The Apocalypse Watch

  “You needn’t have feared. I’ve been working with them since my last year in The Hague.”

  “It’s so good to see you,” said Harry, his voice filled with emotion, “to hear you.”

  “I feel the same way, old friend. Since I learned the Brüderschaft knew about you, I’ve been so terribly worried—”

  “They knew about me?” Latham interrupted sharply, his eyes wide, bulging in astonishment. “You’re not serious!”

  “Nobody’s told you?”

  “How could they? It’s not true.”

  “It is, Harry. I explained to Drew how I found out.”

  “You?”

  “I assumed your brother had passed on the information.”

  “Christ, I can’t think! Latham brought both his hands to his temples, pressing harshly, his eyes tightly closed, the crow’s-feet emphasized.

  “What is it, Harry?”

  “I don’t know, there’s a dreadful pain—”

  “You’ve been through so much, so long. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

  “No. I’m Alexander Lassiter—I was Alexander Lassiter, that’s all I was to them.”

  “I’m afraid not, my dear.” Karin glanced at her old friend, suddenly alarmed. There was a dark red circle on his left temple; it seemed to throb. “I brought your favorite brandy so we could celebrate, Harry. It’s in the glove compartment. Open it and have some. It’ll calm you down.”

  “They couldn’t have known,” choked Latham, with trembling fingers opening the glove compartment and pulling out the pint of brandy. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Perhaps I was wrong,” said De Vries, now frightened. “Have a drink and relax. “We’re meeting Drew at an old country inn on the outskirts of Villejuif. The Antinayous wouldn’t permit us to meet at the safe house. Calm down, Harry.”

  “Yes, yes, I will, because, my dear—my dearest Karin—you are wrong. My brother will tell you, Gerhardt Kroeger will tell you, I’m Alex Lassiter, I was Alex Lassiter!”

  “Gerhardt Kroeger?” asked a bewildered De Vries. “Who’s Gerhardt Kroeger?”

  “A goddamned Nazi … also a superb doctor.”

  “In fifteen or twenty minutes we’ll be at the inn where your brother is waiting for us.… Let’s talk about the old days in Amsterdam, my old friend. Do you remember the night Freddie came home half soused and insisted on playing your American game of Monopoly?”

  “Good God, yes. He threw out a handful of diamonds and said we should use them instead of the paper money.”

  “And the time you and I drank wine and listened to Mozart until it was almost dawn.”

  “Do I?” cried Latham, swallowing brandy and laughing, his eyes, however, not bright with laughter, but dark, glaring. “Freddie came out of your bedroom and made it plain that he preferred Elvis Presley. We threw pillows at him.”

  “And that morning in the café on the Herengracht when you and I told Freddie he could not jump into the canal to make a point about pollution?”

  “He was going to do it, my dear—my dearest Karin. I swear he was.”

  The harmless badinage covered the remaining minutes until De Vries turned into the graveled parking area of the rundown country inn, country but barely out of the city, flanked by overgrown fields, isolated, and not really inviting. The meeting between the brothers was as warm, although warmer on the younger’s part, as the welcoming embrace between Harry and Karin. The difference was in the older brother; there was surface ebullience, but a chill underneath. It was unexpected, not natural.

  “Hey, big bro, how did you do it?” exclaimed Drew as the three of them sat in a booth, De Vries on Harry’s side. “I’ve got a legend for a brother!”

  “Because Alexander Lassiter was a person. It’s the only way it could be done.”

  “Well, you sure pulled it off—at least up to a point, enough to get you there.”

  “You’re talking about what Karin told you?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “Untrue. Totally false!”

  “Harry, I said I could be wrong.”

  “You are wrong.”

  “Okay, Harry, okay.” Drew held up both hands, palms forward. “So she’s wrong, it happens to be what she heard.”

  “Bastard sources, illegitimate, no confirmation.”

  “We’re on your side, bro, you know that.” The younger brother looked at De Vries, his expression questioning, disturbed.

  “Alexander Lassiter was real,” said Harry emphatically, wincing as he raised his left hand to his temple, rubbing it in circles. “Ask Gerhardt Kroeger, he’ll tell you.”

  “Who is—”

  “Never mind,” Karin broke in, shaking her head, “he’s a fine doctor, your brother explained that to me.”

  “How about to me, bro? Who’s this Kroeger?”

  “You’d really like to know, wouldn’t you?”

  “Is it a secret, Harry?”

  “Lassiter can tell you, I don’t think I should.”

  “For Christ’s sake, what the hell are you talking about? You’re Lassiter, Harry Latham is Lassiter. Cut the bullshit, Harry.”

  “I hurt, oh, God, I hurt. Something’s wrong with me.”

  “What is it, dear Harry?”

  “ ‘Dear Harry’? Do you know how much that means to me? Have you any idea how much I love you, adore you, Karin?”

  “And I adore you, Harry,” said De Vries, suddenly finding the older Latham crying and falling into her chest. “You know I do.”

  “I love you so much, so very much!” went on the semihysterical, babbling Harry as Karin cradled him in her arms. “But I hurt so—”

  “Oh, my God,” said Drew softly, watching the astonishing sight across the table.

  “We have to get him to a doctor,” said De Vries, whispering. “He began this in the car.”

  “You’re damned right,” agreed Drew. “A head doctor. He was in deep cover too long. Jesus!”

  “Call the embassy, get an ambulance. I’ll stay with him.”

  The younger Latham got up from the booth just as two men carrying weapons came rushing through the entrance, both in stocking masks. The target and the kill were apparent. “Get down!” he shouted, pulling his gun from his hip holster and firing before the assassins had adjusted to the dim light. He took out the first killer and lunged behind the freestanding bar as the second man raced forward, his automatic weapon on rapid fire. Drew stood up, squeezing the trigger repeatedly, emptying his magazine. The second assassin fell as the few scattered customers ran hysterically out the front door. Latham rushed from behind his worthless barrier. Karin de Vries was on the floor, her left hand still gripping his brother’s arm; she had tried to drag him with her. She was alive, her right hand bloodied, but she was alive! But Harry Latham was dead, his head blown apart, a horrible mass of blood and white tissue, what was left of his brain in fragments, half out of his skull. Drew, his mouth stretched in dread, shut his eyes in terror, then forced them open as he plunged his hands into his dead brother’s pockets, pulling out his billfold and all other papers that could lead to his identity. Why? He was not sure, he just knew he had to do it.

  He then pulled the sobbing Karin out from under the booth and, wrapping her hand in a cloth napkin, propelled her away from the terrible scene. He shouted to the management, who had fled into the kitchen, to call the police. He would make the proper inquiries later. It was no time to mourn the brother he loved, nor any moment to stare in remembrance at his corpse. He had to get Karin de Vries to a doctor, and then go back to work. The Brotherhood had to be destroyed, they had to be, if it took him the rest of his life, or if it took his life. It was a commitment he swore before any and all the gods there might be.

  “You can’t go to your office, don’t you understand that?” said Karin, sitting on a gurney in the surgical annex of the doctor on the embassy’s secure listing. “The word will go out and you’re a dead man!”

  “Then my office has to be moved to w
herever I am,” said Drew, his voice low, insistent. “I need all the resources we have, everywhere, and I’m not settling for anything less. The key is a man named Kroeger, Gerhardt Kroeger, and I’ll find the son of a bitch, I’ve got to! Who is he? Where is he?”

  “He’s a doctor, we know that, and he must be German.” De Vries studied the younger Latham brother as she slowly raised and lowered her bandaged right hand following the doctor’s instructions. “For God’s sake, Drew, let it out.”

  “What?” asked Latham sharply, standing beside her and taking his eyes off her wounded hand.

  “You’re trying to make believe it didn’t happen, and that doesn’t make sense. You grieve for Harry as I do—undoubtedly more so—but you’re holding it inside, and it’s shattering you. Stop pretending to be so coldly efficient. That was Harry, not you.”

  “When I saw what they did to him, I told myself that mourning would come later. It’s on hold and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “I think so. Your rage can’t be contained. You want revenge, and that comes first.”

  “You used a phrase about Harry before, about the way he approached problems, or crises. You called it sang-froid, which I understand means calmly or dispassionately.”

  “It does.”

  “My French is limited, a fact I’m reminded of a lot, but there’s a variation of that phrase—”

  “De sang-froid—in cold blood,” said Karin, her eyes locked with his.

  “Exactly. That’s what Harry was really good at. He approached everything in life, not just calmly or coolly, but coldly—ice cold. I was the only exception; when he looked at me there was a warmth in those looks I rarely saw otherwise.… No, there was one other, our cousin, the one I told you about who died of cancer. She was also special to him, very special. Speaking in the gender sense, could be she was his ‘Rosebud’ until you came along.”

  “You refer to Welles’s Citizen Kane, of course.”

  “Sure, it’s part of our lexicon now. A symbol from the past that has more meaning for the present than a person realizes.”

  “I had no idea he had such feelings toward me.”

  “Neither did Kane. In his mind’s eye he just saw a thing he loved as a child, and he never found anything else to take its place. That left only his accomplishments.”

  “Harry was like that as a child?”

  “Child, young man, and man. A straight-A student with an IQ that was off the charts. Bachelor’s degree, master’s, and Ph.D. before he was twenty-three. He was always driven to be the best there was, and along the way he became fluent in five, or is it six, languages. As I mentioned, he was a piece of work.”

  “What an extraordinary life.”

  “Hell, I suppose the Freudians would say he was a gifted kid reacting to a distant father—distant geographically as well as emotionally—and a sweet, intuitively bright but nonintellectual mother who was maritally mismatched and decided that being attractive, loving, and gracious was her role in life, so why get into debates she couldn’t win.”

  “And you?”

  “I guess I inherited a few more of my mother’s genes than Harry did. Beth’s a large woman and was a damn good athlete when she was young. She captained the girls’ track team in college, and if she hadn’t met my father, she might have tried out for the Olympics.”

  “You have a very interesting family,” said Karin, once again studying Drew’s face, “and you’re telling me all this for another reason beyond my curiosity, aren’t you?”

  “You’re quick, lady—sorry, I’ll try to stop saying that.”

  “Don’t bother, I’m beginning to find it rather nice.… What’s the reason?”

  “I want you to know me, where I am and where I came from. At least part of your curiosity should be satisfied.”

  “Considering your penchant for reticence, that’s an odd thing to say.”

  “I realize that. I’m only just putting it together.… Back at the inn, when the firing stopped and the horrible thing was over, I found myself in a panic, rummaging through Harry’s pockets, inches from what was left of his skull, his destroyed face, every second hating myself, as though I were committing some despicable act. The strange thing was, I didn’t know why, I just knew I had to do it. I was being ordered to and I had to obey that order despite the fact that I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, wouldn’t bring him back.”

  “You were protecting your brother in death as you would in life,” said De Vries. “There’s nothing strange in that. You were shielding his name—”

  “I think I told myself that,” Latham interrupted, “but it doesn’t hold water. With today’s pathology, his identity would be known in a matter of hours … unless his body were taken, quarantined.”

  “After you got the name of the doctor from the embassy—”

  “From the colonel, in fact,” Drew clarified.

  “You called back, asking the doctor for a private telephone. It was a long conversation.”

  “Again with Witkowski. He knows whom to reach and how to do these things.”

  “What things?”

  “Like removing a body and holding it in isolation.”

  “Harry?”

  “Yes. No one at the scene could have learned who he was after we left. That’s when I put it together, somewhere between our getting out of there and my second call to the colonel. Harry was giving me those orders, he was telling me what to do.”

  “Please be clearer.”

  “I’m to become him, I’m taking his place. I’m Harry Latham.”

  10

  Colonel Stanley Witkowski moved quickly, calling in old debts from the Cold War years. He reached a deputy chief of the Paris Sûreté, a former intelligence officer who had headed up the French garrison in Berlin, and with whom a frustrated Witkowski, then a major in the U.S. Army G-2, had seen fit to go around regulations and exchange information. (“I thought we were on the same side, Senator!”) As a result, the colonel had under his sole control not only the body of the slain Harry Latham, but also those of the two assassins. All three were stored under fictitious names in the morgue on the rue Fontenay. Further, in the interest of both countries, a fact readily accepted by the Sûreté deputy, a blackout was put on the terrorist act in the pursuit of additional information.

  For Witkowski understood what Drew Latham only half perceived. The removal of his brother’s body would create partial confusion, but along with the blackout, the disappearance of the killers made it total.

  In a hotel room at Orly, prepared to take the three-thirty P.M. flight to Munich, the man in the steel-rimmed glasses paced nervously in front of a window, erratically distracted by the planes departing from and arriving at the field. The muted thunder of the jets served only to heighten his anxiety. He kept glaring at the telephone, furious that it did not ring, delivering him the news that would justify his return to Munich, his mission completed. That the assignment could fail was unthinkable. He had reached the Paris branch of the Blitzkrieger, the elite killers of the Brüderschaft, so highly trained and skilled, so superior in the deadly crafts, they numbered less than two hundred instantly mobile predators operating in Europe, South America, and the United States. Catbird had been officially informed that in the four years since they had been sent to their posts, only three had been taken, two preferring their own deaths to interrogation and one killed in Paris in the line of duty. No details were ever revealed; regarding the Blitzkrieger, secrecy was absolute. Even Catbird had to appeal to the second highest leader of the Brotherhood, the tempestuous General von Schnabe, to be permitted to enlist these elite assassins.

  So why didn’t the phone ring? Why the delay? The lethal surveillance had been in operation since the arrival of Harry Latham at 10:28 in the morning at De Gaulle airport and his departure by car at eleven o’clock. It was now past one-thirty in the afternoon! Catbird couldn’t stand the lack of communication
; he crossed to the bedside telephone and dialed the Blitzkrieger number.

  “Avignon Warehouses,” said the female voice on the line in French. “How may I direct your call?”

  “Frozen foods division, if you please. Monsieur Giroux.”

  “I’m afraid his line is busy.”

  “I’ll wait precisely thirty seconds, and if he’s not free, I’ll cancel my order.”

  “I see.… That won’t be necessary, sir, I can ring him now.”

  “Catbird?” asked a male voice.

  “At least I used the right words. What the hell is going on? Why haven’t you called?”

  “Because there’s nothing to report.”

  “That’s ridiculous! It’s been over three hours!”

  “We’re as disturbed as you are, so don’t raise your voice to me. Our last contact was an hour and twelve minutes ago; everything was on schedule. Our two men were following Latham in a Renault driven by a woman. Their last words were ‘Everything’s under control, the mission will be carried out shortly.’ ”

  “That was it? An hour ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No. That was the last transmission.”

  “Well, where are they?”

  “We wish we knew.”

  “Where were they going?”

  “North out of Paris, specifics weren’t mentioned.”

  “Why not?”

  “With frequency traffic, it would be stupid. Besides, those two are a prime unit, they’ve never failed.”

  “Is it possible they failed today?”

  “It’s extremely unlikely.”

  “Extremely unlikely is hardly an unequivocal answer. Have you any idea how vital this assignment is?”

  “All our assignments are vital, or else they would not be directed to us. May I remind you, we are the solution of last resorts.”

  “What can I say to Von Schnabe?”

  “Please, Catbird, at this point, what can we say to him?” said the leader of the Paris branch of the Blitzkrieger, hanging up the phone.