Duel of Assassins (32 page)

Fear hurtled at Taras in waves, like the onrushing Autobahn
and the unrolling farmlands alongside. He pushed it away, concentrating on the
wet ribbon of asphalt, the muted hiss of the tires, the speedometer needling at
one-sixty. But the fear always came back, and it wore a face—Charlie’s,
dark-eyed and gaunt, hovering just outside the windshield.

As the road descended, silver mist swirled up from the
emerald fields, veiling the road ahead. Taras cursed, lifting his foot from the
gas and praying for a return of visibility. Of all the times to have to slow
down! He clenched the wheel in impotent rage, squinting ahead, foot braced to
floor the pedal the instant the vaporous curtain parted.

Still at reduced speed, he passed the first sign for Coswig,
then a second one, which announced it as the exit for Lutherstadt Wittenberg.
Ten more kilometers to the turnoff. He peered ahead, watching oncoming cars
materialize suddenly out of the mist. A miniature tractor-trailer. A big red
coach emblazoned
Moto-Viàggio
, full of Italian tourists. A battered,
green and white ex-Vopo van with a young woman at the wheel and a Happy Holstein
decal on the side.

Peeling off the Autobahn at Coswig, Marcus narrowly missed
sideswiping a mustard-colored Trabant that ran a red light. Taras glanced
angrily back at the woman driver—and, for a heartstopping second, saw Charlie.
But it was only a trick of the hairdo; the profile was square-jawed and
mannish.

Christ, you’re losing it
, Taras told himself.
Get
a grip on yourself
. He was only five minutes from Wittenberg, as long as he
stayed alert. The last thing he needed now was to dope off, miss a sign and
drive down the wrong fucking road.

*

Marcus scolded himself for running the red light—and nearly
colliding with that Ford—as he headed up the Autobahn ramp. He had hot-wired
the Trabant out of a parking lot behind the Goldener Adler rather than risk
Charlotte’s Opel Omega, in case it was being searched for. By the time the
Trabi was reported missing, Marcus would have discarded it.

Even with the midget vehicle’s twenty-six-horsepower,
two-stroke engine maxed out on the Autobahn, Marcus found he couldn’t average
much more than eighty-five kilometers an hour, which kept him in the right-hand
lane. But that was good enough. He was ahead of schedule.

And now that he’d left Wittenberg and Charlotte in his wake,
he felt his old confidence returning. When an overtaking businessman in a big
BMW gave him a sidelong appraisal, Marcus smiled back and flounced his dark
curls.
All right
, he thought. If he could fool that oaf, why couldn’t he
waltz through the Potsdam security checks just as easily, get his shot and slip
away in the bedlam? There was only one area of apprehension—or perhaps concern
would be a more accurate word. And that was the Cossack. Would he be at the
Cecilienhof, seeking the revenge with which Marcus had so carefully enticed
him? And if he was, would he able to spot Marcus in disguise? But that was the
game, after all. And Marcus had already given Taras all the hints he could.

Wedged into the tiny car and tucked behind a poultry truck
that was steadily molting feathers in his direction, Marcus schooled himself to
relax, not to keep thinking ahead. He chuckled as he recalled a Trabi joke:
Question:
Why is the Trabant the quietest car to drive? Answer: Because your knees cover
your ears.
A little later, just past the turnoff to Niemegk, the morning
mist finally boiled off and allowed slanting sunlight to gild the summer
fields. A fine day, Marcus thought, and wished for his old vagabond harmonica.

*

On the outskirts to Wittenberg Taras slowed to ask a
pigtailed girl on a bicycle the directions to the Goldener Adler. She smiled
and pointed over her shoulder.

“You see down there, the entrance to Lutherstadt, that is
the Schlosskirche. You turn left just there, then you go one long block
straight down Schloss-strasse and there is your hotel, right on the
Marktplatz.”

It was just past nine o’clock, but Lutherstadt’s cobblestone
streets and sidewalks were surprisingly empty of traffic as Taras pulled to the
curb by the market square. He jumped out and began loping along the sidewalk,
looking for the Adler. Then he saw the small marquee ahead with HOTEL in black
Gothic letters. A motorcycle was parked outside. Taras suppressed the urge to
sprint, slowed to a walk.

Careful now.

Inside the small, dark lobby a family with several children
was blockading the hotel desk, the father haranguing the elderly woman clerk,
who was nodding her head but maintaining a steely glint in her eye. Taras
shoved between them, ignored their sputtering Teutonic protests as he showed
his credentials, and then the photos of Charlotte and Marcus.

The clerk’s eyes narrowed further and her mouth tightened as
her glance shifted from the pictures to the credentials and back to Taras.
Finally she nodded, only once but emphatically, and gestured at the ceiling.

“Ja, Zimmer sieben.”

They are both in?

“Ja, ja.”

Chalky light filtered down the gloomy stairwell from a
stained-glass window on the landing above. Warped wooden treads groaned
underfoot as he climbed, so Taras hugged the railing, placing his feet
carefully along the edges. At the end of a narrow corridor on the first floor
he found a black enameled door with a brass seven, slashed in the Continental
manner.
Zimmer sieben.

Taras stood with his ear against this door, gun in hand. But
the only sounds were stage whispers drifting up the stairwell from the lobby.
Taras tried to imagine some acceptable condition under which Charlotte would
still be inside with the Potsdam Conference due to start in less than
forty-five minutes. He drew a blank. But he had to go in. If he waited out here
any longer, a squad of GSG-9 commandos would show up with explosive charges,
stun grenades and H&K submachine guns. And this was not their show, but
his.

He braced his arms on the balustrade behind, leaned back,
cocked his right leg, kicked out explosively, aiming the sole of his shoe just
above the door handle.

The door caved in, but only slightly. The latch was still
caught in the splintered frame. So Taras flung himself forward, impacting with
shoulder and hip and caroming inside, pointing and swinging his .45.

The room was empty except for Charlie.

And she was gone too. Leaving her body behind, naked, ankles
tied to the bed.

Black rage exploded inside Taras. He stumbled away, smashed
open the bathroom door, ready to empty his clip into anything that moved,
preferably Marcus Jolly.

A leather-jacketed boy with spiked blond hair was lying dead
in the bathtub, one arm draped over the side. A miniature Iron Cross dangled
from one pierced pink ear. There was a fecal stench. Something clicked in
Taras’ memory:
The kid who’d faxed Charlie’s column from the post office in
Dessau. His motorcycle downstairs.

But Marcus was gone.

Taras backed out, felt his knees buckle, sat down on the
carpet, back propped against the bed. After a second or two he sucked air deep
into his lungs and forced himself to look behind him. He avoided her eyes, saw
the tape burns on her wrists and around her lips. His darling had been gagged
and bound hand and foot. Then, with trembling fingers, he reached out and
lowered her eyelids over the congealed horror of her last seconds.

He began to sob. He thought of the first time he had seen
Charlie on the terrace at that party in Chevy Chase, of the time they had hiked
out to her special place overlooking that woodsy Virginia valley and, instead
of sharing poetic thoughts, had stripped and coupled like frenzied teenagers.
He lay his cheek now against her arm, allowing himself to be cruelly deceived
for an instant by her skin’s residual warmth and plasticity. She had been alive
until very recently. On another nightmare morning, Eva Sorokina had been far
colder—but no more dead than Charlotte was now.

He held her lifeless hand in his.

Why did you go with him? Why didn’t you wait for me to
come back to you? You know I loved you, Charlie, I loved only you.

Realizing his grief could totally incapacitate him, Taras
stood up and flung it away, embracing his rage. In two strides he reached the
dresser, grabbed up a chair and smashed it to kindling on the carpet. He looked
around for something else to destroy and saw the desk clerk standing in the
splintered doorway, holding a corner of her apron over her mouth, her eyes
enormous.

“Polizei!”
Taras yelled at her. “Go call the police.”
He motioned her violently away, and she went, stomping down the stairs in a
panic. Now his gaze swept the room and fastened on the old armoire. He threw it
open, pulled an extra blanket out and draped Charlotte’s corpse.

Then he stared down at the jars, vials, tubes and
makeup-smudged tissues spread over the dresser top. He remembered the tidy
elegance of Charlie’s taffeta-skirted vanity in the Cleveland Park condo. She
hadn’t left this litter. He scoured the dresser and armoire and even under the
bed for her emergency wig. It was gone. So was her handbag—and with it, he
knew, her press credentials.

The fucking twisted bastard was going to Potsdam in drag. To
kill Rybkin.

Then Taras realized he had
seen
Marcus in drag—no
more than fifteen minutes before—in Coswig, driving a mustard-colored Trabant
and wearing Charlie’s wig.

If he alerted Strotkamp immediately, they might still catch
Marcus at the gate to the
Neue Garten
, or even on the Autobahn. But so
what? Why should Taras do that? In order to save the life of Alois Rybkin? Or
to preserve international stability?

At this moment Taras cared about only one thing.
He
wanted to be Marcus’ executioner, exactly the thing he had told President
Ackerman he did not want.

I just changed my mind.

When the desk clerk saw Taras hurrying downstairs she
quickly hung up the telephone, eyeing him warily. But he ignored her, glancing
into the restaurant where a TV showed a man with a microphone, fronting the
Cecilienhof Palace.

Taras checked his watch. Nine-fifteen. The presidential
motorcades wouldn’t be showing up for another thirty minutes. There was still
time.

He hurried outside and turned left, then froze. His car was
gone. In fact, the street was empty of cars. He turned the other way, saw his
little Ford just vanishing into an alley, upended behind a tow truck.

“Parken verboten!”
explained a cheerful old man
standing nearby. He waggled his cane helpfully at a large no-parking sign.

“Danke.”
Christ! Hell of a law-abiding hamlet they
had here. Tow an illegally parked car after fifteen minutes, but let a murderer
walk away. So why was the big motorcycle left alone?

Taras looked at the cycle a split-second longer—a big Yamaha
sportbike with red-and-white fairing—then dashed back into the Adler. Within a
minute he had returned with a set of keys filched from the corpse in the
bathtub. The second key he tried fit the ignition.

As a local police car pulled to the curb a moment later in
response to the desk clerk’s terrified summons, the crescendoing whine of the
Yamaha’s engine was still reverberating around the market square, but Taras was
already out of sight.

*

“Guten Morgen, Fraülein.”

The guard at the gate of Potsdam’s
Neue Garten
smiled
as he glanced at Charlotte’s perimeter credential and waved the Trabant
through. Marcus smiled back in genuine relief, and joined a slow-moving
serpentine of cars and vans on a narrow asphalt road that wound through
overhanging lindens and oaks to a large parking area.

Leaving their vehicles, the arriving journalists were herded
by uniformed guards with walkie-talkies along several parallel paths toward a
perimeter fence of crowd-control barriers, then funneled into a half-dozen
queues to pick up their press handouts and have their credentials checked again
before they passed through metal detectors. Marcus gave no more thought to his
disguise, made no attempt to feminize his walk or mannerisms. Rather he
convinced himself—temporarily, as an actor—that he was simply what he seemed to
be, a reporter, who happened to be a woman, on her way to cover a major event.
If that subtly affected the way he walked and carried himself, so be it.

As a result, he was able to stroll through the security
checkpoint and collect his camera at the end of the belted metal detector with
hardly a quickening of his pulse. Next he found himself on a crowded footpath
trailing a half-dozen voluble Middle Easterners, all of whom seemed to be
feasting on Egg McMuffins from a big plastic sack. One fellow, catching sight
of Marcus, made a gallant bow and offered him a Styrofoam container.

Marcus was grateful, having been running on adrenaline since
yesterday’s lunch. “I’m perfectly ravenous, thank you so much,” he answered,
surprising himself as he heard the tenor lilt that had replaced his customary
baritone. But there was nothing remotely ladylike in the way he wolfed down the
little breakfast sandwich.

The parkland now opened on the long sweeping palace front,
which was obviously modeled after a steep-gabled English manor house. But the
idyllic setting was under full-scale media siege this morning, ringed with
monster media trucks, smaller vans with hydraulic microwave masts, throbbing
generator units, cables snaking across grass and blacktop toward the Tudor
edifice. Federal police guards slung with submachine guns roamed everywhere,
bolstered by sidearmed officers from several local jurisdictions and blue-blazered
event security personnel—all talking into handheld radios. The police
bandwidths must be nearly gridlocked, Marcus thought, as he kept scanning the
crowd. He was looking for plainclothesmen, KGB or GSG-9 types, blank-faced,
shrewd-eyed men with no apparent function. These, he knew, would constitute his
greatest danger.