Greg Iles - Black Cross

Get up? Rachel thought. Is that what you are telling me? Yes. Get up and walk or you will die where you lie.

She scrabbled up onto her forearms, then her knees. Frau Hagan lay motionless twenty meters away. Sergeant Sturm was bellowing orders one after another. Some of the women prisoners were moving en masse toward the main gate, where a small group of SS stood with their weapons leveled. Rachel got unsteadily to her feet.

Someone fired a shot into the air.

The mob pushed on toward the gate. At any other camp they would have been shot down without a thought, but these were Brandt’s guinea pigs. The guards hesitated. Rachel stepped over the mutilated dog and moved toward her fallen friend. She could not stop herself. She felt a remarkable sense of calm. For the first time, she realized, her children were not uppermost in her mind. Death was beckoning, yet she felt no fear.

She had almost reached Frau Hagan when someone seized her arm. She looked up into the face of Anna Kaas. The nurse pulled her away from Frau Hagan, toward the hospital.

Rachel looked back at the dead Pole. “Where are you taking me?”

“Shut up and follow me!”

There was a sudden hail of gunfire. Rachel turned toward the main gate. The SS were shooting into the ground at the mob’s feet. The line of advancing women wavered, but several shouted defiantly. Then Sergeant Sturm pointed his revolver at the crowd and fired three times in quick succession.

“He’s shooting people,” Rachel said.

The mob broke and ran, leaving its wounded behind.

Anna dragged her up the hospital steps and into the main corridor. Instead of taking her to an examining room, she pushed Rachel into a dark alcove that smelled of dirty linens.

“Before the yard is cleared you must return to your block,” she said quickly. “You don’t want to see a doctor. The doctors here will use your injuries as an excuse to kill you. Do you understand?”

Rachel stared.

Anna took hold of her shoulders and shook her. “Hagan is dead! You are alive! Without you, your children will die! Do you hear?”

Rachel nodded dully.

“It is madness!” Anna said, a hysterical tone underlying her voice. “I thought we would all be dead by now. And now this! God knows what Sturm will do after what Hagan did!”

She pulled Rachel out of the alcove and marched her to the back door of the hospital. “You know where you are. Go left, toward the latrines. Get into your block any way you can.” She opened the door and looked out. The alley was empty. “Go now!” She shoved Rachel down the steps and closed the door.

Rachel went.

30

McConnell had been waiting alone in the cellar of Anna’s cottage for eight hours when he heard someone knock at the front door. He turned off the gas lamp and sat completely still in the darkness. He knew the knocking might be Stern, but Stern had taken off without a word and he could find his own goddamn way back in.

Besides, it might not be Stern. Stern could have been caught by a German patrol ten minutes after he left the cottage and been tortured ever since. He could have given up its location only minutes ago. The sound of the knocking was faint, probably because there was a staircase and a heavy door between McConnell and the kitchen, and then the foyer beyond that.

The knocking stopped.

McConnell didn’t try to relight the gas lamp. He took several deep breaths and tried to slow the pounding of his heart. He wasn’t sure if it was light or dark outside, but he figured dark.

Where the hell was Stern?

After his dramatic dawn exit, Anna had shown McConnell through a narrow door in the corner of the kitchen that led to the cellar. Down a steep flight of wooden steps was a low-ceilinged room stacked with bellied boxes and rusted farm machinery. There was a sofa at the back, and a couple of old duvets. He’d collected the bags from the foyer and hauled them down the steps one piece at a time while Anna watched him with a hopeless look in her eyes. She’d spoken a few puzzled words, then left for Totenhausen.

During the first two hours McConnell had jumped at every sound, expecting to hear sirens or gunfire or whatever alarms might result from Stern gassing the prison camp. After that, he’d begun having visions of Stern in the hands of the SS, trying to hold out against God only knew what kind of tortures. But when no storm troopers arrived to break down the cottage door and arrest him, he calmed down enough to eat some cheese from his bag and consider his situation.

Brigadier Smith had proved to be even more devious than McConnell had given him credit for. The moment McConnell climbed out of that Lysander onto German soil, he had become an accessory to the mission, helpless to stop Stern except by killing him or turning him in to the SS — both moral impossibilities.

Smith had counted on that.

So here he was, cowering in the cellar of a frightened German nurse, unable to escape Germany without Stern’s help. The nurse intrigued him. She was the furthest thing imaginable from his idea of a spy. Had it been she who smuggled out the sample of Sarin that he’d tested in his Oxford lab? It was certainly possible. But if so, what had motivated her to take such a risk? In the absence of facts, he found himself certain that Anna Kaas had endured some great tragedy at the hands of the Nazis. Why else would she risk her life to fight them? Very few Germans had.

Her reluctance to embrace Brigadier Smith’s plan had surprised and pleased him. She must have been excited at the prospect of action, especially after months or even years of living a double life, always under threat of discovery yet never seeing any benefit from the risks she took. But now that the day had arrived, she seemed appalled by what “London” had decreed must be done. Before leaving the cottage, she’d looked back at him and said, “It’s odd, isn’t it? The Nazis say we must kill Jews to save the German people. Your Brigadier Smith says you must kill Jews to save the Jewish people. I wonder . . . do any of these men care about saving individual human beings?” A simplification, perhaps, but she had gotten to the heart of the matter. Maybe together they could convince Stern to abandon the idea of killing the prisoners.

Perhaps they could work out a compromise.

McConnell gripped the arm of the sofa. Something had made a crashing sound upstairs. He heard a quick scream, then voices. He felt along the sofa cushion until his left hand closed over the folding stock of his Schmeisser. He’d never thought he would really use the weapon, but if SS men were coming for him—

A shaft of light sliced down through the darkness.

He pointed the submachine gun at the top of the stairs.

“Are you down there?”

A woman’s voice. Anna. But she was not alone.

“Come on, Doctor!”

Stern.

McConnell exhaled in relief. Keeping the Schmeisser in his hands, he climbed the steps to the kitchen. He arrived in time to see Anna pour a glass of vodka and drink it in a single swallow. With trembling hands she poured another.

“What’s the matter?” McConnell asked. “What happened?”

“I frightened her,” said Stern, leaning in the foyer doorway. “I tried to get in earlier, but you wouldn’t answer the door. I didn’t want to break in, because I thought you might shoot me. I waited for her, then shoved in behind her when she opened the door.”

“Where the hell have you been all day?”

Stern walked over to Anna and drank a shot of vodka from her bottle. “Rostock,” he said, and wiped his mouth.

Anna’s glass clinked on the countertop. “You are insane! Why did you go there?”

Stern took another swallow of vodka. “It was too windy to make the attack. Besides, I knew we’d never reach the coast without being caught if an alarm was raised. Not in daylight.”