Brandenburg (10 page)

Franz Lieber looked across at the two beautiful young girls sitting opposite.

They were both half-caste mestizos, and very young and very ravishing, no more than seventeen, and they looked like twins. They were voluptuous, as only young girls can be, their bronzed, silky flesh protruding in all the right places. Cheap jewelry dangled from their wrists and necks, and their short, tight summer skirts displayed generous portions of their legs.

Lieber smiled and said, “My friend will be here soon. In the meantime, relax, enjoy yourselves.”

Lieber saw the girls smile. One of them leaned forward to sip her vodka, showing her figure to Lieber deliberately.
Only seventeen,
thought Lieber,
but already she knows how to use her body like a weapon.

The wiser of the two said, “Madame Rosa says you are very generous, sí?”

Lieber grinned. “I’m always generous to girls who please me.”

The girl laughed and said, “Then I will please you very much.” She looked at her friend, and they both giggled. Lieber smiled back wolfishly. He was fifty, with thick gray hair swept back off his forehead. He was a big man and big-boned. He also had big appetites: in food and drink, as his generous belly testified, and especially in women.

Tonight he and Hans were going to enjoy themselves, spend some time with the girls. It was a favor Lieber extended to certain guests, a refreshing, stimulating end to an evening. Hans would be here soon. In the meantime, he would have some fun . . .

He smiled at the girl who had not spoken. She was fresh, not long in the business, Lieber guessed.

“What’s your name?”

“Maria.”

“Come here, Maria.”

The girl glanced at her friend. Her friend nodded, and the girl stood up slowly, came around to stand in front of Lieber. She looked good enough to eat . . .

The mobile phone on the poolside table rang. Lieber answered, “Sí?”

He heard the voice, recognized the urgency in it, and said, “One moment.”

He covered the telephone mouthpiece and turned sharply to look at the girl, then at the other. “I need to talk in private,” he said curtly. “Go inside and wait.” He gestured to the open French doors behind him, light spilling from a sumptuously furnished room beyond.

The two girls hesitated.

“Now!” Lieber roared.

The girls jumped at the sound of his voice, speaking in whispers as they crossed quickly to the open French doors. Lieber waited until they were safely inside and out of listening range, then pressed the button on the scrambling device clipped to the phone.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Lieber listened to the frantic voice.

“It’s Kruger. I’m at the hotel. We have a problem. I think someone overheard us discussing Brandenburg.”

•   •   •

Hernandez’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror as he drove toward the center of the city, not knowing where to go, what to do, only that he needed to hide.

He swung the Buick left onto the Calle Chile, past the illuminated pink dome of the Pantheon on the Plaza de los Héroes. The traffic was thin, and Hernandez wove swiftly in and out of the lanes. His heart pounded with fear as he watched to see whether the twin beams of a car’s headlights would appear rapidly behind him. But none did. No one was following him. Not yet.

The red Buick was a problem. Its color made it easily identifiable, and the men had seen the car. He needed somewhere to hide it. Hernandez knew now where to go. He swung past the brightly lit Plaza de la Constitución, and down toward the river, where the streets became narrower and darker.

The warrenlike riverside barrio of La Chacarita loomed ahead, a drowsy, dark place of tin-and-cardboard shacks built on river mudflats. He could smell the river now, the rotten smell of sulfur and silt and mud, the river low. A familiar fishy odor swept into the car through the open window. At the river’s edge, he drove right and halted outside a shabby house of peeling white plaster.

Hernandez climbed out and pulled the suitcase after him. La Chacarita was for the poorest of the poor, a tough area that even the cops avoided. He locked the driver’s door and checked the others before stepping up to the house and knocking softly on the door.

Nearby, a group of old men sat chatting on the stone steps outside an old shanty dwelling. They glanced up but otherwise paid him no attention. Hernandez looked toward the river; a full moon dotted the silvery water with
camelotes
—floating clumps of matted waterweeds that looked like malignant bumps on the river’s surface.

He heard a scraping noise behind the door and turned back.

A girl’s voice called out softly, “Who is there?”

“It’s Rudi.”

A metal bolt rattled and a moment later the door opened. A young woman stood there in the dimly lit hallway. She wore a plain white cotton dress, and her brown eyes sparkled at her visitor. A look of innocence lit up her beautiful brown face, a look that always brought out the tenderest feelings in Hernandez.

“How’s my Graciella?” Hernandez smiled.

She smiled back shyly, her long brown hair falling about her shoulders as she looked down at the suitcase. A sudden expression of fear darkened her face. “You are going away, Rudi?”

Hernandez shook his head. “No, Graciella. But I need a place to stay until the morning.”

She didn’t ask why, simply nodded and led him inside and closed the door. She took Hernandez by the hand into a small room off to the left, with a single ancient wooden bed set against a peeling wall.
Above the bed a tiny red light flickered below a picture of the Virgin, the room frugal, but spotlessly clean.

“You sleep in my room, Rudi?” The girl looked up into his eyes. Her body was full, would have been undeniably tempting to any man, but Hernandez shook his head.

“I’ll sleep on the kitchen floor, Graciella.” He smiled fondly at her and cupped her face in his hand. “Now, be a good girl and make me some yerba mate.”

The girl nodded and smiled back at him. As his hand came away from her face, she took hold of it silently and led him toward the kitchen.

•   •   •

It took Franz Lieber five minutes to make the necessary phone calls. When he had finished, he looked at the turquoise water of the swimming pool, its pale, icy-blue calm as smooth as a sheet of glass. In contrast, there was a rage inside Lieber.

He swore.

Just when everything was going smoothly, just when everything was coming together, some snooping Latino goes and screws it up
. The man was dead once they found him, whoever he was, of that much Lieber was certain. There was no place in the city the man could hide.

How could anyone possibly have known about the meeting? Lieber ignored his drink and concentrated hard, searching for weak links, for flaws. But there were none, especially in South America, especially in Paraguay, not here, not on his territory. The only ones who knew about the meeting were top people, and they could all be trusted, of that Lieber was certain. So how?

He sighed heavily. The consequences of failure were too awesome to even contemplate. Years of planning destroyed, millions wasted. Millions. Lieber grimaced. He had invested heavily in this, in time and money, and now everything was in jeopardy.

The man would simply have to be found, no matter what resources it took. At least forty men were already scouring the city, watching
the airport, the railway and bus stations, the main exit roads. Lieber hoped the man hadn’t too much of a head start. Kruger’s description of him was vague—tall, in his thirties, dark-haired, a noticeable scar on his right cheek—but the man’s big, ancient, red American car, that was something. Not many of those in Asunción.

Lieber pushed himself up from the chair angrily. The Mercedes would be here soon. He would have to get rid of the young women.

“Norberto!”

The mestizo manservant scurried out from the house.

“Sí, señor?”

“Take a car from the garage and drop the women off at Rosa’s.” Lieber produced his wallet, handed the servant a wad of notes. “Give them this. Tell them I don’t need them tonight.”

“Sí, señor.”

“Do it now. Pronto!”

Lieber stepped into the study, taking the phone with him. The room looked out onto the front driveway. He poured himself a generous measure of scotch and drank half of it in one swallow. As he went to stand by the window, the phone buzzed in his hand. It was Kruger.

Lieber switched on the scrambler and said, “I’ve got forty men out looking. I’m doing the coordinating.”

“The airport, the railway station?”

“All being covered. Including the main roads out of the city. I’ve issued a description of the car and the man.”

Kruger’s stern voice came down the line. “The others should be with you any minute. We want this
Schwein,
no matter what it takes. I’m afraid of the consequences for all of us if he isn’t found.”

Lieber swallowed. “Don’t worry, he’ll be found.”

The line clicked. As Lieber put the phone down by the window, he saw the headlights of a car sweep into the driveway and bear rapidly up the path. The Mercedes had arrived.

9

ASUNCIÓN. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 3:02 A.M.

The young woman lay sleeping on a tattered mattress by the old blackened stove.

She was seventeen, and Hernandez loved her—not the way he did his other women, but in a special way, a protective way. Graciella Campos had a mind that would have fit more comfortably into the body of a ten-year-old. In the barrio, she could have been trodden on, used, abused.

When he first met her, the men were already queuing up to use her body for a handful of Guaranis at a time. He was writing an article on the orphans in the barrio when a woman had told him about Graciella. Could Hernandez help?

When he met her, he was struck by her incredible beauty and innocence. Her grandfather guardian had died; she was penniless, and Hernandez took pity on her. He had offered to pay for a place for her outside the shantytown, this little delicate flower living in the dung pile of La Chacarita. But the child in the woman’s body had refused, was scared outside of her natural habitat. The barrio was home to her despite the grinding poverty.

So Hernandez became her guardian, gave her what he could afford each week, got her a job on the cleaning staff at the cathedral near the plaza. He’d arranged with the woman who introduced them to call on Graciella every day, attend to anything she couldn’t manage. But somehow she always managed.

The men no longer bothered her. A friend of his, a tough, honest man who worked on the riverboats, acted as her guardian angel. Already her guardian had cut and bloodied the faces of several who had not respected his protection.

Graciella’s shanty house had three tiny rooms. They were in the largest, the room that served as a kitchen, a room the girl had proudly decorated in a simple, clean way. Whenever Hernandez came by, he always made sure he brought her something—a plant, some candy, a cheap trinket—to please her, to see the smiling brown eyes look up at him with innocent gratitude. But not tonight.

It was after 3 a.m. now, and Hernandez sat restlessly at the rickety old kitchen table. Graciella refused to leave his side and sleep in her tiny bedroom, wanting to be near her protector. But Hernandez was not tired. Too much was going through his mind. Graciella had proudly made them a supper before she fell asleep on the mattress on the floor.

The tape machine lay on the table, and he had the earphones on. Having listened to the tape so many times in the last seven hours, he knew the words the way an actor knows his script, every word engraved in his memory, every inflection noted. Graciella had been mildly intrigued. When she saw Hernandez with the tape machine, she had smiled and said, “Music, Rudi?”

Hernandez smiled back and shook his head. “No, something more important than music, Graciella.” She hadn’t comprehended and turned back to her cooking. It would have been pointless trying to explain; she never would have understood.

Now he looked again at the tape. What was on there wasn’t much, certainly not as much as he had hoped for, though at least it was something. But what?

He rewound the tape, pressed the
PLAY
button.

“The shipment . . . ?”

“The cargo will be picked up from Genoa as arranged.”

“And the Italian?”

“He will be eliminated, but I want to be certain we don’t arouse suspicion concerning the cargo. It would be prudent to wait until Brandenburg becomes operational. Then he will be dealt with along with the others.”

Pause.

“Those who have pledged their loyalty . . . we must be certain of them.”

“I have had their assurances confirmed. And their pedigree is without question.”

“And the Turk?”

“I foresee no problems.”

“The woman in Berlin . . . you’re absolutely certain we can rely on her?”

“She won’t fail us, I assure you.” Pause. “There are no changes to the names on the list?”

“They’ll all be killed.”

“Your travel arrangements . . . everything has been organized?”

“We leave Paraguay on the sixth.”