Алистер Маклин - Prime Target

‘The Jugend von Siegfried,’ Erika said. ‘Photographed in 1945, on the very day they were inaugurated.’

Names had been entered in white ink next to everyone in the picture. The first boy on the left was Karl Sonnemann. The next one was Stefan Fliegel; beside him was Uli Jürgen.

‘Einar broke the pattern when the American showed up.’

‘Harold Gibson?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did he know about him?’

‘Emily sent me e-mail about the man and his organization, all gathered from notes she’d found – they were for a paper Uncle Johannes had been preparing at the time of his death, about Americans providing financial support to a Nazi organization in Berlin.’

‘And you showed the e-mail to Einar?’

Erika nodded. ‘He is like a ferret with anything like that. He took the information to himself, worked on his own research.’

‘Did you know he was planning to eliminate Harold Gibson?’

Erika shook her head.

‘You don’t have any control over this guy at all, do you?’ Sabrina said.

Erika said nothing. Sabrina looked at the picture again. ‘Uli Jürgen,’ she said. ‘That name rings a bell.’

Erika nodded. She pointed to the radio on the corner of the worktop. ‘Uli Jürgen. There was a bulletin. He was found dead earlier today.’

Sabrina caught Erika’s gaze and held it, trying to communicate to her the seriousness of the situation. ‘Listen, Erika, I want you to understand something. This situation that you have created has got much bigger than just your personal vendetta. Other people’s lives are at risk and that could have serious implications for world security. So I’m going to ask you again, and I want a straight answer this time: what do you do if you need to contact Einar Ahlin?’

Erika paused, searching Sabrina’s face. Apparently impressed with her gravity, she said reluctantly, ‘He has a girlfriend. She passes messages between us, both ways.’

‘What’s her address?’

Erika took down a pad and pencil from a shelf above the worktop. ‘Her name is Magda Schaeffer.’

‘Remember,’ Sabrina said, ‘if the address is wrong, I’ll be back.’

‘It’s correct, you have my word.’ Erika scribbled an address in Oranienstrasse. ‘It’s a one-room flat above a little nightclub. Magda works there, she’s a stripper.’

Sabrina put the paper in her pocket. She looked at the photograph again. The name of the boy standing next to Uli Jürgen was Andreas Wolff.

‘Do you have a scanner?’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘For these records.’ Sabrina slapped the book. ‘I want copies. Quickly.’

‘I don’t think that’s any part of our deal.’

Again there was no conviction. Sabrina felt the protest was a token.

‘Why did you let me know they exist, Erika? Why did you have them brought here?’

‘I wanted you to see them, to understand their part in what we do.’

Sabrina shook her head. ‘You wanted me to force an issue. You still want the Siegfried gang attacked, but you know damn well Einar’s going to get caught long before he gets around to killing them all. And your chances of finding another Einar must be one in a million.’

‘I know nothing of the sort.’

‘Please, Erika, credit me with a little intelligence. Your killer is an extrovert, he puts on the high profile every time he makes a hit. He’ll get taken out before he’s halfway through Emily’s list.’

‘We have a mission–’

‘You know that pretty soon your only hope will be to let the law do the job for you, because your assassin will be a goner. And I think that after the fright you got today with Gregor, you want to draw back from the physical stuff sooner rather than later.’

Erika was silent for a moment, then jerked a thumb at the door. ‘There is a scanner in my office along the hall.’

‘Come and help me.’

Erika set up a word-processing program on the computer and Sabrina used the flatbed scanner to transfer copies of the book pages on to the screen. The completed copy file was very large.

‘How do you plan to get all that on to a disk?’ Erika said. ‘The high-capacity removable drive is broken.’

‘I won’t take a copy away with me,’ Sabrina said. ‘I’ll send it to a safe box. Let me use the keyboard.’

She called up the modem, made contact with her communications area and tapped in her UNACO password for Mailbox Access. The padlocked box came up. She put in her personal access code. The lid of the box opened. She addressed the Jugend von Siegfried file to C.W. Whitlock and uploaded it. The transfer took three minutes. When it was complete, she typed out a terse note, labelled it MOST URGENT, and addressed it also to Whitlock.

‘And now I get out of your life,’ she said.

‘Can you guarantee that?’

‘No. But I’ve no desire to have anything more to do with you. Barring any sidewash, we’re through with each other.’

At the door she said, ‘I understand your mission, Erika. But you haven’t been cheated out of anything. It’s true what I said, your executioner’s luck can’t hold.’

Erika flapped her hand, perhaps accepting that. ‘My feelings about what has happened are–’ She hesitated. ‘They’re complex. Mingled. To know how I feel, maybe you would have to be a German Jew.’

C.W. Whitlock was in the corridor outside UNACO’s copy room. As he punched the red button on his mobile and dropped it in his pocket Philpott stepped up behind him.

‘There’s a communication for you from Berlin,’ Philpott said, pointing to the door of the Secure Communications Suite. ‘Shall we look at it?’

They went in and Whitlock sat down by the console. When he had ascertained the Mailbox file was from Sabrina, he punched in DIRECT PRINT and stood by to wait for the printout.

‘Can you give me a running translation of the stuff coming out of the printer?’ Philpott asked.

Whitlock nodded. For ten minutes without pause, he sight-translated from the sheet of paper unreeling on to the carpet. He read summaries of fraudulent transactions which had resulted in Jewish businessmen being ruined. He read gloating descriptions of evictions, midnight batterings, a gang rape of a Jewish woman and two murders. After the description of the second killing, Whitlock stopped.

‘I think I want to take this stuff in smaller doses from here on,’ he said.

‘Quite.’ Philpott started rolling up the ribbon of paper. ‘Our dear girl has struck gold of a particularly nauseating yellow. Let’s get translators down here to deal with this. I’ll fix a meet with the Federal German Legation.’

He glanced at the monitor. ‘Why is that blinking, C.W.?’

Whitlock looked up. ‘Damn.’ He hit the button marked READ. ‘It’s a separate communiqué. She probably meant us to read it first.’

Sabrina’s message flashed on to the screen, short and to the point: Wolff may be next on the list.

‘Talk to her as soon as you can,’ Philpott said. ‘Then alert Mike.’

‘Uli Jürgen,’ Wolff said, repeating the name, his voice husky on the telephone. ‘I heard about the murder on the radio, and the name rang a bell then. Now you mention it, I believe a member of a group I met at a restaurant on Leipziger Strasse was called that. It was one of those occasions I was being shown off by Rudolf Altenberg. Jürgen was talkative, something of a showman as I recall.’

‘He was on the list,’ Mike said. ‘He was also standing next to someone with your name on an old photograph that the assassin works with. That’s what I called to tell you. It’s a picture of all the people on the list taken when they were boys.’

‘It occurs to me,’ Wolff said, ‘that maybe that group I met were the people on this list. All about the same age as myself, all acting as if they weren’t a group. They didn’t sit together, and they said nothing about being connected in any way, but at the same time they acted as if they hadn’t seen each other in ages and were having trouble concealing their pleasure. It’s odd how a thing like that shows.’