had been correct in one area: The front door was on the far left, at the end of the gravel drive, symmetrically unbalanced, as if temporary, but removed from [email protected]'s quarters. And directly ahead of her, the short- dock and the great river beyond, was the porticoed side door of Gunter Jdger's suite of rooms; a dim red light was affixed to the interior roof of the small porch. Karin took several deep breaths, hoping to control the pounding in her chest, removed Drew Latham's automatic from her raincoat pocket, and started across the grass toward the porch with the dim red light. One of them would live, the other die. It was the end of their godforsaken marriage. But first there was Water Lightning, Gunter Jdger's omega for the paralyses of London, Paris, and Washington. Frederik de Vries, once the most brilliant of agents provocateurs, had figured out a way to do it. She knew it!
Karin reached the short porch with the eerie red light; she walked up the single step, holding on to one of the two columns that supported the overhang, the heavy rain pounding a steady tattoo on the roof. Suddenly, she gasped, fear and confusion spreading over her. The door was ajar, open no more than three inches, beyond the slit was only black darkness. She approached it, Latham's automatic in her left hand, and pushed the door back. Again only darkness, and except for the now-torrential rain, silence. She walked inside.
"I knew you'd come, my dear wife," said the unseen figure, his voice echoing off the unseen walls.
"Close the door, please."
"Frederik!"
"Not Freddie any longer, I see. You only called me Frederik when you vere angry with me, Karin. Are you angry with me now?"
"What have you done? Where are you?"
"It's best we talk in the dark, at least for a while." You knew I'd come here .. . ?"
"That door's been open since you and your lover flew into Bonn.
"Then you understand they know who you are-"
"That's totally irrelevant," interrupted De Vries/jAger firmly.
"Nothing can stop us now."
"You won't get away."
"Of course I will. It's already been arranged."
"How? They know who you are, they won't let you!"
"Because they're out there in four acres of tangled shrubbery and ruins, their listening devices waiting for me to reach others here in Germany and in England, France and America? So they can accuse others, arrest others, because I talked with them? I tell you, dear wife, the temptation to place calls to the Presidents of France and the United States, and the Queen of England, was nearly irresistible. Can you imagine the utter bewilderment in the intelligence communities?"
"Why didn't you?"
"Because the sublime would become the ridiculous and we're deadly serious."
"Why, Frederik, why? What happened to the man who, above all, loathed the Nazis?"
"That's not quite right," said the new Fuhrer curtly.
"I loathed the Communists first, for they were stupid. They squandered their power everywhere, trying to live up to the Marxist doctrine of equality when no such equality exists. They gave authority to uneducated peasants and crude, ugly louts. There was nothing grand about them at all."
"You never spoke in those terms before."
"Of course I did! You just never listened carefully enough.. ..
But that, too, is irrelevant, for I found my calling, the calling of a truly superior human being. I saw a void and I filled it, admittedly with the help of a surgeon of great stature and perception who realized that I was the man they needed."
"Hans Traupman," said Karin in the darkness, immediately angry with herself for saying the name.
"He's no longer with us, thanks to your team of blunderers. Did you people really think you could hijack his boat and speed away with him? All four cameras blacked out in succession, the radio suddenly malfunctioning, the boat itself heading upriver? Honestly, such amateurism. Traupman gave his life for our cause, and he wouldn't want it any other way, for our cause is everything."
GUnter Jdger knew a great deal, but he did not know everything, considered Karin de Vries. He thought Traupman had died on his boat.
"What cause, Frederik? The cause of the Nazis? The monsters who executed your grandparents and forced your father and mother to live as pariahs, until they finally took their own lives?"
"I have learned many things since you abandoned me" wife."
"I abandoned you .. . ?"
"I traded my execution for diamonds, all the diamonds I had left in Amsterdam. But who was going to hire me after the Wall fell?
What