Maybe the delivery truck skipped every third day.
Maybe deliveries came at a different time every third day.
There was no way to know, and this was one of the many reasons Tracie was resentful of Aaron Stallings and angry he had put her in such an untenable position. He had known all along that Hitler was in West Germany, had undoubtedly known since well before he recruited her for this op. But instead of sending Gruber here—or even a full team—to conduct surveillance in anticipation of an op against the old Nazi, he had waited and withheld critical information from her for reasons known only to himself.
And then Tracie had to deal with the fallout.
It was immoral and it was wrong, and one of these days it might just cost her life.
She waited and fumed and checked her watch, trying to develop an alternative plan she could implement on the spur of the moment in case the driver didn’t show. She would give it another thirty minutes, and if the delivery truck hadn’t rolled through by then, would move to Plan B.
Assuming she could come up with a Plan B.
She breathed deeply, trying to control her anger. Checked her watch again. It was less than ninety seconds since the last time she looked.
Then she heard it: the rumble of a truck approaching in the distance. The driver downshifted as his vehicle climbed a relatively steep incline, the engine whining and complaining.
Hopefully this was the truck she was waiting for. Over the last three days she had discovered that very few vehicles traveled this desolate stretch of road unless they were destined for the Phoenix compound, so she liked her odds. One way or the other, though, she would know in a few seconds.
A vehicle rounded a corner in the distance and she squinted against the brightness of the midday sun. The truck was big and boxy and she felt her adrenaline ramp up. This was the it.
She had edged out of the underbrush at the sound of the engine, and now Tracie knelt behind the front of the Opel, as if inspecting a damaged tire. She waited for the delivery truck to get close enough for the driver to see that that a young woman was stranded at the side of the road, but not so close he would have the option of continuing past if chivalry was dead in his world.
She counted down, pretending not to notice the oncoming vehicle. At what she hoped was the right moment she lifted her head as if startled. Then she stood, brushing dirt and road dust off her bare legs, plainly visible to the driver under her short skirt. Then she walked out into the middle of the road, waving her hands urgently in an appeal for help.
He had no choice, really, unless he wanted to run her down and keep going. Tracie had left the car angled out into the road as far as she dared, and now she used it and her body as a barrier, leaving nowhere for the driver to go.
He had already begun slowing, easing off the gas at the approximate moment he would have been able to see that the motorist experiencing roadside difficulties was a pretty young woman. Now air brakes hissed and squealed, and the brown-and-green delivery truck ground to a stop in the middle of the road.
The driver left the diesel engine idling and stepped down from the cab. He offered his best “I’m here to help” smile, but Tracie noticed he couldn’t quite resist running his eyes up and down her body.
“Car trouble?” he asked by way of introduction.
“Yes,” Tracie answered. “It just died on me. I don’t know what could be wrong.” Later, it would be important to speak the language like a native, to fit in if at all possible, but at the moment it didn’t really matter whether the man recognized her as a foreigner or not. Still, he didn’t seem to, and that pleased her.
“What seems to be the problem?” He walked toward Tracie, still paying much more attention to her body than to her vehicle. He failed to notice Matthias Gruber step out of the woods on the far side of the road.
Gruber used the bulk of the driver’s truck to shield himself from view for as long as he could, and then he crossed the road behind the man, moving quickly but quietly, and the man never saw him coming. Gruber placed his weapon against the side of the driver’s head and said, “Don’t move. Stay completely still if you want to live.”
“What is this about?” the driver said, but seemed to take his warning very seriously. He froze in place and moved nothing but his jaw, and even that, only enough to speak.
“You are going to take a ride with me,” Gruber said. “Spend a little time out of sight. Think of it as a short vacation. You’ll sleep, eat, maybe watch a little television. In a day or so you will go back to work and will never see either of us again.”
“I don’t carry much money, but you are welcome to what I have,” the man said. “Please take it and go.” It was as if he hadn’t heard a word Gruber said. Sweat had broken out along the driver’s forehead under his Koenig Freight Company ball cap.
“You’re not listening,” Gruber said. He snugged the pistol’s barrel up against the man’s head and said, “Take off your shirt and cap.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Do it.”
Tracie looked worriedly along the road in both directions. This was taking too long. If a car came along—any car, it didn’t have to be a police vehicle—things could go sideways in a hurry.
The driver looked momentarily angry, then perplexed, and then finally resigned. He unbuttoned his brown work shirt and reached back to hand it to Gruber.
“No,” the operative said. He gestured with his gun at Tracie. “Give it to her.”
“I do not under—”
“DO IT!”
The driver cringed. He was shaking now, confused but clearly certain he was about to die. He handed the shirt to Tracie.
“Now the cap,” Gruber said. This time there was no hesitation. The driver snatched it off his head and handed it to Tracie.
“Now, walk over to the edge of the forest.”
“Please, you do not need to—”
“Shut up and walk.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“You are going to die in the next three seconds if you do not do as you are told.”
The man’s shoulders slumped and he trudged, head down, in front of the Opel and across the sandy verge to the underbrush looming along the side of the road.
“Very good,” Gruber said, and lifted a roll of duct tape off the ground. He pulled the man’s arms behind his back and fastened the tape around his wrists, then moved to the elbows and repeated the procedure. Then he beckoned the driver deeper into the forest, like a man inviting a guest into his home.
The driver looked pleadingly at Tracie and she said, “Go.”
He walked fifteen feet into the woods. When Gruber indicated he had gone far enough, he stopped immediately. Gruber secured his ankles with the tape and then held his hand out to Tracie, who passed him a small washcloth. He placed it in the driver’s mouth and secured it with tape. Waited for another cloth and when Tracie handed it to him, he placed it over the man’s eyes and taped it as well. He took the man by the shoulders and lowered him gently to the ground.
Gruber said, “Listen carefully. We do not want to hurt you. Do what we say and you will be released soon unharmed. Do anything other than what we say and you will die a painful death and then be buried deep in this forest, where you will never be found. Nod if you understand.”
The man nodded.
“So you know what is going to happen: we will be leaving for a little while. I will return to pick you up within a couple of hours, and then we will move you to a much more comfortable location. If all goes well you will be free soon. Nod if you understand.”
The man nodded.
“However,” Gruber continued, “If you try to sit up, or if you attempt to scream, or if I find you have moved so much as a centimeter from your present position when I return, I will shoot you in the head. You will never see me coming, will not know I have returned. The bullet will enter your brain and you will never know what hit you. Nod if you understand.”
The man nodded v
igorously.
“Good. Now remain perfectly still. I will be back soon.”
Gruber backtracked out of the thick woods and trotted straight to the Opel while Tracie climbed into the cab of the delivery truck. He started the car and drove a hundred or so feet along the shoulder, moving it well away from the helpless delivery driver. The goal was to avoid anyone stumbling over the trussed-up man in the event a Good Samaritan should stop and check on the empty vehicle abandoned along the side of the road.
While Gruber was occupied with the Opel, Tracie checked the front of the truck for the bill of lading she knew they would need. The driver had thoughtfully left a clipboard containing the relevant paperwork on the passenger’s side of the bench seat.
Down the road, Gruber killed the Opel’s engine and leapt from the car. He locked the doors and sprinted back to Tracie as she climbed down out of the cab. They met at the back of the box truck, where he wasted no time pulling open the doors.
Tracie could feel the nervousness vibrating off Gruber like a force field, and she shared his tension. If a sufficient amount of supplies weren’t packed inside the cargo box, the whole hastily devised plan would crumble like a stale cookie.
They shared a look inside the truck and Tracie felt a bit of her worry melt away. The cargo box was nearly full. Cases and wooden boxes and cardboard cartons supposedly filled with canned soup, vegetables cleaning supplies were stacked on wooden pallets half-a-dozen high. The supplies were packed nearly to the top of the cargo box, and the sheer volume of materials made Tracie wonder just how many people Phoenix was planning to recruit—or perhaps already had recruited—for their big Nazi comeback. The truck had shown up at the compound each day of her surveillance, meaning the amount of materials being stockpiled had to be significant.
There was no time to worry about that now. She handed Gruber the driver’s Koenig shirt and ball cap and while he was slipping them on, she grabbed her backpack and climbed into the back of the truck. She boosted herself into the cargo box, shifting cartons around and slithering through the resulting gaps. She continued in this manner until she had made herself invisible from the rear door.
“That’s far enough,” Gruber called, his words floating to her from the roadway behind the truck. “Good luck, Quinn.”
“Good luck to you too, Gruber,” she replied.
He slammed one of the doors closed, and she said, “Oh, and Gruber?”
“Yes?”
“Good work today.”
“Right back atya.” He closed the second door and instantly the back of the delivery truck was plunged into darkness.
A moment later she heard the pitch of the engine change, and then they were moving, the truck rumbling down the narrow road.
19
November 18, 1987
Approximately 3:00 p.m.
Phoenix Compound
Langenberg, Federal Republic of Germany
The Phoenix compound was massive.
As far as Tracie could tell, based on her rushed and incomplete surveillance over the last two and a half days, the front portion of the camp consisted of a series of buildings resembling private residences set back from the front gate by maybe an eighth of a mile and accessible by a long, narrow dirt driveway.
Behind the front cluster of buildings by perhaps another eighth of a mile was a massive building being used as a warehouse, and then row after row of long, narrow structures she assumed had been constructed to serve as barracks for the training and indoctrination of recruits.
What was located behind the barracks buildings in the hundreds of acres contained within the ten-foot-high electrified barbed wire fence was a mystery. Most of it had been hidden from sight by the thick forest during surveillance, and climbing over the electric fence to get inside the compound had been out of the question.
Tracie had preferred to concentrate her time and attention on the front of the complex, anyway. The residential-type buildings represented the most likely place Phoenix would have squirreled away their prized possession—Der Führer himself, Adolph Hitler—which meant those were the buildings she would probably have to breach.
From the darkness inside the cargo bed, Tracie had no way of knowing how soon they would arrive at the compound, but based on her previous surveillance and the location where they had hijacked the truck, she knew they must be getting close. She sighed deeply and tried to control her nerves.
***
The truck rounded a corner and in the distance Matthias Gruber—he liked to remain in character during an assignment, even when he was by himself—could see the compound resolve into view. A wooden guard shack stood at the entrance, and as he began to slow, Gruber wondered how in the hell Phoenix explained the existence of an electrified fence and armed guards to the local authorities, when the facility was technically supposed to be a hazardous materials disposal facility.
Then he recalled Quinn’s concern about the odd phrasing the Wuppertal Police spokesman had used on the TV news, about her conviction that the local cops weren’t interested in finding the shooter, about her suspicion that some official high up on the food chain in the Wuppertal Police might be involved with Phoenix.
If any of that were true, the last thing that official would allow would be any kind of close inspection of this compound, which was close enough to Wuppertal to be quickly accessible, but also set off by itself, isolated and forbidding.
Gruber eased the truck to a halt at the guard shack, brakes squealing and hissing, diesel engine growling, and waited to be challenged. During surveillance, Quinn and he had observed the procedure through their binocs. It seemed straightforward: one guard would leave the shack and approach the cab, examine the bill of lading, and then wave the driver into the camp while an invisible partner inside the shack activated the electric gate.
Knowing what to expect didn’t do much to ease his tension, though, and he forced himself to adopt the bored air of nonchalance any delivery driver would likely project. He wanted to evoke the feeling in the sentry that this was just another stop in a long day of deliveries.
After a short delay, a man stalked out of the small guardhouse. On his hip was a sidearm, and while his hand hovered near it, the fact he had left it holstered Gruber took as a positive sign.
“Papers?” he said, lifting his hand toward the open window and then blinking in surprise as he caught sight of Gruber. His eyes narrowed and he said, “Where is the usual driver?”
“Sick,” Gruber said gruffly. “He’s home with a fever, so I have to work a double. And it’s my wedding anniversary. Just my luck.”
The guard didn’t answer.
Gruber turned his head and frowned, staring through the dirty windshield, doing his best to project the aura of bored worker bee, someone who didn’t really care whether he was allowed inside the compound to complete the delivery or not.
A second passed, and then two, and the guard shrugged. “I still need to see the paperwork,” he said, and Gruber lifted the bill of lading off the seat and passed it through the window.
He examined it uncritically and then passed it back. “You know where to go?”
He hesitated and then shook his head, almost forgetting he was not supposed to be familiar with the compound’s layout.
The guard pointed along the driveway, which seemed unnecessary given the fact it was the only driving option. “Follow the track, past the first cluster of buildings,” he said. “Once beyond them, continue for maybe a tenth of a kilometer. You will come to a warehouse with a loading dock. Back your truck up to the dock and open the garage door. Unload your items and leave them just inside the building. Pull the door closed before you leave. Our people will redistribute the items from there. Do you understand?”
Gruber nodded, still doing his best to maintain the fiction of boredom while his heart hammered in his chest.
The guard stepped back and waited with an air of expectation.
Gruber spread his hands in confusion.
“Get
out of the cab,” the guard said impatiently. “I must examine the cargo before you enter.”
He had known this was coming, had seen the procedure repeated twice already during surveillance. Still Gruber had hoped against hope the step would be forgotten or otherwise overlooked during this delivery.
As long as today’s inspection was as perfunctory as the ones they had watched from a distance, he knew they would be fine. But if this guard suspected something might be wrong, or decided for whatever reason to be more thorough than his comrades, Gruber knew he and Quinn would be in handcuffs—or worse—within the next few minutes.
He climbed down from the cab and trudged to the rear of the truck. Twisted the iron handle and opened first one door and then the other. Held his breath as the guard climbed into the back of the truck and began reading labels on boxes, comparing them to the items listed on the bill of lading. He checked one and then another. Moved a couple of boxes and randomly checked a third and then a fourth.
The guard’s progress was taking him closer and closer to Quinn. Gruber pictured her crouched, gun drawn, ready to blast the guard to hell.
He prayed it wouldn’t come to that.
It didn’t.
After examining two more boxes the man seemed satisfied. He climbed down from the cargo box and initialed the paperwork, then handed the clipboard back to Gruber, who made a concerted effort not to display the relief he was feeling.
The guard turned and retraced his steps to the front of the truck, waiting while Gruber closed and secured the rear doors. He stood impatiently as Gruber climbed back into the cab. Then he turned and gestured at the shack, making a circular motion with his hand. A moment later the gate began to roll open.
First hurdle down, Gruber thought as he waited for the opening to widen enough to drive through. When it had, he offered a perfunctory smile to the stone-faced young guard and then eased the truck into the Phoenix compound.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 84