only a sparkling jigsaw.of shattered glass. Taking three steps back, he
rushed the jagged window and leaped through. He tumbled across the
glass-covered bricks in an expert parachutist's roll and came to his
feet at a run. The glass cut him badly, but he uttered no sound as he
disappeared into the darkness after Harry.
226 A.M. The NaHerman Cabin Near Wollsbiirg, FRG
'Stop tying to change my mind!' Hans shouted. He lashed out with his
cuffed hands, missing Hauer's face by inches.
Hauer didn't flinch. They sat opposite each other on the cabin floor,
Hans with his back set against the wan, the foil packet containing the
Spandau papers in his lap. Behind Hans's eyes swirled a thousand
currents of rage and tension.
'Listen,' Hauer pressed, 'you're reacting just like every relative of
every kidnap victim I've ever seen. No one wants police
involved-they'll try anything to get their loved one back. Anything but
the right thing. You know better, Hans.
You know how many kidnap victims we get back alive: ninety percent of
hostages are dead before the ransom call ever comes. You've already
been lucicy- You can get Ilse back, but you're going to have to take
her.'
Hans glowered at the floor. Statistics meant nothing to him now.
All he could see was the nightmare image of the girl dredged from the
Havel, leached gray by the oily river ...
Hauer watched him silently. For the fifteen minutes since Hans regained
consciousness, Hauer had tried in vain to convince him that Ilse's only
chance lay in rescue. In his mind there was no other option. Bitter
experience had taught him that the real hostages in a kidnapping were
the family members left behind, not the victim In @ years Hauer had seen
them all: the shattered mothers who served coffee to the police in
zombie-like traces of sedation; the raging fathers who refused to sleep
until they collapsed from exhaustion; the wives who could not stop
crying, or who could not cry at all; and the husbands, like Hans, who
toughed it out in stoic silence until helplessness and despair finally
unmanned them. Hans had to be saved from himself.
Hauer watched as, despite the handcuffs, Hans worked open the foil
packet containing the Spandau papers. Hans examined the first page-the
scrawled German that switched to carefully blocked Latin-md then,
apparently satisfied that Natterman had not tried to steal the precious
ransom, tie closed the packet and stuffed it into his trouser pocket.
He refused to meet Hauer's eyes, keeping his own focused on the
handcuffs.
Hauer stood up. He st@ to speak again, to marshal the reasons Hans
should set aside his fear and do what he himself would do. But as he
stared, he began to see with different eyes. He saw that his son,
though like himself in many ways, was profoundly different in others.
Hans was not yet thirty, still young enough that he defined himself more
by his job and his friends than by his inner self. And with the family
situation he had-a mother he despised and a father he had hated until
tonight-Hans probably drew more emotional sustenance from his wife than
he would ever understand. In the span of eight hours, he had seen his
job unmasked as a travesty, his friend brutally murdered, and his wife
torn from his side.
Little wonder, Hauer reflected, that he lacked the resolve to punch
through the blinding red wall of emotion and act.
Hauer had seen this type of paralysis before, and inexperience was not
always the root of it. Hans's internal compass, Ww that of so many
Germans, gravitated toward a magnetic north-the gilded scaffolding of
official authority. With that mffolding shattered and himself branded a
fugitive, he was a man adrift. Hauer felt no such confusion. His
internal compass pointed to the true nordi of his spirit. He had lost
his illusions very young, and through the trials of finding his way in
the world alone, he had learned to exalt the essence, not the trappings,
of his work. He took a most un-German approach to his skill as a
marksman: in unexpected moments he found himself viewing the world
through his rifle scope-not in a limited, but a profoundly focused way.
All existence compressed into the tube- of polished lenses, the smallest
movement magnified a hundredfold, melding him with the target a thousand
yards away: the six-inch red paper circle, the tawny fur beneath the
stag's shoulder, the pale forehead of a man. When he led men-in the
army, on the GSG-9 firing range, in the streets'of Berlin-he led not by
virtue of his rank, but by example. In situations like this one, cut
off from command, the fire inside Hauer burned all the brighter,
spurring him to action, driving him toward resolution.
As he watched Hans now, he felt an awful powerlessness.
What Hans needed was a new allegiance, a fixed star that the spinning
needle in his soul could lock bnto. If Hauer could not provide that, if
he could not ' lead the son who had returned to him like a prodigal,
then he would truly have failed as a father, as all that he had believed
himself to be.
He started suddenly. Professor Natterman was speaking.
'Your father is right,' the old man was saying. 'Give in to Nazis and
they crush you. Exterminate you. We can't surrender the papers, we've
got to take Ilse back.'
'Nazis?' Hans groaned. 'You're both crazy! Crazy old men! What does
that have to do with getting Ilse back? With today? It's ancient
history!'
You're right,' Hauer said quickly. He squatted dow his haunches, his
face a foot from Hans's own. 'Forget all that crap. What matters is
Ilse. But unless you force yourself to look at this objectively, Hans,
your emotion is going to kill her. You have never faced this thing you
are facing now.
You've seen brutality, and you've seen death. But you have never faced
pure evil. That is what you are facing now. Call it Nazism or Phoenix
or whatever you want, it's all the same. It is a thing as mindless and
as ravenous as a cancer.
It perceives only what it wants, obstacles to getting what it wants, and
threats to its existence. Right now it wants those papers.
The papers are a dream. You have them, Ilse has read them, so both of
you are also threats. Killing her, killing you-this is less than
