Berlin Encounter (5 page)

It was the longest afternoon of Sally’s life.

She remained brisk and busy, forced herself to stay cheerful and show nothing was wrong as far as she knew, even though inside she died a little with every passing second.

To make matters worse, much worse indeed, she knew she could not give in to panic and desperation and worry. She had to
think.

The first time the commander happened to leave the office, she called her colleague on the floor above. “Rose? It’s Sally.” She paused impatiently while the phone chattered in her ear. “Yes, I know. The commander’s in a major tizzy down here, too. No, no idea. Listen, I need you to cut me a set of travel documents. No, leave out the name, I haven’t heard anything about who yet. Flight tonight to Berlin. Yes, that’s right. Tonight. Official pass into the Soviet sector. Leave the names blank, I’ll type them in as soon as it’s cleared up, then call you back. You’re a dear. Thanks. Bye.”

When she set down the phone, Sally found that the strain of keeping her tone light and easy had caused her knuckles to squeeze the receiver so hard they had difficulty unlocking.

Another hour of agony, then the commander left a second time. She was up and out of her chair as soon as the outer door closed behind him. Sally bundled up a pile of papers and her shorthand pad, shook her head violently enough to unpin her hair, took a deep breath, and left the room.

She raced up the stairs, arriving on the third floor out of breath and flushed, just as she intended. She tripped down the hallway, casting out hurried smiles and hellos to everyone she passed, knocked on the door, and breezed in immediately, saying, “What a day, what a day, what a day.”

The heavyset bespectacled man looked up and drawled in best New England nasal boredom, “Why, Sally, dear. You look positively frazzled.”

“Something big is going on, I can feel it.” She leaned across the wooden barrier, asked with the gaiety of just another office snoop, “Heard anything?”

“Even if I had, do you think I would tell you?” His head dropped back to the document under his oversized magnifying glass. “You’d just hop back down to the power station and tell some bigwig on me.”

“Wendell, dear, you know I’d never do such a thing. Not to you.” Wendell Cooper was the operation’s forger, his work so good it passed inspection by top experts. Which was the only reason he was tolerated. Those occupying the power station, the name given to the offices on the ground floor, thought him overly effeminate and slightly balmy besides. They avoided him at all costs.

Sally knew Wendell to be both truly lonely and a genuine lover of gossip. He fed voraciously on the little tidbits Sally passed him from time to time and responded with his own brand of friendship. Sally went on in her most excitable manner, “I’m sure something big is going on. I can feel it in my toes.”

“You don’t say.” Wendell pretended boredom. “Well, you’ll be sure and tell me what you hear. It helps to pass the hours. Speaking of which, how’s the gallant colonel?”

“Off having loads of thrills and adventures,” she said brightly, though it cost her dearly to force the words around the lump in her throat. “The lucky stiff.”

“Good time to be away, if you ask me. There’s the feeling around here that heads may roll.”

“Speaking of being away,” Sally said, unable to stand it any longer. “I need a passport, please. It’s urgent.”

Wendell sniffed. “It always is, dear. You’ll learn that with time. Getting everybody into a whirlwind gives them a sense of power.”

“Maybe so, but I was sent up here by rocket.”

Wendell had still not looked up from his work. “Nationality?”

“Swiss.”

“A neutral. Hmmm. Must be something very big not to be going with one of our own. Where is he headed?”

“She. I’m not supposed to say,” Sally poised delicately, then added the spice. “But I was ordered to have documents prepared for a crossing into eastern Germany.”

He looked up at that. “They are sending a woman into the Soviet sector?”

“Strange, isn’t it?” She leaned farther across, kicked up one heel as though nothing mattered more than a little gossip. “Wish it could be me.”

“No you don’t. Not if you want to ever wake up in your own bed again. Those Russkies play for keeps.” Wendell sighed, pushed his work to one side, opened a drawer, sorted through a pile, and plucked out a red passbook emblazoned with a gold seal. He carefully folded it open on his desk and slid it under the heavy glass ring, said, “Name?”

Sally gripped the papers to keep her hands from trembling, pretended to inspect her pad, replied, “Stella Frank.”

A long moment of silence, interrupted only by Wendell’s quiet scratching. “Residence?”

“Parc des Eaux Vives, Geneva.”

“Best let me see that, dear, I don’t speak a word of the Frog language.”

“What, and try to decipher my chicken-scratch?” She spelled it out for him, then gave her birthdate and birthplace.

“We’ll give her the standard travel stamps,” Wendell said, choosing several from the revolving trays on his desk, knowing by rote whether blue or red or green or black ink was required. “Ready with the darling’s photo?”

“Not yet.” Sally shrugged at his look of irritation. “Don’t get mad at me. I just salute and serve.”

Wendell looked at his clock. Almost five o’clock. His anger became genuine. “Surely they don’t expect me to sit here all night until the lab is finally ready to wake up.”

Sally pretended concern. “Just let me have the stamp. I’ll glue it in myself, bring everything back tomorrow.”

“Thanks ever,” he said, clearly relieved. “I wouldn’t mind, but I’ve already made plans.” He handed her the passport, a circular stamp, and the inkpad. “Top left-hand corner of the photo.”

“You’re a dear.” Sally gathered everything to her breast and gave him a brilliant smile. “Whatever it is you’re up to tonight, I hope it’s fun.” Then she fled.

The travel documents were on her desk when she returned, which almost stopped her heart until she realized that the commander had already left for the day. Sally slid them into the typewriter and filled out the requisite information before her nerves could give out. Her flight was not until eleven-thirty that night. Plenty of time. She sat and pretended to work as the clock crawled through two complete revolutions, the amount she had already decided was the minimum she could risk.

At seven o’clock she grabbed up a few interoffice memos and letters. They would normally be delivered the next morning by the office boy, but they gave her at least a flimsy excuse to do what was clearly the riskiest part of her preparations. She took a deep breath, willed herself to act both calm and tired, just finishing up another long day. Then she stepped into the hall.

The corridors were silent, save for the occasional guard and janitor. Sally walked from office to office depositing the papers, greeting all she passed, slightly amazed they could not hear her pounding heart.

The door to Harry Grisholm’s office was unlocked. She pushed in, crossed to his desk, and stopped, wondering now where to begin.

Then she saw it. There in his file basket. Covered by other papers, but one edge poking out, and on it the name of her beloved. Jake Burnes. His file. Sally’s legs almost gave way at her good fortune.

Her fingers shaking uncontrollably, she switched on Harry Grisholm’s desk lamp, opened the file, and read. Because she liked Harry, she had been immensely glad when she heard that he was to be Jake’s handler on this case. But nowhere near as elated as now.

It was all there. The contacts, the itinerary, the addresses, the handover, everything. Sally wrote as fast as her quivering hand would permit, certain every moment that the door would open and she would be caught, captured, chained, kept from doing what she knew she had to. Only she. No one else to trust. No one.

She slapped the file shut, hugged it once to her chest, whispered to the dark ceiling, “I’m on my way, darling.” Then she was out the door and gone.

———

The officer of the guard at the main gate did not think there was anything out of the ordinary in Harry Grisholm’s nine o’clock return. The little man was well known among the staff for his odd hours. The guard saluted his car, ordered the barrier to be raised, and made a note in the book. He then looked up, only to find the little man waving him over to the car.

“You’re Lieutenant Towers, do I have that right?”

“Sir, yes sir,” the young man replied, astonished and immensely pleased to be remembered.

“Good, good. I was just wondering, Lieutenant, is anybody working late tonight?”

“Sir, not that I know of, but I could check the book for you.”

“No, that won’t be necessary. I was just wondering if anybody might still be around.”

“I’m pretty sure they’ve all gone home, sir. Mrs. Burnes, she was around again late, but she left almost an hour ago.”

“I see,” he said slowly. “Mrs. Burnes has left, has she?”

“Signed her out myself. The guards are going about their rounds now, but they all know you, sir. I’m sure there won’t be any trouble if you need to get back in.”

“No, no, not if everyone has already left for the night. Would you mind if I used your phone for a moment?”

“Course not, sir. Right this way.” The lieutenant watched the little man pry himself awkwardly from behind the wheel, then limp over to the guardhouse. He could not help but stare. Everybody knew how Harry Grisholm had received his wounds.

Harry picked up the receiver and dialed a number. “Commander Randolf, please.” A moment’s pause, then, “Edgar. Harry here. I’m in the guardhouse at the main gate. I’m afraid I can’t do that memo we discussed after all. Wanted to call you immediately and just let you know it will have to wait until tomorrow. It appears that your diligent assistant has already called it a night. Yes, that’s right. She left almost an hour ago, according to the lieutenant here. No, no problem, just thought you should know. Yes. All we can do is wait, I suppose. Until tomorrow then. Good-night.”

Harry Grisholm hung up the phone. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Very good of you.”

“No problem, sir. Anything else I can do?”

Harry looked up at the young man and gave that gentle smile from the eyes that warmed the young man to the bone. “Thank you, Lieutenant. I shall remember your kind offer.”

“Thank you, sir.” The lieutenant held the car door, shut it, saluted smartly as the car turned and went back out into the night. He watched long after the lights had disappeared. This was one for the books. The young man shook his head. It wasn’t every day that he had a chance to talk with a living legend.

The hours passed with the brutal slowness of waiting for war.

The night was dry and warm and clear, and filled with the music of a forest in full June concert. Jake leaned his back against a pine just outside the perimeter fence, his face and hands blackened, his clothes as dark as the surrounding night. He knew it was useless to try and doze. There had been many in his squads who could drop off at a moment’s notice and wake instantly refreshed ten minutes later, alert for the smallest sound even when asleep. But not Jake. Five minutes or five hours, if he slept at all he woke groggy. And tired as he was now, if he managed to doze off he would probably sleep for hours.

But fatigue was a familiar companion, as was the waiting. War had forced him to come to know many such cronies. Liking them had nothing to do with it. To survive meant understanding their ways and using them for his own benefit.

Jake’s mind continued to drift back over the war. He found himself thinking of his younger brother, the one who had not returned from the Normandy invasion. Jake had never seen Bobby again after his own departure; all Jake’s memories were of the young man before leaving the U.S. Suddenly his brother’s fresh and eager face became superimposed over the image of the blond scientist, tall and arrogant and cold and superior. A perfect Aryan Nazi. The enemy. Just like the ones responsible for blasting his last living relative to smithereens. Now here he was, risking his own neck to bring the man out. Jake shook himself like a dog emerging from the water and began refitting his packs. There was no future in thoughts like that.

Strange, though, how being here in this midnight terrain brought him closer to the war than he had been since leaving the Italian battlefields. Nothing in Badenburg or Karlsruhe had affected him like this. Here in the depths of darkness, surrounded by danger, he was beset by memories and sensations which he had thought gone forever, lost both by time and his own acceptance of faith. Yet now he sat and struggled with both the external dangers and the same internal forces of fury and vengeance that once had dominated his existence.

Jake loathed the fact that he was risking his life to save an enemy. And that was how he saw Hans Hechter. No matter that he was needed by Jake’s government, that his mind and his knowledge was deemed essential. In the instant of facing the scientist, Jake knew he had come face-to-face with the foe.

Yet there was something more. Jake knew this for a fact, and yet could not come to grips with how he knew or why it bothered him so. He was faced with an internal struggle so deep he could not truly fathom what it was, one which left him feeling unsettled and angry. With Hechter, with himself, with life. Jake was a straightforward kind of person, not given to long introspective battles. This sort of hidden confusion left him very disturbed.

He checked his watch, found himself genuinely glad to be able to focus on something else, even something so dangerous as his present mission. He tightened the straps to his two packs, one gripping his chest and the other his back. He slid the wire cutters from his leg pouch and started forward.

The wire gave him no problem at all. The strands were rusted almost through, the ground unkempt and so weed-infested he could almost have stood upright and remained hidden. Clearly the guards had wasted little concern on keeping up security since the war. Jake folded the two sides of the fence back to form an opening in the shape of an inverted V. As he slipped through, he had the fleeting impression that the wire had been left there more to keep the scientists in than the enemy out.

There were no dogs, only one pair of guards who gave the terrain a haphazard circuit every half hour. Jake had watched and timed and was certain enough of his relative safety to risk a run straight across the concrete launch-pad. The entire perimeter, both of the pad and the complex itself, was ringed with tall poles sprouting lights like multiple steel branches. Yet only a handful still worked, and these flickered and popped so much that they generated more shadows than light.

Jake reached the first set of steel doors, sidled around to where the cliffside was covered with a pelt of uncut grass, and began to climb. The cloudless night was so bright as to faintly wash the cliff and the doors and the fields and distant trees to colorless silver. When he was directly above the doors, he reached into the chest pack and drew out the first bomb.

The bombs he had brought were bulky, heavy, and made to be used by someone who had no knowledge whatsoever of explosives. Anticipating that he would be up against some form of reinforced subterranean compound, the bomb’s designers had delicately balanced power with directive force. The intention was to focus the bomb’s force inward to where it would hopefully inflict structural damage. The result was a squarish charge fastened to what looked like a heavy metal pie plate, with the timer a sort of afterthought dangling from one end. Jake gave the timer a final check, dug the hole, set the bomb. Then he scrambled down and moved on to the next door.

He set the four bombs, all he could carry, above the four doors closest to the entrance where the scientists were scheduled to be waiting. He scrambled down to ground level, crouched in the shadows of a concrete entrance platform, waited for the guards to pass. The single team talked loudly as they walked, keeping themselves company.

Carefully he skirted around the illuminated islands created by three working light posts. He checked a final time, then climbed the entrance stairs where Hechter and Grunner were to be waiting. The doors were locked. Jake made a swift inspection. Definitely a holdover from the former proprietors. Solid steel construction, bolted directly into the stone framework. Jake extracted his remaining three charges, all much smaller and less powerful than the ones dug into the hillside. He set them as he had been instructed, taping one to the top of the seam made between the two doors, the second at the base of the seam, the third directly over the central lock. He stepped back, desperately hoping he had it right. Otherwise Colonel Jake Burnes, spymaster extraordinaire, would be left standing there behind enemy lines with not even a butter knife to get the doors open.

Jake did a quick swivel-check of the surroundings and satisfied himself that his work had gone unnoticed. He slid off the platform, crouched down far enough that the concrete landing would act as a buffer, fitted in his earplugs, checked his watch, and prepared to wait.

It was strange how, surrounded on all sides by the night and by danger, his thoughts would turn to Sally. Jake settled into a more comfortable position and decided maybe it wasn’t so strange after all.

Theirs was more than a loving relationship, he realized. She had
restored
him. The void caused by the loss of his own family had been filled by his marriage to Sally.

His marriage. The wedding had been a simple affair, held in the Karlsruhe military chapel now run by Chaplain Fox, their friend from the Badenburg relief center. Jake had called in all his chips and wrangled military transport to bring over Sally’s parents. Pierre and Jasmyn had been there, along with Lilliana Goss and Kurt and a few military pals. The meager crowd had been vastly augmented by Jake’s unbounded joy, so strong that he felt the chapel would burst from trying to hold it all.

Sally had worn a cream-colored wool suit with a pleated skirt and fitted jacket over a white silk blouse. Her hat had been trimmed with a half-veil of lace, as simple and beautiful as her bouquet of roses and wildflowers. Jake had often heard that grooms remember nothing of the ceremony. But not him. The memory of Sally’s luminous beauty, and the love which had shone from her eyes, was etched upon his heart for all days.

———

With his mind so far away, the explosions coming so loud and so close almost stopped his heart.

The three blasts of the door-charges, going off within a heartbeat of each other, sounded like a mad giant hammering a massive anvil and ripping it to shreds in the process.

Jake raised his head above the level of the platform. He was immensely pleased to find the frame and the supporting rocks shattered, the doors bent and smoldering and barely upright.

Then the night was shattered a second time. Sirens shrieked. Voices shouted. A single spotlight switched on, too far around the corner of the cliff to shine upon Jake as he vaulted onto the platform and wrenched open the door, using one of the bomb packs to protect his hands. He searched through the acrid smoke for the two scientists, saw nothing, was momentarily panicked by the fear that he had blasted the wrong door.

Then two familiar faces peeked through the smoke. Jake hissed and motioned frantically for them to move. Together the scientists stepped through the frame.

Jake pointed down into the shadows, opened his mouth to tell them to hide, when an icy voice howled, “Stop! I have you covered! Guards, guards, over here!”

The scientists froze to the spot. Jake hid behind the door, heard footsteps race down the hall, judged the moment the best he could. Then powered by the gallon of adrenaline coursing through his veins, he slammed the door home. It met the oncoming person with a resounding thud. Jake unholstered his gun, jerked the door back open, saw it was the cadaverous political officer who had challenged him earlier. The man was out cold.

“They’re coming,” hissed Grunner.

Jake pushed the two scientists off the platform and into the neighboring darkness. Pleaded silently with the charges to go off on time. Heard the footsteps and the shouts approach and held his own gun at the ready, wondering what good it would do against such odds, ready to try just the same.

The charge set farthest away blasted with light and thunder and a booming, rocking force that caused the earth to shiver and sent a dust cloud rocketing skyward. The footsteps and shouts abruptly veered off.

Then a closer charge blew. Before the dust began raining back to earth, while the spotlight’s glare was dimmed to a frustrated grayish tinge, Jake lifted the two scientists and urged them forward with a shouted, “Run!”