Greg Iles - The Spandau Phoenix

desperate captain unknowingly precipitated the most bizarre conspiracy

of the Second World War. And a hundred miles to the east, alive or eat

rea u Hess-a man with enough secrets in his head to unleash catastrophic

civil war in England@isappeared from the face of the earth.

The Duke of Hamilton maintained his attitude of skepticism throughout

the brief interview, but before he left the hospital, he issued orders

that the prisoner be moved to a secret location and held under double

guard.

BOOK ONE

WE T BERLIN, 1 7

A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit

concealeth the matter.

PROVERBS 11.13

CHAPTER ONE

The wrecking ball arced slowly across the snow-carpeted

courtyard and smashed into the last building left on the prison grounds,

launching bricks through the air like mosscovered mortar rounds. Spandau

Prison, the brooding redbrick fortress that had stood for over a century

and housed the most notorious Nazi war criminals for the past forty

years, was being leveled in a single day.

The last inmate of S andau, Rudolf Hess, was dead. He had committed

suicide just four weeks ago, relieving the West German government of the

burden of one million pounds sterling it paid each year to maintain the

aged Nazi's isolated captivity. In a rare display of solidarity,

France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union-the

former Allies who guarded Spandau by monthly turns-had agreed that the

prison should be destroyed as quickly as possible, to prevent its

becoming a shrine to neo-Nazi fanatics.

Throughout the day, crowds had gathered in the cold to watch the

demolition. Because Spandau stood in the British sector of Berlin, it

fell to the Royal Engineers to carry out this formidable job. At first

light an explosives team brought down the main structure like a

collapsing house of cards.

Then, after the dust settled into the snow, bulldozers and wrecking

cranes moved in. They pulverized the prison's masonry, dismembered its

iron skeleton, and piled the remains into huge mounds that looked all

too familiar to Berliners of a certain age.

This year Berlin was 750 years old. All across the city massive

construction and restoration projects had been proceeding apace in

celebration of the historic anniversary. Yet this grim fortress, the

Berliners knew, would never rise again. For years they had passed this

way as they went about their business, rarely giving a thought to this

last stubborn symbol of what, in the glow of glasnost, seemed ancient

history. But now that Spandau's forbidding battlements no longer

darkened the Wilhelmstrasse skyline, they stopped to ponder its ghosts.

By dusk, only the prison heating plant still stood, its smokestack

painted in stark relief against the gunmetal clouds. A wrecking-crane

drew back its mammoth concrete ball. The stack trembled, as if waiting

for the final blow. The ball swung slowly through its arc, then struck

like a bomb.

The smokestack exploded into a cloud of brick and dust, showering what

had been the prison kitchen only minutes before.

A sharp cheer cut through the din of heavy diesel motors.

It came from beyond the cordoned perimeter. The cheer was not for the

eradication of Spandau particularly, but rather a spontaneous human

expression of awe at the sight of largescale destruction. @tated by the

spectators, a French corporal gestured for some German policemen to help

him disperse the crowd. Excellent hand signals quickly bridged the

language barrier, and with trademark efficiency the Berlin Polizei went

to work.

"Achtung!" they bellowed. "Go home! Haue ah! This area is clearly

marked as dangerous! Move on! It's too cold for gawking!

Nothing here but brick and stone!"

These efforts convinced the casually curious, who continued home with a

story of minor interest to tell over dinner.

But others were not so easily diverted. Several old men lingered across

the busy street, their breath steaming in the cold. Some feigned

boredom, others stared openly at the wrecked prison or glanced furtively

at the others who had stayed behind. A stubborn knot of young

toughs@ubbed "skinheads" because of their ritually shaven

scalpsswaggered up to the floodlit prison gate to shout Nazi slogans at

the British troops.

They did not go unnoticed. Every passerby who had shown more than a

casual interest in the wrecking operation had been photographed today.

Inside the trailer being used to coordinate the demolition, a Russian

corporal carefully clicked off two telephoto exposures of every person

who remained on the block after the German police moved in.

Within the hour these photographs would find their way into KGB

caserooms in East Berlin, where they would be digi tized, fed into a

massive database, and run through a formidable electronic gauntlet.

Intelligence agents, Jewish fanatics, radical journalists, surviving

Nazis: each exotic species would be painstakingly identified and

catalogued, and any unknowns handed over to the East German secret

policethe notorious Stasi-to be manually compared against their files.

These steps would consume priceless computer time and many man-hours of

work by the East Germans, but Moscow didn't mind asking.

The destruction of Spandau was anything but routine to the KGB.

Lavrenti Beria himself, chief of the brutal NKVD under Stalin, had

passed a special directive down through the successive heads of the

cheka, defining the importance of Spandau's inmates to unsolved cases.

And on this evening-thirty-four years after Beria's death by firing

squad-only one of those cases remained open.

Rudolf Hess. The current chief of the KGB did not intend to leave it

that way.

A little way up the Wilhelmstrasse, perched motionless on a low brick

wall, a sentinel even more vigilant an the Russians watched the Germans

clear the street. Dressed as a laborer and almost seventy years old,

the watcher had the chiseled face of a hawk, and he stared with bright,

unblinking eyes. He needed no camera. His brain instantaneously

recorded each face that appeared in the street, making associations and

judgments no computer ever could.

His name was Jonas Stern. For twelve years Stern had not left the State

of Israel; indeed, no one knew that he was in Germany now. But

yesterday he had paid out of his own pocket to travel to this country he

hated beyond all thought.

He had known about Spandau's destruction, of course, they all did.

But something deeper had drawn him here. Three days ago-as he carried

water from the kibbutz well to his small ev desert-something bilious

had shack on the edge of e Neg risen from his core and driven him to

this place. Stern had not resisted. Such premonitions came

infrequently, and experience had taught him they were not to be ignored.

Watching the bulwarked prison being crushed into powder, he felt

opposing waves of triumph and guilt roll through his chest. He had

known-he knew-men and women who had passed through Spandau on their way

to the death factories of Mauthausen and Birkenau. Part of him wished

the prison could remain standing, as a monument to those souls, and to

the punishment meted out to their murderers.

Punishment, he thought, but not justice. Never justice.

Stern reached into a worn leather bag at his side and withdrew an

orange. He peeled it while he watched the demolition. The light was