James Becker - Echo of the Reich

But it was the overcoats that puzzled him. Now that the sun had gone down, the evening was getting cooler, but the air was still warm, and presumably the house had a central heating system, so why were the two men dressed in that fashion? It couldn’t be because they were cold; that didn’t make sense. In fact, Bronson could only think of one possible reason for what they were wearing, and he didn’t like the idea at all.

He switched his attention back to the events unfolding in front of him. One of the men was still standing by the open door of the garage, while the other was escorting the four guests to the door at the rear of the garage, and in a few moments all five men had disappeared from view.

Bronson toyed with the idea of trying to get across to the house and into the garage while there was only one man on duty, but he guessed there was only one logical reason for the second man to remain by the open door, and that was because additional visitors were expected. Moments later, he was proved right when a second car turned into the driveway and parked near the first. Again, four men emerged from the car, collected bags and then disappeared into the garage. The only difference this time was that as soon as all four men were inside, the garage door closed behind them and the thin sliver of light visible under the door was extinguished.

Bronson lay still, the binoculars still clamped to his face, studying the building, but no lights went on anywhere in the property, and in any case, every set of shutters that was visible to him was now firmly closed.

He tried to make sense of what he’d just seen. The only reason he could think of for the two men to be clad in heavy overcoats on such a mild evening was because of what they were wearing underneath. That, together with the gleaming black leather boots they both had on, suggested a uniform of some sort, and presumably a uniform that they did not want any casual passerby to see. And that thought generated a host of different, and distinctly unpleasant, possibilities.

From the first, Bronson had assumed that Marcus and his band of men had formed a terrorist organization, and terrorist groups did not tend to wear uniforms or anything else that would enable them to be easily identified. That, in fact, was the point. Terrorists lurked in the shadows, forming their plans, delivering their weapons, and then making their escape, if at all possible, completely undetected. Wearing a uniform would never be a part of their agenda.

He still had no doubt that Marcus had planned some kind of terrorist-style atrocity against London, but now Bronson wondered if the German had formed a sort of private army. Could this gathering at the house be a meeting of the principal officers of that army, a meeting that required the attendees to wear full uniforms? That would explain not only what the two men in the garage had been wearing, but also the bags that the eight visitors had carried into the house.

And there was yet another, even darker, possibility, suggested to Bronson by those gleaming black boots. What if Marcus hadn’t created a private army? What if he had simply re-created an older one? Maybe what was happening inside the property at that very moment was a neo-Nazi revival, a re-creation of a part of one of the most evil and ruthless regimes the modern world had ever seen. The thought sent a shiver down Bronson’s spine.

One thing was now perfectly clear to him: there was no way he could get inside the property that evening. There were simply too many people in there for him even to attempt it. And if his theory about a neo-Nazi group was correct, if he was apprehended on or near the property, he had absolutely no doubt what the outcome would be. If he was lucky, they’d simply shoot him. If he was unlucky, he’d be strapped to that hideous chair in the concrete room and worked over for a day or two by some of Marcus’s men to extract whatever information they wanted, and then they’d kill him.

The one thing he wasn’t going to do, he decided, was get any closer to the house. He considered returning to his car and simply driving away, but he was loath to do that for the moment. In any case, he had no idea where he’d go or what he should do. He couldn’t simply walk away from what he’d been forced to do inside that house. He had to try somehow to retrieve both the pistol he’d used to kill the man in the chair and the film Marcus had taken of the event. For the moment, that must be his goal. The bigger, and ultimately far more important, problem of the threat to London had receded somewhat in his mind, taking second place in his list of priorities.

The best thing he could do, he decided, was wait. And watch. When the garage door finally opened again, he might see something that would help him decide his course of action, and perhaps he could even memorize some of the faces of the people as they emerged to return to their cars. A decent camera with a telephoto lens would have been extremely useful at that point, but Bronson hadn’t gotten one, and he had no way of obtaining one at that time in the evening.

For the next two hours, the house remained still and silent: no lights showing in any of the windows, no sign of any activity. The winking, telltale light on the burglar alarm box had been extinguished, because the system had been disarmed, and the property looked completely deserted. The moon was the faintest of crescents high in the sky above him, but it cast sufficient light for Bronson to see the shape of the house, even if he could no longer make out any of the details.

The noises of the wood had changed after nightfall. The birdsong had ceased, the buzzing of insects was no longer audible, and a silence seemed to have fallen across the land, disturbed only by the sounds of the creatures of the night. Somewhere over to his right a vixen screamed, the howl of a tortured soul, and some distance behind him a snuffling and grunting sound suggested that he’d been right about the possibility of wild boar being found in the area. He heard plenty of noises, but actually saw very little. A fox wandered across the clearing in front of him, between him and the house, and paused briefly to stare in his direction before moving on, following its usual patrol route. Several times he heard bats, their high-pitched squeaking unmistakable, and once a large owl, uncannily silent on its massive wings, flew slowly over the house, heading north on its nightly search for prey.

Just before midnight, the light in the garage snapped on again, dimly outlining the closed door, and moments after that, with a faint click and the whirr of an electric motor, the door began to open and light flooded out across the gravel drive.

Bronson focused the binoculars on the garage. As the door clicked up into the fully open position, one man appeared, striding across to the wall on the left-hand side of the door, then disappeared from view. Moments later, three floodlights mounted on the garage wall were switched on, illuminating the two parked cars outside the building. Then the man reappeared, stepped outside the garage and looked round, then walked back inside and across to the internal door, which was standing open.

Before he reached it, another figure appeared, quickly followed by about seven or eight others, most of them carrying bags-Bronson guessed they were the men he had seen arriving earlier. As far as he could tell, they were dressed in the same clothes they’d been wearing before, but as he stared through the binoculars at the group, now standing and talking more or less in the center of the garage, one figure immediately stood out.

Bronson knew that he would never forget Marcus’s face. It wasn’t simply that he recognized the man who’d forced him to kill a helpless human being, it was what the German was wearing that gripped his attention.