down at the body. It wasn't Ilse.
It was a man. A dead man with long blond hair. The right arm hung from
the torso by a single cord of tendon; the shoulder had been blasted into
mush by the professor's shotgun. But the most shocking sight was the
throat. It had been expertly cut from ear to ear.
'A thorough job, Professor,' said Hauer.
'I-I didn't do that,' Natterman stammered. 'Not the throat.'
Hauer glanced furtively'at the windows.
'There's someone else out there!' Natterman cried.
Hauer watched in astonishment as the old man flew at the carcass like a
grave robber. He rifled every pocket, then began groping beneath the
frozen, blood-matted shirt.
'What are you doing, Professor!'
Natterman looked up, his eyes wild. 'I-I'm trying to find out who he
is.'
'Any papers on him?'
Natterman shook his head violently, afraid for a moment that Hauer had
asked about the missing diary pages. But he doesn't know they're
missing, he reassured himself, getting to his feet. He doesn't know ...
Hauer said, 'It's a good thing he didn't get hold of the Spandau papers.
There's no telling where they might be now.'
'You have the papers?' Hans asked in surprise.
My God, Natterman thought wildly. Where are those pages? 'Ilse gave
them to me,' he said.
'The question,' Hauer mused, 'is who finished this bastard off?'
With a grunt he crouched over the body and heaved it onto its stomach.
The half-severed head flopped over last. Hauer probed the thick blond
hair behind the corpse's right ear. 'Well, well,' he said, 'at least we
know who sent this one. Look.'
Hans and the professor knelt and examined the spot Hauer had exposed
with his fingertips. Beneath the roots of the dead man's hair was a
mark just under two centimeters long.
It was an eye. A single, blood red eye.
'Phoenix,' Hauer muttered.
Natterman jerked as if he had been stunned with electricity.
'It's the eye from the Spandau papers! The exact design!
The All-Seeing Eye. What does it mean there? On this man's head?'
Hauer stood. 'It means that Funk's little cabal sent this fellow.
Or his masters did.'
'You said 'Phoenix.' You haven't read the Spandau papers. What do you
know about the word Phoenix?'
'Not nearly enough.'
'But who killed him?' Hans asked. 'Whoever it was ...
it's almost as if he's helping us. Maybe he knows something about
Ilse.'
Hans darted toward the door, but Hauer caught him by the sleeve.
'Hans, whoever killed this man did it to get the papers, not to help us.
You were outside for ten minutes and no one talked to you.
Obviously no one wanted to. Whoever's out there could cut your throat
as easily as he did this fellow's, so forget it.' He kept hold of
Hans's sleeve. 'Did you fix the telephone?'
Hans looked longingly at the door. 'The wire's spliced,' he said in a
monotone.
'Good. I'll call Steuben at the station. If something's changed in
Berlin, we just might be able to slip back in before morning.'
Hauer knew it was a lie when he said it. They wouldn't be going back to
Berlin. Not until they had followed the Spandau diary wherever it
led-until they had traveled the professor's 'tunnel into the past' to
its bitter end. One look at the mangled carcass at his feet told him it
was going to be a bloody journey.
'We'd better stand watches,' he said. 'Whoever killed our tattooed
friend may still be out there. You're up first, Hans.'
Thirty meters from the cabin, a tall @@ntinel stood in the deep snow
beneath the dripping trees. In one hand he held three bloodstained
sheets of onionskin paper, in the other a knife. By holding the blade
at a certain angle, he could illuminate the pages by reflecting light
from the cabin windows.
But it was no use. He spoke three languages fluently, but he could not
read Latin. As he watched the silhouettes moving across the yellow-lit
windows, he envied the old man's education . Not that it made any
difference. He had known what the papers said ever since he'd stood
outside the door of the Apfel apartment and listened to the arguments
inside. Stuffing the pages into his coat pocket, he murmured a few
words in Hebrew. Then he squatted down on his haunches in the deep
snow. He had lived in the burning desert for the past twelve years, but
the cold was nothing to him. Jonas Stern knew he could outwait anybody.
Especially Germans.
mI-5 Headquarters Charles Street, London, England
Sir Neville Shaw jerked his head up from the Hess file; he'd been poring
over it so long that he had dropped into a kind of half-sleep.
He snapped out of it when Wilson, his deputy, barged into his dim office
without knocking, something he was forbidden to do on pain of
bloodcurdling punishments.
'What the devil!' Shaw snapped.
'I'm sorry, sir,' Wilson panted. 'I think we've got a problem.'
'Well?'
'We finally got something on Spandau-from a Ukrainian in the technical
section of KGB East Berlin. It seems the KGB shot pictures of everyone
who gathered to watch the destruction of the prison. He didn't know why
they took the pictures, but he slipped us the list of names their
computers matched to the photos. They actually turned up a couple of
old SS men-'
'Get to the point!' Shaw barked.
'It's Stern, sir. Jonas Stern. The Israeli that the Mossad wrote us
about. He was at Spandau Prison on the day we tore it down!'
Only a steady whitening of Shaw's, knuckles on the desktop revealed how
shocked he was. He rocked slowly back and forth for nearly a full
minute; then he looked up at Wilson, his eyes bright with purpose. 'Did
you pull the file on the woman I told you about?'
