The Scarlatti Inheritance (44 page)

“He must understand first!” The misshapen head nodded back and forth. “He must be made to understand!”

“If it meant that much, why did you hide it? Why did you become Kroeger?”

The nodding head stopped, the ashen slit eyes stared. Canfield remembered Janet speaking about that look.

“Because Ulster Scarlett was not fit to represent the new order. The new world! Ulster Scarlett served his purpose and once that purpose was accomplished, he was no longer necessary.… He was a hindrance.… He would have been a joke. He had to be eliminated.…”

“Perhaps there was something else, too.”

“What?”

“Elizabeth. She would have stopped you again.… She would have stopped you later, just the way she stopped you at Zurich.”

At Elizabeth’s name, Heinrich Rroeger worked up the phlegm in his scarred throat and spat. It was an ugly sight. “The bitch of the world!… But we made a mistake in twenty-six.… Let’s be honest, I made the mistake.… I should have asked her to join us.… She would have, you know. She wanted the same things we did.…”

“You’re wrong about that.”

“Hah! You didn’t know her!”

The former field accountant replied softly without inflection. “I knew her.… Take my word for it, she despised everything you stood for.”

The Nazi laughed quietly to himself. “That’s very funny.… I told her she stood for everything I despised.…”

“Then you were both right.”

“No matter. She’s in hell now.”

“She died thinking you were dead. She died in peace because of that.”

“Hah! You’ll never know how tempted I was over the years, especially when we took Paris!… But I was waiting for London.… I was going to stand outside Whitehall and announce it to the world—and watch Scarlatti destroy itself!”

“She was gone by the time you took Paris.”

“That didn’t matter.”

“I suppose not. You were just as afraid of her in death as you were when she was alive.”

“I was afraid of no one! I was afraid of nothing!” Heinrich Kroeger strained his decrepit body.

“Then why didn’t you carry out your threat? The house of Scarlatti lives.”

“She never told you?”

“Told me what?”

“The bitch-woman always covered herself on four flanks. She found her corruptible man. My one enemy in the Third Reich. Goebbels. She never believed I’d been killed at Zurich. Goebbels knew who I was. After nineteen thirty-three she threatened our respectability with lies. Lies about me. The party was more important than revenge.”

Canfield watched the destroyed man below him. As always, Elizabeth Scarlatti had been ahead of all of them. Far ahead.

“One last question.”

“What?”

“Why Janet?”

The man in the chair raised his right hand with difficulty. “Him.… Him!” He pointed to Andrew Scarlett.

“Why?”

“I believed! I still believe! Heinrich Kroeger was part of a new world! A new order! The true aristocracy!… In time it would have been his!”

“But why Janet?”

Heinrich Kroeger, in exhaustion, waved the question aside. “A whore. Who needs a whore? The vessel is all we look for.…”

Canfield felt the anger rise inside him, but at his age and in his job, he suppressed it. He was not quick enough for the boy-man beside him.

Andrew Scarlett rushed forward to the overstuffed chair and swung his open hand at the invalid Kroeger. The
slap was hard and accurate. “You bastard! You filthy bastard!”

“Andy! Get back!” He pulled the boy away.

“Unehelich!” Heinrich Kroeger’s eyes were swimming in their sockets. “It’s for you! That’s why you’re here! You’ve got to know!… You’ll understand and start us up again! Think! Think the aristocracy! For you … for you.…” He reached with his slightly mobile hand to his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a slip of paper. “They’re yours. Take them!”

Canfield picked up the paper and without looking at it handed it to Andrew Scarlett.

“They’re numbers. Just a lot of numbers.”

Matthew Canfield knew what the numbers meant, but before he could explain, Kroeger spoke. “They’re Swiss accounts, my son. My only son.… They contain millions! Millions! But there are certain conditions. Conditions which you will learn to understand! When you grow older, you’ll know those conditions have to be met! And you’ll meet them!… Because this power is the power to change the world! The way we wanted to change it!”

The man-boy looked at the deformed figure in the chair. “Am I supposed to thank you?”

“One day you will.”

Matthew Canfield had had enough. “This is it! April Red has his message. Now I want it! What are you delivering?”

“It’s outside. Help me up and we’ll go to it.”

“Never! What’s outside? Your staff members in leather coats?”

“There’s no one. No one but me.”

Canfield looked at the wreck of a man in front of him and believed him. He started to help Heinrich Kroeger out of the chair.

“Wait here, Andy, I’ll be back.”

Major Matthew Canfield, in full uniform, helped the crippled man in brown tweeds down the stairs and onto the lobby floor. In the lobby, a servant brought over the crutches discarded by the Nazi when he first ascended the staircase to his room. The American major and the Nazi went out the front door.

“Where are we going, Kroeger?”

“Don’t you think it’s time you called me by my right
name? The name is Scarlett. Or, if you will, Scarlatti.” The Nazi led them to the right, off the driveway, into the grass.

“You’re Heinrich Kroeger. That’s all you are to me.”

“You realize, of course, that it was you, and you alone who caused our setback in Zurich. You pushed our timetable back a good two years.… No one ever suspected.… You were an ass!” Heinrich Kroeger laughed. “Perhaps it takes an ass to portray an ass!” He laughed again.

“Where are we going?”

“Just a few hundred yards. Hold your pistol up, if you like. There’s no one.”

“What are you going to deliver? You might as well tell me.”

“Why not? You’ll have them in your hands soon enough.” Kroeger hobbled along toward an open field. “And when you have them, I’m free. Remember that.”

“We have a deal. What is it?”

“The Allies will be pleased. Eisenhower will probably give you a medal!… You’ll bring back the complete plans of the Berlin fortifications. They’re known only to the elite of the German High Command.… Underground bunkers, rocket emplacements, supply depots, even the Führer’s command post. You’ll be a hero and I’ll be nonexistent. We’ve done well, you and I.”

Matthew Canfield stopped.

The plans of the Berlin fortifications had been obtained weeks ago by Allied Intelligence.

Berlin knew it.

Berlin admitted it.

Someone had been led into a trap, but it was not him, not Matthew Canfield. The Nazi High Command had led one of its own into the jaws of death.

“Tell me, Kroeger, what happens if I take your plans, your exchange for April Red, and don’t let you go? What happens then?”

“Simple. Doenitz himself took my testimony. I gave it to him two weeks ago in Berlin. I told him everything. If I’m not back in Berlin in a few days, he’ll be concerned. I’m very valuable. I expect to make my appearance and then … be gone. If I don’t appear, then the whole world knows!”

Matthew Canfield thought it was the strangest of ironies. But it was no more than he had anticipated. He had
written it all down in the original file, sealed for years in the archives of the State Department.

And now a man in Berlin, unknown to him except by reputation, had reached the same conclusion.

Heinrich Kroeger, Ulster Stewart Scarlett—was expendable.

Doenitz had allowed Kroeger—bearing his false gifts—to come to Bern. Doenitz, in the unwritten rule of war, expected him to be killed. Doenitz knew that neither nation could afford this madman as its own. In either victory or defeat. And the enemy had to execute him so that no doubts existed. Doenitz was that rare enemy in these days of hatreds. He was a man his adversaries trusted. Like Rommel, Doenitz was a thorough fighter. A vicious fighter. But he was a moral man.

Matthew Canfield drew his pistol and fired twice.

Heinrich Kroeger lay dead on the ground.

Ulster Stewart Scarlett was—at last—gone.

Matthew Canfield walked through the field back to the small inn. The night was clear and the moon, three-quarters of it, shone brightly on the still foliage around him.

It struck him that it was remarkable that it had all been so simple.

But the crest of the wave is simple. Deceptively simple. It does not show the myriad pressures beneath that make the foam roll the way it does.

It was over.

And there was Andrew.

There was Janet.

Above all, there was Janet.

Read on for an excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s

The Bourne Identity

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying.

Two abrupt explosions pierced the sounds of the sea and the wind and the vessel’s pain. They came from the dimly lit cabin that rose and fell with its host body. A man lunged out of the door grasping the railing with one hand, holding his stomach with the other.

A second man followed, the pursuit cautious, his intent violent. He stood bracing himself in the cabin door; he raised a gun and fired again. And again.

The man at the railing whipped both his hands up to his head, arching backward under the impact of the fourth bullet. The trawler’s bow dipped suddenly into the valley of two
giant waves, lifting the wounded man off his feet; he twisted to his left, unable to take his hands away from his head. The boat surged upward, bow and midships more out of the water than in it, sweeping the figure in the doorway back into the cabin; a fifth gunshot fired wildly. The wounded man screamed, his hands now lashing out at anything he could grasp, his eyes blinded by blood and the unceasing spray of the sea. There was nothing he could grab, so he grabbed at nothing; his legs buckled as his body lurched forward. The boat rolled violently leeward and the man whose skull was ripped open plunged over the side into the madness of the darkness below.

He felt rushing cold water envelop him, swallowing him, sucking him under, and twisting him in circles, then propelling him up to the surface—only to gasp a single breath of air. A gasp and he was under again.

And there was heat, a strange moist heat at his temple that seared through the freezing water that kept swallowing him, a fire where no fire should burn. There was ice, too; an ice-like throbbing in his stomach and his legs and his chest, oddly warmed by the cold sea around him. He felt these things, acknowledging his own panic as he felt them. He could see his own body turning and twisting, arms and feet working frantically against the pressures of the whirlpool. He could feel, think, see, perceive panic and struggle—yet strangely there was peace. It was the calm of the observer, the uninvolved observer, separated from the events, knowing of them but not essentially involved.

Then another form of panic spread through him, surging through the heat and the ice and the uninvolved recognition. He could not submit to peace! Not yet! It would happen any second now; he was not sure what it was, but it would happen. He had to
be
there!

He kicked furiously, clawing at the heavy walls of water above, his chest burning. He broke surface, thrashing to stay on top of the black swells. Climb up!
Climb up!

A monstrous rolling wave accommodated; he was on the
crest, surrounded by pockets of foam and darkness. Nothing. Turn!
Turn!

It happened. The explosion was massive; he could hear it through the clashing waters and the wind, the sight and the sound somehow his doorway to peace. The sky lit up like a fiery diadem and within that crown of fire, objects of all shapes and sizes were blown through the light into the outer shadows.

He had won. Whatever it was, he had won.

Suddenly he was plummeting downward again, into an abyss again. He could feel the rushing waters crash over his shoulders, cooling the white-hot heat at his temple, warming the ice-cold incisions in his stomach and his legs and.…

His chest. His chest was in agony! He had been struck—the blow crushing, the impact sudden and intolerable. It happened again!
Let me alone. Give me peace
.

And again!

And he clawed again, and kicked again … until he felt it. A thick, oily object that moved only with the movements of the sea. He could not tell what it was, but it was there and he could feel it, hold it.

Hold it! It will ride you to peace. To the silence of darkness … and peace.

The rays of the early sun broke through the mists of the eastern sky, lending glitter to the calm waters of the Mediterranean. The skipper of the small fishing boat, his eyes bloodshot, his hands marked with rope burns, sat on the stern gunnel smoking a Gauloise, grateful for the sight of the smooth sea. He glanced over at the open wheelhouse; his younger brother was easing the throttle forward to make better time, the single other crewman checking a net several feet away. They were laughing at something and that was good; there had been nothing to laugh about last night. Where had the storm come from? The weather reports from Marseilles had indicated nothing; if they had he would have stayed in the shelter of the coastline. He wanted to reach the fishing grounds eighty kilometers south of La Seyne-sur-Mer by
daybreak, but not at the expense of costly repairs, and what repairs were not costly these days?