Tom Hyman (47 page)

She said she’d wait.

The attention of the station switched away from her as completely as if she had walked out the door. She was a problem, and someone higher up had just taken her off their hands.

Anne sat on the hard red plastic chair for over an hour, watching the riffraff of the Munich streets—prostitutes, pimps, pushers, and an occasional drunk-and-disorderly—parade past her on the way to an arraignment or a lockup. Lawyers and family and friends of the arrested filled the chairs around her, smoking and talking in voices amplified by the tile walls around them.

The frustration of not being able to communicate added greatly to Anne’s panic. She feared that she would just go berserk and start screaming at people if the chief didn’t send for her soon.

At five P.M. a woman in civilian clothes came to the gate in the barrier and called out Anne’s name. Anne jumped up and ran over, tears of relief in her eyes.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting so long,” the woman said in almost accentless English. “The chief has been very busy. My name is Marthe, by the way.”

Anne shook the woman’s hand. “I’m so glad you speak English.

I’ve felt so lost and alone ever since this happened.”

“I understand very well. I’m sorry.” She escorted Anne down along a corridor to the back of the building, and then into an elevator. She pressed the button for the top floor.

“Does the chief—what is his name?”

“Werner Schmidt. Chief Werner Schmidt.”

“Does Chief Schmidt speak English?”

“Yes, he does. Better even than me.”

“Thank God for that.”

From the elevator bank on the top floor, Martha ushered Anne down another long corridor. This one had plush carpeting, and the noise level was far quieter than below.

Marthe showed her into the chief’s office and settled her in a seat next to a big, dark wooden desk. There she waited another ten minutes before Chief Schmidt appeared. He was a tall man with dark hair, a walrus mustache, and a distinct no-nonsense air about him.

Anne’s passport was on his desk. He picked it up, glanced at it, then handed it to her.

“I am sorry for the long wait, Mrs. Stewart. Please tell me your problem.” His voice was neither hostile nor friendly. It was neutral, withholding judgment.

“I arrived here this morning from New York. I was supposed to meet my husband, Dalton Stewart, at the airport. He has an office here in Munich. My daughter was supposed to be with him.

He never showed up. I was paged at the airport by Baroness von Hauser.

I assume you know who she is?”

Schmidt nodded. He had an elbow up on his desk and was cradling his head delicately in his hand—thumb under chin, forefinger against cheek—giving her his full attention.

“She told me that she had my daughter. How she got her I don’t know.

She wants information from me. I agreed to give it to her if she’d bring my daughter to me, but she insists I go to her place—a castle somewhere in the country. I’ve never seen it.

I’m afraid to do that. I don’t trust the woman. I’m at the end of my rope to know what to do—” Schmidt interrupted. “Do you know what has become of your husband ? ” “No. The baroness said he was in an accident. Do you know?”

Schmidt shook his head no. “Do you have the information the baroness wanted?”

“Yes.” Anne removed the black plastic RCD from her handbag and handed it to Schmidt. She explained what it contained.

Schmidt turned the cartridge over in his hand, then gave it back.

He didn’t seem especially interested in it.

“Mrs. Stewart,” he said in a low voice. “Before you came in, I took it upon myself to telephone the baroness, so that I would be better prepared to talk to you. Would you like to hear what she told me?”

Anne met the chief’s dispassionate gaze with a look of surprise.

“Of course.”

“Very well.” Schmidt pulled a small notebook from his pocket, opened it, glanced at a page, and looked up at Anne. “She did indeed admit to me that she has your daughter—Genny, is that her name?—yes. She has Genny with her. She explained to me that the girl was brought to her estate—Schloss Vogel—by her father, yesterday. He left Schloss Vogel this morning to pick you up at the airport and bring you back to the estate. When it was apparent that he had not arrived to pick you up, the baroness called the airport and had you paged. When you called her, she told you that Genny was safe with her, but that she didn’t know what had become of your husband. She offered to send someone to the airport to pick you up, but you refused. Instead you insisted that she bring a large sum of money to the airport before you would give her this computer cartridge. The cartridge, as she explained it to me, is the property of a joint venture between her and your husband. You’re now separated from your husband?”

“Yes, but—” “The baroness told me that you stole this cartridge from your husband’s office in New York, because you knew it was valuable, and wished to force your estranged husband and the baroness to pay a ransom for its return. She said your motive for this was twofold: first, to get money, of course; second, to get revenge on both her and your husband.

The baroness and Mr. Stewart are to be married, as I understand it, pending his divorce from you.

And she did also warn me that you might claim that she was kidnapping your daughter. If you want your daughter, she informed me, all you have to do is go to Schloss Vogel, give the baroness the cartridge, and pick up your child.”

The chief tucked the notebook back in his suit pocket and smiled patronizingly at Anne. “Now, doesn’t it sound to you, Mrs. Stewart, that what the baroness told me is probably the truth ? ” Anne just stared at the man. She could no longer summon the kind of outraged anger she had unleashed against the official at the American embassy.

She felt truly alone and abandoned.

For an instant Stewart was tempted to do nothing, to accept the fate offered him. Let the damned murder run its course. Solve all his problems. Foot steady on the gas pedal, holding the speed at 85 mph; hand steady on the wheel, straight ahead. Do nothing, and let it all come to an end in the next few seconds.

But he had to get his daughter back.

The thought of Genny made him want to weep. He was so proud of that child. So intensely proud. And he had never really been proud of anything before.

Genny was valuable beyond all the money in the world. She was a new kind of human. Homo sapiens rex—smarter, stronger, and healthier than anything the world had ever seen. No one yet knew her potential. But what was truly important was that she was his child, his only child.

He’d get her back. Whatever he had to do, he’d get her back. Nothing would stop him.

He sensed the roadway curving slightly to the right. The back end of the truck in front was no longer parallel to his windshield, but bending slightly, opening a few more inches of room on his left side.

It had to be now, before they were through the turn.

He cranked the wheel sharply left.

The BMW lurched out of its three-walled moving prison with a high-pitched squeal of tires and plunged down the bank of the median divider.

Stewart straightened the steering wheel instantly and began applying the brakes. The surface was rough grass, and the car bucked furiously as it shot diagonally down toward a concrete drainage ditch at the bottom of the divider.

The left front tire slammed into the ditch. The car swerved, throwing the back left tire into the ditch as well.

Trapped in the concrete channel, the BMW continued forward, tilted over at a forty-five-degree angle. The car’s undercarriage scraped along the near edge of the ditch with a shower of sparks and a shriek of tearing metal.

Directly ahead the ditch terminated in a concrete catch basin.

Stewart clutched the wheel and hit the brake pedal with all his strength. The pedal slammed against the floorboard with no resistance.

The brake lines were severed.

Stewart yanked the emergency brake. The BMW’s momentum slowed.

Stewart pulled harder. The emergency brake line parted and the handle7

its purchase lost, flew backwards in his hand.

Stewart jammed the shift lever into first gear. The car’s momentum slowed further, but not enough to stop short of the catch basin. The left front edge of the bumper hit the concrete first and crushed against the left front tire. The bottom of the radiator struck next, and the car’s front end, designed to give way under high impact, collapsed back against the reinforced frame of the passenger compartment.

Amidst the buckling and rending of metal and a rain of thousands of pellets of safety glass, the BMW came at last to a halt, tilted steeply on its left side.

The safety bag deployed, slapping back hard against Stewart’s face and chest, and then deflated. Black smoke billowed from the accordioned remains of the engine compartment.

Stewart was shaken up but conscious. He pulled on the door handle.

The catch released, but the door wouldn’t open; it was wedged against the concrete side of the drainage ditch. He pressed the button to open the window, but the window didn’t move. He tried the other windows.

None worked.

He grabbed the hand hold over the passenger-side door and pulled himself across the front seat. He braced his feet against the drivers side door and pulled on the passenger side door latch.

The latch clicked open. He pushed the door outward, but it was tilted up at such a sharp angle it refused to stay open. He braced one foot on the side of the driver’s headrest and pushed himself about a foot closer to the passenger door, but he still couldn’t hold the door open and climb out at the same time.

Stewart could now smell gasoline mixed with the acidic, choking stench of the black smoke.

Genny pulled herself up to her hands and knees and looked around. She had landed on her feet and then fallen forward and banged her head and the heels of her palms. She felt dazed, but after she stood up her head cleared and she knew she wasn’t badly hurt.

It was quite dark. What light there was seemed to come from far above.

She looked up and saw the small hole in the floor she had fallen through. It was far out of her reach.

Gradually her eyes adjusted to the dim light. She turned around, trying to determine where she was. There were walls on either side of her. They were so close that she could touch them with her elbows.

She was in a narrow passageway. The floor was wood and the walls were stone. Down one way it was pitch-black, but in the opposite direction she could detect a faint amount of light. She decided to go that way.

Keeping one hand on the wall to guide her, she started off, placing each foot carefully ahead of her, inches at a time. The old plank flooring creaked, and her feet crunched on occasional pieces of stone and cement that had fallen from the walls over the years.

The air in the passageway was stale and chilly; it irritated her lungs when she inhaled. Thick cobwebs brushed against her face.

She stuck her free hand out in front of her to ward them off.

Layer after layer of intricate olfactory sensations swarmed through her nostrils, forming a complex tapestry of ancient smells, from the pungent bittersweet of decomposing wood and insect and rodent remains to the dusty, astringent sting of the masonry. It reminded her of the musty, dirt-floored cellar under the old stable at the house on Long Island.

The light became a little brighter. She could see a dimly glowing area in the distance. She increased her pace, taking full steps.

The dim light was coming from a tiny hole in the wall, too high up for Genny to look through. She put her hand against the wall, then braced her feet against the opposite wall and walked her way up the stone until she could put her eye to the opening. She saw part of a bedroom.

There was a double bed with a canopy over it, and a big, round, windowed alcove with melon-colored drapes. A polished antique desk and chair were positioned on a small oriental rug in the center of the alcove. The floor, decorated in an elaborate parquet design, gleamed warmly in the lateafternoon sunlight. Clothes were thrown on the bed, along with some funny-looking black and red underwear.

Genny listened for sounds. No one seemed to be in the room.

She put her nose to the peephole and sniffed. Cigarette smoke. It was from a different kind of cigarette—not the kind the people from home usually smoked. She could also smell several kinds of soaps, colognes, bath oils, and shampoos. And some kind of alcoholic drink. She could catch subtle traces of a woman’s odor.

Not the baroness’s, though—Genny would recognize her smell immediately.

Genny dropped back to the floor, then reached up and probed the edge of the hole with her fingers. She felt a round metal plate on a pivot that could be swung down to cover the opening. She moved it back and forth a couple of times, then left it as she had found it. The part of the wall around the hole seemed to be wood.

Genny continued down the passage. Six feet further along she ran smack into a wall. When she had recovered from her surprise, she felt around with her hands and feet and discovered that the passage continued to the left. It was utterly black. Even with her extraordinary eyesight, she could see nothing. She moved her hands carefully along the wall surface. The stones were rough and irregular, and she had to proceed slowly. She listened for sounds.

Someone was walking along the other side of the wall on her left.

She heard a door open and close nearby.

Her fingers made contact with more wood. She reached up and felt another small metal disk like the first one. She slid it back and forth but saw no light. There was probably a room on the other side here too, she decided, but something must be blocking the view. A door opened and closed somewhere nearby, and she could hear, further away, the soft murmur of women’s voices, talking in German.

There must be a door somewhere, she thought, because she could smell the odors left by people who had been in the passageway recently. If only she had a flashlight.