The Zulu clambered back into the Range Rover and screeched onto the highway, accelerating to a ridiculous speed. He raced on that way for three or four minutes; then he geared down and turned off the highway again. When the Rover finally stopped, he leaped out and ran away.
Stern moved the blindfold enough to see his surroundings. The Rover had stopped at some type of roadside park. A knot of brightly-dressed Africans lounged around the single building. Several held liquor bottles in their hands. Their focus seemed to be a public telephone mounted on a wall. One of their number was talking into it.
Stern watched as his Zulu driver approached the men. Rather than slow down, the Zulu swiped the air with a broad sweep of his arm. The tribesmen scattered like frightened children. They knew the Zulu, Stern thought.
The Zulu shouted into the telephone for a minute or so, bobbing his head up and down like a bird. Abruptly he ceased this motion and looked back down the highway. Stern followed his gaze. The light was there again, but larger now—and it was no longer one light, but two. Hauer Stern thought suddenly. Damn him!
As the Zulu came running back to the Rover, Stern stiffened, fearing the bullet that had been promised if anyone followed the pickup vehicle. None came. The driver’s door slammed shut; then the Rover roared out of the park and accelerated to 150 kilometres per hour. Over the edge of his blindfold Stern saw the Zulu checking his rearview mirror every few seconds. So Hauer’s still there, he thought. How the hell did he get past Gadi?
The engine screamed as the Zulu pushed the Rover to a frightening speed. Stern wondered if the driver really expected to shake Hauer by this simple tactic. On a paved highway Hauer’s rented Ford could overtake the Range Rover without much trouble.
Suddenly the Zulu savagely twisted the wheel and threw the Rover into a two-wheeled skid that hurled it down a shallow slope onto the hard, rolling veld. The vehicle decelerated rapidly, but the torturous terrain more than made up for the reduction in speed. No conventional automobile could catch them now. Stern tried to keep his head from slamming into the roof as the Rover vaulted humps, leaped ditches. When the Rover finally shuddered to a halt, Stern collapsed against the door and tried to catch his breath.
The Zulu wrenched the door open, jerked Stern out and ripped off the blindfold. On all sides Stern saw the seemingly limitless veld, lit by an eerie blue light filtering through the storm clouds above. The first heavy drops of African rain smacked against the roof of the Rover. Then the clouds opened with a crash. Following the Zulu’s line of sight, Stern spotted the fast-approaching headlights, now jinking wildly up and down as if manipulated by some mad puppeteer. The African raised his face to the dark clouds as if beseeching some native god to lift him up and away from his pursuer. While Stern stared through the rain, hypnotized by the dancing headlights, a new sound rumbled into his, ears. At first he thought it was rolling thunder. Then the engine of the pursuing car. But the sound grew nearer much faster than the headlights. Soon it was a buffeting roar, terrifying in its intensity.
When Stern finally looked up, he saw that the source of the roar had blotted out the sky. He crouched beneath the blast of the rotors and shielded his eyes against the whipping rain, but the Zulu jerked him up and into the gaping maw of the helicopter as it hovered briefly-near the earth. As they lifted away from the hurricane below, Stern heard another sound cutting through the din of the rotors—a higher sound, like the rim of a crystal goblet singing. Then it came to him—the brief whine punctuated by a dull thwack—bullets! Two more slugs punctured the thin aluminum skin of the chopper but miraculously missed the vitals of the machine—the cabling, hydraulics, and precious rotors.
The helicopter yawed at a sickening angle as it climbed, but the Zulu held Stern fast. Far below, Stern saw the pursuer’s headlights, spinning and shrinking to unreality. The chase car had stopped now. It merged with the Rover, a tiny bright speck against the rain-swept veld. Stern thought of Hauer, of how angry he must be at this unexpected tactic. He pictured the furious German kicking the Rover or even firing a few slugs into it for good measure. He couldn’t help but smile.
But the man below was not kicking the Range Rover, or stupidly firing his pistol into the lifeless steel hulk. For the man below was not a man at all, but a woman. An Englishwoman smelling of powder and expensive perfume. Claire de Lune. And if Jonas Stern had known that, he would not have been smiling.
4:10 Pm. Room 604 The Protea Hof Hotel, Pretoria
Hauer and Schneider sat facing each other across the narrow space between the two double beds. Hauer held his Walther loosely in his hand; Schneider’s hands were empty. Gadi sat by the window, hands clenched around his Uzi. After piling the dead Russians into the bathroom, he had gone over to the Stanley House to try to capture Borodin’s sniper, but the sniper had disappeared.
Professor Natterman lay asleep on the bed, his thigh and his side wrapped in gauze. Aaron Haber guarded the door. There would be no more surprise entries.
“Do you believe me now?” Schneider asked.
Hauer had spent five minutes on the phone with Colonel Rose. “I believe you,” he said. “But not because of what the American said.”
“Why, then?”
“Your father. He was an investigator during the student riots in the sixties. Back then a lot of police officers would just as soon have shot a student as talked to one. Your father was different.”
Schneider nodded.
“Unless the acorn fell a long way from the tree, you’re not part of Phoenix. Besides, why would Funk need to send you? Phoenix must have an army here in South Africa.”
“Will you come back to Berlin with me?”
Hauer shook his head. “Right now I care about only one thing-saving my son’s life. After that’s done, I’ll remember that I need to care about cleaning Funk and his stormtroopers out of Berlin. But by then it may be too late.” Hauer stood. “I’ve got a feeling I may not be coming back from this trip, Detective. So I’m going to trust you to handle, Berlin. I have to trust you.”
Hauer felt every eye in the room upon him. “Here is the situation as I see it: The British want to suppress the Spandau diary, and the Hess story with it. The Americans—at least in the past—have been willing to go along with the British. The Russians want to expose the papers and force the British to accept partial blame for what the Nazis did in the war. It’s political one-upmanship.” Hauer turned his head. “Have I got that right, Professor?”
“Succinctly put, Captain.”
“From the Russian point of view, one would think the Spandau papers are a minor consideration compared to the very real danger of Phoenix. If the Russians learn that a secret, extremely nationalistic group exists within the police and political hierarchies in both East and West Germany, a group bent on breaking the DDR away from Russia and uniting with West Germany, a group that has infiltrated the Stasi, there is really no telling what they might do.”
“What are you saying, Captain?”
“I’m saying that the Russians need to learn about Phoenix. In the right way, of course. I didn’t tell Colonel Rose any of this, so it will all be up to you. You heard Professor Natterman. In Berlin there is a photocopy of the Spandau papers. Also in Berlin—in the house of a dead policeman named Josef Steuben—there is a fireproof safe. In that safe is a year’s accumulation of evidence of drug crimes against Funk and his men. But more importantly—” Hauer paused, reluctant to reveal something that a friend had died to protect, “—there is a list of every member of Bruderschaft der Phoenix whose name I could learn. The list names members on both sides of the Wall. Once the Russians know what Phoenix is, Schneider, they will give anything for that list.”
The light of admiration dawned in Schneider’s eyes.
“We all want Phoenix crushed, yet we can’t trust our own countrymen to do the job. So, as painful as it may be, we must turn to the Allies. That means the Americans. When you get to Berlin, retrieve the photocopy and the list, then hide them well. Then tell
Colonel Rose what you have, and what you want. And what you want is American supervision of a German purge of Phoenix. When the Americans agree to that, let them present the Russians with their own offer. I suspect it will run something like this: In exchange for continued silence about the Hess—which is what the British and Americans want—the Russians will be given the names of Phoenix members in the East. They can purge the Stasi at their leisure, and get the higher-ups by interrogating the Stasi members.” Hauer cracked his knuckles. “As far as I can see, everybody should be happy with that arrangement.”
A strange smile flickered across Schneider’s face. “I think you’re in the wrong line of work, Captain. You should have been a negotiator.”
“I am,” Hauer told him. “A hostage negotiator.”
“I thought you were a sharpshooter.”
Hauer sighed. “Sometimes negotiations fail.”
Schneider stood. “I’d better go. Colonel Rose said there’s a plane leaving for Cairo in forty minutes, and there’ll be an Army jet waiting for me there.”
Hauer offered his hand. “Good luck, Detective.”
Schneider’s grip was like a bear’s. “You come back to Berlin, Captain. And bring your son. We need more men like you.”
At the door Hauer spoke softly. “It’s funny, Schneider. I want the same thing Phoenix wants, a united Germany, but—”
“We all want that,” Schneider cut in. “But we don’t want men like Funk running it. There is a better Germany than that.”
Hauer met Schneider’s eyes. “We’ll never get them all, you know. Not the ones at the top. Those bastards never pay—”
Schneider laid a hand on the Walther in his belt. “If the courts don’t get them, Captain, there are other ways. And don’t take too long here. The local police are going to start discovering corpses soon.” With that, Schneider turned and walked away, a hatted man whose shoulders stretched half the breadth of the hallway.
When Hauer walked back through the foyer, Gadi said, “Isn’t there something else we can do while we wait?”
Hauer shook his head. “Stern is our only chance. We’ve got to wait until he calls us.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Gadi confided. “What if Uncle Jonas can’t find a way to call?”
Hauer shrugged. “Then he dies. Just like Hans and Ilse.” Perhaps inspired by Schneider, he touched the grip of his own pistol. “Then we hunt the bastards down and kill them—every one of them.”
Gadi exhaled in frustration. “So we just sit here?”
“We sit here.”
“How long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“I don’t like it, Captain. And I don’t trust that detective, either.”
Hauer lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. “Who cares.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
4.55 p.m. MI-5 Headquarters, Charles Street, London
Sir Neville Shaw sat alone in his darkened office, clutching the telephone receiver to his ear. “What do you mean, you lost him?” he asked.
Swallow’s low voice quavered with barely controlled hysteria. “Someone picked him off a motorway with a helicopter. I was too far back to stop it.”
Shaw rubbed his forehead. This was bad news indeed. “Thank you for informing me,” he said at length. “Your services have been appreciated, but they will no longer be needed.”
“What?”
“There will be no further contact between you and this office.”
“Don’t give me that, you bastard!” Swallow shrieked. “I want to know where Stern went! I know you know, and you had better tell me!”
Shaw straightened up at his desk. “Listen to me very carefully. Your orders are to stand down. Stand down as of this moment. Any further action on your part may disrupt a parallel operation, and will thus be considered not insubordination, but treason to the Crown. Is that clear?”
Swallow’s laugh was like the cackling of a witch. “The Crown,” she scoffed. “Listen to me, little man. I know what kind of operation this is. I know you ordered the murder of Rudolf Hess in Spandau. And if you don’t tell me where Stern is now, I’ll blow this story wide open. I’ll kill Stern one way or the other, and when I’ve done with him, I’ll come for you. Now—”
Shaw broke the connection. The light on his phone went dark. Seconds later Deputy Director Wilson appeared in his doorway, a darker shadow in the dim office. “What did she want, Sir Neville?”
Shaw stared at Wilson’s anxious face for a long time. “Nothing,” he said finally. “Stern’s mucking about Pretoria, Swallow’s on his tail. Why don’t you send out for some food, old man? Get enough for yourself. It’s going to be a long night, and I want you with me.”
Wilson nodded crisply. “Certainly, Sir Neville.”
When Wilson had gone, Shaw consulted his map of southern Africa. He checked the scale against a line he had drawn from the Mozambique Channel to a sand-coloured blank spot near the Kruger Park. As if in a dream, he saw two tiny helicopters flying slowly across the map, somewhere along that line. Parallel operation, he thought, remembering his words to Swallow. He hoped Alan Burton had better luck than Swallow had. Burton was the last chance for the secret to stay hidden. Shaw took his favourite pipe from the stand on his desk and began rummaging for his tobacco. Jonas Stern must be good indeed to have eluded that she-devil, he thought. He wondered about Swallow’s death threat as he sucked on the, cold pipe stem, but he soon put it out of his mind. At this point in time, a deranged assassin was the least of his worries.
5.00 p.m. Mozambique/South Africa Border
The two helicopters flew in tandem, noses dipped for speed as they swept across the coastal plain north of Maputo.
In the seat next to Alan Burton, Juan Diaz cursed under his breath. They had spent half the day in a guerilla camp that looked like an outpost from hell. Ragged tents pitched in the middle of a desert, cannibalized army trucks, emaciated black men carrying rusty AK-47s, girls of twelve or thirteen stolen from nearby villages and forced into whoredom by the soldiers: the dogs had looked healthier than the people.
“Who were those bastards?” asked Diaz, who had a fair grasp of English.
“The MNR, sport,” Burton replied. “Bloody wogs. Fascists, to boot. You’re lucky they didn’t know you’re a communist.” Diaz spat and muttered something in Spanish. “I didn’t like it any more than you, Juan boy. But we had to stop to pay them. Those fuzzy-wuzzies are providing our diversion this evening. Plus, it was a good place to lie up. That freighter was too exposed.”
Diaz leaned out to make sure his sister ship was close behind. “Who are they trying to divert for us, English?”
“Government air forces. There’s a Mozambican base about a hundred miles south of here, and a South African one further south.”
“Ay-ay-ay,” Diaz groaned. “What’s based there?”
“In Mozambique? The usual African complement. Transport craft, helos, a few outdated fighters. But the South Africans have it all.”
The Cuban crossed himself and dropped the chopper even closer to the plain.
“You didn’t think an incursion into South Africa would be a stroll on the beach, did you?”
Suddenly a torrent of what sounded like gibberish to Diaz burst out of the African ether and filled the cabin. Burton leaned forward and began transmitting in a slower, broken version of the same language. When he finished, he replaced the transmitter and settled back into his seat with a trace of a smile on his lips. “Takes me back, that does.”
“What was that shit?”
“Portuguese, sport. Language of a lost empire.”
“Everything still okay?” the pilot asked nervously.
“Bloody marvellous, I’d say.”
Burton felt like a different man after the confinement of the ocean voyage. He was glad to be back in Africa. The only complication so far had been the “observer” that the MNR guerilla chief had foisted on him. The observer was a giant black named Alberto
who carried a frightening arsenal of grenades, knives, and pistols. But when Burton thought of The Deal, he refused to let Alberto worry him. The guerilla looked like more of a soldier than any of the Colombians, and if he got in the way, Burton could always kill him. The Englishman reckoned there might be a good deal of killing before this mission was done. But that was all right. England had never seemed closer than it did just now.
6.07 Pm. Horn House, The Northern Transvaal
Jonas Stern waited alone in the vast reception hall of Horn House, praying that Ilse Apfel possessed more nerve and presence of mind than her overwrought husband. By all rights she should be in worse shape, emotionally speaking. But something about the way Natterman had talked about the girl gave Stern hope. Maybe she had the sand to do it. Maybe.
“Herr Professor?”
The voice emanated from a dark hallway to Stern’s left. He turned to see Pieter Smuts emerge from the shadows.
“That’s right,” said Stern, putting his full concentration into each syllable of German. “Professor Emeritus Georg Natterman, of the Free University of Berlin. Who are you?”
Smuts smiled bleakly. “I believe you have something for me, Professor?” Stern regarded the Afrikaner with imperious detachment.
“Where is my granddaughter?”
“First the papers.”
Playing the role of arrogant academic to the hilt, Stern raised his chin and looked down his nose at Smuts. “I’ll not give the Spandau papers to anyone but the man who can prove they are his rightful property. Frankly, I doubt anyone here can do that.”
The Afrikaner grimaced. “Herr Professor, it is only my employer’s extreme patience which has kept me from—” An invisible bell cut Smuts off in mid-sentence. “One moment,” he said, and disappeared down the hall from which he had come. Glancing around the grand reception hall, Stern wondered what madman had constructed this surreal schloss on the highveld. He took a couple of tentative steps down the opposite corridor, but Smuts’s returning footsteps brought him back almost immediately.