelve blocks to the west stood the British Embassy. Harry knew the ambassador, but he also knew that his chances of getting through the gate unmolested were nil. If either Goltz or Rykov had reached a telephone, the friendly embassies would be covered already. Twenty blocks to the east was a French safehouse where Harry knew he could find refuge, but the shortest route to it lay through one of the busiest sections of East Berlin. Even at night it would be risky.

  Harry started walking. He crossed two deserted corners, then passed a row of yellow phone boxes where an ill-kempt young man stood shouting into a telephone. On impulse Harry turned and walked back to the phone boxes. He took hold of the boy’s jacket with one hand and broke the connection with the other.

  “Hey!” the boy snapped. “Arschloch! Let go!”

  “Coins!” Harry demanded, pointing to the phone. “Pragen!”

  “Fick Dich in Knie!” the German cursed.

  Harry grabbed the tangled mane of blond hair and twisted until the boy’s eyeball rested against the telephone’s coin slot. “Pragen! ” he hissed.

  Snarling, the youth pulled thirty Pfennig from his jacket and dropped the jangling coins onto the sidewalk. Harry jerked him out of the phone box and shoved him down the street. “Beat it!” he growled.

  “Haue auf!” The boy backed off cursing, then turned and shuffled on.

  Harry dialled an East Berlin number from memory and waited. He could still hear the siren, but fainter.

  “British Embassy,” said a sleepy female voice, after a dozen rings.

  “I have an urgent message for Ambassador Brougham,” Harry said breathlessly. “The code is Trafalgar. Am I being recorded?”

  “Yes, sir!” The crisis code had worked its magic.

  Harry paused, remembering Colonel Rose’s warning not to tell the British anything about the Spandau case. He understood the caution, but under these circumstances he might be captured and silenced long before he got through to Colonel Rose.

  “Are you there, sir?” asked the Englishwoman.

  “Message to God,” Harry said, using Rose’s nickname.

  “Zinoviev, repeat, Zinoviev. Break. Phoenix, repeat, Phoenix. Break. Message to Ambassador Brougham: This is Major Harry Richardson, US Army. I was abducted, repeat, abducted into East Berlin tonight. I have escaped and I’m on my way to your embassy for asylum.”

  Harry heard a hiccup of astonishment. “I’m on foot, and I should be there in about seven minutes. Get those gates open!” Harry slammed down the phone and looked westward to ward the British Embassy. Then he started east toward the safehouse.

  2.36 a.m. KGB headquarters, Soviet Sector, Berlin. DDR

  Ivan Kosov sat thoughtfully in his Swiss-made office chair and gazed at a four-by-five-inch file photograph of Harry Richardson. It was a telephoto shot, long and grainy, but the expression on the American’s face looked as cocksure as it had when he picked the name Zinoviev from the three Kosov had tossed out. Kosov muttered an oath and slid the photo aside. Now he looked into the piercing eyes of Rudolf Hess. This picture was an eight-by-ten, sharp and clear, of the Deputy Führer during his prime. The heavy-browed Aryan face radiated authority and self-assurance. Beneath this photo lay a smaller shot of Hess as a First World War pilot. His eyes looked younger, brighter somehow—unweighted with the knowledge of immeasurable death and destruction.

  Kosov had stared at these photos of Hess for years, wondering why Moscow was still obsessed with the old Nazi’s mission. They had proof that Prisoner Number Seven was an impostor—or so Kosov had heard from several Dzerzhinsky Square old-timers that he trusted. Yet if Centre had such proof, why didn’t they expose him long ago? They’re waiting, the old-timers said. Waiting for what? Corroboration, they said. Was Zinoviev that corroboration? Whoever Zinoviev was? Was there really some hidden purpose in Hess’s flight, or was this simply one more conspiracy theory veiled in the murky corridors of Moscow Centre? Kosov had the feeling he was about to find out at last.

  The computers had tracked Yuri Borodin to London. Kosov had sent a query straight on to the embassy, and while he waited for the reply, he’d ordered a printout of Harry Richardson’s file. Kosov envied the freedom Borodin enjoyed. Twelfth Department agents, for all practical purposes, “stationed” themselves. A far cry from the deskbound life Kosov had led for the past decade. Suddenly Kosov’s printer began to chatter. Not bad, he thought. Borodin must have been at the embassy when the message came through. He read the reply as his printer spat it out, thankful that the days when he had to decode his own messages were long past.

  TO KOSOV- 07611457

  2:39 AM GMT London

  In response to query YES I know agent in question NO I have no relationship with him other than ADVERSARIAL Subject is valuable resource hold him there until I arrive. ETA tomorrow. CANCEL TODAY a.m.

  BORODIN

  Kosov slammed a horny hand down on his desk. The American had lied after all! But while this knowledge delighted Kosov, Borodin’s intention to come to Berlin did not. “I’ve caught the golden goose,” he said bitterly, “and this prima donna wants to come take the credit. We’ll see about that.”

  While Kosov grumbled, his printer began to chatter again. What emerged this time was not a message, but a digital facsimile photograph, a study in grays and black. It showed four uniformed young men in their early twenties, standing shoulder to shoulder against the famous Borovitsky Gate of the Kremlin. Kosov didn’t recognize the uniforms, but the young men were obviously officers. A hand-pencilled arrow pointed to the face of the second man from the left. The photo was very grainy, but Kosov recognized the hardness in the eyes and around the mouth of that face. Those eyes have seen much death, he thought. At the bottom of the photo was a handwritten caption: V K Zinoviev: Awarded Okhrana Captaincy 1917. Typed beneath the photo were the words: Message follows by courier, Zemenek.

  Kosov felt a thrill of triumph. Here was the mysterious Zinoviev at last! And sent to him by the chairman himself! Yet Kosov’s triumph was tempered by puzzlement and uneasiness. Zinoviev an officer of the Okhrana? What in God’s name could the Okhrana have to do with
this case? It was a ghost from an even more distant past than Rudolf Hess. The Okhrana was the tsar’s dreaded secret police force—the most ruthless enemy the communists had ever known.

  Kosov scratched his grizzled head. With a sharp sense of frustration, he realized what was eating at him. Without quite knowing it, he had been expecting Zinoviev to turn out to be the mysterious one-eyed man.

  It made sense. For years he’d had a name with no face to go with it, and a one-eyed man without a name. Why couldn’t they be one and the same? Maybe they are, he thought suddenly, staring at the photo again. The hard-faced young officer in the photo had two living eyes—of that Kosov had no doubt. They stared out from the picture like smouldering lumps of coal. You are very young here, little tiger Kosov thought. Plenty of time yet to lose an eye. Especially in your job, eh? Most Okhrana officers had lost more than their eyes after Tsar Nicholas was overthrown.

  ‘Telephone, Comrade Colonel!” interrupted a secretary.“Urgent.”

  Startled out of his reverie, Kosov snatched up the receiver. When he heard Captain Rykov explain what had happened at the Stasi safehouse, he felt the blood leave his head in a rush. “My God,” he muttered. “My God! Get back here any way you can, you idiot!”