Ice Station Wolfenstein

by Preston; Child

  With a pointed but unnoticed glance at Sam's lit cigarette, Smith rolled down his window. "He's German," he said. "Born in Potsdam in 1916. His full name's Harald Josef Kruger. No relatives, as far as anyone knows. The nurse at the home said nobody ever came to see him and he paid all his bills himself. No next of kin listed. Very neat, though. Organized. He didn't have much stuff, but his papers were all in order. Every bank statement for the past ten years, all his receipts, all his personal documents neatly filed. Not that it made for very exciting reading, as he's been in the home since 1998. There certainly wasn't anything to suggest that anyone would want to chop him into wee bits."

  They turned off the main road, toward Hopetoun House, then turned again into a rather dismal housing estate. "Look, Sam," Smith said. "I know that you know the ropes, but just . . . be prepared for a bit of hostility here. The nurses are fine, but the facility managers aren't too chuffed to have us crawling all over the place. And if you find being in the room too much, just say, ok?"

  "What, you think I'm going to lose it at the sight of blood, Paddy?" Sam chuckled.

  "Just trying to be sensitive," Smith muttered. "It's your first crime scene since—"

  "I know, I know. Since that crime scene." He sucked down another lungful of smoke. "But you know, Paddy, it's actually not my first since then. You have no idea how many crime scenes I see. There's the place on St Andrew Square where cyclists keep going onto the pavement when they're not allowed, and there's the newsagent on Easter Road that got cleared out of cigarettes twice in one year."

  "Ha. Funny." Smith grimaced. "But you know what I mean. Just . . . watch yourself, ok?"

  "Ok."

  Despite DCI Smith's assurances that the nurses were comparatively friendly, Sam found himself on the receiving end of an icy reception. The staff nurse at the desk looked him up and down with frank disapproval.

  "Do you have any press identification, Mr. Cleave?" she asked. The expression on her face made it clear that she did not believe that anyone so unkempt could work for a reputable paper.

  "Nope," said Sam. "Sorry, but the days when we all stuck press badges in our fedoras are long gone. You can google me if you like, but I promise you, my byline picture looks even worse than the real thing."

  "I can vouch for him," Smith said, flashing his ID. "He's here because he's the one journalist I trust to handle this sensitively, ok? Everyone else, you just keep telling them to contact the station."

  The nurse looked deeply suspicious, but she let them pass. Smith led the way to G21 with Sam trailing in his wake. He watched carefully as Sam entered the room. The body had been removed, but the forensic team was still swarming all over the place and the bloodstains stood out starkly against the magnolia paint on the walls.

  The dark stench of blood hit Sam like an uppercut. It took all his concentration not to recoil, or to run out of the room, or to throw up. He fixed his eyes on an unsullied patch of burgundy carpet and focused on breathing through his mouth. There was no way he would give anyone the satisfaction of seeing that he couldn't handle a little blood. Least of all himself.

  Once he was sure that he wouldn't vomit, Sam raised his eyes and took in the scene. It was a completely anonymous room. Pale walls, standard issue bedding, a few small, banal pictures, the kind of default decoration that no one actually chooses. There was nothing to indicate the tastes or personality of the occupant.

  Having got a grip on himself by checking out the mundane objects, Sam forced himself to look at the wing chair. He was standing behind it, so all he could see was the spattered blood on the wall and a little on the carpet. The worst, he knew, would be around the other side, where the old man's blood had soaked the fabric of the chair. He dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands. Come on Sam, he thought. You've seen worse. Get on with it.

  "Are youse the police?"

  Sam whirled around, grateful for the interruption. An elderly man in a pale blue dressing gown was standing in the doorway, supporting himself on a Zimmer frame.

  "I said, are youse the police?"

  A nurse came up behind the old man and began flapping and shushing him, trying to lead him away, but the man was having none of it. DCI Smith crossed the room in a couple of steps and positioned himself in the doorway, blocking as much of the view into the room as possible. In his best calm, professional voice, he began to reassure the old man that they were the police, and they were doing everything they could to find out what had happened.

  Sam decided that he had taken a liking to the old man. Perhaps it was something about the unkempt hair, perhaps it was the belligerent refusal to listen to the nurse, but for a moment Sam felt as if he was staring his own future in the face. He walked over to the door and stood at Smith's shoulder.

  "Who's this?" the old man asked, pointing to Sam. "He's no police, is he? Look at the state of him."

  Yes, Sam thought, as the nurse led the old man away toward the bathroom. I definitely like this guy. He turned to Smith. "Have you lot got statements from everyone?" he asked. "Am I ok to talk to people?"

  "Statements are done," Smith confirmed. "But honestly, I doubt you'll get much out of Mr. McKenna. DI Andrews was with him for the best part of an hour this morning and said that he hadn't seen or heard anything much, he just wanted to ramble on about how Mr. Kruger was a Nazi."

  "Great!" Sam smiled. "I'll go and talk to him once he's out of the bathroom. If the Post doesn't like the Nazi angle, I can maybe try selling the story to News of the World."

  "Hilarious," Smith remarked, deadpan. "Now come and I'll show you around the crime scene while you wait for him to do his business."

  "But how come the police have to be here?" Mr. McKenna protested, as he and Sam sat down for a chat in the facility's lounge. It was a chilly room with plastic-covered seats. At Smith's insistence, DI Andrews had been sent in to accompany them.

  "He's here to protect you," said Sam, nodding amiably at the young DI. "I've not had a criminal record check, so I'm not allowed to be in here on my own in case I'm dangerous."

  Mr. McKenna harrumphed a bit, muttering about health and safety gone mad and suggesting that these rules had not done Mr. Kruger any good. Sam did not mind. It was good to be out of the crime scene. DCI Smith's account of finding the body had brought up too many memories that now needed to be submerged again, and a good chat with an elderly xenophobe would do the trick, he thought. Besides, in this room there was a pot of tea and a pile of cheap, prepackaged biscuits, and Sam always preferred to be where the tea was.

  "I've already spoken to the police," Mr. McKenna grumbled. "I'm not doing it again. Get one of the nurses if you've got to have someone in here."

  Sam looked over at DI Andrews. "Would that be ok?"

  "Fine with me," the DI replied, looking relieved. Sam wondered how their earlier interview had gone. "I'll send someone in."

  A moment later, a young male nurse was in the room and Mr. McKenna was directing him to sit at the far end and not listen in. DI Andrews made a swift exit, before the nurse could insist he stayed, and as he left Sam was sure he heard Mr. McKenna muttering "Fuck the filth!" under his breath. He stifled a laugh and tried to maintain his professional composure, such as it was.

  "No recordings," Mr. McKenna said, seeing Sam setting up his Dictaphone between them. "Just you write things down. And don't you put my name in your paper. I don't want any of this linked to me, right?"

  "No problem," said Sam. "You'll be 'sources close to Mr. Kruger,' is that ok?"

  Mr. McKenna laughed. "No one was 'close' to Kruger. Not really. But we chatted a bit. We're both fond of whisky, and you've got to talk about something when you're drinking."

  "So what did you chat about?" Sam asked.

  "Him being a Nazi, mostly," said Mr. McKenna. Sam spluttered on his tea. He had known that the Nazi accusation was coming, but he hadn't expected it to be so matter of fact. "It's true!" Mr. McKenna insisted. "I'm not just saying that because he was German. He told me about it. We'd
both been engineers—me in the RAF, him in one of the big Nazi research centers. Peenemünde."

  "Peenemünde?"

  "Aye. It was a research station on an island in the Baltic, up near the Polish border. Luftwaffe base. It's where Wernher von Braun developed buzzbombs and V2 rockets. Aeroballistics. That's what Kruger worked in. I nearly got killed by a buzzbomb when I was stationed in London. We used to laugh about how he probably built it."

  Sam looked at the old man with interest. It was easy to forget that the residents of the facility had once been young people with active, complicated lives. Is this what's in store for me? Sam wondered. Anonymous old age, surrounded by staff who don't know or care that I used to be a real person? I wonder what this guy's life was like before he got dumped in here. "So how does someone get from working with Wernher von Braun to a retirement home in South Queensferry?" Sam asked.

  "By getting old," Mr. McKenna replied. "You go where the kids are, if you've got any."

  "I thought Mr. Kruger had no family?"

  "Not now," said McKenna, "but he used to have a daughter. Elisabeth, her name was. Nice lass. I remember she used to come here sometimes to see him. You'd never have guessed them for father and daughter, what with her accent. She was American. Looked and sounded like a film star. That was because they were in California, you know. Or it might have been New Mexico. After Paperclip." He saw Sam's bemused expression. "Operation Paperclip? When the Russians came and the Yanks got all the Nazi scientists out?"

  Sam nodded. "Heard of it. So what happened to Elisabeth?"

  "She married a Scotsman. That's why she moved here. But they died, her and her husband both. Car crash. In 2000, I think it was. Maybe 2001? No, 2000, because Mary Williams was still living in the room to the other side of mine and she died just before my 80th birthday. Anyway, after Elisabeth died, Kruger didn't have anyone else. I think that's why he left his box with me."

  "His box?"

  Mr. McKenna slowly leaned forward in his seat and called out to the nurse. "I need my box," he said. "There are things in it that I need to show to Sam here. I need you to go and get it for me. The wooden box. In my room."

  The nurse, clearly accustomed to humoring Mr. McKenna's whims, was only gone for a moment. When he returned, he was carrying a battered wooden strongbox with a sturdy handle on the top. He set it on the table while Mr. McKenna fished out the key that hung on a string around his neck. As the nurse retreated to his chair at the other end of the room, McKenna handed the key to Sam.

  "You get it, son," he said. "It's too fiddly for me these days."

  Sam took the chunky brass key from him and fitted it into the lock. Despite the box's obvious age, it had been well maintained. It opened easily to reveal a neatly arranged selection of highly polished brass mechanical parts, folded papers, and a couple of small leather-bound notebooks. "Anything in particular I should be looking at?" Sam asked. "I'm not sure what most of this stuff is."

  "Neither am I," said Mr. McKenna. "Most of the parts are things I don't recognize."

  "He never told you what they were?"

  "No. And I never asked. If he'd wanted to say, he would have." Mr. McKenna took out some papers and unfolded them. "You don't speak German, do you?"

  Sam shook his head. "Not since school. If those papers aren't about how many brothers and sisters Kruger had, I won't be much use to you." He leaned forward to look at the papers. Some were neatly typed, some handwritten. He selected a notebook at random and opened it to see the same flowing script. These notes were brief, with lots of abbreviations, crossed-out sections, further notes added in the margins, hastily-scribbled equations. At the back, Sam caught a glimpse of a sketch. He smiled. Who ever thought about Nazi scientists stopping to doodle? "So why did he give you the box?"

  "In case he died," Mr. McKenna said with a shrug. "They're not always that careful here when they clear out the rooms. If you don't have family to come in and do it for you. They just dump everything in a skip. They don't check for things that shouldn't be thrown away. If you've got something that's important to you, you pass it on to someone else so it won't go in the bin. I've got things from a few people. My son's got a list of the bits that he's to save when I go. Don't know what he'll do with them, mind. Probably just sell them. But at least they'll still be out there. I don't suppose I'll care, being dead."

  "That's tea time, Mr. McKenna." The nurse stood up and moved toward Mr. McKenna, ready to help him back onto his feet.

  "Can we have just a few minutes longer?" Sam asked.

  "Sorry," said the nurse. "We serve dinner at five."

  Sam bit back a sharp response. "Want me to take the box back to your room?" he asked Mr. McKenna.

  "I don't want it," the old man whispered. "Can you take it?"

  "Errr, sure." Sam was surprised. "Do you want me to pass it on to the police?"

  Mr. McKenna scowled. "What would they do with it? They'd probably say I stole it or something. No, just you keep it. Or find someone who'd want it. I don't care. I just don't want it here."

  Sam packed the papers and notebooks back into the box with great care while the nurse got Mr. McKenna to his feet, straightened his dressing gown and helped him balance. "Are you sure?" Sam called, as the nurse and Mr. McKenna made their way out of the room. "You could probably sell these. Could be worth a fair bit of money."

  Slowly and painfully, Mr. McKenna took the handful of steps back toward Sam and clapped him on the shoulder. "Maybe I could," he muttered, leaning in close. "But do you think I want to end up like Kruger?"

  Fair point, Sam thought. So you gave it to someone who doesn't care. Good choice. He locked the strongbox again, picked it up by the cold brass handle and made his way back to join DCI Smith in Mr. Kruger's room.

  "Were you carrying that box when we got here?" Smith asked as they got back in the car.

  "What, this?" Sam glanced at the box as if it had only just appeared. "Nah. The old boy I was talking to earlier, Mr. McKenna, he gave it to me. Apparently it's a super secret Nazi box and I might want to write about it or something. He wasn't taking no for an answer, so I said I'd take it. I'll keep it for a bit. He's bound to want it back eventually."

  "Poor old guy." Smith shook his head. "I hope I don't end up like that."

  Chapter 2

  ". . . AND OF COURSE, we are all extremely grateful to the Knox family, without whom we could not have completed this amazing new building. It's a great example of how important our alumni network is, and how it continues to play an important role in the life of the university long after students have graduated."

  Sam examined the end of his pen. The blue plastic cap was squashed and mangled where he had been chewing it, desperate for a cigarette. He had been stuck in this room for an hour and a half, being invited to admire shiny plastic chairs and partitioned "pods" that would serve in place of tutors' offices. The smell of fresh paint was giving him a headache, and he was surrounded by people with iPads and other technology that Sam refused to embrace.

  He glared at the smooth young journalist to his left, who had no notepad in sight but was glibly recording the whole of the chancellor's speech on his tablet. The young man felt Sam's gaze and glanced over at him, shooting a pitying look at the disheveled figure with the cheap notepad and chewed Biro. He smirked. Laugh it up, teenager, Sam thought. Let's see how funny it is when print media dies and I'm ready to retire and you've got decades left in you. Then Sam realized that he had not been listening to a word the chancellor was saying, so he began scribbling furiously again.

  ". . . So please join me now in welcoming this local treasure to the stage!"

  For a moment Sam worried that he had not caught the name of the "local treasure," but his fears were quickly assuaged. In such a small city, there were only so many nationally famous local authors to go around. This one got trotted out at every major function in the city and, to judge from the half-hearted applause, his appeal was starting to wear thin. Sam scanned the audience, checking out
the reactions. At the end of the row a petite, pissed-off brunette caught his eye. She was fidgeting slightly, and Sam suspected that she was a fellow smoker who would much rather be outside looking for a place to shelter from the drizzling rain than in here watching a writer test one of the humanities department's new seats.

  As soon as the writer had satisfied everyone that the seat worked and was fit for such activities as spinning around and rolling across the floor, the chancellor announced that the new humanities department was now open and invited everyone to the champagne reception. Sam, the dark-haired woman, and the rest of the smokers marched straight toward the nearest door. Just as he got his hand on the door handle, a waiter appeared next to Sam with a tray laden with glasses. He stopped to claim two of them, then slipped out before anyone could stop him to point out that taking the alcohol outside was strictly forbidden.

  The brunette was clearly familiar with the new building already. She turned right and headed straight for a corner behind the reception area, sheltered from the wind that was sweeping down from Salisbury Crags. Sam followed her. It was a trick he had learned early on, after the smoking ban had driven him outdoors. Find the person who knows the layout; follow them to find the place where the wind won't stop you lighting up.

  There were five smokers in the little group, all eyeing Sam's champagne glasses enviously, wishing they had thought to swipe some on their way out too. Sam held one of the glasses up. "I'll give my spare to anyone who fancies giving me a cigarette," he offered. There was a collective lurch forward as the other four rushed to offer him a smoke, but it was the brunette who got there first. She held out her cigarette packet and let Sam take one while she accepted the champagne and took a grateful gulp.

  "Thanks," Sam said, dipping his head toward his lighter.