Jeffery Deaver - Garden Of Beasts

Please be assured we reject out of hand the tainted Jew-thinking of traitors like Dr. Freud but feel that solid National Socialist philosophy and science will allow us to match the personality types of soldiers with the means of death, the nature of the victims and the relationship between them to more efficiently achieve the goals you have set forth for our great nation.

We will be submitting the complete report to you within two months.

With all humble respect,

Col. Reinhard Ernst,

Plenipotentiary

for Domestic Stability

Paul looked up, across the field, to see the soldier glance into the classroom at the young men, close the door, then walk calmly to the bus and turn on the engine.

When the door to the classroom closed, the students looked around them. It was Kurt Fischer who got out of his seat and walked to the window. He rapped on it.

“You’ve forgotten the pencils,” he called.

“There are some in the back,” someone called.

Kurt found three stubby pencils sitting on a chalkboard ledge. “But not enough for us all.”

“How can we take a test without pencils?”

“Open a window!” somebody called. “My God, it’s hot in here.”

A tall blond boy, jailed because he’d written a poem ridiculing the Hitler Youth, walked to the windows. He struggled to undo the latch.

Kurt returned to his seat and tore open his envelope. He pulled out the sheets of paper to see what sort of personal information they wanted and if there would be any questions about their parents’ pacifism. But he laughed in surprise.

“Look at this,” he said. “The printing didn’t come out on mine.”

“No, mine too.”

“It’s all of them! They’re blank!”

“This is absurd.”

The blond boy at the window called, “They don’t open.” He looked around the stifling room at the others. “None of them. The windows. They don’t open.”

“I can do it,” said a huge young man. But the locks defeated him too. “They’re sealed shut. Why would that be?…” Then he squinted at the window. “It’s not normal glass, either. It’s thick.”

It was then that Kurt smelled the sweet, strong aroma of petrol exhaust flooding into the room from a vent above the door.

“What’s that? Something’s wrong!”

“They’re killing us!” a boy shrieked. “Look outside!”

“A hose. Look!”

“Break out. Break the glass!”

The large boy who’d tried to open the windows looked around. “A chair, table, anything!”

But the tables and benches were bolted to the floor. And although the room had seemed to be a regular classroom, there were no pointers, no globes, not even ink bottles in the wells they might try to shatter the glass with. Several students tried to shoulder down the door but it was thick oak and barred from the outside. The faint blue cloud of exhaust smoke streamed steadily into the room.

Kurt and two other boys tried to kick the windows out. But the glass was indeed thick – far too strong to break without heavy tools. There was a second door but that too was securely closed and locked.

“Stuff something in the vents.”

Two boys stripped off their shirts and Kurt and another student boosted them up. But their murderers, Keitel and Ernst, had anticipated everything. The vents were thick screening, a half meter by a meter in size. There was no way to block the smooth surface.

The boys began to choke. Everyone scrabbled away from the vent, into the corners of the room, some crying, some praying.

Kurt Fischer looked outside. The “recruitment” officer, who’d scored a goal against him just minutes earlier, stood with his arms crossed, gazing at them calmly, the same way someone might watch bears frolic in their pen at the Zoological Garden on Budapest Street.

Paul Schumann saw before him the black Mercedes, still protecting his prey.

He saw the SS guard looking around vigilantly.

He saw the balding man walk up to the soldier who’d fitted the hose to the classroom building, speaking to him, then jotting on a sheet of paper.

He saw an empty field where a dozen young men had just played a soccer game in their last minutes on earth.

And above all of these discrete images he saw what linked them: the appalling specter of indifferent evil. Reinhard Ernst was not simply Hitler’s architect of war, he was a murderer of the innocent. And his motive: the handy collection of information.

The whole goddamn world here was out of kilter.

Paul swung the Mauser to the right, toward the bald man and the soldier. The second gray-uniformed trooper leaned against the van, smoking a cigarette. The two soldiers were some distance apart but Paul could probably touch them both off. The balding man – maybe the professor mentioned in the letter to Hitler – was probably not armed and would most likely flee at the first shot. Paul could then sprint to the classroom, open the door and give covering fire so the boys could get away to safety.

Ernst and his guard would escape or hunker down behind the car until help arrived. But how could Paul let these young men die?

The sights of the Mauser centered on the soldier’s chest. Paul began applying pressure to the trigger.

Then he sighed angrily and swung the muzzle of the rifle back to the Mercedes.

No, he had come here for one purpose. To kill Reinhard Ernst. The young people in the classroom were not his concern. They’d have to be sacrificed. Once he shot Ernst the other soldiers would take cover and return fire, forcing Paul to escape back into the woods, while the boys suffocated.

Trying not to imagine the horror in the room, what those young men would be going through, Paul Schumann touched the ice once more. He steadied his breathing.

And, just at that moment, his prayer was finally answered. The back door to Ernst’s car opened.

I used to swim for hours at a time, and hike for days, Willi Kohl thought angrily, as he leaned against a tree and caught his breath. It was unjust to be given both a hearty appetite and a flair for a sedentary job.

Ach, and there was the matter of his age too, of course.

Not to mention the feet.

Prussian police training was the best in the world but tracking a suspect through the woods like Göring on a bear hunt had not been part of the curriculum. Kohl could find no signs of Paul Schumann’s route, nor anyone else’s. His own progress had been slow. He would pause from time to time as he approached a particularly dense thicket and make sure no one was sighting at him with a weapon. Then he’d resume his cautious pursuit.

Finally, through the brush ahead of him, he noticed a mowed field around a classroom building. Parked nearby were a black Mercedes, a bus and a van. An Opel too, on the opposite side of the field. Several men stood about, two soldiers among them, with an SS trooper beside the Mercedes.

Was this some sort of furtive black market business deal Schumann was involved in with this Webber? If so, where were they?

Questions, nothing but questions.

Then Kohl noted something unusual. He eased closer, pushing aside brush. He squinted the sweat from his eyes and looked carefully. A hose ran from the tailpipe of the bus into the school. Why would that be? Perhaps they were killing vermin.

Then he soon forgot this curious detail. His attention turned to the Mercedes, whose back door was open. A man was climbing out. Kohl realized with a shock that it was a government minister: Reinhard Ernst, the man in charge of what was dubbed “domestic stability,” though everyone knew that he was the military genius behind rearming the country.

What was he doing here? Could it -