A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (31 page)

She sniffed but nodded determinedly. “I’m fine.”

Looking over her shoulder and past the van, he saw an electrical closet near the lift doors. “Come on,” he said.

He led her across the car park. The closet was locked, but he smashed the lock in with the butt of his pistol. Inside he found several large coils of electrical cord. He took a coil and handed it to Ellie, then took another for himself.

He led her back over to the van, where the naked Waffen-SS men stood over their uniforms, shielding themselves with their hands. Quinn handed his coil of cord to Ellie. “Tie them up at the wrists and ankles,” he said. “Make sure they’re secure. Be careful—have whoever you’re tying stand separate from the rest. One of us will cover you, but the other two will need to be changing.”

While she set about tying the first soldier up with Barnes covering her, Gunning and Quinn changed. Quinn took the lieutenant’s uniform; he was happy to discover that these jackboots fit him more comfortably than the ones he had taken from the Luftwaffe sergeant yesterday. Gunning put on one of the storm troopers’ uniforms. When they were changed, they covered Ellie while Barnes changed, also into a storm trooper’s uniform.

The Waffen-SS officer who had disguised himself as a Wehrmacht major was the last man Ellie bound. Before she could bind his feet, Quinn took him aside.

“How did the SS find us?” he asked.

The major stared at him balefully. “Go to hell,” he said.

Quinn belted him across the jaw. The major, his hands tied behind his back, staggered back. When he had regained his footing, he hawked and spat something at Quinn’s feet. Quinn looked down to see a gobbet of bright red blood, a tooth sitting in its center.

He grabbed the major by the jaw, feeling him flinch at the rough contact, and held his face up to force eye contact. “I don’t have time for this, you Nazi pig,” he said. “For every question you don’t answer, you lose a finger. How did you find us?”

The major just stared at him, a rivulet of blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. Quinn shrugged, released his jaw and spun him round. he unholstered the lieutenant’s pistol, grabbed the palm of the major’s right hand and fired a single bullet into his little finger.

The major screamed and tore away from him, dropping to one knee and writhing in agony. Quinn took a step forward, grasped him by the hair on the top of his head and jerked him round to face him. He put his mouth to the major’s ear.
“How?”
he demanded.

“I—don’t—know,” the major ground out through clenched teeth. “I just—follow my orders.” He took several large gulps of air, visibly composing himself. “The order came down to get you—I went and got you.”

Quinn shoved him forward, releasing his hair and sending him sprawling across the ground on his stomach.

He turned to walk away, but the major called after him, “He’s finished.” Quinn stopped and turned back to face him; he had raised himself up onto one knee and was staring after him. “Heydrich’s finished,” he continued. “We have him already. We had you all the whole time. We orchestrated everything you’ve done. You can run now, but this is the SS. We’ll hunt you down.”

Quinn took a step toward the kneeling man and kicked him savagely in the face, sending him sprawling onto his back. Then, as the major scrambled to lift himself onto his elbows, Quinn raised his Luger, aiming it directly between the major’s eyes. For a long moment both men remained utterly motionless, staring at each other.

After several seconds that lasted an eternity, Quinn blinked, then turned his head to see Ellie a few meters away from him. She was staring at him, her eyes wide. He craned round a little further, to where Gunning and Barnes were also looking at him.

Without looking back at the major, he lowered his pistol and replaced it in its holster. Abruptly, he turned back round, dropping to one knee beside the major and grabbing him by the hair again. “I spare your life, because you’re not worth it, you stinking piece of Nazi filth,” he hissed in his ear, loud enough only for the major to hear.
“I’m better than you
. Always remember that.”

He rose, turned his back on the major and strode away. “Ellie,” he said over his shoulder, “bind his ankles.”

They left the six Nazis, naked and bound, in a far, darkened corner of the parking garage. The lieutenant had been carrying the keys to the armored van, so they threw their own clothes and the uniforms of the other three SS soldiers into its back and left in it. Barnes drove, and Quinn sat next to him in the front seat.

“Do you believe him?” Barnes asked. It was the first time any of them had spoken, other than to give an instruction or report information, since Quinn had walked away from the major.

“About them already having Heydrich?”

“Yes.”

“About everything we’ve done being planned by them?”

“Yes.”

“Not a word of it.”

“Why?”

“Because if they had him already, they would have simply stormed the floor we were on,” he said. “No, they knew we were there, but not because Heydrich has already lost. They were desperate to figure out what we were going to do and would have been even more desperate to stop us if they’d known we would go to Heydrich. Now that he knows, they’re scrambling to stop him.”

He pursed his lips. “They disguised themselves and snuck in to get us. That means they still haven’t got him, though they’ll be ready for him.” He paused. “And it means we were betrayed.”

“I agree,” Barnes said, “but I’m hardly surprised. Heydrich has some pretty efficient sources inside the SS; it stands to reason they have some of their own inside his hierarchy. We must have walked past a dozen of his people on that floor, and God knows how many others knew we were there.”

Quinn shook his head. “No. This was someone highly placed enough to understand who we were immediately. Heydrich’s secretary, or Captain Meier. Or Galland or Remer.”

“Who?”

“The two generals with him. You didn’t recognize them?”

Barnes shrugged. “I’m not MI6. German domestic politics isn’t my brief.”

When the guard at the booth saw their black SS uniforms, he waved them through without checking their IDs. They sped up the ramp out of the parking levels and onto the parkway leading to In den Lauben—

Into total chaos. They could not tell right away what had happened, but they could see that things had gone horribly wrong. The crowd that had thronged the roadside a half hour earlier had thinned considerably. It was still thousands strong, but those that remained were running desperately away from the direction of the bridge and, on its far side, the communal hall.

As they turned onto In den Lauben, they saw why. A hundred meters ahead of them, where the avenue led out onto the Nibelungen Bridge, was a war zone. Someone had set up a roadblock of three armored cars, blocking passage onto the bridge. In the intersection before it were several wrecked vehicles—Mercedeses, motorcycles, and an
Orpo
Volkswagen. Bodies littered the ground. Several other vehicles were sitting at the intersection, and Waffen-SS troops were using them for cover as they exchanged fire with someone out of view.

“Good God,” said Barnes.

“Take us closer,” Quinn said. “Stop about fifty meters back.”

Obediently, Barnes pulled forward and stopped where Quinn had indicated, pulling up to the curb beside the building complex on the side of the street opposite from the hotel; a plaque proclaimed it to be the offices of the Hermann Göring Works. “Wait here,” Quinn said, opening his door.

“Where are you going?” said Barnes.

Quinn paused. “I’m going to go find out the situation,” he said. “It’s best I go alone. I don’t want us all getting pressed into combat.”

Reluctantly, Barnes nodded. Quinn slipped out of the van’s cab and hurried along the pavement toward the skirmish. As he drew closer, the fighting seemed to be dying down; gunfire was becoming more sporadic.

He approached half a dozen storm troopers and a sergeant under cover behind an armored truck. As he came up behind them, he could see further round the corner of the Hermann Göring Works. In the middle of the narrow road running between the river and the Works, about thirty meters beyond the intersection with In den Lauben, an armored personnel carrier bearing the eagle badge of the Eastern Command lay on its side, smoke issuing from under its bonnet. Motionless bodies, clad in both black and field grey, littered the ground around it, and its hull was pockmarked and dented from the attack it had just sustained.

Quinn scanned the bodies, checking the ones in black to see if Heydrich was amongst them, but he did not see him. Another body did catch his eye though, the only one wearing a blue uniform. At first it was the
uniform’s color that drew his attention, but upon closer scrutiny he recognized the face: Reichsmarschall Galland, a large dark stain across the front of his tunic.

Next he surveyed the bodies scattered around him in the intersection, searching still for Heydrich. Here the bodies were mainly Wehrmacht, though, with a fair number of civilians mixed in. The two motorcycles that had led the Commissar-General’s convoy had smashed into the wheels of the armored trucks, blocking the way onto the bridge. Both their drivers lay lifeless half a dozen meters from them, limbs splayed at unnatural angles.

He turned back to the sergeant and his men a few meters away behind the armored truck.
“Scharführer,”
he snapped, and the sergeant looked up.

“Yes, Herr
Obersturmführer?
”

“We have them holed up in that vehicle?” He nodded toward the personnel carrier.

The sergeant shook his head. “No, Herr Ober-sturmführer. The survivors managed to reach cover in the building here.” He gestured toward the Hermann Göring Works.

Quinn surveyed the building. “And Commissar-General Heydrich is amongst them?”

“Yes, Herr Obersturmführer.”

Quinn nodded. “Who is in command here?”

The sergeant pointed, and Quinn followed the gesture to a parked staff car at the far corner of the intersection. An SS officer—too far away for him to make out his rank—surrounded by a pair of aides stood next to the car’s open door, talking into the mouthpiece of the car’s radio. “The sturmbannführer, Herr Obersturmführer.”

“Very good, Scharführer,” Quinn said. “Carry on.” He left the sergeant and his troops and headed toward the major at the staff car. As he approached, the major completed his conversation on the radio, turned to one of his aides and issued an order. The aide saluted and hurried away. Quinn came up, stopped and saluted neatly; the major turned to him.

“Obersturmführer,” he said. “I do not recognize you. What is your name?”

Quinn’s pause lasted only a heartbeat. “Obersturmführer Kaufholz. I have just arrived on the scene, Herr Sturmbannführer,” he said. “I have a platoon with me. I understand the Commissar-General and his men have taken refuge inside the building.”

The major nodded. He had turned his gaze from Quinn to stare instead down the street running between the river and the Works. “Yes. They seem to have taken refuge there—” he pointed, “—on the ground floor opposite the river. At the moment we have something of a stalemate, but we have reinforcements coming up from the opposite direction. They’ll get behind them, and soon we’ll be able to squeeze them in a vice.” He grinned wolfishly. “In the end it should seem a rather pathetic attempt at a coup.”

“I see you seem a little thinly manned, Herr Sturm-bannführer.”

The major bristled. “That was necessary,” he said, a touch defensively, “to ensure surprise—and given the short notice that we had on this operation.”

“I apologize, mein Herr,” Quinn said. “I had not intended a criticism. I merely make the observation that you probably do not have enough men to secure the rest of the building—” he gestured back up In den Lauben at the Hermann Göring Works offices, “—and prevent the enemy from escaping that way while we await reinforcements. May I request that I lead my platoon to reconnoiter the rest of the building?”

The major had followed his gesture, turning from the street and the personnel carrier to stare at the long face of the Works, which extended a good three hundred meters back along the avenue. After a few moments’ consideration, he nodded and turned back to Quinn. “Very well, Obersturmführer. But be careful—their situation is too hopeless for there to be any necessity for us to lose a dozen men in a room to room fire fight.”

“Of course, Herr Sturmbannführer,” Quinn said. “Thank you.” He snapped his heels together, saluted crisply, and walked back up In den Lauben toward their van.

He climbed into the cab. “Take us back up the road,” he ordered Barnes, “and round the corner back behind the building here.” He gestured at the Works.

Barnes obediently put the car in gear and pulled around, heading back up In den Lauben. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Heydrich and a few men are holed up at the other end of the building,” he explained. “The SS commander thinks I have a platoon with me; I’m to reconnoiter the building and make sure Heydrich stays confined at that end while the SS waits for reinforcements to hit him from the other direction. It doesn’t sound like there were many survivors from their ambush.”

Barnes pulled round the far side of the building and up onto the curb. They both got out. While Barnes got Ellie and Gunning out of the back of the van and explained the situation to them, Quinn tried the doors.

“All locked,” he reported. “Makes sense. It’s a Day of National Mourning. The whole place will be deserted.”

Gunning shrugged. “Only one way in, then,” he said and, at Barnes’s nod, slammed his rifle butt into one of the building’s windows, shattering it with a loud clatter.

Quinn gave Gunning a boost up so he could scramble through the window, then, after Gunning had called the all clear, gave another to Barnes. Next came Ellie. Quinn frowned as she stepped up to him. He did not want her coming with them, but neither did he think she would be safe if she stayed behind.

She read the expression on his face. “Don’t bother saying anything,” she said. “I’ve come this far, and you wouldn’t have gotten nearly so far without me. I see this through.”