The blonde, her tight black skirt rising up on her crossed legs, made eye contact with Bayer. She smiled. He sheepishly grinned back.
Koch and Bayer got on the elevator, and as the doors closed Bayer met the blonde’s eyes again. She winked.
“Now, those,” he said as the car began to rise, “were some good-looking women. Wonder who they are?”
Koch was looking up and watching the floor indicator move past 3.
“Prostitutes,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Hookers?” Bayer felt as if he’d been punched. “No!”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
The elevator stopped at the fourth floor and the doors opened.
“Really,” Koch said, then looked at Bayer and added, “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Richard Koch had been gone for more than an hour. He had said it was going to take him no more than a half hour to get rid of the car.
The time was not a problem for Kurt Bayer. It was, instead, that from almost the moment that Koch had left, Bayer’s stomach had started to growl.
Bayer had dug through his luggage, hoping to find a stick of the chewing gum from the pack that he had spilled in there a few days ago. There was none.
What I really want is something salty.
Some nuts or chips would be good.
He went over to the table between the two beds, and on the white notepad there, wrote:
* * *
R—
In the bar
KB
* * *
He put the whole pad in the center of the dark bedspread where Koch couldn’t miss it, then went out the door.
The bar turned out to be easy to find. An open area off of the main lobby, it was noisy and smoky. There was a twenty-foot-long bar, made of nice dark wood and with a dozen tall seats, about half of which were being used. The thirty or so cocktail tables were almost all taken; some had a couple sitting and enjoying drinks at them, others two or more couples.
Bayer saw three empty seats at the far end of the bar and went and sat in the very last one, against the wall. He realized that from there he could keep an eye on the lobby and probably see when Koch came in and intercept him. Then they could go get dinner.
He looked on top of the bar and smiled—there were bowls of potato chips and nuts.
Bayer was reaching for a chip when the bartender walked up. He was in his midforties, tall, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, a gray mustache, and somewhat jowly cheeks. He wore a cheap black vest, a clip-on black bow tie, and a white shirt with slightly frayed cuffs. The gold tin name tag on the vest pocket read: SEAN O’NEILL.
“’Evening,” the bartender said. “What’re you drinking?”
“’Evening, Sean,” Bayer said. “I was thinking about a beer, but I’ve had a long day and think I deserve a real drink.”
“You name it.”
“Martini, up.”
Yeah, that should either tame the rumbles in my stomach or make me ravenous.
“Vodka or gin?”
“Gin. Do you have Beefeater’s?”
I’m supposed to be blending in. What good German would be drinking British booze?
“You got it, pal.”
The bowl of chips was empty, and he had the nut bowl down to half full by the time the bartender brought his second martini. And still no sign of Koch.
“Thank you, Sean.”
“Sure thing.”
Bayer looked at the drink before taking a sip.
Better take it easy on this one, he thought. My old man always said to stay away from gin, that it made you mean or stupid. Or maybe both.
Now’s not a good time to learn that he was once again right.
He took a sip at the same time the bartender brought bowls of fresh chips and nuts.
He put down the glass and reached for a chip from the new bowl. Right as his hand got to the bowl, there were slender, pale white fingers with long, red manicured nails reaching in ahead of him.
“Excuse me,” a female’s soft voice said.
Bayer turned to the voice and was met with the same sweet smile he had first seen earlier, just before getting on the elevator.
“Would you like some company?” the young blonde in the tight black skirt said, motioning at the empty chair next to him.
“Please,” he tried to say but his throat caught.
He took a sip of his martini as she stepped up into the seat and put a small black clutch bag on the bar.
Well, if she’s a hooker she’s not getting much business on a Saturday night.
He glanced at her. She was trying to get the bartender’s attention.
What the hell does Koch know? She’s not one. Look at her. She’s too good-looking, too young, too innocent.
She turned and caught him looking at her. She smiled, more widely this time, and for the first time he noticed that her teeth were crooked.
Bayer glanced down the bar to the far end, where the bartender was making small talk with a customer.
He raised his voice and waved his left hand. “Sean!”
The bartender turned and at first seemed to make a face. But then he grabbed a cocktail napkin and started coming toward them.
He put the napkin in front of the blonde.
Bayer said, “What would you like—”
“Mary,” she said.
“A Bloody Mary?” Bayer said.
“No, silly.” She giggled, and showed a bit of her crooked teeth. “My name is Mary. Mary Callahan. I’ll have”—she looked at his martini—“oh, I guess I’ll have one of those.”
The bartender said, “A Beefeater’s martini coming up,” and turned away.
“Oh?” she said excitedly to Bayer. “Is that gin?”
“Is that okay?” Bayer asked.
“I guess. You like yours, right?”
He nodded. “Want to try it before you get yours?”
“Do you mind?” She smiled.
He slid the glass over in front of her and she slowly put it to her lips and took a tiny sip.
Bayer saw that when she took the glass from her lips, there was red lipstick on the glass. He wondered how he could “accidentally” get that to his lips and see what it tasted like.
“Whew!” she said. “That’s strong—”
“You want to order something else?” he said and started to wave for the bartender.
“Oh, no,” she said, looking intently at him. “That’ll be just fine.”
Her eyes twinkle!
She put the glass back on the napkin and slid it back to him.
She offered her right hand and said, “Thank you—”
Bayer took her hand and shook it.
She repeated, “Thank you—”
“Oh, Kurt. It’s Kurt,” he replied. “And you’re very welcome, Mary.”
Bayer noticed how soft and warm her hand was—and that she made no effort to immediately pull it free after they had shaken.
Sean the bartender walked up with Mary’s martini and put it on the napkin before her.
She then, with a smile, removed her hand from Bayer’s and picked up the martini and gestured toward him.
“To new friends,” she said.
He met it with his and they clinked glasses.
“New friends,” he said, grinning.
He wondered if the sudden warm feeling he had was caused by the gin or the thoughts he was having of Mary.
They both sipped their drinks.
She took a slender chrome case from the small black purse and pulled a cigarette from it.
Bayer quickly scanned the bar, found a nearby basket of matches, took a pack from it and lit her cigarette.
“Thank you,” she said after delicately exhaling the smoke over her shoulder.
He smiled, then sipped at his martini, trying to fill what was beginning to feel like an awkward silence.
He tasted something different this sip, and, when he looked at the glass rim, saw that he had tou
ched the point where Mary had sipped and left a little lipstick.
I’d like to have more of that.
But what do I say now?
“Didn’t I see you earlier?” Mary asked.
Thank God!
Bayer smiled and nodded enthusiastically. “By the elevators.”
“That’s right. You were coming in with another man.”
“Just a friend,” Bayer said, not worried about revealing anything about their mission.
He and Koch, when they were on the U-boat, had come up with the simple cover story of being two friends traveling to New York, where they would be joining in the war effort.
As with the best of cover stories, it was close to the truth. They felt somewhat like friends now. They were traveling to New York. And they would be “joining in the war effort”—though they found more than a little humor in the twist on that.
“It appeared that you had a friend, too,” Bayer said.
“She’s on a date.”
“Oh?”
Mary smiled sweetly, but he noticed her hand holding the cigarette shook a little.
In a nervous voice, she asked, “Are you interested in a date?”
That bastard Koch was right!
“A date?” he repeated tentatively.
She picked up her martini and, as she sipped, looked over the rim at him and nodded.
Damn!
He reached for his glass and took a sip and suddenly grinned.
She took the matchbook that was in front of him, opened it, and on the inside cover wrote: “10/30.”
“Till midnight,” she said, her voice inviting and her left pinky first pointing to the ten-dollar fee then to the one for thirty dollars, “or for all night.”
He looked at the matchbook, then looked into her eyes.
Jesus. They’re still twinkling!
Well, this sure will beat hell out of hearing Koch snore all night.
He took the pen and circled “30.”
Mary made her crooked smile.
[ FOUR ]
New York Bay
2345 6 March 1943
Francesco Nola put down the battered black binoculars, pulled back on the throttle controls, and made a hard course correction, swinging the wooden wheel so that the Annie headed in a due eastward direction and in line with the channel markers. The dimly lit compass face responded by rocking then spinning inside its grimy glass dome on the helm, the white number 90 finally settling in behind the black line etched in the dome glass.
Dick Canidy could tell that they were now in the Narrows, the tidal strait between Upper New York Bay and Lower New York Bay, and that on the present course, they were headed for shore.
Behind them was Staten Island, and ahead—directly ahead, as Canidy could now make out the shoreline and some docks—was the southwestern tip of the borough of Brooklyn, on Long Island.
“So after I ice up the Annie here and deliver her to my cousin at Montauk—he’s taking her on a four-day run—I’ll come right back to the city and we’ll meet a little after that,” Nola said.
He reduced the throttle more, causing the boat to settle in the water.
“You have my home telephone number. If I am not there, then I am at the fish market. You can get me one place or the other.”
“Okay,” Canidy said.
Outside the pilothouse windows, he saw the man who had thrown him the lines at the fish-market dock. The man was walking toward the bow, preparing the lines for docking.
Canidy wondered if he should offer to help, then saw on the dock a man coming out onto the pier finger. The building behind him had a faded sign reading: ISLAND ICE &SUPPLIES BRKLYN. A metal chute projected out of the top floor and reached down and out to the pier where the Annie was about to be moored.
Canidy watched quietly as Nola, with a mix of grace and skill, spun the boat in its own length, working the engines against themselves—starboard in forward, port in reverse—then both in concert, to back the boat in so that the ice chute could easily reach and fill the fish holds.
After a couple minutes of bumping the levers in and out of gear, the Annie gently nudged to a stop against the pier. Nola put the twin gear levers in the neutral position, then went out the steel door of the pilothouse to get a better view of the work on the deck.
He saw that the fore and aft lines were being tied to pilings, and nodded to his crewman.
He turned with his hand out to Canidy.
“See you soon,” he said.
“Thank you,” Canidy replied, shaking the offered hand.
“Just in time,” Nola then said and nodded toward the dock.
Canidy looked toward the building and noticed nothing special. Then, just beyond the building, he saw a taxicab pull up to the curb.
“Mine?”
Nola nodded.
“That’s some service. Especially out here at this hour.”
Nola smiled and squeezed his arm.
Canidy went to the car. When he got close, he realized it wasn’t just any cab.
He got in the backseat and closed the door quickly, appreciative of the warmth inside.
“Small world,” Canidy said to the monster fishmonger cabbie.
The fishmonger did not reply. He put the car in gear…then sniffed audibly and slightly cocked his head.
Canidy heard him grunt, and watched as he quickly rolled down the driver’s window and then the front passenger’s window—He’d do the back ones, too, Canidy thought, if he could reach them—before driving off.
It was almost two o’clock when the cab pulled up at 2 Lexington Avenue. Other than a couple walking up the sidewalk to the Gramercy Park Hotel—a man and a woman coming in late from some formal event, judging by their attire—there was no one else around.
Nor was there anyone in the lobby as he went through, nor at the front desk.
When he got to the elevator bank, the indicators showed the cars were all stopped on upper floors.
He pushed the call button, then considered taking the steps up. About the time he decided he was just too exhausted to do that, an empty car arrived and opened its doors.
In his suite, he found his uniform lying on his bed, cleaned and pressed.
He pulled the .45 from the small of his back and put it under a pillow on the bed.
Then he peeled off his fish-slimed clothes, stuck them in a bag, and considered what to do with them.
Nobody’s going to steal anything smelling this bad.
He went to the suite door, opened it, and put the bag in the hallway, looping its drawstring closure over the doorknob. Then he phoned the hotel operator and gave instructions that he needed the clothes he’d left outside his door back from the laundry service by eight o’clock, and he asked for a wake-up call.
I’ll put in a call to Donovan first thing. With any luck, I can have Eric Fulmar here by tomorrow afternoon, or at least before I meet with Nola on Monday.
He then took a hot shower, pulled on fresh boxers and a T-shirt, and crawled into the soft, king-sized bed.
Ann would like this bed, he thought, yawning and rolling onto his back. And I would like Ann in it….
[ ONE ]
Aboard the Red Rocket
Rock Island Train Number 507
Davis, Oklahoma
1215 6 March 1943
“We should be going to Amarillo instead,” Rolf Grossman said as he placed what looked like a very fat black cigar on the folding table of the Pullman compartment. “Strike while the iron is hot.”
The “cigar” was a five-hundred-gram stick of explosive wrapped tightly in a thin skin of black paper.
“Is that a good idea?” Rudolf Cremer said, watching him compulsively put together another pouch bomb. “On a moving train?”
Grossman glared at him.
“I know what I’m doing,” he said, then turned back to the table.
He put one of the acid-timed fuses—disguised to look like an ink pen—beside the explosive and its detonator, then
pulled from his suitcase a small black leather pouch. He attached the fuse and detonator to the explosive, tinkered with the pen timer, then carefully slipped the assembly into the pouch.
“Now we have a half kilo with a short fuse,” he said, clearly pleased with his work, “and another with a long fuse.”
With his history, Cremer thought, how the hell can he tell the difference?
“We have no need for either until we get to Kansas City,” Cremer said.
“We would in Amarillo.”
The year-old Army ordnance Pantex facility, on sixteen thousand acres of Texas Panhandle seventeen miles outside of Amarillo, was producing explosive-filled projectiles—bombs and shells—round the clock.
Cremer shook his head. Grossman’s appetite for blowing up things was insatiable—which of course made the Oberschutz more or less perfect for their mission—and taking out such an enormous target probably would make him happy only until he could explode something else.
“Why must I keep reminding you that Skorzeny’s orders are that we do not go after big targets?” he said. “We are successful in what we were trained to do.”
Otto Skorzeny, thirty-four, was a legendary Nazi lieutenant colonel. He had won the Iron Cross fighting with the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler against the Soviets and afterward had been handpicked by the Führer to lead the German commandos. With dark hair and deep, dark eyes, he had strong good looks that were crudely accented by a scar that went from the tip of his chin, arced across his left check, and ended at his ear—a wound he received dueling with sabers as a student in Vienna.
The radio mounted in the wall of the Pullman compartment was tuned to a news broadcast—heavy on the Dallas explosions—but the station’s signal was getting weak and the sound had deteriorated to mostly static.
Grossman got up and walked over to it.
“But taking out a bomb-building plant would be incredible,” he said. “Imagine the secondary explosions….”
Cremer could indeed imagine the incredible destruction of massive stockpiles of explosives erupting. Not to mention the setback it no doubt would cause the Americans in their war effort. But a task on that scale—if it was even possible—was best left to the Luftwaffe, not a lone pair of agents, and thus he had to constantly discourage Grossman and that had become a source of more than a little friction between them.
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