last occupied by the Nuremberg war criminals?”
Holy Mother of God! Hans choked down a scream. Every eye in the room burned upon his face. For the first time Hauer’s steely mask cracked. His probing eyes fixed Hans motionless in his chair, stripping away the pathetic layers of deception. But it was too late to come clean.
“No,” Hans said lamely.
“Specifically,” Schmidt bored in, “did you discover, remove, see, or even hear of documents pertaining to or written by Prisoner Number Seven—Rudolf Hess?”
Hans felt cold sweat running down his spine. His heart became an enemy within his chest, thumping out the tattoo of his guilt. And there stood Schmidt, lie-hungry, watching each centimeter of paper unspool from his precious machine. Looking at him now, Hans fancied he saw a mad doctor reading an electrocardiograph, a diabolical quack watching each fateful squiggle in the hope of witnessing a fatal heart attack. Hans felt his willpower ebbing away. The truth welled up in his throat, beyond his control. Just tell the truth, urged a voice in his head, tell it all and take whatever consequences come. Then this insanity will focus elsewhere. Yet as Hans started to do just that, Schmidt said:
“Sergeant, have you ever omitted an important piece of information from a job application?”
Hans felt like a spacewalker cut loose from his tether. Schmidt had asked another control question! Hadn’t he? But why hadn’t he triumphantly proclaimed Hans’s guilt to the tribunal? Hans had expected the little demon to dance a jig and scream: Him! Him! There is the liar!
“No—no, I haven’t,” Hans stammered.
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
While Hans sat stunned, Schmidt turned to Funk and shook his head. The prefect closed the file before him, then turned to the Soviet colonels and shrugged. “Any questions?” he asked.
The Russians looked like sleeping bears. When one finally shook his head to indicate the negative, the gesture seemed the result of a massive effort. Hans even sensed the soldiers in the back of the room relaxing. Only Captain Hauer and Lieutenant Luhr remained tense. For some reason it struck Hans just then that Jürgen Luhr was the kind of German who made Jews nervous. He was a racial type—the proto-Germanic man, tall and broad-shouldered, thin-lipped and square-headed—a mythical Aryan fiend passed down in whispered tales from mother to daughter and father to son.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Sergeant,” Funk said wearily. “We’ll contact you if we need any further details.” Then over Hans’s shoulder, “Bring in the last officer.”
Hans floundered. They had drawn him into the trap, yet failed to pounce for the kill. “Am I free to go?” he asked uncertainly.
“Unless you wish to stay with us all night,” Funk snapped.
“Excuse me, Prefect,” Lieutenant Luhr cut in. All eyes turned to him. “I’d like to ask the sergeant a question.”
Funk nodded.
“Tell me, Sergeant, did you notice Officer Weiss acting in a suspicious manner at any time during the Spandau assignment?”
Hans shook his head, remembering Weiss being dragged down the hall. “No, sir. No, I didn’t.”
Luhr smiled with understanding, but he had the watchful eyes of a police dog. “Officer Weiss is a Jew, isn’t he, Sergeant?”
One of the Russian colonels stirred, but his comrade laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“I believe that’s right,” Hans said tentatively. “Yes, he’s Jewish.”
Luhr gave a curt nod of the head, as if this new fact somehow explained everything.
“You may go, Sergeant,” Funk said.
Hans stood. They were telling him to go, yet he sensed that some unspoken understanding had passed between the men in the room. It was as if several decisions had been taken at once in some language unknown to him. He turned toward the soldiers and police at the back of the room and shuffled toward the door. No one moved to stop him. Why hadn’t Schmidt called him a liar? Why hadn’t the Russian who’d caught him searching called him a liar? And why did he feel compelled to keep lying, anyway?
Because of the Russians, he realized. If the prefect—or even Hauer—had only questioned him alone, he could have told them. Just as Ilse wanted him to. He would have told them …
A burly policeman held open the door. Hans walked through, hearing Funk’s tired voice resume behind him. He quickened his pace. He wanted to get out of the building as soon as possible. He entered the stairwell at a near trot, but slowed when he saw two beefy patrolmen ascending from the first floor. Nodding a perfunctory greeting, he slipped between the two men—
Then they took him.
Hans had no chance at all. The men used no weapons because they needed none. His arms were immobilized as if by steel bands; then the men reversed direction and began dragging him down the stairs.
“What is this!” Hans shouted. “I’m a police officer! Let me go!”
One of the men chuckled quietly. They reached the bottom of the stairs and turned down a disused hallway, a repository of ancient files and broken furniture. When the initial shock and disorientation wore off, Hans realized that he had to fight back somehow. But how? In the darkest part of the corridor he suddenly let his body go limp, appearing to lose his will to resist.
“Scheisse!” one man cursed. “Dead weight.”
“He soon will be,” commented his partner.
Dead weight? With speed born of desperation Hans fired his elbow into a rib cage. He heard bone crack.
“Arrghh!” The man let go.
With his free hand Hans pummeled the other attacker’s head, aiming for his temple. The policeman held him fast.
“You bastard …” from the darkness.
Hans kept pounding the man’s skull. The grip on his arm was loosening—
An explosion that seemed to detonate behind his right eye paralyzed him.
Darkness.
Less than sixty feet away from Hans, Colonels Ivan Kosov and Grigori Zotin stood outside an idling East German transit bus in the central parking lot of the police station. Inside the bus, the Soviet soldiers from the Spandau patrol waited for their long-delayed return to East Berlin. Most were already fast asleep.
Zotin, a GRU colonel, did not particularly like Kosov, and he was deeply offended at the KGB colonel’s effrontery in donning the uniform of the Red Army. But what could he do? One couldn’t keep the KGB out of something this big, especially when higher powers wanted Kosov involved. Rubbing his hands together against the cold, Zotin tested the KGB man’s perception.
“Can you believe it, Ivan? They gave them all clean reports.”
“Of course,” Kosov growled. “What did you expect?”
