Crucified (11 page)

"It will fit you. I know your size. These papers will pass scrutiny by anyone who stops us. The focus will be on the escapers, not on those hunting them. From here on, you're German. Hide everything English in this satchel. We'll throw it off the first bridge we cross. This wasn't how we planned it, I know, but there's been a huge escape from Stalag Luft III.

I keep the records from the gate. Instead of signing you in and sneaking you out later, I will be able to erase your very existence in the flurry of tonight's escape documents."

"Where do you hide a tree? In a forest," said the airman.

"Yes. And I'm the woodsman."

"Where are we going?"

"To hide you somewhere safe."

"And after that?"

His handler told him.

A deathtrap, if ever there was one.

GERMANY, NOW

Two days later

The smell of smoke was in the autumn air, and for a second, as he gazed through binoculars at the two people having breakfast across the street from this hotel room, the Legionary had a vision of this medieval town back in the Inquisition. Nowhere had the witch hunt been as zealous as it was in Germany. Here, there were no limits on the use of torture, and denunciations spread like wildfire. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a witches' coven?" In some districts of the Rhineland, no woman over forty remained alive. Inquisitors ran so short of wood that it became necessary to burn witches in groups. In this town, it was said, so many charred stakes stood in the central square that it looked like the Black Forest after a fire.

The vision faded, but the phantom flames did not.

The Legionary watched them lick around the image magnified by the binoculars.

The man in the ring of fire was Wyatt Rook. The young priest recognized him from tabloid photos as the New York historian who'd stumbled on Balsdon's body. Tall, lean, and smartly dressed, Rook had been asked to investigate the fate of the
Ace of Clubs.
Would he be a help or a hindrance to the Legionary's crusade?

The woman encircled by hellfire was Liz Hannah. The priest paid close attention to her. Unlike a pious female, who would pull herself in so as not to offend the religiosity of holy men, this wanton wore her hair in streaked abandon, and painted her face like a whore, and fingered a button of her blouse to toy with Rook, and dressed to show off instead of hide her shame.

Was there any doubt?

The Legionary of Christ shook his head.

Beneath that godless exterior, she had a witch's tit.

+ + +
 

"Why history? A good-looking bloke like you—why not the thrill of the courtroom?" Liz pressed Wyatt over a hearty breakfast the morning after they arrived in Germany.

This town sat on foundations from the Stone Age.

The castle at its heart dated back a thousand years. The higgledy-piggledy buildings were mostly brown stone, with small windows and red tiled roofs. The skyline boasted fairy-tale towers, steeples, and weathervanes. Down through the years, there'd been sieges and a battle with Napoleon. A sign by the door of their quaint, renovated hotel advised that Bach and Wagner had both slept there.

"What did you say to lure me here?"

"Many things."

"One thing in particular as you pulled up your top."

Liz rolled her eyes. "Men," she scolded. "It's
so
easy to pull your puppet strings."

"Marionette," he corrected. "That's the proper term. A puppet is a glove-like figure manipulated by hand. A marionette is a puppet-like dummy manipulated from above by strings attached to its jointed limbs."

Wyatt winked.

"That's why I study history," he added.

"To be a smarty-pants?"

"No, to solve puzzles. Everything we say or do has a history.

The best cops and lawyers are historians. The history of the killer and the victim leads to murder. The best doctors are historians. The history of a patient leads to illness. The best politicians are historians. The mess in Iraq dates back centuries.

I could see it coming. The politician who didn't earn a C in history at Yale."

'"How do you like them apples?' I think that was the come-on that lured you here."

"Yes," said Wyatt. "So what does that mean? You chose an idiom with a history."

Liz smirked. "Tell me."

"In the First World War, a Stokes gun fired a trench mortar that looked like an apple on a stick. Troops called the mortar rounds toffee apples. If they took out an enemy tank, the men in the trenches would shout, 'How do you like them apples?'"

"Now I grasp why you don't have a girlfriend, Mr. Rook.

Dating a walking encyclopedia would drive me nuts."

"You chose me."

"Okay, here's a question: Supposedly, Bomber Command used the
Ace of Clubs
to insert a double agent into Hitler's Reich. I can see why our side kept that information from the history books. But after the Nazis lost the war, why was the German side not exposed?"

"What are you willing to bet me for the answer?"

"You are a wicked man."

"Strip poker was your idea."

"I'll bet my shoe."

"I'm not a foot fetishist."

"Let's put the shoe on the other foot, then. If you can't think up a valid answer to my question, you'll take me out to dinner dressed in drag."

"What!"

"You heard me, smarty-pants. Let's up the ante. Losing this hand will put you in touch with your feminine side."

"No wonder we got expelled from Eden."

"I'll even do your makeup."

"I have a reputation to maintain," said Wyatt.

"I'm not afraid to take my clothes off in public, but you're afraid to put them on?"

"My fear is that you'll snap a picture and put it on the Internet."

"Then you'd better not lose."

"I don't suppose you'd settle for my pants instead?"

"Nice try."

"Some like it hot, huh?"

"That's what my mother and her second-wave feminists don't grasp.
This
is what they spawned."

"I like the second wave. Puzzle out the internal consistency, then you know how to win at their game."

"I much prefer wild card poker."

"So I see."

"Playing with smart men who won't tie me down."

"Touche."

"Well? Are you chicken?"

Liz was playing him like a fish. Not for nothing was she employed as a researcher for a TV network. In playing out the line, she let him run free, peppering her conversation with Americanisms picked up from lots of movies and life in a global village. To deliver the punch lines, she'd assume an American accent. To jerk on the line, she'd drop in something homegrown like "bloke," to let him know she knew exactly who she was. And while she was teasing him verbally, she used body language to keep him on her hook.

Sex it up.

That was her third-wave game.

"In for a penny, in for a pound," he said, throwing back his best rendition of a British accent.

Liz dug in her bag and withdrew a tube of lipstick. She set it up in a phallic manner between them on the table.

"You got a purty mouth," she drawled, as if the line was strummed on a dueling banjo.

"Trying to psych me out?"

"Go on, sport. Play the ace of clubs."

"Say I'm a strategist with Bomber Command. Churchill orders me to insert a secret agent into Germany in such a way that those plotting to overthrow Hitler can find him. Why use a bomber? Because I can choose
where
to insert him. Why use the
Ace of Clubs
? Because my secret agent is among its crewmen. If an RAF officer bails out where we know the
Ace
went down, he'll almost certainly end up a POW in Stalag Luft III."

"My granddad was the only officer aboard. The rest of the airmen were sergeants."

"If I'm a strategist with Bomber Command, I can create any cover story I want. That's how secret agents stay secret. I issue him a false ID and an officer's uniform to wear under his own.

Once the traitors sneak him out of Stalag Luft III, they give him a German identity. The fake ID from me is shed like a snake's skin and can't be traced by Nazi spies in Britain to a real person."

"How was he sprung from the camp?"

"Say I'm a strategist with the Judas traitors. Those opposing Hitler were in the German military. With almost ten thousand POWs from Bomber Command alone, how difficult would it be for a well-placed mole to lose track of a prisoner?

Burn a piece of paper and—
poof!
—he's gone. He could vanish during a purge, when prisoners were being moved from one camp to another. Or he could vanish as a ghost, a POW who fakes an escape and hides in the camp, then escapes for real when the guards are off hunting for him."

"Is that your theory?"

Wyatt shook his head. "My bet is they used the Great Escape. Shortly after the
Ace
went down, seventy-six POWs broke out of Stalag Luft III. Hitler was enraged and ordered all be shot. The head of the Luftwaffe thought that would be a mistake. It would look like murder, and there could be reprisals against German POWs. Hitler compromised, and fifty were shot. All but three of the escapees were caught. And the man who decided who should live and who should die was Artur Nebe.

"Nebe put each man's name and personal details on an index card. He shuffled through them and said, 'This one is very young. He can stay alive.' Or, 'This man has no children.

He'll be one of them.' Those culled for death were shot in small groups in the woods along the roads back to the camp.

"It turned out that Nebe was among the traitors plotting against Hitler. When the assassination failed, he and five thousand others were arrested. Though tortured for two months, he betrayed no one. He and the other leaders of the conspiracy were hanged by piano-wire nooses strung from meat hooks.

The slow strangulations were filmed for Hitler to view later."

"So you think Nebe let the Judas agent slip away?"

Wyatt shrugged. "I'm saying there are many ways the agent could disappear. And if Judas and those advancing his plot got caught up in the executions . . ."

"That would explain why the German side wasn't exposed after the war. Judas and his ilk were dead."

Wyatt cocked his finger at Liz. "I win," he said. "
You
guessed the answer, so it must be logical."

The tube of lipstick returned to her bag.

"The next time we bet," Wyatt said, "let's go back to wager-ing for your clothes."

"Want to up the ante again?" Liz asked.

"How?"

"Let's go for broke."

She pretended to push her entire stash of poker chips to the center of the table.

"Since you seem to work to incentive," she said, "I'll make you an all-or-nothing deal. If you can solve the puzzle of where my granddad is now, I'll
fuck
the socks off you, Mr. Rook."

Well, there you have it.

The thinking man's conundrum.

A choice between divergent views of the world.

On the one hand, there was original sin. Adam and Eve, the apple and the snake, in the Garden of Eden. Here was a modern Eve, tempting him with her apples, while he, thanks to concupiscence, was teetering on the brink. He knew he should wag his finger at her, refuse to be made a sex object (her mother would like that), and demand that their clergy get together to work out sinless Marquis of Queensberry rules before any rumpy-pumpy.

The high road.

On the other hand, there was human evolution. My, how Darwin had tossed a monkey wrench into righteousness. Ninety-nine percent of his genes were the same as those of a chimp.

Most of his body language came from the R-complex—the old reptile brain—at the top of his spinal cord. Like a snake flicking its tongue. This sexy stuff originated in the limbic system—the irrational mammalian brain—lurking at the center of his noggin.

Home of the four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fucking. And the game-playing? That came from his cerebral cortex—the rational brain—the new kid on the block. All that was happening here was survival of the species, and what if he took the high road and then got hit by a bus?

He'd never get to taste the apple.

Tsk-tsk...

"Fuck the socks off me, huh?" he said.

"Don't tell me you know the origin of that idiom, too?"

"I believe the expression is '
knock
the socks off you.'

It dates back to fisticuff days in the nineteenth century. That's boxing hyperbole for a knockdown fistfight so savage that the loser got knocked out of his socks as well as his shoes.

"But, hey, let's not quibble. I much prefer a carrot to a stick."

Wyatt held out his hand.

"You're
on,
Ms. Hannah," he said.

+ + +

The hotel room across the street was the Art Historian's.

Growing weaker by the day, he was on a crusade as important as any undertaken by Christian knights to the Holy Land. If he didn't find his Holy Grail soon, leukemia would end his life. So while the Legionary spied on Liz and Wyatt, the dying man sat in the shadow of the priest, listening to Balsdon's screams and reading the sergeant's archive.