The Apocalypse Watch

by Robert Ludlum

  Bombarded later by questions, he also refused comment, saying only that the instigators knew who they were, and “that was enough.” MBC stated that their switchboards were overloaded, estimating that the calls were well into the thousands, over eighty percent supporting Mr. Wagner.

  The only clue this reporter has been able to unearth is that the inquiries are somehow related to recent events in Germany, where right-wing factions have made significant inroads throughout the Bonn government.

  In his still unfinished medical complex, Gerhardt Kroeger paced aimlessly, impetuously, in front of his wife, Greta, who sat in a chair in their quarters deep in the forests of Vaclabruck. “He’s still alive, that we know,” said the surgeon excitedly. “He’s passed the first crisis, and that’s a good sign for my procedure but not healthy for the cause.”

  “Why so, Gerhardt?” asked the surgical nurse.

  “Because we can’t find him!”

  “So? He will die shortly, no?”

  “Yes, of course, but if he has a cranial hemorrhage and dies among the enemy, their doctors will perform an autopsy. They will find my implant, and that we cannot permit!”

  “There’s not much you can do about it, so why aggravate yourself?”

  “Because he must be found. I must find him.”

  “How?”

  “There will come a time in his last days, his last hours, when he’ll have to make contact with me. His confusion will be such that he demands instructions, demands them.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I know. I don’t know the answer.” The telephone rang on the table beside the wife’s chair. She picked it up.

  “Yes?… Yes, of course, Herr Doktor.” Greta placed her hand over the phone. “It’s Hans Traupman. He says it’s an emergency.”

  “I would think so, he rarely calls.” Kroeger took the telephone from his wife. “This must be an emergency, Doctor. I can’t remember when you called me last.”

  “General von Schnabe was arrested an hour ago in Munich.”

  “Good heavens, what for?”

  “Subversive activities, inciting to riot, crimes against the state, all the usual legal garbage our forebears refined in a far more conducive environment.”

  “But how?”

  “Apparently your Harry Latham-Lassiter was not the only infiltrator in our valley.”

  “Inconceivable! Each and every one of our followers was put through the most rigorous examinations, even to the point of electronic brain scans that would reveal lying, doubts, the smallest hesitation. I myself devised the procedures; they’re foolproof.”

  “Perhaps one of them had a change of heart after he or she left the valley. Regardless, von Schnabe was picked up by the police and identified in a lineup where the accuser could not be seen. According to what little we’ve learned, it may have been a woman, as there apparently were references to sexual abuse. A middle-level police officer was heard laughing about it with his colleagues in the Munich station.”

  “I told the general constantly, warned him repeatedly, about his liaisons with female personnel. He always answered, ‘With all your learning, Kroeger, you don’t understand. A general connotes power, and power is the essence of sex. They want me.’ ”

  “And he wasn’t even a general,” said Traupman over the phone. “Much less a von.”

  “Really? I thought—”

  “You thought what you were meant to think, Gerhardt,” interrupted the doctor from Nuremberg. “Schnabe is a brilliant student of military operations, a devoted partisan of our cause—few among us could have found, created, and managed our valley—those were his enormous strengths. Actually, in medical terms, he was, is, a sociopath of the highest intelligence, the sort of person such movements as ours demand, especially in the initial stages. Afterward, of course, they are replaced. That was the error of the Third Reich; they believed their false titles, lived them out, and overrode the real generals, the Junkers who might have won the war with a properly timed invasion of England. We will not make those mistakes.”

  “What do we do now, Herr Doktor?”

  “We’ve arranged for Schnabe to be shot in his cell tonight. The assassin will use a silenced pistol. It’s not difficult; unemployment is high even among the criminal classes. It must be done before his interrogation begins, specifically the Amytals.”

  “And Vaclabruck?”

  “It’s yours to run for now. What concerns us, what concerns our leader in Bonn, is your computerized robot in Paris. When will he die, for God’s sake?”

  “One day, three days at the outside, he can’t last more than that.”

  “Good.”

  “Excuse me, Herr Traupman, but it is all too possible that he will experience a virtual explosion in his occipital lobe.”

  “Where your implant resides?”

  “Yes.”

  “We must find him before that happens. If they discover one robot, they’ll believe there are a thousand others!”

  “I said as much to my wife.”

  “Greta, of course. What does she suggest?”

  “She agrees with me,” replied Kroeger as his wife stood up and shook her head violently. “I must fly to Paris and meet with our people. First with the Blitzkrieger; they’re missing something. Then with our plant at the American Embassy; we must refine what he knows about the Antinayous. Finally, our man at the Deuxième Bureau. He vacillates.”

  “Be careful with Moreau. He’s one of us in his stomach, but he’s a Frenchman. We really don’t know which side he’s on.”

  12

  Drew Latham, now his brother Harry, waited in the shadows of the Trocadéro, behind the statue of King Henry the Innocent, his eyes peering through night-vision binoculars. Nearly a hundred yards across the vast concrete pavement were the equally dark spaces between the statues of Louis the Fourteenth and Napoleon the First. It was the rendezvous point of his last request to Karin de Vries that day. The delivery of selected confidential papers he needed from his “dead brother’s” office. It was almost eleven o’clock, the Paris night illuminated by a summer moon, a professional white hunter’s moon in the African veldt, and Drew Latham found comfort in that fact.

  Two men emerged from a black sedan parked in the long, curbed entrance to the great facade of monuments. They wore dark business suits and walked toward the rendezvous, each carrying a briefcase ostensibly holding the papers he had “urgently requested” from his “brother’s” desk. They were neos, for that last request, as coded, had not been transmitted by Karin de Vries. It was proof that her telephone was tapped within the embassy.

  Drew ambled into the scattered groups of strollers, many Parisians, the majority foreign tourists holding cameras. Erratic flashes popped everywhere. The lapels of Drew’s jacket were turned up, and a black visored cap partially covered his face as he made his way through the crowds, constantly remaining in the company of one group after another until he was within fifty feet of the rendezvous. He studied the two men between the two imposing statues; they were calm, as immobile as the monuments, the immobility only slightly marred by their slowly turning heads. Latham moved with his current group of tourists, instantly, alarmingly, noting that they were Asian and uniformly much shorter than he. Another small crowd of Westerners was coming from the opposite direction; he joined it, ironically realizing by the language that these sightseers were German. Perhaps it was a favorable omen; then it became practically optimistic. As one, the group closed in on the monument to Napoleon, conqueror of conquerors, and by the stridency of the comments there was a certain unmistakable association. Sieg Nappy! thought Drew as he kept his eyes on the two false couriers, now less than ten feet away. It was the moment to do something, but Latham was not sure what it was. Then it came to him. Les rues de Montparnasse. Pickpockets! The scourge of the seventh arrondissement.

  He chose the thinnest, least imposing woman nearest him and suddenly grabbed her shoulder bag. She screamed, “Ein Dieb!” In the
semidarkness, Drew threw the purse to an unsuspecting man closest to the first false messenger from the embassy, and pummeled a couple into him, then another man and then another, while shouting unintelligible words in ersatz German. In seconds, a minor riot was taking place in front of Napoleon’s statue, the screams reaching a rapid crescendo as everyone in the crowd tried to locate the thief and his stolen property in the shadows. The first illegitimate courier was caught up in the melee; he awkwardly struggled against the encompassing crowd, when suddenly Latham stood in front of him.

  “Heil Hitler,” said Drew quietly in counterpoint to the surrounding hysterical voices as he punched the man in the throat with all his strength. As the neo collapsed, Latham dragged him away, pulling him into the darkness behind the row of statues that overlooked the Eiffel Tower, its majestic spires bathed in floodlights.

  He had to get the man out of the Trocadéro! Get him out but avoid the second courier and whatever backups there were in the black sedan. He had come prepared to this rendezvous as he had to the others, with equipment willingly provided by the Antinayous. A medical spray of Arcane that would numb the vocal chords, a wire garrote that served to immobilize wrists, and a cellular phone with an untraceable number. He exercised the first two, taking a moment off to render his awakening captive back into unconsciousness, then pulled out the phone from his inside pocket. He dialed the colonel’s unlisted home number.

  “Yes?” came the soft voice over the line.

  “Witkowski, it’s me. I’ve got one.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Trocadéro, north side, last statue.”

  “The situation?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s another man, and a car, a black four-door parked above. Who’s in it, I don’t know.”

  “Is the place crowded?”

  “Half and half.”

  “How did you grab your target?”

  “Have we got time for this?”

  “If I’m to operate effectively, we make time. How?”

  “A crowd of tourists near the marks. I stole a purse and started a riot.”

  “That’s good. We’ll escalate. I’ll call the police and say we believe an American may have been murdered for his money.”

  “They were German.”

  “That’s hardly relevant. The sirens will be there in a few minutes. Get to the south side and work your way to the street. I’ll be there soon.”

  “Jesus, Stanley, the guy’s dead weight!”

  “You out of shape?”

  “Hell, no, but what do I say if I’m stopped?”

  “He’s a drunken American. Everyone in Paris loves to hear that. Should I repeat it in French—actually it doesn’t matter, you’ll do better your way—more believable. Get going!”

  True to the colonel’s words, ninety seconds later the clamorous hee-haws of the Paris police filled the vast complex of the Trocadéro as five patrol cars converged on the entrance. The crowds raced toward the street and the excitement as Latham, his arms supporting a dragging figure, hurried across the concrete to the south side. Once behind the statuary, he lifted the neo over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and raced up the darkness to the street. The Nazi’s body slumped beside him, Drew knelt waiting for Witkowski’s signal. It came when an embassy car swerved into the curb, its lights flashing on and off twice, the basic signal to evacuate.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  Top-Secret Gov’t Laboratory Robbed

  Rudolph Metz, Scientist, Disappears. Data Missing

  BALTIMORE, Saturday - In the hills of outer Rockland, a little known and highly classified scientific compound housing top-secret experiments in micro-communications called in the authorities this morning, initially because the staff could not reach Dr. Rudolph Metz, the internationally renowned fiber-optics scientist, on his telephone or on his beeper. Visits to his residence produced no response. The police, under warrant, broke in and found nothing irregular except for a minimal amount of clothing in the closets of a couple as well off as Dr. Metz and his wife. Later, the laboratory’s technicians reported that the past year’s entire research had been deleted from the computers, leaving in its stead a series of “frostbites” connoting a virus.

  Dr. Metz, a seventy-three-year-old former Wunderkind of German science and a man who continuously extolled and “thanked the heavenly Father” for his American citizenship, was “a strange person,” as was his fourth wife, according to neighbors in Rockland. “They always kept to themselves, except when his wife would suddenly throw grand parties, showing off her jewelry, but nobody really knew them,” said Mrs. Bess Thurgold, who lives next door. “I couldn’t relate to him,” added Ben Marshall, an attorney who lives across the street. “He’d clam up whenever I mentioned anything political, you know what I mean? I mean, here we were, a bunch of people who’d made it—hell, we couldn’t afford to live here if we hadn’t—but he never had an opinion. Not even about taxes!”

  Unattributed speculation, at this juncture, centers on psychiatric distress induced by overwork, marital problems as a result of the disparity of age between his current wife and the oft-married Metz, and even kidnapping by terrorist organizations who could benefit by extracting his knowledge.

  Latham and Stanley Witkowski drove the unconscious body of the false courier directly to the colonel’s apartment on the rue Diane. Using the delivery entrance, they took the neo up the freight elevator to Witkowski’s floor and dragged him into the colonel’s suite of rooms.

  “This way we’re not official, and that’s bardzo dobrze,” said Witkowski as they splayed the figure of the would-be killer on the couch.

  “What?”

  “It means that’s ‘good.’ Harry would have understood; he spoke Polish.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay. You did all right tonight.… Now, we just have to get this cat awake and scare the shit out of him until he talks.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Actually, I’m trying to cut down.”

  “I’m not your conscience or someone from your support group. Have you got a butt?”

  “Well, I carry a few—emergencies, you know.”

  “Light one and give it to me.” The colonel began slapping the cheeks of the neo; the killer’s eyes began to blink as Witkowski took the lighted cigarette from Latham. “There’s a bottle of Evian on my bar over there. Bring it to me.”

  “Here it is.”

  “Hey, Junge!” cried Witkowski, pouring the water over the face of their captive, whose eyes sprung wide. “Keep those baby-blues open, fella, because I’m going to burn your eyeballs out, okay?” The colonel placed the burning cigarette a quarter of an inch above the neo’s left eye.

  “Ah-haa!” screamed the Nazi. “Please, nein!”

  “Are you telling me you’re not so tough after all? Hell, you burned people, eyes and all, bodies and all. Are you saying you can’t take one eyeball—then, of course, maybe the next?” The lighted cigarette touched the outer jell of the neo’s eye.

  “Ahhyaa-ayahh!” The colonel slowly pulled the cigarette away. “The sight may come back in that one, but only with proper treatment. Now, if I perform the same operation with your other, it will be different. I’ll burn through the retina and, God knows, even I couldn’t stand the pain, forget about the blindness.” Witkowski moved the cigarette to the right eye, an ash falling into it. “Here we go, Wehrmacht, see how it feels.”

  “Nein—nein! Ask me what you will, but do not do this!”

  Moments later, the colonel continued while the neo held an ice pack over his left eye. “Now you know what I’m capable of, Herman, or whatever your name is. Just as you bastards were fifty years ago, when I lost a couple of grandparents in Auschwitz. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll put you back on those pillows and not only burn your eyes out, but cut off your balls. Then I’ll set you free and see how you handle the streets!”

  “Cool it, Stosh,” sai
d Latham, gripping Witkowski’s shoulder.

  “Don’t you tell me to cool anything, youngster! My people hid Jews and they were gassed for it!”

  “Okay, okay, but right now we need information.”

  “Right … right.” The colonel breathed deeply, then spoke quietly. “I got carried away … you don’t know how I hate these bastards.”

  “I’ve got a good idea, Stanley. They killed my brother. The interrogation, please.”

  “Right. Who are you, where do you come from, and whom do you represent?”

  “I am a prisoner of war and I am not required—”

  Witkowski struck the neo’s mouth with the back of his free hand, the blow savage, his gold army ring drawing blood. “There’s a war, all right, you scum, but it’s not declared, and you’re not entitled to a damn thing except what I can dream up for you. And let me assure you, it won’t be pleasant.” The colonel looked up at Latham. “There’s an old carbine bayonet of mine on the desk over there, I use it to open envelopes. Be a good lad and bring it to me, will you? We’ll see how it opens throats, that’s really what it was designed for, you know.”

  Drew crossed to the desk and returned with the snub-handled blade as Witkowski probed the flesh around the terrified false courier’s neck. “Here you are, Doctor.”

  “Funny you should say that,” said the far older G-2 veteran. “I was thinking of my mother only last night; she always wanted me to become a doctor, a surgeon, to be exact. If she said it once, she said it a thousand times. ‘You got big strong hands, Stachu. Be a doctor who operates; they make good money.’ … Let’s see if I can get the hang of it.” The colonel jabbed his finger into the soft flesh just above the German’s breastbone. “This feels like a good place to start,” he continued, lowering the point of the blade. “It’s kind of Jell-O-like, and you know how that spreads so easily when you put the edge of a spoon into it. Hell, it ought to be a cinch with a knife, and believe me, this is a real knife. Okay, let’s start the first incision—how do you like that? ‘Incision.’ ”