me to tell you to watch your back. He wouldn't tell me why. I think
he's in the same spot I am, Schneider. He doesn't know who to trust.
He wants to help me, but he's being muzzled from above. I think he's
waiting for some kind of clearance to come clean with me.'
Schneider grunted. It wasn't easy for a German to see any Russian in a
positive light. 'Don't trust him too much, Colonel,' he said.
'Kosov would sacrifice you without a thought.'
'You worry about your own ass,' Rose advised. 'Kosov's got enough to do
without yanking my chain. Moscow went nuts when they found out about
Axel Goltz's mutiny. The KGB is interrogating every Stasi agent in
Berlin, trying to figure out what's going on. If they crack this
Phoenix thing, they'll be lining those tattooed bastards up against the
Wall by the dozen and passing out blindfolds and cigarettes.'
Rose punched a stiff forefinger into Schneider's barrel chest.
'If you find Hauer and Apfel, you bring 'em back here with the papers.
Hauer's probably the 'only guy who can straighten this mess out now. And
those Spandau papers are the only thing that could buy my ass out of the
sling. Oh yeah, one more thing. If you happen to find the guy who
killed Harry Richardson'-Rose smacked the car window with the meaty end
of his fist-'you have my permission to gut and skin the son of a bitch.
Briefing concluded, Detective.'
Schneider smiled coldly. 'Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Oberst.'
He climbed out of the Ford and clambered into the waiting gunship.
He was still 150 miles from Frankfurt Airport, and thirteen air-hours
away from South Africa. Plenty of time left to figure out how he was
going to find Hauer, and plenty of time to figure out what he was going
to say when he did. The questions he could not get out of his mind were
the ones Rose had barely touched on. What was Phoenix, reany?
Was it a secret subsect of Der Bruderschaft? If so, if it was a
neo-fascist group that had penetrated both the police and political
hierarchies, Schneider feared not only for his police department, but
for Germany itself The primary goal of all neo-Nazis was German
reunification. It was easy there enough to see that a premature grab
for that goal could suit in catastrophe fOr the country. Russia might
be flirting with glasnost and perestroika, but faced with the specter of
two fascist-led Germanys pressing for reunification, the nation that had
lost twenty million citizens to Hitler's armies might respond with
unimaginable force and fury.
Kosov's warning to COIOnel Rose about 'watching his back' brought
Schneider back to more immediate concernsWho besides Kosov even knew
that he was involved in the Phoenix case? Schneider remembered Harry
Richardson's mutilated corpse baking in the overheated, apartment. Did
Kosov know the animal who had killed him? Schneider thought of the
mysterious B written in Richardson's bloodHad Kosov been able to read
its significance? If so, why couldn't he give Rose a name to go with
his warning? Could Harry Richardson have been killed by a Russian only
an hour after Kosov released him at the Wall? Schneider knew Colonel
Rose saw the British as the villains in this case, but he suspected it
was somehow more complicated than that.
As a homicide detective, he had found that 99 percent of all
the simplest mysteries' could be solved by reasoning out explanation for
any event. But this mystery-he had felt from the beginning-fell into
the 1 percent category.
ain international Airport 10.29 A.M. Frankfort Twelfth Department agent
Yuri Borodin sat eating a Wienerschnitzel in the large restaurant
overlooking the main runway of Flughafen Frankfurt. Every two minutes a
huge jet would swoop down from left to right across the giant picture
window and settle silently onto the tarmac. Borodin had seen everything
from Japan Airlines 747s to Aeroflot airliners to U.S. Air Force C-130s.
To the right of Borodin's Wienerschnitzel lay a red file a half inch
thick. It contained a concise summation of the KGB file on Rudolf Hess,
a multivolume collection of data amassed over fifty years.
A courier from Moscow had delivered the file to Borodin at the Frankfurt
Airport - Sheraton thirty minutes ago.
Borodin had scanned its contents with only desultory interest.
The file described a convoluted plot to kill the British heads of state
during World War Two, a plot involving highranking British Nazi
sympathizers, the British royal family, and a British communist cadre
manipulated by a tsarist Russian named Zinoviev and a young German agent
named Helmut Steuer. It told of the KGB's certainty that Spandau's
Prisoner Number Seven was not Rudolf Hess but his wartime double, and of
that double's murder just five weeks ago. KGB Chairman Zemenek stated
his belief that the killing had been done by an assassin paid by Sir
Neville Shaw of Britain's mI-5. Borodin admired the nerve and
resourcefulness shown by Vasili Zinoviev and Helmut Steuer, but the rest
of the story essentially bored him.
Except for the part about the blackmail. When Borodin saw how Churchill
had forced Joseph Stalin to keep silent about the Hess affair, he had
come instantly alert. Because he saw then how important the recently
discovered Spandau papers could be to KGB Chairman Zemenek. The Spandau
papers could conceivably clear the way for the Kremlin to tell the world
what it knew about British collaboration with the Nazis during the war,
and thus force them to share responsibility for the Holocaust. Borodin
also saw that if he were the man who recovered those papers, his already
advanced career would take a critical leap forward.
He had only one problem. At the end of the Hess file he had found a
message inserted by the chairman of the KGB.
It said: Borodin: General Secretary Gorbachev currently exploring
possibility of collaborating with U.S. State Department regarding joint
disclosure of the truth about Hess's mission. Do nothing to antagonize
any U.S. operatives you may encounter in pursuit of the Spandau papers.
British operatives fair game.
Zemenek Yuri Borodin wiped his mouth with his napkin, shoved his empty
plate aside, and pulled the file to him. He reread Chairman Zemenek's
note. At this point, he reflected, another agent in his position might
have trouble digesting the meal, since less than eighteen hours ago he
had tortured and executed an American Army Intelligence major. But
Borodin wasn't worried. The Hess file had told him one thing: if he
returned to Moscow with the Spandau papers, no one would ask whom he had
