of the event. For the moment, that must be his goal. The bigger, and ultimately far more important, problem of the threat to London had receded somewhat in his mind, taking second place in his list of priorities.
The best thing he could do, he decided, was wait. And watch. When the garage door finally opened again, he might see something that would help him decide his course of action, and perhaps he could even memorize some of the faces of the people as they emerged to return to their cars. A decent camera with a telephoto lens would have been extremely useful at that point, but Bronson hadn’t gotten one, and he had no way of obtaining one at that time in the evening.
For the next two hours, the house remained still and silent: no lights showing in any of the windows, no sign of any activity. The winking, telltale light on the burglar alarm box had been extinguished, because the system had been disarmed, and the property looked completely deserted. The moon was the faintest of crescents high in the sky above him, but it cast sufficient light for Bronson to see the shape of the house, even if he could no longer make out any of the details.
The noises of the wood had changed after nightfall. The birdsong had ceased, the buzzing of insects was no longer audible, and a silence seemed to have fallen across the land, disturbed only by the sounds of the creatures of the night. Somewhere over to his right a vixen screamed, the howl of a tortured soul, and some distance behind him a snuffling and grunting sound suggested that he’d been right about the possibility of wild boar being found in the area. He heard plenty of noises, but actually saw very little. A fox wandered across the clearing in front of him, between him and the house, and paused briefly to stare in his direction before moving on, following its usual patrol route. Several times he heard bats, their high-pitched squeaking unmistakable, and once a large owl, uncannily silent on its massive wings, flew slowly over the house, heading north on its nightly search for prey.
Just before midnight, the light in the garage snapped on again, dimly outlining the closed door, and moments after that, with a faint click and the whirr of an electric motor, the door began to open and light flooded out across the gravel drive.
Bronson focused the binoculars on the garage. As the door clicked up into the fully open position, one man appeared, striding across to the wall on the left-hand side of the door, then disappeared from view. Moments later, three floodlights mounted on the garage wall were switched on, illuminating the two parked cars outside the building. Then the man reappeared, stepped outside the garage and looked round, then walked back inside and across to the internal door, which was standing open.
Before he reached it, another figure appeared, quickly followed by about seven or eight others, most of them carrying bags-Bronson guessed they were the men he had seen arriving earlier. As far as he could tell, they were dressed in the same clothes they’d been wearing before, but as he stared through the binoculars at the group, now standing and talking more or less in the center of the garage, one figure immediately stood out.
Bronson knew that he would never forget Marcus’s face. It wasn’t simply that he recognized the man who’d forced him to kill a helpless human being, it was what the German was wearing that gripped his attention.
The black jackboots, black breeches and tunic were chillingly familiar, as was the peaked cap bearing the eagle insignia with the skull symbol, the Totenkopf — Bronson knew that much German-mounted below it. On the left-hand side of the uniform hung a chained black ceremonial dagger, and the lapel bore a rank badge bearing four square pips above two parallel bars. Bronson remembered military ranks from his days in the army, and that, he was sure, was the German rank Obersturmbannfuhrer, equivalent to a British lieutenant colonel. The only splash of color was the blood-red armband displaying the all too familiar black swastika in a white circle.
Then Marcus turned slightly to his left, and for the first time Bronson could see his right lapel. There, gleaming in the overhead lighting, he could clearly see what he’d been expecting ever since the German had stepped into the garage: the twin lightning-bolt runes of the SS.
Two of the men then raised their right arms toward Marcus in rigid salutes, salutes which he returned. Then the two men turned on their heels and walked out to the cars.
He’d been right. The German hadn’t created his own private army. Instead, he’d revived the most feared and detested military unit of all time, the SS or Schutzstaffel, the black-uniformed thugs responsible for running the concentration camps and perpetrating the vast majority of the atrocities recorded during the Second World War. The SS had fielded almost one million men, and had managed to enslave, torture, experiment on and eventually kill some twelve million people, most of them Jews. But they’d also directed their lethal attentions toward other “undesirables” who might in some way contaminate the purity of Hitler’s ideal of an Aryan race, such as Poles and Slavs, the mentally and physically handicapped, political dissidents, clergymen and homosexuals. Of all the forces, of all the nations, involved in the global conflicts of the twentieth century, the SS had been by far the most chillingly efficient as a killing unit, and by far the most reviled.
Bronson knew that what he was staring at wasn’t some toothless neo-Nazi revival, a bunch of deluded socialists wearing shirts with silly badges. From what he’d already found out about Marcus, he guessed that he was as close as possible to the real thing.
Not neo-Nazi. Just Nazi.
And that worried him more than anything else.
30
24 July 2012
Just under half an hour later, once the two cars had departed and the house was again still and silent, Bronson moved back from his observation position below and behind the bushes and stood up, his joints and muscles protesting.
He had two choices about getting back to his car. He could retrace his steps through the wood, but that meant passing close by the house again, and in the dark he wasn’t sure he could do that without tripping over something or making enough noise to be detected. Or he could work his way down through the wood, moving away from the house all the time, until he reached the road. Then he could simply walk along it, turn right up the rough track and get to his car that way.
It wasn’t a difficult decision.
He took a last look at the house and turned away, moving slowly and carefully and keeping inside the wood itself. The further away he got from the property, the quicker he felt able to move, and in less than five minutes he stepped over a narrow ditch and onto the tarmac surface of the Rothen road.
When he reached the open area in front of the house, Bronson crossed to the opposite side of the road, just in case there were any watchers positioned. His rubber-soled shoes made almost no sound on the tarmac, but as a precaution he stepped onto the grass verge and walked along that, where his footsteps would be completely silent.
The house still looked empty in the faint moonlight, the only light the steadily blinking telltale on the external alarm box, which meant that somebody had armed the system again, presumably after the occupants-and he had counted at least four men plus Marcus still in the house-had retreated to their bedrooms.
Beyond the house, Bronson crossed back to the east side of the road. The beginning of the track was easy to find because the gap in the undergrowth was wide, though the track itself was barely visible in the moonlight. He checked the road, but saw no vehicles in either direction, then began making his way along the track. Bronson was fairly sure he was alone, but he still took his time and exercised caution as he headed toward the clearing where he’d parked his car, keenly alert for any noise that would indicate the presence of one of Marcus’s men, or anyone else, for that matter.
In the end, it was something he smelled that alerted him. The faint whiff of tobacco smoke was unexpected but unmistakable. Somebody had smoked a cigarette on or near the track in the last few minutes.
It could have been one of the locals out walking his dog last thing in the evening and enjoying a cigarette. Or it could have been somebody a lot less innocent, and Bronson wasn’t about to take a chance.
The instant he detected the smell, he stopped moving. Then slowly and silently he moved over to his right, toward the trees and bushes that bordered that side of the track, removing the Llama pistol from his waistband as he did so and clicking off the safety catch. He knew that there was already a round in the chamber, so the weapon was ready to fire.
For several minutes he stood motionless by the trunk of a large tree, concentrating with every fiber of his
