Текст книги "The Bourne Sanction (Санкция Борна)"

Автор книги: Eric Van Lustbader

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

She took him on a tour of the ovens, which seemed sinister even so many years after

their use. They seemed alive, appeared to shimmer, to be part of an alternate universe

overflowing with unspeakable horror. At length, they passed out of the crematorium and

arrived at a long room, the walls of which were covered with letters, some written by

prisoners, others by families desperate for news of their loved ones, as well as other

notes, drawings, and more formal letters of inquiry. All were in German; none had been

translated into other languages.

Bourne read them all. The aftermath of despair, atrocities, and death hung in these

rooms, unable to escape. There was a different kind of silence here than the one on the

Leitenberg. He was aware of the soft scuff of shoe soles, the whisper of sneakers as

tourists dragged themselves from one exhibit to another. It was as if the accumulated

inhumanity stifled the ability to speak, or perhaps it was that words-any words-were both

inadequate and superfluous.

They moved slowly down the room. He could see Petra’s lips move as she read letter

after letter. Near the end of the wall, one caught his eye, quickened his pulse. A sheet of paper, obviously stationery, contained a handwritten text complaining that the author had

developed what he claimed was a gas far more effective than Zyklon-B, but that no one at

Dachau administration had seen fit to answer him. Possibly that was because the gas was

never used at Dachau. However, what interested Bourne far more was that the stationery

was imprinted with the wheel of three horses’ heads joined in the center by the SS death’s

head.

Petra came up beside him, now her brows knitted together in a frown. “That’s damn

familiar.”

He turned to her. “What do you mean?”

“There was someone I used to know-Old Pelz. He said he lived in town, but I think he

was homeless. He’d come down to the Dachau air raid shelter to sleep, especially in

winter.” She pushed a stray lock of hair behind one ear. “He used to babble all the time,

you know how crazy people do, as if he was talking to someone else. I remember him

showing me a patch with that same insignia. He was talking about something called the

Black Legion.”

Bourne’s pulse began to pound. “What did he say?”

She shrugged.

“You hate the Nazis so much,” he said, “I wonder if you know that some things they

gave birth to still exist.”

“Yeah, sure, like the skinheads.”

He pointed at the insignia. “The Black Legion still exists, it’s still a danger, even more

so than when Old Pelz knew it.”

Petra shook her head. “He talked on and on. I never knew whether he was speaking to

me or to himself.”

“Can you take me to him?”

“Sure, but who knows whether he’s still alive. He drank like a fish.”

Ten minutes later Petra drove down Augsburgerstrasse, heading for the foot of a hill

known as Karlsburg. “Fucking ironic,” she said bitterly, “that the one place I despise the

most is now the safest place for me.”

She pulled into the lot outside the St. Jakob parish church. Its octagonal baroque tower

could be seen throughout the town. Next door was Hцrhammer’s department store. “You

see there at the side of Hцrhammer’s,” she said as they clambered out of the car, “those

steps lead down to the huge air raid bunker built into the hill, but you can’t get in that

way.”

Leading him up the steps into St. Jakob, she led him across the Renaissance interior,

past the choir. Adjacent to the sacristy was an unobtrusive dark wooden door, behind

which lay a flight of stone stairs curving down to the crypt, which was surprisingly small, considering the size of the church above it.

But as Petra quickly showed him, there was a reason for the size: Beyond it lay a

labyrinth of rooms and corridors.

“The bunker,” she said, flicking on a string of bare lightbulbs affixed to the stone wall

on their right. “Here is where my grandparents fled when your country bombed the shit

out of the unofficial capital of the Third Reich.” She was speaking of Munich, but

Dachau was close enough to feel the brunt of the American air force raids.

“If you hate your country so much,” Bourne said, “why don’t you leave?”

“Because,” Petra said, “I also love it. It’s the mystery of being German-proud but self-

hating.” She shrugged. “What can you do? You play the hand fate deals you.”

Bourne knew how that felt. He looked around. “You’re familiar with this place?”

She sighed heavily, as if her fury had left her spent. “When I was a child my parents

took me to Sunday Mass every week. They’re God-fearing people. What a joke! Didn’t

God turn his face away from this place years ago?

“Anyway, one Sunday I was so bored I snuck away. In those days, I was obsessed with

death. Can you blame me? I grew up with the stench of it in my nostrils.” She looked up

at him. “Can you believe that I’m the only one I know who ever visited the memorial? Do

you think my parents ever did? My brothers, my aunts and uncles, my classmates?

Please! They don’t even want to admit it exists.”

Seemingly weary again. “So I came down here to commune with the dead, but I didn’t

see enough of them, so I pushed on and what did I find? Dachau’s bunker.”

She put her hand on the wall, moved it along the rough-cut stone as caressingly as if it

were a lover’s flank. “This became my place, my own private world. I was only happy

underground, in the company of the one hundred and ninety-three thousand dead. I felt

them. I believed that the soul of each and every one of them was trapped here. It was so

unfair, I thought. I spent my time trying to figure out how to free them.”

“I think the only way to do that,” Bourne said, “is to free yourself.”

She gestured. “Old Pelz’s crash pad is this way.”

As they picked their way along a tunnel, she said, “It’s not too far. He liked to be near

the crypt. He thought a couple of those old folks were his friends. He’d sit and talk to

them for hours, drinking away, just as if they were alive and he could see them. Who

knows? Maybe he could. Stranger things have happened.”

After a short time, the tunnel opened out into a series of rooms. The odors of whiskey

and stale sweat came to them.

“It’s the third room on the left,” Petra said.

But before they reached it, the doorway was filled with a hulking body topped by a

head like a bowling ball with hair standing up like the quills of a porcupine. Old Pelz’s

mad eyes looked them over.

“Who goes there?” His voice was as thick a fog.

“It’s me, Herr Pelz. Petra Eichen.”

But Old Pelz was looking in horror at the gun on her hip. “The fuck it is!” Hefting a

shotgun, he yelled, “Nazi sympathizers!” and fired.

Thirty-Four

SORAYA ENTERED The Glass Slipper behind Kiki and ahead of Deron. Kiki had

called ahead, and no sooner were they all inside than the owner, Drew Davis, came

waddling over like Scrooge McDuck. He was a grizzled old man with white hair that

stood on end as if it were shocked to see he was still alive. He had an animated face with

mischievous eyes, a nose like a wad of chewed-up gum, and a broad smile honed to

perfection on TV ops and stumping for local politicos, as well as his good works

throughout the poorer neighborhoods of the district. But he possessed a warmth that was

genuine. He had a way of looking at you when you spoke with him that made you feel he

was listening to you alone.

He embraced Kiki while she kissed him on both cheeks and called him “Papa.” Later,

after the introductions, when they were seated at a prime table that Drew Davis had

reserved for them, after the champagne and goodies had been served, Kiki explained her

relationship with him.

“When I was a little girl, our tribe was swept by a drought so severe that many of the

elderly and newborn grew sick and died. After a time, a small group of white people

arrived to help us. They told us they were from an organization that would send us money

each month, after they’d set up their program in our village. They had brought water, but

of course there wasn’t enough.

“After they left, thinking of broken promises, we fell into despair, but true to their

word water came, then the rains came until we didn’t need their water anymore, but they

never left. Their money went for medicines and schooling. Every month I, along with all

the other children, got letters from our sponsor-the person sending the money.

“When I was old enough, I started writing back to Drew and we struck up a

correspondence. Years later, when I wanted to go on to higher learning, he arranged for

me to travel to Cape Town to go to school, then he sponsored me for real, bringing me to

the States for college and university. He never asked for anything in return, except that I do well in school. He’s like my second father.”

They drank champagne and watched the pole dancing-which, much to Soraya’s

surprise, seemed more artful, less crass than she had imagined. But there were more

surgically enhanced body parts in that one room than she’d ever seen. For the life of her

she couldn’t figure out why a woman would want breasts that looked and acted like

balloons.

She continued to drink her champagne, all too aware that she was taking tiny, overly

dainty sips. She’d like nothing better than to take Kiki’s advice, forget about her

problems for a couple of hours, kick back, get drunk, let herself go. The only trouble was, she knew it would never happen. She was too controlled, too closed in. What I ought to

do, she thought morosely as she watched a redhead with gravity-defying breasts and hips

that seemed unattached to the rest of her, is get smashed, pull off my top, and do some

pole dancing myself. Then she laughed at the absurdity of the notion. She’d never been

that kind of person, even when it might have been age-appropriate. She had always been

the good girl-cool, calculating to the point of overanalysis. She glanced over at Kiki,

whose magnificent face was lit up not only by the colored strobe lights but also by a

fiercely experienced joy. Wasn’t the good girl’s life drained of color, of flavor? Soraya

asked herself.

This thought depressed her even more, but it was just the prelude, because a moment

later she looked up to see Rob Batt. What the what? she thought. He’d seen her, all right,

and was making a beeline right at her.

Soraya excused herself, rose, and walked in the other direction, toward the ladies’

room. Somehow Batt managed to snake his way to a position in front of her. She turned

on her heel, threaded her way around the tables. Batt, running up the waiters’ aisle from

the kitchen, caught up with her.

“Soraya, I need to talk to you.”

She shook him off, kept going, out the front door. In the parking lot she heard him

running after her. A light sleet was falling, but the wind had failed entirely, the

precipitation coming straight down, melting on her shoulders and bare head.

She didn’t know why she’d come out here; Kiki had driven them from Deron’s house,

so she had no car to get into. Maybe she’d been disgusted by the sight of a man she’d

liked and trusted, a man who’d betrayed that trust, who’d defected to the dark side, as she privately called LaValle’s NSA because she could no longer bear to utter the words

National Security Agency without feeling sick to her stomach. The NSA had come to

stand for everything that had gone wrong in America over the last number of years-the

power grabs, the sense felt by some inside the Beltway that they were entitled to do

anything and everything, laws of democracy be damned. It all boiled down to contempt,

she thought. These people were so sure they were right, they felt nothing but contempt

and perhaps even pity for those who tried to oppose them.

“Soraya, wait! Hold on!”

Batt had caught up with her.

“Get out of here,” she said, continuing to walk away.

“But I’ve got to talk to you.”

“The hell you do. We have nothing to talk about.”

“It’s a matter of national security.”

Soraya, shaking her head in disbelief, laughed bitterly and kept on walking.

“Listen, you’re my only hope. You’re the only one open enough to listen to me.”

Rolling her eyes, she turned to face him. “You’ve got some fucking nerve, Rob. Go

back and lick your new master’s boots.”

“LaValle sold me out, Soraya, you know that.” His eyes were pleading. “Listen, I

made a terrible mistake. I thought what I was doing would save CI.”

Soraya was so incredulous she almost laughed in his face. “What? You don’t expect

me to believe that.”

“I’m a product of the Old Man. I had no faith in Hart. I-”

“Don’t use the Old Man routine with me. If you really were his product you’d never

have sold us out. You’d have hung in there, become part of the solution, rather than

making the problem worse.”

“You didn’t hear Secretary Halliday, the guy’s like a goddamn force of nature. I got

sucked into his orbit. I made a mistake, okay? I admit it.”

“There’s no excuse for your loss of faith.”

Batt held up his hands, palms-outward. “You’re absolutely right, but, for God’s sake,

look at me now. I’m being thoroughly punished, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know, Rob, you tell me.”

“I have no job, no prospect of getting one, either. My friends won’t answer my calls,

and when I run into them on the street or a restaurant, they act like you did, they turn

away. My wife’s moved out and taken the kids with her.” He ran his hand through his

wet hair. “Hell, I’ve been living out of my car since it happened. I’m a mess, Soraya.

What could be a worse punishment?”

Was it a flaw in her character that her heart went out to him? Soraya wondered. But

she showed no trace of sympathy, simply stood, silent, waiting for him to continue.

“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Listen-”

“I don’t want to listen.”

As she began to turn away again, he shoved a digital camera into her hand. “At least

take a look at these photos.”

Soraya was about to hand it back, then she figured she had nothing to lose. Batt’s

camera was on, and she pressed the REVIEW button. What she saw was a series of

surveillance photos of General Kendall.

“What the hell?” she said.

“That’s what I’ve been doing since I got canned,” Batt said. “I’ve been trying to find a

way to bring down LaValle. I figured right away that he might be too tough a nut to crack

quickly, but Kendall, well, he’s another story.”

She looked up into his face, which shone with an inner fervor she’d never seen before.

“How d’you figure that?”

“Kendall’s restless and bitter, chafing under LaValle’s yoke. He wants a bigger piece

of the action than either Halliday or LaValle is willing to give him. That desire makes

him stupid and vulnerable.”

Despite herself, she was intrigued. “What have you found out?”

“More than I could’ve hoped for.” Batt nodded at her. “Keep going.”

As Soraya continued to scroll through the photos her heart started to hammer in her

chest. She peered closer. “Is that… Good God, it’s Rodney Feir!”

Batt nodded. “He and Kendall met up at Feir’s health club, then they went to dinner,

and now they’re here.”

She looked up at him. “The two of them are here at The Glass Slipper?”

“Those are their cars.” Batt pointed. “There’s a back room. I don’t know what goes on

in there, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. General Kendall is a God-fearing family man, goes to church with his family and LaValle’s every Sunday like

clockwork. He’s very active in the church, very visible there.”

Soraya saw the light at the end of her own personal tunnel. Here was a way to get both

her and Tyrone off the hook. “Two birds with one photo shoot,” she said.

“Yeah, only trouble is how to get back there to snap ’em. It’s invitation only, I

checked.”

A slow smile spread across Soraya’s face. “Leave that to me.”

For what seemed a long time after Kendall had kicked him until he vomited, nothing

happened. But then, Tyrone had already taken note that time seemed to have slowed

down to an agonizing crawl. A minute was made up of a thousand seconds, an hour

consisted of ten thousand minutes, and a day-well, there were simply too many hours in a

day to count.

During one of the periods when his hood was taken off, he walked back and forth the

narrow width of the room, not wanting to go near the far end with its ominous

waterboarding tub.

Somewhere inside him he knew he’d lost track of time, that this slippage was part of

the process to wear him down, open him up, and turn him inside out. Moment by moment

he felt himself sliding down a slope so slick, so steep that whatever he did to try to hold on to it failed. He was falling into darkness, into a void filled only with himself.

This, too, was calculated. He could imagine one of Kendall’s underlings coming up

with a mathematical formula for how far a subject should break down each hour of each

day he was subject to incarceration.

Ever since he had suggested to Soraya that he might be useful to her he’d been reading

up on how to handle himself in the worst situations. There was a trick he’d come across

that was useful to him now-he needed to find a place in his mind where he could

withdraw when the going got really rough, a place that was inviolable, where he knew

he’d be safe no matter what was done to him.

He had that place now, he’d been there several times when the pain of kneeling with

his arms locked high behind him became too much even for him. But there was one thing

that frightened him: that damn trough on the other side of the room. If they decided to

waterboard him he was done. For as far back as he could remember he’d been terrified of

drowning. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t even float. Every time he’d tried to do either he’d

choked, had to be hauled from the water like a three-year-old. He’d soon given up,

figuring it didn’t matter. When was he going to go sailing or even lie on a beach? Never.

But now the water had come to him. That damn trough was waiting, grinning like a

whale about to swallow him whole. He was no Jonah, he knew that. That fucking thing

wasn’t going to spit him out alive.

He looked down, saw that the hand he held out in front of him was trembling. Turning

away, he pressed it against the wall, as if the cinder block could absorb his unreasoning

terror.

He started as the sound of the door being unlocked ricocheted around the small space.

In came one of the NSA zombies, with dead eyes and dead breath. He put down the tray

of food and left without even glancing at Tyrone, all part of the second phase of the plan

to break him down: make him think he didn’t exist.

He went over to the tray. As usual, his food consisted of cold oatmeal. It didn’t matter;

he was hungry. Taking up the plastic spoon, he took a bite of the cereal. It was gummy,

had no taste whatsoever. He almost gagged on the second bite because he was chewing

on something other than oatmeal. Aware that his every move was monitored, he bent

over, spit out the mouthful. Then he used the fork to paw open a folded piece of paper.

There was something written on it. He bent over further to make out the letters.

DON’T GIVE UP, it read.

At first, Tyrone couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he read it again. After reading it a third time, he scooped the message up with another bite of oatmeal, chewed it all slowly and

methodically, and swallowed.

Then he went over to the stainless-steel toilet, sat down on the edge, and wondered

who had written that note and how he could communicate with him. It wasn’t until some

time later that he realized this one brief message from outside his tiny cell had managed

to restore the balance he’d lost. Inside his head, time resolved itself into normal seconds and minutes, and the blood began once again to circulate through his veins.

Arkadin allowed Devra to drag him out of the bar before he could demolish it

completely. Not that he cared about the thuggish patrons who sat in stupefied silence,

watching the mayhem he wreaked as if it were a TV show, but he was mindful of the

cops who had a significant presence in this trashy neighborhood. During the time they’d

been in the bar he’d noticed three police cruisers pass slowly by on the street.

They drove through the sunshine down littered streets. He heard dogs barking, voices

shouting. He was grateful for the heat of her hip and shoulder against him. Her presence

grounded him, wrestled his rage back down to a manageable level. He hugged her more

tightly to him, his mind returning with feverish intensity to his past.

For Arkadin, the ninth level of hell began innocently enough with Stas Kuzin’s

confirmation that his business came from prostitution and drugs. Easy money, Arkadin

thought, immediately lulled into a false sense of security.

At first, his role was as simple as it was clearly defined: He’d provide the space in his

buildings to expand Kuzin’s brothel empire. This Arkadin did with his usual efficiency.

Nothing could have been simpler, and for several months as the rubles rolled in he

congratulated himself on making a lucrative business deal. Plus, his association with

Kuzin brought him a boatload of perks, from free drinks at the local pubs to free sessions

with Kuzin’s ever-expanding ring of teenage girls.

But it was this very thing-the young prostitutes-that became Arkadin’s slippery slope

into hell’s lowest level. When he stayed away from the brothels, or made his cursory

weekly checkups to ensure the apartments weren’t being trashed, it was easy to turn a

blind eye on what was really going on. He was mostly too busy counting his money.

However, on those occasions when he availed himself of a freebie or two, it was

impossible not to notice how young the girls were, how afraid they were, how bruised

their thin arms were, how hollow their eyes, and, all too often, how drugged up most of

them were. It was like Zombie Nation in there.

All of this might have passed Arkadin by with a minimum of speculation had he not

developed a liking for one of them. Yelena was a girl with wide lips, skin as pale as

snow, and eyes that burned like a coal fire. She had a quick smile and, unlike some of the

other girls, she wasn’t prone to bursting into tears for no apparent reason. She laughed at his jokes, she lay with him afterward, her face buried in his chest. He liked the feel of her in his arms. Her warmth seeped into him like fine vodka, and he grew used to how she

found just the right position so that the curves of her body meshed perfectly with his. He

could fall asleep in her arms, which for him was something of a miracle. He couldn’t

remember when he’d last slept through the night.

About this time, Kuzin called him into a meeting, told him he was doing so well he

wanted to increase his partnership stake with Arkadin.

“Of course, I’ll need you to play a more active role,” Kuzin said in his semi-intelligible

voice. “Business is so good that what I need most now is more girls. That’s where you

come in.”

Kuzin made Arkadin the head of a crew whose sole purpose was to solicit teenage girls

from the populace of Nizhny Tagil. This Arkadin did with his usual frightening

efficiency. His visits to Yelena’s bed were as plentiful but not as idyllic. She had grown

afraid, she told him, of the disappearances of some of the girls. One day she saw them;

the next they had vanished as if they’d never existed. No one spoke of them, no one

answered her questions when she asked where they’d gone. In the main, Arkadin

dismissed her fears-after all, the girls were young, weren’t they leaving all the time? But Yelena was certain the girls’ disappearances had nothing to do with them and everything

to do with Stas Kuzin. No matter what he said, her fears did not subside until he promised

to protect her, to make sure nothing happened to her.

After six months Kuzin took him aside.

“You’re doing a great job.” A mixture of vodka and cocaine slurred Kuzin’s voice

even further. “But I need more.”

They were in one of the brothels, which to Arkadin’s practiced eye looked oddly

underpopulated. “Where are all the girls?” he asked.

Kuzin waved an arm. “Gone, run away, who the fuck knows where? These bitches get

a bit of money in their pocket, they’re off like rabbits.”

Ever the pragmatist, Arkadin said, “I’ll take my crew and go find them.”

“A waste of time.” Kuzin’s little head bobbled on his shoulders. “Just find me more.”

“It’s getting difficult,” Arkadin pointed out. “Some of the girls are scared; they don’t

want to come with us.”

“Take them anyway.”

Arkadin frowned. “I don’t follow you.”

“Okay, moron, I’ll lay it out for you. Take your fucking crew in the fucking van and

snatch the bitches off the street.”

“You’re talking about kidnapping.”

Kuzin laughed. “Fuck me, he gets it!”

“What about the cops.”

Kuzin laughed even harder. “The cops are in my pocket. And even if they weren’t,

d’you think they get paid to work? They don’t give a rat’s ass.”

For the next three weeks Arkadin and his crew worked the night shift, delivering girls

to the brothel, whether or not they wanted to come. These girls were sullen, often

belligerent, until Kuzin took them into a back room, where none of them ever wanted to

go a second time. Kuzin didn’t mess with their faces, as that would be bad for business;

only their arms and legs were bruised.

Arkadin watched this controlled violence as if through the wrong end of a telescope.

He knew it was happening, but he pretended it had nothing to do with him. He continued

to count his money, which was now piling up at a more rapid clip. It was his money and

Yelena that kept him warm at night. Each time he was with her, he checked her arms and

legs for bruises. When he made her promise not to take drugs, she laughed, “Leonid

Danilovich, who has money for drugs?”

He smiled at this, knowing what she meant. In fact, she had more money than all the

other girls in the brothel combined. He knew this because he was the one who gave it to

her.

“Get yourself a new dress, a new pair of shoes,” he’d tell her, but frugal girl that she

was, she’d merely smile and kiss him on the cheek with great affection. She was right, he

realized, not to do anything to call attention to herself.

One night, not long after, Kuzin accosted him as he was leaving Yelena’s room.

“I have an urgent problem and I need your help,” the freak said.

Arkadin went with him out of the apartment building. A large van was waiting on the

street, its engine running. Kuzin climbed into the back, and Arkadin followed. Two of the

brothel girls were being guarded by Kuzin’s pair of personal ghouls.

“They tried to escape,” Kuzin said. “We just caught them.”

“They need to be taught a lesson,” Arkadin said, because he assumed that was what his

partner wanted him to say.

“Too fucking late for that.” Kuzin signaled to the driver, and the van took off.

Arkadin settled back on the seat, wondering where they were going. He kept his mouth

shut, knowing that if he asked questions now he’d look like a fool. Thirty minutes later

the van slowed, turned off onto an unpaved road. For the next several minutes they

jounced along a rutted track that must have been very narrow because branches kept

scraping against the sides of the van.

At length, they stopped, the doors opened, and everyone clambered out. The night was

very dark, illuminated only by the headlights of the van, but in the distance the fire of the smelters was like blood in the sky or, rather, on the undersides of the belching miasma

churned out by hundreds of smokestacks. No one saw the sky in Nizhny Tagil, and when

it snowed the flakes turned gray or even sometimes black as they passed through the

industrial murk.

Arkadin followed along with Kuzin as the two ghouls pushed the girls through the

thick, weedy underbrush. The resiny scent of pine perfumed the air so strongly, it almost

masked the appalling stench of decomposition.

A hundred yards in the ghouls pulled back on the collars of the girls’s coats, reining

them in. Kuzin took out his gun and shot one of the girls in the back of the head. She

pitched forward into a bed of dead leaves. The other girl screamed, squirming within the

ghoul’s grasp, desperate to run.

Then Kuzin turned to Arkadin, placed the gun in his hand. “When you pull the

trigger,” he said, “we become equal partners.”

There was something in Kuzin’s eyes that at this close range gave Arkadin the shivers.

It seemed to him that Kuzin’s eyes were smiling in the way the devil smiled, without

warmth, without humanity, because the pleasure that animated the smile was of an evil

and perverted nature. It was at this precise moment that Arkadin thought of the prisons

ringing Nizhny Tagil, because he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was

locked within his own private prison, with no idea if there was a key, let alone how to use it.

The gun-an old Luger with the Nazi swastika imprinted on it-was greasy with Kuzin’s

excitement. Arkadin raised it to the height of the girl’s head. She was whimpering and

crying. Arkadin had done many things in his young life, some of them unforgivable, but

he’d never shot a girl in cold blood. And yet now, in order to prosper, in order to survive the prison of Nizhny Tagil, this was what he had to do.

He was aware of Kuzin’s avid eyes boring into him, red as the fire of Nizhny Tagil’s

foundries themselves, and then he felt the muzzle of a gun at the nape of his neck and

knew that the driver was standing behind him, no doubt on Kuzin’s orders.

“Do it,” Kuzin said softly, “because one way or another in the next ten seconds

someone’s going to fire his gun.”

Arkadin aimed the Luger. The shout of the report echoed on and on through the deep

and forbidding forest, and the girl slid along the leaves, into the pit with her friend.

Thirty-Five

THE SOUND of the bolt being thrown on the 8mm Mauser K98 rifle echoed through

the Dachau air raid bunker. That was the end of it, however.

“Damn!” Old Pelz groaned. “I forgot to load the thing!”

Petra took out her handgun, pointed it in the air, and squeezed the trigger. Because the

result was the same as what had happened to him, Old Pelz threw down the K98.

“Scheisse!” he said, clearly disgusted.

She approached him then. “Herr Pelz,” she said gently, “as I said, my name is Petra.