Jeffery Deaver - Garden Of Beasts

Taggert stepped inside the large closet, swung the door nearly shut and undid his top several shirt buttons to alleviate the terrible heat. He breathed deeply, sucking air into his aching lungs. Sweat dotted his forehead and prickled the skin in the pits of his arms. But that mattered not one iota. Robert Taggert was wholly sustained, no, intoxicated, by an element far better than damp oxygen: the euphoria of power. The boy from low, gray Hartford, the boy beaten simply because he was a sharper thinker but a slower runner than the others in his low, gray neighborhood had just met Adolf Hitler himself, the most savvy politician on the face of the earth. He had seen the man’s searing blue eyes regard him with admiration and respect, a respect that would soon be echoed in America when he returned home and reported about the success of his mission.

Ambassador to England, to Spain. Yes, even here eventually, the country he loved. He could go anywhere he wished.

Wiping his face again, he wondered how long he would have to wait for Schumann to return.

The answer to that question came just a moment later. Taggert heard the front door of the boardinghouse open and heavy footsteps in the hall. They continued past this room. There was a knocking.

“Käthe?” came the distant voice.

It was Paul Schumann speaking.

Would he go inside her apartment to wait?

No… The footsteps returned in this direction.

Taggert heard the jangle of the key, the squeak of old hinges and then a click as the door closed. Paul Schumann had walked into the room where he would die.

Heart pounding like any hunter close to his prey, Robert Taggert listened carefully.

“Käthe?” Schumann’s voice called.

Morgan heard the creak of boards, the sound of water running in the sink. The gulp of a man drinking thirstily.

Taggert lifted his pistol. It would be better to shoot him in the chest, front on, as if he’d been attacking. The SS would want him alive, of course, to interrogate him and wouldn’t be happy if Taggert shot the man in the back. Still, he could take no chances. Schumann was too large and too dangerous to confront face-to-face. He’d tell Himmler that he’d had no choice; the assassin had tried to escape or grab a knife. Taggert had been forced to shoot him.

He heard the man walk to the bedroom. And a moment later, the sounds of rummaging through drawers as he filled his suitcase.

Now, he thought.

Taggert pushed one of the two closet doors open further. This gave him a view of the bedroom. He raised the pistol.

But Schumann wasn’t visible. Taggert could see only the suitcase on the bed. And scattered around it were some books, and other objects. Then he frowned, looking at a pair of shoes sitting in the bedroom doorway. They hadn’t been there before.

Oh, no…

Taggert realized that Schumann had walked to the bedroom but had then slipped off his shoes and eased back into the living room in stocking feet. He’d been pitching books through the doorway onto the bed to make Taggert think he was still there! That meant -

The huge fist crashed through the closet door as if it were spun sugar. The knuckles struck Taggert in the neck and jaw and he saw searing red in his vision as he staggered into the living room. He dropped the pistol and grabbed his throat, pressing the agonized flesh.

Schumann gripped Taggert by the lapels and flung him across the room. He crashed into a table and fell to the floor, where he lay crumpled like the German bisque doll that had landed beside him, unbroken, staring at the ceiling with her eerie, violet eyes.

“You’re a ringer, right? You’re not Reggie Morgan.”

Paul didn’t bother to explain that he’d done what every smart button man has to do – memorize the appearance of a room when he left it and then match that memory with what the place looks like when he returned. He’d seen the closet door, which he’d left closed, was open a few inches. Knowing that Taggert would have to track him down and kill him, he knew that’s where the man was hiding.

“I-”

“Who?” Paul growled.

When the man said nothing, Paul took him by the collar with one hand and, with the other, emptied his jacket pocket: a wallet, a number of American passports, a U.S. diplomatic identity card in the name of Robert Taggert and the Stormtrooper card he’d flashed at Paul in the alley when they’d met.

“Don’t move,” Paul muttered, then examined the find. The wallet was Reginald Morgan’s; it contained an ID card, some business cards with his name and an address on Bremer Street in Berlin and one in Washington, D.C. There were several photographs too – all depicting the man who’d been killed in Dresden Alley. One photo had been taken at a social function. He stood between an elderly man and woman, his arms around them both, all smiling at the Kodak.

One of the passports, well used and filled with entry and exit stamps, was in Morgan’s name. It too contained a picture of the man from the alley.

Another passport – the one he’d showed Paul yesterday – also contained the name Reginald Morgan but the picture was of the man in front of him. Now, he held it under a lamp and examined the document closely. It seemed phony. A second passport, which seemed genuine, contained dozens of stamps and visas and was in the name of Robert Taggert, like the diplomatic ID card. The two remaining passports, a U.S. one in the name of Robert Gardner and a German one in the name of Artur Schmidt, had pictures of the man here.

So this guy on the floor in front of him had killed his contact in Berlin and taken over his identity, Paul understood.

“Okay, what’s the game?”

“Just settle down, buddy. Don’t do anything stupid.” The man had dropped the stiff Reggie Morgan persona. The one who emerged was slick, like one of Lucky Luciano’s sharkskin-suited Manhattan underbosses.

Paul held up the passport he thought was genuine. “This’s you. Taggert, right?”

The man pressed his jaw and neck where Paul had hit him and rubbed the reddened area. “You got me, Paulio.”

“How’d it work?” He frowned. “You intercepted the pass codes about the tram, right? That’s why Morgan did a double-take in the alley. He thought I was the rat because I flubbed the phrase about the tram, same as I thought about him. Then you swapped documents when you were searching the body.” Paul read the Stormtrooper card. “‘Veterans’ Relief.’ Crap,” he snapped, furious he hadn’t looked at it more closely when Taggert had first flashed it at him. “Who the hell are you, mister?”

“A businessman. I just do odd jobs for people.”

“And you got picked because you looked a little like the real Reggie Morgan?”

This offended him. “I got picked because I’m good.”

“What about Max?”

“He was legit. Morgan paid him a hundred marks to get him the wire on Ernst. Then I paid him two hundred to pretend I was Morgan.”

Paul nodded. “That’s why the sap was so nervous. It wasn’t the SS he was afraid of; it was me.”

But the history of the deception seemed to bore Taggert. He continued impatiently. “We’ve got some horse trading to do, my friend. Now-”

“What was the point of this?”

“Paulio, we don’t exactly have time for chats, don’t you think? Half the Gestapo’s looking for you.”

“No, Taggert. If I’m understanding this right, thanks to you, they’re looking for some Russian. They don’t even know what I look like. And you wouldn’t lead ’em back here – at least not until after you’d killed me. So we’ve got all the time in the world. Now, spill.”

“This is about bigger things than you and me, buddy.” Taggert moved his jaw in a slow circle. “You fucking loosened my teeth.”