Greg Iles - The Spandau Phoenix

could afford sixty seconds to think this thing through properly.

Trespassers at Spandau. After all these years, Moscow's cryptic

warnings had finally come true. Had Centre expected this particular

incident? Obviously they had expected something, or they wouldn't have

taken such pains to have their stukatch on hand when the British leveled

the prison. Kosov knew there was at least one informer on his Spandau

team, and probably others he didn't know about. The East German

Security Service (Stasi) usually managed to bribe a@least one man on

almost every KGB operation in Berlin. So much forfraternal socialism,

he thought, reaching for a pencil.

He jotted a quick list of the calls he would have to make: KGB chairman

Zemenek at Moscow Centre; the Soviet commandant for East Berlin; and of

course the prefect of West Berlin police. Kosov would enjoy the call to

West Berlin. It wasn't often he could make demands of the arrogant West

Germans and expect to be accommodated, but today would be one of those

days. The Moscow call, on the other hand, he would not enjoy at all. It

might mean anything from a medal to expulsion from service without a

word of explanation.

This was Kosov's fear. For the past ten years, operationally speaking,

Berlin had been a dead city. The husk of its farmer romance clung to

it, but the old Cold War urgency was gone. Pre-eminence had moved to

another part of the globe, and Kosov had no Japanese or Arabic. His

future held only mountains of paperwork and turf battles with the GRU

and the Stasi. Kosov didn't give a damn about Rudolf Hess.

Chairman Zemenek might be obsessed with Nazi conspiracies, but what was

the point? The Soviet empire was leaking like a sieve, and Moscow was

worried about some intrigue left over from the Great Patriotic War?

The Chainnan's Obsession. That's what the KGB chiefs in Berlin had

called Rudolf Hess ever since the Nuremberg trials, when he was

sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau.

Four weeks ago Kosov had thought he had received his last call about

Spandau's famous Prisoner Number Seven. That was when the Americans had

found the old Nazi dead, a lamp cord wrapped around his neck. Suicide,

Kosov remembered with a chuckle. That's what the Allied board of

inquiry had ruled it. Kosov thought it a damned remarkable suicide for

a ninety-three-year-old man. Hess had supposedly hanged himself from a

rafter, yet all his doctors agreed that the arthritic old Nazi couldn't

lift his arms any higher than his shoulders. The German press had

screamed murder, of course. Kosov didn't give a damn if it was murder.

One less German in the world made for a better world, in his view. He

was just grateful the old man hadn't died during a Soviet guard month.

Another sharp chest pain made Kosov wince. It was thinking about the

damned Germans that caused it. He hated them. The fact that both his

father and his grandfather had been killed by Germans probably had

something to do with it, but that wasn't all. Behind the Germans'

arrogance, Kosov knew, lurked a childish insecurity, a desperate desire

to be liked. But Kosov never gratified it. Because beneath that

insecurity seethed something else, something darker. An ancient, tribal

desire-a warlike need to dominate. He'd heard the rumors that Gorbachev

was softening on the reunification issue, and it made him want to puke.

As far as Kosov was concerned, the day the spineless politicians in

Moscow decided to let the Germans reunite was the day the Red army

should roll across both Germanys like a tidal wave, smashing everything

in its path.

Thinking about Moscow brought Kosov back to Hess. Because on that

subject, Moscow Centre was like a shrewish old woman. The Rudolf Hess

case held a security classification unique in Kosov's experience; it

dated all the way back to the NKVD. And in a bureaucracy where access

to information was the very lifeblood of survival, no one he had ever

met had ever seen the Hess file. No one but the chairman.

Kosov had no idea why this was so. What he did have was a very short

list-a list of names and potential events relating in responses.

to Rudolf Hess which mandated certa' One of those events was illegal

entry into Spandau Prison; and the response: immediate notification of

the chairman. Kosov felt sure that the fact that Spandau now lay in

ruins did not affect his orders at all. He glanced one last time at the

scrawled letters on his pad: Hauer, Polizei Captain. Then he stubbed

out his cigarette and lifted the red phone.

6.-25 A.M. British Sector. West Berlin

The warm apartment air hit Hans in a wave, flushing his skin, enfolding

him like a cocoon. Ilse had already left, he knew it instinctively.

There was no movement in the kitchen, no sound of appliances, no running

shower, nothing. Still jumpy, and half-starved, he walked hopefully

into the kitchen. He found a note on the refrigerator door, written in

Ilse's hurried hand: Wurst in the oven. I love YOU. Back by

18:00-Thank you, Liebchen, he thought, catching the pungent aroma of

Weisswurst- Using one of his gloves as a potholder, he removed the hot

dish from the oven and placed it on the counter to cool. Then he took a

deep breath, bent over, rolled up his pants leg and dug the sheaf of

onionskin out of his boot. His pulse quickened as he unfolded the pages

in the light. He backed against the stove for heat, plopped a chunk of

white sausage into his mouth, and picked up reading where the Russian

soldier had surprised him.

... I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate

consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and

learn the obscene truth not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but

of England@f those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her

existence for a chance to sit at Hitler's blood-drenched table. The

facts are few, but I have had more time to ponder them than most men

would in ten lifetimes. I know how this mission was accomplished, but I

do not know why. That is for someone else to learn. I can only point

the way. You must follow the Eye.

The Eye is the key to it all!

Hans stopped chewing and held the paper closer to his face.

Sketched below this exhortation was a single, stylized eye.

Gracefully curved, with a lid but no lashes, it stared out from the

paper with a strange intensity. It seemed neither masculine nor

feminine. It looked mystical somehow. Even a little creepy. He read

on: Whatfollows is my story, as best I can remember it.

Hans blinked his eyes. At the beginning of the next paragraph, the

narrative suddenly switched to a language he could not understand.

He didn't even recognize it. He stared in puzzlement at the

painstakingly blocked characters. Portuguese? he wondered. Italian

maybe? He couldn't tell. A few words of German were sprinkled through

the gibberish-names mostly-but not enough to get any meaning from.

Frustrated, he walked into the bedroom, folded the pages, and stuffed

them underneath the mattress at the foot of his bed. He switched on the

television from habit, then kicked his mud-caked boots into an empty

corner and dropped his coat on top of them. Ilse would scold him for

being lazy, he knew, but after two straight shifts he was simply too

exhausted to care.

He ate his breakfast on the bed. As much as the Spandau papers, the

thought of his father weighed on his mind. Captain Hauer had asked him