I asked, “What about?”
“Bolz.”
“Say again?”
“Bolz,” the skinhead said in a nasty tone. “Lothar and Lotte Bolz.”
I stared back at him through the faint loom of light off the snow. “Who?”
“You heard.”
“Yes,” I said, “I heard all right, but I don’t follow. Who are these — ” I broke off: I’d remembered. Lothar and Lotte Bolz, husband and wife, were East Germans who’d gone on a Nazi-catching mission to Chile years and years before, seeking out a man who’d slipped away from the Democratic Republic. They’d been rumbled and arrested, charged, tried, sentenced. Twenty years, I fancied. I said, “All right, I’ve got there. So?”
“We want to know about them.”
“I don’t know anything about them other than that they’re in a Chilean gaol.”
“Yeah? Well, I’ll just tell you a thing or two, just so you know this is for real, all right?”
“All right,” I said.
The skinhead seemed to smile, stretching the thin, hard lips. “You’re Commander Shaw, employed by 6D2. You came north to pick up a woman operative ex Leeds. Okay?”
I felt shock, though the fact of the initial tail had half prepared me. In 6D2 we don’t advertise. Somewhere along the line there had been some carelessness: I was sure chummy in the nick had known who Felicity Mandrake was.
I shrugged; it had happened now and bluff was out. I said, “All right, let’s take that as read. Why did William Smith attack Miss Mandrake?”
“He wanted to know something. So do I.”
“Know what?”
“When the Bolzes are due in.”
I laughed. “Don’t you mean due out?”
Plug shook his head. “I don’t mean that at all. I want to know when they’re coming in. They’re being exchanged, as if you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know,” I said truthfully. “They’re no concern of mine. But assuming you’re right, so what? What’s it to you?” The skinhead disregarded the question. Still holding the knife steady he said, “We want the lot. All about the handover and the exchange. The facts, see. Date, time, place, security measures. Don’t leave anything out.”
“I don’t know a tiling,” I said. “What you’ve just said — that’s the first I’ve heard. I told you, the Bolzes are nothing to do with me.”
“Lies,” he said.
“If you say so.”
“I say so. Leeds has an airport, right?”
“Right.”
“I reckon they won’t make the exchange at a London airport for all kinds of reasons. Any provincial one … and you happen to be in York, handy for Leeds. Another thing: that woman had been in Leeds. Why?”
I shrugged. “Nothing to do with the Bolzes. Or with you.”
“I’m making it my business.” The knife moved in a little farther, enough to make me give an involuntary yelp. It was coming much too close to my liver. Plug was pleased with my reaction and said it was just a foretaste. I would die in any case, he added confirmatorily, but there was no need to do so in slow agony. Inessential parts would go first: hands, feet, nose. Beneath the back seat, said Plug, there was a surgeon’s saw. “Just take that in,” he said.
“Messy, surely?”
“We’ll cope. Just talk, or else.”
Things were forming in my mind, some sort of plan that just could work out providing I didn’t rush it. While I sat in silence and could be presumed to be assessing my priorities, Plug had a word with the front seat passenger, who got out and re-embarked in the back, shoving me across to be the sandwich between him and Plug. Plug transferred the knife to the other man, and the driver turned in his seat and presented the muzzle of a heavy revolver, a police weapon, a Chiefs Special,.38 calibre. It wasn’t silenced — silencers are fitted only to .32 calibres or less — but out here it didn’t matter: only the sheep would hear. Plug bent and burrowed about below the seat, and came up again with the surgical saw, neat but nasty. I could almost begin to hear the teeth rasping over bone. My bone.
The skinhead spoke again. “I meant what I said. I’ll use it.”
“I believe you . But what I don’t know I can’t talk about.” The skinhead laughed; it was a horrible sound. “Everyone has his breaking point. You’ll talk what you know, all right. Better start. I’m getting impatient.”
I breathed out hard. “You’ve got the wrong man. Leeds, you said. I’ve nothing to do with Leeds — ”
“The lady friend — she had.”
Felicity Mandrake. Well, he’d said it himself. And she’d been the one chummy had been after in the first place. They were already conditioned towards her. With ideas forming in my mind fast now, I took an obvious and awed look at the surgical saw and became a coward. I said, “Yes, well. Miss Mandrake. I don’t know anything about her orders. We met unofficially … you know how it is. A few days in York — ”
“Having it off. Okay. I’m no prude.” There was a dirty snigger. “Just go on, Shaw. Just go on.”
The moon had come out from behind cloud cover and now shone down, bringing up the lying snow like a shroud over the landscape. The fall had stopped now; the scene was beautiful, but the moon’s light showed up the skinhead’s face and that was not pretty. Beyond it, in my mind’s eye, the eye of the mind that was planning ahead, I saw Sutton Bank and its lethal downward gradient. I licked at my lips and did my best to be convincing when I said, “If you tell me more, fill me in a little, something might link up if you follow me. But it’s Miss Mandrake you’ll have to talk to in the end.”
“How?”
“She’ll be leaving hospital in the morning. We could be waiting.”
“We?”
“You’ll need me. You don’t imagine she’ll just get into the Jag at your invitation, do you?”
There was a pause. I felt Plug’s breath sweep my face. He was thinking it over. After a while he said sardonically, “This is how you keep yourself alive a little longer?”
I shrugged. “Take it how you like,” I said. He gave me a hard look. We were both in something of a cleft stick; I could be speaking the truth — and indeed was — when I said I had no knowledge of the Bolzes. But I’d offered him Felicity Mandrake on a plate. All I had to do to upset Plug’s applecart was to get him to take the Jag back towards York. We would have to go down Sutton Bank unless he went on for Stokesley and Ingleby Cross, which was a very long way round, and at Sutton Bank all sorts of interesting things could be made to happen. I sweated blood in assuring Plug that I was genuine, that my way was the only hope he had. He began, grudgingly, to believe it. In the meantime — because before Plug died I had to dig out his own knowledge — I said that if lie put that saw away and filled me in on detail, I would do what I could to help and after that I would rely on his humanity to repay me with kindness. Mendaciously, he nodded; but he complied with the first part of my request.
He told me some things that rocked me rigid. The implications added up to real trouble for the Western nations. When he had finished I repeated that to the best of my knowledge Miss Mandrake might well be involved. As it happened Felicity had once been attached to HQ 6D2 Chile, part of our world-wide chain, or non-communist world-wide anyway. I had an idea Plug already knew this, and my statement was his clincher. After that no time was lost even though the night was there to he whiled away until Felicity was picked up in the morning. By a stroke of luck Plug wanted to get back to York soonest possible. The evening’s work, it seemed, had taken longer than he’d expected and there was something he had to see to in York. Neither Plug nor the others seemed worried about Sutton Bank; it was the shortest way and that was that. The driver was a bonehead in any case, the sort of tearaway one meets often enough on the roads. The Jag was started up, the front seat passenger got back where he’d come from, and the driver reversed out, crunching through the lying snow with not too much difficulty. Back on the main road he headed south for Helmsley and York. No more snow was coming
down but by now the roads were hard frozen and the going was murderous, which suited me well enough. I knew I faced death whatever happened so I would be no worse off by taking the enormous risk I proposed to take.
In the early hours we passed back through Helmsley, which was as covered with snow as the moors themselves, and as deserted: the only sign of life was two coppers in a mobile parked in the market square, just smoking fags and watching. They took no special notice of us as the driver prudently slowed and turned onto the Thirsk road. With Helmsley behind us, I began to tense up. Plug’s vigilance had relaxed a little now, though the knife was there still and would prove troublesome, but not for long. When things started happening, they would move very fast indeed and Plug wouldn’t stand the ghost of a chance. On we went, past a forest on our right hand. Then I saw the warning signs for Sutton Bank. There was something like a mile of its steep gradients. I tensed more.
We came down, too fast as I knew we would, to the very sharp left-hand bend a little below the summit. As we rounded it, I took a deep breath and sent up a prayer for deliverance from evil.
Then I turned in my seat and at once felt the movement of the knife. Gritting my teeth against searing pain, I thrust my body back and took hold of Plug’s neck and rammed him hard through the gap between the two front headrests.
That did it.
The driver looked round, startled and furious. I gave Plug’s body a heave and he sprawled half on top of the driver. Immediately, the Jag went out of control. It shot sideways in a huge skid, cannoned off the right-hand side of the road, then cannoned back again into hard rock, all the time descending at enormous speed. The brakes, if the driver used them at all, were totally ineffective: the surface was ice. The Jag began to break up before it rolled over, and thereafter zoomed down the gradient on its roof with the doors hanging off, until it did another somersault and righted itself. Some crazy instinct kept Plug and his mates hanging grimly on, but as for me, the moment we came abreast of a sand-filled lay-by alongside Ampleforth forest I threw myself bodily out while the Jag smashed into a telegraph pole. In jumping I must have hit my head, but I landed in the sand and broke no bones. When I came to I was half frozen and away down the gradient I saw the smashed Jag with a lick of flame coming from it. I gathered myself together and slid on my backside down the hill. Coming up to the Jag I saw the three men in it, lying at odd angles with what could have been broken necks. I never found out for sure; just after I’d had that quick look, the Jag went up and became a flaming funeral pyre.
*
York Police had been getting worried about the length of time I had left the Volvo parked. I was back in York well before dawn, having been ferried in from Sutton under Whitestone Cliffe by a police car after the fire engine had attended — too late, of course, to save the charred remains inside the Jag. I explained the crash to the nick and though I said precious little else I adjured them to keep a dead silence from the Press and everyone else until I had reported in person to Max at Focal House in London. This, they would do. I asked about William Smith, who had still uttered nothing at all, and suggested they mentioned Plug to him, just to see what happened. They agreed to this too, and promised to be in touch if anything emerged from those sealed lips. Once Plug had been mentioned, I said, it would be up to them to ensure that William Smith was held in custody and if there was any difficulty over that, Max would fix things with the Home Office. These arrangements made, I was given a shake-down to snatch an hour or two’s sleep after having attention from the police surgeon for my knifed side; then a bite of breakfast and I was on my way to the hospital to pick up Felicity Mandrake, whose head had been passed fit for discharge by the medics, Then out for Leeds airport, where I left the Volvo, en route for an interview with Max in Focal House. I had contacted Max from the York nick, and had told him the matter was interesting; he knew what I meant by that, and the orders were that both Felicity and I should report in person soonest possible and leave the Tartan Army for the time being.
From Heathrow we were helicoptered in by a 6D2 chopper to the landing pad on the Focal House roof, from where we had a fine view of the snow, which had moved south by now, overlying the City. It looked bleak and slushy down there, with muffled City gents moving about like beetles. I was glad I’d never been one of them … we went inside the building to what was known in FH as The Suite, the luxury penthouse where Max lived and moved and ruled his British empire. Max was a superbly important man, not only to his minions in the British end of 6D2, but also to Whitehall itself and never mind the fact that the organisation, being multi-national, was strictly unofficial and right outside the Establishment. 6D2 carried weight and had the full confidence of officialdom, for whom indeed we frequently acted behind the scenes, behind the facade of Government. It was an ideal set-up that gave us freedom and independence but at the same time solid backing when necessary, and we had similar understandings with all governments outside the Eastern Bloc.
We entered The Suite’s outer office. Mrs Dodge, Max’s personal secretary, was on one of four telephones, but she pressed the receiver into her bosom for long enough to say, “Max will see you now, Commander Shaw,” and to press a button on her intercom.
We went in.
Max had his back to us, standing at one of his big windows and staring out over snow-bound London. The Post Office tower stood free of the snow, a dun-coloured, lit-up needle probing into the lowering sky.
Max turned. “A bloody awful day,” he said. “What’s it like in Yorkshire?”
“Much the same,” I told him.
He said, “Sit down, both of you, and tell me what’s interesting in York.”
We sat, and I filled in the background to what had happened overnight. This done, I asked, “Do we know anything currently about Lothar and Lotte Bolz?”
Max, who had been doodling on his blotter, looked up sharply, eyes narrowed in a tough, square face. “Currently, Shaw?”
“Are they being exchanged, and if so, for whom?”
Max said, “The answer to the first part is yes, they are. The information is Top Secret classification, or is supposed to be. Treat it as such, and never mind your villains’ knowledge. As to the second part, they’re being exchanged for a couple of British subjects currently in East Germany.”
I stared. “Why is Chile playing on that wicket, for God’s sake? Is there Whitehall pressure by any chance?”
Max nodded. “Yes. There’s a trading agreement coming up for ratification. The Chileans don’t want to lose it. The United States are involved as well … that’s just between the three of us here present. But neither Whitehall nor Washington wish to be overtly involved, and — ”
“And it’s been handed to us.”
“Exactly,” Max said. “As your friends appear to have found out, which I don’t like. It’s a pity you managed to kill them all,” he added sourly. “They might have responded to questioning.”
“William Smith hasn’t,” I reminded him.
“William Smith may weaken. I hope he does.” Max brought out a gold cigar-case and lit something with an expensive aroma: at a current salary of £60,000 a year plus an unlimited expense account, he could afford it. Then he said, “The people coming over from East Germany are Edward Jones and Arnold Priddy. Not particularly important, but innocent of the charges of espionage brought against them by the East Germans. Whitehall’s been digging away for their release for some years, but I don’t suppose you’ve heard of them.”
I said, “I’ve read about them in Required Reading.” Required Reading was one of our chores when we happened to have the time to attend to it, which I didn’t often have; it filled agents in on matters with which they were supposed to have at least a passing acquaintance. Max seemed surprised to hear that I’d been so conscientious and I felt I’d chalked up a good mark. I went on casually, though I knew I was about to drop a bomb that would lift Max from his comfortable chair, “I have something rather more vital than Edward Jones or Arnold Priddy. So
mething Plug told me in the North Yorkshire Moors.”
“Well?”
I said, “The Bolzes are corning in with what could be dynamite — if it gets hooked away by a bunch of West Germans, which is what Plug and his mates intended should happen.”
Max looked irritated. “Don’t talk to me in riddles. What is being brought in?”
“Adolf Hitler’s brain,” I said, “pickled in a glass container in a metal box intended by the Bolzes to be passed to the Kremlin via East Berlin.”
*
Max was as startled as I had expected; startled but sceptical, utterly so. Hitler, as didn’t we all know, had committed suicide back in 1945 in that Berlin bunker, alongside his mistress. But the remains had never been found, I reminded him — as Plug had reminded me. Max said, “That was upset in 1968, remember?”
“That Soviet intelligence man … Lev Aleksandrovich Bezymensky — ”
“Right. Wrote a book.”
“I know.” Bezymensky had written The Death of Adolf Hitler, according to which Hitler’s remains had been found by the Russians in 1945; there was a story that the corpse had been shoved into a feeding-trough in the street, saturated with petrol, and burned. His valet, Heinz Linge, had also testified to having burned the corpse of his late master — Linge had died in 1980 — but until Bezymensky’s book had been published, nothing of this had been made public. In spite of photographs of gruesome, burned remains and of the Russian autopsy reports as shewn in the book, Plug hadn’t believed a word of it, for reasons that I was about to come to, though in point of fact I couldn’t and wouldn’t say that Bezymensky had been wrong. Time would tell. But, and this I stressed to Max, many stories had circulated since 1945, stories that Hitler was alive and well somewhere in South America. There could be a firm basis. Heaps of ashes are pretty anonymous and there had been no overwhelming proof, leaving aside that book, that Hitler had ever died at all in his bunker beneath war-shattered Berlin. And according to Plug and his friends, Hitler had indeed got away to South America by devious routes that had included Spain and the Canary Islands, and had died in Chile a few years later at the age of sixty-one. A matter of only a few months ago the late Fuehrer’s brain, preserved and intact, had been discovered quite by chance in the foothills of the Andes, in a hut guarded by an ancient German who had once been an NCO attached to the Fuehrer’s personal retinue. The discovery had been made by a West German, a member of the Bundestag, officially a Social Democrat but in fact a still-convinced Nazi. This man had been on a climbing holiday when he had found the hut and its custodian; and had indulged in much reminiscence of the old days, days in fact when he had been a mere child, with the old soldier of the Wehrmacht. A mutual trust had been brought about between them; the child that had become the man had been well steeped in the Nazi ideology and knew what he was talking about. And he had been made to believe implicitly in the old soldier’s story: that he had fled from Germany with his beloved Fuehrer, and that in course of time that Fuehrer had died in his arms, and had been buried in secret, and that a German doctor, resident in Chile, had first removed the brain and preserved it and had delivered it into the ex-feldwebel’s keeping as a sacred relic.
Werewolf (Commander Shaw Book 16) Page 2