“Who are you, and what do you want?” the Nazi demanded.
“I’m your worst nightmare, and I want you.”
He furrowed his forehead. His confusion was evident but he still showed no sign of concern.
“Whatever this is about,” he said, “I will deal with it later. Right now I have more pressing priorities, as you can see.” He gestured toward the rear of the camp and the burning buildings, as if perhaps Tracie had not yet caught sight of them.
“I don’t think so.” She shook her head and drew her weapon. It wasn’t technically necessary, Hitler Junior wasn’t armed and she had no doubt she could maneuver him physically if it came to that. But physical action would be much more likely to draw the unwanted attention of passing soldiers than would holding a pistol and shielding it from view with her body.
So that was what she did.
“Right now,” she continued, “your priorities are whatever I say they are. And I say you’re going to turn around and march right back inside your lovely little cottage.”
He glanced from the pistol to Tracie’s face, his features arranged in an expression of sheer disbelief. “I will do no such thing.”
“Walk or die. It’s your choice. But make it now, because time is at a premium.”
Hitler Junior’s entire body began shaking. His head, his hands and arms, every exposed body part trembled. At first, Tracie thought it was out of fear, but then she realized he still wasn’t afraid. He was shaking from fury. This was not a man accustomed to being crossed.
He glared at her, his eyes dark and angry. And then he stalked past her and into the cottage. He didn’t go for her gun, didn’t try to slam the door before she could react. He simply walked inside and waited for her to join him.
28
November 19, 1987
2:55 a.m.
Phoenix Compound
Langenberg, Federal Republic of Germany
“What is it you want? Why do you come here and threaten me?” The younger—and now only living—Hitler spoke quietly, his voice cold and hostile, and he stared at Tracie with undisguised loathing.
“What do I want? At the moment, I want my curiosity satisfied. I want to know just what the hell you hope to accomplish with…all of this.”
They faced each other in the tiny living area of what appeared to be an exact duplicate of the Hitler Senior’s cottage, right down to the minimalist furnishings. Tracie wondered whether the bedroom would feature just a single bed and small end table, as it had for the frail, obviously dying Hitler. She doubted it.
“What do I hope to accomplish? Are you serious? I hope to—I will—accomplish what was so unfairly denied my father. I will accomplish a world where the Thousand Year Reich reigns supreme once again, a world where the superior, both mentally and physically, shall rule. I will accomplish a world as it should have been so long ago.”
“The ‘superior’ being you, and those who look and think like you.”
Hitler was silent. He gazed impassively at Tracie. He silence was answer enough. She was aware of the time passing, understood implicitly that the bodyguard who had so reluctantly gone off to take charge of the firefighting efforts would return soon, once it became clear his boss wasn’t following as he had promised to do. She understood also that the bodyguard’s return would occur sooner rather than later, and that if she were still here when it happened she would likely never leave the camp alive.
And yet she stood rooted to the spot, frozen by the sheer audacity—and apparently limitless evil—of the man standing before her. He hadn’t even been alive when his father murdered millions of men, women and children solely due to their heritage, and yet he seemed to be cut from exactly the same cloth, seemed to suffer exactly the same delusions.
Was it DNA? A strand of insanity that had imbedded itself in Adolph Hitler and then been passed along to his heir, born when the elder had already been eliminated as a threat to world security?
Or was this evil learned? The product of an upbringing where the son had been subjected day after day to the twisted philosophies and moral rot of a father who had come far too close to fulfilling his dream the first time and been hell-bent on accomplishing those same goals decades later through his proxy. His son.
It was a question Tracie knew she would ponder over the course of dozens—hundreds—of sleepless nights, and also one that would be the source of endless nightmares to be suffered through when she did sleep.
But at this moment, the question was irrelevant.
At this moment, she had an assignment to be executed.
So to speak.
Hitler had backed away from Tracie as they faced each other, eventually running out of room in front of a small fireplace with a plain mantel, adorned only with a pair of potted plants.
He raised his hands in what was apparently supposed to be interpreted as a gesture of reason, or perhaps of compromise. “Now I will ask you the same question. What do you hope to accomplish? It is obvious you are the one who set fire to my barracks.”
“That’s right.”
“But all of them are empty except one. And even if every last building is destroyed, even if this entire camp burns to the ground and is leveled, we will simply rebuild.” Hitler’s eyes glittered in the low light with manic intensity, his face burning with a passion that had to equal—and maybe surpass—anything his father might have displayed as he was building his empire of evil back in the 1930s and 1940s.
It was awe-inspiring and terrifying.
“We will come back bigger and stronger and better,” he continued, “because we are the men of destiny. We are the ones who will craft a new world, a world that will come as close to perfection as humanly possible. We are the ones, don’t you understand? The world has been waiting four long decades for the return of Nazi Germany, and when we do return, we will be bigger and stronger and better armed than before. And we will be unstoppable.”
Tracie watched and listened, spellbound. Adolph Hitler Junior was every bit the charismatic presence his father must have been. Evil and black-hearted, clearly, but charismatic nevertheless.
His hands remained spread as he continued speaking with messianic fervor. His right hand hovered directly in front of one of the plants atop the fireplace mantel. “We are on the verge of receiving an influx of financial support the likes of which even the richest nations on earth have never seen. This windfall will constitute the final piece of the puzzle. The New Third Reich will have the ability to recruit and train warriors far superior to those available to any misguided nations who might seek to oppose us. It will take time, that is true, but we are far closer to realizing our goals than you or any others on the outside realize.”
Too late, Tracie realized she had allowed the Nazi fanatic to take control of the conversation, to dictate the terms of engagement. She had unconsciously lowered her weapon during Hitler’s soliloquy, and now she began to raise it, internal alarm bells jangling.
Hitler continued speaking as he reached behind the potted plant atop the fireplace mantel and swept it to the floor. Its ceramic base shattered, exploding in a hail of shards and dirt. In one smooth motion, he grasped a handgun that had been hidden behind the plant.
He fired even before aiming, even as he was still pulling the gun off the mantel. Tracie squeezed her trigger at the same time, the pair of percussive blasts melding into one single awful explosion.
Her shot missed its target.
Hitler’s shot missed its target.
Tracie cursed her carelessness even as she dropped to the floor and rolled. Hitler’s gun roared again, the slug thudding into the wood plank floor inches from her head. Her ears were ringing and the sharp smell of gunpowder filled the room and she rolled again before her shoulder banged against Hitler’s closed bedroom door.
The Führer fired a third time, but he had expected Tracie to stop, not to roll a second time, and his bullet hit the floor again, this time in the space her body had occupied until a half-second ago.<
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Tracie was on her side, unable to roll further. She sighted up the barrel and squeezed the trigger before Hitler could manage a third shot, and the slug hit home, square in the man’s chest. He had taken one step forward as he fired, and now he staggered back, slamming into the fireplace mantel as a crimson circle bloomed on the front of his white nightshirt
He glanced down incredulously, as if unable to comprehend what had just happened, and then he raised his weapon again.
Tracie squeezed off another shot, and this one hit home less than an inch from the first, and now more blood flowed, and Adolph Hitler Junior pulled his own trigger, but his body had spasmed when the second bullet struck home, and his gun belched fire and roared for the last time as the bullet blasted harmlessly into the ceiling.
Then he sank to the floor, coming to rest on his knees.
His mouth opened.
Closed.
Opened again.
He tried to speak, but any words he might have managed were lost in the ringing in Tracie’s ears. She was at the moment totally deaf.
He didn’t fire his gun. He seemed to have forgotten he was holding it. The fanatical glitter in his eyes was replaced by a look of stunned incomprehension, and as Tracie watched, they glazed over completely.
He was no longer looking at Tracie.
He was no longer looking at anything.
He stared straight ahead as he tumbled forward onto his face.
29
November 19, 1987
3:00 a.m.
Phoenix Compound
Langenberg, Federal Republic of Germany
Tracie pushed herself to her feet, never letting her weapon stray from the motionless body of Adolph Hitler II. He was dead, she was sure of it, and yet a career’s worth of training and experience had taught her to take nothing for granted.
She edged across the room and stopped next to the prone man. Hitler’s gun had dropped to the floor next to his hand, and Tracie reached forward with one foot and kicked it across the floor.
She reached down with her left hand. Kept her Glock trained on Hitler with her right. Pressed two fingers to his neck below his ear. Felt for a pulse.
Didn’t get one.
Checked again.
Still nothing.
Finally satisfied he was no longer a threat, Tracie rolled the body over onto its back. She was breathing heavily and shaking, and not just from adrenaline. She had allowed herself to be distracted by the sheer force of her target’s personality—he was as evil as his father had been, of that there could be no question, the malevolence had radiated off the man in black waves—but he was a spellbinding speaker, and Tracie had been drawn in.
The mistake had nearly cost her life.
She forced herself to concentrate. There would be plenty of time later to castigate herself for her potentially lethal lapse in judgment—always assuming, of course, she made it out of here alive—but for now there was still work to be done.
Tracie stared at the corpse, shaking her head in amazement. The likeness of this man to the images she had seen of the 1940s-era Adolph Hitler was striking, even more so up close than when she had observed the man from a distance. If she had seen a photo of Adolph Hitler II today, she would have had no reason to believe he was anyone other than The Führer himself. Had this man lived, he would have been the most successful weapon in the New Nazi Party’s arsenal in terms of recruitment and propaganda.
To Tracie Tanner, though, he represented nothing more than a checkmark inside a box. She was one step closer to mission completion.
The corpse’s eyes were open and staring straight up at the ceiling, and although his heart no longer pumped blood through the twin bullet wounds, his nightshirt had nearly soaked through with it. The white cotton clung to his chest, sticky from blood.
A gold chain hung around the dead man’s neck, and Tracie felt a lightning bolt of excitement shoot through her. She had almost given up hope of finding the relic that stood at the heart of this mission—the Amber Room treasure key—but now, it looked as though the key may have fallen right into her lap.
And it made sense that it would be here. A man with Hitler’s arrogance and overarching confidence would never have entrusted an item worth upwards of three hundred million dollars to anyone else’s care.
He would have insisted on keeping it close.
Probably very close.
Probably around his neck, hanging on a gold chain.
Tracie knelt and lifted the chain and raised her eyebrows in surprise. What she had thought was a single strand of gold rope, thick and glittering, was in reality a pair of identical chains.
They separated when she lifted them, and she began pulling them out from under Hitler’s shirt. Whatever was hanging from the chains was large and relatively heavy, and offered considerable resistance against the weight of the blood-soaked nightshirt.
She tugged harder and a moment later they popped free. She held Hitler’s head off the floor with one hand and lifted the chains clear. Dangling at the end of each was a large gold skeleton key, complete with tiny boxes threaded through with copper wiring at the end of each tine.
The keys looked identical.
And it all became clear.
Of course.
The door to the hidden vault containing the Amber Room treasure was secured by a pair of booby-trapped locks, not just by one single lock.
It stood to reason. Even with Berlin falling down around him in 1945, even as he prepared for a desperate dash to freedom that would likely result in death, Adolph Hitler Senior would never have trusted a lowly Nazi soldier with the only access to hundreds of millions of dollars. He would have wanted a failsafe, and by keeping one of the two keys to the locked vault, he would have ensured no one could access it until he decided the time was right.
She could see it all clearly in her mind’s eye. To open the vault and render the booby traps—bombs, probably—useless, it would be necessary to turn both keys at the same time. It was one of the measures for safeguarding nuclear weapons that had been in place for decades: A single operator, working alone, could not produce a nuclear strike; the weapons were accessible only to at least two people working together.
It was simple and brilliant.
And if her theory was right, she now had in her possession both keys to the Amber Room treasure. But her mission was to cripple Phoenix, and although eliminating the two Hitlers represented a good start, it would all be for nothing if she were unable to escape this compound. A Hitler-less Phoenix would still be formidable if allowed to access three hundred million dollars.
And Tracie knew she had to be running out of time.
Hitler’s bodyguard would be back any second.
She was surprised he hadn’t already returned.
She slipped the pair of identical gold chains over her head and dropped the blood-soaked keys down the front of her blouse. They were tacky with drying blood and she could feel them sticking to her skin and she grimaced in distaste.
The sound of heavy footfalls pounding the dusty ground drew Tracie’s attention away from the keys and back to the task at hand: staying alive. Someone was moving fast, and that someone was approaching Adolph Hitler Junior’s cottage.
It could only be one person.
Tracie bent and shoved her hands under the corpse’s armpits. Lifted Hitler’s upper body and began dragging him across the floor toward the stuffed chair the bodyguard had apparently been using while his boss slept. Hitler Junior had not been a particularly large man, but he was nothing more than dead weight now—literally—and pulling him against the drag presented by the lush Oriental rug installed in the living area was a chore.
The footfalls clomped up the wooden steps of the farmer’s porch as Tracie reached the chair. A pair of clipped knocks on the door were followed almost immediately by a voice, concerned and slightly out of breath: “Mein Führer? Are you alright? Do you need help, sir?”
Tracie lifted the body as high as she
could with her petite frame. She was shaking and panting from effort, stress and adrenaline. She heaved Adolph Hitler Junior into the chair, wishing she had had the foresight to lock the front door. It wouldn’t have kept the bodyguard out but could have given her a few extra precious seconds, time that very well might represent the difference between living and dying.
“Mein Führer! Please answer me!” The bodyguard knocked a second time, two quick raps with his knuckles, and from the rising tension in his voice she knew a third knock would not come. His sense of propriety had kept the man out of his boss’s cottage thus far, but duty was about to override propriety.
Hitler’s body slumped to the side and Tracie straightened it. Her goal was to make the corpse look like a man taking a well-deserved rest, although even if successful, the fiction would only last a fraction of a second—nobody “rested” with the amount of blood soaking this man’s shirt. He had died with his eyes open, and now they stared straight ahead, directly toward the still-closed front door as if in rapt fascination.
Across the room the knob rattled, and Tracie pictured the bodyguard weighing his responsibility for protecting Adolph Hitler’s life with the certainty of severe punishment that would follow if he entered without an invitation and the Führer was simply changing clothes or sitting on the john.
She crossed his legs at the knee and slipped behind the chair, gun drawn.
And waited for the door to open.
30
November 19, 1987
3:05 a.m.
Phoenix Compound
Langenberg, Federal Republic of Germany
She didn’t have to wait long. She had barely dropped into a crouch, gun held in two hands against the chair’s right wingback, when the door burst open and the bodyguard entered.
“I am sorry, Mein Führer, but I—”
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 89