CHAPTER 8

The old-fashioned ceiling fan revolved as slowly as a second hand, a perpetual-motion machine endlessly grinding away eternity. Beyond the drooping palm fronds that formed the thatched ceiling of the open-air parrillada, he could see the noon haze hanging over the Paraguay River. It was as if the entropy that will end the universe had already begun. A mosquito whined by his ear and he slapped at it with a gesture that had become automatic over the past four days. On the far side of the earth-colored river the Chaco jungle formed an endless hedge, a dull green wall rippling in the heat waves.

On the broad Avenida McAl Lopez a ragged shoe-shine boy, his bare arms as thin as the straw in Caine’s drink, worked on a fat policeman’s boots. The boy’s movements were slow and desultory in the dense heat that soaked up energy like a sponge. A sand-colored gecko crawled tentatively up one of the wooden posts that supported the thatched roof. With a final flick of his long tail he disappeared into a crack in the wood and it was as though he had never existed.

Even now Caine couldn’t get used to the summer heat. He felt suffocated and oddly immobile in the breathless humidity wrapped around him like a rubberized wet suit. With a listless gesture he motioned to the waiter and ordered another iced caña, the powerful liquor distilled from sugarcane. The young waiter, his pencil-thin mustache giving him a gigolo’s oily charm, served the drink with a flourish, as if he were executing a verónica in the Plaza de Toros. Then the waiter walked proudly back to the empty bar, his platform heels clicking like castanets on the flagstone floor.

The rank smell of mud and decay floated up from the riverbank. The shops were shuttered and the streets almost deserted, as the city languidly prepared for the afternoon siesta. A lone army Jeep crawled slowly and deliberately along the riverfront toward Calle El Paraguayo Independiente. For perhaps the twentieth time in as many minutes, Caine glanced at his Omega. His contact was late and the waiter was getting restless. He wanted to close up and go home for his siesta. To give him something to do, Caine called him over and ordered a carne asada, although the heat had sapped his appetite.

The indistinct sound of an argument came from the kitchen. Behind his sunglasses Caine’s eyes crinkled with a smile as he thought he heard the waiter’s voice saying something about “Turistas locos.” He lit another cigarette, hoping it would help keep the insects away, although so far as he could tell, the smoke didn’t seem to bother the insects at all.

He knew when he arrived in Asunción that he couldn’t just head on down to Pedro Juan Caballero and ask around the small town for the local Nazi criminal. In effect, that’s what a number of the previous Mengele hunters had done. They were the ones found floating face down in the Paraná River. Caine had decided that he would have to locate Mengele long before he could approach the target. When he finally saw Mengele, it would only be when he was closing for the hit.

He spent the first couple of days playing tourist, learning his way around Asunción, and getting acclimatized. The combination of jet lag and the humid one-hundred-plus-degree temperature weakened him more than he had anticipated and he knew that any attempt to initiate the action phase before he was fully operational would be suicidal.

That first morning he had dutifully joined a minibus tour leaving from the curved driveway of the Hotel Itá Enramada, its modernistic white facade and palm trees giving it the appearance of an outpost from Miami Beach. The tour would not only help orient him, but would also help establish local cover as a tourist. A small group of American tourists milled around the spacious palm-lined lobby, checking camera equipment and trying to one-up each other on the bargains they had got on gaudy Guarani handicrafts and silver maté cups.

A woman in a flowered print dress and a large straw hat decorated with plastic fruit was reminding her husband for the twentieth time that they had to be sure and get enough samples of nauditi lace for the entire family. Her husband, his pink sunburned knees sticking out under Bermuda shorts, pretended he hadn’t heard her and fiddled with one of his camera cases. She poked him with her fingers as they boarded the minibus in front of Caine.

“Oh, honey, we mustn’t forget Aunt Flo,” she said. The man looked unhappily out the window, as if the one thing in the world he wanted to do was to forget Aunt Flo.

Caine settled into a window seat with a silent prayer to whoever had invented air conditioning. A teen-aged blonde in jeans traveling with an elderly woman that he took to be her grandmother, glanced at him out of the corner of her eye to let him know that her glands were working. Give her fifteen years and a couple of failed marriages and she might even become interesting, Caine thought, and turned to the window.

At last the minibus began to move, trailing a cloud of exhaust fumes that hung in the air like brown fog. He watched the corrugated shacks along the riverfront slide by, catching glimpses of naked brown children playing soccer in a dusty field. The driver pointed out the ornate Government Palace and ministry offices on Calle El Paraguayo Independiente, gleaming white in the bright sunlight. The minibus turned away from the river and headed downtown, stopping for a guided tour at the Pantheon of Heroes in the Plaza de los Héroes.

The Pantheon was a white marble structure that looked like the fourth Xerox of the Hotel des Invalides in Paris. It had been built to commemorate the disastrous nineteenth-century War of the Triple Alliance, in which the outnumbered Paraguayans had fought the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Barely thirty thousand Paraguayan males, mostly boys, survived the carnage and a sequence of military dictatorships had ensued. As a result of the Chaco border war with Bolivia during the thirties, the military solidified their power with the establishment of a fascistic regime that still endured, modeled after the National Socialism that held sway in Germany at that time.

After leading them to a number of tourist shops on Calle Palma, Asunción’s bargain-basement version of Fifth Avenue, the driver took them to the Jardín Botánico for more picture taking. Caine snapped photos for his fellow tourists, who squinted into the sun and said “cheese” till it hurt. The man who wanted to forget Aunt Flo took enough snapshots of the orchids to start a florist’s catalog.

The grand finale of the tour was a brief boat ride to an island in the river inhabited by a tribe of Macá Indians, selling handicrafts from market stalls. The tourists descended on the stalls like Sennacherib on the fold, waving wads of guaranis and noisily haggling for all they were worth. Some of the chattering Macá women smoked fat cigars while impassive Indian men in loincloths, their dark eyes shuttered like camera lenses, charged two hundred guaranis to pose for pictures. Caine bought a gaudy lightweight aho poi shirt to further reinforce his tourist image. By the time the weary tourists staggered off the minibus with armfuls of booty, Caine had decided that a sojourn in a Vietnamese “tiger cage” would beat going on another tour.

Caine found the name of the local office of Mengele & Sons in the Asunción phone book. It was a little anticlimactic, like finding the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. You always knew it had to be there. He located the office in a modern three-story building on Independencia Nacional near the Braniff office. There was no way to avoid going in, he would have to know the layout.

The cool shade of the hallway soothed his skin like sunburn lotion, after the blistering morning heat of the streets. The Mengele office shared the third floor with a lawyer’s office. Caine entered the Mengele office and stopped at the partition separating him from a petite blond receptionist, who was chewing on a pencil. The walls were hung with blown-up photographs of agricultural equipment, digging into the earth like giant mechanical insects from a grade B science fiction movie. Beyond the partition were a few shirt-sleeved clerks bent over their desks and two doors to private offices. One of the doors bore a brass plate with the inscription, ALOIS MENGELE, PRESIDENT. Mengele’s brother.

Caine’s eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses as he checked the walls for light switches and alarm wiring. The files he needed would be in Mengele’s office, probably in a desk or wall safe. The blonde stopped chewing on her pencil, ruffled a few papers to show she had more important things to do than talk to him, and finally looked up.

“What do you wish, señor?”

“Where is the office of Señor Gomez?” Caine asked, naming the lawyer in the adjoining office. He deliberately emphasized his American accent and mangled the syntax. A gringo who could speak fluent Spanish was bound to be suspect.

“He is in the other office, the next door on the left, señor.”

“Gracias.”

He left the office and explored the corridor, listening for a moment to the sound of typing coming from behind the lawyer’s door. At the end of the corridor a rickety, unlit staircase led him to an alley beside the building. He went back up the stairs to the second floor and came down again, leaving the building by the main entrance. It was then that he saw the procession.

A single drum announced the platoon of soldiers with the inexorable, almost frightening tempo of a heartbeat. Rifles held at port arms with fixed bayonets gleaming in the tropic sun, they marched four abreast down the center of Independencia Nacional. Traffic ground to a halt and pedestrians came to a kind of informal attention as they solemnly lined both sides of the avenue. Caine positioned himself in the second rank of shoppers watching the soldiers approach, their legs kicking high in a measured goose step like a mechanical wave approaching some distant shore.

Behind the soldiers white-robed acolytes carried large ornate icons of the crucified Christ and the Blue Virgin of the Miracles on their shoulders. The icons swayed above the acolytes as though they were riding a raft on a sea of impassive Indian faces. A ripple of movement ran along the lines of onlookers as they knelt and genuflected at the icons’ approach. Behind the icons a group of priests and assistants blessed the crowd with the sign of the cross, looking like a flock of crows in their black cassocks. After the priests came another platoon of goose-stepping soldiers, bringing up the rear.

Caine stood transfixed as the procession marched by. He felt an almost superstitious sense of shock and recognition and unconsciously he touched the Bauer, held snug in his waistband at the small of his back, almost as if it were a good-luck charm. Never before had he associated the Church with goose-stepping soldiers and fixed bayonets. As nothing ever had, it brought home to him a glimpse of what life for these people was really all about. No wonder Mengele had been able to go about his business here with complete impunity, he mused.

That evening he attended Sabbath eve services in a tiny synagogue in the Trinidad suburb. The church procession had convinced him that any attempt to directly approach Mengele would only muddy the water and forewarn the target. He needed hard information on local Nazis and it was likely that the Jews of Asunción had some of the answers. If you want to know where the wolves are, you could do worse than to ask the sheep, he thought.

An orange afterlight of the tropic sunset lingered over the streets like a floating veil, bringing little relief from the relentless heat. The street was crowded with gossiping housewives. Ragged copper-skinned children played in a garbage-strewn corner lot. From an open tienda a radio blared the rhythms of música folklórica as he entered the small wooden-frame house that served as a synagogue.

Inside, about twenty mostly elderly Jews in business suits stood praying in Spanish-flavored Hebrew. Their perspiring bodies swayed ritualistically as they faced a wooden closet covered by a crepe curtain. It bore a crudely painted Lion of Judah standing on a Star of David. Caine awkwardly placed a handkerchief on his head to serve as a yarmulke, wondering what he was supposed to do.

A fat red-faced man in his fifties with bulldog jowls shoved a prayer book at Caine, pointing out the place in the text. Caine shrugged helplessly and the man smiled back with an air of patient resignation. After the service Caine told the man, who introduced himself as Jaime Weizman, that he was an American Jew who was thinking of opening a business in Paraguay and needed advice on local conditions. They arranged to meet for lunch at the parrillada and it was Weizman that Caine was waiting for as he checked his watch again.

The only hitch was that he had been tailed by a green Chevy from the synogogue back to his hotel. It was frustrating because there was no reason for it and because he couldn’t flush the tail without revealing that he knew he was being followed and thereby blowing his cover. Things were getting hairy too soon, he told himself as he sipped his drink.

The waiter brought over his carne asada and went back to the bar, where he settled on a stool and pulled out a tattered paperback. The lurid book cover showed a blonde in a torn blouse being pistol-whipped by a faceless figure in a trench coat. The waiter dived headfirst into the book as into a pool, as Weizman finally arrived in an old Fiat.

Weizman ambled slowly toward Caine, his checked sports jacket refracted in the shimmering heat, as though seen through warped glass. He settled into the chair opposite Caine with a small sigh of relief. With an air of annoyance at the interruption, the waiter put down his book and came over to the table. Weizman ordered a sopa Paraguaya, a kind of corn bread quiche, and a cold cerveza. The waiter delivered the order to the kitchen and went back to the bar and his paperback.

Caine explained once again that as a fellow Jew he wanted to get to know the Jewish community in Asunción before committing himself to a business venture in Paraguay. As Caine spoke, Weizman’s dark eyes regarded him with a disconcerting mixture of friendliness and unhappiness, like a puppy that wants to play and knows it’s going to be rebuffed. Weizman patted at his florid, sweating face with a handkerchief, smiling apologetically, as though he were wagging his tail.

“Perdóneme, Señor Foster, but you are not Jewish,” Weizman said uneasily, his English heavily accented and tentative.

Caine briefly considered lying, then decided against it. He sensed that hidden inside that amiable envelope of flesh was a shy, frightened man.

“How can you tell?”

Weizman shrugged with that gesture of Latin indifference that is mostly indolence. Then he smiled shyly, as though offering Caine a gift.

“After two thousand years, you get a knack for it.”

“You’re right, I’m not Jewish.”

Weizman nodded solemnly. The waiter brought a frosted bottle of beer that Weizman consumed greedily, sucking at the bottle like a starving baby at the nipple. Weizman was like a man who had gone hungry and forever afterward lived with the fear that his food might be taken from him again.

“I’m with Interpol. I’m here to investigate Nazi war criminals,” Caine said crisply, flashing the bronze badge he had bought in Las Vegas.

“What war crimes? The camps were all a figment of Zionist propaganda. If you don’t believe me, ask any German.”

“I did.” Caine smiled. “They’re all innocent. Hitler fought the war single-handed.”

“Meshuggener.” Weizman smiled sadly, meaning “crazy” as if it were a compliment. “Do you know the story in the Talmud about the king who visited the prison? Each of the prisoners protested his innocence, except for one man, who admitted he was a robber. Throw this thief out of here,’ the king said. ‘He will corrupt all these innocents.’” Weizman giggled happily at his own story.

“I’m here after some of the guilty ones, even if they are maligned victims of Zionist propaganda,” Caine said with a wink.

“Guilt.” Weizman looked at him quizzically. “You use such old-fashioned words, Señor Foster. I thought you North Americans were much more up-to-date. Besides, guilt, vengeance, justice, those words passed me by a million years ago. I am a Jew, Señor Foster. What matters to us is survival. That’s all, just survival. We’re very good at it, we Jews. Survival is the great Jewish”—he waved his hand, searching for the word, as though seeking to pluck it from the air—“talent.”

“Do you want to see the Nazis go free?”

“Which of us is truly free, Señor Foster? You, me, the Germans? We are all the prisoners of our past, verdad? When the Nazis came to power, the Jews tried to flee Germany. Not one country was willing to take them in, including your United States. There was only one place that was willing to accept them. Do you know where that was, Señor Foster?” Weizman asked, mopping his sweating brow with the soggy handkerchief. “Nazi Germany. Then during the war the world stood idly by, while the Holocaust happened. Europe was flattened, but not one of the death camps was ever bombed. Not one! After the war it was business as usual. The war was over. Who wanted to dig up a past better left buried? After all, the Nazis were only doing their duty, like a good German should.”

“If you really believe that shit, why did you agree to see me?”

“To find out what you were after. There are only a few hundred Jews in Paraguay, Señor Foster. We are a small tightly knit community and we survive mostly by staying out of the limelight. So when anyone takes an interest in us, it’s dangerous, and we have to know what it’s all about.”

“Is that why you had me tailed back to my hotel?” Caine asked, with a sudden surge of relief.

“I’m afraid we’re not very good at that sort of thing,” Weizman apologized.

Jesus, so that’s all the Chevy was, Caine thought. Amateurs should never play with professionals. It was like giving children your new Buick and asking them to go play Grand Prix driver on the Santa Monica freeway.

“No, you’re not. I’d advise you not to try it again.”

“Do you know what it’s like to be a Paraguayan Jew, Señor Foster? Our glorious leader, Alfredo Stroessner”—Weizman’s lips pursed in a strange kind of unctuous irony as he whispered the name, looking around the empty restaurant to make sure he wasn’t overheard—“is descended from Bavarian immigrants. We are under constant surveillance. People who stick their noses into German business just disappear. We have been threatened many times. Even the most casual remark can cause arrest and the whole community is threatened with reprisals. Twice our synagogue was firebombed and when we went to the police, they told us to mind our own business. My Cousin Meyer once identified Eduard Roschmann right here in Asunción. What was left of my cousin’s body was found two days later in the jungle by Mennonite missionaries. Don’t stir up trouble, Señor Foster. The Germans here still believe in the principle of collective guilt. Whatever you do, we will be the ones to pay for it.”

“So just play it safe, is that it?”

“We survive, Señor Foster,” Weizman sighed. “It’s what we’re good at.”

“Where’s Josef Mengele?”

“I’m begging you, señor.” Weizman’s bulldog face quivered with emotion. “Por favor, let it alone. Let us handle it in our own way.”

“That’s what the Jews said to Moses when he wanted to challenge the Pharaoh. Fortunately he wasn’t paying attention.” Caine smiled.

“Such a deal,” Weizman giggled. “I was right, you are a meshuggener.”

“No, I’m just a goy with a job to do. Have you ever seen Mengele here in Asunción?”

Weizman hawked and spat into the sand.

“That one. It would give you a chill to see him. He left Asunción years ago and moved to Amambay province in the south. But he used to come back every so often. Sometimes I would see him at the Amstel Restaurant. And once at the Tyrol Hotel in Eldorado.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Maybe five—no, six years ago. There was another man from Interpol here then. He also stirred things up. That’s when we were firebombed the first time. And for what? Mengele was already gone. We heard that he had left Pedro Juan Caballero and crossed the border to Ponta Porã, on the Brazilian side of the Paraná. The last we heard he had simply disappeared into the Mato Grosso. That was the last anyone ever heard of him and good riddance. He hasn’t come back.”

“Would you know if he were back in Paraguay?”

For a moment Weizman’s eyes searched Caine’s face as if it were a map he was trying to read. Then he shook his head with finality.

“He is not in Paraguay. If he were, we would know about it, comprende? Besides”—he shrugged—“we have enough Nazis here without him.”

“Who leads the Nazis here in Asunción?”

Weizman’s eyes turned up and Caine could, see the whites as Weizman shifted uneasily in his chair, like a child who has to go to the bathroom.

“Müller,” he muttered, actually trembling in terror like a field mouse in front of a snake. “Heinrich Müller. He owns a meat-packing business. Perfect for a butcher, wouldn’t you say? But be careful, señor. He has important friends. Political friends.”

“Such a deal,” Caine said, and stood up. He left a five-hundred-guarani note on the table for the check and extended his hand to Weizman.

“Gracias,” he said and shook Weizman’s limp, moist hand.

“Buena suerte.” Good luck, Weizman said, looking as though he didn’t have any to spare. Caine left him sitting there, fervently attacking his sopa Paraguayo as though it were his last meal.

Caine was growing impatient. He had been tailing Müller for almost a week without getting a single chance to make the snatch. Of course, snatching Müller might alert Mengele, but since Caine had no intention of letting Müller go, all the Nazis would know for sure was that Müller had disappeared. Then, too, if he could move quickly enough against Mengele, Müller’s disappearance wouldn’t matter. “Surpries lies at the foundation of all undertakings, without exception,” Koenig used to say, quoting Clausewitz. Koenig was fond of quoting Clausewitz. Except that it didn’t look like he was going to get the chance to put the theory into practice, Caine mused, because he hadn’t found any way to get at Müller.

To make matters worse, inevitably he had been spotted. It was impossible to tail someone in such a small community and go unobserved, so he had taken the opposite tack, blatantly showing up wherever Müller did, making a noisy show as the ugly American tourist with a local hooker on his arm for camouflage. But the ploy only worked short term and time was running out. He had been spotted once too often for coincidence, and now they were undoubtedly wondering who the hell he was and whether or not to terminate him.

Even now Müller was flicking an uneasy glance in his direction across the crowded restaurant. Unless he did it tonight he would have to abort; he was already running too close to the wire. Maybe they were playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie. That very evening before dinner Caine had come back to his room in the Hotel del Lago to find that the hair he had stretched across the doorposts was broken and the keys he had placed in a carefully disarranged pattern in his bureau drawer had been moved. The problem was that the son of a bitch was never alone, Caine mused as he swallowed the last of his beer.

Müller was a big man—nearly six feet—his body still hard and trim under his lightweight sport shirt and slacks. His hair was closely cropped and iron gray, his blue eyes like aquamarines set in a face that looked like it had been hammered out of bronze. Even in his civies he still looked like an SS officer on furlough. He leaned over and whispered something to his bodyguard, Steiger, then with a bellow he rejoined his table companions in singing war songs from the good old days. They punctuated their bleary nostalgia by banging their beer bottles on the table in time to the singing, drowning out the plaintive Paraguayan music played by a trio of a harp and two guitars in the far corner.

Steiger was a bullet-headed Neanderthal with a white scar running down his forehead into his cheek. Caine didn’t bother to fool himself into thinking Steiger was a pushover. He hadn’t gotten that scar from Heidelberg. He had the piggish face of a Brown-shirt bully and Caine was willing to bet that the scar came from the kind of street brawl he probably relished. Steiger made no effort to hide the gun in his waistband, jammed against his beer belly like a truss. It was a naval Luger with a six-inch barrel, the kind that used to be carried by the Wehrmacht paratroopers. Also seated at the table were Müller’s mistress, an aging blonde who wore a silk scarf around her neck to hide a sagging chin line, and a fat, bald German in a business suit, who crooned the lyrics in a beery off-key monotone.

It had to be now or never, Caine decided, signaling the waiter for the check. He had completed his preparations in Asunción, renting a black Ford and buying everything he needed: flashlight, canteen, binoculars, car flares, fishing tackle with eighty-pound test line, the tin cans of vegetables that he had emptied, the five-gallon can of gasoline. But it was impossible to get at Müller in Asunción. The man’s house and office were made of brick and built like fortresses, his pattern of movement constantly varied—and Steiger never left his side.

Then Müller broke the pattern once again. Caine followed Müller’s Mercedes to the resort town of San Bernardino on the tropical shore of Lake Ypacaraí. Müller evidently planned to spend a few days with his mistress at his sumptuous lakeside villa. Caine reconnoitered the area till he found the spot he was looking for: a jungle clearing near an abandoned farmhouse, miles from any habitation. Near the clearing was a stagnant marsh pool, oozing with the stench of slime and death. The marsh was bordered with thick mud, black and sticky as pitch.

Using the fishing line and pebbles placed in the empty tin cans, the way they used to around the fortified hamlets, he set trip wires across the overgrown trail from the farmhouse to the clearing. As he worked the smell of his own body heat, the noisy shrieks of the jungle birds, the trip wires, brought it all back. Asia.

He thought he heard the belch of mortars and the rattle of small-arms fire, but when he looked up, there was only the electric whine of insects, like the constant hum of high-power lines and the squawking of a pair of wildly colored parrots. That fucking war just won’t end, he thought miserably. He reached for a stick to throw at the birds, then flinched back with horror as it slithered silently into the undergrowth.

But it was no go. Caine had watched the villa through the binoculars from a rowboat well out in the lake. He counted on the glare from the water to cover the glint of sunlight off the lenses. But except for a bit of waterfront fishing with Steiger, Müller hadn’t left the villa. All Caine had to show for two days of stakeout were the surubi and armados fish he had caught, a wealth of mosquito bites, and, in spite of a thick layer of sunscreen, a neon-bright sunburn that made him look like a warning ad for Solarcaine—until tonight, when Müller finally ventured out to La Cordobesa for dinner and the sentimental Bierhaus sing-along.

Their singing followed Caine out of the restaurant, the lyrics hanging in his mind like an unfinished sentence.

“Wie heist Lilli Marlene, Wie heist Lillie Marlene?”

The question lingered like a Zen koan. It seemed that if he could just find an answer to the riddle of Lilli Marlene’s identity, it would somehow contain an answer to the riddle of the universe itself. He shrugged the thought away as he got into the car. Perhaps there was no answer, no real Lilli Marlene. And perhaps the universe didn’t mean anything either.

He backed the car into the dark alley beside the restaurant, by the back exit door he had spotted earlier. He opened the locked door with his folding knife and slipped unnoticed into the filthy men’s lavabo near the door. He latched the cubicle door, folded down the toilet seat, and settled down to wait, trying to breathe through his mouth to minimize the stench.

While he watched the door through the doorjamb crack of the cubicle, he made a slipknot loop from a length of fishing line and put it back into his pocket. Then he took out the Bauer and cocked it. He was counting on the beer and the regularity of Miiller’s bladder capacity. The last time he had seen Müller out drinking in Asunción, Müller had hit the john approximately every forty-five minutes. It wasn’t much, but it was something. More important, Steiger hadn’t gone with him.

Caine glanced around the cubicle at the graffiti. The partitions were decorated with the usual badly drawn cocks and cunts and obscene Spanish suggestions that would have required a contortionist to fulfill. That’s the part that the Company doesn’t talk about when recruiting, he thought wryly. That an agent spends more time in toilets than a janitor does.

Müller’s image filled the doorway for an instant and then it was gone. Caine waited until he heard the piddling water sound from the urinal before he quietly unlatched the cubicle door and stepped out. Müller was just zipping up his fly when he heard Caine. He started to turn, his eyes narrowing at the sight of the Bauer aimed at his heart.

“Put your hands up,” Caine ordered sharply.

Müller raised his hands slowly, an ironic smile playing across his face.

He didn’t looked worried. Probably playing for time till Steiger came looking, Caine thought, his eyes burning bright green as with fever.

“No, against the wall, hotshot,” Caine said, gesturing at the wall with the Bauer. He held Müller spread-eagle against the wall and quickly frisked him, keeping the Bauer clear. He knew he had to be quick. Steiger could come in at any second. Now he had come to the danger point. If Müller were to make his move, it would have to be now.

“Put your hands behind you.”

Instantaneously with the tensing of the muscles in Müller’s shoulders telegraphing the move, Caine slammed the butt of the Bauer with all his strength into Müller’s kidneys. Müller’s strangled gasp was lost in the hollow thump as Caine rammed his left palm against the base of the skull, cracking Müller’s forehead against the wall.

“Put ’em behind you,” Caine hissed, and as Müller weakly brought his hands behind him, Caine slipped the fishing-line loop around the crossed wrists and pulled it so tight the line disappeared into the flesh. Müller started to fill his lungs to shout and Caine jammed the Bauer into the same kidney. All that came out of Müller was a hoarse gargle.

“Shut up,” Caine hissed, and tightly bound Müller’s hands with the remaining length of line. A thin red bracelet of blood formed around Müller’s wrists and began to drip on the floor.

“Go,” Caine said and shoved Müller ahead of him into the dark corridor and out the alley exit. He kicked Müller facedown onto the Ford’s rear-seat floor, fishing in Müller’s pockets for the keys to the Mercedes. When he found the keys, he started the Ford, pulled out of the alley, and drove for half a block, stopping alongside the parked Mercedes. Warning Müller not to move, he jumped out of the Ford and quickly opened the Mercedes. He released the hook lock, opened the hood, and yanked out the distributor cap and wiring. Then he slammed down the hood, locked the Mercedes, and was back in the Ford within seconds, heading out of town along the lake-front road. In spite of all that, he knew nothing he did would delay Steiger for long.

He could hear Müller trying to gain leverage against the rear seat, as he neared the outskirts of San Bernadino. Suddenly he doused his lights and swerved to a stop in a dark private road. Caine heaved the distributor cap and the Mercedes keys in opposite directions far into the trees, then went around to the rear door and tightly bound Müller’s feet with another length of fish line. He forced Müller to hop into the front seat, where he could keep an eye on him, and soon they were again speeding out to the deserted farmhouse.

The headlights carved a tunnel of light through the dense jungle darkness as they sped down the unlit asphalt road. The warm, moist wind created by the car’s speed flowed through the half-opened window, pressing against his skin in a clammy embrace. Insects splattered like brown raindrops against the windshield until he was forced to use the wipers, smearing the glass with a gummy film.

“Who are you? Israelien?” Müller gasped. Since the Eichmann snatch Nazi fugitives had been haunted by the nightmare of Israeli commandos. Now the nightmare was coming true at last.

Müller twisted to look at Caine, his face sweating and taut with pain. But his pale eyes were cold and still in control of it.

“Bitte, the line is too tight. My hands are getting numb.”

“So what,” Caine said.

The asphalt ended and they began bouncing down a dirt road, hedged like a corridor by the dark shadows of trees. Müller gritted his teeth in pain. Every few seconds Caine glanced across at him, then back up at the rearview mirror, which remained pitch-black. He held the speedometer needle poking around fifty, like a compass needle touching north.

“Are you Israelien?” Müller asked. When Caine didn’t answer, he shrugged and looked away into the darkness.

“It doesn’t matter. It had to come. We are both dead men, you and I. Unless you free me, you’ll never get out of Paraguay alive. Do you know who I am?”

“I know who you are, Müller,” Caine said.

“You know nothing,” Müller retorted contemptuously. “I am Hauptsturmbannführer Heinrich Müller of the Waffen SS. Did you think I would deny it? I am not like those others, the weaklings, who claimed that they were only following orders. Otherwise they wouldn’t have harmed the hair on a Jew’s head,” he added mockingly. “I did not follow orders, I gave them,” he thundered proudly.

“And millions died,” Caine said.

“Why not? It was war and they were in the way. We were trying to do what no society had ever done before. To create a New Order for the world and defend our sacred Vaterland at the same time. Only a squeamish weakling would let a few Jews stand in the way of what we were trying to accomplish. Besides, what were those lice to me? Or anyone? Shall I tell you something? All anyone ever cares about is himself. It’s human nature. If you’re honest, you’ll admit it.

“I tell you, getting a tiny splinter in your little finger will bother you personally more than the death of thousands of people you don’t know. Ja, all the rest is liberal posturing”—nodding his head sagely.

“Shut up,” Caine said.

“You can’t take the truth can you, filthy Jew,” Müller muttered, almost to himself.

Caine took the Bauer from his waistband and with a single sweeping movement smashed the butt into Müller’s mouth.

“I said, ‘Shut up,’” he spat out sharply.

Müller coughed and out came a mouthful of blood and broken teeth. His lips glistened bright red, as if he had smeared on lipstick.

As he drove the remaining few miles in silence, Caine tried to compute how much time he had before Steiger came. Getting a car would take him a few minutes, but that was all. Steiger would know whom to look for and he would only have to ask a few people to find out what kind of car Caine was driving. Then it was only a matter of questioning people until he found someone who had seen the Ford. Only two roads went out of town and he would have to explore a few side ones. Figure half an hour at best.

He glanced over at Müller, who stared impassively into the darkness. His bartered face might have been sculpted from stone. Müller knew all he had to do was hold out till Steiger came—Caine was clearly alone. Either he would be rescued or killed—so in any event the pain period would be limited. Müller had no incentive to talk. But Caine had other ideas.

He remembered Smiley Gallagher, his small squinting eyes gleaming with shy pride as he defended his techniques. They were sitting in that noisy bar in Saigon where the MP’s never came because Madame Wu had the girls service them with French ticklers if they came in civies, and razors if they came in uniform.

“If all you’re after is information, you don’t need lots of time and an elaborate apparatus. All that is required is a basic knowledge of human physiology and the creation of the right psychological conditions. For example,” Smiley had said, pausing to delicately pluck a morsel of lemon grass from his plate of Ga Xa Ot and chew it with the contented air of a well-fed cow, “suppose you want to interrogate two prisoners from the same outfit. All you have to do is bust them up for a while to see which of them takes it better. Then you question the stronger and when he refuses to answer, you shoot him. Then you cock the gun and put the same question to the weaker one. At that point you couldn’t stop him from spilling his guts if you tried.

“The essence of torture is expectation,” Smiley said, his soft brown eyes as untroubled as if he were calmly describing the behavior of laboratory animals. “You see, Johnny, the key is that the subject must have the clear notion that the pain will increase indefinitely until he gives you what you want. Oh, yes,” he added, like a physics student rewriting an equation, reducing it to its simplest form. “The subject has to feel that you’re threatening the thing he loves most, his sight, his manhood, his woman, or his life.”

The car bumped slowly across a field to the dark silhouette of the old abandoned farmhouse. After he shut the headlights, the darkness was almost complete. The night was filled with crawling sounds and bird cries and, somewhere, the plaintive shrieks of an animal that he couldn’t identify. Caine took the flashlight, fishing hooks and line, and the car flares from a paper bag in the trunk, then put the bag over Müller’s head.

Caine dragged Müller from the car and leaned him against the fender. Using the flashlight, he carefully examined the knots around the wrists to make sure they were holding. Müller’s clenched hands had turned into dark purplish claws. Soon they would be useless.

“Where are you taking me?”—Müller’s voice sounding hollow and muffled from inside the bag. Caine responded with a savage knee to the groin. Today’s lesson, class, is to speak only when spoken to, he thought. He waited for Müller to finish retching into the bag, a thread of vomit dripping down onto his chest.

He cut the line binding Müller’s legs and prodded him with the Bauer down the trail that was barely discernible in the narrow flashlight beam. Even though he remembered exactly where he had placed the trip wires, he almost missed them in the darkness. He had Müller step carefully over the wires and then shoved the stumbling figure down the trail to the clearing.

Using the fishing hooks and line, he tied Müller to a tree. It was essential that Müller be unable to move and he crisscrossed his chest and arms and legs with so many coils that Müller looked like a fly trussed up by a spider for later consumption. He was careful to leave the head and neck free, so that Müller would be unable to kill himself. When he was finished, he positioned the flashlight in the crook of a nearby tree so he could see what he was doing and checked the Omega. There wasn’t much time left.

He removed the bag from Müller’s head and lit a cigarette. Müller’s bloodshot eyes glowed as red as coals in the pale light. An insect buzzed Caine’s face and he slapped at it automatically. They heard a bird shriek not far away and then the shriek was suddenly cut off. Around them the jungle darkness stirred and thrashed like a restless sleeper, spilling the rank smell of the marsh toward them like a pail of dirty water.

“You can scream all you like,” Caine said conversationally. “There’s no. one within miles; that’s why I chose this place. And don’t think Steiger’s going to come to the rescue like the U.S. Cavalry. I’ve taken care of that. So there’s just you and me. Now let me tell you what I’m going to do,” he said, unbuckling Müller’s belt and pulling down his pants and undershorts. Müller’s eyes were almost all pupil, black as a hawk’s with fear and rage.

“I’m going to cause you more pain than you can imagine. You won’t pass out, you won’t be saved, and you won’t die. The pain will just get worse and worse until you tell me what I want to know. It’s like you said before. All anybody ever thinks about is himself. So I suggest you forget about trying to protect anyone else and just think about yourself.

“I’m going to start on your testicles. After maybe forty seconds or so you might as well cut them off because they’ll be absolutely dead and useless. Understand?

“Now then, I’m going to ask you only one time and one time only. Where is Josef Mengele?”

“Bitte,” Müller’s voice quavered. “I don’t know.”

“Too bad for you,” Caine said calmly and flicked away his cigarette, checking his watch again.

“God in heaven, I’d tell you if I knew. I swear it,” Müller shouted desperately, twisting uselessly against the fishing line.

Caine took Müller’s soft penis in his hand, pulling it up to expose the testicles. The penis stirred slightly as he flicked open his cigarette lighter and touched the tip of the flame to the testicles.

Müller’s body leaped and quivered with electric shock, as it thrashed mindlessly against the fishing coils, which began to drip with blood. A piercing scream seemed to emanate from his very bowels, as the acrid smell of burnt hair and scorched flesh reached Caine’s nostrils. It was not a human scream. The body jerked with desperate convulsions and the stench of charred meat grew very strong as the skin blistered and began to turn black. The animal-like screaming went beyond pain or dying and it seemed to go on forever, like an echoing air-raid siren wailing desperately for the end of the world. The skin was gone and Caine could see one of the testicles itself, blistering and charring as it shriveled to the size of a pea. Then he became aware that the scream had become a ululation, that it had a pattern, and that Müller was somehow screaming the word Peru as if it were the name of God.

Caine clicked the lighter shut, grabbed Müller’s head, and banged it against the tree trunk. Müller continued to wail mindlessly, like a small child. He slapped Müller’s contorted face two or three times.

“Mengele is in Peru?”

Müller tried to look at him with hatred, as if remembering the SS officer he had been, but he was broken and there was nothing in his eyes except the dull glaze of pain.

“Ja, bitte. No more, bitte. No more,” he whimpered.

Müller’s head fell forward and hung from his neck like a broken fixture. His rasping breath shattered into a series of sobs. His face was a death’s head, glistening with sweat and tears and blood. Then Caine heard it. The tinny, rattling sound of the trip-wire alarm and a sudden crackle of underbrush. Steiger.

Caine moved quickly. He tore Müller’s shirt and wadded it for a gag that he stuffed into Müller’s mouth. He bound the gag in place with another strip of shirt, his fingers bumping against each other in his haste. Then he grabbed the flashlight and a car flare. Just as he clicked off the flashlight, he heard another jangling rattle and a muffled curse. Steiger had hit the second trip wire. There were only seconds left. He struck the car flare and dropped it near Müller’s feet, where it burned cherry-red, like a dying star, as he blundered into the underbrush and rolled behind a tree. For a moment he froze and closed his eyes, so that his vision could adjust to the darkness as quickly as possible.

He knew the Bauer wouldn’t stand a chance against the range of the Luger, so he would have to play cat and mouse, hoping to get within range before Steiger spotted him. Even if he could manage it, the .25 caliber shell was too light to risk a body shot. It would have to be a head shot, and he couldn’t afford to miss. Steiger wasn’t about to hand him the luxury of a second chance.

Caine lay silently, breathing shallowly to minimize the sound of his own breath and straining his ears for any sound of movement. A mosquito’s whine by his ear sounded loudly as a plucked guitar string. There was the distant chattering of two birds engaged in a nervous dialogue. And a faint, almost inaudible grinding sound that could have been a beetle chewing on a leaf. Otherwise there was nothing.

Obviously Steiger had also frozen, waiting for him to make a mistake. Caine felt he had a few things going for him. Steiger didn’t know where he was or how he was armed, so he would have to be cautious. Steiger didn’t know the terrain or if there were any more trip wires, so he would probably stick to the trail and move slowly. Also the flare light would inevitably draw Steiger like a moth to a flame and at the moment of firing would fractionally reduce his night vision. Finally Caine had the flashlight, which could be used to mislead as well as illuminate.

Even so, Caine knew his chances were no better than fifty-fifty because at this stage he hadn’t wanted to risk bringing anything bigger than the Bauer through Paraguayan Customs. When Steiger approached the clearing and first spotted the flare, he would realize his danger and choose to crawl around one side of the clearing or the other, so he could dive into the cover of the underbrush the instant he heard or spotted Caine. If he came on Caine’s side, he would be within range of the Bauer, and Caine would have a shot at him. If he went on the far side, it would be a long shot for the Bauer and Caine wouldn’t stand a chance. Either way it was an easy shot for the Luger.

His heartbeat sounded loudly as a drum, in the deathly silence. Sweat burned his eyes and the old tightness grabbed at his solar plexus like a fist. It was like being back in Indochina—the jungle sounds, the heat and the death you couldn’t see but you knew was out there. It was the terror of a nightmare grown real, and for a moment he felt as if he were drowning in black water. Then he remembered the training at the Farm, Koenig speaking quietly in the tent after night maneuvers on the boom-boom course.

“When you’ve done everything you can and the fear comes, and believe me, it’ll come, ask yourself the question: Is there anything else I can do?” Koenig had said.

There was still one thing he could do, Caine thought. Stealthily, placing his hands slowly one at a time so as not to disturb any animals or leaves or twigs, he began to creep on his hands and toes through the brush toward the trail. When Steiger came, he would expect to find Caine somewhere in front of him and not so close to him by the trail. He crept slowly; each movement seemed to take hours. His eyes caught every shadow and his ears registered barely audible sounds, as instincts millions of years old came alive in him. He had become the most efficient killing machine nature had ever created: the human animal stalking its prey.

As he neared the shadow of a tree at the edge of the clearing, its trunk about half the width of a man, the jungle itself seemed to hold its breath. He crouched behind the tree, steadying the Bauer in his right hand against one side of the trunk and the flashlight in his left hand against the other side. Most people hold a flashlight in front of them near their side. Caine was counting on Steiger knowing that and firing in the vicinity of the light as soon as he saw it. Caine wiped the sweat from his eyes against his shoulder, holding his breath in the dark silence. Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly, he thought.

The sound of a broken twig thrilled through him. It seemed to come from about twenty-five feet away, right around the maximum effective range of the Bauer. It was going to be very close. There was a flicker of shadow in the faint reddish glow from the flare and he thought he heard the faint scuffle of a shoe in the same direction. He no longer had any time to think about it because those primordial instincts had taken over and he clicked the flashlight on. The beam caught a crouching Steiger, silhouetted for an instant against the darkness. He was on the far side. But it didn’t matter, because he was already whipping the Luger into a two-handed stance aimed at the light. The two guns fired simultaneously. Steiger missed. Caine didn’t.

Steiger crumpled forward and lay still, but Caine didn’t move. He carefully and deliberately placed four more shots into Steiger. The body jerked spasmodically with the first two shots, as if jolted by electric shocks. The body received the last two shots without movement. Caine reloaded the Bauer and listened for any sounds on the off-chance that Steiger hadn’t come alone. But there was nothing.

He raced over to Steiger, grabbed the Luger, and fired it almost point-blank into the head. The skull cracked open like a rotten fruit and bits of brains and blood sprayed across the ground. Then Caine ran across the clearing to Müller. But he was too late.

Incredibly, Müller had worked the gag loose by rubbing the back of his head against the tree. Then he had committed suicide by swallowing the wadded-up shirt and choking himself. A piece of shirt strip hung from the corner of his mouth, like a rat’s tail from a snake’s mouth. Caine tried to pull the shirt strip out, but it tore apart in his hand. Besides it was pointless. Müller’s pupils showed no reaction to the flashlight.

Caine cut the body down and kicked it a few times in savage frustration. Then he caught himself and just stood there, listening to the night sounds of the jungle coming to life once more. He was blown wide open and there wasn’t much time left. His only chance was to get to the Mengele office before the Nazis had a chance to react. The only question was whether Steiger or either of Müller’s companions had taken the time to make a phone call.

He carried both bodies to the edge of the marsh and dumped them into the black mud. In a few days they would be unrecognizable; the jungle animals would see to that. Then he drove the car Steiger had used into the ramshackle shell of the farmhouse to hide it from view. Using the flashlight, he carefully examined the Ford, checking the engine, the wiring under the dashboard, and the car’s underbody, just in case Steiger had left him a surprise package. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and crawled out from under the car. Everything was clean.

He stripped off his filthy clothes and buried them in the bushes, then washed himself with water from the canteen before changing into a fresh pair of slacks and a sports shirt, congratulating himself on his foresight in bringing them along. Soon he was back in the Ford, speeding along the road to Asunción.

It was nearly two in the morning by the time he parked the car on a dark street off Independencia Nacional. The streets of the business section were deserted at this hour, and the quiet thunk of the closing car door echoed ominously in the stillness, like the sound of a midnight knock at the door. On the corner a single streetlight cast a yellowish glare with the unblinking gaze of a solitary jaundiced eye. Moths and insects swirled and battered themselves against the light, like the souls of the damned desperately seeking entrance to the New Jerusalem. Their tiny corpses littered the glass globe with dark smudges.

Caine opened the trunk and took out another paper bag, containing the five-gallon can of gasoline. He checked his pockets: Luger, detonators, lockpick, flashlight, the Bauer in his waistband, the small lump of plastique that he had retrieved from his cache in a safety-deposit box in a New York bank between flight connections. He had saved a small block of surplus plastique after the Abu Daud hit in Paris, when they had blown apart Le Beau Amateur in the Boulevard St. Michel section as a diversion. If the police stopped him, he could always tell them he was planning to open a retail outlet for urban guerrillas, he thought wryly. Keeping to the shadows, he made his way to the alley exit and up the stairs to the third-floor office.

For a long moment he pressed his ear to the door, but there was no sound. Either he had beaten them to the punch, or they were very good. On his previous visit to the office he hadn’t seen any alarm wiring on the office door, but something made him hesitate. Then he realized what it was. The office was the bull’s-eye of the red zone. If they were to come at him, this is where it would be. But he had no choice, he decided with a slight shrug. He had already taken two strikes: Weizman and Müller. The office was the only remaining route to Mengele in Paraguay. It was all he had left.

The lock was a standard Yale that wouldn’t have slowed the balding, bespectacled “flaps and seals” instructor in Langley long enough to check his watch. But it took Caine almost five minutes with the pick until he heard the faint, satisfying click. In an instant he was inside with the flashlight, checking the drapes and cutting the alarm wire to the inner office. He put the can of gasoline on the desk, checked the window to make sure no light could seep out to the street, then used his folding knife to pry open the desk lock. Using standard burglar procedure, he started with the bottom drawers and worked his way up, so he wouldn’t waste time closing the drawers.

The second drawer was full of folders of correspondence in German and Spanish on orders for machinery. Caine scanned the material quickly, looking for references to money being moved from Germany or the Paraguayan office, or anything on Peru. But there was nothing, except for a single cryptic reference in a letter that had slipped behind the drawer and had caught on the slot. The letter was a copy of a memo sent by Alois Mengele to the head office in Günzburg more than a year ago. In it Mengele had mentioned a possible need for funds to deal with “der Seestern,” or “the Starfish.” Apart from that there was nothing, Caine decided, wondering what the hell the Starfish was all about. He would have to blow the safe.

He found the wall safe behind a dusty set of ledgers on a five-tiered wall shelf. He explored carefully for alarm wires, but there didn’t seem to be any. The gray plastique fitted in a ring around the combination lock like a doughnut on a peg. He was just about to insert the detonator, when the overhead light clicked on.

There were two of them, both of them beefy middle-aged men who looked enough like Steiger to be cousins. They had the same cropped hair, bullying air of competence, and unimaginative eyes. They were the kind of men who reacted to orders with that fanatic Prussian sense of discipline the Germans call Kadavergehorsam, which makes a corpse snap to attention. Except that they hadn’t come to trade war stories with Caine. One of them carried a 6.35mm Walther PPK, the other a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. The guns bracketed Caine neatly between them like parentheses.

“Put your hands on your head, Herr Foster. Slowly. Very slowly,” the taller one with the shotgun said, his English thick with German consonants.

They must have been hiding in the other inner office, Caine thought, cursing himself for not having checked. It was a rookie’s mistake. The fatal kind, because in this business there are no second chances. If they had come from outside, he would have heard them.

“You’ve made quite a mess here,” the taller one said, his eyes briefly flicking over the scattered papers, but the gun never wavered.

“Don’t worry,” Caine said. “I have a cleaning lady coming in tomorrow to straighten up.”

“A comedian, Fritz,” the taller one said. “Don’t you think he’s a comedian?”

Fritz smiled. It was not a nice smile. Caine didn’t get the idea that Fritz thought he was much of a comedian.

“Place the Luger on the desk. Slowly, with two fingers only on the butt,” he ordered.

Caine did as he was told, his mind racing. He was remembering Koenig’s famous speech about guns. The one they used to have fun imitating over beers at Clyde’s in Georgetown. Harris had been good at it, balancing on the balls of his feet and holding his hands on his hips, just like Koenig, his voice a nasal parody of Koenig’s deep frog’s croak. Throughout the Company, Koenig’s theory was a voice crying in the wilderness, but Caine hoped to hell Koenig was right because it was the only chance he had.

The man with a gun is as vulnerable as the man he’s aiming at,” the famous speech had begun. “That’s because the very fact that he has a gun makes him think that he won’t actually have to use it. That expectation slows his reaction time by as much as half-a-second and if you can get close enough, that’s all the time you need. If there are two men with guns, it’s even better, because each of them will wait for the other to react first and they have to be careful not to hit each other.”

Sure, Caine thought miserably, because it didn’t look like these two krauts were disciples of Koenig’s theories. Right now he wished that Koenig were here to put it to the test instead of him.

Fritz ordered him to face the wall and lean against it for the frisk. Caine positioned himself so that more of his weight was on his feet than his hands. He noted out of the corner of his eye as he turned to the wall that Fritz shoved the Walther in his belt as he approached, so that he would have both hands free for the frisk. He apparently counted on the taller kraut’s shotgun to cover Caine. It was the mistake he had been praying for, Caine thought, and he tried to empty his mind so that the action would be instinctual, which is the way the body works best. If you questioned an Olympic champion on what he was thinking when he set the record, the odds are that he wouldn’t be able to tell you, because conscious thought only impedes reflex action.

The frisk, as every police rookie learns, is a vulnerable position for the officer, because he has to come within a range where his reaction time is slower than any movement, making his gun useless. The theory is that the prisoner’s weight should be on his hands so they can’t be used as weapons without losing balance. At the Farm they were taught the theory’s basic fallacy, which was that the wall provided a purchase for a rear kick.

The angle would be critical because he had to guess at the exact instant that Fritz’s body would be momentarily between him and the shotgun. With his face to the wall he wouldn’t be able to see it. He could only feel it through the aikido concept of irimi, in which you sense that an opponent has entered your space and the resulting blow combines the force of his momentum against your own. Caine began the calm, rhythmic breathing that would initiate the instantaneous flow of the kokyu no henka movement, remembering the way Koichi would stand there in the gym, oblivious to everything except the harmony of his own breathing.

His mind barely had time to register the hard feel of Fritz’s hands starting under his armpits when he moved, lashing backward at the right shin with his heel. He caught it wrong, missing the nerve, but it was all right, because the balance was gone and they both were falling. He felt the hot deafening explosion of the shotgun blast singe his ears as he fell backward on top of Fritz, who reacted immediately even before they hit the floor by wrapping his arms around Caine, pinning Caine’s arms to his sides in a crushing grip. His upper arms felt useless, as though caught by a steel band, as they both kicked desperately in an attempt to find something to push against for leverage. Caine managed to twist slightly sideways and brought the edge of his right hand in a slicing motion behind him, past his hip. There was the feel of something soft and then hard as his hand connected with the pelvic bone and the satisfying sound of a grunt from Fritz, as the pain hit his groin and slightly loosened his grip.

He sliced again with his hand, this time connecting solidly with the groin. Fritz’s sudden scream was lost in the blinding whoosh of a second explosion, the sudden heat searing Caine’s skin. Some of the shotgun pellets had hit the can of gasoline on the desk and it had exploded into a fireball. The room filled with white-hot light that dissolved every shadow in a blinding glare. For an instant Caine’s hands were almost free, and as he reached behind him for the Bauer, he caught Fritz’s middle finger in his left hand, bending it back with a savage twist that snapped the bone like a dry twig.

Out of the corner of his eye Caine saw the barrel of the shotgun somewhere in the blinding glare of flame and fired the Bauer without aiming, wildly emptying the clip in the direction of the shotgun. He managed to roll to his feet, crouching to avoid the fire searing his lungs like acid. The room was going up in flames like a tinderbox, the taller kraut’s wounded body burning as it thrashed feebly on the floor like a half-crushed insect.

Caine braced himself as an enraged Fritz came surging up at him, and almost absentmindedly Caine could hear the distant hee-haw of a police siren. Fritz was swinging a wild right hook and at the last second Caine sidestepped away from it and tried a back-knuckle feint to the temple. As Fritz’s arm came up to block the blow, Caine executed a reverse spinning round-kick that missed the solar plexus but caught Fritz in the stomach. Fritz started to double over and Caine locked his fingers and smashed down at the back of Fritz’s neck in a two-handed chop that smashed Fritz’s head into the corner of the burning desk with a crack like the sound of a well-hit baseball. Fritz crumpled to the floor, his body contorted in an awkward posture of death. Caine slapped at his already smoldering clothes as he leaped for the flaming doorway. There were barely seconds left and with a sudden desperate leap he dived headfirst through the doorway, arms over his head and rolled to his feet in the smoke-filled front office. He bolted through the office door and down the corridor toward the side staircase.

As he ran, he could hear the shouts of police and firemen pounding up the front staircase. Ignoring them, he ducked his head and leaped down the stairs, taking almost an entire flight in a single bound, then tore down the side alley away from Independencia Nacional. He ran down the dark empty street toward the car, the echo of his footsteps lost in the rumble of police and fire engines and the howl of approaching sirens. The breath whistled through his lungs like air through a cracked flute as he ran on. His throat was filled with the bleak taste of defeat, like ashes in his mouth. The game was over. He had blown it.