'Actually, Ethan, I came up here hoping you would be the one to come after me.'
'You know, I never met a coward yet who wasn't ready with an excuse the minute he turned rabbit.'
The shot that hit Ethan sent him stumbling back along the pillar. The second bullet knocked him down. As Ethan slid and then tumbled down the pitch, he kept his eyes on the rocks below him - gauging his fall without quite controlling it.
He managed to stay on the pillar all the way to the base, but that was it. When he dropped over the edge he slammed into a boulder four feet under the rim. His armour saved his ribs, but his face slapped stone and he lost consciousness as he dropped the last six feet.
When he came to, Ethan moved his legs slowly, almost curiously. Not paralyzed, he thought, but his body ached, and he could not be sure if anything was broken. His pain was too general to know anything with certainty. He struggled to sit up and wondered if Kenyon was close by. He looked overhead, realising Kenyon might already be taking aim. He saw only the grey, moonlit sky.
'Are you still there, Bob?' he called.
There was no answer.
'It's okay, buddy. I dropped my gun when I fell. I won't put up a fight if that's what you're afraid of. You're going to have to look me in the eye though when you do it. I know that might be hard for a man who hires other people to do his dirty work, but it's got to be done. . .'
Kenyon's shadow cut across the skyline. He was standing at the base of the pillar ten feet overhead. Ethan saw him swing his arm: taking aim. 'Tell me something, Ethan,' he said. 'Was she worth it?'
Malloy knew Ethan was in trouble when he drew his weapon and then didn't move, but there was nothing he could do except watch and wait for a shot if Kenyon showed himself. He could hear nothing of their conversation, of course, but he could almost imagine the bile between the two men. That alone explained Kenyon's willingness to double back and risk everything for the chance at Ethan.
Ethan staggered before Malloy heard the gunshot. A second gunshot stepped on the echo of the first. By then Ethan was already sliding across the rock. From his vantage point, Malloy had no idea if Ethan's armour had protected him or if Kenyon had shot him in the head. He could not even tell how far Ethan
fell after he dropped out of sight.
He felt his gut go hollow as he watched, the ache of possibly losing a man who had become a close friend, but he hadn't the luxury of indulging in his grief. Kenyon was going to have to move or risk getting caught by the police, and he wanted to be ready.
His first chance at Kenyon was a fleeting one. Kenyon's body was in profile only a moment before he went behind yet another boulder. Not wanting to give himself away with a bad shot, Malloy waited for a better opportunity.
Then Kenyon emerged from the rocks and stood stock still for the space of a second or two on the pillar from which Ethan had fallen. His body faced Malloy. His weapon was aiming down at Ethan's position.
Putting the red dot over Kenyon's heart, Malloy squeezed off one round without hesitation. He heard the soft spit of the bullet, watched Kenyon drop at almost the same instant, and then heard the well-oiled slide of the mechanism as his weapon ejected the hot shell.
Malloy and Kate and Josh Sutter were waiting for Ethan at the front gate when the police helicopter ferried him from the rocks to the brightly lit front lawn. As soon as he touched down, Ethan stepped out of the saddle and walked toward Kate, who came toward him as if every step hurt. 'The police tell me Kenyon asked if he could talk to you. They're willing to give you a couple of minutes, if you want to see him.'
'He can go to hell,' Kate said.
'You're not going to have another chance for a long time, Kate. Maybe years.'
'The man is dead to me, Ethan. I never want to see him again. I don't even want to hear his name.'
Ethan reached out to hook his arm around her.
'Careful,' she told him, wincing at the gesture. 'Everything hurts.'
'I know the feeling,' he answered, letting his lips brush against her forehead and hair, thinking to himself, 'Most definitely worth it.'
*
Malloy walked Josh Sutter back toward the helicopter that contained Robert Kenyon, two Spanish police officers and a medic who was busying working on his patient. 'You're kidding me,' Josh announced incredulously. His voice was as bright as the day they had first met. 'You were aiming at his
heart?'
'You didn't really think I wanted to hit him in the foot, did you?'
'The
Federates
were telling me you shot him there because you wanted to be sure we could take him alive.'
Malloy laughed. 'Makes a good story, I guess, but it's just not true. I was going for the kill and screwed up.'
They stopped well beyond the whirling blades of the police helicopter. Josh needed to go, but he seemed to want to say something more. 'I appreciate your insisting that I fly over for the arrest, T. K. That was. . . it meant a lot to me.'
'I told you I would.'
'I know you did but, you know, people say things, and then they forget. You have no idea how good it felt to put the cuffs on that guy and read him his rights.'
'I thought you'd want to see him in the ground. I sure did.'
'Jim always said it was better to take a scumbag alive. That way the lawyers got to peck at his liver for a few years before we finally strapped him down on the gurney and took him out of his misery.'
'Jim was a hard man - but a good soul.'
'He was the salt of the earth, T. K.'
'Are you going to be all right with the Bureau - after what happened in Hamburg?'
'My supervisor told me he wanted to send me back to Germany to face charges when they were screaming for me to be extradited, but then the Germans decided they didn't need to talk to me after all. I mean, they actually said they didn't think I had done anything inappropriate, so he cooled down some. You wouldn't happen to know anything about why the Germans changed their minds about me, would you?'
'Someone gave them a list of names from Chernoff's laptop.'
'Someone?'
'One of the senior accountants I work for. Anyway, the Germans were so happy about getting the information they decided to accept our explanation of what happened.'
'That Jim and Dale went rogue, and you and I went home?'
'That's the story I like.'
Josh thought about this for a minute. 'What about the siege at that park where we spent half the night?' he asked. 'Jim and Dale can't get the blame for that too, can they?'
'Those guys were probably Chernoff's people, don't you think?'
Berlin,
February 1939.
The letter had no return address, but like all his mail for the past year or so it showed signs of having been opened. Inside Rahn found a note that read:
You are being investigated.
Elise had not signed it, but he knew her handwriting. He knew as well that she had put herself at risk by mailing such a warning. Of course he had suspected for some time that they were reading his mail and tapping his phone. If Himmler had ordered an investigation, that was another matter. It meant they were not going to be content until they had everything. A stray remark, a fool-hardy tryst, an intercepted letter such as this one, and of course a detailed racial profile. . .
The world had changed in the past two years. Not so much in direction as speed. He had seen terrible things at Dachau in 1937, but those things had paled against the open hostility in the worker camp — the slave camp — at Buchenwald. They were no longer interested in containment. Buchenwald had become a death camp in all but name. They were not marching people to the walls and shooting them, of course. They simply worked them to death. In the end it all came to the same. They drove the people to exhaustion, and those who did not go quickly, the young and strong ones, they starved. Then there were the ones who got special treatment from the mad wife of the camp director who, even among the guards, was called the Witch of Buchenwald.
What he was still trying to understand was how he had got into the middle of it. He was not that sort of man! But of course there were a great many men who were not at all
that sort.
Truth was they had moulded him into their image by giving him what he wanted most. He had enjoyed the comforts Himmler had extended to him. He liked his salary. He liked notoriety. He enjoyed the company of intellectuals. He liked the women who came to him for the asking and performed. . . anything. He liked fine restaurants and the best seats at the opera. He even liked giving speeches to adoring ladies and respectful old gentlemen.
He could chide himself for the deal he had made with Himmler, but he had enjoyed every second of it until he had understood that in the process he had become a murderer like the rest of them! It had been a Faustian bargain - his soul for the freedom to write! And the joke of it was this: he could no longer write. The better part of his second book he had written long before Heinrich Himmler had made him a knight of the Order of the Skull. The rest was taken from him and rewritten so that it seemed he had ranted against the Jews. Why hadn't he quit when they rewrote his book? Of course he knew the answer - he just didn't like it. No question really. He hated what they did to his book, but still enjoyed the splendour of knighthood, the runic SS, the handsome men with their eyes watching him, the beautiful women for the asking. . . the whole great show of the Reich rising up to the terror of its enemies! Until the blood of the twelve miners splashed across his soul, it had been a fine run! Now, seeing what he had done, he hated the runic double SS more than Hell's Gates. It physically revolted him when he looked down at his hand and saw the ring that bound him by a blood oath to the Devil's own.
He had not long to wait for the investigation to be completed. He knew that. They would find him out soon enough, learn his darkest secret - that amongst the pagans and heretics of his ancestry there were Jews as well. In 1935, though it had been policy to do so, no one had bothered to require him to fill out a certificate of racial purity. Certainly no one had asked about his grandparents. Why should they? He was not trying to join the SS,
they
were recruiting
him!
Of course in the first days after he had joined the Order no one had dared approach him about paperwork that he needed to complete. He had received the form some months after joining and, seeing the problem at once, he had ignored it. No one said a word, nor had he expected them to. He was Himmler's darling. His time was his own, and he might not be pleased about being ordered to fill out routine paperwork. But times had changed.
Krystalnacht
, the Night of Broken Crystal in the fall of 1938, had been a declaration of war on the Jews in Germany and Rahn's exalted position had eroded. He could no longer ignore a request for information about his ancestry. What he did not provide, they would find on their own. It was only a matter of time.
It was strange to realise he was an enemy of the Reich. Absurd, really. He remembered the miners Bachman had murdered. He had not really thought about the deadness in their eyes as they ate their meals in dull silence. He had written it off as exhaustion, but he had seen that look again at Buchenwald. It was the look of doom. Sometimes, in the mirror, he saw it in his own eyes, too. No one survived the camps, not in the end. So he went about his business each day, still nominally a member of Himmler's civilian staff,
wondering at the day and hour when they would arrest him
and pack him off to join the rest!
Sometimes, at the absurdity of it, he would laugh. It was beyond believing! Sometimes, his guts churning in fear, he was sure they were coming and that he would be better off killing himself. A bureaucratic investigation was inevitably slow but it was also careful. At some point, they would realise they had recruited a Jew! He saw men looking at him and realised word of the investigation had leaked out. They were very good about that kind of thing. He saw them get quiet as he approached. Bachman dropped by to tell him Elise was not feeling well. 'No dinners this week, I'm afraid!' A moment later he was gone. The next week it was Sarah's turn to be under the weather.
He went once, uninvited, to their townhouse, knowing Bachman was away. The maid told him Frau Bachman was engaged and could not receive him. Was there a message to give her? He had thought she would agree to see him. When she refused, he knew he was lost.
He did not decide to act because of that. The idea simply presented itself one day as he was scanning the usual reports that crossed his desk - a note about work at Berchtesgaden. The Eagle's Nest - a splendid Bavarian-style cabin cradled high among the rocks - would be completed that spring, deep inside the compound. It would be presented to the Führer on 20 April, the culmination of a national celebration of his fiftieth birthday.
Berchtesgaden was guarded by SS troops.
For the first week after the idea had simply boiled up from the chaos of his fears, Rahn managed to push it away completely. He went to his office each morning. He worked long days, his head bowed into his books. He ate and drank alone at night, watching his door with the curiosity of a fugitive as he wondered if they would come on this night or if he might be free a few nights more. Old friends happened not to notice him when he walked in the streets. When he rang up the worst sort, even they had business that kept them from seeing him socially.