David Baldacci: Deliver Us From Evil

“He and Whit don’t always get on.”

Reggie frowned. “None of us get on all the time. It’s the nature of the beast.”

She swallowed some tea and played with a biscuit on her plate. It was gray and drizzly outside, and a sharp wind smacked against the window, apparently trying to force its way inside. Across from them an ill-nourished fire sputtered in the soot-caked fireplace. Reggie knew if the weather stayed like this through the summer, half of London would become suicidal and the other half would seriously contemplate it. Ordinarily, a trip to warm, sunny Provence would be a godsend. Ordinarily.

“You know he wanted a frontline place with Huber but the professor objected?”

She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “That was Huber. Whit going in guns blazing wasn’t going to work in that situation. The old Nazi wanted boobs and ass, not a touchy Irishman with tats and a Glock.”

Dominic raised an eyebrow. “Whit has tattoos?”

Reggie sighed wearily. “Get on with it, Dom. I’m tired.”

“But perhaps with Kuchin Whit can participate?”

“I told Whit I’d talk to Mallory, and I will.” She eyed him over her cup. “What about you? What part do you want to play?”

Dominic shrugged. “I’ve been reading up on the Holodomor ever since our first meeting. I really want to get this bastard.”

“Just don’t let your emotions run away with you. That makes you lose your focus, and that’s where mistakes come in.”

“How do you turn it off? How do you not feel?”

She leaned still closer and her lovely eyes grew wide and her smile seductive. “I’ll tell you how. Every time Huber put his hand on my ass I pretended it was you, Dom, feeling me up. And that got me through it.” She tongued a piece of biscuit into her mouth.

Dominic blinked and looked confused, his cheeks tinged red.

Reggie laughed. “I’m just kidding. I’m taking Whit’s advice to lighten up more. Seriously, when he did that he wasn’t touching me, he was grabbing Barbara, his German bimbo. I had to play the role in order to take him down. One step at a time. It was just a role. That’s how I got through it. I get emotional and lose it, he walks. That’s the best motivation not to ever lose it. Because then they win.”

Dominic swallowed the rest of his beer. “What was it like?”

She stared dully at him. “What, when he had his bloody hand up my skirt?”

“No, I meant when you, you know?”

“I really didn’t think about it, to tell you the truth. I just did it.”

“I’ve never had to do it yet. I was just wondering.”

“When the time comes you’ll deal with it, Dom. Everyone does it differently, but you’ll finish the job. I have no doubt.”

He was silent for a moment and then said in a low voice, “The other Nazi hunters turned them over to the police and they were tried in court. Why don’t we do it that way?”

Reggie leaned forward and said in a near whisper, “Those are just the cases you read about in the newspapers. And do you really think there aren’t groups that turned the Germans directly over to the Israelis? And do you think the Jews gave them their day in court? And people are losing interest. The Americans have a division at their Justice Department devoted to the Nazis. Funding and personnel have been slashed because everyone believes the old Hitler lovers are mostly dead. As if the bloody Third Reich had a monopoly on evil. I’ve seen genocide in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe that would bugger the imagination. Evil has no geographic boundaries. Anyone who thinks otherwise is barmy.”

After a few moments of silence Dominic changed subjects. “So how do you see the plan formulating?”

She gave him a stern look. “In a way that I don’t want to discuss in a public place.”

“Sorry. I’m heading out to Harrowsfield tonight.”

Reggie relaxed. “So am I. The professor wants to start early. And the couple in the flat above mine are screwing their brains out every hour. All I hear is ‘Oh God, oh God, yes, do me!’ I turn my wireless up all the way, but it’s still driving me mad. Do you want to ride out together?”

“No, I’ll take my motorbike.”

“You mean your crotch rocket?” she said wryly.

“What? Oh, you’ve been talking to Whit about more than missions.”

“Pretty rainy to be doing the two-wheeler, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got all-weather gear.” He added wistfully, “I like it better at Harrowsfield than I do my place in Richmond.”

“I like it that I’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep.”

“I’ll see you there then. I have to stop for some petrol first. Cheers.”

As they got up to leave she put a hand on his shoulder. “Dom, when the moment comes all you need to focus on is that justice is finally being done. That’s all. And you’ll be fine. I promise.”

THE NEXT MORNING Reggie woke early. She sat up in her bedroom on the third floor of Harrowsfield and shivered. This part of the house was never heated. She looked out the window. The rain had passed and she thought she could actually see some sunlight breaking through the cloud cover. She washed her face with water from the tap, changed into sweats and sneakers, left the mansion through the rear, and started her run. Five miles later, sweaty and her lungs percolating nicely, she returned to the house. The smells of coffee brewing and bacon and eggs cooking drifted out from the kitchen. She quickly showered, enduring the last minute of rinsing with only cold water as the old pipes muttered and clanked in protest of their usage. She changed into jeans, flats, and a black V-neck sweater with a white tee underneath and headed downstairs.

There sometimes could be as many as twenty people at Harrowsfield, though today she knew the number was closer to ten, some of them historians doing research in the library or in a set of offices set up on both the main and second floors. Their one goal was to identify the next monster the team would go after. There were linguists immersing themselves in some language from lands where new evil lurked. Still other researchers were poring over old cable communications, pilfered diplomatic records, and handwritten accounts of atrocities smuggled out of third world countries. The task was harder now, she knew. The Nazis had been meticulous record-keepers. Subsequent sadists, operating in many different places, weren’t nearly as accommodating in leaving a trail of their pervasive wickedness.

Mallory had used great care in vetting all of the people who worked here. There was no formal recruitment, of course. One couldn’t put an advertisement in the paper seeking justice-minded vigilantes comfortable with killing folks who desperately deserved it.

In her case, Mallory had sought Reggie out at university where he was a visiting scholar. After a months-long courtship of sorts, he’d broached the subject of bringing to justice Nazis who’d fled Germany before the fall. When she’d enthusiastically agreed with the goal, he’d gone a bit further, finally ending with the theoretical possibility of saving the world the price of a trial by also playing the roles of judge, jury, and executioner.

More months had passed while he allowed her to stew on that. When she’d voluntarily returned to him with more questions, he’d answered them, to a certain extent. When he could sense her commitment deepening he’d let her meet with some other folks. Whit was one and Liza another. Another month passed and then Mallory brought her some news clippings of an old man who’d been found slain in his lavish home in Hong Kong. Though it had never been made public, Mallory told her that the fellow had been identified as a former concentration camp commander and one of Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand men. They had talked long into the night of the ethics involved in such an action. It was never explicitly said, but Reggie suspected that the professor and other people she’d met through him had been behind the killing. By then she desperately wanted to be part of it.