Стив Берри - The Kaiser's Web--A Novel

“You are being played for a fool,” she said.

No shocker there. “By who?”

“The Brown Eminence.”

“He’s long dead.”

“Not his successors.”

“Does that mean Theodor Pohl?”

She smiled, her cheeks colored by only a slight warmth. “They don’t want you to know of Africa. They want you to think Bormann and Braun lived and died here. But that is not true.”

If not for events of the past few days he would have dismissed her as insane.

She glared at him. “How old do you think me?”

He’d been wondering the same thing. “Eighty to eighty-five.”

She smiled. A first. “You flatter me, Herr Malone. I am ninety-three.”

“You age well.”

“Aryan genes, perhaps. But I was never one to believe in all that racial superiority.” She paused. “My father worked in the Reich’s Security Office in Stuttgart at the local Gestapo headquarters. He was an envoy who traveled all over Europe, performing various duties. What those might have been, I have no idea. I was sixteen when the war ended. Everything around us was in shambles. One day in 1945 my father went away and never came home. My mother, brother, and I had no idea what happened to him. Dead? Alive? We did not know. He was just gone. Then, in 1947, my mother told us we were leaving Germany and moving to Argentina. I was astounded. I had never ventured more than a hundred kilometers from Stuttgart. But I must admit, I was pleased to go. Germany was in ruins.

“We first went to Italy, then sailed from there to Buenos Aires. We were given new names and identities, which we all thought strange. I became Margarita. But I abandoned that fiction long ago and took back my birth name. Ada. A few days after we arrived, my father appeared. Safe and healthy. It was astonishing. He took us by car west until we saw the Andes Mountains. We traveled up into the foothills and eventually came to an iron gate that was opened by armed men, who allowed us inside. A few days after that we came to Chile.”

“You’ve been here ever since?”

She nodded. “I was young and somewhat naïve, just glad to be away from war. Eventually I came to learn that powerful men require others to implement what they need done. Those others are not important people, just ones the powerful can rely upon. My father was that for Martin Bormann.”

Now he was intrigued.

“He handled many tasks. Personal and business. One of his duties was to provide protection. So he created many Bormanns. In Europe, Asia, across South America. Those who searched for the Brown Eminence found most of them, but never did they come close to the actual man.”

He recalled more of what he’d read on the internet earlier. For decades after the war Bormann sightings had been regularly reported throughout Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Even Vergara described a possible encounter. A few of the Bormanns even turned themselves in to authorities, claiming a need for justice in their old age, but all were eventually confirmed as either deranged or delirious. Never had a serious lead developed that Martin Bormann was alive.

“Your father did a good job.”

“That he did. It was his idea to move Bormann and Braun to Africa. He’d been told of the Orange Free State, and Bormann finally agreed to go.”

He was trying to gauge her, deciding if she could be believed. But she’d gone to a lot of trouble to get him here.

“I hate Nazis,” she said.

“Your father was a Nazi.”

“That’s true. And for a daughter who wants to remember him fondly, that fact has been difficult.”

It seemed she wanted to speak her mind, so he let her.

“I went once and heard Hitler speak.” A sadness laced her declaration as memory seemed to take hold. “He paraded into the hall to some lively military tune, wearing his brownshirt uniform and the shiniest boots I’d ever seen. Everyone stood while he spoke. It was required. He had a voice like thunder and he reveled in mocking his enemies, telling us the latest outrage the Fatherland had suffered. He loved to use mythology and antiquity to emphasize a glorious destiny. The crowd laughed, applauded, and shouted approval for two hours. It was hideous.”

He heard the disgust in her voice.

“He was an evil man who thought little of women. He came to our house once. I heard him tell my mother that a woman must be a cute, cuddly, naïve little thing, tender, sweet, and dumb. Their duty was to birth children and please their husbands. He was a pig.”

“And Bormann?”

She spat on the floor. “Even worse. A sloven bastard. He treated Evi miserably.”

He made the connection. Evi. Eva Braun’s nickname, which only her closest friends used.

“Back then, living here, in southern Chile, was like being in Germany,” she said. “We all spoke German in school. The walls of our classrooms were decorated with swastikas and portraits of Hitler. We joined the youth organization and learned to respect hard work and authority. We read Mein Kampf and old copies of Das Reich. We studied Goebbels’ speeches and were trained as avengers, told one day we would be part of the next great struggle for a new Germany. What nonsense. But we did all live together, growing our own food and taking care of one another in what many called Hitler’s Valley. It stretched across Patagonia with three main communities: Deutschland, Heimat, and Vaterland.”

Germany. Homeland. Fatherland.

“It was quite lovely,” she said. “Bormann was in charge of it all. Until he left. Then my father took over. When he died, all of the responsibilities passed to me.” She surveyed him with an insolent air of triumph. “Many have come before you, searching. And we have always dealt with them. The last encounter happened a few years ago. Two Americans. One died. One was deceived.”

Jonathan Wyatt. Chris Combs.

“You were part of that?” he asked.

“I arranged the entire deception.”

“Why?”

“It was part of my duty. But the Kaiser ordered one of my friends murdered in the process. A wonderful woman named Isabel. For that there is no forgiveness. I no longer owe that disgusting man anything.”

“So why did you agree to be a part of what’s happening here?”

She smiled. “My last opportunity to repay the Kaiser.”

“Pohl has led us the whole time? To right here?”

She nodded, her face a blend of confidence and calm. “But I have now assumed control of your leash.”

“To what end?”

She gestured with a disdainful sweep of her hand, then pointed. “That you will discover in the plastic bin, there, on the table.”

He glanced through an archway into a small dining room and saw the container.

“I prepared it just for you,” she said.

How convenient.

“Please take it, and go.”

Apparently the meeting was over. So he stood, walked over, and grabbed the container. But before he left he removed the toy soldier from his pocket, the one he’d found at the hacienda, and set it on the table.

“I believe this is yours.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHILEAN LAKE DISTRICT

3:15 P.M.

Engle eased his car close to another vehicle parked on the shoulder of the road in a thick stand of araucaria trees. He stopped directly adjacent to the driver’s-side window and rolled down his own window.

“What happened?” he asked the man in the other car, whose window was already down.

“Malone came three hours ago. He and Ada spoke in the church. I snuck in through a rear door and got close enough that I could hear.”

He listened as his spy reported all that was said.

None of it good.

“Malone did not get here by way of the path we set up,” his man reported. “Ada led him on her own.”