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  Maria looked at him blankly. She shook her head. “No. Should it?”

  It was the very first thing, he decided, that she had been honest about. He let her go, and she immediately stepped away from him, rubbing her wrist.

  “If you ever touch me like that again, I shall kill you,” she said, her voice low with emotion. She meant it.

  “There won’t be a next time,” McGarvey said. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

  “Why?” she cried out. “You said you were willing to help.”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d rather not get involved in whatever you have going with Esformes. That’s your fight, not mine.”

  “You can’t leave just like that.”

  “Yes, I can, and I will,” McGarvey said. “I made a mistake coming here like this, getting myself involved in your problems.”

  “But what about me?”

  McGarvey had to smile inwardly. Her almost complete self-centeredness seemed innocently childlike.

  “I’m sure you and your friends will persevere. Dr. Hesse gave us the clue. You’ll figure it out if you put your mind to it.”

  “Goddamnit! I won’t let you leave!” she shouted.

  “There’s nothing you can do about it,” McGarvey said, looking at her evenly.

  “We’ll see,” she snapped coldly. She turned on her heel and went to the door.

  “Sorry about your wrist,” McGarvey said.

  She hesitated a second, then yanked open the door and was gone.

  The concierge booked him a seat on the morning flight to Miami. From there he would have to decide whether he would return to Paris or continue up to Washington to straighten out the mess he was apparently in.

  It had been a mistake, after all, to run from Paris. Like it or not, his name had been involved in the embassy attack, making him very much a part of the situation.

  Pushing Carley away had provided no solution to his dissatisfaction. Nor had following Maria Schimmer halfway around the world on a wild-goose chase been sensible. He didn’t think she was connected with the Russians.

  And yet the loose ends in this business bothered him.

  He could accept for the moment the possibility that Maria’s meeting with Carleton Reid had been happenstance. He could even accept her explanation as to why she’d been in the embassy.

  But a comment Dr. Hesse had made stuck out in his mind. The old man had not only gone to the naval archives for them, he had brought back a series of files on the submarine. Not copies of the files, but the actual documents themselves.

  “Look at them if you wish,” Dr. Hesse had told them. “In fact, you must before you leave.”

  It made no sense to McGarvey. Why had the old man been so insistent that they look at the files? They had, but they’d found nothing else useful, unless he’d wanted their fingerprints on the documents, for some reason.

  At eight that evening he placed a call to Dr. Hesse’s home in Freiburg. It was midnight there, but the old man had told him that he never got to sleep until one in the morning, and sometimes later.

  An unfamiliar male voice answered on the first ring. “Yes, who is this?”

  “A colleague,” McGarvey said in German. Something was wrong. “I am calling for Dr. Hesse. Is he there, please?”

  “Yes, which colleague? Where are you calling from?”

  “Dr. Fritz Webber. I am telephoning from Mexico City. May I speak with the professor, please?”

  “I’m afraid not, Dr. Webber. Dr. Hesse is dead. He has been murdered.”

  “My God,” McGarvey whispered.

  A key grated in his lock. He slammed down the telephone and snatched his pistol as the door opened and Maria Schimmer came in. She was wearing sandals and a white cotton off the shoulder dress. Without a word she closed and chained the door, kicked off her sandals, and unzipped her dress, letting it fall to the floor. She stood before him nude.

  20

  MCGARVEY SLOWLY LOWERED HIS gun and laid it on the table. Dr. Hesse was dead, and Maria was offering herself to him. He was beginning to lose his capacity for surprise.

  “What do you want?” he asked quietly.

  “Is that all you can say?” Maria flared.

  She was a beautiful woman. Her long dark hair fell from her shoulders to her breasts. A small, intensely red strawberry birthmark on her left breast was matched by a similar one on her belly, just beneath what was obviously a bikini line.

  “You’re even more beautiful than I thought you would be,” McGarvey said. “But what are you doing here like this? What do you want?”

  “You may make love to me if you wish,” she replied, lowering her voice but looking directly into his eyes.

  “Why?” he asked.

  Her left eyebrow rose. “What, are you a queer? Don’t you want to make love to me?”

  “I’d like very much to make love with you, but why now? Like this?”

  She stepped forward, away from her dress. “I never thanked you for saving my life.”

  McGarvey went across the room, picked up her dress, and handed it to her. For a moment she’d thought he was taking her up on her offer, and he’d seen a tiny glint of triumph in her eyes that faded when she understood what he was doing.

  “Get dressed,” he said.

  She grabbed the dress from him, and turned away to put it on. Her back was also beautiful.

  “You’re going to have to tell me why you came here like this.”

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  “Someone has killed Dr. Hesse, very possibly because of your submarine.”

  Clothed, Maria whirled around, genuinely shocked. “When?”

  “I don’t know. The police were there when I telephoned.”

  “Did you give them your name? Did you tell them where you were calling from?”

  “No.”

  Maria no longer looked angry or embarrassed. “You said we’d been followed in Freiburg. Could it have been the same man?”

  “It’s possible. Were you expecting this?”

  Maria was startled. “Of course not,” she said. “But you heard him. He said there had been killings.”

  “That stopped in 1978.”

  “Because the inquiries stopped. Maybe he stirred up an old hornets’ nest.”

  “There are a lot of them in Germany,” McGarvey said.

  “Yes,” Maria answered, momentarily lost in thought. “Especially now that the wall has come down and the light of day has risen in the east.”

  “Which brings us back to the submarine and what was aboard her,” McGarvey prompted after a beat.

  Maria looked up. “It was the first time I’d ever heard of a cargo.”

  “Bullshit!” McGarvey said harshly.

  “No, listen to me, please. I have been lying to you about some things. I’ll admit that.”

  “Now you’re going to tell me the truth?” McGarvey asked, his skepticism obvious in his tone.

  “There is something aboard that submarine that I’m looking for.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Major Roebling was bringing something with him to Argentina. Something terribly important. In this you must believe me.”

  “I’m still listening.”

  Maria nodded. “He brought no cargo with him, Kirk. All he brought was a small notebook with the names and cover identities of twelve men. The ‘Council.’”

  “Nazis?”

  She nodded again. “Schutzstaffel. They were to be organized. Argentina was to become their Fourth Reich, and Roebling was to be their link between the old world and the new.”

  “It was forty-five years ago. No one cares any longer.”

  “Simon Wiesenthal does.”

  “Before long all those old Nazis will be dead. As it is, most of them are already so old they can offer no threat.”

  “With a restored Germany?” Maria asked with emotion. “Think about it. They have the money, the power. They could beco
me the core of a new government, or movement.”

  “I think not,” McGarvey said.

  “Christ!” she said. “What do I have to do to convince you to help us?”

  “Us?” McGarvey asked.

  “I’m not alone, Kirk,” she said tiredly. “There aren’t many of us, and people like Captain Esformes would like to see us destroyed because we upset the status quo here, but we are determined to continue.”

  “By doing what, exactly?”

  “If we can find the submarine, and Roebling’s book with the names, then we can expose whoever is left. They won’t hold up to scrutiny, Kirk. They’re bad men. Mass murderers, some of them. Doctors who experimented on children, pregnant women. Monsters.”

  “Old men now.”

  She laughed harshly. “Don’t disparage the power of old men. Unless I miss my mark, your Dr. Hesse had something to do with them. And now he is dead.”

  McGarvey said nothing.

  “I want you to meet someone,” Maria said. “He is the assistant director of the Natural History Museum of Buenos Aires. Tell him about Dr. Hesse, and about what you may have figured out.”

  “I’m leaving first thing in the morning.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t prevent you from coming with me tonight. Please.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then you can go back to your friends in Paris, or your ex-wife in Washington. Whatever.”

  McGarvey looked at her. One of his teachers at the Company training camp outside Williamsburg had told him that a good spy could spot the anomalies a mile away.

  He’d never mentioned Kathleen to her. He’d never mentioned Washington or his past life. None of that.

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby,” he said.

  “Five minutes.”

  “Right.”

  She picked up her sandals, and at the door she looked back. “If you had touched me, I would have had to kill you eventually.”

  “Are you a lesbian?”

  “A black widow spider,” she said, and she left.

  “His name is Albert Rothmann,” Maria told him in the taxi.

  It was a few minutes after nine and the city was starting to come alive for the evening. Traffic was heavy along the broad Boulevard Córdoba, and already there were long lines waiting outside the more popular restaurants and nightspots.

  “A co-conspirator of yours?” McGarvey asked. He was feeling irascible. He did not like being lied to, and he liked being spied on even less. Maria and whoever she worked for, or represented, had done both.

  “He was a friend of my father’s. Like an uncle to me, actually.”

  “Convenient.”

  “I need your help, Senor McGarvey. And I will take it any way I can get it. If taking shots at me is your price, then so be it. I’ll not shoot back.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, turning ten minutes later down a tree-lined lane that led off the Avenida San Martin into a small park. The main section of the Natural History Museum was housed in a large, ornate building reminiscent of some of the neoclassic structures in Paris.

  The cabbie left them off at a staff entrance that was open, and they took an elevator up to the fourth floor. The museum was long closed for the evening, and no one seemed to be around. The dinosaur displays were eerie in the darkness.

  “He often works late,” Maria explained.

  “Does he know we’re coming?”

  “Yes. I called him earlier this evening. He’s very interested in meeting you.”

  An office door at the end of the corridor was ajar. No light came from within.

  “That’s odd,” Maria said as they approached. “He said he would wait for us.”

  McGarvey stopped her. “Was there supposed to be anyone else up here tonight?”

  She looked at him in confusion and alarm. “No, just him.”

  McGarvey pulled out his gun and motioned for her to hold back. He cautiously approached the door, flattening himself against the wall to the right, and listened. There were no sounds.

  He pushed the door open with his foot, and a moment later reached around the corner for the light switch. He flipped it on and rolled through the doorway, sweeping his pistol left to right.

  There was no one in the small office except for a dark-haired man seated at the desk. He had been shot in the middle of the forehead with a small-caliber weapon. His head was flung back against the back of his chair, and his arms were outstretched in front of him as if he were propping himself up.

  Maria let out a little cry from the door. McGarvey turned back to her.

  “Rothmann?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  McGarvey went to the desk and felt for a pulse at the side of the man’s neck. There was none, but the body was still warm, the skin still pliable.

  “Is he dead?”

  “Yes, but not a long time. Who else knew we were coming here tonight?”

  “No one,” Maria said. “Unless my telephone at the hotel was tapped …”

  They both heard sirens in the distance. “Esformes,” McGarvey said.

  “The bastard!”

  “We’d better get the hell out of here,” McGarvey said, holstering his gun and taking her by the arm.

  Out in the corridor she pulled away from him. “You were going to tell us where the submarine might be.”

  “Later.”

  The sirens were already much closer.

  “Now!” she cried, her eyes wild.

  “Goddamnit!” McGarvey shouted. “Look, there were five Greek letters in the code, according to Mossburg’s testimony: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon. Starting with the Rio de la Plata right here as alpha, the next place a submarine could make a rendezvous along the coast would be Bahia Blanca.”

  She stared at him open-mouthed.

  “I can read a map too,” he said. “Mossburg told his interrogators that alpha and beta were out for some reason. Which leaves gamma as the next possibility.”

  “Golfo San Matías,” she said.

  “That’s what I figured. Can you get us there?”

  She looked at him. The sirens were very close. “Why the change of heart again?”

  “Him,” McGarvey said, glancing at the door to Rothmann’s office. “And Dr. Hesse. And Paris.”

  “There may not be a connection …”

  “I think there is,” McGarvey said dangerously.

  She studied his face for another second, then nodded. “I have access to a small airplane at the airport. If we wait until dawn to take off we won’t attract any attention.”

  “We’ll have to get out of here first.”

  The sirens were just outside now.

  “There’s a back way,” Maria said, and together they hurried down the corridor, taking the stairs two at a time to the ground floor.

  The night watchman or someone had let the police in the front door. McGarvey and Maria could hear them coming through the museum, one of them shouting orders.

  They slipped out into the corridor and had just managed to reach another door that led to a vast storage area and duck inside, when the staff entrance door at the end of the corridor banged open.

  “This way,” Maria whispered urgently. She took McGarvey’s hand and guided him through the darkness, past big piles of wooden crates, pallets of what appeared to be fiberglass insulation or packing material, and something very large that loomed up on their left.

  The sounds of pursuit faded, until they came to a window at the rear of the building. From there they could hear more sirens outside converging on the museum.

  Maria quickly ran her fingers around the inside edge of the windowframe, stopping at a point halfway up on the left.

  “Alarmed?” McGarvey asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Give me a credit card, or something like it.”

  McGarvey took his American Express card out of his wallet and gave it to her. Carefully she inserted it between the bottom of the windowframe and the casement, sl
iding it to the left until it stopped. She bent it forward, then slid it another quarter inch to the left.

  “Open the window slowly,” she said.

  McGarvey unlocked the latch and slowly raised the window while she held the alarm system’s trip switch in place. He climbed out the window, and once outside he reached back and held the credit card in place as she climbed out. Sliding the card almost all the way past the switch, he nodded to Maria, who lowered the window so he could pull the card out.

  Straight across from the loading dock area and access road to their right was a heavily wooded park, evidently part of the museum’s grounds.

  Without a word he followed Maria across, and they reached the safety of the trees as several sets of lights came around from the front of the museum. Without looking back they hurried through the darkness, coming ten minutes later to a broad avenue filled with shops and cafés and people and traffic.

  They hailed a taxi and told the driver to take them to the airport. As they sped away McGarvey wondered who set them up. If it had been Esformes, he wondered exactly what the man’s problem was with Maria. It was something, he suspected, that he would find out about sooner or later. That and the obvious fact that Maria was not an amateur. She’d had training somewhere. She’d known about the alarm on the museum window and how to bypass it. It was curious.

  21

  THE SUN WAS HIGH in the morning sky when they flew over the Punta Rasa and got their first glimpse of the vast Golfo San Matías. Bounded on the south by the Valdés Peninsula, the bay was more than a hundred miles on a side, with few cities or settlements along its coast.

  “Ten thousand square miles of water for a submarine to stay hidden,” McGarvey said, looking up from a chart. “And no prying eyes ashore to see a thing.”

  Maria was an expert if somewhat distracted pilot. The plane was a twin-engine Cessna 310 that belonged to a company called International Traders, Ltd. She said it was a dummy corporation that had been set up by her and two others to funnel funds into their search efforts.

  The explanation, like most of the others she’d given him, seemed too pat to be entirely true. There was more to her and the mysterious group she represented than she was ready or able to reveal.