‘I don’t give a fuck what it costs. Find someone on the inside!’ Wiley slammed the receiver back onto its encryption cradle, got up from his desk and paced his office. The German Chancellor was already describing the crash as a massacre and she was demanding answers. He contemplated briefing the new director but immediately dismissed the notion. The old regime would have simply denied any involvement, but if the CIA connection surfaced on this new President’s watch, Wiley knew he’d be finished. Four floors below, a heated argument between Larry Davis and Ellen Rodriguez was in full swing.
‘Jesus Christ, Larry. I don’t know what O’Connor or Weizman have done to get so far up the administration’s nostril, but this is way out of control!’ Rodriguez’ green eyes were blazing. ‘Ten people are dead, including two babies, because we’ve got a bunch of thugs out there. Amateurs firing at anything that moves!’
‘If you’re not up to this, Rodriguez… ’ Wiley strode into the room. ‘What’ve we got, apart from this clusterfuck in Gottingen?’
Davis mopped his bald pate. ‘It appears the targets were not in Gottingen, but Bad Arolsen,’ he said, glancing at Rodriguez. ‘We got a look at the visitors’ book and Nefertiti used her own name to sign in.’
‘Why would she use her own name?’
Davis shrugged and Rodriguez stepped in. ‘Probably because you have to book to search documents well in advance, and at the time Weizman made the phone call to the International Tracing Service, she wouldn’t have been aware we had her in our crosshairs.’
‘Was Tutankhamen with her?’
‘She was accompanied by a man fitting his description,’ Davis replied quickly.
‘So where are they now?’
‘Not sure, but we’re sending more assets into Bad Arolsen,’ said Davis.
‘Which I think is a mistake.’
Wiley wheeled on Rodriguez. ‘Why?’
‘Firstly, Germany is not some third-world country where murders are part of everyday life,’ Rodriguez replied evenly. ‘Everyone from the Chancellor down is demanding answers to our latest effort in Gottingen and the police will be on high alert across the country. If we start pouring assets into a little village like Bad Arolsen, that’s only going to draw the crabs. Secondly, the targets are highly unlikely to still be there.’
‘And why is that?’
‘I’ve worked with O’Connor before. He is, or was, one of our best agents. He hopes for the best and plans for the worst, so he’d expect us to be close on his heels. He won’t stay exposed a moment longer than he has to.’
‘So where do you suppose he might be now?’
‘O’Connor already knows what we’ve got planned for Weizman, and knowing O’Connor, he’ll be on to us – you,’ she added, ‘having exactly the same plans for him. Our contact in Bad Arolsen has reported that Weizman asked to see the documents for the Mauthausen concentration camp. They may be headed there, although just why O’Connor has sided with Weizman, I’m not sure. Perhaps it has something to do with that Mayan conference.’
‘I’d stick to finding out where they are if I were you, Rodriguez,’ Wiley responded, a menacing edge to his voice. He turned to his chief of staff. ‘Get Vienna to stake out the border crossings to Austria, and I want observation on the trains and airports. Get hold of the rental car hirings in the area and get someone out to the Mauthausen concentration camp. I want these two on toast.’
42
O ’Connor parked the car outside Mauthausen’s forbidding stone walls behind which, during the war, over 120 000 people had been murdered by the Nazis. With the exception of some of the cramped, squalid barracks, which had been torn down, the camp had remained as it was when Aleta’s family was interned in 1938. The camp was maintained now as a memorial to the innocent souls who had been taken.
It was early, and a Sunday, so the car park was empty. The tourist buses would come later. O’Connor and Aleta walked towards the main gate in silence. Aleta’s long dark hair trailed over her shoulders, moving gently in the light morning breeze.
Rusted iron bars protruded from the granite archway, the big eagle which they had once supported torn from its mount by prisoners when the camp was finally liberated by the US 11th Armored Division in May of 1945. The heavy wooden doors in the centre of the archway were closed. O’Connor and Aleta entered through a side arch beneath the observation towers and passed into the SS assembly compound, where the prisoners had been stripped naked and left for hours in the hot sun or freezing snow while their clothes were disinfected.
Aleta had researched the camp thoroughly before arriving in Austria, but even that had not prepared her for the grisly reality that confronted her when she entered the gas chambers. The chambers at Mauthausen could accommodate up to 120 prisoners and the Nazis had disguised them as shower rooms. Aleta choked back tears as she walked through the white tiled rooms, the shower heads and water pipes still in place. Each room had its entry through a heavy iron bulkhead door. The doors, now rusting, were made to be sealed and locked from the outside and were equipped with a centre peep-hole. The SS guards would observe the prisoners falling to the tiles and fighting for their lives, blood streaming from their ears and other orifices as deadly Cyclone-B hydrogen cyanide was vented into the room.
O’Connor and Aleta walked silently into the adjacent rooms, which contained the ovens used to incinerate the bodies the SS guards dragged from the ‘shower rooms’.
‘I need some air,’ Aleta said finally, her face pale. They climbed the steps that led out of the gas chambers and walked past the barrack blocks and the brothel that had been set up for prisoners who collaborated with the Nazis. They passed through the massive granite ‘prisoners’ gate’ and walked towards the quarry, where thousands of prisoners had died, whipped and worked to exhaustion digging out rocks with their bare hands.
The car park now hidden from view, neither O’Connor nor Aleta saw the Audi pull in and park at the far end. The CIA asset noted the blue strip with the white ‘D’ for Deutschland beneath the twelve gold stars of the European Union on the registration plate of the rental Volkswagen Passat. He transmitted the number to the chief of station in Berlin in a secure burst from his cell phone. Ten minutes later he received his instructions. ‘Car hired in Kassel-Wilhelmshohe by male fitting description of Tutankhamen. Nefertiti likely to be with him. Once confirmed, follow and terminate both targets at first opportunity.’
‘Given what happened here,’ Aleta said thoughtfully, ‘it’s surprising Israel doesn’t show more compassion towards the Palestinians.’
‘Some might argue the Israelis have the right to defend themselves against rocket attacks.’
‘Yes. But the Israeli attacks in Gaza and Lebanon have been ruthlessly disproportionate: they’ve even bombed schools and UN posts.’
‘That can hardly be compared to the Holocaust,’ O’Connor suggested gently.
‘Every life is precious. When you flatten places like Gaza, the most populated area on the planet – where one and a half million people are crowded into a tiny area that even the Vatican calls a concentration camp – you’ve made a decision to kill innocent civilians. If it were any other nation raining cluster bombs and white phosphorous on women and children, your people in Washington would be outraged. White phosphorous! A compound that clamps to the skin and keeps burning deep into the body. How do the Israelis justify that?’
O’Connor didn’t reply, surprised by the ferocity of Aleta’s views. Was it an Arab or a Jew, he wondered, who had said, ‘A man without a country is a man without dignity. And our dignity is more important to us even than our life.’ O’Connor was convinced the awful killing would continue on both sides until the Arab Islamists recognised Israel’s unequivocal right to exist, and the Israelis withdrew from their illegal settlements and returned the land they had occupied since 1967 so a Palestinian state could become a reality.
They reached the ‘staircase of death’ and Aleta looked towards the cliff. ‘There are 186 steps to the top,’ she said. ‘The prisoners were made to carry huge rocks up these stairs on their shoulders, as punishment.’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I think if my grandfather were alive today, he’d be urging the Israeli government and people to take a different course. I’m not blaming the Israeli people – they want peace just as much as the ordinary Palestinians – but the hardliners in the Israeli government will never rest until all Palestinian land is taken by force, and the
