by Peter Riva
His head snapped around and Tische lunged at Pero. Again, Pero hadn’t seen the dagger come out. Tische brought it up under Pero’s chin and pricked the skin. “What about meine schwester?”
“Well, you have a sister, Spacil had a daughter, and records don’t show she died, so she’s around somewhere.” Pero could see his bluff worked as Tische took the point away from Pero’s throat but kept it handy.
“By now your friends are dead, that demonstration at Borchardt was their death warrant, just the same as if you pulled the trigger. My men will have seen to it.”
“And the shipment?”
The next stop, brightly lit, diverted him. “Holzhauser Strasse.” The doors opened, Tische blocked Pero’s exit and said nothing until the doors closed.
“The gold with the uranium? It will be loaded by now. Our lawyers had it released this afternoon. You have lost, Herr Baltazar, and your friends are dead. All for this little package as the CIA called it.” He pulled it out and held it up. “The field agent was given instructions to carry it on his person, he was supposed to bring it somewhere and then die, thereby closing the trail, but he never made it. He mailed it to that verdammt embassy man. You were supposed to help me move it or find it, without knowing.” His eyes lost focus as he reminisced, “After we had arranged the purchase of the geld—a simple hint to a minor official in the Treasury. We told him how he could get a pay grade improvement, a salary increase of sixty dollars a month for doing a good government job, but only if he released twenty million in gold for a Treasury profit. Hah! After that, all I had to do was arrange your presence here on that scheisse kleine filme!” (shitty little film) “Even the stupid masters in Langley, desperate to cover up the secret funding and close the trail of their complicity, didn’t guess they provided your name and file as an expendable agent. You were so easy to follow and control, you were to lead me to the package, where it was being taken. If the radiation killed you, so what? Same as happened to the other man. But you are, I will admit, most adaptive. Where did you hide this?” He dangled the sock with the Russian lead ball bag inside.
“In the aquarium.”
“Ach so, my man thought so, but he couldn’t find it.”
“Well, it was well hidden in a plant. Don’t blame him.”
“Most generous.” He held the sock covered bag up to the light, as if he could tell what it was.
Pero prayed that they were still recording.
Tische continued, “Do you know what is really in here?”
“Some radioactive salts, lethal material, and some liquid, I was told.”
“Nein, it is a sample of the future, Herr Baltazar. The future. It gives us money and power. Leverage. With a lever you can move the world, Archimedes said that. He was right. With this lever, we will move the world again and again.”
The train speaker cut in, “Die nexte halt ist Borsigwerke.” Tische wasn’t paying attention to the stops anymore. Pero quickly looked up at the roof label and saw there was only one stop left, the head stop, Alt-Tegel, just before the airport. Out the windows, it was a grim part of the city, industrial, unlit.
“But Herr Tische, Aue or Spacil—which do you want me to call you?”
“Spacil, a name of pride.”
“Gut, Herr Spacil, what is in the package that is so damn important? It’s just water and some flakes of paper.”
Tische’s curiosity got the better of him. He reached into the sock, opened the Russian bag, and took out the package. The heavy water bag was still vacuum-sealed, not leaking. He held it up to the light. “Do you see those tiny particles in there, Herr Baltazar?”
Pero pretended to peer closer, then backed away. With the swaying of the train, Pero was suddenly up against the doors, with no room to run. “Yes, looks like the paper bits as I was told it was.”
“Ach, yes, paper now, but when they were placed in that cave in the Jura …”
Pero thought, So Sam was right, the calcium carbonate was from the Jura. He would be so pleased to be right again. And then he realized, doing a mental reset, that it was a foolish time to be thinking off target from the murderous intent of Tische still holding the stiletto. Concentrate Pero, concentrate.
Spacil continued, almost softly, speaking to himself, “But in 1945 they were Reich marks, already valueless. Mein Vater knew this, but he knew soldiers would be attracted to a mass of them. They would report the find or show them off, word would spread and lead them to a cache of gold we wanted them to take and keep secret, safe for our future. This gold, hiding our secret, which was in the same cache as all that worthless money, this gold would be taken and stolen, to be slipped into the other gold the Allies were stealing from Germany. And this gold would have to be kept safe, safe until we needed it again. The Americans in CIC never knew what it really was. The Treasury didn’t want to know. Mein Vater was the only one, a true genius. He was the one who used Jüdisch geld to make it easy to identify later. Now it is only meine schwester and I, we know, we are releasing the dragon, red golden dragon. This sample would have given people the key to our plans, we couldn’t have that.”
“Die nächster halt is Alt-Tegel, letzter halt, alle absteigen” The train speaker declared, everybody off at the next station.
“What dragon is that Spacil?”
“The one you Americans were too stupid not to use on the Russians, the one that will unbalance the world, the one which will allow us to rise up again. Die zukunft! Tomorrow! Herr Baltazar, it is our motto. It was mein Vater’s motto. Simple but true.” He paused, the train was slowing down. “Did you know the German officers only ever told the truth at the Nuremberg Trials? Not one of them ever told a lie. All mein Vater’s associates used to marvel at their honesty. We knew not one allied soldier could have ever told the truth the way they did. And the irony, not lost on mein Vater, was that the Americans never learned from listening to the truth, they remained—still remain—blind.”
The train stopped, the doors opened. He had his stiletto out front, between them, pointing at Pero’s gut. “Walk Herr Baltazar, over there, it is a good place for you to die.” Pero did as he was told and backed up to a poster advertising an action film, cars crashing, Bourne something or other. “Your little game has failed.” Tische checked right and left down the damp and still platform. “Oh, yes, the history lesson.” He was enjoying the captive audience. “Goering said it perfectly: if you want to control the masses, first you frighten them, then you tell them they are in greater danger, and then you swear to protect them. They are yours. He said all this in his papers while in American prison awaiting execution. He denied them the privilege of killing him, mein Vater helped. And now good-bye Herr Baltazar.”
The empty train started up, passing down the platform. The passing interior lights glinted on the stiletto blade, pointed at Pero’s liver. Pero had no doubt Tische would know exactly where to aim. “That flag sure does look good inside the glass box.”
“Was?” Tische exploded in rage. “Was did you say?” He stuck the stiletto into Pero’s side. But Tische’s outrage had caused a hesitation, so quickly Pero tried to make a hollow, move the entry point away from his liver. The blade slid in all too easily. Tische twisted the blade. “You vil tell me now!”
The steel in the abdomen flesh was hurting terribly. Pero couldn’t get a breath.
“Now! You vil tell me now, or I will make the pain much worse.”
“The Hitler flag, the Swiss have it, microdots and all.” Tische’s eyes teared up and went redder. He twisted the knife again. Pero was at the limit he could endure. Pero had one hand on the now bloody dagger, the other pushing on Tische’s chest. Tische held the vacuum sample bag in his fist, pushing Pero’s chest with his knuckles—pinning Pero against the poster while with his other hand, he was trying to force the dagger deeper.
But Tische was squeezing the bag and so Pero decided to help him. He took his hand off Tische’s chest and put his hand on Tische’s hand that was holding the bag and squeezed, and th
en harder.
Tische looked down, just for a second. He tried forcing the blade to go in deeper, but only managed to topple both of them over. Tische’s back hit the hard concrete with Pero on top. Pero kept his pressure on the bag, willing it to burst while the blade dug deeper.
Finally, the vacuum bag popped.
At that moment, Tische looked at the liquid spraying out, jerked his whole body to get Pero off him and then backed away, crawling in fear. As he crept off, the blade came out.
Tische, stumbling, crawling, went as far as he could and then sat upright, abruptly, back against the concrete wall under another garish poster advertising beer. Lying on the ground, Pero kept one hand on the wound, the fresh one, a few inches to the left of the first one.
Tische Aue Spacil sat there and started twitching, then thrashing. The heavy water had saturated his eyes, face, and chest. He had received direct, immediate contact. It was burning into his flesh, his eyeballs. A thousand radiation treatments in one second. He started screaming. He kept screaming for what seemed like ages until he stopped and then people arrived.
Pero didn’t know who was who, or why. He couldn’t focus. The pain of the wound was too much.
Out of the fog, he heard his name and hands moving him to a laying-down position on a mattress of some sort, things being stuck in his arms. He heard Addiena’s voice saying it was all right, then he heard Susanna’s pleading “Oh, don’t die, don’t die, you stupid man, you promised …”
Somehow, he summoned the strength to reply. “What die? And not feed you bananas my little Bonobo?” And he went to sleep for a while. He was very tired.
But not dead, he thought, not quite yet.
Chapter 18
Charité Mitte
The Humboldt University Hospital, on Schumann Strasse, dates from 1801 and has always been a center for the most advanced modern medical care. It was just as well, for Pero had enough tubes sticking out of him to resemble a robot having its oil changed. He found he could stand the ache of most of them except for the catheter allowing him to urinate without getting out of bed.
Overall, he was a good patient. Over the years, Pero had found he enjoyed hospitals. They were places where he could get to escape the stress of normal life, watch mindless TV, get three square meals a day, and have people fussing over him. So, he thought, what’s not to like? The short beds and my toes hitting the end keeping me from a good night’s sleep for one.
He had been in hospitals in places around the world often enough. He had had malaria, twice, then there was back surgery after he fell off a Land Rover roof in Kenya, a knee operation for torn cartilage, the wrist, the ribs, and, not least, an embarrassing infected behind in Kenya that Mbuno would not let him forget. Lying there, Pero ruefully thought that perhaps he should, at fifty-five, slow things down a bit.
Patience in the hospital is boring. Or, rather, the patient hopes it is boring. Boring means the patient is not unconscious or really hurting. There in Humboldt’s Charité Mitte Klinik, Pero had loads of time on his hands. He was happily bored.
Tische’s stiletto had nicked the liver, severe shock had set in, but Pero survived. André, on encouragement from Mbuno, had the good sense to run after the two men. He was running like mad when Mbuno informed him that hyena kill for fun. André had, as a precaution, called for an ambulance at each U-bahn stop.
The ambulance medics arrived on the platform just as Tische stopped convulsing. They couldn’t revive him. The shock was too much for his heart.
While Pero lay there in the hospital, he didn’t know that the ambulance technicians were still undergoing anti-radiation treatment somewhere in the klinik. Alt-Tegel station had been declared closed. Pero, in turn, was stuck in a room by himself, in a ward sectioned off from the rest of the hospital, with a Geiger counter slowly clicking above the bed-head. Sam’s iodine pills had saved his life. Heep’s antibiotics prevented infection too. The liver is the only major organ that can repair itself. Pero’s was. He was healing.
Pero felt sorry for the hospital staff. Apparently, for the first ten days while he was unconscious, until they were sure he was safe and not contaminated, the staff had to rotate ten-minute shifts to attend to him. Thankfully, he was not all that radioactive. He had no swelling or anything more dire than what Sam had warned about. He just had what they referred to as “background” emission—that seemed to worry them sufficiently.
When he had regained consciousness, they moved him from ICU to the separate, secure, ward room. Since then, his strength seemed to be returning albeit too slowly for his liking. On the first day that he was allowed any real contact, he had been on two tiring phone calls for what seemed like hours. That was his limit for a few days, two calls only, then more rest. It all seemed exhausting.
Of the calls he had received, those with the most pull put through first. In his first permitted phone call, Lewis forbade him from explaining the bag and its contents.
“Baltazar, get this straight: you are not, repeat not, to involve anyone else in this mess? Get it? We will not tolerate you telling all our secrets to everyone. Get it? Is that clear?”
Pero took his time, drank a little water from the glass straw and asked, “You do know I’ve only been out of the coma for six hours and you are already yelling at me?”
“Yes. It’s important.”
“I am tired. Okay, fine. Glad to see you’re putting the CIA first. What do I explain to the doctors here?”
“You don’t, leave that to us.” He softened, “Look, Pero, I am sorry, but really you could cause a panic, many people could get hurt, please just shut up for once.”
Pero dropped his head back on the pillow, feeling very weary—more than he wanted to admit. He knew Lewis was right. He wasn’t a very good field agent, he talked too much, he involved way too many people. But, dammit, we got the job done! Tische was dead, and yes he knew Tische would have been more useful alive. Pero was sorry about that. If he had been a real field agent, he would have had to allow Tische to kill him and escape. Tische wasn’t going to get away, Pero had known that then and was now feeling a little guilty for the pleasure of killing the bastard. To anyone who asked, he just said it was his stupid doggedness to get the full story on tape that kept him goading Tische on.
Pero slapped his forehead, clearing his thoughts, No, that is a lie Pero. Don’t lie to yourself. You wanted to make sure it was only him and his sister running this thing. That’s what you found out, that’s what will give access to all the other investigations. Pero had known, instinctively perhaps, that if you have the head of an organization, you can trace back down the pyramid to the players. The other way was never so easy. Tische was the head, the rest would be investigated and exposed.
So he told Lewis he was resigning as a field agent once again and for the foreseeable future, as a hunter-runner as well. Lewis didn’t argue. Pero calculated that, despite his success, he must have aggravated Lewis’ ulcer too much.
The afternoon call was from the ambassador. He wanted all the details. Pero referred him to Lewis. Then the ambassador revealed that it was Lewis who had leaked the material for his three red line paper to State and the Senate Intelligence Committee. And then he shocked Pero, “Your father called and gave me the name and number of the key players in the Senate. I worked with your father over the years, a great man, much like you.” Then he gave a little chuckle, “Well, not at all like you, obviously, you do get into the fray, don’t you?”
“I had not meant to, Mr. Ambassador. It just turned out that way.”
“Again?”
“Again.” And then, as requested, Pero told him the tale of the last train ride.
“As I said, the fray. Glad you have survived. Now, news. Doctor Turner and Doctor Reidermaier are traveling with me to Geneva for a conference,” the ambassador meant he had a conference to attend, “they make a strange couple. He’s way over six feet and she’s barely over five—but as minds go, they make an astounding pair.”
“
You sure they are a pair? Not just colleagues?”
“No, they are a pair, holding hands, finishing each other’s sentences and beaming. It’s written all over them. Mary-Kate and I had them staying with us at the residence these past weeks,” he meant his wife, “and they used only one room, seemed very happy. I didn’t really understand their nicknames, though.” He waited for Pero to ask what they were. Pero obliged. “Giraffe and Tickbird. Can you make heads or tails of that?”
Pero laughed, a bit too much, it hurt. “Giraffe has been his nickname since school. Slow, deliberate, tall, and able to see and feed where others never go. Tickbirds live in complete symbiosis with giraffes. They need the giraffe to be host for their food and in return they warn the giraffe of impending danger. If you ever see them together, the tickbird seems to be whispering in the giraffe’s ear.”
The ambassador laughed, “Yes, yes, that fits them perfectly. I’ll have to explain that to Mary-Kate.”
“What about Heep and Danny Redmond?”
“When the fracas was over, they bolted from the residence and became your unofficial bodyguards along with André Schmitz. They stayed two days until Lewis and I convinced them it was safe and that we’d protect you.” Pero already knew there were two heavily armed and competent Marines outside his door. “So they went back to work. I am sure they’ll want to be your first visitors. Mr. Redmond seems to think you can walk on water, says you saved his life twice.”
“No, Sergio did that, saved yours too, it seems.” A nurse had shown Pero the Zeitung headline saying that Sergio Negroni had single-handedly saved the US ambassador from attack by neo-Nazis.
“Ahem, yes, Sergio told me your modus operandi, he’s taking the media credit, but he used his influence—it is quite considerable you know—to force an official, but secret, three red line, statement concerning your exploits, pointing the finger of pride, rightly at you. He said something about payback for the outgoing DG. And let’s not forget that remarkable man, Mbuno.”
Feeling the conversation was getting too revealing, Pero wanted, badly, to change the subject. Any official recognition—no matter how secret—could lead to danger for Mbuno in Kenya’s uncertain political climate. “And the investigation into Tische’s activities?”