Horst saw that as he came through. “Shoot if you must, but not unless you must,” he warned. “Our objective is to get out of here tomorrow unremarked, with the Professor alive. His life is the maximum priority if we must choose between those two.”
“Will they try to kill him, or take him?” she asked.
Her first priority was maintaining her cover, but it amounted to the same thing in practice.
Though I’m certainly not going to die for the Herr Doktor if I can help it. Aloud she added clinically:
“I’d say take from the way this is going, but you’d know better here in Europe.”
He shrugged. “Impossible to tell for certain, but I would wager any sum that they will try to take him—and kill him only if they cannot. He knows much that they would very much like to know.”
“Bad practice to send a man like that abroad,” she said absently, thinking very hard indeed about what the Germans were up to. “Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose.”
He gave her a sharp glance; the remark was a little sophisticated for the agent of a domestic revolutionary group rather than an international spy. Then he shrugged again.
“It was necessary.”
She mentally chided herself for the slip, then went to the outer door and knelt; the door locks were a rather old-fashioned French box style, which meant you could look directly through the keyhole—in America they would have been replaced with Yale types long ago in a major city, but this was convenient and for a seaport Amsterdam was extremely law-abiding. Horst made a motion to follow her, then sat in a chair facing the door—it would be much easier for her to maintain this posture without stiffening muscles she would need at maximum efficiency than it would be for a six-foot man.
The soft sound of the elevator bell sounded from down the corridor, and the rattle of the operator pulling back the folding brass screen of the door. Luz made a thumbs-up gesture. Then she drew her eye back a little from the hole as four men came into view. They were all youngish and medium-sized, none of them past their mid-thirties from a quick estimate, and all in unexceptional middle-class gear including overcoats, with carpetbags in their hands. All but one had mustaches, cut rather close . . . which was a little bit sloppy. Though plenty of men other than young French military officers favored that style these days, it still made you mentally superimpose a kepi above it. Two of them turned casually and watched either way as the third opened the door, and then they all entered neatly.
Her teeth skinned back a little as a flush of heat warmed belly and chest. She’d felt like this before . . . and the earliest time had been hiding behind a pungent-smelling bush with her father, the Winchester in her hands, waiting for the jaguar to come down by the water hole where they’d staked out the goat. She put a thumb over the hole just in case and turned her head; Horst was at her shoulder.
“Four of them,” she said softly. “Two were definitely the ones we saw at the airship dock. Just right for a snatch team.”
Horst nodded, his hard square face expressionless save for a narrowing of the eyes.
“There will be more outside, with an automobile ready to take him to a Deuxième Bureau safe house for interrogation . . . though they might want to get him to France for that. And to put him on trial,” he added absently, as his eyes went opaque with thought.
¡Ay! her mind prompted.
Things Horst had said about trips on high-altitude zeppelins coalesced with hints about the Professor.
The May raid? Is that what they want him for?
Ten German airships had raided Paris on May 5th, coming in at night and very high to avoid the fighting scouts guided by searchlights. They’d dropped gas, not explosives—hundred-pound sheet metal containers full of phosgene mixed with chlorine as a spreading agent and a small bursting charge set to explode at three hundred meters up. The carnage had been terrible, since on a short trip from the German bases in Belgium each airship had been able to carry tons of the noxious stuff. Thousands dead and many more blinded or crippled, mass panic and flight . . .
But if Horst and the Herr Doktor were both involved in that, and they were both in America just now . . . this has to be some sort of project aimed at us but . . . maybe related to that raid? Perhaps it was a trial run? Berlin knows we’re coming in to the war soon; they don’t have any more incentive to avoid angering us . . . but a transatlantic raid would be very difficult with any worthwhile payload. Oh, this really is big. It’s worth anything to get the intelligence on it back to Washington.
The thought flickered through her mind in an instant, and a cold prickle ran over her skin. Aloud she went on:
“We have to intercept them before they leave this floor with him,” she said. “But, Horst . . . we’ll have to take them by surprise, unless you want a gunfight right here. They could have anything up to machine carbines in those bags, depending on how badly they want this man.”
He winced and bared his teeth. “They will want him very badly,” he admitted. “Assuming that they know who he really is, which is a good bet at this point. And from Amsterdam they could consult with Paris on secure lines easily to get orders.”
“If we try to play it safe and stop them flat before they reach him we’re actually increasing our risk and his, especially since you want to keep this quiet. We’re outnumbered, so we need tactical surprise, and it’s worth it if they’re not going to kill him. And to kill him they wouldn’t need four men—one man with a knife or a muffled pistol would do fine.”
Unwillingly, he nodded. That meant letting the French agents get into the Professor’s room, letting them think they had him secured and nothing to worry about except an inconspicuous extraction, and then hitting them from the rear. The slight extra risk that they’d simply kill him was worth it.
“How long to open one of these doors?” Horst said musingly, as if speaking to himself.
She answered straightforwardly: “Seconds if they have a passkey, and I think they probably do.”
“In this whore of a merchant city? Ja.”
“I could get through one of these locks in about twenty seconds with my picks,” she said, tapping her finger lightly on the box lock. “Less, after I practice on this one a bit. And if they don’t leave their key in the other side of the lock—if they do we’d have to break in. Or they may not lock it behind them at all, if they’re set on speed; they could leave one man on guard in the corridor. That’s likely from the way they handled getting set up in their own room. In, snatch the Professor, get him back to their room, and lock his door behind them.”
And if he’s behind the Paris attack, they’ll want him very, very badly . . . for which I don’t blame them in the least. Odd I’m going to have to kill them for the greater good defending thoroughly wicked enemies, but there you are. That’s espionage for you.
Aloud she went on: “I’d have a much better chance of taking out a guard quietly if they do, so I’d better go out first.”
He closed his eyes and thought again. “Ja, we will have to do it that way. I do not like it . . . but, yes.” A chuckle. “I am going into battle beside a woman, not something I had imagined, and yet I find your presence profoundly comforting, Elisa.”
“Not many I’d rather have on my side in a fight either, Horst,” she said.
Technically he was going into battle behind a woman, but it wouldn’t be tactful to mention that.
His eyes went to a clock on the mantel above the hearth. “Ten o’clock. They will not move for some time, at least four hours. Good, we will have time for dinner to settle.”
She nodded; the best time for that sort of operation in a large city was a few hours after midnight, which was as close to deep sleep as a metropolis got.
“You should get some more rest, if you can,” she said. “I’ll wake you in two hours or if they move.”
He went out and returned with a comforter and pi
llow for himself and another for her to kneel on; one of the things she respected in him was that he didn’t need to chatter. She settled in to wait, letting her mind drift without words and keeping her eyes a little out of focus as she looked through the keyhole. All she had to watch for was movement.
* * *
• • •
Hisst,” Horst said softly, then plugged the keyhole with his thumb for an instant: “They’re moving.”
Luz came out of her half doze instantly. Some inner sense told her it wasn’t long before dawn, and the air had a peculiar stale stillness. The clock said three forty-five. She rolled to her feet and waited, still loose from her last set of stretches; they looked at each other as the half-minute mark went by, Horst showing his teeth in an unconscious snarl and Luz smiling slightly and letting the cosh slip into her right palm with its loop around her wrist while she undid the collar of her pajama jacket.
He nodded and opened the door, standing behind it as she went out first—though she could see his repugnance at it in every inch of his taut body. There was no way any French agent was going to look at him and see anything but a very dangerous German, though, and gracias a Dios Horst was smart enough to see that.
Whereas I’m a good-looking young woman in the sort of pajamas a cinema siren would wear . . . or a very high-class courtesan, I suppose.
The doors on this floor were fairly far apart, since most of them led to multiroom suites. There was a Frenchman standing mock-casually outside the Herr Doktor Professor’s. He came alert as the door opened, and she thought she recognized the knee-forward stance of a savateur. Then he saw who she was and relaxed, taking his hand out from beneath his jacket. Luz smiled slightly, putting on a sleepy-sated pouting look and rolling her hips a little more, and saw his eyes drop to the hint of cleavage showing where the top two buttons of her jacket were undone.
Oh, you deserve this so much, François, she thought. ¡Que güey! Darwin never sleeps!
Still smiling, she pivoted smoothly on her right heel and drove the ball of her left foot up between his legs as hard as she could. That would have hurt even if he were wearing a cup . . . and he wasn’t. The thump of impact was followed less than a second later by another as she brought the cosh around and down on the back of his head, which was presented to her neatly as he bent over gasping with his mouth wide open and no sound but a breathy hiss coming out of it. The fine lead shot inside the leather transmitted all the force of the full-armed strike with her weight behind it as it flattened against the bone, and he fell as limp as a puppet with its strings cut.
He might well be dead. She hadn’t pulled the blow; it would have been insane to do so.
The first time Luz had killed had been on the night her parents died. It had been one of the revolucionarios; she’d cut his throat when he staggered drunkenly by her hiding place to piss out some of the looted pulque, and she’d taken his rifle and bandolier and clothes and horse to escape into the silent Sonoran desert. Pedro’s lessons had worked perfectly—hand over the mouth and nose, jerk back in the same motion, drag the cutting edge down diagonally from below the ear to past the Adam’s apple.
She’d had nightmares about it for a long time, the sudden smell like wet iron added to the rebel’s stale sweat and tobacco and liquor, and the hot flood over her hand, black in the darkness lit only by the last flames of the hacienda’s casa grande, and the body twitching beneath her until it went flaccid.
After that it got easier and easier. Sometimes she was a little troubled that it didn’t trouble her much anymore.
Horst was beside her before the Frenchman had finished slumping into a puddle, moving like a big golden cat. He looked down at the body and pursed his lips admiringly, then put his big left hand on the doorknob. In his right was what they called a trench knife these days, a cut-down bayonet with a set of brass knuckles added to the hilt and a lead knob on the pommel. It looked crude and ugly and effective, which was truth in advertising, and he had a Luger tucked into his belt.
Luz drew in a long breath, let it out, felt her pulse slow a little, and nodded.
He turned the knob—the door wasn’t locked—then crouched and lunged through as it opened, going instantly from a standing start to a blur of speed like a charging tiger. The suite was a mirror image of the one next door that Horst had booked, and this was the large sitting room. There were the remains of a meal on the table and four men; two of the Frenchmen were holding the Professor. He sagged between them in his old-fashioned nightshirt, blood streaming from a cut under his thick white hair, and his eyes rolled up as one of them pressed a damp cloth over his mouth and nose.
The third had a Star Model 14 automatic in his gloved hand—with blood on the barrel, so he’d pistol-whipped the elderly German to quiet him for the chloroform—probably a mixture of alcohol and chloroform and ether, since the pure stuff didn’t work as well as fiction would have it. He leveled the weapon as the other two dropped the half-conscious academic unceremoniously. Luz whirled the cosh around her head once by the strap and then threw it across the ten feet separating them; the man whipped up his right hand to protect his face, fired, and missed. Horst closed with him.
The first of the two Frenchmen who’d been holding the old German came at her with a pivot like a dancer, his left foot flicking up and snapping around for her head—a fouetté figure, a high whip kick. It was delivered with bone-cracking force and dangerously fast; she barely managed to go in beneath it, weight and momentum pushing her down as she let her knees go slack and threw out her left hand to stop the fall. The navaja snicked open in her right and she cut viciously at his groin as she rose. He tumbled backward just in time to avoid having the inside of his thigh sliced open and came upright with a knife in his own hand. It was a narrow double-edged blade and he held it point down with his other hand covering it, Apache-style.
Some distant part of her noticed that the Deuxième Bureau were apparently recruiting street fighters from the gangs who haunted the drinking kens of Ménilmontant, or at least using them as trainers.
“Come to me and die, puto Gabacho,” she snarled in Spanish.
His dark eyes flared as he recognized the blade in her hand and the way she held it, and this time there was no nonsense about her sex—he probably wasn’t seeing anything but knife, hands, and feet. Then his covering hand moved in an extravagant gesture designed to distract the eye while the point of the knife lanced forward—Apache-style again. They were already close enough to strike without footwork.
When you are ojo a ojo, someone is going to die very soon, old Pedro’s voice echoed in her mind. You are committed. Strike or die, there is nothing else.
Her blade moved in a smooth swift floretazo toward his midsection, point lowered and edge turned to the left. The Frenchman’s guarding hand flashed out to grab her wrist and immobilize it while he struck himself. The hand slapped down on her wrist . . . but the blade wasn’t there. He had just time enough to realize she’d flicked it into her rising left inside his guard before the point took him beneath the chin.
There was a crisp popping feel as the six-inch blade slammed up through his palate and into his brain, and she wrenched the knife free with desperate speed and skipped backward.
The third Frenchman might have been a bad problem, except that Horst had just gripped his chin and neck and turned his head until he was staring out from between his shoulder blades. The German dropped the body and put a hand to his side.
“The pigdog kicked me,” he wheezed. “I don’t think any ribs are broken, though. Or if they are, just a little cracked.”
Luz shuddered and took a deep breath as her awareness flared out again into the harsh blood-and-feces-scented aftermath of twenty seconds of combat. There was no time for reaction, or anything but dealing with the consequences. Probably nobody had heard the single shot, or dismissed it.
The first man Horst had gone for, the pistoleer, was
lying on his back with the trench knife jammed up under his breastbone and apparently stuck fast.
Close in, knife beats pistol nine times in ten, she thought.
Horst was already returning with a handful of towels from the bathroom, and they wrapped them around various wounds; luckily the blood stopped pumping out like a hose when the heart ceased beating, but there had already been too much from the loser in the knife duel, and she discovered that there was a tiny nick over her collarbone where his thrust had almost gone home into her jugular.
Mierda, she thought, sticking a little piece of clean paper over it. No time, no time . . .
She stepped to the outer door, checked both ways, and dragged the man she’d coshed over to the French agents’ room and through into their bathroom by his feet—it was convenient that this was a first-class hotel, with the luxury of private bathing facilities for most of the higher-priced rooms. She heaved him into it, and helped Horst with the others. The four of them made a mound even arranged spoon-fashion, but with a little effort they fitted well enough into the big claw-footed, cast-iron tub that body fluids and blood would leak down the drain and not drip through the floorboards.
It was astonishing how much blood a human being held, and as anyone who’d spilled a bottle could testify, a little went a long way when it got out. The same bathroom furnished towels to replace the ones they’d taken from the Professor’s suite. Back there Horst took the half-empty bottle of red wine from the old man’s late meal and carefully poured it over the stains on the rug. With luck that would cover the blood and the smell long enough; they only needed enough time to cross the border, and their train left about dawn.
While he did that she examined the Herr Doktor, reflecting that she’d need a name for him. The wound on his scalp was superficial, though it had bled copiously as injuries there always did, and she fixed it with sticking plaster and iodine from Horst’s supplies. The bone beneath seemed unaffected, but though he seemed in reasonable shape the skinny old man was at least in his sixties, and he’d been drugged too, with the usual mixture. At least they’d smeared Vaseline on his face to avoid chemical burns.
Black Chamber Page 9