Schneider doubted if Richardson would remember him, but that didn't
matter. What mattered was that an American army officer was somehow
involved in what was fast shaping up to be an explosive murder case.
Schneider took several deep breaths and forced himself to think slowly.
He'd found Richardson's card outside the victim's house, but there had
been blood all around it. What did that mean? And what should he do?
He thought of the prefect's insolent aide, and the overly officious
manner that in Schneider's experience spelled coverup.
With sudden insight Schneider realized that he now stood at one of those
crossroads that can change a man's life forever.
He could get into his car and go home to his wife and his warm bed-a
course of action almost any sane German would choose-or he could make
the call that he suspected would pluck him from his old life like the
wind sweeps a seed from the ground.
'God,' he murmured. 'Godfrey Rose.'
Schneider jumped into his car and fired the engine. Thirty minutes ago
he had been mildly intrigued by the night's events. Now his mind ran
wild with speculation, electrified by the smell of the kind of chase he
had become a detective for in the first place.
Squealing away from the curb, he made an illegal U-turn and headed east
on the Budapester Strasse, making for the Tiergarten station. He hoped
his English was up to the task.
CHAPTER TWELVE
12.'30 A.M. Veipke, FRG. Near the East German Border Professor
Natterman swung the rattling Audi back toward the frontier and pushed
the old sedan to 130 kilometers per hour. Now that the end of his
harrowing journey approached, he could not keep from rushing. The speed
was exhilarating; the protesting whine of the tires as he leaned the car
into the curves kept his fatigued mind alert. Thank God for old
friends, he thought. A boyhood churn had come through for him tonight,
providing the Audi with no questions asked.
Thankfully, the mysterious Englishman who had 'accidentally' stumbled
into his compartment had disappeared.
Natterman hadn't seen him again on the train, nor at Helmstedt when the
few passengers disembarked. A few times during the last hour he had
caught sight of headlights in the blackness far behind him, but they
came and went so frequently that he wrote them off to nervousness.
As the Audi jounced over the railroad linking Gardelegan to Wolfsburg,
the professor spied the eerie, never-dimming glow of the sprawling
factory city to the west. The sight startled him still.
When he was a boy, Wolfsburg had been a tiny village of less than a
hundred, its few houses scattered hodgepodge around the old feudal
castle. But when the Volkswagen works came there in 1938, the village
had been transformed almost OVERNIGHT into an industrial metropolis.
He could scarcely believe his father's tiny cabin still remained in the
quiet forest northeast of the city.
It had been eleven months since he last visited the cabin, but he knew
that Karl Riemeck, a local laborer and old family retainer, would have
both the grounds and the house in fine shape. The thought of spending
some time in the old place had almost blotted out the wild theories
whirling through Natterman's weary brain. Almost. As he roared down
the narrow road cut through the deep forest, visions of notorious and
celebrated faces from the past flickered in his mind like pitted
newsreels. Hitler and Churchill ... the Duke of Windsor ... Stalin ...
Joseph P Kennedy, the American ambassador to wartorn Britain, a Nazi
appeaser and father of a future U. S. President. . . Lord Halifax, the
nerveless British foreign secretary and secret foe of Churchill ...
Those smiling faces now seemed to conceal uncharted worlds of deception,
worlds waiting to be mapped by an intrepid explorer. The thrill of
impending discovery coursed through the old historian's veins like a
powerful narcotic, infusing him with youthful vigor.
He eased off the gas as he crossed the Mittelland Canal bridge.
Again he had arrived at the impenetrable core of the mystery: what were
the British hiding? If Hess's double had flown to Britain to play a
diversionary role, what was he diverting attentionfrom? Why had the
real Hess flown to Britain? To meet Englishmen, of course, his mind
answered. But which Englishmen? With a pang of professional jealousy
Natterman thought of the Oxford historians who were documenting the
pro-Nazi sympathies of over thirty members of the wartime British
Parliament whom they believed had known about Hess's flight beforehand.
The gossip in academic circles was that the Oxford men believed these
MPs were Nazi appeasers, enemies of Churchill whom Hess had flown
secretly to Britain to meet. Natterman wasn't so sure.
He had no doubt that an apparently pro-Hitler clique of upper-class
Englishmen existed in 1941. The real question was, did those men really
intend to betray their country by forging an unholy alliance with Adolf
Hitler? Or was there a deeper, more noble motive for their behavior?
The answer to this lay in Hitler's war plans. The Fuhrer's ultimate
goal had always been the conquest of Russia-the acquisition of
Lebensraum for the German people-which made him very popular with
certain elements of British society. For despite being at war with
Germany, many Englishmen saw the Nazi state as an ideal buffer against
the spread of communism. Similarly, the Fuhrer had visions of Germany
and England united in an Aryan front against communist Russia. Hitler
had never really believed that the English would fight him. Yet when
Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitable surrender to and
alliance with Germany, the Fuhrer got angry.
And there, Natterman believed, lay the basis of Rudolf Hess's mission.
Hitler had assigned himself a very strict timetable for Barbarossa-his
invasion of the Soviet Union.
He believed that if he did not invade Russia by 1941, Stalin's Red Army
would gain an overwhelming superiority over him in men and materiel.
That meant that to be successful, his invasion armies had to jump off
eastward by May of 1941 at the latest, before the snows melted and made
the effective use of tanks impossible. And the British, Natterman
remembered, had known this. An RAF group captain named F. W.
Winterbotham had worked it out in 1938. And this knowledge@orrectly
exploited@ould have given the British a peculiar kind of advantage.
For the longer they could fool Hitler into believing they wanted a
