Hour of the Assassins (22 page)

He raced over to Steiger, grabbed the Luger, and fired it almost point-blank into the head. The skull cracked open like a rotten fruit and bits of brains and blood sprayed across the ground. Then Caine ran across the clearing to Müller. But he was too late.

Incredibly, Müller had worked the gag loose by rubbing the back of his head against the tree. Then he had committed suicide by swallowing the wadded-up shirt and choking himself. A piece of shirt strip hung from the corner of his mouth, like a rat's tail from a snake's mouth. Caine tried to pull the shirt strip out, but it tore apart in his hand. Besides it was pointless. Müller's pupils showed no reaction to the flashlight.

Caine cut the body down and kicked it a few times in savage frustration. Then he caught himself and just stood there, listening to the night sounds of the jungle coming to life once more. He was blown wide open and there wasn't much time left. His only chance was to get to the Mengele office before the Nazis had a chance to react. The only question was whether Steiger or either of Müller's companions had taken the time to make a phone call.

He carried both bodies to the edge of the marsh and dumped them into the black mud. In a few days they would be unrecognizable; the jungle animals would see to that. Then he drove the car Steiger had used into the ramshackle shell of the farmhouse to hide it from view. Using the flashlight, he carefully examined the Ford, checking the engine, the wiring under the dashboard, and the car's underbody, just in case Steiger had left him a surprise package. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and crawled out from under the car. Everything was clean.

He stripped off his filthy clothes and buried them in the bushes, then washed himself with water from the canteen before changing into a fresh pair of slacks and a sports shirt, congratulating himself on his foresight in bringing them along. Soon he was back in the Ford, speeding along the road to Asunción.

It was nearly two in the morning by the time he parked the car on a dark street off Independencia Nacional. The streets of the business section were deserted at this hour, and the quiet thunk of the closing car door echoed ominously in the stillness, like the sound of a midnight knock at the door. On the corner a single streetlight cast a yellowish glare with the unblinking gaze of a solitary jaundiced eye. Moths and insects swirled and battered themselves against the light, like the souls of the damned desperately seeking entrance to the New Jerusalem. Their tiny corpses littered the glass globe with dark smudges.

Caine opened the trunk and took out another paper bag, containing the five-gallon can of gasoline. He checked his pockets: Luger, detonators, lockpick, flashlight, the Bauer in his waistband, the small lump of
plastique
that he had retrieved from his cache in a safety-deposit box in a New York bank between flight connections. He had saved a small block of surplus
plastique
after the Abu Daud hit in Paris, when they had blown apart
Le Beau Amateur
in the Boulevard St. Michel section as a diversion. If the police stopped him, he could always tell them he was planning to open a retail outlet for urban guerrillas, he thought wryly. Keeping to the shadows, he made his way to the alley exit and up the stairs to the third-floor office.

For a long moment he pressed his ear to the door, but there was no sound. Either he had beaten them to the punch, or they were very good. On his previous visit to the office he hadn't seen any alarm wiring on the office door, but something made him hesitate. Then he realized what it was. The office was the bull's-eye of the red zone. If they were to come at him, this is where it would be. But he had no choice, he decided with a slight shrug. He had already taken two strikes: Weizman and Müller. The office was the only remaining route to Mengele in Paraguay. It was all he had left.

The lock was a standard Yale that wouldn't have slowed the balding, bespectacled “flaps and seals” instructor in Langley long enough to check his watch. But it took Caine almost five minutes with the pick until he heard the faint, satisfying click. In an instant he was inside with the flashlight, checking the drapes and cutting the alarm wire to the inner office. He put the can of gasoline on the desk, checked the window to make sure no light could seep out to the street, then used his folding knife to pry open the desk lock. Using standard burglar procedure, he started with the bottom drawers and worked his way up, so he wouldn't waste time closing the drawers.

The second drawer was full of folders of correspondence in German and Spanish on orders for machinery. Caine scanned the material quickly, looking for references to money being moved from Germany or the Paraguayan office, or anything on Peru. But there was nothing, except for a single cryptic reference in a letter that had slipped behind the drawer and had caught on the slot. The letter was a copy of a memo sent by Alois Mengele to the head office in Günzburg more than a year ago. In it Mengele had mentioned a possible need for funds to deal with “
der Seestern
,” or “the Starfish.” Apart from that there was nothing, Caine decided, wondering what the hell the Starfish was all about. He would have to blow the safe.

He found the wall safe behind a dusty set of ledgers on a five-tiered wall shelf. He explored carefully for alarm wires, but there didn't seem to be any. The gray
plastique
fitted in a ring around the combination lock like a doughnut on a peg. He was just about to insert the detonator, when the overhead light clicked on.

There were two of them, both of them beefy middle-aged men who looked enough like Steiger to be cousins. They had the same cropped hair, bullying air of competence, and unimaginative eyes. They were the kind of men who reacted to orders with that fanatic Prussian sense of discipline the Germans call
Kadavergehorsam
, which makes a corpse snap to attention. Except that they hadn't come to trade war stories with Caine. One of them carried a 6.35mm Walther PPK, the other a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. The guns bracketed Caine neatly between them like parentheses.

“Put your hands on your head, Herr Foster. Slowly. Very slowly,” the taller one with the shotgun said, his English thick with German consonants.

They must have been hiding in the other inner office, Caine thought, cursing himself for not having checked. It was a rookie's mistake. The fatal kind, because in this business there are no second chances. If they had come from outside, he would have heard them.

“You've made quite a mess here,” the taller one said, his eyes briefly flicking over the scattered papers, but the gun never wavered.

“Don't worry,” Caine said. “I have a cleaning lady coming in tomorrow to straighten up.”

“A comedian, Fritz,” the taller one said. “Don't you think he's a comedian?”

Fritz smiled. It was not a nice smile. Caine didn't get the idea that Fritz thought he was much of a comedian.

“Place the Luger on the desk. Slowly, with two fingers only on the butt,” he ordered.

Caine did as he was told, his mind racing. He was remembering Koenig's famous speech about guns. The one they used to have fun imitating over beers at Clyde's in Georgetown. Harris had been good at it, balancing on the balls of his feet and holding his hands on his hips, just like Koenig, his voice a nasal parody of Koenig's deep frog's croak. Throughout the Company, Koenig's theory was a voice crying in the wilderness, but Caine hoped to hell Koenig was right because it was the only chance he had.

The man with a gun is as vulnerable as the man he's aiming at,” the famous speech had begun. “That's because the very fact that he has a gun makes him think that he won't actually have to use it. That expectation slows his reaction time by as much as half-a-second and if you can get close enough, that's all the time you need. If there are two men with guns, it's even better, because each of them will wait for the other to react first and they have to be careful not to hit each other.”

Sure, Caine thought miserably, because it didn't look like these two krauts were disciples of Koenig's theories. Right now he wished that Koenig were here to put it to the test instead of him.

Fritz ordered him to face the wall and lean against it for the frisk. Caine positioned himself so that more of his weight was on his feet than his hands. He noted out of the corner of his eye as he turned to the wall that Fritz shoved the Walther in his belt as he approached, so that he would have both hands free for the frisk. He apparently counted on the taller kraut's shotgun to cover Caine. It was the mistake he had been praying for, Caine thought, and he tried to empty his mind so that the action would be instinctual, which is the way the body works best. If you questioned an Olympic champion on what he was thinking when he set the record, the odds are that he wouldn't be able to tell you, because conscious thought only impedes reflex action.

The frisk, as every police rookie learns, is a vulnerable position for the officer, because he has to come within a range where his reaction time is slower than any movement, making his gun useless. The theory is that the prisoner's weight should be on his hands so they can't be used as weapons without losing balance. At the Farm they were taught the theory's basic fallacy, which was that the wall provided a purchase for a rear kick.

The angle would be critical because he had to guess at the exact instant that Fritz's body would be momentarily between him and the shotgun. With his face to the wall he wouldn't be able to see it. He could only feel it through the aikido concept of
irimi
, in which you sense that an opponent has entered your space and the resulting blow combines the force of his momentum against your own. Caine began the calm, rhythmic breathing that would initiate the instantaneous flow of the
kokyu no henka
movement, remembering the way Koichi would stand there in the gym, oblivious to everything except the harmony of his own breathing.

His mind barely had time to register the hard feel of Fritz's hands starting under his armpits when he moved, lashing backward at the right shin with his heel. He caught it wrong, missing the nerve, but it was all right, because the balance was gone and they both were falling. He felt the hot deafening explosion of the shotgun blast singe his ears as he fell backward on top of Fritz, who reacted immediately even before they hit the floor by wrapping his arms around Caine, pinning Caine's arms to his sides in a crushing grip. His upper arms felt useless, as though caught by a steel band, as they both kicked desperately in an attempt to find something to push against for leverage. Caine managed to twist slightly sideways and brought the edge of his right hand in a slicing motion behind him, past his hip. There was the feel of something soft and then hard as his hand connected with the pelvic bone and the satisfying sound of a grunt from Fritz, as the pain hit his groin and slightly loosened his grip.

He sliced again with his hand, this time connecting solidly with the groin. Fritz's sudden scream was lost in the blinding whoosh of a second explosion, the sudden heat searing Caine's skin. Some of the shotgun pellets had hit the can of gasoline on the desk and it had exploded into a fireball. The room filled with white-hot light that dissolved every shadow in a blinding glare. For an instant Caine's hands were almost free, and as he reached behind him for the Bauer, he caught Fritz's middle finger in his left hand, bending it back with a savage twist that snapped the bone like a dry twig.

Out of the corner of his eye Caine saw the barrel of the shotgun somewhere in the blinding glare of flame and fired the Bauer without aiming, wildly emptying the clip in the direction of the shotgun. He managed to roll to his feet, crouching to avoid the fire searing his lungs like acid. The room was going up in flames like a tinderbox, the taller kraut's wounded body burning as it thrashed feebly on the floor like a half-crushed insect.

Caine braced himself as an enraged Fritz came surging up at him, and almost absentmindedly Caine could hear the distant hee-haw of a police siren. Fritz was swinging a wild right hook and at the last second Caine sidestepped away from it and tried a back-knuckle feint to the temple. As Fritz's arm came up to block the blow, Caine executed a reverse spinning round-kick that missed the solar plexus but caught Fritz in the stomach. Fritz started to double over and Caine locked his fingers and smashed down at the back of Fritz's neck in a two-handed chop that smashed Fritz's head into the corner of the burning desk with a crack like the sound of a well-hit baseball. Fritz crumpled to the floor, his body contorted in an awkward posture of death. Caine slapped at his already smoldering clothes as he leaped for the flaming doorway. There were barely seconds left and with a sudden desperate leap he dived headfirst through the doorway, arms over his head and rolled to his feet in the smoke-filled front office. He bolted through the office door and down the corridor toward the side staircase.

As he ran, he could hear the shouts of police and firemen pounding up the front staircase. Ignoring them, he ducked his head and leaped down the stairs, taking almost an entire flight in a single bound, then tore down the side alley away from Independencia Nacional. He ran down the dark empty street toward the car, the echo of his footsteps lost in the rumble of police and fire engines and the howl of approaching sirens. The breath whistled through his lungs like air through a cracked flute as he ran on. His throat was filled with the bleak taste of defeat, like ashes in his mouth. The game was over. He had blown it.

CHAPTER 9

“
Allah akhbar ashadu an la ilaha Allah wa ashadu anna Mohammed rasul Allah
,” the yearning cry of the
muezzin
came warbling from a loudspeaker in the distant El Aqsa mosque. The setting sun gilded the cluster of stone houses crowded over the hills with a rich patina, as of burnished gold. The metallic Dome of the Rock glowed like a burning ember in the brilliant tangerine dusk. The dome dominated the Temple mount, perhaps the holiest spot on earth. It had been built over the gray rock on which, as the legend has it, Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac. That same rock had been the heart of the Holy of Holies of Solomon's Temple, the resting place of the Ark of Moses. Jesus had called the Temple his “Father's House” when he chased the moneylenders from its courtyard. Later, the prophet Mohammed had ascended to heaven from that very spot, the hoofprints struck by his horse still visible on the surface of the rock, according to the Moslems.