Adam knew that he was being watched. Maybe he chose, for whatever reason, not to appear tonight. Act III began, a prison scene. The minutes ticked past. Gaby cast a quick look at Adam’s loge-and Michael felt her fingers crunch his hand.
He knew. Adam was there.
“A man’s standing in the loge,” she whispered, her face close to his. He smelled the delicious apple-wine scent of her hair. “I can’t tell what he looks like.”
Michael gave it another moment. Then he glanced up and saw the sitting figure. The footlights, dimmed to a moody cast as Tosca visited her imprisoned lover Cavaradossi, glinted on the lenses of eyeglasses. “I’m going upstairs,” Michael whispered. “Wait here.”
“No. I’m coming with you.”
“Shhhhh!” the man behind them hissed.
“Wait here,” Michael repeated. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. If anything happens, I want you to get out.” Before Gaby could protest again, he leaned forward and kissed her lips. An electricity passed between them, a tingling of the nerves that connected them for a few seconds like raw wires. Then Michael stood up, walked purposefully up the aisle, and left the auditorium. Gaby stared at the stage, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, all her attention fixed on the deadly drama that was yet to be played out.
Michael ascended a series of wide staircases. An attendant, a young man in a white jacket, black trousers, and white gloves, stood on duty on the third tier. “May I help you, please?” he asked as Michael approached.
“No, thank you. I’m meeting a friend.” Michael walked past him, found the rosewood door of loge number six, and rapped quietly on it. He waited. A latch was slid back. The door opened on brass hinges.
And there was the man called Adam, his eyes wide with terror behind his glasses. “I was followed,” he said, his voice reedy and trembling. “They’re all over the place.”
Michael entered the loge and closed the door behind him. He slid the latch shut. “We don’t have much time. What’s your message?”
“Wait. Just wait.” He held up a pale, long-fingered hand. “How do I know… you’re not one of them? How do I know you’re not trying to trick me?”
“I could recite the names of people you know back in London, if that would help. I don’t think it will. You’ll have to trust me. If you don’t, we might as well forget this and I’ll swim home across the Channel.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that… I don’t trust anyone. Not anyone.”
“You’ll have to start right now,” Michael said.
Adam sank down in a red-cushioned chair. He leaned forward and ran a shaking hand across his face. He looked emaciated, about to pass out. Onstage, Cavaradossi was being escorted from his cell to face a firing squad. “Oh, God,” Adam whispered. He blinked, his glasses reflecting the dank gray light. He looked up at Michael and drew a deep breath. “Theo von Frankewitz,” Adam began. “Do you know who that is?”
“A sidewalk artist in Berlin.”
“Yes. He’s… a friend of mine. Back in February… he was called to do a special job. By an SS colonel named Jerek Blok, who used to be the commandant of-”
“Falkenhausen concentration camp, from May to December of 1943,” Michael interrupted. “I’ve read Blok’s dossier.” As little as there was of it. Mallory had gotten him the dossier on Blok; it had told him only that Jerek Blok was forty-seven years old, born into a military and aristocratic German family, and that he was a Nazi party fanatic. There had been no photograph. But now Michael felt like a raw nerve: Blok had been seen in Berlin with Harry Sandler. What was their connection, and how did the big-game hunter figure in this? “Go on.”
“Theo… was taken to an airstrip, blindfolded and flown west. He thinks that was the direction, because of how the sun felt on his face. Perhaps an artist would remember such things. Anyway, Blok was with him, and there were other SS men, too. When they landed, Theo could smell the sea. He was taken to a warehouse. They kept Theo there for over two weeks, while he painted.”
“Painted?” Michael stood toward the rear of the loge, positioning himself so he couldn’t be seen from the auditorium. “Painted what?”
“Bullet holes.” Adam’s hands were white-knuckled on the armrests. “For more than two weeks he painted bullet holes on sections of metal. The sections were obviously part of a larger structure; they still had rivets in them. And someone had already painted the metal olive green.” He looked quickly at Michael, then back to the stage. The orchestra was playing a funeral march as Cavaradossi refused a blindfold. “They had pieces of glass for Theo to paint, too. They wanted bullet holes in precise patterns, and what would look like cracks in the glass. Blok wasn’t satisfied when Theo finished, and he made Theo do the glass all over again. Then they flew Theo back to Berlin, paid him a fee, and that was it.”
“All right. So your friend painted some metal and glass. What’s it mean?”
“I don’t know, but it worries me.” He ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “The Germans know the invasion’s coming soon. Why are they spending time painting bullet holes on green metal? And there’s this, too: another man came to visit the warehouse, and Blok showed him the work Theo was doing. Blok called this man Dr. Hildebrand. Do you know that name?”
Michael shook his head. Onstage, the soldiers of the firing squad were loading their muskets.
“Hildebrand’s father created the chemical gases used by the Germans in the Great War,” Adam said. “Like father, like son: Hildebrand owns a chemical manufacturing company, and he’s the Reich’s most vocal proponent of chemical and germ warfare. If Hildebrand’s working on something… it could be used against the invasion.”
“I see.” Michael’s stomach had knotted. If chemical gas shells were dropped on the Allies during the invasion, thousands of soldiers would die. And adding to that tragedy was the stark fact that, once repulsed, the invasion of Europe might be delayed for years-time for Hitler to fortify the Atlantic Wall and create a new generation of weapons. “But I don’t understand where Frankewitz fits in.”
“I don’t either. Once the Gestapo found my radio and destroyed it, I was cut off from all information. But this is something that must be followed up. If not…” He let the sentence hang, because Michael fully understood. “Theo overheard Blok and Hildebrand talking. They mentioned a phrase twice: Eisen Faust.”
“Iron Fist,” Michael translated.
A fist of flesh knocked at the loge’s door. Adam jumped in his chair. Onstage, the firing squad lifted their rifles, and the orchestra played a dirge as Cavaradossi prepared to die.
“Monsieur?” It was the voice of the white-jacketed attendant. “A message for you.”
Michael heard the tension in the young man’s voice; the attendant was not alone. Michael knew what the message would be: an invitation from the Gestapo for a lesson in screaming. “Stand up,” Michael told Adam.
Adam did-and at that instant the rosewood door was broken open by a man’s husky shoulder as the muskets fired onstage. Cavaradossi sagged to the stage. The noise of the gunfire had masked the sound of the door splintering. Two men, both in the dark leather overcoats of the Gestapo, were shouldering their way into the loge. The man in front had a Mauser pistol in his hand, and he was the one Michael went for first.
Michael picked up the red-cushioned chair and smashed it across the man’s head. The chair burst to pieces, and the man’s face bleached white as blood spewed from his broken nose. He staggered, the gun coming up, and his finger twitched on the trigger. The bullet whined over Michael’s shoulder, the noise obscured by the soprano wailing of Ninon Vallin’s Tosca as she fell at Cavaradossi’s corpse. Michael reached out, grasped the man’s wrist and the front of his overcoat, twisted sharply, and lifted the man over his shoulder. He took a lunging step toward the gilded balcony and threw the gunman into space.
The man shrieked, louder than Tosca had ever dreamed, as he fell fifty-two feet to the auditorium floor. For a second their voices blended in eerie harmony; then there were other screams, and the screaming spread like a contagion across the audience. The orchestra stopped in a shatter of broken notes. Onstage, valiant Ninon Vallin was desperately trying to continue her role, so close to the dramatic finale.
But Michael was determined it was not going to be his own swan song. The second man reached into his coat; before the gun could come out, Michael slammed his fist into the man’s face and followed it with a blow to the throat. Strangling around a crushed windpipe, the man fell backward and crashed against the wall. But the loge’s splintered doorway filled with a new figure: a third man in a pin-striped suit, a Luger in his right hand. Behind him was a soldier with a rifle. Michael shouted to Adam, “Grab on to my back!” and Adam did, putting his arms under Michael’s shoulders and locking his fingers together. Adam was light, a hundred and thirty pounds if that; Michael saw the third man’s eyes widen as he realized what was about to happen, and the Luger rose for a shot.
Michael leaped to his right and bounded over the balcony with Adam clinging to his back.
