The Berkut (48 page)

The road to Frankfurt had been busy, but the road north seemed to have little traffic, and what there was seemed to be almost exclusively military. It was eighty kilometers to Marburg, and after several hours it looked as if Nefiore would have to walk the entire distance. But after only a few kilometers, a motorcycle with a sidecar came along. The driver, a young boy, stopped his machine, dismounted, lit a cigarette, groped at his pants and urinated loudly on the road as Nefiore caught up with him. When he was done, he offered the pack of cigarettes to the priest with the same hand he had used for his personal business. The priest refused politely.

"Not very pleasant weather to be walking," the boy said. "How far are you going?"

"Marburg."

"Kassel for me. I'm a courier for the Americans. I thought I'd hate them-they killed my papa-but they're not bad. Different from the Ivans. What do you think?"

So young, Nefiore thought. A boy playing man. Boys always talked a lot when they were trying to act adult. "An American machine?" he asked earnestly, looking at the motorcycle.

"German," the boy said, astonished that this soldier couldn't tell the difference. "The Americans gave it to me to use. Very efficient with petrol. They give me ration cards for the petrol, but I don't use the whole allowance. I trade for food and other things."

"For your family?"

"My mother went away with our soldiers."

"You are a Jew?"

The boy recoiled with a sour look on his face.
"Me?"
he asked incredulously. He spat. "She went with them because she wanted to. My father was already
dead. She liked soldiers. The Fü
hrer said that German women should be good to our soldiers. Don't you remember?"

"She never came back?"

The boy dropped his cigarette, mashed it with his boot and then looked hard at Nefiore. "You don't look like a soldier," he said. "I see what remains of the Wehrmacht every day. You're not thin enough. Your eyes sparkle too much. Veterans' eyes are all dull, like there's smoke inside them. I'll have to see your papers if you're going to ride with me. It wouldn't be proper to give you a lift if your papers aren't in order. I work for the Americans, you know."

"Yes, I think you made that clear before." Father Nefiore showed the boy his papers and waited nervously for him to complete his inspection. The boy was a poor reader who mouthed the words silently as he read. "They're A-OK," he finally pronounced in American slang.

It was a tight squeeze in the sidecar, but the boy waited patiently while the priest settled himself. Then he stepped up on the starter, jamming it downward in a violent motion and kicking it into life on the first try. He might be a child, Nefiore noted, but he knew how to handle the machine. He gunned the throttle several times, looked
backward to make sure the lane behind them was clear, and shouted, "Hold on tight."

They roared off in a cloud of pebbles and dirt. At first Nefiore was worried, but before long he could feel the boy's mastery over the machine and let himself relax.

When they reached Marburg in the early evening, the boy left Nefiore in front of the massive Gothic edifice of the Church of Saint Elizabeth. Not many people were about. The church was impressive. At the top of its spire was a horseman, a fierce knight of the Teutonic Order. It had been the knights, Nefiore knew, who had built the church seven centuries before. The statue was impressive evidence that even Catholicism could not tame Teutonic ferocity. The structure looked more like a fortress than a house of worship.

Inside, the church was empty. Before him were the nave and an eastern wall filled with magnificent windows of stained glass. To the left of the high altar he found the entrance to the vestry. The floor was covered with dirt, but when he rubbed it with his shoes beautiful patterns of ceramic tiles were revealed. Before him stood the Golden Shrine, a massive work fashioned from copper, an intricate blending of statues in bas-relief, enamel inlays and complicated metal filigree. Precious stones and even tiny sparkling pearls were inlaid in the metal. It lacked the subtlety of Roman artisans, but even to an Italian the shrine possessed a certain raw power.

As he had been instructed to do by Farraro, Father Nefiore found a notch behind the main statue. There was a small box in back; a copper trigger fell easily to his touch and a thin opening in the roof
-
like structure over the statue appeared. The inside of the opening was lined with cloth. Nefiore's fingertips searched and quickly located a thin package; when he released it from its ledge, it fell down a precut groove into his hand. Slipping the package into his shirt, he pushed the trigger device closed so that it was again flush. He remembered what Farraro had told him: "For seven hundred years the Golden Shrine has been used for the holiest and most secret missions."

He was nervous and perspiring as he turned to leave and found himself face-to-face with another priest, a bald man, short and wide. His eyelids were thick and looked swollen; there was a sparse white stubble of whiskers on his leathery brown cheeks. "It's a pilgrim's church," the stranger said in Latin. "God be with you, pilgrim." As he stepped away, his cassock fluttered momentarily and Nefiore could see that the man had a revolver in his hand.

An armed priest! Things
were
different in Germany. He was shaken.

Now he had a package in his shirt that could cost him his life. The last few days had seemed a game, a kind of scavenger hunt. Even in the American prison camp, he had been unafraid, but now his fear was real and powerful.

Nefiore made his way shakily through Marburg, following the Lahn River north to the village of Wetter. It was a tidy place, a sea of white walls and heavy orange-tiled roofs. Here Charlemagne had led his armies across the river. A Roman citadel had once stood here, an outpost at the ford to keep the warlike Huns at bay from the civilized world. He saw the steeple from a hill outside town; using it as a guiding landmark, he went straight to the rectory, a small building behind the simple church. He knocked several times, but there was no response. Inside, he found a chair and sat down to wait. Soon he was dozing.

A hand on his shoulder awakened him with a start, and he found himself staring into the same puffy eyes that had confronted him in Saint Elizabeth's. "I came as fast as I could," the old priest said. "I can't keep up with you young fellows anymore."

Nefiore stared at the man, his mouth open.

The old priest's voice was soft and reassuring. "Here you are safe, Father. Let me take your coat and we'll find you something to eat. Do you like tea?"

60 – September 21, 1945, 11:00 A.M.

Valentine was in a quandary. If he called the
ass
office in Switzerland and informed his case officer of his suspicions, Arizona might tell him to leave it alone. He was a good man and had some of the instincts of an agent, but Beau thought this was too farfetched even for Arizona to go along with it. Conferring with him was out of the question; there was a better way.

It took him nearly two hours to find an American army unit with the necessary communications equipment, but only a few minutes to bribe a PFC by giving him the names of a couple of local women he could score with. Rather than talking to Arizona, Valentine had decided it would be wiser to call the
ass
Control Center.

A male voice answered.

"Crawdad requesting traffic," Beau said. Then he waited for his call to be switched.

Another male voice came on the line. "Crawdad?" Valentine recited a short litany of authenticators and waited for his identity to be confirmed. "Where are you?" the voice asked.

The tone and the question told Valentine to be careful. "Let's just stick to procedure, bub," he said. It was not normal for an agent's location to be asked during a routine check-in. "But for the record you can say I'm out of town with my sick grandmother."

"We haven't had contact with you in quite some time," the voice

said with perceptible irritation.

"Granny had amnesia; it was contagious."

"Don't piss me off," the voice said.

"Better'n bein' pissed on," Valentine answered.

"I don't have time for adolescent games with an undisciplined cowboy," the voice snapped. "Cowboy" was the term used by desk jockeys for agents. "Under the authority of a directive issued yesterday, you are hereby informed that all agents are to report immediately to the nearest army intelligence unit and identify themselves."

Something was seriously wrong. "Level with me, pal. What's going on?"

"Follow orders, hotshot," the voice said.

"Why aren't we supposed to report to our case officers?" Valentine demanded. "This is outside procedure."

"Just do it, wise guy," the voice said as the connection broke. Valentine thanked the PFC and left. It was warm, and banks of puffy white clouds moved across a bright blue background. The news from
ass
HQ didn't sound so good, he thought as he lit a cigarette. If his outfit wanted him to report to army intelligence, he'd go back to Switzerland-when he was in the right mood, of course. The
OSS
desk dicks had always jerked agents around. This time they could wait; he still had work to do. Besides, the idea of returning to Switzerland made him cringe; even the thought turned his stomach. When he needed it, Arizona would give him the dope on what was up.

61 – September 26, 1945, 2:15 P.M.

There were times when Rivitsky did not understand his leader and this was one of those times. They had established comfortable if somewhat primitive headquarters in Nordhausen. He had accompanied Petrov to Magdeburg several times to help Ezdovo and Pogrebenoi organize their air-search plan, but it was evident that the two were quite capable in their own right and that Petrov was simply treading water. Ezdovo and Pogrebenoi had begun overflying the Harz Mountains and surrounding areas, covering it foot by foot as they searched for evidence of Brumm. Bailov and Gnedin were in Bad Harzburg looking for leads and had been instructed not to report back unless something solid developed. So far there'd been no word from them.

Three times a day Petrov called the Soviet Air Force's meteorological center in Berlin to receive forecasts for the Harz region; after each call he made notes, which he then tacked to a wooden doorframe, and the stack was now fat and tattered by being brushed against. Two days before, he had received the late afternoon report, written his notes, studied them for a while and proclaimed, "Winter's moving in. It's time to move to Berlin." He offered no explanation.

By noon the next day Rivitsky and he had loaded their truck and begun the drive back. After a morning of visiting various Soviet administrative facilities, Petrov handed Rivitsky written directions to an address in an eastern Berlin suburb called Kopenick. Their destination turned out to be a walled estate on the banks of the Mugglesee, a lake that was technically part of the Spree River in Brandenburg, more than twenty kilometers east of Berlin's center, and before the war a popular stopping area for tourists on the river. A toothless Air Force general met them angrily, disputed their requisitioning of the facility and placed a call to Moscow. Shortly thereafter he abandoned the place to them, tripping over himself with apologies as he departed.

Even after they settled in, Petrov did not explain the reason for their shift in location. Rivitsky had noted that it was Petrov's way to
exercise power surgically and with economy, always applying precisely the necessary force. Over time he had come ~o look on Petrov's judgment with awe; no matter what happened, h
i
s leader seemed to know exactly what had to be done and when. But now he sensed something different. Petrov was still cool and reserved, but Rivitsky had the sense of being in the eye of a storm, peering out on a turmoil they themselves had created. Petrov seemed to be turning the entire world upside down. Less than twenty-four hours after reestablishing themselves in the German capital, his authority and machine-gun directives had transformed the once tranquil estate into a massive communications center, fully tended by operators and technicians eager to please.

While Rivitsky saw to the installation of equipment, Petrov went off by himself to think about the remaining loose ends. He had already spent much time trying to obtain additional information about Brumm's sergeant major, but Gestapo records on enlisted men were abbreviated and lacked the detail of officers' dossiers. Doubtless it was a reflection of Hitler's feelings on the relative merits of the two military classes. There was no evidence to indicate involvement by the sergeant major, but neither was there reason to exclude him from consideration. His name was Rau, and there were some indications that he had been born in the southern part of the country, but that was the extent of their information. There were no extant military or civilian records
at least nothing yet. Toward the end, Petrov knew, the Germans had stashed records in every hole and hiding place in the countryside. Reports came in daily of newly discovered caches; eventually something would turn up.