field of red.
The book was
CHAPTER 80
These weren’t drug smugglers. These were Nazis — and they must have been operating in this house since World War II. Even after Germany surrendered, even after the Nuremberg Trials, even after the Soviet occupation of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall, they’d been operating. It seemed incredible, unbelievable. All the original Nazis would be dead by now — wouldn’t they? Who were these people? And what in God’s name were they still doing after all these years?
If Pendergast didn’t know about this, and she suspected he didn’t, it was imperative for her to learn more.
She moved with great caution now, her heart beating hard. Although she had seen no sign of activity, no sign of anyone coming or going, there still might be people in the house. She couldn’t be certain.
In the corner sat a table with some electronic equipment, also covered by grimy plastic. She raised one corner, slowly, silently, to find herself staring at a collection of vintage radio equipment. Next, she turned her attention to the filing cabinets, examining the labels. They were in German and she didn’t know the language. She chose one at random, found it locked, and took out her tools. In a minute she had picked the simple lock and eased open the drawer. Nothing. The drawer was empty. But based on the lines of dust coating the upper edges of the drawer, it looked like it had until recently been full.
Several other drawers confirmed the same thing. Whatever papers that had been kept there were gone — although not long gone.
Taking out her flashlight and shining it briefly around, she spied doors in each of the far walls. One of them had to lead upstairs. She moved toward the closest, grasped its knob, and pulled it open with infinite care, keeping the squeak from the rusty hinges to an absolute minimum.
Her light revealed a room, tiled in white on the floor, ceiling, and all four walls. A naked steel chair was bolted in the middle, and under the chair was a drain. Steel cuffs dangled from the arms and legs of the chair. In the corner a hose was coiled up, detached from a rusty faucet.
She retreated, feeling faintly sick, and moved to the door on the other side of the basement room. This one led to a narrow staircase.
At the top of the landing was another closed door. Corrie listened for a long time, then grasped the doorknob and eased it open a quarter of an inch. A quick examination with the dental mirror showed a dusty, disused kitchen. She pushed the door wide and looked around the kitchen, then passed quietly through to a dining room, and then into an ornate sitting room beyond. It was decorated in a heavy, encrusted Bavarian hunting-lodge style: antlers mounted on paneled walls, massive carved furniture, landscapes in heavy frames, racks of antique rifles and carbines. A shaggy boar’s head with gleaming yellow tusks and fierce glass eyes dominated the mantelpiece. She quickly scanned the bookcases and searched a few cabinets. The documents and books were all in German.
She moved into the hall. Here she stood, barely breathing, listening intently. All remained silent. At last she climbed the stairs, one at a time, pausing on each tread to listen. At the second-floor landing she waited again, examining the closed doors, and then opened one at random. It disclosed a room almost devoid of furniture beyond a skeletal bed frame, a table, a chair, and a bookshelf. A broken window looked onto the back garden, shards of glass still littering the sill. The window was barred.
She checked the other rooms on the second floor. All were similar — all bedrooms, all stripped — except for the last room. That one turned out to be a dust-choked photographic workshop and darkroom, and in addition contained several printing presses and primitive-looking photocopying machines. Racks of copper printing plates of all sizes lined one wall, many engraved with elaborate and official-looking patterns and seals. It appeared to have been an old document-counterfeiting operation.
Back in the hall, she climbed the stairs to the third floor. She found herself in a large attic that had been divided into two rooms. The first — the room in which she now stood — was very strange. The floor was covered by thick, Persian-looking rugs. Dozens of candles, large and fat, sat in ornate freestanding holders, pools of melted wax hanging stalactite-like from their bases. On the walls were black tapestries covered with bizarre yellow-and gold- colored symbols, some sewn on, others fashioned from thick felt: hexagrams, astronomical symbols, lidless eyes, interlocking triangles, five- and six-pointed stars. At the base of one such tapestry was emblazoned a single word: ARARITA. In one corner of the room, a series of three marble steps led up to what looked like an altar.
This was just too creepy, and she backed away. One last room, and then she’d get the hell out.
Shivering, she moved through a low doorway into the attic’s second room. It was full of bookshelves and had once been a library, or perhaps a research room. But now all the bookshelves were empty, the walls barren save for a single, moth-eaten Nazi flag hanging limply against the far wall.
In the middle of the room stood a large industrial paper shredder of new manufacture, plugged into the wall and looking ludicrously out of place in what was otherwise a midcentury time capsule. On one side of it stood a dozen tottering stacks of paper, and on the other a series of black garbage bags full of the shredded result. A closet door stood open in the far wall.
She thought of the empty filing cabinets downstairs, the vacant bedrooms. Whatever had gone down here was now quickly becoming history: the place showed every indication of being methodically stripped of its incriminating contents.
She realized — with a faint tickle of fear — that if this work was ongoing, it could pick up again at any time.
These were the only documents remaining in the house. Pendergast would no doubt want to see them. Quickly and quietly, she moved over to the stacks of paper, examining them. Most dated back to World War II and were on Nazi letterhead, complete with swastikas and old-style German lettering. She cursed her inability to read German as she ploughed through the documents, being careful to maintain them in their correct order and piles, trying to root out any that might prove to be of special interest.
As she worked her way down through the stacks, shifting papers and only examining one or two out of each huge batch, she realized that the documents on the bottom were more recent than those on top. She turned from the older documents and focused on these newer ones. They were all in German and it was impossible to ascertain their significance. Nevertheless, she collected those documents that looked most important: the ones with the most stamps and seals, along with others that were stamped in large red letters:
STRENG GEHEIM
Which to her eyes looked a whole lot like a TOP SECRET stamp.
Suddenly her eye caught a name on one of the documents: ESTERHAZY. She recognized it immediately as the maiden name of Pendergast’s late wife, Helen. The name was sprinkled throughout the document, and as she sorted through the documents directly below, she found others with that name on it as well. She collected them all, stuffing them into her knapsack.
And then she came across a batch of documents that were not in German, but some in Spanish and — she guessed — the rest in Portuguese. She could muddle through Spanish, at least, but most of these papers seemed pretty dull: invoices, requisitions, lists of expenses and reimbursements, along with a lot of medical files in which the names of the patients were blacked out or recorded by initials only. Nevertheless she stuffed the most significant-looking ones into her knapsack, now full almost to bursting…
She heard the creak of a floorboard.
Immediately, she froze, adrenaline flooding her body. She paused, listening intently. Nothing.
Slowly, she closed her knapsack and stood up, careful to make no noise. The door was open only a crack, and a dim light filtered through. She continued listening and — after a moment — heard another creak. It was low,
