out another bellow.
She threw a quick look over her shoulder and said, “Shit. It’s him. What do we do now?”
Up ahead, a clutch of tourists choked the main door from the porch. “We mingle.”
They slowed to a walk, shoving their way through the tight-knit group, eliciting stern frowns, disapproving hisses. Jax could hear the tour guide’s stentorian voice saying in heavily accented English, “Over one hundred children sought refuge here, beneath the tower, on the second night the Allies bombed the city. The cathedral took a direct hit. All were killed.”
As Jax pushed toward the tall arched entrance, the tourists-a bunch of British pensioners, from the looks of them-turned mulish, refusing to budge. He was aware of the Kawasaki rider skirting the edge of the group, positioning himself to close on Jax as he neared the top of the main entrance steps.
“Excuse me,” said October, seizing a furled black umbrella from the hands of the pudgy, balding man beside her. “Can I borrow this?”
“I say,” sputtered the tourist.
As the Kawasaki rider lunged forward, the muzzle of his suppressed pistol coming up toward Jax, October reached out to thrust the handle of the borrowed brollie between his legs. Hooking one ankle, she gave it a sharp yank.
The man staggered, hunching forward as he fought to regain his balance. But by then, October was close enough to aim a downward chop at his extended right wrist, followed by a snap kick that spun the man around and sent him stumbling backward to pitch down the short flight of steps to the pavement below.
Wheels clanging, a tram trundled up the cobbled street before the cathedral, its windows filled with curious faces pressing forward. A chorus of gasps and tut-tuts arose from the tour group as a flock of helping hands descended on the man sprawled at the base of the steps.
“Thank you,” said October, restoring the umbrella to its rightful owner.
“Nice job,” said Jax. He grabbed her hand. “We have a streetcar to catch.”
Dashing down the steps, they leaped onto the back platform of the streetcar as it clattered past. On the pavement behind them, the Kawasaki rider struggled to his feet, still surrounded by a clucking, smothering horde of concerned British tourists, all talking at once.
“You okay?” Jax said, glancing at her.
She nodded, her breath coming hard and fast. The tram picked up speed, rattling over the bridge just as the cathedral clock began to chime the first notes of Beethoven’s Symphony Number Five, the somber tones ringing out to drift across the river and down the mist-filled valley.
Rodriguez watched Clay Dixon swing his leg over the Kawasaki’s seat, his hands clenching around the motorcycle’s handlebars, his body rigid with rage and frustration as he stared at a rusty barge floating past on the river below.
Rodriguez walked over to stand beside him, his gaze on the pigeons swirling around the clock tower of the cathedral.
“You okay?”
Dixon hawked up a mouthful of bloody spittle and shot it at the gutter. “Fucking bitch. We should have hit them on the road when they were with the Russians.”
“That would not have been wise.” Rodriguez kept his gaze on the cathedral’s red brick facade. “We can deal with this. There are two places our targets will logically go next: Baklanov’s house in Rybachy, and the salvage company’s office in Zelenogradsk. I’ll send Lysenko and Saidov to Rybachy. You go to Zelenogradsk.”
Dixon gunned the Kawasaki to life. “Fucking assholes. I want her. I want them both.”
“I don’t care who gets them, as long as we get them.”
25
They rented a beat-up old Lada from a shady outfit in a grimy lane just off a wide avenue the Soviets had renamed Moskovsky. The white-haired, wizened Russian behind the counter insisted they pay cash in advance, but magnanimously threw in a free Cyrillic map of the province.
“It’s a little out of date and not particularly accurate, but-” He broke off to toss a quick glance over his shoulder, then leaned in closer to add in a whisper, “Accurate maps are considered military secrets, so you might be in for a few surprises. Still, it’s better than nothing.” He hesitated. “Usually.”
“This doesn’t sound promising,” said October, spreading the map open across the dashboard.
“Can you find Zelenogradsk and Rybachy, or are they still military secrets?”
“Here’s Rybachy. It’s on the Curonian Spit.” She drew her finger along the thin bar of sand dunes that stretched from the Oblast to Lithuania and divided the Baltic Sea from the Curonian Lagoon. “I don’t see Zelenogradsk.”
“It must be around there somewhere.” He turned the key, and on the third try managed to get the Lada to turn over. He wrestled it into gear, and the car lurched forward. “We’ll try Rybachy first.”
Keeping one eye on the rearview mirror, he spent about ten minutes weaving in and out of city traffic, driving randomly around first one block, then the next.
“See anyone?” she asked, craning around to look back.
“No.”
“Maybe there’s no one else.”
“Maybe,” said Jax, unconvinced.
They drove through dark fallow fields and sodden bogs, the road a narrow tunnel between avenues of elms that met overhead and stretched on for miles and miles across the countryside. In another week or two the tree limbs would be bare, but now they were clothed in brilliant shades of yellow and rust that drifted softly down around them. Occasionally they’d see the broken spire of an abandoned church in the distance, or pass through villages of three to five houses huddled around the inevitable statue of Lenin. More often they found place-name signs whose villages were slowly disappearing.
“Why hasn’t anyone ever heard about what happened here?” said October, staring at the crumbling ruins of a medieval church marooned in a plowed field.
“It didn’t just happen in East Prussia, you know. The Allies massacred huge German-speaking populations in the provinces taken over by Poland and Czechoslovakia, too.”
She turned to look at him. “How many people are we talking about?”
Jax shifted down to swing out around a lumbering farm wagon that nearly blocked the road ahead. “No one ever bothered to do an accurate, detailed reckoning, but the most unbiased estimates put the number of German- speaking civilians expelled from Eastern Europe at around sixteen million.”
“Sixteen million people?”
“Give or take a few million.” He swung back into the right lane. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he could see the plodding wagon, then the narrow road stretching out straight and empty behind them. “The lucky ones managed to make it across the new German borders. But a lot of the women and children were just herded into concentration camps and left to die of starvation and disease, or killed outright. And then there are the tens of thousands of Germans that the Russians sent to slave labor camps in Siberia. Only a handful of those survived to make it back to the West.”
“How many?” she said softly. “How many died?”
He glanced over at her white, tightly held face. “No one knows for sure. A U.S. government study in the late forties put the number of dead at between two and three million-most of them women and children. And the very old, of course.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
Jax blew out his breath in a long sigh. There had been some revisionist attempts to drastically lower the death figures. But most historians without a political agenda tended to agree that the original estimates were probably conservative. He said, “We all think we know what’s true and what isn’t. You think the U.S. could never have been complicit in something like this, while I think it’s impossible for someone to sit in a room on a Naval base in New
