Pandora's curse

Anika pressed her hands to her ears as more shots rang out: high whipcracks of rifles, the deeper boom of handguns, and the staccato ratchet of the machine pistol. Chips of stone filled the air, carving visible streaks through the thickening gunpowder smoke. A fresh spray of blood landed on her, and she knew Schroeder had just been hit. Yet the former soldier hadn’t reacted. It was either a fatal shot or his body was now beyond pain. She peered into the smoky gloom and saw the leader of the torturers. He was backed against the house, a weapon in his hand. He spotted Anika and the pistol’s aim dropped to her position. Closing her eyes was a reflex.

She never heard the shot. A frantic burst of rifle fire covered all other sounds. She did feel the impact, a razor slash of fire that tore along her outer thigh. The fusillade pouring into the garden had distracted the leader and thrown off his aim. Crying out and clamping a hand over the long wound, she wriggled deeper under the bench. Her body was drenched in sweat. She was sobbing and didn’t care. A bullet ricocheted against a metal chair, and a burned ember of steel fell into the blood, sizzling obscenely as it cooled.

Out of the gloom, the torturer lurched toward her, his body spasming as the rifles found their mark. He took half a dozen hits before falling to his knees and then collapsing to the ground. His eyes were fixed in death. Anika noticed that his knife had fallen just out of her reach. She twisted to see if the leader was still there and saw two silhouettes running through the haze, racing toward the open farmhouse door. Bullets pounded into the building after them, sparking more shrapnel from the stone. An instant later, a car’s engine rumbled to life and the big Mercedes pulled from the house.

Just as quickly as the firefight had started, it was over. The echoes of gunfire faded even as Anika’s hearing returned.

She spat the taste of gunpowder from her mouth, not knowing if she should move from her hiding place. She wanted to lie there forever. Then she heard Schroeder moan above her and knew she had to tend to him. It was instinctive.

Okay, AK, move. Painfully, she rolled from under the bench, clutching at the oozing wound in her leg. Nothing happened when she raised her head, no gunfire, no shouts.

The bullet had caught Otto Schroeder in the lower chest. The blood bubbling from the neat hole appeared carbonated. A lung shot. Fatal if he didn’t get attention immediately. She looked into his face. Schroeder stared at her with the certainty of his own death.

“Help!” Anika shouted into the twilight, hoping to draw the attention of whoever had fired into the garden with rifles, the people who’d just saved her life. “Help us please!”

There was no response from beyond the garden walls. A minute might have passed — she didn’t know. Whoever had just saved her by killing two of Schroeder’s torturers and chasing off the others was not coming. Anika was on her own. Ignoring the throb radiating from the gash in her thigh, she turned to the old man. Schroeder’s breathing became more shallow, and less blood was coming from his injuries. Even if she called an ambulance right now, she doubted it would arrive before he died.

She knelt gingerly next to his head, taking one of his big farmer’s hands into hers. All she could offer was comfort.

“You’ll be okay, Mr. Schroeder.” Her sympathy felt flat. Both knew it was an empty platitude.

“I was told someone would come for me,” Schroeder breathed through bleeding lips. “But I beat them. They didn’t get what they wanted.”

“Who were they?” Despite everything that happened, Anika wanted to know.

“I don’t know. A call one week ago said people were coming to question me. It was a warning I ignored. Then I got two more calls, but nothing was ever said.” Anika thought that one of those calls must have been Opa Jacob. It was a favorite trick of his to make sure his quarry was around: just ring and hang up at hello. The other call could have been the torturers doing the exact same thing.

“But who are they?” She pressed, fearful that he would die before she understood what had just happened.

“My past.” Schroeder coughed up a clot of blood that Anika wiped away with her sleeve. “I was warned a week ago that it wouldn’t end with me. I thought I was the last to know.”

“Know what, Mr. Schroeder?”

“The truth.” Even with death rapidly approaching, he wouldn’t reveal why he had been tortured.

Inspiration struck her. “About the gold? They wanted to know about the gold, didn’t they?”

Pain had pulled his face in on itself, but he managed to open his eyes wide and stare at her. His voice quavered. “How do you know about that? Are you with the people who warned me?”

Anika ignored his questions. “The men who did this to you knew about the gold and wanted to know what happened to it. Is that right?”

“The gold is only a small part of it,” he dismissed and then fell silent. For a moment Anika thought he’d died, but then he squeezed her hand. “They wanted to know if I’ve told anyone about the rest of it.”

“Have you?”

“I always knew the secret was worth killing for.” He smiled a bloody smile. “I just never imagined I would have to die for it.”

“What secret?” Anika asked frantically. He wasn’t making sense. She had another minute or two before he was gone. “What secret, Mr. Schroeder?”

“Pandora’s Curse. I have prayed my entire life that the nightmare would end with me. But now I know it won’t. It’s going to continue.”

“What is Pandora’s Curse?”

Schroeder closed his eyes tightly, fighting death by force of will. “They told me there is a man who can help…”

“The people who warned you about these… torturers? They told you someone can help?” The old man nodded vaguely. “Who? Who can help?”

Schroeder’s chest rattled and he coughed another, larger mass of blood. “An American. Philip Mercer,” he wheezed, the words no more than a whisper. His grip on Anika’s hand relaxed. His arm fell off the bench and into the pool of their mingled blood. He was dead.

Anika wasn’t surprised to feel tears on her cheeks. Somehow this old soldier had kept a horrible secret, and at the end of his life, his silence had killed him. She slumped next to the body. The smoke had cleared, and the full horror of what had just happened was splashed against the garden walls and leached into the dirt between the flagstones.

With an effort, she firmed her jaw and forced herself to separate herself from what had just taken place. Anika had to think like a doctor and not a victim.

Okay, AK, get to work. There were three dead from multiple gunshot wounds and one injured. Her wounded leg was the first priority. The pain was something she could work through, but she would need stitches to close the gash. That meant a hospital. She knew that calling an ambulance would put her in the middle of a police investigation and that was out of the question. Once she explained her presence here, it was only a matter of time before Schroeder’s torturers learned her identity, and judging by their savagery, she would be killed long before they were apprehended. The nurse with the apartment next to hers could suture the wound, and Anika herself could get the drugs she needed for infection and pain if necessary.

Using the rough stone wall as a crutch to gain her feet, Anika swayed until her head cleared. It wasn’t blood loss accounting for the dizziness, she thought. It was the shock of Schroeder’s death and the others. She had to get out of here. Pausing at the gate, she considered the possibility of driving all the way home and knew she wouldn’t make it. Once she reached Ismaning, she would call her neighbor to come get her. She had to get her car away from the scene and knew that was something she could handle.

Anika was panting by the time she got to her car. She grabbed a towel from the backseat and tied a rough bandage around the foot-long slash with the strap from her backpack. The last of the water was like a flash flood on a dry desert when it reached her throat, cooling and nourishing and desperately needed. She used another towel to wipe the worst of the blood from her face, arms, and legs. In the rear-view mirror, her eyes shone with equal measures of fear and resolve.

Anika took one last look at the house, a single lamp in a front room casting a feeble glow into the night. She was certain her being here at the same time as the torturers wasn’t a coincidence. She dialed her opa’s number but cut the connection when she heard his gruff “Hello.” Anika sagged. He was all right. She’d feared that the gunmen had learned about Schroeder through Jacob Eisenstadt, using the same