Greg Iles - The Spandau Phoenix

Richardson to his apartment-not just to it but into it! I'm outside

now, but I'm going back up. The building's in Wilmersdorf, about three

blocks north of the Fehrbelliner Platz. Zahringerstrasse, I think. It's

a really expensive building. Kosov can trace it. Sixth floor. Have

you got that?"

"I think so," replied a nervous voice. "But would you repeat it on

tape? I just got the recorder rolling."

"Christ!" Rykov repeated his message for the tape; then he dashed back

into the lobby of Harry Richardson's apartment building.

7.23 Pm. Hasiomere, Surrey, England

Swallow arrived at Michael Burton's tile-roofed cottage just as it

started to rain. She climbed out of the Ford Fiesta which she'd rented

at Gatwick Airport and puttered up the walk carrying a bright blue

umbrella. In her other arm was a clipboard and a large tin cup-the bona

fides of a charity worker. She rang the bell, but there was no answer.

Seeing no lights in the windows, she went round back, and there she

spied the yellow-lit hothouse that Burton had constructed from

second-hand lumber and thick sheets of clear painter's plastic.

The hothouse glowed like an island of summer in the chilly dusk.

Swallow walked right up to it and, finding the door open, stepped

inside.

It was incongruous somehow: the tall, rangy excommando standing among

the fragile orchids; the artificial warmth of the hothouse after the

bracing evening air. Humidifying heaters hummed somewhere out of sight.

Rain pattered on the plastic above their heads. The cloying scent of

orchids masked even Swallow's distinctive perfume. Burton looked up

suddenly, startled, but he relaxed when he realized that his visitor was

a woman, a village matron by the look of her, probably colleeting for

the orphans or something. He watched her shake off her umbrella and

lean it against a two-by-four stud.

"What can I do for you?" he asked in a kindly voice.

Swallow had meant to shoot him through her handbag, but when her hand

went into her purse, the ex-SAS man perceived what almost no one else

would, an involuntary narrowing of the eyes, a slight tensing of the arm

that suggested a shooting posture. Swallow was too far away for Burton

to attack her-whieh his training told him to do-so he spun away toward

the double-layered plastic wall of the hothouse.

He snatched up a sharp spade in his right hand as Swallow fired, hitting

him in the shoulder. He dropped behind the line of a planting table,

slashed open the plastic wall with the spade, and plunged through it

into the yard.

Swallow darted to the opening and knelt in a textbook shooting stance,

preparing to fire again as Burton fled across the lawn. But Burton did

not flee. Having judged it too long a mn over open ground, the

ex-commando stabbed the spade back through the plastic, missing

Swallow's throat by inches. Stunned, she aimed at his blurred

silhouette and shot him again, this time in the chest. The impact blew

Burton backward onto the glistening turf. Swallow stepped through the

rent in the plastic wall and stood over him. He was gasping, and she

could hear the pitiful wheeze of a sucking chest wound.

The last words Michael Burton spoke were not the names of his ex-wife,

his children, his mother, or his brother. In the gathering dusk he

raised his head, choked out, "Hess"; then he fell back and gurgled,

"Shaw, you bloody bastard." But only Swallow was there to hear him.

Four seconds later she shot him in the forehead, turned, and walked

calmly back across the lawn toward the cottage, leaving Burton lying in

the rain with potting soil on his fingers and.the smell of orchids

seeping out of the little hothouse like a soul.

As she drove back toward Gatwick-where she had a seat reserved on the

next flight to Tel Aviv-4t struck Swallow why Sir Neville Shaw had

wanted Michael Burton dead. No doubt it had been Burton who four weeks

ago had slipped over the wall of Spandau Prison during the American

watch month, stuffed a forged suicide note into Rudolf Hess's pocket,

and strangled him with an electrical cord. But Swallow had no interest

in this, unless at some future date it might give her leverage over

Shaw. To her the man who murdered Rudolf Hess was merely a way station

on the road that led to Jonas Stern.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

7.30 Pv. Zahringerstrasse, west Berlin Julius Schneider wished he'd

taken the stairs. The elevator war, an old hydraulic model, slower than

walking. When the doors finally opened, he hurried into the green

carpeted hallway and toward the corner that led to apartment 62@e number

Colonel Rose had given him over the phone. The colonel had said

little-no more than a choked command to appear at this address as soon

as humanly possibleWhen Schneider rounded the corner, he saw Sergeant

Clary standing guard outside the door to apartment 62.

Clary's right hand rested on the butt of the .45 in his belt.

His taut face revealed nothing. Schneider remembered the young man only

an hour before at Eva Beers's flat, grinning with satisfaction at taking

a KGB killer into custody. Clary looked like he couldn't grin now if he

wanted to.

"Inside, sir," he said as Schneider approached.

"Danke, " the German replied, and passed through the door.

Even if the corpse had not been lying in the foyer, Schneider would have

felt the presence of death in the apartment.

He smelled gunpowder, and burmt flesh. The overheated air hung with

that foul stillness that Schneider had long ago learned to breathe only

shallowly when exposed to it. Too much of that reek could poison a

man's soul. But the corpse was there, lying on its stomach. A small

bullet holeprobably an entrance wound-stained a dark spot between the

shoulder blades. Without hesitation Schneider rolled the body over.

Dmitri Rykov stared up with sightless eyes.

"Well?" said a strained voice.

Schneider looked up at Colonel Godfrey Rose- The American had an unlit

cigar clamped between his teeth. His face was gray and haggard.

"Isn't he the Russian from the Sonnenallee checkpoint?"

Schneider asked.

"Yeah. Clary got a telephoto shot of him standing outside the customs

booth."

Schneider nodded. "Is this why you called me here?"

Rose shook his head, then turned and disappeared down a short dark

hallway. The German followed, the familiar weight of mortality in his

belly. When he saw what awaited in the bedroom, a cold dread began to

seep outward from his heart.

Harry Richardson sat wide-eyed in a wooden chair, facing the bedroom

door. He was naked. The chair sat in a pool of blood. Thin nylon

ropes bound Harry's arms and legs to the chair. A pair of navy blue

dress socks had been stuffed into his mouth. Schneider immediately

noticed the cluster of small red circular marks on Richardson's chest.

Cigarette burns. Schneider had worked his share of child abuse cases.

Just below the burns, three lateral slashes trisected the abdomen, not

deep, but bloody and probably unbearably painful.

But the head was the worst. Carved into Harry Richardson's high

forehead was a jagged red swastika. Rivulets of sticky blood streaked

down from the arms of the broken cross, into Harry's open eyes, across

his lips. Schneider had to remind himself to start breathing again.

"What happened?" he asked in. German.

Colonel Rose stood in the far corner of the room, his legs slightly

apart, planted as firmly as trees in the earth. He held his arms folded