The Sword of the Templars (16 page)

There was the sound of a wooden match striking across rough stone. Holliday and Peggy turned.

“Herr Doktor Holliday, Fräulein Blackstock,” said Axel Kellerman, standing in the doorway to the chamber. Two blond, uniformed men stood behind him. Both of them were armed with very modern looking Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifles. Kellerman lit his cigarette then blew out the match. He exhaled twin plumes of smoke through his nostrils and smiled. “How good of you to drop by.”

“I told you we should have brought a gun,” muttered Peggy.

15

Handcuffed, Holliday and Peggy Blackstock were taken back down to the Schloss in a security golf cart. Peggy had been relieved of her camera and bag, and Holliday had the Maglite taken away from him. Arriving at the estate, Holliday saw that the big Mercedes sedan he’d seen leaving the property earlier was back in the parking lot. The guards pulled him and Peggy out of the golf cart and pushed them toward the car.

Two more security guards came out of the service entrance, the hunched and handcuffed form of Rudolph Drabeck sagging between them. The first pair of men disappeared back inside the Schloss, taking Holliday’s Maglite and Peggy’s camera and shoulder bag with them. The guards with Drabeck were wearing sidearms. From where Holliday was standing they looked like bulky HK45 automatic pistols.

Kellerman stood beside the open driver’s-side door of the big sedan.

“We are, as the saying goes, taking you for a ride,” he said. “You will please get in the backseat, both of you.”

“I don’t think so,” said Holliday. One of the guards separated himself from Drabeck and grabbed Holliday by the arm, dragging him toward the rear door of the vehicle. Holliday tried to jerk out of his grip, then stumbled, barging into Drabeck and almost knocking him over. The old man grunted with surprise. Holliday saw that Drabeck’s face had been beaten raw, his nose broken, the nostrils crusted with blood.

“Please, Doctor, I would rather not resort to violence,” chided Kellerman. “Yet.”

The guard pulled Holliday upright. Kellerman gestured with his chin.

“Take off their handcuffs,” he ordered. The guard did as he was told. Peggy and Holliday rubbed their wrists.

“Ich flehe dich an!
” groaned the old man, pleading, “
Bitte, ich flehe dich an!”

“What’s he saying?” Peggy asked, turning to Holliday.

“He’s begging for his life,” translated Kellerman, his voice flat, without emotion. “Now, please, get in the car. We’re already behind schedule.”

“Where are you taking us?” Peggy asked.

Kellerman sighed.

“To a place where no one will hear you screaming and where bloodstains will not mar my expensive carpeting,” responded Kellerman. “
Ein schweinbetrieb
, a pig abattoir I own a short distance from here. Eminently suitable, I think. You will be tortured while Doctor Holliday watches. When he tells me where he has hidden the sword that your grandfather stole the torture will stop.”

“Uncle Henry didn’t steal the sword and you know it,” said Holliday.

“I don’t have time to argue semantics with you, Doctor. Get in the car.”

“And if I don’t?”

Kellerman sighed theatrically again.

“Then I’ll have no choice but to ask Stefan to break Miss Blackstock’s fingers, one by one,” said Kellerman. There was no arguing with that; the logic was impeccable.

“All right,” said Holliday. He ducked into the backseat of the car with Peggy right behind him, prodded by Stefan. The door slammed. Kellerman got behind the wheel. Outside there was a sound like a sharp, barking cough. Turning, Holliday saw Drabeck drop to the gravel surface of the parking lot.

Stefan the security guard unscrewed the fat suppressor from his pistol, reholstered the weapon, and picked up Drabeck’s feet while the other man lifted his shoulders. They carried the dead man to the back of the car, and Kellerman popped the trunk. The two security guards hoisted the body of the old man up and in, and then slammed the trunk lid. Stefan got into the backseat beside Peggy, and the other man climbed into the front seat beside Kellerman. Stefan unhol stered the squat, heavy-looking automatic again and held it in his lap, his thick index finger curled around the trigger.

“You didn’t have to kill him,” said Peggy, her teeth gritted and her eyes wet with tears.

Kellerman glanced at her in the rearview mirror. His face was expressionless.

“He was of no further use to me.”

Kellerman turned to the guard in the seat beside him.

“Zeit in die Heia zu gehen, jawohl?”

“Dein Wunsch ist mir Befehl, Mein Herr,”
the guard said and laughed. Kellerman turned the key in the ignition and dropped the transmission into reverse. They backed and filled, then headed off down the winding tree-lined driveway to the main road. The car turned right, away from Friedrichshafen, and Kellerman drove into the darkness, north toward the nearby mountains.

“Maybe you should tell me why the sword is so important to you,” said Holliday from the backseat. He tried the door handle. Kellerman had locked it remotely. “I know you’re crazy, but even a crazy man doesn’t kill over a piece of memorabilia.”

“I assume you’re trying to irritate me,” said Kellerman as he drove the big car along the dark road. “A rather juvenile tactic. Frankly, I had expected more from a man like you.”

“I’m stressed at the moment,” answered Holliday dryly.

“The sword belongs to me,” said Kellerman. “It is my family legacy.”

“It’s just a sword. Not even a very good one,” responded Holliday. “They’re not hard to come by. Try eBay next time instead of murdering innocent people.”

“Derek Carr-Harris was hardly innocent,” laughed Kellerman, the sound hollow and utterly without humor. “He was a cold-blooded murderer, as was your uncle.”

“That’s a lie!” Peggy said hotly.

“My uncle was a medieval historian,” said Holliday. “During World War Two he was attached to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Branch. It was an extension of the Roberts Commission set up by FDR. Their job was to protect objects of cultural value from plundering and destruction. Even German ones.”

“True,” said Kellerman, “but the MFAA was also a cover for a variety of independent, intelligence-related actions by the British and the Americans at the end of the war.” Kellerman paused. A truck swept by in a rush of sound, washing the interior of the car for a moment with the beams from its headlights. “You’re something of a military historian, Doctor. Have you ever heard of something called Operation Werewolf by any chance?”

“Sure,” said Holliday. “It was a last-ditch defense plan organized by Himmler and run by an SS-
Obergruppenführer
named Prutzmann. It was a left-behind partisan organization.”

“Oddly, very much like the so-called Tribulation Force described in a series of popular Christian novels in your country,” nodded Kellerman. “But the Operation Werewolf I am referring to was a joint operation devised by a number of high-ranking intelligence officials in both America and the United Kingdom. It was jokingly referred to by Winston Churchill as the
Kammerjäger
Brigade. Do you know what a
Kammerjäger
is, Doctor?”

“I can guess.”

“It means vermin exterminator, Doctor Holliday. The
Kammerjäger
Brigade’s mandate was to find, hunt down, or otherwise discover the locations of names on a list of various high ranking SS officers and other important members of the Reich, and having found them their further instructions were to assassinate them.” Kellerman paused, and then spoke again. “ ‘What we do in life will echo in eternity,’ ” he quoted. “You know those words, Herr Doktor Holliday?”

Who
was
this guy?

“Russell Crowe in the movie
Gladiator
.”

“Good words, Doctor, and true ones. Your uncle and his English friend wrote them in blood in the spring and summer of 1945. My father was one of the names on Churchill’s death list, Doctor, and both your uncle and Derek Carr-Harris were killers in the
Kammerjäger
Brigade. To my sure knowledge they were responsible for the assassinations of more than two dozen good men in Germany, Austria, and in Rome. They very nearly caught my father, and if they had, they would have killed him on the spot.”

“You’re a liar!” Peggy snarled. “Grandpa never killed anyone!”

The road ahead was completely dark. There was forest on either side of them. No traffic, not even distant headlights. There was no way to tell how long it would be before they reached their destination.

Now or never.

Holliday leaned forward slightly. The guard in the front seat tensed, his hand going toward his holstered weapon.

“Kellerman?”

“Yes?”

Holliday whispered in his ear.

“Fick’ dich selber, du Arschloch
.”

He let the pencil he’d palmed from Drabeck’s pocket in the parking lot drop down his sleeve and into his right hand. He swept his arm up back-handed across Peggy’s front, plunging the sharpened point of the pencil into Stefan’s right eye and deep into the frontal portion of his brain, killing him instantly. A single shriek died half-stillborn in Stefan’s throat. Fluid from the burst eyeball drained down his cheek.

Leaving the pencil in place, Holliday dropped his hand into the dead man’s lap, prying the big automatic from his nerveless fingers. He thumbed down the safety, and, twisting his body while leaning over Peggy, covering her, he fired repeatedly into the rear of the front seat.

Upholstery exploded and the bullets took the security guard in the groin and belly, the concussions from each shot filling the interior of the car with a sound like raging thunder. The man twisted and jerked, screaming as he flopped back against the dashboard. Lifting the heavy pistol above the back of the seat, Holliday fired twice more, hitting the security guard in the throat and face. There was a humpty-dumpty instant as the man’s head burst open, spraying the front seat and the windshield with blood, brains, and bone chips. Kellerman swerved, tires squealing as the car almost went off the road. Holliday jammed the muzzle of the pistol under Kellerman’s collar.

“Pull over,” he ordered. “Now.”

Silently, Kellerman did as he was told, guiding the big car onto the gravel shoulder. The inside of the car smelled like blood and gunpowder. Holliday worked his jaw back and forth; his ears were ringing. Adrenaline was rushing through his system, and his stomach was roiling. Most other times and places he would have been sick. He swallowed bile.

“Unlock the doors,” he ordered. “Reach for some kind of weapon and I won’t even think about it.” Kellerman nodded, his head barely moving. He reached down and touched a button on his door. There was a dull clicking sound. Holliday glanced out the window. Dark woods on either side. They were in the middle of a forest.

“You okay, Peg?” Holliday asked.

“Yeah,” she answered, her voice choked. Stefan’s body was sagging against her like a sleeping lover.

“Open the door and push out the body,” ordered Holliday.

“I don’t want to touch him.”

“Just do it, we don’t have much time.”

“Okay.”

She leaned over the dead man and tugged the door open. Pushing and straining, she toppled him outward. The corpse flopped half out of the car, legs and feet still inside. Peggy kicked and struggled, finally managing to get the rest of the body out. Holliday looked out through the blood-sprayed windshield. Still no traffic.

“Get the guy out of the front seat,” he said to Peggy.

“Aw, come on!”

“Do it, Peg!”

She climbed out of the car, stepped over Stefan’s body and opened the front passenger-side door. Gri macing, she grabbed the nearly headless body by the arm and hauled it out of the car.

“Now what?” Peggy called from the side of the road.

“Get the gun out of his holster. There’s a little lever with an S on it on the left-hand side. Push it down. Aim it at Kellerman. If he does anything that makes you nervous, squeeze the trigger and keep on squeezing until you don’t feel nervous anymore.”

“Okay,” she answered. She crouched down over the guard’s body and retrieved his weapon, taking off the safety and aiming the pistol back into the car.

Holliday turned his attention back to Kellerman.

“I’m getting out of the car and so are you. Make any kind of stupid move and I will kill you, understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do it. Slowly.”

The two men climbed out of the car. The open air smelled like pine needles. A breeze sighed through the trees. The moon was rising. The forest looked like something from a fairy tale.

“Walk around the front of the car and stand on the shoulder,” ordered Holliday. Kellerman did as he was told. So far he had barely spoken. Less than five minutes had passed since the tables had abruptly turned. Holliday followed Kellerman around the big car, the .45 aimed squarely at the small of the man’s back. Kellerman glanced down at the crumpled bodies of his security guards.

“Stefan has a two-year-old son. Hans was about to be married.”

“Spare the sentiment,” said Holliday. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“I will kill you for this,” pledged Kellerman.

“So what?” Holliday said. “You were going to kill us anyway.” He turned to Peggy. “Search him. Weapons and cell phones.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes. Give me the gun.” She handed him the weapon. He popped out the magazine and put both pistol and magazine into the pocket of his jacket. Peggy searched Kellerman. She came up with a Deutsche Telekom iPhone and a palm-sized Beretta Tomcat .32-caliber automatic. Holliday put both into his other pocket.

He turned back to Kellerman. “Roll your friends into the ditch.”

The German gave Holliday a long appraising look but said nothing. He dragged the bodies to the edge of the ditch that ran beside the shoulder of the road and pushed them over.

“And now?” Kellerman asked sourly.

“And now we go,” said Holliday. “When the next
Autobahnpolizei
patrol comes by you can explain how your two dead employees got that way.”