The Eagle's Covenant (12 page)

If Breggie was to be truthful to herself, it had frightened her. So much so that she had driven straight home and not dared to go into another pharmacy, even to buy a child’s medicine off the shelf. Joseph was not too pleased when Breggie insisted he go out to a chemist somewhere in the city and buy a bottle of child’s cough mixture. He rolled her a cigarette before he left.

Most of that day was then taken up with pacifying the baby, fretting over it, coaxing it, loving it and screaming at it. Whatever Breggie did, the baby just seemed to get worse. The medicine Joseph had brought home was little more than flavoured linctus by the time she had watered it down, and Breggie knew they were getting close to point where they would have to get professional help.

“If the baby is no better tomorrow, Joseph,” Breggie told him, “we must send for a doctor.”

Joseph was reading. He looked up from the magazine and gave Breggie a peculiar look. “Lot of good that’ll do,” he muttered, “it will just bring the police down on us like a ton of bricks, you know it will.” He went back to his magazine.

“Joseph!” Breggie shouted despairingly. “Little babies like this can die very easily if they get unwell. We mustn’t let that happen.”

Joseph put the magazine down again. “Then don’t let it happen. Look after him. That’s what your here for.”

“That’s not what I’m here for.” Her voice notched up a pitch. “It’s what
we
are here for, Joseph, you and me.”

He picked up the magazine again. “You just get on with it, Breggie. He’s your responsibility.”

Breggie ripped the magazine from his grasp. “He’s our responsibility,” she screamed and flung the magazine across the room.

Joseph jumped up from the chair but Breggie grabbed him as he walked past. She spun him round.

“Nothing must happen to that baby, Joseph. Nothing!”

“What if it does? It’s no great loss?” He shrugged.

She slapped him hard across the face. “You bastard; it’s Hansi’s baby you’re talking about, Hansi’s baby! Nothing must happen to him.”

“Then don’t let it.” He brushed past her and picked the magazine up from the floor. “And if you hit me again, Breggie, I’ll break your fucking neck.”

Breggie slumped into a chair. She seemed beaten. “It should have been my baby, Joseph,” she cried. “Do you know that? My baby. If that English bitch hadn’t come along it would have been me that Hansi married.” The tears were flowing freely down Breggie’s cheeks.

Joseph looked down at her forlorn figure. “Don’t kid yourself. That English bitch has class. All you have is a pair of legs that opens at the first sign of a prick. You’re OK for screwing, Breggie. Pretty good screw too. But the English woman,” he paused and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, “she’s class. Hans would never have married you. You were always going to be his rough trade. For him, it had to be someone he could show off, someone elegant. She had it Breggie and you know it.”

“He loved me, Joseph,” she wept softly.

He shook his head. “No, Breggie, he fucked you; that’s all.”

He looked at the magazine then changed his mind and flung it on to the table. “I’m going out.” He put his hand in his pocket and brought out his tin of hand rolled cigarettes. “Here, have one of these.” He put the tin on to the table next to the magazine. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

He left her there weeping and shut the door, closing his mind to the problem. But whatever Joseph Schneider was, it wasn’t stupid. If the baby died, they were both in trouble. Tomorrow they would have to find a doctor.                                         

*

The programme had come up with a host of matching sequential groups, filling the screen in columns. Joanna saw some names come out at her as instantly recognisable but almost certainly perfectly useless. Feeding a batch of Russian letters or other East European languages would have been pointless. She sat at the computer and began the next stage of the search.

Joanna began scrolling through the text a page at a time and highlighting what she considered were possible key words for access to Hansi’s files. Each word she thought she could use was highlighted and saved to a memory bank. After thirty minutes she had reduced the columns to one containing about twenty or so words.

Joanna separated these into four groups of five and began concentrating on ways of identifying the passwords. One was quite obvious to her. It was the word
Kampf
. It was a complete word meaning conflict, or struggle. Other words began to impose themselves upon her until she saw the word
Keile’
in one of the groups. It meant ‘key’ in German. Joanna suspended the programme and tried to access Hansi’s files with the word
Keile
but it was rejected. She went back to the word search again.

After several abortive attempts at coming up with the right words, Joanna instructed the programme to run the groups with pairs of consonants and vowels attached as prefixes and suffixes. It spewed out many, many more words and, finally, put a list of matches on the screen. Joanna could feel her pulse quickening; she was getting closer. Her next step was to get through the first door to the files’ directories. She would need a key to open the cabinet.

Cabinet!

“I wonder, “she muttered beneath her breath. The word
Schrank
was on the list. She tried that but she was still denied access. Seven letters. Hansi could have used an eight letter word, she thought, and typed the letter ‘e’ on the end. The new word,
Schranke
meant ‘barrier’. It seemed apt. She entered it into the password dialogue box and held her breath.

There was a momentary pause as the programme checked the word. Joanna tensed. Suddenly the screen changed and Hansi’s list of files appeared. Joanna felt a ripple run through her and she banged the desk softly with her closed fist. She was in! She had opened the door and was looking at a screen asking her to select a file.

At this point Joanna felt quite weak. She remembered often feeling like this at University when she had cracked open a particularly difficult programme. Then she would feel elated and punch the air.

She stood up and walked around the room for a few minutes, letting the blood circulate and getting the stiffness out of her limbs. She could feel the excitement beginning to filter back, but at the same time she was also feeling nervous. Cracking Hansi’s files had never been something Joanna thought she’d ever want to do. Now she had done it and was about to look into her dead husband’s most intimate secrets. It scared her.

Coffee first, she thought. The pot of tea was still there but it was cold and now she needed coffee. She went out to the kitchen and made a pot, bringing it back to Hansi’s desk. She poured a cup, drank it straight down and refilled the cup again. Then she looked at the screen. Which file, though? Which one to look at first?

Because the files were listed alphabetically, Joanna decided to go in that sequence. The first file was titled
Abwehr.
It meant ‘defence’. She opened the file and found herself looking at what appeared to be a breakdown of special groups working within an organisation. It was headed ‘
Gegenintelligenz’
, ‘counter- intelligence’ operation. It listed sections of the Volkspartei working as a military arm of the party, and gave details of those units, their leaders and where in the Federal Republic they were stationed.

Joanna scanned the pages quickly, speed reading her way through each screen and uncovering the details of a secret army assembled to undermine the freedoms enjoyed by the German Nation. Details of how the groups worked to spread disinformation in key areas such as the press and the big workers unions, government employees and the unemployed revealed a deliberate plan to mitigate any opposition to the Volkspartei
.

With her disbelief growing by the minute, Joanna realised she was reading a document that was inspired by right wing extremism culled straight from the pages of Nazi history. That it belonged to her dead husband was even more disturbing and she was beginning to think she should never have broken into the files in the first place.

But Joanna knew that was nonsense; she had made the first, tentative steps into her husband’s innermost sanctum and needed objectivity and pragmatism as her companion; not emotion or fear. Somewhere in those files, Joanna believed, she would find the name of the woman who had kidnapped her baby son. She owed it to him to find her.

*

It was midnight and Breggie de Kok was still awake. Her head ached and her eyes felt as though someone had poured sand in them. She wanted sleep; quiet, uninterrupted sleep. A sleep in which there were no dreams. A sleep in which she could drown and wake refreshed. A sleep that would last a full dozen hours or so. One without worry. One without fear. One from which she would wake and not have to think about anybody else.

But that richness was no longer part of her life. Beside her bed in his cot was the infant Manny. He was sleeping now, but for how long? How long had it been, she wondered, since she had finally rocked him off to sleep? And how long would it be before he woke again, crying and choking for breath?

When Joseph returned with the small bottle of linctus, he had found Breggie asleep, so, naturally, he woke her. The effects of the cigarettes had left her with a deep, throbbing headache which did nothing to improve her temper. The inevitable argument followed which had resulted in blows. Breggie had come off worse, but what the hell, she had thought to herself, it was at least a way of letting the frustration out.

And, of course, the baby had woken up because of the noise and the inevitable cycle began again. Breggie wondered how much longer she could stand it. She wasn’t cut out for baby minding on such a scale. The maternal instinct in her was more forced than natural which made her task so much more a chore than a pleasure.

She swung her feet off the bed and went through to the kitchen, made herself a cup of coffee and sat at the breakfast bench drinking it and contemplating her future.

Breggie could see nothing but failure as the inevitable outcome. The baby’s health was deteriorating fast. It meant he would need specialist treatment. Joseph had reluctantly agreed to ask the organisation to send a doctor which meant they would have to reveal their whereabouts to Joseph’s controller. It went against their meticulous planning and the principle of the need to know. The only other people who knew of the house were the elderly couple who obtained it for them. They had been specially hired by Joseph, and no one in the organisation knew of its whereabouts.

Breggie finished her coffee and made up her mind. Once the doctor had seen the baby and prescribed something more likely to help the little chap, she would leave the house for a place nobody knew about. Not even Joseph. She hadn’t been there for almost a year now. Somewhere she had spent some of the happiest moments of her life in Germany.

She felt happier now that she had made her mind up. She put the empty coffee cup in the sink and turned the light out. On the way back to bed she paused beside the cot where Manny was sleeping.

“Not long now little fellow,” she whispered. “Soon you will be where you really belong.”

*

Joanna woke with a start. She was still at the desk, sitting in the luxurious captain’s chair Hansi liked so much. The computer in front of her was still running but a screen saver was decorating the screen with psychedelic patterns. She shook her head and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Then she stood up and went through to the bathroom. The clock on the wall told her it was four o’clock in the morning. She freshened up and went back to the computer, hit a key and contemplated the file that had returned to the screen.

Joanna had come a long way since breaking into Hansi’s files. It was a road of surprises, shocks and disappointments. A whole gamut of emotions had swamped her until she thought she was no longer capable of being touched by each new revelation of Hansi’s past.

She had made copious notes, gone from one file to another and cracked passwords that barred entry to some small files. In doing so, Joanna had lost her way a little. The original quest had been to track down the South African woman, but she had diverged from that route so often as she followed Hansi’s devious, secret world of revolution, disinformation, plotting and intrigue against the established order in Germany. It was almost beyond her comprehension that in today’s sophisticated Europe such devil’s work could still be contemplated. But in front of her were the facts.

What Joanna had uncovered was the blueprint of the New Germany and its role as Europe moved into a closer union as a United States of Europe. At its head would be Franz Molke and the Volkspartei
.
Behind it would be the might and strength of Schiller’s empire with Hansi holding supreme power.

What had shocked Joanna to her core was the line from a letter to Franz Molke, the leader of the Volksparte
i
, from Hansi in which he had declared that it was ‘unlikely’ his father, Herr Manfred Schiller, would still be alive much beyond the year two thousand. If he was then he, Hansi, would find a way of terminating his father’s influence. It would mean ‘
complete
,
unchallenged control of my father’s empire’
. What was unwritten but clearly meant was that Hansi did not intend his father should live long enough to stop his murderous plans.