Greg Iles - The Spandau Phoenix

"Guten Abend, Colonel." He turned and jogged to the waiting Ford.

While Kosov fumed, Rykov emerged from the customs booth, trailed

noiselessly by a lean figure dressed from head to toe in black.

"Misha," Kosov muttered, his voice hoarse with fury.

The young killer pricked up his ears like a hungry panther.

"I think it's time you paid a visit to the whore who showed us such

disrespect. Show her that we keep our promises."

Misha nodded, and then, with a swiftness that astonished Rykov, he

melted into the gray dusk of the Sonnenallee.

"What now, Colonel?" asked Rykov.

"We wait," Kosov replied, still staring after the Americans. "I'm

expecting a visitor."

Fifty meters away, Harry climbed into the Army Ford and found a bearish

man wearing a hat and civilian clothes waiting in the backseat.

He looked familiar, but Rose made no introductions.

Sergeant Clary swept across West Berlin with the subtlety of a fire

truck. Harry let his head fall back on the seat, intending to savor his

newfound freedom, but Rose gave him no respite. The colonel heaved a

beefy forearm back over the passenger seat and grinned.

"Okay, Harry, what did you find out over there?"

Harry answered with his eyes closed. "I found out that whatever is in

those Spandau papers is important enough for a Stasi agent to kill a KGB

officer over it."

"Axel Goltz," said Rose. "Did you kill him?"

"He didn't leave me any choice."

The colonel nodded. " ' Our East German sources said Kosov went berserk

when he found out he couldn't interrogate Goltz. He arrested every

ranking Stasi officer he could lay his hands on."

Harry shook his head. "Colonel, Goltz was no more afraid of Kosov than

a rabid dog would have been. He acted as if he expected Heinz

Guderian's tanks to roll out of the Black Forest any minute and chase

the Russians right out of Germany."

"It'd take more than that," Rose muttered. "Every T-72

tank in the DDR is on the move. They're running civilian vehicles right

off the roads. Someone in Moscow has decided that the Germans need a

lesson in humility."

"Maybe they do," Harry said softly. "Did you pick up anything on the

names I gave you? Zinoviev or Phoenix?"

"Yes and no." Rose shared a glance with the unidentified passenger in

the backseat- "In the office, Harry."

Harry nodded slowly. "Okay."

In the silence that followed, it became impossible for Harry to ignore

the man on the seat beside him. Finally, Rose acknowledged the

stranger. "Harry, meet Detective Julius Schneider of the Berlin

Kriminalpolizei. He's gonna be working with us for a while. He's the

guy who saved your ass. Says he knows you."

"A pleasure, Detective." Harry shook Schneider's bearlike paw.

"I thought you looked familiar. I owe you a very tall "It is not

necessary," said the German.

"Okay, okay," Rose grumbled. "Let's adjourn this mutual admiration

society and get up to my office."

The car had arrived in Clay Allee, the thoroughly American boulevard

named for the first U.S. commandant of West Berlin. While Sergeant

Clary returned the Ford to the motor pool, Rose, Schneider, and

Richardson made their way to the fourth floor. Rose took a seat behind

his huge desk. poured whiskeys all around, and waited for Clary to take

up his post outride the door H&" opened the discussion. "So what's the

big secret, guys? Who's Comrade Zinoviev? He isn't Lenin's Zinoviev,

is he?"

Rose gave Schneider a sidelong glance. "H@y, Harry.

We don't know exactly who Zinoviev is, or was. We don't know if he's

dead or alive. But I can guarantee you that 'comrade' wasn't his

preferred manner of address."

Harry drummed his fingers impatiently. "Christ, tell me something."

Rose took a pull from his Wild Turkey. "Our computers didn't have squat

on Zinoviev, Harry, zero. I was tempted to put in a coded request to

Langley-you know, can we run a name through your sacred database, blah,

blah? But I never liked using those guys. To me it's kind of like

going to the Mafia. They're a little too greasy for my taste. So what

I ended up doing was calling an old buddy of mine stateside.

Programs computers for the FBI. He ran it through their setup for me,

and you wouldn't believe what their machine spit out."

"Surprise me."

Rose smiled, knowing that for once he would. "V.V.

Zinoviev was a captain in the Okhrana. Ring any bells?"

Harry looked bewildered. "The tsar's secret police?"

"Give the boy an apple," Rose quipped. "The Okhrana were the world's

original anti-communists. They make Joe McCarthy and his pals look like

a pack of church ladies. The question is, What could a hitman for Tsar

Nicholas possibly have in common with Rudolf Hess?"

"Well," Harry reflected, "for one thing, the Okhrana carried out massive

pogroms against the Jews in Russia."

Both Rose and Schneider looked stunned.

"Look, Colonel," said Harry, "you're way ahead of me on this. Why don't

you just back up and give me the Reader's Digest version?"

"Okay. My FBI buddy punches Zinoviev into the Bureau computers, right?

Well, up comes a file. It gives the Okhrana reference, Zinoviev's date

of birth, but no death date. It says he disappeared from sight in 1941,

which was@' "The year Hess flew to Scotland," Harry finished.

"Right. Well, in Zinoviev's file was a code-HCOwhich I'm told stands

for 'Hardcopy Only.' There was also a cross-index to another file."

"Hess?"

"You got it. So my buddy goes for the Hess file, right?

And what does he find? A bunch of crap you can get from Encyclopaedia

Britannica. But he also finds a notation showing a special addendum to

Hess's file, with what the Bureau calls a J classification. Want to

guess what the J is for?"

Harry's face showed disbelief. "No way."

Rose smiled thinly. "Old J. Fdgar himself. And J files cannot be

accessed by anyone except the director."

"Christ. What does the FBI have to do with Rudolf HessT' "You're not

gonna believe this, Harry. Remember the big Soviet defections of the

sixties and seventies? Nosenko, Penkovsky and the rest? The CIA

handled their debriefings, right? Naturally. But if you'll recall, the

FBI wasn't always limited to operations within the Continental U.S.

During World War Two, Hoover couldn't stand seeing Bill Donovan's OSS

get all the glory, and the result-aside from a lot of political

head-butting-was that the Bureau got involved in some pretty big

espionage cases. So-after the CIA finished debriefing those big

defectors, the FBI got themselves a little taste. They were given a

very limited brief, of course, questions to be confined to KGB

recruitment methods on U.S. soil, et cetera."

Harry nodded slowly.

"However, when the FBI got their shot at these defectors, they took the

chance to clean up some unfinished business.

They had quite a few unsolved cases from the war years, and Hoover had

left instructions that they be pursued whenever possible. One of those

cases happened to involve British collaboration with the Nazis-e.g the

flight of Rudolf Hess."

Harry whistled long and low.

"The FBI questioning turned up a shitload of information, but as you

might imagine, the Bureau wasn't anxious to reveal to the CIA how far

outside their brief they had strayed. Anything that couldn't t)e

confirmed by collateral evidence was buried in the basement of a file

warehouse.

'Hardcopy Only,' get it? Apparently Zinovidv fell into that category."