STAG OPENED HIS eyes. He looked around at the sunny room, immaculately modern, white and clean. On the table next to him sat a clear vase of white roses, bursting with freshness.
He didn’t know where the hell he was.
Sitting up, he tried to put a hand to his aching head, and he saw the IV stuck in his arm. He then registered the hospital bed he was lying in. Outside his room, he heard the squeal of gurney wheels and a voice speaking German.
“Ah, you’re awake.” The voice came from the doorway. There appeared a middle-aged man in a wrinkled trench. He introduced himself as James Duffy, NATO.
Stag gave him a blank stare, still trying to recall what had happened to him. He remembered his fight with Troost, and the searing pain to the side of his head. Then he remembered seeing Angelika. And then the black hole she’d put in Troost’s forehead.
He lay back, trying to absorb the meaning of it. If Angelika shot Troost while he was texting Portier, then that meant she was a double agent.
“I want to offer my condolences in the loss of your friend,” Duffy said.
Stag hesitated, still numb.
“I know you’re in pain, Mr. Maguire. I would like to leave you alone. However, when we sent our agents into Kehlsteinhaus, we found Troost’s phone. It was encrypted to erase all texts after sending them. We don’t know what the scuffle was about, but we have a very good idea.”
“Interpol …” was all Stag could manage.
“Yes. Sorry about that. Interpol has some very good agents. Excellent, in fact. Rarely are we bedeviled by an embedded holdout from an earlier ethos.”
Stag took a deep breath, trying to reconcile all the new information.
“We have an urgent need for information. You see, our best agent works at Tarnhelm under Portier. She found out this morning from Portier that Troost was taking a meeting there with you. She wanted to make sure to interrupt it. However … we believe we may have come too late.”
Angelika Aradi worked for NATO. And since these people had obviously saved his life, he had to trust them. There was no time to spare.
“There’s a bomb. Heydrich’s lost bomb. On the mountain above the Königssee. We’d just told Troost about it. We were hoping to retrieve it before Tarnhelm.”
Duffy’s face was hard. “I see.”
“We’ve got to send machinery out there to get it. Contact Mac. He knows where it is. Here’s his number.” Stag looked around, not seeing his phone.
“Are you talking about the mountain climber, Killburn’s the name? I’m sorry to tell you this, but he’s dead. They found his body at the bottom of a cliff.”
Stag squinted his eyes against the sunshine. It was suddenly killing his head. Without further thought, he untaped his arm and slid out the IV, grimacing.
“Take me there. I’ll show you.” Blood streamed from the IV wound. He hardly noticed. He slapped the old tape on it and went to the wardrobe to retrive his clothes.
The helicopter flew right atop the bend in the road where the SD truck had accidentally gone off the cliffside in the spring of 1942. From the air, Stag could make out the scarring in the rock where the truck had fallen down the cliff in the snow and landed on the ledge. Below that was another scarring. Where a large object had rolled from the truck bottom farther down the mountain.
But the crevice where the object had been lodged was empty.
Duffy sat in the back, humped against the helicopter window. They were both wearing headsets. Both connected to the intercom, but no words were necessary. The bomb was gone. Tarnhelm had gotten there first.
Stag swallowed his bitterness. If he’d only known who to trust. If he’d only tried NATO first.
Hell, if he’d only Googled Heydrich.
The helicopter landed on the roadside above. They got out and surveyed the pylons still left behind where Tarnhelm’s work crew had hurriedly lifted the bomb by sky crane and spirited it away.
NATO was on it. Stag had no doubt. But where the bomb was now and, more importantly, where it would end up was anybody’s guess.
“You don’t look too good,” Duffy said, stepping up to him.
“You don’t look too good yourself,” Stag answered.
There was nothing more to say.
Stag was rushed to a NATO plane for a meeting in Berlin. Duffy sat across from him in the rumpled raincoat.
“Is she an assassin or not?” Stag asked, accepting the two Motrin the man mercifully held out to him. He was bleeding through his head bandage, but there wasn’t time to care about it.
“We characterized her as such to keep her cover. We suspected a mole in Interpol for a while, only we could never quite identify him. It took you to bring Troost into the open. But no, she is Tarnhelm intelligence, and always has been. She grew up poor, her mother an outcast, her father caught in a Muslim genocide. But she was bright and street-savvy, and Portier grew to trust her more than anyone. He was instrumental in her daughter’s recovery. And she grew to trust him.”
“What made her flip?”
Duffy thought for a moment. “Time to fly straight, I imagine. Her daughter’s been given a second chance and I suspect she wants better things for her, if you forgive me the cheap sentiment.”
“What does she do for NATO?” Stag wanted all the information he could get.
“She’s an operative of what we call TWR, the NATO anti-genocide arm that was first developed specifically to fight nuclear threats. It now includes all others. It was meant to parallel the original White Rose first founded to fight Germany’s National Socialists.”
“The White Rose? You mean like in Sophie Scholl?”
“In her honor. We find we still have to focus on genocide. There were six million murdered Jews in the Holocaust. We thought we knew genocide after the Germans managed to mechanize it. But we fool ourselves. We don’t have mass murder under control. There have been fifty-five million targeted peoples murdered since 1945.” He shrugged. “And none of us have even used a nuclear device. It’s the world’s dirty secret. We kill those we don’t like. En masse.”
“People want to see themselves as good. But the truth is all people are bad. The only good ones fight it.”
“I thought we’d gotten beyond the Holocaust.”
Duffy sighed. “We’re a species that needs groups and fears anything foreign. It is our biological necessity. But are we a school of fish moving in unison in the shallow waters or a school of piranha that scours the bones of our own? That we must decide one person at a time.”
Stag knew about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. It was an underground resistance group led by various students and a professor at the University of Munich. Sophie Scholl was twenty-one when she was beheaded after a Nazi show trial. Her judge had been Roland Freisler, one of the members of Heydrich’s Wannsee Conference.
It never failed. All good things led back to Heydrich, he thought.
“I take it she didn’t murder a NATO official?”
“No. Pure deza—what the Soviets called dezinformatsiya—disinformation on our part.”
“Does Portier suspect?”
Duffy wearily shook his head. “We don’t know. She took a terrible chance going to the Eagle’s Nest. As I said, she worked intelligence for Tarnhelm for years before she flipped. Now she’s our asset, not theirs, but they don’t know that.” He grew grim. “She’s in a bad situation. Very precarious. Very. With that bomb out there, I don’t need to tell you she is most vital.”
“We have to figure out who they sell it to. They don’t want it for themselves. They want it for a client.”
“Yes, well, that list is pretty long. But we’ve already got a good idea who the top contenders are. Now we just have to interrupt the transfer.” Duffy paused, looking uncomfortable. “On the face of it, our intelligence tells us the bomb is targeted to destroy an oligarch suburb of Moscow.”
“The face of it? There’s more?”
“Portier is planning to send out the documents of the strike to Moscow afterward. Proving it was a hired strike by the man in Washington. I don’t need to tell you, the Russians will retaliate once those documents are seen in Moscow.”
Stag went numb. Next it would be DC. Then it would be Moscow. And so on and so forth until they were just a black crumb whirling in space.
His nerves taut, he looked out the window. With stress numbing him, it was easy to just watch the ground go by below. They ducked through several mountain passes out of Berchtesgaden and headed north by northwest toward Munich. He thought about Jake and the guilt he felt over getting him involved. He was grateful that Angelika had taken the chance to save him, but he only wished the situation had been such to save them both. Now it seemed obvious that she was the shooter in the alley in Bali. While working for Tarnhelm and Portier, she’d also been watching out for him all along.
But no one could afford to think about personal safety any longer. Not while the bomb was out there, headed to parts unknown.