by Allan Folsom
Click.
The dead bolt slid back and they listened.
Silence.
Bracing himself, Littbarski aimed the shotgun directly at the center of the door. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of Remmer’s face as he pressed back tight against the wall on the far side of the door Noble, two hands on the Magnum military style, stood at the ready, a foot behind McVey on the near side.
Taking a breath, McVey reached out and grasped the doorknob. Twisting it, he shoved gently. The door opened several inches and stopped. Inside they could just make out part of a dimly lit rococo floor lamp and the corner of a couch. A radio, at low volume, played a Strauss waltz.
“Cadoux,” McVey called out loud.
“ Nothing. Only the sound of the waltz.
“Cadoux,” he said again.
Still nothing.
Glancing at Remmer, McVey gave the door a hard shove and it swung open far enough for them to see Cadoux sitting on the couch facing them. He was wearing a dark corduroy sport coat over a blue shirt, and a narrow tie was knotted loosely at his throat. A crimson stain had spread over most of what was visible of the shirt, and the tie had three holes in it, one right over the other.
Straightening, McVey looked up and down the hallway. The doors to the five other rooms were closed and no light showed beneath them. The only sound came from the radio in Cadoux’s room. Bringing the .38 up, McVey stepped into the doorway and eased the door all the way open with the toe of his shoe. What they saw was a double bed with a cheap nightstand next to it. Beyond it was a partially open door to the darkened bathroom. McVey looked over his shoulder at Littbarski, who tightened his grip on the shotgun and nodded. Then McVey looked to Remmer on the far side of the doorway, then to Noble at his left shoulder.
“Cadoux is dead. Shot,” Remmer said in German into the microphone at his collar.
In the lobby, Holt moved back, covering the front door with the Uzi. In the back alley, Seidenberg blinked his eyes to clear them and pulled deeper into the shadows behind the oak tree, covering both the rear door and the alley. Kellermann refocused his binoculars on the window.
“We’re going into the room.” Remmer’s voice came I through all the radios again. The men tensed as if they had a sudden and universal premonition something was going to happen.
Littbarski stood his ground in the hallway as McVey led the way into the room. Abruptly it lit up brighter than the sun.
“Look out!” he screamed.
There was a thundering explosion. Littbarski was blown off his feet and the entire window of room 412 erupted outward into the alley, casing and all. Immediately, a huge rolling fireball roared skyward pulling with it a trail of heavy black smoke.
At the same instant, the door of the hotel clerk’s living quarters was jerked open and Anna stepped into the lobby.
“What was that?” she snapped at Holt in German.
“Get back inside!” he yelled, looking up as dust and plaster rained down from the ceiling. Then it occurred to him she was no longer wearing the thick glasses. He looked back too late. A .45 caliber assault pistol was in her hand, a silencer squirreled to the barrel.
PTTT. PTTT. PTTT.
The gun bucked in her hand and Holt stumbled backward. He tried to get the Uzi up, but couldn’t. His lower jaw and the left side of his face were gone.
McVey was flat on his back on the floor. Fire was everywhere. He heard somebody screaming, but he didn’t know who it was. Through the flame, he saw Cadoux above him. He was smiling and had a gun in his hand. Rolling over, McVey raised up and fired twice. Then he realized the only thing left of Cadoux was his upper torso the gun in the hand was part of something else but it was something he couldn’t see.
“Ian!” he cried out, trying to get up. The heat was un-bearable. “Remmer!”
Somewhere off, over the roar of the flames, he thought he heard a burst of automatic weapons fire followed abruptly by the heavy boom of Litfbarski’s shotgun. Pushing himself off the floor, he tried to visualize where he was and where the door was. Someone was groaning and coughing nearby. Putting up an arm against the heat and flame, he moved toward the sound. A heartbeat later he saw Remmer, gagging and coughing in the smoke, on one knee trying to get up. Moving to him, he threw an arm under his elbow and lifted.
“Manny! Get up! It’s okay!”
Grunting in pain, Remmer stood, and McVey started them off through the smoke, in the direction he thought the door ought to be. Then they were out of the room and into the hall. Littbarski was on the floor, blood oozing from a close pattern of bullet holes in his chest. Partway down the hall was what was left of a young woman. A machine pistol was on the floor nearby. Littbarski’s shotgun had decapitated her.
“Christ!” McVey swore. Looking up, he saw the flames had broken out into the hallway and were climbing up the walls. Remmer had slumped back to one knee and was grimacing in pain. His left forearm was bent backward, his wrist dangling at an unnatural angle.
“Where the hell is Ian?” McVey started back into the room. “Ian! Ian!”
“McVey.” Remmer was using the wall to help him stand. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
“IAN!” McVey cried out again into thick smoke and roaring inferno inside the room.
Then Remmer had McVey by the arm and was tugging him down the hallway. “Come one, McVey. Jesus Christ! Leave him! He would!”
McVey’s eyes locked on Remmer’s. He was right. The dead were dead and the hell with them. Then there was a sound at their feet and Noble crawled through the doorway. His hair was on fire, so were his clothes.
Two shots from a Steyr-Mannlicher telescopic rifle, fired from a rooftop across the alley, had taken down Kellermann and Seidenberg. And now Viktor Shevchenko, having discarded the Steyr-Mannlicher for a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, was rushing up the stairs to the lobby to help Natalia and Anna take care of any unfinished business. The trouble was there was one person he hadn’t counted on, and neither had Anna—Osborn, who’d come running at the sound of the explosion, Bernhard Oven’s Cz in his hand.
His first encounter had been with an old man who had I been right outside the car just as he’d opened the door. The startled moment between them had given Osborn the split second he needed to see the automatic in the old man’s hand and to shove the Cz into his stomach and fire. Then he’d run the half block to the hotel and raced into the lobby at full speed at the moment Anna put a just-to-I make-sure shot into Holt. Seeing him, Anna swung the gun, firing in a fan pattern toward him. With no other choice, Osborn had simply stood his ground and squeezed I the trigger His first shot hit her in the throat. His second grazed her skull, spinning her around and throwing her face-first onto the chair above Holt’s body.
Ears still ringing from the blast of the gunshots, Osborn had the sense he’d better turn around. As he did, Viktor I came through the door swinging the Kalashnikov from his I waist. He saw Osborn but wasn’t quick enough, and Osborn pumped three shots into his chest before he crossed the threshold. For a second Viktor just stood there, totally surprised that it was Osborn who had shot him, and that anything at all could happen that fast. Then the look faded to disbelief and he stumbled backward, tried to catch himself on the handrail, then fell headfirst down the stairs.
With the acrid smell of gunsmoke still hanging in the air, Osborn looked down at Viktor, then stepped back in side and looked around. Everything seemed strangely off-angle, as if he’d walked into the middle of a bizarre and bloody sculpture. Holt lay on his side near the fireplace where he had fallen. Anna, his killer, was facedown, half kneeling on the chair next to him. Her skirt, obscenely hiked up over her rump, exposed a tight-fitting half stocking, and above it, a white fleshy thigh. A soft breeze washing in through the front door worked at cleansing everything, but couldn’t. In the space of no time, Osborn had killed three people, one of them a woman. He tried to make sense of it but couldn’t. Finally, in the distance, he “ heard sirens.
Then
, real time lurched back.
A grinding sound to his right was followed by a heavy thud. Swinging around, he saw the elevator door start to open. Heart racing, he stepped back, wondering in the same instant if he had any ammunition left. Abruptly a figure started out.
“HALT!” he yelled, trying desperately to think of the ‘German, his finger closing on the trigger, the ugly snout of the Cz coming up to fire.
“OSBORN! JESUS CHRIST, DON’T SHOOT!” McVey’s voice rang out at him. They staggered forward out of the elevator, retching and coughing, trying to suck in fresh air. McVey and Remmer, bloody, tattered and reeking of smoke, with Noble, painfully burned and semiconscious, somehow propped between them.
Osborn rushed to them. Seeing Noble up close, he grimaced. “Get him down in a chair. Easy!”
McVey’s eyes were bright red from the smoke and they came up to Osborn and hung on him. “Pull the alarm,” he said carefully, as if making absolutely certain he was understood. “The whole top floor is burning.”
115
* * *
6:50 P.M.
“I AM comfortable tonight,” Elton Lybarger said, smiling easily, looking from Von Holden to Joanna beside him. Theirs was the middle car in a train of three armor-plated black Mercedes-Benz limousines traveling bumper to bumper across Berlin. Scholl and Uta Baur rode in the lead car; in the last were Salettl and the twins, Eric and Edward. “I am relaxed and feel confident. My thanks go to both of you.”
“It’s why we are here, sir. To make you feel at ease,” Von Holden said as the limousines turned onto Lietzen-burgerstrasse and sped off in the direction of Charlotten-burg Palace.
Brushing a piece of lint from the arm of his tuxedo, Von Holden picked up the phone from the backseat console I and dialed a number. Joanna smiled. If he’d been less distracted he might fully have appreciated the way she looked because she’d done it for him. Her makeup flawless, her hair was parted on the left, then teased up and dampened so that it fell in a natural cascade over the right I side of her face, setting off the stunningly seductive Uta Baur creation she wore—a floor-length white-and-emer-aid gown, closed at the throat but then open again nearly to the sternum in a teasingly erotic display of her breasts, With a short black mink coat thrown over her shoulders, she looked, on her last night among European aristocracy, as if she were part of it.
Von Holden smiled thinly back at her while the phone continued to ring on the other end. Abruptly a recorded voice interceded in German. “Please call back, the vehicle is unattended.”
Von Holden let the phone slip through his fingers and he hung up slowly, trying not to show his frustration. Once again came the feeling that he should have argued more forcefully with Scholl, that his place was with the operation at the Hotel Borggreve, not delivering Lybarger to Charlottenburg. But he hadn’t, and there was nothing on earth he could do about it now.
At three that afternoon, he had forged the final details of his plan with the Stasi-trained operatives who would execute it—Cadoux, Natalia, and Viktor Shevchenko. Joining them had been Anna Schubart and Wilhelm Podl, explosives specialists and Libyan-trained terrorists, who had arrived by train from Poland.
Meeting in a dingy back room of a motorcycle repair shop near the Ostbahnhof, one of East Berlin’s two main train stations, Von Holden had used photographs and drawings of Hotel Borggreve, one of several buildings owned by a nonexistent company fronting the Berlin sector, to carefully blueprint the tactics and timing of what he wanted done. His planning had been so detailed as to include how Anna and Wilhelm, playing the role of her aging father, would dress, the type and number of weapons that would be used, and the size of the charge and the manner of detonation of the Semtex explosive.
McVey and the others had been handed a situation they could not afford to turn down. What gave Von Holden the only edge he would need was what Scholl had pointed out and what he had known from the beginning: that, capable as McVey and the others had proven, they were still policemen. They would think as policemen and prepare as policemen, cautiously but predictably. Von Holden understood this because many of his own operatives had been recruited f from the ranks of the police and he had found, early on, how completely unequipped they were in the terrorist mind-set, and how thoroughly retrained they had to be.
Understanding this, the process itself was simple. Cadoux, having reached them by telephone and given them enough truthful information to incriminate himself, would then promise them the intelligence they needed to pursue Scholl. Telling them he was afraid for his life at the hands of the men he had double-crossed, he would give them an address where they could find him, and then hang up.
When they came, he would start to give them the information they needed, then excuse himself to go to the John. Not wholly trusting him, one of the men would accompany him. And he wouldn’t protest. As soon as they’d left the room, Natalia would trigger the plastic explosive by remote control. Cadoux would shoot the man with him and Natalia would take out any policemen waiting in the hall way outside. Viktor, Anna and Wilhelm Podl would handle the traffic in the lobby and outside the building. Overall it was exceedingly simple. They were leading their victims into a small box and then exterminating them.
At 3:45 exactly, the meeting broke up. The others went to the hotel and Von Holden drove Cadoux to the grocery nearby to make the call. Once done, they went directly to the hotel, ran over the plan one more time and planted the explosives. Then, telling the others he wanted to talk with Cadoux privately, he closed the door to room 412.
What he’d wanted to do was make Cadoux feel important, that there were no hard feelings from his earlier mistake, because he knew how much Avril Rocard meant to him. Wishing him well, he’d started to go, then turned back realizing he had forgotten to provide Cadoux with a weapon. Opening his briefcase, he took out a nine-millimeter automatic pistol, an Austrian made Glock 18. The Glock 18 could be switched to fully automatic fire and was fitted with a magazine that carried thirty-three rounds, and Cadoux had brightened at the sight of it. “Good choice,” Von Holden remembered him saying.
“One other thing,” Von Holden had said before handing him the gun. “Mademoiselle Rocard is dead. She was killed at the farmhouse near Nancy.”
“What?” Cadoux roared in disbelief.
“Unfortunate. Especially from my point of view.”
“Your point of view?” Cadoux was ash white.
“She was in Berlin at my invitation. We were lovers, or didn’t you know? She enjoyed a good fuck, not the impossible thing she tolerated from you.”
Cadoux came at him in a rush. Screaming with rage. Von Holden did nothing until Cadoux reached him, then he simply lifted the Glock and squeezed off three quick rounds. Cadoux’s body had muffled the report, the slugs barely making a sound. After that he’d put him on the couch in a sitting position and left.
In the distance, Von Holden could see the brightly lit facade of Charlottenburg as they approached. Picking up the phone once more, he punched in the number and waited as it rang. Again he got the same answer. The vehicle was unattended. Hanging up, he stared off. His instructions had been rigidly clear. Immediately following the detonation of the Semtex and what should have been the simple mop-up operation afterward, the four were to leave the hotel and drive off in a blue Fiat delivery truck parked diagonally across the street. They were to go south away from the area, until Von Holden contacted them by car phone for a report. Afterward, they were to leave the truck on Borussiastrasse near Tempelhof Airport, and go off alone and in different directions. By ten o’clock, they were to have been out of the country.
“Is something wrong, Pascal?” Joanna asked.
“No, nothing,” Von Holden smiled at her.
Joanna smiled back. Then they were swinging through the iron gates, over the pavement stone of Charlottenburg’s entryway, and around the equestrian statue of the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm I. In front of them Von Holden could see Scholl’s limousine, and Scholl and Uta Baur gett
ing out. Next, his driver was pulling up. The limousine stopped. The door was opened and a heavyset security guard in a tuxedo extended his hand to Joanna.
Three minutes later they were being shown into the Historical Apartments, the rich, ornate, private living quarters of Friedrich the First and his wife, Sophie-Charlotte. Scholl, suddenly acting like an excited theatrical producer, had Lybarger, Eric and Edward in a corner and was trying to locate a still photographer to take pictures.
Taking Joanna aside, Von Holden asked her to make certain Lybarger was taken to a room where he could rest until he was called.
“Something is wrong, isn’t it?”
“Not at all. I’ll be back,” he said quickly. Then, avoiding Scholl, he left by a side door and pushed his way through a corridor filled with serving personnel. Moving toward the main reception area, he turned into an alcove and tried to raise the Hotel Borggreve by radio. There was r no reply.
Snapping off the radio, he nodded to a security agent and went out through the main entrance where the others were beginning to arrive. He saw the exceedingly short, bearded Hans Dabritz step out of a limousine and extend his hand to a tall, exquisitely thin, black fashion model, thirty years his junior. Keeping in the shadows, he walked toward the street. Crossing the driveway, he glimpsed Konrad and Margarete Peiper in the backseat of a limousine as it passed him. Behind them was a solid line of limousines waiting to turn in through the main gate. If Von Holden called for his, it would be at least ten minutes before it arrived. And right now ten minutes was far too long to stand passively by waiting for a limousine. Across the street, he saw activist Gertrude Biermann get out of a taxi and cross determinedly toward him, her thick ankles all too visible beneath the loden green of her military overcoat. As she reached the main entrance, her plain, militant appearance caused a rush of security personnel. And she reacted in kind, baring her temper as well as her invitation. Across, the taxi she had arrived in was still by the curbside, waiting to pull out in traffic. Quickly Von Holden moved to it, opened the rear door and got in.