Crossfire Page 37

  Again the old man was stunned. “Impossible,” he breathed. “They, of all people, would never dare.” He shook his head. “No.”

  “It’s true,” McGarvey said. “Rheinfälls is dead. If you don’t believe me, telephone his home.”

  Feldmann hurried over to the manager’s desk and made a telephone call. As he waited for the connection to be made, he turned and looked at McGarvey and Maria. After a full minute he hung up. He said something to the manager, and then came back.

  “There is no answer, but it means nothing.”

  “It means he is dead, Herr Feldmann,” McGarvey said. “We just came from there. Everyone on his staff was murdered as well.”

  Feldmann ran a hand across his eyes. “It’s just that it’s so hard to believe … after all this time.” He looked up, almost pleading. “There’s no reason. Not now.”

  McGarvey took the man by the arm. “We must talk. Now, before it’s too late.”

  “Too late?”

  “They’ll kill you next.”

  “I’ll run again.”

  “Where?” McGarvey asked. “There is no place left, Herr Feldmann. The world has become far too small in the last forty-six years.”

  Again the old man ran a hand across his eyes. When he looked up, there was a new, warier expression on his face. “Who are you? What do you want of me? How do I know that you are telling me the truth?”

  “Rheinfälls told me that the gold was cursed. And before he died he told me that it was kept at Ponte do Sor.”

  “Who are you?” the old man demanded.

  The maitre de casino was watching them. So were some of the others on the staff. They were attracting too much attention here.

  “Let’s talk outside,” McGarvey suggested.

  Feldmann tried to pull away. “No.”

  “Goddamnit, if you want to die like the rest of them, it’s your choice. But I’m an American. CIA. And I’m here to try to help you. I’m trying to straighten out this mess so that the killings will finally stop.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “We’ve been to see Hesse. And we have Major Roebling’s notebook from the U-boat off the coast of Argentina. We’ve seen Rainer Mossberg’s testimony. Goddamnit, we’ve got most of it already. We’ll get the rest without you if you don’t want to help. But we’re also trying to save your life.”

  Feldmann was overwhelmed. It was as if they’d placed a hundred-pound weight on his frail shoulders; his stoop had become more pronounced, and his legs seemed ready to buckle. “The castle,” he said softly. “It’s there, where we put it beginning in 1941. All of it. No one has touched so much as a gram of it.”

  Maria’s eyes were shining. She’d heard every word.

  “The ledger is there too. No one touched it. We were all afraid to. You understand.”

  “The ledger—it’s still with the gold?” McGarvey asked, not understanding, but afraid if he said so the old man would refuse to go on.

  “Yes, of course,” Feldmann said, giving McGarvey an odd look. “It’s what this is all about. I thought that you—” All of a sudden the old man stiffened and what little color there had been in his face drained away.

  “Kirk!” Maria cried.

  McGarvey turned. Two men dressed in well-tailored business suits had come in the front entrance. They stood a few feet away from each other, completely neutral expressions on their faces, their stance loose, professional. Each of them held a large-caliber, silenced pistol trained in McGarvey’s direction. They were less than twenty feet away. At that range they could not miss.

  “Please step away from Herr Feldmann,” one of them said. His English was nearly perfect. But McGarvey could still hear a faint accent. German.

  “The generals sent you,” McGarvey said.

  “Step to the side, sir. We have no wish to cause you any harm.”

  Activity in the broad entry hall was gradually coming to a complete standstill. There were at least a dozen people standing around, some of them with cocktails or glasses of champagne. They’d been talking, but when it began to register that something was happening near the front door, that men with guns had actually entered the casino, a hush fell over the hall.

  They could hear the muted hum of conversation from the gaming rooms to the rear of the building, and from the restaurants upstairs.

  The maitre de casino behind his desk about ten feet to McGarvey’s right, was speaking urgently into the telephone. The two armed men totally ignored him.

  “If I refuse?” McGarvey asked calmly.

  “Then we will have to destroy you,” one of them said. They were ordinary-looking men. Nothing to distinguish them. Yet their actions and choice of words were chilling. Destroy, not shoot or kill. Military.

  “Perhaps I already know too much,” McGarvey said. “Perhaps others do as well. Perhaps this can no longer be contained.”

  One of the men began moving slowly to the side, so that unless the old man moved directly behind McGarvey, he would have a good shooting angle on Feldmann.

  A couple came in the front doors and passed the two gunmen without noticing what was going on. They were so intent on each other that they passed through the hall and into the gaming room without once looking around.

  “Consider,” McGarvey said. “If that’s the case, there would be no reason to continue the killing.”

  “You fucking Nazis!” Maria screamed suddenly, and she fired a single shot that struck one of the men in the side.

  Instant pandemonium broke out in the entry hall, people bolting in panic, crawling over each other in a mad effort to get out of the line of fire.

  Feldmann let out a cry and lurched to the left.

  “No!” McGarvey shouted, diving to the right and shoving Maria to the side, her second shot going wide.

  Both men fired rapidly, hitting Feldmann at least five times before they turned and hurried toward the doors.

  Maria jerked away from McGarvey, but before she could fire again he grabbed her gun hand and bodily pulled her around.

  She turned on him. “Bastard!” she screeched, spittle flying from her mouth. “You bastard! You bastard!”

  “Enough!” McGarvey shouted, wrenching the gun out of her hand.

  “Goddamn you!” she screamed, coming at him.

  He stepped back and slapped her across the face, stopping her in her tracks.

  “They would have killed us both, you stupid fool,” McGarvey told her.

  Her eyes were glazed and she was shaking in rage. Feldmann was dead, there was no doubt about it. The manager was staring at McGarvey, the telephone still to his ear, his eyes wide.

  McGarvey took Maria by the arm and unhurriedly led her across to the doors, outside, and down the walk to their car. He could hear sirens in the distance, and someone was shouting at them from the casino, but no one came out to stop them. Nor did anyone think to give pursuit as they got into the car, McGarvey driving this time, and took off into the night.

  60

  KURSHIN STOOD BESIDE THE bed in the Hotel Lisboa Penta, the telephone pressed tightly to his ear as he listened to the intermittent ringing. Ten rings now without answer.

  Of the eleven other names in the notebook he’d stolen from the woman’s hotel room in Argentina, he’d found only three of them here in the Lisbon area. Alois Rheinfälls, Dieter Feldmann, and Karl Sikorsky.

  He willed Rheinfälls to answer the telephone now. Someone who would listen to him. Someone who would give him the information that he needed.

  This time he was going to win, because this time he was immortal. He smiled to himself as he listened to the distant phone continue to ring.

  Hadn’t that been proved in the high valley in Iran against McGarvey, the Iranian air force, and SAVAK? All of them together had not been able to defeat him.

  Hadn’t it been proved again in the mountains against Colonel Berezin, and against the mountains themselves?

  And tonight at the airport. The three KGB officers who’d
been sent to arrest him had failed. He could not be touched. He was invincible.

  Baranov would understand. And so would McGarvey. They were the only two men for him.

  He hung up the telephone, waited a moment, and then picked it up again. When he had an outside line he dialed Dieter Feldmann’s number in Cascais.

  Finding out where McGarvey and the woman were staying had been child’s play. McGarvey had wanted to be found. It was as if the man were taunting him: “Here I am, Arkasha. Come and get me, Arkasha. I am waiting for you, Arkasha.”

  The telephone at the Feldmann villa on the coast began to ring.

  It had also not been difficult to find out which room was McGarvey’s and to let himself in. He’d been disappointed, though not very surprised, that they were not here. But they had not been gone very long. He could still smell McGarvey’s presence here. The soapy, deodorized smells that all Americans left behind lingered in the air, on the pillowcases and sheets, and on the towels in the bathroom.

  The telephone rang a second time.

  He and the Argentinian bitch were here in Portugal to find the gold that the Nazis had hidden. The RSHA major, Walther Roebling, had thought he was playing a trick on the U-boat’s crew, but in the end the cruel trick had been played on him as well. Kurshin wondered what had happened to the man. Had he gone down with the submarine after all?

  The telephone was answered on the third ring by a man who, sounding very flustered, gave only the telephone number. His Portuguese had a heavy German accent, and Kurshin easily switched to that language.

  “Hello, I wish to speak with Herr Feldmann, please,” Kurshin said respectfully.

  “He is gone. They are all gone, including Rheinfälls.”

  “Gone?” Kurshin asked. “Gone where?”

  “The police will have to be called …”

  “What has happened?”

  “But they won’t be able to help, of course.”

  “Where is Herr Feldmann, please? I am calling for Sikorsky.”

  “Herr Sikorsky is there?” the man shouted.

  “Yes, of course. I am with him now. We had to run. But where have the others gone?”

  “I don’t know. After the American called, everything has been so confused. No one will answer at the casino.”

  After the American called.

  Kurshin’s grip tightened on the telephone and his hip began to throb painfully. “Where have they gone?” he demanded.

  “The castle,” the man shouted raggedly.

  “Where?”

  “Ponte do Sor! The castle! The gold! Everything is ruined now …”

  It had taken Chaim Landau nearly ten minutes to track down the two men who’d arrived in Portugal that afternoon from Tel Aviv. He’d been told they’d left the embassy at six, which they had, but he didn’t find out immediately that they had returned and were in the basement.

  He was out of breath by the time he hit the bottom of the stairs and raced to the security door at the end of the corridor. He prodded the buzzer.

  Landau was a special operations case officer, a desk man, not a field agent. His job, among other things, was to make connections between widely disparate facts and data, and from them draw some kind of meaningful conclusions.

  One source of his raw data was ongoing projects that the Mossad maintained worldwide. If and when one of these going “concerns,” as they were called, wound up in Portugal, it was also his job to act as contact, confidant, and baby-sitter.

  One of those “concerns” had just telephoned, giving Landau the thing that the two men had come all the way from Tel Aviv to get.

  The window in the door slid back. “Are they here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the Lisbon chief of station, Mordechai Lavon, said, unlocking the door. “It’s Landau,” he called to someone else inside.

  Landau stepped into the embassy’s safe zone. “She just called.” All the offices here were protected from any sort of surveillance, including electronic. They were mostly used for Mossad or Aman—Israeli military intelligence—operations, but on occasion the Israeli ambassador to Portugal held top-level conferences down here.

  Portugal, like Argentina, had always been a safe haven for Nazis.

  “In there,” Lavon said, motioning to the conference room across the corridor.

  Mossad officers Lev Potak and Abraham Liebowitz were studying a map of Portugal when Landau and Lavon came in.

  “She called,” Landau said.

  Potok looked up, a smile on his craggy, weatherbeaten face. “Yes? How long ago was this, Chaim?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “And?” Potok prompted. Liebowitz was grinning.

  “They’re on their way out to Ponte do Sor. It’s a small town of maybe ten thousand people. About a hundred fifty klicks inland.”

  “They?” Potok asked. “Kirk McGarvey is here with her?”

  “Yes. She was calling from the casino at Estoril. She said she would try to talk him out of it, but she didn’t think she could stop him, short of killing him.”

  Potok suppressed a smile. “What else?”

  “There’s been a shooting. Outside of Estoril. A man named Rheinfälls. Evidently he was assassinated as the woman and McGarvey were speaking with him.”

  Potok turned to the chief of station. “Do we know this Rheinfälls?”

  “One of the German recluses,” Lavon said. “Don’t know much about him except that he has plenty of money but very few friends. He lives in a big compound with some hired German muscle. Probably former BND.”

  “Are the police involved yet?” Potok asked Landau.

  “Unknown. Apparently she had only a minute to talk, because she hung up abruptly. But she kept repeating Ponte do Sor. And, ‘It’s there.’”

  “We’ll have to do something about this American, first,” the chief of station said.

  “No,” Potok replied sharply. “I’ve worked with him before. He’s a good man. Whatever he’s doing in this business will only be to our benefit.”

  “How can you be so sure, Lev?” Lavon asked.

  “I’m sure,” Potok said. “The man saved my life, for starters. And I can’t even begin to tell you what he did for Israel.”

  Lavon and Landau were both impressed. Potok was from Tel Aviv. His opinions carried a lot of weight.

  “How do we get out to this Ponte do Sor?” Potok asked.

  “Car. I’ll drive you,” Landau said.

  “We’ll leave immediately. You’d better carry a gun.”

  “Yes, sir,” Landau said. “But may I ask what the ‘it’ is that she was talking about?”

  “Might be nothing at all,” Potok said oddly. “It’s something she and a few of her friends have been working on for a very long time. Friends of Israel. We all thought it was fiction, and it probably is. But we’ll check on it just the same.”

  “Yes, sir.” Landau had the good sense not to ask the next, obvious question: If it was fiction, why had Tel Aviv sent out two of its top agents?

  61

  THE CASTLE WAS WELL south of the town of Ponte do Sor, and dominated the only hill for miles around. The moon was nearly full, and the night was so bright that the ramparts and spires of the sprawling medieval pile looked like something out of a Disney fantasy. McGarvey half expected to see Crusaders massing in the valley, ready to attack, while dark-skinned Moors, armed with longbows, pots of boiling oil, and piles of rocks were making ready for the siege.

  Maria had said very little on the long drive out, but as McGarvey turned off the main highway and started the mile or so up the secondary road to the castle itself, she began to shiver, almost violently.

  “Do you want to wait until morning?” McGarvey asked. He felt terrible himself. The wound in his side ached all the way up to his armpit, and he’d found himself drifting off for seconds at a time with no conscious recollection of where he was or how he got there.

  “No,” she mumbled tersely.

  The road began to climb thr
ough a dense grove of olive trees that heightened the fantastical illusion. The gnarled trees looked like old men, hunched over, pointing the way in the darkness, wizards showing them the path to hell. Soldiers. The Crusaders, now that they were in among them.

  “Is it really here, Kirk?” she asked in a small, awed voice. “I mean, after all this time.”

  “Unless they were lying to us,” McGarvey said. But they hadn’t been lying. He’d heard certainty in their voices. The certainty bred by fear.

  The hill steepened, and the road began to switch back on itself, once, twice, and a third time, and then their headlights flashed across the massive iron gate just at the crest. It was flanked on one side by what appeared to be a Victorian-style carriage house, and on the other by a stout two-story gatekeeper’s house made of gray stone with a slate roof. Windowboxes filled with flowers sat beneath leaded windows that were dark now. A bicycle leaned against a stone wall to one side of the house; beyond it they could see a well-tended garden. Even in February things grew here.

  McGarvey switched off the headlights but left the engine running. He got out of the car and, glancing across at the still dark gatehouse, walked the final twenty-five yards up the driveway to the iron gate.

  A sign on the gate advised that the Castelo de Oro was open to visitors from 9:00 A.M. until sunset, Tuesday through Saturday; from 10:00 A.M. until 5:00 P.M. Sunday; and closed on Monday. Admission was fifteen escudos.

  It was a museum! Either everything they had been told was a lie, or this was a massive joke that the Germans had played on the world. Even the name—Castle of Gold—was a joke.

  The main gate was locked, but a smaller gate to one side was not. When McGarvey tested the latch, it swung open noisily.

  “Was ist los?” a man shouted from the gatehouse.

  McGarvey turned around as the beam of a flashlight caught him in the face. He raised a hand to shield his eyes.

  “Wer ist das?” the man shouted. He was at a second-story window.

  “I have come from Herr Rheinfälls and Herr Feldmann,” McGarvey said, walking back toward the house.

  “Yes? Who are these people? What are you doing here at this hour?”