'No. Who is this?'
'Rykov. Shut up and listen. Tell Kosov that Borodin followed Major
Richardson to his apartment-not just to it but into it! I'm outside
now, but I'm going back up. The building's in Wilmersdorf, about three
blocks north of the Fehrbelliner Platz. Zahringerstrasse, I think. It's
a really expensive building. Kosov can trace it. Sixth floor. Have
you got that?'
'I think so,' replied a nervous voice. 'But would you repeat it on
tape? I just got the recorder rolling.'
'Christ!' Rykov repeated his message for the tape; then he dashed back
into the lobby of Harry Richardson's apartment building.
7.23 Pm. Hasiomere, Surrey, England
Swallow arrived at Michael Burton's tile-roofed cottage just as it
started to rain. She climbed out of the Ford Fiesta which she'd rented
at Gatwick Airport and puttered up the walk carrying a bright blue
umbrella. In her other arm was a clipboard and a large tin cup-the bona
fides of a charity worker. She rang the bell, but there was no answer.
Seeing no lights in the windows, she went round back, and there she
spied the yellow-lit hothouse that Burton had constructed from
second-hand lumber and thick sheets of clear painter's plastic.
The hothouse glowed like an island of summer in the chilly dusk.
Swallow walked right up to it and, finding the door open, stepped
inside.
It was incongruous somehow: the tall, rangy excommando standing among
the fragile orchids; the artificial warmth of the hothouse after the
bracing evening air. Humidifying heaters hummed somewhere out of sight.
Rain pattered on the plastic above their heads. The cloying scent of
orchids masked even Swallow's distinctive perfume. Burton looked up
suddenly, startled, but he relaxed when he realized that his visitor was
a woman, a village matron by the look of her, probably colleeting for
the orphans or something. He watched her shake off her umbrella and
lean it against a two-by-four stud.
'What can I do for you?' he asked in a kindly voice.
Swallow had meant to shoot him through her handbag, but when her hand
went into her purse, the ex-SAS man perceived what almost no one else
would, an involuntary narrowing of the eyes, a slight tensing of the arm
that suggested a shooting posture. Swallow was too far away for Burton
to attack her-whieh his training told him to do-so he spun away toward
the double-layered plastic wall of the hothouse.
He snatched up a sharp spade in his right hand as Swallow fired, hitting
him in the shoulder. He dropped behind the line of a planting table,
slashed open the plastic wall with the spade, and plunged through it
into the yard.
Swallow darted to the opening and knelt in a textbook shooting stance,
preparing to fire again as Burton fled across the lawn. But Burton did
not flee. Having judged it too long a mn over open ground, the
ex-commando stabbed the spade back through the plastic, missing
Swallow's throat by inches. Stunned, she aimed at his blurred
silhouette and shot him again, this time in the chest. The impact blew
Burton backward onto the glistening turf. Swallow stepped through the
rent in the plastic wall and stood over him. He was gasping, and she
could hear the pitiful wheeze of a sucking chest wound.
The last words Michael Burton spoke were not the names of his ex-wife,
his children, his mother, or his brother. In the gathering dusk he
raised his head, choked out, 'Hess'; then he fell back and gurgled,
'Shaw, you bloody bastard.' But only Swallow was there to hear him.
Four seconds later she shot him in the forehead, turned, and walked
calmly back across the lawn toward the cottage, leaving Burton lying in
the rain with potting soil on his fingers and.the smell of orchids
seeping out of the little hothouse like a soul.
As she drove back toward Gatwick-where she had a seat reserved on the
next flight to Tel Aviv-4t struck Swallow why Sir Neville Shaw had
wanted Michael Burton dead. No doubt it had been Burton who four weeks
ago had slipped over the wall of Spandau Prison during the American
watch month, stuffed a forged suicide note into Rudolf Hess's pocket,
and strangled him with an electrical cord. But Swallow had no interest
in this, unless at some future date it might give her leverage over
Shaw. To her the man who murdered Rudolf Hess was merely a way station
on the road that led to Jonas Stern.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
7.30 Pv. Zahringerstrasse, west Berlin Julius Schneider wished he'd
taken the stairs. The elevator war, an old hydraulic model, slower than
walking. When the doors finally opened, he hurried into the green
carpeted hallway and toward the corner that led to apartment 62@e number
Colonel Rose had given him over the phone. The colonel had said
little-no more than a choked command to appear at this address as soon
as humanly possibleWhen Schneider rounded the corner, he saw Sergeant
Clary standing guard outside the door to apartment 62.
Clary's right hand rested on the butt of the .45 in his belt.
His taut face revealed nothing. Schneider remembered the young man only
an hour before at Eva Beers's flat, grinning with satisfaction at taking
a KGB killer into custody. Clary looked like he couldn't grin now if he
wanted to.
'Inside, sir,' he said as Schneider approached.
'Danke, ' the German replied, and passed through the door.
Even if the corpse had not been lying in the foyer, Schneider would have
felt the presence of death in the apartment.
He smelled gunpowder, and burmt flesh. The overheated air hung with
that foul stillness that Schneider had long ago learned to breathe only
shallowly when exposed to it. Too much of that reek could poison a
man's soul. But the corpse was there, lying on its stomach. A small
bullet holeprobably an entrance wound-stained a dark spot between the
shoulder blades. Without hesitation Schneider rolled the body over.
Dmitri Rykov stared up with sightless eyes.
'Well?' said a strained voice.
Schneider looked up at Colonel Godfrey Rose- The American had an unlit
cigar clamped between his teeth. His face was gray and haggard.
'Isn't he the Russian from the Sonnenallee checkpoint?'
Schneider asked.
