The Apocalypse Watch (82 page)

“A side door?” Karin had interrupted, brushing the rain off her face under her black canvas hat.

“Jäger’s living quarters,” answered the German intelligence officer. “Bedroom, bath, office, and an addition on the north wall that contains a small personal chapel with its own altar. It’s said he spends hours there in meditation. The side door is his private entrance, the closest to the riverbank and forbidden to everyone else. The front door is at the far left, the old boathouse’s original entrance; it’s the one the guards and visitors use.”

“In other words, he’s basically separated from the rest of the household when he’s in his quarters.”

“Definitely. Director Moreau was particularly interested in the arrangement as I described it to him. He reached me after you called him in Paris, and together we devised the plan to accommodate you with the minimum of risk.”

“What did he tell you, if I may ask?”

“That you knew Günter Jäger years ago and that you were a highly trained strategist who might accomplish what others could not. I along with most senior officers in our profession accept Moreau’s judgments as those of an expert. He also mentioned that you would be armed and capable of protecting yourself.”

“I hope he’s right on both counts,” said Karin softly.

“Oh?” The German officer stared at De Vries. “Your superiors approve of your tactics, of course.”

“Naturally. Would the celebrated Moreau himself have reached you on my behalf if they did not?”

“No, he wouldn’t.… Your raincoat will soon be soaked. I can’t offer you a new one, but I have an extra umbrella. You’re welcome to it.”

“Thank you, I’m grateful. Are you in touch with your personnel by radio?”

“Yes, but I’m sorry, I can’t let you have one. The risk is too great.”

“I understand. Just let them know I’m on my way.”

“Good luck and be very, very careful, madame. Remember, we can lead you to the door, but we cannot do anything else for you. Even if you cried out, we could not respond.”

“Yes, I know. One life compared to so many thousands.” With those words Karin snapped open the umbrella and started down the flagstone path through the deluge. Constantly wiping the rain from her eyes, she reached the once-elegant gazebo, its skeletal outlines of burnt wood and coiled screening somehow akin to a wartime photograph illustrating the lesson that war was an equalizer, touching the rich and the poor alike. And then beyond, as if to purposely contradict the lesson, there was a perfectly kept croquet field, the lawn manicured, the wickets and the brightly painted poles intact.

She raised her head, squinting under the brim of her canvas hat, studying the enormous pine tree with different, less imposing trees on either side. Suddenly there were the barely visible flashes.
Two
of them! A guard was on patrol. Karin lowered herself to the ground, peering into drenched darkness, waiting for another signal. It came quickly: three flashes, repeated twice. The way was clear!

She raced across the croquet course, her flat shoes sinking into the swollen, wet grass until she felt the hard surface of the second flagstone path. Without hesitating, she raced down it, keeping in mind the approximate forty paces and the sharp curve; she found it too late, plunging headlong into the overgrown foliage as the flagstones turned abruptly left. There was no visibility, no way she could have known. She got painfully, awkwardly, to her
feet and picked up the umbrella; it was broken, useless. On her knees, she looked to her right, as instructed. There was nothing but downpour and darkness, yet she dared not move until the signal came. Finally, it did: three flashes. Karin walked slowly, cautiously, to the end of the flagstone path; she was at the edge of the woods and saw the lair of her once and now-despised husband,
Führer
of the Fourth Reich. There were lights on at the far left side of the structure, darkness everywhere else.

The former boathouse was much longer, though not necessarily larger, than she had envisioned, for it was one level. The German intelligence officer had said there was an addition on the right that housed the isolated living quarters of the man called Günter Jäger. Additions had been made on the left as well, she thought, observing the lighter, newer wood, twenty-five or thirty feet long, and considering the width to the river side, enough for two, three, or four added rooms for the staff. The officer had been correct in one area: The front door was on the far left, at the end of the gravel drive, symmetrically unbalanced, as if temporary, but removed from Jäger’s quarters. And directly ahead of her, the short dock and the great river beyond, was the porticoed side door of Günter Jäger’s suite of rooms; a dim red light was affixed to the interior roof of the small porch. Karin took several deep breaths, hoping to control the pounding in her chest, removed Drew Latham’s automatic from her raincoat pocket, and started across the grass toward the porch with the dim red light. One of them would live, the other die. It was the end of their godforsaken marriage. But first there was Water Lightning, Günter Jäger’s omega for the paralyses of London, Paris, and Washington. Frederik de Vries, once the most brilliant of agents provocateurs, had figured out a way to do it. She knew it!

Karin reached the short porch with the eerie red light; she walked up the single step, holding on to one of the two columns that supported the overhang, the heavy rain pounding a steady tattoo on the roof. Suddenly, she gasped, fear and confusion spreading over her. The door was ajar, open no more than three inches, beyond the slit
was only black darkness. She approached it, Latham’s automatic in her left hand, and pushed the door back. Again only darkness, and except for the now-torrential rain, silence. She walked inside.

“I knew you’d come, my dear wife,” said the unseen figure, his voice echoing off the unseen walls. “Close the door, please.”

“
Frederik!
”

“Not Freddie any longer, I see. You only called me Frederik when you were angry with me, Karin. Are you angry with me now?”

“What have you
done?
Where are you?”

“It’s best we talk in the dark, at least for a while.”

“You knew I’d come here …?”

“That door’s been open since you and your
lover
flew into Bonn.”

“Then you understand they know who you are—”

“That’s totally irrelevant,” interrupted De Vries/Jäger firmly. “Nothing can stop us now.”

“You won’t get away.”

“Of course I will. It’s already been arranged.”

“
How?
They know who you are, they won’t let you!”

“Because they’re out there in four acres of tangled shrubbery and ruins, their listening devices waiting for me to reach others here in Germany and in England, France, and America? So they can accuse others, arrest others, because I talked with them? I tell you, dear wife, the temptation to place calls to the Presidents of France and the United States,
and
the Queen of England, was nearly irresistible. Can you imagine the utter bewilderment in the intelligence communities?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because the sublime would become the ridiculous—and we’re deadly serious.”

“Why, Frederik,
why?
What happened to the man who, above all, loathed the Nazis?”

“That’s not quite right,” said the new
Führer
curtly. “I loathed the Communists first, for they were stupid. They squandered their power everywhere, trying to live up to the Marxist doctrine of equality when no such equality
exists. They gave authority to uneducated peasants and crude, ugly louts. There was nothing grand about them at all.”

“You never spoke in those terms before.”

“Of course I did! You just never listened carefully enough.… But that, too, is irrelevant, for I found my calling, the calling of a truly superior human being. I saw a void and I filled it, admittedly with the help of a surgeon of great stature and perception who realized that I was the man they needed.”

“Hans Traupman,” said Karin in the darkness, immediately angry with herself for saying the name.

“He’s no longer with us, thanks to your team of blunderers. Did you people really think you could hijack his boat and speed away with him? All four cameras blacked out in
succession
, the radio suddenly malfunctioning, the boat itself heading upriver? Honestly, such amateurism. Traupman gave his life for our cause, and he wouldn’t want it any other way, for our cause is everything.”

Günter Jäger knew a great deal, but he did not know everything, considered Karin de Vries. He thought Traupman had died on his boat. “What cause, Frederik? The cause of the Nazis? The monsters who executed your grandparents and forced your father and mother to live as pariahs, until they finally took their own lives?”

“I have learned many things since you abandoned me, wife.”

“
I
abandoned
you
…?”

“I traded my execution for diamonds, all the diamonds I had left in Amsterdam. But who was going to hire me after the Wall fell? What good is a deep-cover espionage agent when there’s nothing to penetrate? Where would my lifestyle go? The unlimited expense accounts, the limousines, the extravagant resorts? Remember the Black Sea and Sevastopol? My
God
, we had fun, and I stole two hundred thousand, American, for the operation!”

“I was talking about the ‘cause,’ Frederik, what about the
cause
?”

“I’ve come to believe in it with all my being. In the beginning, others wrote my speeches for the movement.
Now I write them all,
compose
them all, for they are like short heroic operas, bringing those who see and listen to their feet, their voices ringing with my praises, honoring me, holding me in adoration as I hold them enthralled!”

“How did it start … Freddie?”

“Freddie—that’s better. Would you really like to know?”

“Didn’t I always want to hear about your missions? Remember how we sometimes laughed?”

“Yes, that part of you was all right, not like the bitch whore you were most of the time.”

“
What
…?” Immediately Karin lowered her voice. “I’m sorry, Freddie, truly sorry. You went to East Berlin, that’s the last word we had of you, any of us. Until we read that you’d been executed.”

“I wrote that report myself, you know. Rather sensational, wasn’t it?”

“It certainly was graphic.”

“Fine writing’s like great speaking, and great speaking’s like fine writing. You’ve got to create instant images to capture the minds of those reading or listening. Capture them immediately with fire and lightning!”

“East Berlin …?”

“Yes, that’s where it began. Certain of the Stasi had ties with Munich, especially with a provisional general of the Nazi movement. They recognized my abilities, and my God, why not? I’d made fools of them too often! After the official leaders I dealt with retrieved my diamonds in Amsterdam and set me free, several came to me and said they might have work for me. East Germany was collapsing, the entire Soviet Union soon to follow—everyone knew it. They flew me to Munich and I met with this general, von Schnabe. He was an imposing man, even perhaps a visionary, but he was basically a martinet, a harsh bureaucrat. He lacked the fire to be a leader. However, he had a concept, a concept he was progressively turning into reality. It could ultimately change the face of Germany.”

“Change the face of
Germany
?” said Karin incredulously. “How could an obscure, unknown general of a despised radical movement be capable of such a thing?”

“By infiltrating the Bundestag, and infiltration was something I knew a great deal about.”

“That doesn’t answer my question … Freddie.”

“Freddie—I like that. We had good times for a number of years, my wife.” Günter Jäger’s voice still seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere in the darkness of the room, the source further obscured by the pounding rain against the shaded windows and the roof. “To answer your question. To infiltrate the Bundestag, the right people simply have to be elected. The general, with the help of Hans Traupman, scoured the country for talented but discontented men, placed them in distressed economic districts, fed them ‘solutions,’ and funded their campaigns beyond anything their opponents could match. Would you believe we have over a hundred members in the Bundestag at this moment?”

“You were one of those men … my husband?”

“I was the most extraordinary, my wife! I was given a new name, a new biography, a completely new life. I became Günter Jäger, a parish clergyman from a small village in Kuhhorst, moved by the church authorities to Strasslach, outside Munich. I left the church, fighting for what I called the disenfranchised middle class, the burghers who were the backbone of the nation. I won my seat in a landslide, as they say, and while I was campaigning, Hans Traupman watched me, and made his decision. I was the man the movement needed. I tell you, whore-wife, it is fantastic! They’ve made me emperor, king, the ruler of all we espouse, the
Führer
of the
Fourth Reich
!”

“And you accept it, Freddie?”

“Why not? It’s the extension of everything I practiced in the past. The persuasiveness I exhibited while burrowing into the enemy camps, the speeches I gave solidifying my false commitments, all those dinner parties and symposiums—it was all training for my greatest achievements.”

“But you once considered
these
people your enemies.”

“No longer. They’re
right
. The world has changed and it’s changed for the worse. Even the Communists with their iron fists were better than what we have now. You
take away the discipline of a strong state and what’s left is the rabble, screaming at one another, slaughtering one another, no better than animals in a jungle. Well, we’ll get rid of the animals and restructure the state, selecting and rewarding only the purest to serve it. The dawn of a great new day is upon us, my wife, and as soon as it is understood, the truth of its force and the force of its truth will sweep across the world.”

“The world will point to and remember the brutality of the Nazis, won’t it … Freddie?”