The Apocalypse Watch

  “It couldn’t have happened at all, it’s counterproductive. Moscow would never have allowed it.”

  “It happened here and Moscow covered it up. Wisely, I might add.”

  “Are you saying my brother, your husband’s control, ordered him to assassinate such men? That’s preposterous! It would make the U-2 fiasco pale by comparison. I don’t believe you, lady. Harry’s too smart, too knowledgeable to do anything like that; there could have been mass reprisals in the States, everyone one step closer to nuclear war, and nobody wanted that.”

  “I did not say your brother ordered my husband to commit such acts.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “They were committed and Harry was Frederik’s control.”

  “You mean your husband—”

  “Yes,” interrupted Karin de Vries softly. “Freddie served your brother well, boring into the Stasi to the point where they threw him parties as a diamond merchant from Amsterdam who was making the apparatchiks rich. Then a pattern developed; times and locations coincided where powerful East Germans beholden to the Kremlin were assassinated. Separately and together, both Harry and I confronted Frederik. He denied everything, of course, and his innocent charm and his quick tongue—the same qualities that made him an extraordinary deep-cover operative—persuaded us both that it was coincidence.”

  “There’s no such thing as coincidence in this business.”

  “We found that out when Frederik was captured a week before the Berlin Wall came down. Under torture, compounded by the injected serums, my husband admitted to the assassinations. Harry was among the first specialists to reach and tear apart the Stasi headquarters, and in his anger over Freddie’s death he knew exactly what to look for and when it happened. He found a copy of the transcript and kept it on his person, bringing it to me later.”

  “Then your husband was a loose cannon, and neither you nor my brother saw through him?”

  “You would have to have known Freddie. There was a reason behind his intemperance. He had a hatred toward the militant Germans, a deep loathing that did not extend to the tolerant, even penitent citizens of West Germany. You see, his grandparents were executed in the town square by a Waffen SS firing squad in front of the entire village. Their crime: bringing food to the starving Jews held behind an open barbed-wire enclosure in a field by the railroad yard. However—and this is most painful—along with his grandfather and grandmother, seven innocent males, all fathers, were shot as examples for a disobedient citizenry. In the hypocrisy of panic, the De Vries family was stigmatized for a generation. Frederik was brought up by relatives in Brussels, permitted only on rare occasions to see his parents, who eventually committed suicide together. I’m convinced the terrible memory of those years stayed with Freddie until the moment he died.”

  Silence. And then the bewildered waiter returned with their glasses of wine, spilling part of one on Drew’s trousers. He left, and Latham said, “Let’s get out of here. There’s a decent restaurant, a brasserie, around the corner.”

  “I know it too, but I would prefer to finish our conversation here.”

  “Why? This place is awful.”

  “I don’t think it’s right that we be noticed together.”

  “For God’s sake, we work in the same place. Incidentally, why haven’t I ever seen you at our embassy get-togethers? I’m sure I’d have remembered.”

  “Such parties are not a priority with me, Monsieur Latham. I live a very solitary and quite happy life.”

  “By yourself?”

  “That is my choice.”

  Drew shrugged. “Okay, then. You saw my name on our roster sent to The Hague, and on the basis of my being Harry’s brother, you asked for your transfer. Why?”

  “I told you, I was cleared by NATO for maximum-classified materials. Six months ago I took a secure-channel memorandum from radio traffic to the supreme commander, and being curious—as I was today—I looked at it. It said that one Drew Latham was being transferred to Paris with full Quai d’Orsay credentials, to explore the ‘German problem.’ It took no imagination to know what that was, monsieur. It was the ‘German problem’ that killed my husband, and I remembered all too clearly your brother talking about you most affectionately. How he wished you had never tried to follow in his footsteps, for you were too quick-tempered and had no facility with languages.”

  “Harry’s jealous because Mother always liked me better.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I certainly am. Actually, I have an idea she thought—still thinks—we’re both a little strange.”

  “Because of your professions?”

  “Hell no, she doesn’t know what they are, and Dad’s smart enough not to tell her. She’s convinced we’re somewhere in the ranks of the State Department, traveling all over the world for months at a time, and why aren’t we both married so she can spoil her grandchildren.”

  “A natural concern, I’d say.”

  “Not for two sons in an unnatural profession.”

  “However, Harry did allow that you were very strong and quite intelligent.”

  “Quite intelligent?… Jealousy again. I got extra money on my college scholarship because of my prep school hockey—he fell on his ass on a pair of skates.”

  “You’re joking again.”

  “No, not that part, it’s real.”

  “You had scholarships?”

  “We had to. Our father was a Ph.D. in archeology, and all it brought him were digs from Arizona to the old Iraq. The National Geographic Society and the Explorers’ Club paid for the travels but not for the wife and kids. When those movies came out, Harry and I used to laugh and say to hell with the ‘Lost Ark,’ where were the kids of Indiana Jones?”

  “The frame of reference is beyond me, although I recognize the academic aspect.”

  “Our father had tenure, so we weren’t broke, but we certainly weren’t rich, barely middle-class well-off. We had to get scholarships.… Now, you’ve heard my life story, and I’ve heard more than I care to hear about your husband … what about you? Where are you coming from—out of the woodwork, Mrs. de Vries?”

  “It’s not relevant—”.

  “Yes, you said that before and I don’t buy it. Before you go much further in the embassy, especially in D and R, you’d better make it clear.”

  “You don’t believe a word I’ve told you—”

  “I believe the surface, what Witkowski confirmed, but beyond that I’m not sure.”

  “Then you can go to the devil, monsieur.” Karin de Vries started sliding across the booth to get up, when the inebriated waiter approached.

  “Is there anyone here named Lat’am?” he asked.

  “Latham? Yes, that’s me.”

  “There is a call for you on our telephone. That will add thirty francs to your bill.” The waiter wandered away.

  “Stay here,” said Drew. “I told Communications where I’d be.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I want you to, I really want you to.” Latham got up and walked rapidly to the antiquated telephone at the end of the distressed bar. He picked up the receiver, which was lying in a pool of stale wine, and spoke. “This is Latham.”

  “Durbane here,” said the voice on the line. “I’m patching you through on scrambler to Director Sorenson in Washington. You’re clear at both ends. Go ahead.”

  “Drew?”

  “Yes, sir—”

  “It happened! We just got word about Harry. He’s alive!”

  “Where?”

  “As near as we can determine, somewhere in the Hausruck Alps. A call came through from the anti-neos in Obernberg saying they were engineering his escape, and to keep our secure lines open from Passau to Burghausen. They refused to identify themselves, but they have to be real.”

  “Thank God!” cried Latham in relief.

  “Don’t be too confident. They say he’s got to get through damn near twelve miles of snow in the mountains before they ca
n reach him.”

  “You don’t know Harry. He’ll get there. I may be stronger, but he was always tougher.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind. I’ll go back to the embassy and wait.” Latham replaced the phone and returned to the table.

  Karin de Vries was not there.

  5

  The column of figures trudged through the snow as the long shadows of evening spread across the mountain range, the only illumination the headlights of the two huge vehicles and the flashlights of the guards. Harry Latham leapt off the truck, the ache in his head subsiding the nearer they came to the bridge over the gorge above the offshoot of the Salzach River. He could make it! Once over the narrow bridge, he would find his way; he had memorized the reverse route and the markings he had made, recalling it all a thousand times during his so-called hospitalization, otherwise known as being held hostage. But he could not remain in the alpine truck, where he had hidden himself, for the vehicles were searched, each piece of equipment matched to an invoice. Instead, he had to join the column of Sonnenkinder, blindly marching off to their uncertain futures throughout Germany and all Europe, singing their songs of blood purity, Aryan righteousness, and death to the ill born. Harry sang with the loudest of them, his fervor acknowledged by grins and bright eyes as they crossed over the bridge. Only moments now.

  The moment came! The column marched to the right in the snow-swept night, and Harry ducked away, crouching, and scurried to his left during a particularly brief, heavy snowfall. An observant guard saw him and raised his pistol.

  “Nein!” said the Reichsführer of the detail, gripping the soldier’s arm and lowering it. “Verboten. Ist schon gut!”

  The man known in covert operations as Sting trudged through the knee-deep snow untrampled by preceding feet, breathlessly hoping he would see the first of the marks he had made weeks before—years ago in his mind—when he was first escorted to the hidden valley. There it was! Two broken limbs of a sapling that would not rejuvenate until spring. The small tree had been on the left, the next marking was on the right, a descending, diagonal right.… Three hundred yards later, his face hot and flushed, his legs freezing, he saw it! The branch of an alpine spruce he had snapped; it was still angled downward, its remnant dried, devoid of sap. The mountain road between the two alpine villages was less than five miles away, most of it downhill. He would make it. He had to!

  Finally, his feet in ice-cold agony, his body bent over in pain, he did. He sat down and massaged his legs, his hands scraped by his half-frozen trousers, when a truck appeared on the left. He propelled himself to his feet, staggered into the road, and violently waved his arms in the beams of the headlights. The truck stopped.

  “Hilfe!” he yelled in German. “My car went off the road!”

  “No explanations, please,” said the bearded driver in accented English. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve driven up and down this road for the past three days, hour after hour.”

  “Who are you?” asked Harry, climbing into the seat.

  “Your deliverance, as the British say,” replied the driver, chuckling.

  “You knew I was coming out?”

  “We have a spy in the hidden valley, although we have no idea where it is. She, like everyone else, was taken there blindfolded.”

  “How did she know?”

  “She’s a nurse in the hospital down there, a nurse when she isn’t ordered to copulate with another Aryan Brüder so to produce a new Sonnenkind. She watched you, saw you folding pieces of paper and sewing them into your clothes—”

  “But how?” interrupted Latham/Lassiter.

  “Your rooms have hidden cameras.”

  “How did she get word to you?”

  “All the Sonnenkinder are permitted, even ordered, to reach parents or relatives to explain their absences with pleasant fictitious stories. Without those explanations, the Oberführer fear exposure, as with your American cults, who barricade themselves in other mountains and valleys. She reached her ‘parents,’ and with precise codes told us the American would be leaving, the precise day or time she couldn’t know, but you were definitely going to escape imminently.”

  “The evacuation—and it is just that—was my way out.”

  “Whatever, you’re here and on your way to Burghausen. From our humble headquarters there you may reach whomever you like. You see, we are the Antinayous.”

  “The who?”

  “The opposite of the one who, under the nom de plume of Caracalla, slaughtered twenty thousand Romans who opposed his despotic rule, according to the historian Dio Cassius.”

  “I’ve heard of Caracalla, Dio Cassius as well, but I’m afraid I don’t understand you.”

  “Then you are not a serious student of Roman history.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “So we’ll bring it up-to-date, in another context, in another reversal, ja?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Anglicized, we are anti-Nyoss, ja?”

  “Okay.”

  “Substitute ‘neos’ for ‘nyoss,’ h’okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then what have you got? Anti-neos, nicht wahr? Anti-neo-Nazis. That’s who we are!”

  “Why do you have to hide under an obscure name?”

  “Why do they hide under the secret name of the Brüderschaft?”

  “What has one got to do with the other?”

  “Secrecy must match secrecy!”

  “Why? You’re legitimate.”

  “We battle our enemy both above the ground and underneath the dirt.”

  “I’ve been there,” said Harry Latham, falling back into the seat. “And I still don’t understand you.”

  “Why did you leave?” asked Drew, having gotten Karin de Vries’s telephone number from security.

  “There wasn’t anything more to say,” replied the D and R researcher.

  “There was a hell of a lot more to say, and you know it.”

  “Please check my clearance files, and if anything upsets you, report it.”

  “Forget that crap! Harry’s alive! After three years under cover, he escaped and he’s on his way back!”

  “Mom Dieu. I cannot tell you how happy, how relieved I am!”

  “You knew all along what my brother was doing, didn’t you?”

  “Not on the telephone, Drew Latham. Come to my flat on the rue Madeleine. It is twenty-six, apartment five.”

  Drew gave the number to Durbane in Communications, grabbed his jacket, and raced out to the Deuxième car, which was now his constant companion. “Rue Madeleine,” he said. “Number twenty-six.”

  “A nice neighborhood,” said the driver, starting the unmarked vehicle.

  The apartment on rue Madeleine added another dimension to the enigma that was Karin de Vries. Not only was it large, it was tastefully, expensively appointed; the furniture, the drapes, and the paintings were far beyond the salary of an embassy employee.

  “My husband was not a poor man,” said the widow, noting Drew’s reactions to the decor. “He not only played the part of a diamond merchant, he actively participated, and with his usual élan.”

  “He must have been some kind of fellow.”

  “And then something beyond that,” added De Vries without a comment in her voice. “Please, sit down, Monsieur Latham. May I offer you a drink?”

  “Considering the sour wine at the café of your choice, I gratefully accept.”

  “I do have Scotch whisky.”

  “Then I more than accept, I beg.”

  “No need to,” said De Vries, laughing softly and walking to a mirrored bar. “Freddie taught me to always keep four libations on hand,” she continued, opening an ice bucket, a bottle, and pouring a drink. “Red wine at room temperature, white wine chilled—one full bodied, the other dry, and both of good quality—as well as Scotch whisky for the English and bourbon for the Americans.”

  “What about the Germans?”

  “Beer,
the quality unimportant, for he said they’d drink anything. But then, as I told you, he was extremely bigoted.”

  “He must have known other Germans.”

  “Natürlich. He insisted they had a fetish for imitating the British. ‘Whisky’—which is Scotch—without ice, and although they prefer ice, they deny it.” She brought Drew his glass and, gesturing at a chair, said, “Sit down, Monsieur Latham, we have several things to discuss.”

  “Actually, that’s my line,” said Drew, sitting in a soft leather armchair across from the light-green velveteen couch preferred by Karin de Vries. “You won’t join me?” he asked, partially raising his glass.

  “Perhaps later—if there is a later.”

  “You’re one hell of a puzzle, lady.”

  “From where you sit I’m sure I appear so. However, looking over at you, I am simplicity itself. It’s you who are the puzzle. You and the American intelligence community.”

  “I think that remark requires an explanation, Mrs. de Vries.”

  “Of course it does, and you shall have it. You send a man out under the deepest cover, an extraordinarily talented operative fluent in five or six languages, and you keep his existence so secret here in Europe, so secret, he has no protection, no one he can reach as a control, for no one has the authority, much less the responsibility, to advise him.”

  “Harry always had the option to pull out,” protested Latham. “He traveled all over Europe and the Middle East. He could have stopped anywhere, picked up a phone, called Washington, and said, ‘This is it, I’m finished.’ He wouldn’t have been the first deep cover to have done that.”

  “Then you don’t know your own brother.”

  “What do you mean? For Christ’s sake, I grew up with him.”

  “Professionally?”

  “No, not that way. We’re in separate branches.”

  “Then you truly have no idea what a bloodhound he is.”

  “Bloodhound …?”

  “As fanatic in his pursuits as the fanatics he was pursuing.”

  “He didn’t like Nazis, who does?”

  “That’s not my point, monsieur. When Harry was a control, he had assets in East Germany, paid by the Americans, who fed him information that dictated his orders to his runners, runners like my husband. Your brother had no such advantage this last time. He was alone.”