THE CONCIERGE WAS busy at the desk when Stag arrived back in the lobby of the Dresdenhof. He exited in nonchalant silence and stepped into the cold. The day was dark with typical Berlin spring weather that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to snow or rain. He was expecting to see security goons appear behind him at any minute, but no one followed him.
Back at the elevator to the Adlon, he searched his pockets for his room key card. Deep exhaustion was taking over. He ordered food and checked the news. Buried in the Metro section of the Wuttke online paper was a small mention of Harry’s death. Heart failure was the cause. Wuttke Man Found Dead and Abandoned. The apartment resident was wanted for questioning. Harry’s obit ran in the same paper.
The food came, and he ate while doing more research on Tarnhelm. It was ostensibly a small Swedish janitorial service. But what seemed mundane on the surface was far from it. From their website, he discovered their specialties were high-security clean-up operations and controlled document destruction. The Tarnhelm corporate motto was “We are the Dustbin of the World.”
The words raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Heydrich, with his usual ironic humor, referred to the Gestapo as a cross between a general maid and the dustbin of the Reich. Trash removal. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, no exceptions.
He also discovered what a tarnhelm was. It came from Wagnerian mythology; it was a magical helmet that provided a cloak of invisibility.
Einhar Kronbauer stared grimly at the old Polish maid, for a moment unsure of what she was trying to say in her crappy German. He only knew it was concerning apartment 12A. Something was amiss. And if there was one thing he did not enjoy, it was something going amiss in 12A.
The woman chattered away and urged him to go with her. He had to see what she saw.
He went up with her in the elevator. Katrine, with the fat arms and limp hair, nervously rang her hands. When the elevator door opened, she tugged on his sleeve and urged him quickly to the door.
Kronbauer took out his own key and threw open the door. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but the maid led him to the desk. There in the carpet were the impressions left of the saber-legs of the chair, impressions clearly marked by decades of the chair’s weight being left there, untouched. Only now, the chair was centimeters off target. Obviously moved. And the maid, who was paid an ungodly premium to keep the apartment in EXACT order, was emphatic in her denials.
Einhar had his ideas who had moved the chair. He’d have to make another phone call, something he looked forward to with the same enthusiasm as a colonoscopy.
He stared at the upset maid, his mind wandering to the dread of having to punch in that awful phone number. He knew only one thing: Someone was going to have a funeral. He just hoped like hell it wasn’t going to be his.
Luc Portier still had his hand on the phone that now lay silent on his desk. He’d had the second phone call from Kronbauer. He swiveled in his leather chair and stared out at the spectacular view of the Alps on the horizon.
He knew who’d been in the apartment. The next steps would be crucial to managing this problem before it spun out of control. Stag Maguire had proven to be a bit more wily than they’d given him credit for. He’d disappeared from his Wuttke apartment, and now had somehow managed to enter the Dresdenhof and get inside that apartment with his own key.
Tarnhelm’s men would be in the apartment soon, combing every inch of it for a clue as to what Maguire was looking for. But Portier already knew what would be. The copy of Mein Kampf. For decades now, Tarnhelm had studied the coding. Their best human and computerized cryptology had produced zero results. The code was based on an absolutely random key and it couldn’t be cracked without it.
Goddammit, he was sick of being a slave to that apartment. The cryptographers insisted nothing could be changed because there could be coding in the placement of the shellac records stored in the Telefunken or in the books on the shelves or the level of liquor in the bottles at the bar. For now, everything had to remain exactly as they’d been handed it. Exactly.
Now it appeared that information about 12A had somehow turned up in Wuttke, Wisconsin, in the hands of Stag Maguire. A dipshit journalist who didn’t have a clue what he was doing. How many nations would be at once terrified and thrilled at the possibility, should what Portier feared was inside the book be discovered?
He swiveled back to his desk, stood, and walked to the glass wall that separated his office from his private elevator. He took the lift down and stepped out into the sub-basement where Tarnhelm had its boardroom.
The conference table was empty. Just six seats for the entire board. A board meeting was overdue. There’d been talk that one member was losing his enthusiasm for security service. The man was growing too rich and lazy to bother with secrets any longer. He just wanted to fuck whoever happened to enter his plane with a pussy, and not much else.
Perhaps, with the shock of what Maguire might be able to expose, what was needed was a lesson. A real lesson. One they could all reeducate themselves with. Loyalty and enthusiasm could both be bolstered with a dramatic dose of terror. After all, there were no men on earth more obsessed with self-preservation than a bunch of white male executives sitting around a conference table.
A lesson it was, Portier decided. He would bring them in and pick their brains for a solution to Maguire. Plans would have to be formed and implemented. Security had been breached and that was unacceptable for Tarnhelm, much less Luc Portier. They should be made fully aware of it. Then they would all see how he, Portier, planned on going forward. They would get a nice coppery taste of the stakes at play, once they had blood in their mouths.
He walked past the conference table to a jib door set unobtrusively into the exotic blond wood paneling. He pressed both hands on it and it popped open to show another door that was two-feet-thick steel. It led to the small room beyond that was nothing more than cold stainless walls, a concrete floor. It was hewn into the sub-basement in 1942. The kind of brutalist architecture even Albert Speer would have admired. An old defunct bomb shelter, with no real use any longer except as a panic room. But he wondered why anyone back in ’42 would think to devise such a shelter. For a country not at war. Built for a bomb that didn’t exist.
He pressed the two-foot-thick steel door shut.
Yes, it was time for a board meeting. Time to test loyalties. Stag Maguire had managed to place everything at stake. Tarnhelm would not survive a meddling journalist who knew more than they did. Yet they couldn’t just go after him with an Uzi. Maguire knew things that they needed to know. They would have to finesse it out of him. Or torture it out of him. Then Maguire could be neutralized.
The board would have to convene right away. They would have to find a solution. If not, they wouldn’t need Tarnhelm. It would all be over. Maybe even in a flash.
He thought of the SS motto. My Honor is called Loyalty. In the end, when tested, some would have it; some would not.
Now he just had to find out who it was.