The Amber Room (24 page)

A waiter stepped over, and Paul asked what type wine she’d like.

“A good red would be nice. Something local,” she said, remembering last night’s dinner with Knoll.

The waiter departed.

“I called the airline,” Paul said. “There’s a flight out of Frankfurt tomorrow. Pannik said he could arrange to get us to the airport.”

“Where is the inspector?”

“Went back to Kehlheim to see about the investigation on Chapaev. He left a phone number.”

“I can’t believe all my stuff’s gone.”

“Knoll obviously wanted nothing left to trace you.”

“He appeared so sincere. Charming, in fact.”

Paul seemed to sense the attraction in her voice. “You liked him?”

“He was interesting. Said he was an art collector looking for the Amber Room. “

“That appeals to you?”

“Come on, Paul. Wouldn’t you say that we live a mundane life? Work and home. Think about it. Traveling the world, looking for lost art—that would excite anyone.”

“The man left you to die.”

Her face tightened. That tone of his did it every time. “But he also saved my life in Munich.”

“I should have come with you to start with.”

“I don’t recall inviting you.” Her irritation was building. Why did it swell so easily? Paul was only trying to help.

“No, you didn’t invite me. But I still should have come.”

She was surprised by his reaction to Knoll. Hard to tell if he was jealous or concerned.

“We need to go home,” he said. “There’s nothing left here. I’m worried about the children. I can still see Chapaev’s body.”

“You believe the woman who came to see you killed Chapaev?”

“Who knows? But she certainly knew where to look, thanks to me.”

Now seemed the right time. “Let’s stay, Paul.”

“What?”

“Let’s stay.”

“Rachel, haven’t you learned your lesson? People are dying. We need to get out of here, before it’s us. You were lucky today. Don’t push it. This isn’t some adventure novel. This is real. And foolishness. Nazis. Russians. We’re out of our league.”

“Paul, Daddy must have known something. Chapaev, too. We owe it to them to try.”

“Try what?”

“There’s one trail left to follow. Remember Wayland McKoy. Knoll told me Stod is not far from here. He might be on to something. Daddy was interested in what he was doing.”

“Leave it alone, Rachel.”

“What would it hurt?”

“That’s exactly what you said about finding Chapaev.”

She shoved her chair back and stood. “That’s not fair, and you know it.” Her voice rose. “If you want to go home, go. I’m going to talk to Wayland McKoy.”

A few other diners started to notice. She hoped none of them spoke English. Paul’s face carried the usual look of resignation. He’d never really known what to do with her. It was another of their problems. Impetuousness was foreign to his personality. He was a meticulous planner. No detail too small. Not obsessive. Just consistent. Had he ever done a spontaneous thing in his life? Yes. He’d flown here virtually on the spur of the moment. And she was hoping that counted for something.

“Sit down, Rachel,” he quietly said. “For once could we discuss something rationally?”

She sat. She wanted him to stay, but would never admit it.

“You’ve got an election campaign to run. Why don’t you channel all this energy into that?”

“I have to do this, Paul. Something is telling me to go on.”

“Rachel, in the last forty-eight hours two people have turned up out of nowhere, both looking for the same thing, one possibly a killer, the other callous enough to leave you for dead. Karol is gone. So is Chapaev. Maybe your father was murdered. You were awfully suspicious about that before coming over here.”

“I still am, and that’s part of this. Not to mention your parents. They may have been victims also.”

She could almost hear his analytical mind working. Weighing the options. Trying to think of the next argument to convince her to come home with him.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll go to see McKoy.”

“You serious?”

“What I am is crazy. But I don’t plan to leave you alone over here.”

She reached over and squeezed his hand. “You watch my back and I’ll watch yours. Okay?”

He grinned. “Yeah, right.”

“Daddy would be proud.”

“Your father is probably turning in his grave. We’re ignoring everything he wanted.”

The waiter arrived with the wine and poured two glasses. She raised her glass. “To success.”

He returned the toast. “Success.”

She sipped the wine, pleased Paul was staying. But the vision flashed through her mind once again. What she saw as her flashlight revealed Christian Knoll the second before the explosion. A knife blade gleaming in his hand.

Yet she’d said nothing to Paul or Inspector Pannik. Easy to guess at both their reactions, especially Paul’s.

She looked at her ex-husband, remembered her father and Chapaev, and thought of the children.

Was she doing the right thing?

Stod, Germany

Monday, May 19, 10:15 a.m.

Wayland McKoy marched into the cavern. Cold damp air enveloped him, and darkness overtook the morning light. He marveled at the ancient shaft.Ein Silberbergwerk. A silver mine. Once the “treasury of the Holy Roman Emperors,” the earth now lay spent and abandoned, a sordid reminder of the cheap Mexican silver that drove most of the Harz’s mines out of business by 1900.

The whole area was spectacular. Knots of pine-clad hills, stunted scrub, and alpine meadows, all beautiful and rugged, yet an eeriness permeated. As Goethe had said inFaust :Where witches held their Sabbath.

It had once been the southwestern corner of East Germany, in the dreaded forbidden zone, and stilted border posts continued to dot the forest. The minefields, shrapnel-scattering trap guns, guard dogs, and barbed-wire fences were now gone.Wende, unification, had put an end to the need for containing an entire population and opened opportunities. Ones he was now exploiting.

He made his way down the wide shaft. The trail was marked every thirty meters by a hundred-watt bulb, and an electrical cord snaked a path back to the generator outside. The rock face was sharp, the floor rubble strewn, the work of an initial team he’d sent in last weekend to clear the passage.

That had been the easy part. Jackhammers and air guns. No need to worry about long-lost Nazi explosives, the tunnel had been sniffed by dogs and surveyed by demolitionists. The lack of anything even remotely concerned with explosives was worrisome. If this was indeed the right mine, the one Germans used to stash the art from Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich museum, then it would almost certainly have been mined. Yet nothing had been found. Just rock, silt, sand, and thousands of bats. The nasty little bastards populated offshoots of the main shaft during winter, and of all the species in the world, this one had to be endangered. Which explained why the German government had been so hesitant about granting him an exploration permit. Luckily, the bats left the mine every May, not to return until mid-July. A precious forty-five days to explore. That had been all the German government would grant. His permit required the mine be empty when the beasts returned.

The deeper he strolled into the mountain, the larger the shaft became—which also was troublesome. The normal routine was for the tunnels to narrow, eventually becoming impassable, the miners excavating until it proved impossible to burrow any farther. All the shafts were a testament to centuries of mining, each generation trying to better the one before and uncover a vein of previously undetected ore. But for all its width, the size of this shaft still concerned him. It was simply far too narrow to stash anything as large as the loot he was searching for.

He approached his three-man work crew. Two men stood on ladders, another below, each boring holes at sixty-degree angles into the rock. Cables fed air and electricity. The generators and compressors stood fifty meters behind him, outside in the morning air. Harsh, hot, blue-white lights illuminated the scene and drenched the crew in sweat.

The drills stopped and the men slipped off their ear protection. He, too, slipped off his sound muffs. “Any idea how we’re doin’?” he asked.

One of the men shoved fogged goggles from his eyes and mopped the perspiration on his brow. “We’ve moved about a foot forward today. No way to tell how much farther, and I’m afraid to jackhammer.”

Another of the men reached for a jug. Slowly, he filled the drilled holes with solvent. McKoy stepped close to the wall of rock. The porous granite and limestone instantly drank in the brown syrup from each hole, the caustic chemical expanding, creating fissions in the stone. Another goggled man approached with a sledgehammer. One blow and the rock shattered in sheets, crumbling to the ground. Another few inches forward now excavated.

“Slow goin’,” he said.

“But the only way to do it,” came a voice from behind.

McKoy turned to seeHerr Doktor Alfred Grumer standing in the cavern. He was tall, with spindly arms and legs, gaunt to the point of caricature, a graying Vandyke beard bracketing pencil-thin lips. Grumer was the resident expert on the dig, possessed of a degree from the University of Heidelberg in art history. McKoy had latched on to Grumer three years ago during his last venture into the Harz mines. The man boasted both expertise and greed, two attributes he not only admired but also needed in his business associates.

“We’re runnin’ out of time,” McKoy said.

Grumer stepped close. “There’s another four weeks left on your permit. We’ll get through.”

“Assumin’ there’s something to get through to.”

“The chamber is there. The radar soundings confirm it.”

“But how goddamned far into that rock?”

“That’s hard to say. But something is in there.”

“And how the hell did it get there? You said the radar soundin’s confirmed multiple sizable metallic objects.” He motioned back beyond the lights. “That shaft is hardly big enough for three people to walk through.”

A thin grin lined Grumer’s face. “You assume this is the only way in.”

“And you assume I’m a bottomless money pit.”

The other men reset their drills and started a new bore. McKoy drifted back into the shaft, beyond the lights, where it was cooler and quieter. Grumer followed. He said, “If we don’t make some progress by tomorrow, the hell with this drillin’. We’re going to dynamite.”

“Your permit requires otherwise.”

He ran a hand through his wet black hair. “Fuck the permit. We need progress, and fast. I’ve got a television crew waitin’ in town that’s costing me two thousand a day. And those fat-ass bureaucrats in Bonn don’t have a bunch of investors flying here tomorrow, expectin’ to see art.”

“This cannot be rushed,” Grumer said. “There is no telling what awaits behind the rock.”

“There’s supposed to be a huge chamber.”

“There is. And it contains something.”

He softened his tone. It wasn’t Grumer’s fault the dig was going slow. “Somethin’ gave the ground radar multiple orgasms, huh?”

Grumer smiled. “A poetic way of putting it.”

“You better damn well hope so or we’re both screwed.”

“The German word for ‘cave’ ishöhle ,” Grumer said. “The word for ‘hell’ ishölle . I have always thought the similarity was not without significance.”

“Fuckin’ damn interesting, Grumer. But not the right sentiment at the moment, if you get my drift.”

Grumer seemed unconcerned. As always. Another thing about this man that irritated the hell out of him.

“I came down to tell you we have visitors,” Grumer said.

“Not another reporter?”

“An American lawyer and a judge.”

“The lawsuits have started already?”

Grumer flashed one of his condescending grins. He wasn’t in the mood. He should fire the irritating fool. But Grumer’s contacts within the Ministry of Culture were too valuable to dispense with. “No lawsuits, Herr McKoy. These two speak of the Amber Room.”

His face lit up.

“I thought you might be interested. They claim to have information.”

“Crackpots?”

“Don’t appear to be.”

“What do they want?”

“To talk.”

He glanced back at the wall of rock and the whining drills. “Why not? Nothing the hell goin’ on here.”

Paul turned as the door to the tiny shed swung open. He watched a grizzly bear of a man with a bull neck, thick waist, and bushy black hair enter the whitewashed room. A bulging chest and arms swelled a cotton shirt that was embroidered withMCKOY EXCAVATIONS , and an intense gaze through dark eyes immediately assessed the situation. Alfred Grumer, whom he and Rachel had met a few minutes ago, followed the man inside.

“Herr Cutler, Frau Cutler, this is Wayland McKoy,” Grumer said.

“I don’t want to be rude,” McKoy said, “but this is a critical time around here, and I don’t have a lot of time to chitchat. So what can I do for you?”

Paul decided to get to the point. “We’ve had an interesting last few days—”

“Which one of you is the judge?” McKoy asked.

“Me,” Rachel said.

“What’s a lawyer and judge from Georgia doin’ in the middle of Germany bothering me?”

“Looking for the Amber Room,” Rachel said.

McKoy chuckled. “Who the hell isn’t?”

“You must think it’s nearby, maybe even where you’re digging,” Rachel said.

“I’m sure you two legal eagles know that I’m not about to discuss any of the particulars of this dig with you. I have investors that demand confidentiality.”

“We’re not asking you to divulge anything,” Paul said. “But you may find what’s happened to us the past few days interesting.” He told McKoy and Grumer everything that’d occurred since Karol Borya died and Rachel had been pulled from the mine.

Grumer settled down on one of the stools. “We heard about that explosion. Never found the man?”

“Nothing to find. Knoll was long gone.” Paul explained what he and Pannik learned in Warthberg.

“You still haven’t said what you want,” McKoy said.