A Bodyguard of Lies

by Donna Del Oro

  The Le Blancs were lying. Meg sensed it. They said she and her grandmother could fly home from Hannover, with a stopover in Frankfurt. She wondered if they were lying. She shot her grandmother a baleful, warning glance but the old woman ignored her. Clare Eberhard was lost again in a fantasy, reliving the past with the aid of the duplicitous Madeleine and Pierre Le Blanc.

  Meg wiped the tears from her cheeks. Her Gran was one tough woman, no matter who she really was. Or what she’d done. Her blood ran in Meg’s. She’d be tough, too.

  And hope and pray that Jake would keep his promise.

  Chapter Forty

  Jake and Pierce had just landed at Tempelhof Flughafen, Berlin’s airport, after having endured two ear-bending hours of debriefing in Dublin with Major Temple and the Irish deputy minister of Defence. When a roomful of irate Irish government officials were finally satisfied that the MI5 agents and the lone FBI investigator had done all they could to keep the passengers on the Global Adventures motor coach safe, and their precious multi-million-Euro stallions free from harm, Temple had given Jake and Pierce the go-ahead to pursue and arrest the kidnappers, the Le Blancs, the suspected Nazi spy, Clare Hillenbrand Eberhard, and her granddaughter, Meg Larsen. Jake had told Major Temple that Meg had tipped him off about the suspected destination—the old Reichstag—he hadn’t revealed the second city, Hannover.

  Jake shot Pierce a fulminating look. Nervous about flying and their assignment, the Brit had talked his ear off during the entire hour-and-a-half flight. Even the tetanus injection and antibiotics the doctor in Dublin had given Jake, and one of Meg’s painkiller pills, hadn’t been enough to tune out the voluble Pierce. Still, the leg wound was no longer bleeding and the swelling had gone down. Meg would be happy about that. The puncture marks on his chest from the taser gun had been swabbed and disinfected, too. They were sore but there was no permanent damage done.

  The thing hurting the most was his pride.

  And his fear for Meg’s and her grandmother’s safety.

  According to Major Temple, the Le Blancs were using aliases and the stolen passports of a French Canadian couple in their sixties. He had no clue what their true identities were, but an Interpol databank was running their passport photos, and he expected to hear back from Lyon, France, Interpol’s headquarters, in twenty-four hours or less. By then, Jake had concurred with the major, the couple could be long gone. They’d use Clare Eberhard for their own propaganda purposes, then ditch the elderly woman and her granddaughter. How they planned to ditch the two women had all of them worried. Even Major Temple.

  Temple had a lot of reputation at stake in seeing Mary Snider brought to trial. A part of Jake could sympathize with the man’s need to see justice done.

  Jake had informed the MI5 agents about Meg’s earlier tip about the Le Blancs planning photo shoots with her grandmother in Berlin and that they’d begun speaking a dialect of German with each other that Meg couldn’t understand—and, she suspected, neither could her grandmother. Temple had suggested either an Austrian dialect or Schweitzer Deutsch—Swiss German—and Jake had concurred. They’d narrowed the Interpol search.

  He’d omitted mentioning the plans to go to Hannover, however. That way, Meg’s information would confirm her cooperation with the investigation and possibly prevent MI5 from charging her with obstruction. Yet, the intel Jake had omitted still gave him some leeway.

  He and Pierce had forty-eight hours only. Then Temple was notifying Interpol to send out border alerts and APBs. After that, a huge dragnet would close in on all four—the kidnappers and their captives.

  Jake had no intention of escorting Pierce, the assigned MI5 agent, all the way to Hannover or even around Berlin. If Temple eventually figured out the Le Blancs’ plan to film Clare Eberhard at what Jake suspected was her family’s gravesite in Hannover, then more power to him. It would be without Jake’s help, and he intended to get to them first. Give Meg and her grandmother their last chance to fly back to the States and get legal help.

  He intended to keep his promise to Meg.

  And to hell with the consequences.

  Pierce had no idea about the GPS beacon, nor Jake’s tracking device, hidden inside the locked compartment of his aluminum suitcase. As soon as Jake could, he’d take it out and start using it.

  Also unknown to Major Temple and his MI5 team were Jake’s encrypted phone calls back to FBI Headquarters and one emergency call to a certain Navy commander stationed in San Diego.

  It was after two AM. At their hotel, the Marriott der Berliner on the Lindenstrasse, Jake and Pierce checked in. They eschewed the porters and carried the bags up to their shared room. Two double beds faced them. Pierce practically dove onto his with a loud groan of fatigue.

  Exhausted but mentally churning with his plan, Jake poured himself and Pierce some Schnapps from a bottle in their mini bar. Fifteen minutes later, Pierce’s snoring could be heard from the bathroom, even while Jake was showering. The man sounded like a freight train.

  Jake dressed rapidly, slung the carry-on over his shoulder and grabbed the aluminum suitcase’s handle. He looked back at the sound sleeper.

  “Sorry, ol’ chap,” said Jake, borrowing some Brit-speak. “Gotta do this myself.”

  Downstairs, he hailed a cab which dropped him off at a car rental agency on the other side of the city. Using cash from an ATM machine he’d stopped at halfway between the hotel and the rental agency, he paid for the car, a fast, eight-cylinder Mercedes sedan. He used one of the two FBI-issued false passports and driver’s licenses he’d brought with him to register for the rental. If he wasn’t too late, the Le Blancs and their captives would still be in the city. They would’ve arrived by sunset, so they had at least six hours’ lead time on Jake and Pierce.

  With that in mind, Jake drove to a two-star hotel on Bismark Strasse, near the Lietzensee Bridge. He showed the clerk the false passport, paid for the room with Euros and checked in. In his small, utilitarian room, he plopped down on the double bed. His feet hung over the end and it was hard and lumpy. Well, too bad. They’d never look for him in this dive, a place he’d known from his earlier, more frugal travels to Germany.

  He’d requested a wakeup call of six AM. Less than four hours’ sleep—not ideal—but he could manage it. His eyelids heavy, he was suddenly drowsy from the day’s physical workouts and the painkiller he’d taken on the jet. His leg no longer throbbed but the rest of his body felt almost numb and heavy with fatigue. Unfortunately, so did his mind.

  He needed to sleep.

  The memory of his and Meg’s sexual fling in that dumpy, cliffside inn perversely filled his head. He could feel her arms and legs around him, enclosing him in her warm, loving embrace. That was the thing about Meg. It wasn’t just about the physical attraction or the sex. Though, baby, that was great. She was hot, sexy, playful… There was more. Meg was giving more of herself and he felt it. She cared for him…

  That possibility flooded him with a kind of joy.

  When he awoke nine hours later, it was with a start. He’d slept through the wake-up call. Sunlight filtered through the flimsy drapes. He rubbed his eyes and stared at his watch. He let go a stream of curses.

  Damn! Still dressed in the clothes from last night, Jake jumped up, hurried to the bathroom and washed his face. With quick, deliberate moves, he retrieved and prepared the tracking device. He carried it down past the small hotel lobby and to the locked rental car in the hotel’s parking lot. The night before he’d stored the aluminum suitcase in the trunk but had retrieved his shoulder holster, pistol and FBI badge.

  Once settled inside the rented Mercedes, he set the tracker, a hard-plastic box with an antenna, on the spacious dashboard and hooked it into the car’s cigarette lighter. He spread a laminated map of Berlin that he’d purchased in the airport on the passenger seat and studied it.

  His hotel wasn’t located in the center of the city but Jake figured he could start there and work his way into the center. With one eye on the tracker’s
LED screen and its programmed Berlin-street map, he’d drive to the center near the Tiergarten and Potsdamer Platz, then slowly circle around in a kind of spiral, gradually moving outward. Of special interest was the area near the Brandenburger Tor, or Brandenburg Gate, the Ebertstrasse and Unter den Linden, the main thoroughfare.

  Of course, there was the German Bundestag near the Spree River. Meg had indicated the old Reichstag would be the scene of a possible photo shoot. That’s where the Nazis held most of their victory celebrations, the building’s balconies draped with red flags emblazoned with black swastikas.

  If he couldn’t pick up anything there, he’d have to widen his circle and that would waste time.

  He didn’t have much of that. It was nearly noon in Berlin.

  Forty-eight hours…now minus twelve… Thirty-six hours to find Meg and her grandmother.

  Before MI5 arrested them.

  Or something worse happened.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Meg could barely eat more than a few bites. The schnitzel and potatoes on her plate swam in gravy, making her feel sick. They were having lunch—mittagessen—in a restaurant in the heart of Hannover’s Alt Stadt district. Her stomach clenched so tightly, she knew she’d be sick if she forced herself to eat.

  Not so, Madeleine and Pierre and Wolf. They ate with gusto and toasted each other and Clare Eberhard with one glass of beer after another. Her grandmother, whom Meg had not been allowed to sit next to during their entire stay thus far in Germany, was still mesmerized by Madeleine. Sitting across from Meg, the elderly woman hung on to Madeleine Le Blanc’s every look and word, and kept calling her Hannah. As Meg had just learned, Hannah was Clare’s little girl, placed in the care of her grandmother when Clare left her homeland to become a spy in England.

  Meg didn’t believe Madeleine’s story for a minute.

  The pieces of the puzzle that was Clare Eberhard’s life gradually fit together, much to Meg’s amazement, but this was a false piece. How such a woman could leave her young child for a life of espionage in an enemy country during wartime was beyond Meg’s comprehension. Her grandmother loved children, had certainly loved her own son and daughter, and later her grandchildren. How or why Meg’s own mother had broken off from the Sniders, Gran and Grandpa Snider had explained to them once: “Drugs.”

  But Clare Eberhard was a fascist fanatic. Or used to be. She wasn’t the grandmother who had lovingly raised Meg and her half-brother as her own.

  From what she had heard about the war from her grandmother’s reminiscences of that era, Meg could glimpse the larger picture of her dark past. The fanatical fervor encouraged by Clare’s father, a high-ranking official in the National Socialist Party. Her husband Horst Eberhard’s training in military intelligence. Clare’s and her husband’s linguistic abilities. The extreme national pride of the German people at that time. The jobs and prosperity created by the Nazis’ military buildup. The grand hopes for a thousand-year Third Reich. The honor of sacrificing for one’s fatherland.

  Meg was beginning to understand that aspect of her grandmother’s past.

  All the ingredients were there for the terrible choices her grandmother had made. Would Meg have done the same for her homeland? She wondered about this as the Le Blancs, Wolf, and her grandmother conversed conspiratorially over dinner in rapid German that Meg couldn’t understand.

  She withdrew into herself and her reflections. Americans were usually skeptical about their government and rightly so. Hadn’t their forefathers written into the Constitution rules of law and balance of power to protect people from the tyranny of government leaders? That was the beauty of the Constitution.

  What the WWII-era German people failed to do was prevent the tyranny of one man and his followers from subverting those rules of law. The turning point was when the Reichstag, loaded with like-minded Nazis, allowed Chancellor Hitler to develop a cult of personality. They passed into law a prohibition against speaking out against der Fuhrer. The penalty: death. That much Meg had learned in school and from books about the war. And those who tried to stop Hitler and his Nazi minions were silenced quickly. Dissent was never given the chance to grow.

  They had believed the lies of a tyrant for too long.

  “And we’re going to meet my sisters at the cemetery?” her grandmother asked, a quiver in her weak voice, close to tears again.

  Meg’s eyes stung with unshed tears and her throat ached. Her grandmother’s mental health was declining fast and the Le Blancs refused to call a physician. Just as callously, they were building up the elderly woman’s hopes and spirits. Meg worried what would happen when the truth hit her grandmother.

  Meg doubted that Clare Eberhard’s sisters were still alive. If they were, they would’ve been in touch long before now. They would’ve learned about her survival from the vast network of old post-war Nazis. Nevertheless, her grandmother’s mental state had deteriorated so much that she was believing such outrageous lies.

  Madeleine nodded while sipping her beer. Pierre called for the check and signaled to Wolf to escort Meg outside. Apparently, they wanted to speak more confidentially with Clare Eberhard. Something about a Tagebuch. Diary. It was the one word she’d understood. Wolf yanked her up and out of the restaurant before she could communicate any further concern to her grandmother.

  The muscled, young bodybuilder took Meg’s upper arm as they walked along the sidewalk. Evidently, Wolf had been to Hannover before. He pointed to a Gothic-style, red-brick building.

  “The Alt Stadt district is very nice, don’t you think?” he asked her in heavily accented English, to which she nodded. “That is the thirteenth-century Old Town Hall. It was destroyed during the war by American bombs. The city rebuilt it in the fifties.”

  Ever mindful of Jake’s advice to stay calm and not provoke them to violence, Meg glanced around. It was indeed a beautiful city, filled with neo-Gothic and half-timbered buildings, hallmarks of this area of Germany, Lower Saxony or Nieder Sachsen. Strangely enough, she was getting a history lesson of Germany along with being terrorized by her captors. It was part of her grandmother’s life and so Meg was willing to learn what had made Clare Eberhard who she was. Whether she could ever understand, was another question.

  Meg refrained from mentioning London, Coventry, and the other British cities bombed nightly by the German Luftwaffe—the Blitzkrieg strikes—that terrorized Brits for over a year.

  For a second, she was tempted to kick him in the balls and set off running, but Jake’s warning sprang to mind for the hundredth time and she repressed the urge.

  “You saw the old Market Church,” Wolf went on, switching to simplified German, “destroyed by the Americans in June, 1943. The heaviest air raid on Hannover was by the British in October, 1943. Within forty minutes, over four hundred planes dropped thousands of mines and bombs. Almost seven thousand civilians were killed. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes. For what? There was nothing here in Hannover of military value.”

  Meg understood most of what he said although some of the numbers escaped her. Her thoughts turned to the cemetery they were about to visit. Standing stiffly beside her, his hand squeezing her arm, Wolf appeared uneasy. She had a sinking feeling something bad was going to happen.

  “What are we going to see at this cemetery? This Engesohde Friedhof?” she asked him.

  “Your grandmother’s family burial vault.” He frowned and looked away.

  “I don’t think that’s good for my grandmother’s health,” she said but he ignored her. He had his orders and, like a loyal goon, was carrying them out. “She’ll be devastated when she learns the Le Blancs have been lying to her about her family.”

  Wolf just looked away and growled out a warning in German. He steered her into the rear of the black limo waiting at the curb. The two hulks in front glanced back, muttered something in that same German Meg couldn’t understand. Wolf laughed and looked at her with a lascivious glint in his eyes. Angry at whatever they were saying about her, she crossed h
er arms over her chest and stared out of the window.

  Let them laugh. I’m still wearing that beacon.

  Five minutes later, the black limo, with the Le Blancs and her grandmother aboard, drove past a manmade lake that Madeleine called the Maschsee. She pointed out the new Town Hall, the Neue Rathaus, on the other side of the lake. It was a huge, splendid, Neo-Gothic stone building with a massive copper dome in the center. Its location across the lake lent it a certain grandeur.

  So she wasn’t Irish, after all. She was German American, Meg reflected; she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Her Grandpa Snider was German American, too, but his identity was American-based. Her Gran—Mary, Clare, whatever her name—was German. Whatever that meant. All she knew was that the post-war Germans she’d met while traveling were more like Americans she knew than practically anyone else. Practical, hardworking, proud of their accomplishments, proud of their country.

  Both Meg and her grandmother stared in admiration at the Neo-Gothic Rathaus. Tears trickled down Clare’s drawn, crepey cheeks. Her gloved hand shook as she pointed to the majestic building. Pity tugged at Meg’s heart. Gran was so overcome with emotion, she was speechless.

  “Grandma, your hometown is beautiful. I wish you had told me the truth. We could’ve come here instead of Ireland. I wouldn’t have told the police. Or anyone. I would’ve kept your secret.” She would have, too.

  Clare’s dark blue eyes stared slowly at Meg, widened a little as if she were just now becoming aware of her granddaughter’s presence in the limo’s large seating area.

  “Meggie.” Her grandmother smiled weakly. “I couldn’t come back. I knew I was wanted. My friends in the Party warned me. So I stayed Mary McCoy, even after your grandfather died. My son wanted it that way. He was afraid for me.”

  Meg’s jaw dropped. “Uncle John knew?” A moment of shock passed. “Did my mother know, too?”