“I wish to enter the castle,” McGarvey called up to the man.
“Impossible. You must return in the morning. At ten o’clock.”
“But I must get in tonight,” McGarvey said. “Now. It is very important.”
“The rules,” the man shouted angrily. “You may not enter the museum until morning.”
Maria had left the car and had moved silently around to the side of the house, out of the caretaker’s sight. Evidently he’d not seen her. McGarvey caught a stray glint of light reflecting from the blade of her knife as she cut the telephone line. Whatever happened here tonight, no one would be able to call for help.
“Go away!” the man shouted.
Maria came back to the front of the house and glanced up at the caretaker as McGarvey returned to the car and shut off the engine. He pocketed the keys.
“The small gate is open,” he told her.
“We don’t know our way around,” she said. “We could stumble around in there for weeks without finding … what we came for.”
“See here!” the caretaker called out.
They started for the gate.
“Come back!” the man yelled at them. “You mustn’t go in there. It is against the rules. I will call the police.”
“As soon as he finds out that the telephone isn’t working, he’ll get dressed and come after us,” McGarvey said, going through the gate.
The caretaker was bleating something, but then he ducked back inside.
As they crossed the broad courtyard, their shoes crunching on the white gravel, McGarvey could see that the castle had been built in different stages throughout the centuries, some of the newer sections probably added not more than a hundred years ago.
The older sections of the structure were in poor condition, while the other parts looked almost habitable. He figured that he might not have been far off, imagining Moors defending these ramparts against the Crusaders. The Moors had probably been the first occupants.
They’d made it nearly to the base of the broad marble stairs that led up to the entry veranda, fronting one of the newer sections, when the gatekeeper came running across the courtyard after them. He’d thrown a robe over his pajamas and put tall rubber boots on his bare feet. He was armed with a ten-gauge double-barreled shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“You must leave now or I will shoot you,” the man shouted. He was out of breath, short and rotund. McGarvey figured him to be in his late fifties or early sixties.
“All right,” McGarvey said reasonably. “If you insist.” He and Maria started back. As they came even with the caretaker, the man started to swing around, following them with the big shotgun.
McGarvey reached out and gently took the gun from him. The hammers hadn’t been cocked.
The caretaker cried out in alarm, and he stepped back and raised his hands over his head, the beam of the flashlight dancing crazily into the sky.
“Put your hands down, mein Herr,” McGarvey said with a smile. “No one is going to harm you.” He cracked the shotgun and pulled out the two shells. They were very old, and apparently they’d gotten wet at some point. He doubted that they would fire. Security was terribly lax. Too lax, he wondered, for this to be the repository for the gold? Or was this merely another ruse to throw off suspicion? He put the gun down.
“What do you want here?” the gatekeeper asked, his voice cracking.
“We want to see the castle.”
“In the morning,” the older man said nervously.
McGarvey smiled reassuringly. “You get a lot of visitors here?”
The gatekeeper nodded uncertainly. “In the tourist season there are many people.”
“And they are allowed to go anywhere within the castle?”
“Ach, no, of course not. There are guided tours.”
“Then there are parts of the castle that are forbidden to the public?”
“Of course.”
“Because it would be too dangerous?” McGarvey suggested.
“Yes, up in the towers,” the man said, glancing up.
Crumbling towers rose above the Moorish-looking section of the castle.
“And elsewhere?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
The gatekeeper seemed suddenly uncomfortable. “The crypts,” he said. “It is a … sacrilege.”
“In the dungeons?” Maria asked.
“The crypts, Fraulein,” the old man corrected. “Where there are many bodies. The Moors, the Christians and …”
“Yes?” Maria prompted.
“And … the Jews.”
“What Jews?”
“From the Inquisition. Many of the bodies were brought here for burial.”
“Is that why the Germans bought this castle?” Maria asked sharply. “Is it some kind of a joke?”
The gatekeeper said nothing.
“Show us,” McGarvey said.
“Show you what?” the old man squeaked.
“The crypts. We would like to see them now.”
“It is forbidden.”
“You may tell everyone that a very large gun was held to your head. You had no choice.”
Still the gatekeeper hesitated.
McGarvey stepped aside. “Macht schnell, bitte.”
The old man held back a moment longer, but then headed toward what appeared to be a maintenance road that led from the courtyard behind the main keep and ran toward the older sections of the castle.
They came to a stop in front of one of the sections, before a heavy iron door. The gatekeeper produced a ring of keys from beneath his robe, unlocked the door, and ponderously swung it open on rusting hinges.
Dark stairs led down into the bowels of what, the gatekeeper explained, had been the original keep built in the eleventh century. In another, even more savage age.
The gatekeeper did something with a black iron valve on the wall, and immediately they could smell gas. A second later a flame winked into life, and the gatekeeper stepped back, extinguishing the scratch lighter hanging from a thong on the wall. Another gas light popped to life twenty feet down the stairs. Then a second farther down, and a third, and more, all the way down to the bottom.
The gas lights did little to expel the odors of cold and extreme damp from below. The stairs in some places glistened, and there were puddles on others. At the bottom, water dripped from the walls.
“Why is it so wet down here?” McGarvey asked as they descended. He figured they were now two hundred feet, perhaps a little more, beneath the courtyard.
“We’re beneath the castle reservoir. One million liters. In the old days they could hold out against seige forever.”
“You mean that we’re under water here?” Maria asked.
“Yes, just that, Fraulein,” the old man said. “If the walls were to spring a major leak anywhere down here, the rest would crumble and all of this would flood immediately. It is another reason the public is not allowed down here. It is too dangerous.”
The tunnel was so low that even the old man had to stoop slightly to avoid cracking his head on the curved ceiling. It led at a slight slope down into the heart of the hill for as far as they could see, the small gas flames fading to a dim blur in the distance.
Fifty feet from the stairs they came to an offshoot tunnel blocked by a massive cast-iron gate.
“The crypts begin here,” the old man said uncomfortably.
“Do you have the keys?” McGarvey asked, fingering the thick, square lock.
The gatekeeper handed him the big key ring. “The black key with the cross.”
McGarvey located that key among the dozens on the ring and unlocked the heavy gate, pushing it inward. The interior of the tomb was in total darkness. The gatekeeper gave him the flashlight. McGarvey switched it on and shined it inside.
The room was long, and much wider than the tunnel. Stone coffins were placed in a dozen niches cut into the walls.
“Who is buried here?” Maria asked in a hus
hed voice.
“The Moors just here,” the gatekeeper said. “The Crusaders are farther down the main tunnel.”
“What about the Jews?”
“Even farther.”
“Let’s go there,” she said.
“It is too dangerous, Fraulein,” the old man protested.
“We’ll do as the lady wants,” McGarvey said. It would be the last of the monstrous joke. It would be exactly where Rheinfälls and his cronies would bury the gold. He could almost hear them laughing about it down here, their coarse jokes echoing off the stone walls.
Every ten or fifteen yards they passed another gate, behind which the gatekeeper said were other stone coffins. There were more than a thousand bodies entombed down here, he told them.
The farther they went, the narrower the tunnel became and the lower the ceiling dropped. At first McGarvey thought it was just an optical illusion, until he realized that he had to bend over almost double in order to walk. It was becoming painful physically, as well as mentally disturbing. He didn’t like this at all. The tunnel ceiling couldn’t be more than four feet high, and they had descended continuously since the stairs, so that by now he figured they had to be more than three hundred feet below the surface.
“Here,” the old man finally said when they had come at least another five hundred yards. Something was different here. For a second or two McGarvey couldn’t say exactly why, until it came to him all at once.
He touched the metal gate. “Steel,” he said half to himself. He looked down the tunnel. There were other gates for at least another hundred yards. He walked to the next one in line. Here the gates were not made of black cast iron as they had been in the other sections of the tunnel. These were made of steel, rusting steel.
“What is it?” Maria asked.
“Steel,” McGarvey said to the gatekeeper. “This part of the tunnel is very new. Maybe even this century.”
“It was built in the early thirties, I think,” the old man said after a long silence.
“Dios,” Maria said softly. “If there are Jews buried here, they were killed by the Nazis.”
The gatekeeper stepped back a pace. But there wasn’t much room to move in the tunnel.
McGarvey opened one of the gates and stepped inside. The coffins here appeared to be made of granite. There were names on some of them, numbers and dates or cryptic symbols on others. The coffins had been chipped and stained by weather to make them appear very old. He figured they’d been constructed at the same time the Nazis had built the extension to the tunnel. There had to be a dozen in this vault alone.
Maria stepped in behind him. “It’s here,” she said in awe. “It’s really here.”
“Hold this,” McGarvey said, handing her the flashlight. He put his back to one of the coffin lids. At first it wouldn’t budge, and he pushed even harder, knowing that he was doing more damage to himself. But the lid finally began to move.
Maria helped him, and when the lid was open a foot or more she shined the light inside.
There were rags. Old, dirty rags. Were they looking at the clothing draped on the disintegrated remains of a corpse? Maria reached in and pulled the rags away. Underneath was wooden planking, the boards damp and nearly rotted through.
McGarvey pulled away some of the wood with his fingers, and then more, suddenly revealing what the coffin really held.
The flashlight reflected brightly off gold bars packed tightly into the coffin, each of them stamped with a long serial number below the German eagle.
“It’s here,” Maria said softly. She reached out to touch the gold, but she could not make her fingers come closer than a few inches.
“I wasn’t sure what we would find,” McGarvey said. He too was impressed, and deeply moved. The lives lost, the human suffering, the pain and anguish that this one coffin filled with gold represented—it was horrible to contemplate. But there was more here. Millions of dollars. Billions of dollars.
Maria turned away from the coffin. She went back out into the tunnel. “There are dozens of gates,” she said.
In the darkness, McGarvey pulled away more wood to make certain the coffin was filled with gold. His fingers touched a small package wrapped in oiled paper. He withdrew it, and turned so that he could hold it up to the dim light filtering through the door into the tomb. It was a thick wad of papers. The top sheet was stamped with a swastika above the initials R.S.H.A., the Nazi secret intelligence service.
A list of some sort started beneath that legend. He couldn’t quite make it out in the darkness.
“Kirk!” Maria cried. “He’s gone …”
All the gas lights in the tunnel went out. Maria screamed. Before McGarvey could reach the door, her flashlight went out.
“Maria!” he shouted.
A man began to laugh. He was some distance down the tunnel, the sound of his laughter distorted by echoes. But McGarvey knew who it was.
There could be no mistake.
“Kurshin!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Kurshin!”
62
THEY HAD SEEN THE TAILLIGHIS well ahead of them turn off the main highway, but it wasn’t until they came to the turn themselves that they realized the other car was heading up to the castle.
“This is it,” Lev Potok said sharply. “It has to be.” A few miles farther to the east was the town of Ponte do Sor. He’d worried all the way from Lisbon about finding where McGarvey and the woman had gone. But this had to be the place.
They’d passed the access road, so Landau had to back up to it. “Are you sure about this?”
“No, but unless you’ve got a better idea, we’ll try this first,” Potok said. “Shut off your lights.”
Landau flipped off the headlights, the road momentarily disappearing. But almost immediately they could see perfectly well in the bright moonlight. “Up there,” he said.
The other car was already near the top of the hill. They could see its headlights flashing through the olive trees, but in the next moment the lights disappeared.
“Where’d they go?” Liebowitz asked from the back seat.
“He’s still there,” Potok said, taking out his pistol and checking its action. “He shut off his headlights too.”
“Did they spot us?” Laundau asked.
“Probably.”
“Is it McGarvey?” Liebowitz asked.
“I don’t think so. He had too big a head start on us.”
“Then, who?”
“Whoever it was who killed the German,” Potok said.
“Here to protect the gold from discovery,” Liebowitz said.
“Gold?” Landau asked.
“Drive,” Potok ordered.
McGarvey, his gun in hand, groped his way silently in the absolute darkness to the doorway. He paused, his left hand brushing the wet stone wall, listening for a sound, any sound out in the tunnel. Somewhere he could hear water dripping, and in the distance he thought he heard an extremely faint hissing noise. But he couldn’t be certain about that.
“Maria?” he called softly. “Are you all right?”
Kurshin laughed again, this time closer. But still it was almost impossible to tell just how far away he was. Sounds were very distorted in the narrow tunnel.
McGarvey had to fight down a rising panic that threatened to blot out all reason and sanity. He was caught now, deep underground in a crypt. A realm of the dead, not the living.
“Is she with you?” he called.
“She’s here, McGarvey,” Kurshin said. His voice sounded odd, somehow disjointed.
“Let her go, Arkasha. This is just between you and me now.”
“No, she will die here with you,” Kurshin said. He laughed again, and it sounded to McGarvey as if the man couldn’t help himself. As if the laugh had been involuntary. Had he become unhinged? Was he now insane? The thought was chilling.
“What’s the point?” McGarvey asked. “Baranov is dead, Didenko has been arrested. There is nowhere for you to go.”
&n
bsp; “Exactly,” Kurshin said, laughing again.
“No one wants you, Arkasha,” McGarvey said, carefully edging his way around the steel gate.
“That no longer matters …”
“Even if you manage to kill us tonight, and get out of here, then what?”
“I don’t care.”
“But you should, Arkasha,” McGarvey said, moving into position so that he could extend his gun hand out into the tunnel.
“No,” Kurshin shouted, and he laughed, this time the sound high-pitched, almost animal-like in its intensity.
“You have the skills, and I’m certain you have the money, to hide yourself somewhere. Mexico, maybe. Cuba. Somewhere in Russia, perhaps. Siberia. But then what, Arkasha?”
“It doesn’t matter, I tell you. Once you are dead, nothing will matter.”
“What then, Arkasha?” McGarvey called softly. “How long before you crack? Before you can no longer stand the lack of purpose? How long, Arkasha, before you put the barrel of your gun into your mouth and pull the trigger?”
Kurshin laughed.
“Why not do it now, Arkasha? Save us the trouble.”
“Die!” Kurshin screamed.
McGarvey reached out into the tunnel and cocked the hammer of his pistol, the noise loud in the darkness. Kurshin could not have missed hearing it and understanding what it was.
Hans Meitner and Lötti Jodl hurried across the gravel courtyard of the castle, their guns drawn. Jodl was leaving a trail of blood from the gunshot wound in his side. Both men were professionals. Both had been lured away from positions with the BND, West Germany’s secret intelligence service, to work for the generals, lured by a rate of pay three times what they had received for their government service.
Neither of them had met the elusive “generals,” of course. As far as they knew, none of the foot soldiers had. They had been interviewed and hired by a law firm in Stuttgart. It was the law firm to which they made their monthly reports, and from which they received their assignments.
This outbreak was a bad one. The worst of all. The opposition had finally penetrated the silence the old fools had maintained for nearly thirteen years.
They should have been killed in the beginning. But as the man who had hired them said: “You will be ordered to kill only under the most extreme circumstances, gentlemen. Only at such time as our true aim is compromised or threatened.”
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