Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

He took off the gag again. “I can break every finger and both your hands, Bayer,” he whispered. “After that I’ll take the bulb out of the table lamp, switch it on, and stuff your prick down the socket.”

Bayer closed his eyes, and sweat rolled in torrents off his face. “No, not the electrodes. No, not the electrodes. Not there,” he mumbled.

“You know what its like, don’t you?” said Miller, his mouth a few inches from Bayer’s ear.

Bayer closed his eyes and moaned softly. He knew what it was like. Twenty years before, he had been one of the men who had pounded the White Rabbit, Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas, to a maimed pulp in the cellars beneath Fresnes Jail in Paris. He knew too well what it was like, but not on the receiving end.

“Talk,” whispered Miller. “The forger, his name and address.”

Bayer slowly shook his head. “I can’t,” he whispered. “They’ll kill me.”

Miller replaced the gag. He took Bayer’s little finger, closed his eyes, and jerked once. The bone snapped at the knuckle. Bayer heaved in his chair and vomited into the gag.

Miller whipped it off before he could drown. The fat man’s head jerked forward, and the evening’s highly expensive meal, accompanied by two bottles of wine and several double Scotches, poured down his chest into his lap.

“Talk,” said Miller. “You’ve got seven more fingers to go.”

Bayer swallowed, eyes closed. “Winzer,” he said.

“Who?”

“Winzer. Klaus Winzer. He makes the passports.”

“He’s a professional forger?”

“He’s a printer.”

“Where? Which town?”

“They’ll kill me.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me. Which town?”

“Osnabruck,” whispered Bayer.

Miller replaced the gag across Bayer’s mouth and thought. Klaus Winzer, a printer in Osnabruck. He went to his attaché case, which contained the diary of Salomon Tauber and various maps, and took out a road map of Germany.

The autobahn to Osnabruck, far away to the north in Nord Rhine/Westphalia, led through Mannheim, Frankfurt, Dortmund, and Munster. It was a four-to five-hour drive, depending on road conditions. It was already nearly three in the morning of February 21.

Across the road Mackensen shivered in his niche on the third floor of the half-completed building. The light still shone in the room over the road, the second floor front. He flicked his eyes constantly from the illuminated window to the front door. If only Bayer would come out, he thought, he could take Miller alone. Or if Miller came out, he could take him farther down the street. Or if someone opened the window for a breath of fresh air.

…He shivered again and clasped the heavy Remington .300 rifle. At a range of thirty yards there would be no problems with such a gun. Mackensen could wait; he was a patient man.

In his room Miller quietly packed his things. He needed Bayer to remain quiescent for at least six hours.

Perhaps the man would be too terrified to warn his chiefs that he had given away the secret of the forger.

But Miller couldn’t count on it.

He spent a last few minutes tightening the bonds and the gag that held Bayer immobile and silent, then eased the chair onto its side so the fat man could not raise an alarm by rolling the chair over with a crash.

The telephone cord was already ripped out. He took a last look around the room and left, locking the door behind him.

He was almost at the top of the stairs when a thought came to him. The night porter might have seen them both mount the stairs. What would be think if only one came down, paid his bill, and left? Miller retreated and headed toward the back of the hotel.

At the end of the corridor was a window looking out onto the fire escape.

He slipped the catch and stepped out onto the escape ladder. A few seconds later he was in the rear courtyard, where the garage was situated. A back entrance led to a small alley behind the hotel.

Two minutes later he was striding the three miles to where he had parked his Jaguar, half a mile from Bayer’s house. ne effect of the drink and the night’s activities combined to make him feel desperately tired. He needed sleep badly but realized he had to reach Winzer before the alarm was raised.

It was almost four in the morning when he climbed into the Jaguar, and half past the hour before he had made his way back to the autobahn leading north for Heilbronn and Mannheim.

Almost as soon as he had gone, Bayer, by now completely sober, began to struggle to get free. He tried to lean his head forward far enough to use his teeth, through the sock and the scarf, on the knots of the ties that bound his wrists to the chair. But his fatness prevented his head from getting low enough, and the sock in his mouth forced his teeth apart.

Every few minutes he had to pause to take deep breaths through his nose.

He tugged and pulled at his ankle bonds, but they held. Finally, despite the pain from his broken and swelling little finger, he decided to wriggle his wrists free.

When this did not work, he spotted the table lamp lying on the floor. The bulb was still in it, but a crushed light bulb leaves enough slivers of glass to cut a single necktie. it took him an hour to inch the overturned chair across the floor and crush the light bulb. it may sound easy, but it isn’t, to use a piece of broken glass to cut wrist-bonds. It takes hours to get through a single strand of cloth.

Bayer’s wrists poured sweat, dampening the cloth of the neckties and making them even tighter around his fat wrists. It was seven in the morning, and light was beginning to filter over the roofs of the town, before the first strands binding his left wrist parted from the effects of being rubbed on a piece of broken glass. It was nearly eight when his left wrist came free.

By that time Miller’s Jaguar was boring around the Cologne Ring to the east of the city with another hundred miles before 0snabrUck. It had started to rain, an evil sleet running in curtains across the slippery autobahn, and the mesmeric effect of the windshield wipers almost sent him to sleep.

He slowed down to a steady cruise at eighty m.p.h., rather than risk running off the road into the muddy fields on either side.

With his left hand free, Bayer took only a few minutes to rip off his gag, then lay for several minutes, whooping in great gulps of air. The smell in the room was appalling, a mixture of sweat, fear, vomit, and whisky. He unpicked the knots on his right wrist, wincing as the pain from the snapped finger shot up his arm, then released his feet.

His first thought was the door, but it was locked. He tried the telephone, lumbering about on feet long since devoid of feeling from the tightness of the bindings. Finally he staggered to the window, ripped back the curtains, and jerked the windows inward and open.

In his shooting niche across the road, Mackensen was almost dozing despite the cold, when he saw the curtains of Miller’s room pulled back.

Snapping the Remington up into the aiming position, he waited until the figure behind the net curtains jerked the windows inward, then fired straight into the face of the figure.

The bullet hit Bayer in the base of the throat, and he was dead before his reeling bulk tumbled backward to the floor. The crash of the rifle might be put down to a car backfiring for a minute, but not longer.

Within less than a minute, even at that hour of the morning, Mackensen knew someone would investigate.

Without waiting to cast a second look into the room across the road, he was out of the third floor and running down the concrete steps of the building toward the ground. He left by the back, dodging two cement mixers and a pile of gravel in the rear yard. He regained his car within sixty seconds of firing, stowed the gun in the trunk, and drove off.