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

“Is my husband there, too?”

“He is.”

Eisenhuth pointed upward and faced Vitt. “That man is a murderer. Apprehend him.”

And the chancellor marched off.

Cassiopeia stared up at Engle. “Ada told me to kill you.”

The man chuckled. “I’m sure she did. After all, as the chancellor noted, I did kill her friend.”

Her hand reached for the weapon at her hip. Engle’s right hand, which had been below the stone balustrade, out of view, came up holding a gun. She freed her weapon and pivoted right, hitting the hard floor, momentarily shielded from a direct line of fire. She rolled, swung the weapon around with both hands, and aimed high.

Engle was gone.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

Cotton surveyed Löwenberg from the air as the chopper lost altitude and swooped close. There was an assortment of buildings, several once surely residences, keeps, chapels, stewards’ quarters, a bailey, a coach house, and a kitchen, the walls probably erected by a succession of owners who apparently possessed the time and resources. Mullioned, dormer, and graceful oriel windows were plentiful. Arc lights cast the stone walls with a mellow, defiant medieval beauty.

He noticed cars parked inside a broad, stone-paved courtyard, perhaps once, centuries ago, a retainer’s village that had clustered to the castle like a coral growth, its occupants secure with the protection thick stone walls then provided. He saw no one other than a lone guard at the entrance to the courtyard.

He motioned down.

“Land on the road, outside the walls,” he said in the microphone around his head.

The pilot started his approach. Schüb was sitting beside him, but the old man wore no communications equipment.

“The chancellor and Cassiopeia have to be inside by now,” he said to Schüb over the noise.

“I must deal with Theodor in my own way.”

He wanted to know, “What do you have in mind?”

“That is between me and him.”

He decided not to press. Decades of bad decisions had led the old warrior sitting beside him to this onerous place in central Germany. Actions the madman Martin Bormann conceived to save his own miserable hide had brought about the birth of a son and a movement that reality could never reconcile with rationality. Perhaps Schüb was right. Pohl was best left to his father.

The chopper touched down.

He led the way out, squinting against the blast of the rotors as the helicopter rose, leaving them in silence as it disappeared off to the east.

They approached the lone guard who stood before a pillared gateway.

“We’re here to see Herr Pohl,” he said in German. “We are with the chancellor’s office.”

“Nothing was said about others arriving by air.”

The man was armed with a side pistol, as were both he and Schüb.

“Just an oversight. As you saw, we arrived by military transport. We were flown directly here per the chancellor’s orders.”

“I need to check.”

He did not want to announce his presence, so as the guard turned toward a small booth where a phone awaited he wrenched the man back and slugged him hard across the left jaw.

The man’s body went down to the cold pavement.

“That was rude,” Schüb said.

“But necessary.”

He motioned forward.

“Shall we?”

Cassiopeia rushed down the corridor toward an entrance at the far end. The space beyond loomed dim. Josef Engle was leading her. No doubt. But there was no other course.

She had to follow.

She stopped outside the doorway.

No lights burned on the other side.

She made a point never to rush into a dark room. So she quickly slipped past the doorway and entered what was once a grand knights’ hall, adorned with colonnades that rose along all four sides. A procession of colorful banners draped down from above. The largest, illuminated by the weak light of sporadic incandescent fixtures, was the symbol for the former German empire—a black, red, and gold banner emblazoned with an eagle. Glass-walled display cases stood in rows down two sides, each containing a suit of armor. The room was clearly a place of splendor, where barons once impressed visitors and confirmed their imperial authority. Pohl was apparently enamored by such displays.

But she should not be surprised.

Her gaze probed the darkness, up and down, into each of the arches.

She stood just beyond a stab of light from the corridor, at the end of one of the archways. Was Engle here, on the ground floor? Or was he above, in one of the galleries, looking down? Was he right? Left? Or on the cavernous room’s other side?

A gun fired and a bullet careened off the stone floor to her right. She dove left, seeking cover behind one of the tall display cases.

“You might find the task of capturing me more difficult than you think,” Engle said.

Cotton noticed that the only door leading from the courtyard was partially open. He’d already felt the hood of a light-colored Mercedes coupe and determined that its engine remained warm. Probably the vehicle Cassiopeia and Marie Eisenhuth had arrived in. Schüb walked ahead of him, also apparently aware that the door leading inside was cracked open. The old man marched straight to the lit portico and entered the castle.

He followed Schüb inside.

A gunshot came from somewhere within.

Off to the left and above. His eyes locked on the second-floor balcony and a thick stone balustrade.

“I am going this way,” Schüb said, and the old man slowly walked ahead toward a wide corridor.

“I’m headed there,” he said, pointing up the staircase.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Marie found Pohl’s bedchamber. Normally she would never have ventured into such a private place, but her husband was here and she desperately needed to know why.

She entered the room and immediately noticed the enormous bed with bulbous Jacobean legs. Above its head hung a massive oil painting that depicted the Archangel Michael with his sword directing anxious wayfarers toward heaven. The symbolism was not lost on her. Pohl apparently liked angels, as a brace of flying nymphs, carved in wood, held aloft lamps that lined the walls.

Then she noticed the panel.

On the far side, in an alcove that jutted off the main room.

A slab of stone hinged open.

What had Engle said?

“Follow the corridor into the master bedchamber. There is an open door there.”

She walked over, stepped inside, and saw stone stairs lined with a carpet runner that wound down in a tight circle.

“He is at the bottom.”

She slowly descended and finished standing on a polished-slate floor, staring at a Nazi banner. Her attention drifted ahead and she spied more memorabilia, each object displayed with care, as if in a museum. She entered the macabre world, her mind reeling at the spectacle. Memories from her childhood flashed vivid. Photographs of her father wearing armbands adorned with a swastika, a jacket she’d once seen in his closet, similar to ones on display before her. A gorget, bandolier, and gauntlets, all familiar and, most disturbing, a porcelain basset hound puppy, similar to one she recalled being in her father’s house for many years, innocuously displayed on a shelf in his study. She later learned how those sculptures were fashioned at Allach, near Munich, by prisoners from Dachau.

She stopped and stared at the shiny white dog.

Tears welled in her eyes.

Her father. That poor misguided fool. She’d loved him for his tenderness, yet hated him for his politics. Thankfully, he never forced his beliefs onto her, and rarely did he even speak of the subject, but the words he’d spoken when he thought death was near— Heil Hitler —verified all that she’d long suspected about his values.