He wasn’t finished—he showed his teeth in a
joyless grin. He looked relaxed enough, except that the joints of
his fingers were slowly turning purple.
“So what if you kill him?” he went on,
finally. “What difference will that make? We don’t know how much
von Goltz may have told him or who else the Colonel may have taken
into his confidence. If he doesn’t get Esther Rosensaft to tell him
he may figure the whole thing out for himself some other way, but
at least with Hagemann we know where we are. You kill him and I
guarantee another will spring up to take his place. Revenge solves
nothing. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering when
the poison gas canisters will start raining down on my apartment
building. I want that formula.”
. . . . .
It had started to rain by the time
Christiansen left the Hotel Goya. He could hear them pinging
against the metal awnings over the shop windows, big wet drops like
tears. When he felt the rainwater going down the back of his neck,
he turned up his overcoat collar. Norwegians were supposed to be
immune to the coldest, wettest weather; they weren’t supposed to
catch pneumonia on the Spanish Mediterranean—it was a question of
national honor. He decided he had better find somewhere in out of
the damp before he disgraced himself, but first he wanted to get
out of this tangle of cat houses and bars.
Making a dash through the traffic, he crossed
the Ramblas, reaching the curb just ahead of a great sheet of water
thrown up by a passing taxi. He waited under the cement balcony of
a hotel until the rain subsided. It didn’t take long.
Hirsch had offered him a lift into Burriana,
but he thought it might be better if he found his own way. After
all, Hagemann had the cooperation of the local police, and Hagemann
might be halfway expecting the arrival of a large Norwegian with a
scarred left hand—he had given plenty of indication that he knew
all about Inar Christiansen. There was no percentage in
compromising the Mossad’s end of things as well. Christiansen would
get there by himself.
Besides, Hirsch made him nervous.
“If and when you do get this stuff, what will
you do with it?” It hadn’t seemed such a naive thing to ask.
“That’s a leadership decision,” Hirsch had
answered, just a little too quickly. He shrugged his shoulders and
his face went blank; Christiansen might have been talking to a
plaster wall. “I’m just supposed to get it. It’s use is a political
question.”
Sure. Except that to Hirsch a weapon was just
that, a weapon. Something to be used against one’s enemies. He
planned to win this war of his. He didn’t care how; he just planned
to win. Well, who could blame him? Where would he go—where would
any of them go—if they lost?
Talking to Hirsch always gave him a bad
conscience. Hirsch had a way of lumping all Gentiles in with the
Einsatzgruppen
—there were only two kinds of people: Jews and
people who murdered Jews. Or consented to their murder, or turned
away with a shrug. That Inar Christiansen hadn’t been the
commandant of Auschwitz was merely an accident of history.
But Hirsch was right about one thing—in his
heart, all Christiansen cared about was settling up for
Kirstenstad. He wanted to kill Colonel Egon Hagemann. That was what
was important to him personally, and he could be ashamed of it
because he had no business putting one man’s death above the
survival of thousands.
So he would help them get their fucking
formula, and then nothing on God’s earth would stop him from
pulling Hagemann’s guts out an inch at a time.
But first he had to get to Burriana.
15
Christiansen ran down the sail on the boat he
had rented in Castellón de la Plana and tied it to the boom. He was
about half a mile offshore, so he fished around in his kit for the
pair of field glasses he had taken off the body of a dead German
officer in 1943. He wanted a close look at an outcropping of rock
that climbed up from the surf like a wall. It was late afternoon
and he hadn’t more than an hour of daylight left. He didn’t want to
waste it.
The boat had an auxiliary motor, but there
had been a good breeze blowing straight down the coast so he hadn’t
felt the need to use it. Besides, the sail was quieter and
attracted less attention. It was the irresistible prejudice of the
machine age that sailboats were the province of harmless cranks.
None of Hagemann’s army of sentries would be made nervous by a tiny
triangle of white canvas bobbing up and down on the horizon.
He was reasonably sure this was the right
place. He couldn’t see a house, but the cliff faces matched
Hirsch’s description and there didn’t seem to be anyplace like it
near enough that he could have made a mistake. Burriana itself was
only about a mile and a half farther up the coast, its low
whitewashed buildings twinkling in the sun. He could have pulled in
there and asked, but that probably wouldn’t have been very
bright.
The cold waves lapped against the sides of
the boat, and it rocked slightly with every move Christiansen
made—it was only about twelve feet long. There was something
strangely comforting about being out alone on the open water. As
almost nowhere else, one really was alone.
Christiansen scanned the cliff face through
his field glasses, and, yes, it looked almost as formidable as
Hirsch had warned. There were no tides to speak of in the
Mediterranean, and the rock dropped straight down into the sea.
There was no beach, no firm ground from which to mount an assault.
And along the south wall, where the sunlight hit it, the face
glistened. It was oozing wet, probably slippery as the sides of a
fish. It could be climbed—anything could be climbed—but it would
take time. Nobody was getting up there in a quick three
minutes.
Everything, of course, would depend on how
heavily the crest was patrolled.
He wondered what sort of a life Hagemann was
leading up there in his seaside fastness—did he feel safe or were
his nights tormented by dreams of retribution? It would have been
nice to think so, but it wasn’t likely. There wasn’t much evidence
that he had either the conscience or the imagination for anything
like that. An intelligent man within certain limits, Egon Hagemann
was otherwise your standard Nazi thug.
It was all there in the Allied War Crimes
Commission dossiers—quite a typical career for the sort of man who
ends up running a death camp. Born February 3, 1899, in Günzburg,
son of a primary school teacher. Drafted into the German army in
July, 1917, and saw the war at close quarters as an infantryman
along the Ardennes front. Wounded twice, received the Iron Cross,
Second Class, mustered out as a sergeant in January of 1919.
Briefly attended the university at Munich.
Then Egon Hagemann seemed to find himself. He
discovered politics—or at least that side of politics concerned
with breaking people’s noses and throwing bricks through
plate-glass windows. Membership in various
Freikorps
. Joined
the Nazi Party and the SA in 1927. Transferred to the SS in 1930.
From there the only direction was up.
And now he was living in splendor because he
had convinced the Syrians that he could deliver the formula for a
nerve gas that would finish the work of the Final Solution.
And Just to be sure he survived to see it, he
had talked his Arab sponsors into buying him this fortress by the
briny deep.
It was wonderful, the confidence the Germans
placed in such things. When they had overrun Norway in 1940, one of
the prizes that interested them most was the heavy water facility
at Vemork—they wanted the stuff for their atomic weapons research,
and Vemork was almost the only large-scale producer in Europe.
Anyone would have supposed they would have taken adequate
precautions against sabotage.
The plant itself was located on a little
notch in the rock face of a mountain. The workers had to cross over
a suspension bridge from town and, for the rest, the place was
considered impregnable. After all, you could guard a bridge easily
enough, and who in his right mind would try scaling a
six-hundred-foot rock face?
Nevertheless, four Norwegian commandos, some
of them men Christiansen had trained with, had climbed straight up
from the frozen riverbed with enough plastic explosives to put the
place out of business for months. They even got out alive, which
just went to prove that anything was possible.
Perhaps not anything. There was one crucial
difference: the Vemork team had merely to reach its target, plant a
few charges, and run, while in this instance it would be necessary
to capture Hagemann and take him out, alive. Further, at Vemork the
Germans had been so sure of themselves they hadn’t even bothered to
patrol the cliffs. Hagemann was unlikely to make the same
mistake.
But one mustn’t complain. At least the cliffs
weren’t six hundred feet high.
The wind was beginning to pick up as the
sunlight faded. Christiansen’s little boat began to buck slightly
against the restraint of the anchor rope, and he was glad he had
thought to bring his rain parka. He slipped his arms into the
sleeves, lit a cigarette, and had another look through the field
glasses to see if anyone was moving up there.
At twenty before five he saw his first
sentry, just a man in a checkered coat walking along with a rifle
slung over his shoulder. No uniform, of course. Sometimes one
becomes conscious of an expectation only after it has been
disappointed. Needless to say, Hagemann wasn’t going to call
attention to his people by dressing them up in SS black.
Christiansen would wait and see how long the
fellow took to make his circuit. It would provide some idea of the
size of the property, and also of how much time an assault team
would have to get up that rock face to level ground. One could
hardly start the second he turned his back.
The man wandered by, his eyes down on the
ground and his hands in his pockets. If he was thinking about
anything it was probably his dinner. He wasn’t really expecting
anything to happen—he was bored. After a few seconds he disappeared
behind a clump of trees.
It all seemed so straightforward now.
Hagemann was up there; all that was required was to go get him. It
wasn’t a matter of success or failure—Christiansen expected that he
would probably be killed—it was simply that now everything was very
clear.
He had even written what was in effect his
will, disposing of the only piece of property he had that could be
said to have any genuine value. When they had stopped off in Bern
for a day and a night, Christiansen had left Esther behind in their
hotel room and had gone to visit his old composition teacher, who,
with the war over, had returned to Europe and was teaching at the
conservatory. They had spent an hour together, drinking tea and
talking about New York and what everyone was doing now and whether
there was any future in this serial music that was such a hot item
just then with the avant-garde, and at the end of it Christiansen
had left behind his cello, along with a letter to be opened in
three weeks’ time. If he wasn’t back to claim it by then it was a
safe bet he would be dead somewhere, and the cello would go to
Juilliard. They would find someone to do it justice.
That only left Esther. He couldn’t give her
anything except the cello, which she wouldn’t want and which wasn’t
really his anyway—a great instrument like that, a work of art in
its own right, is never more than out on loan. Perhaps the only
thing he could do for Esther was to find some way of getting to
Hagemann, so she wouldn’t have to be the bait in their trap. The
bait—that had been his idea to begin with. Poor little Esther, who
said she loved him. He didn’t have a lot to be proud of on that
side.
Hagemann was up there, waiting for her.
At a few minutes after five, two men appeared
at the top of the cliff. Neither of them was the sentry, who hadn’t
returned. They weren’t part of the troops. They both were wearing
expensive-looking overcoats. The taller man’s was a double-breasted
camel’s hair, quite stylish with a wide turned-up collar, and the
other man’s was blue. The shorter man was wearing a hat, which
shaded his face, but he seemed a dark-complected sort anyway. They
stood together talking—perhaps they had come outside expressly for
that purpose, to be away from everyone.
It was impossible, at that distance, to make
out their features. They were just two men, tall and short, light
and dark, watching the sea. They could have been anyone.
And then the sentry’ came by again, and
stopped to give the taller man a crisp straight-arm salute, and
Christiansen knew at once.
. . . . .
Hagemann returned the man’s salute, raising
his hand and then opening it so that the gesture appeared to be
nothing more than a friendly wave. He disliked performing these
little military ceremonies in front of Faraj, who seemed to find
them somehow rather humorous. Faraj was a civilian, without any
great respect for the soldier’s view of the world.
Of course, given the current state of the
Syrian army, that wasn’t really such an unreasonable attitude.
They waited in silence until the sentry had
disappeared out of earshot, and then Faraj turned to him and smiled
his tranquil, maddeningly diplomatic smile.
“You must understand our impatience,
Colonel,” he said soothingly—it was almost as if the man fancied
himself in a boudoir. “The best estimates are that, even after you
have provided us with the formula, it will require at least two
weeks before we can begin generating tactically useful quantities
of the gas. We must have results soon if we are to justify the very
considerable expense. . .
“Yes, my friend, all in good time. The girl
arrived by train less than two hours ago. Do you see how the Mossad
delivers her into my hands?”