Krysalis: Krysalis (45 page)

Filing cabinets. Two seconds, burst the locks. Suppose the late-night watcher was making his way around to the front of the house right this instant, don’t think about that, don’t meet trouble before it comes, ten seconds, Lescombe, under L … no.
Shit!
Five seconds, E for Elwell … two thick, dog-eared cardboard folders, one orange, one a faded green. He opened the orange one, glanced through the first half dozen pages, yes, yes,
yes!

Penetration exactly one minute old, time to go.

He pulled his black polo-neck shirt from out of his waistband and stuck one file up the back, the other up the front, before once again tucking the shirt back in. Not comfortable, not wholly secure, but it left his hands free.

The voice had been pounding inside his head almost ever since his entry. Now it suddenly became a roar, a chorus. Get out. Don’t stop to think, don’t wait, don’t plan. Out,
out, out!

He was leaving the consulting room when he heard the start of a furious knocking on the front door, accompanied by the bark of a dog, dogs, more than one. Then another sound caught his attention. Above. Second floor. Steps, coming downstairs.

Albert retreated into the consulting room while the fracas below steadily increased in volume. Two voices. Female, shrill, frightened. And a man who seemed to be mad, spitting a mixture of strangely accented English and a sibilant language suddenly identifiable as Japanese.

Albert opened the door a crack. “… working late, I see this man, he break, he smash,
ka-cha, ka-cha!
I
watching, let’s go,
pow-eeee!”
He recognized the voice that had challenged him in the garden. Now it was the woman’s turn to speak in querulous tones too low for Albert to catch.

“Yes, yes, po’liss, po’liss, you cor, I rook.”

Again the woman; this time Albert got the word “dangerous.”

“No dangel, we have dogs. Hai,
hai!”

But the woman must have instilled some caution into him, for next the man shouted, “Oh yes, then I ret the dogs go, dey fine him okay.”

Albert heard the click of claws on polished wood and his throat tightened. He’d known Kleist didn’t own a dog; he had come without gas or poison, who would have predicted a mad Oriental neighbor?

The dogs wasted no time on the downstairs rooms, but bounded straight up the stairs, lured inexorably by the intruder’s scent. Albert closed the door, no key,
damn!
Then came a heavy thud, and claws began to work against the panels.

Find a weapon, anything. He flashed his torch around. A wood carving table … there must be a knife, a bradawl, something with a point to it. Steel files, they’d do.

But there were two dogs. Even if he managed to neutralize one, the other would get him. Keep the door shut. Which left … out the window, jump, run for it.

As Albert tugged the curtains aside, however, he looked down and saw a figure march around the side of the house, human, carrying what looked like a club.

The clawing at the door rose to a crescendo. Albert prepared to open the window, regretting the operational necessity that awaited him beneath. As he did
so, however, the door gave under the weight of the dogs and sprang open.

Two black shapes bounded into the room. Albert shone his torch. Alsatians, big, bouncy dogs. Animals with body weight and teeth. Christ Almighty, how could he have failed to close the door properly …?

He held out the brace of steel files, waiting for the brutes to home in. It took them less than a second. All the while his brain continued to function, as it had been trained to do in any crisis, analyzing data, forecasting possible outcomes, percentages, worst scenarios. Whatever happened, this was going to leave marks. If Kleist’s housekeeper was in league with him, he would certainly know he’d been rumbled after this night’s work. Catastrophe, disaster,
obliterate!

Negotiate the dogs, negotiate the people downstairs, seal the house, run, buy maximum time,
execute!

All this was processed in the instant it took the leading dog to stop, turn, and leap for the motionless person by the window.

He knew what to expect. They would have been trained to go for the throat. He forced himself to stand perfectly still until the first dog was within feet of him and already launched into its spring. Albert, both hands full and without light, judged his thrust as best he could, going low, underneath the beast’s belly. He lunged upward, hoping for the stomach, but the point of the file glanced against bone and slipped sideways instead. The dog shrieked. Albert kept pushing, twisting, gouging, until his hand was suddenly showered with invisible wetness and a dead weight bore down on his hand, carrying him with it.

He expected the second dog to jump, so he kept his free arm up to cover his throat. He could sacrifice his
forearm. As long as he kept the use of his hands and his legs, he could sacrifice any part of himself.

Things didn’t work out like that. Instead, he felt long hard needles drive through his left hand; the agony was a mixture of having his skin doused in scalding oil and the electric shock of a deep cut from a razor. Albert dropped the second steel file. His jaws locked. Grenades were going off inside his head, he couldn’t hear, think, move, but he
must not cry out.

He knew what had happened. This dog could smell meat, best-quality steak. Albert had the blood of recent butchery on his hands and the dog wanted it.

He fought to separate himself from the corpse of the first Alsatian, but it was heavy and lay on his forearm. The second animal was tearing at Albert’s left hand. He felt something give inside, a tendon; pain took him to the borders of unconsciousness and he knew he had to end this now or go under. Somehow he managed to yank his right hand free, still holding the file. The other dog growled rabidly; if he hadn’t been starving, desperate for the blood left on Albert’s hands, he would have torn out the intruder’s throat long before. As it was, Albert had mere seconds’ respite. He raised his one good hand and drove the steel file down into the back of the dog’s neck with all his remaining strength.

Go,
go, go!

Albert came upright, still holding the second metal file, and slid over to the window. The French doors through which he had entered were open, allowing light to stream onto the lawn. Through the flashes that tore across his vision he could see a middle-aged woman, her hair in curlers, hugging a lumpy pink dressing gown around her body. She was saying something,
but her words were smothered by the noisy antics of a second person.

This man stood not more than five feet two in his white socks and sneakers, wearing a tee-shirt and blue shorts that extended down past his knees. On his head, pushed far enough back to reveal an almost bald pate, was a fluorescent orange sunhat that produced a tiny trail of light whenever he moved, which he did frequently. In other circumstances, he might have come across as an eccentric, mildly amusing phenomenon, but he was holding a baseball bat in both hands and, as Albert looked down, he executed a series of Samurai-type sword exercises that were anything but funny. “Oh, God,” Albert muttered. “Oh, God.”

The Japanese lifted his head. He must have possessed remarkable night vision, for he caught sight of Albert’s face at the window and cried, “Rook!” Next moment he was running into the house.

Albert, too, was running.

He took the corridor in three strides, vaulted onto the banister and slid all the way to the bottom. The front door was still open. Before he could reach it, however, the frantic figure of the Japanese sped along the parquet floor to land in the opening, baseball bat raised ready to strike.

Albert came to a dead stop. He lifted his hands in the traditional attitude of surrender, and the Japanese grunted with satisfaction.

Albert lowered his hands. As he did so, he allowed the steel file, which he had kept concealed inside his sleeve, to drop into his palm. The Japanese waved the bat warningly, but Albert made a break for the open door.

His opponent, surprised by the sudden onrush,
backed up a pace and found himself against the wall. He brought the bat down, aiming for Albert’s head as he skated past him. In the split second before it could land, Albert leapt into the air and spun around through a semicircle. The Japanese, impelled by the force of his own blow, floundered forward and fell. Suddenly he found himself rammed up hard against the banister, with Albert’s face inches from his own. Then a wet, sticky hand inserted itself under his chin and began to push his head backward, until Albert had a clean shot at the underside of his jaw. The steel point rose inexorably up, through the man’s tongue, through the roof of his mouth, into the brain, where Albert left it.

As he sped through the front door he caught the first blue flash from a police car’s roof light turning into the street. By now he was opposite the entrance of the house next to Kleist’s. He vaulted the wall and hid behind it, flat on his stomach. The car cruised up the street and came to a halt. Albert listened. Doors slamming. Two voices. Footsteps, swiftly entering Kleist’s front garden. Any more in the car? Pray God not. He risked one look. All clear.

His sprint might have won him a place on the Olympic hundred meters team. He ran so fast that he was back in his car and rolling before he remembered that he had not stolen some precious object to give himself cover, and in a rage smashed his good hand down on the steering wheel, wishing with his entire soul that it could have been the Japanese man’s bald, fluorescent but now dead head.

CHAPTER
36

When Anna and Gerhard returned to the house on Sunday, it was to find that Barzel had reached a decision. He was no longer prepared to allow Anna to slink away as she pleased.

“Stay in the house,” he ordered her curtly.

“Tell me something.”

“Did you hear what I—”

“I heard. What have you done to my husband? Where is he?”

Barzel looked into her eyes. They were level, wide open, and glowing with independent spirit. He was afraid of the strength that gave this woman her iron spine, so straight and true, because it jeopardized his chances of returning to Berlin as did nothing else.

“How would I know?” he said, with a smile that was meant to be reassuring.

“He’s been trying to find me, hasn’t he?”

Barzel looked accusingly at Gerhard. When he did not reply at once, Anna shouted,
“Hasn’t he.”

“Don’t lose your temper.”

“The hell with you! Tell me this one thing,
where’
s
David?”

When he still did not reply, she swung her arm back, meaning to hit him, but Barzel was quicker on the uptake than Gerhard. He caught her wrists, first one then the other, and clasped them together, bringing his face to within inches of her own.

“Your husband,” he hissed, “didn’t know when to stop. So
we
stopped him.”

Anna held his gaze. Then, with a turn of speed that not even Barzel could anticipate, she kicked his right calf.

“You
bitch!”
He squeezed her wrists more tightly, taking evil pleasure from the sight of her teeth clenched in pain. “David’s dead, you hear me?”

Anna’s eyes widened still further. “No,” she whispered.

“Yes.
And if you don’t take more care over how you behave from now on, you’ll join him.”

She stopped struggling. He felt the power drain out of her, she went limp in his grasp, and after a few moments he let her go. She fell into the nearest chair, where she sat staring at Barzel through eyes that no longer glowed.

“Why did you have to do that?” Gerhard demanded.

“Shut up.”

“You don’t understand. She’s sick. You think that was any way to handle her?”

“Handling her is your problem.”

Gerhard shook his head and sighed. “Jürgen,” he said quietly, “I need to talk to you.” He used German, not wanting Anna to understand. “We have to find
some way of getting through the next few hours. Come next door, let’s talk.”

Barzel hesitated. Anna seemed to have lost the will to fight, but he distrusted her silence. There was something ominous about it. He called for Stange and told him to keep an eye on their prisoner while he talked with Kleist.

The two men went out onto the tenace, where Gerhard rested his back against the balustrade and folded his arms. “Listen,” he said. “I want to get some things into the open.”

Barzel regarded him coldly, saying nothing.

“When we arrive in Berlin,
if
we do, there’ll be questions for me to answer. I panicked, ran away with the woman, took the file. All things I shouldn’t have done. I’m going to have a hard time of it, we both know that.”

Barzel had begun to study him curiously. Kleist appeared perfectly in control of himself. He was talking sense and he made no attempt to defend Anna or promote her interests. Here was the old Gerhard, the one Barzel had recruited and trained.

It was a dangerously seductive moment for him. He needed another ally.

Notwithstanding his outward command of himself, Barzel found himself in the grip of a disabling tenor. Colonel Huper’s orders were to bring Anna to Berlin, with the file, in one piece and ready to talk
if possible.