“Over there,” Stoke said, “Look! Another somnambulist.”
He hurled the glass ball at the mirror over the fireplace. The glass shattered and Viktor rose up off the stool, leaned forward across the opened piano and fired the Schmeisser at the sound of breaking glass. He got off a short burst of useless rounds but by then Jet was already in the air, flying toward the piano.
She came out of her tuck, did at least one midair somersault, and landed with both feet on the raised piano top. The heavy wooden lid slammed down hard on Viktor’s head and shoulders, smashing his face down against the taut wires. The whole top half of his body was now trapped inside the piano case, Jet’s weight keeping the lid down.
Jet stood atop the Steinway, smiling at Stoke.
“Crouching tiger,” she said. “Never fails.”
“Damn, girl, that was pretty good. Bruce Lee, eat your heart out good. You ever make a kung fu movie?”
From inside the piano came a low moan. Viktor was still alive anyway, but just barely, and Stoke didn’t really feel like giving him first aid right now. He pried the Schmeisser from his clenched fingers just for good measure. Good souvenir. Plus, he wasn’t remotely interested in that horror movie ending where the dead guy raises up and shoots your ass while you’re going out the door with the girl.
“You know what,” he said to Jet, “let’s do the early checkout thing. Do they have that here, you think?”
“Good idea. Where to next?”
“You said Leviathan was designed at this Tempelhof in Berlin, right?”
“Yes.”
“Ever been there?”
“Countless times.”
“How’s the security?”
“I think I could get us inside. Getting out alive would naturally be up to you.”
“Yeah. We’ll go check it out. Let’s pack up and vamoose.”
At the top of the stairs, they separated. He sent Jet along to her room to pack up since he knew she’d take longer. He continued up the stairs leading to the top floor. He thought it would be a real good idea to check on Frau Irma. He couldn’t imagine how she’d been able to sleep through all the commotion downstairs.
He entered the dark bedroom, pausing at the door to listen for snoring. Nothing. There was a funky smell in the room, but nothing he could put his finger on. The east windows were beginning to cast a faint grey light into the room. He could make out a lumpy shape lying in the middle of the four-poster bed. She was out all right, not moving a muscle. Jet must have administered some serious sleepy-time tea. He walked over to the bed and looked down at her.
He switched on the lamp by the bed. The shade was draped in a silk scarf that bathed the whole scene in soft red light.
Sleeping like a baby. A very ugly baby. Stoke had to say he finally understood that old expression “a face only a mother could love.” Her hooded yellow eyes, those man-eating fish eyes, were closed, praise God, and her long grey hair was down, splayed out on the pillow in thick, greasy strands. Stoke had to say it looked better up in buns. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth in a kind of grin and there was a little dried spit on her chin. She was very still. He bent down to see if she was breathing.
In the lamplight, her face looked yellow, as if all the blood had drained out of it. He reached down and put his hand on her powdery cheek. It was very cold and he quickly pressed two fingers to her carotid artery. Nada. There was another star in the skies over Germany tonight. The lovely Frau Irma Winterwald was dead. Jet had maybe accidentally overloaded her teapot with deadly nightshade. He’d have to ask her about that. Girl was getting frisky.
Stoke switched off the lamp. He hoped like hell Frau Irma was going to have herself a closed-casket funeral. Just for the undertaker’s sake if nobody else’s. She hadn’t looked all that good when she was breathing, but at least she had some color in her cheeks. Dead, she was a train wreck. You don’t want something like that lying around your funeral parlor in plain sight. Bad for business.
He looked up from the corpse and saw Jet standing in the doorway. She’d changed clothes. She was wearing a hooded parka and had a knapsack dangling from her shoulder.
“You killed her?” Stoke said.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you why?”
“Self-protection, obviously, but I loathed that old woman. Anyway, we are almost finished with the Germans now.”
“Finished? What’s that supposed to mean, ‘finished’?”
“It’s complicated. I’ll explain on the way to Berlin. Let’s go. Have you looked out the window lately?”
“Hey, look at that. Wow. In summertime, no less,” Stoke said, moving to the window.
“Right. It’s snowing like crazy,” she said, walking over to take another look. Visibility was down to zero. A white-out.
Stokely said, “We’ve got to get out of this house, Jet. Now. We can’t afford to get snowed in up here.”
“Because?”
“Because maybe you can’t hear it, girl, but there’s a great big clock ticking and it’s getting louder by the second.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Ras al Hadd
HARRY BROCK WAS WAITING FOR HAWKE OUTSIDE THE dusty little cantina in the coastal village of Ras al Hadd. The squat, unpainted tourist café had two large windows on a second floor overlooking the sea. The drive south along the coast road from Muscat had taken almost three brutal hours. According to his handheld GPS, it continued in much the same fashion for another thousand kilometers or so, south along the coast to the town of Salalah.
Of course, he couldn’t confirm that on any map. Maps were forbidden in Oman. It was intended to confuse the sultan’s enemies but it worked pretty well for his friends, too.
Hawke parked the brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser they’d given him under a dusty pomegranate tree. It was the only tree he’d seen in the last hour. He drained the last of the water they’d provided and stuck his face right into the stream of icy air coming out of the center console. As he reluctantly switched off the ignition and opened the door on the blast furnace that was Oman in summer, Harry Brock strolled around the corner of the building.
Despite the intense heat and dust, Brock appeared fresh and cheerful. He wore the beginnings of a new beard, a clean white T-shirt, a pair of worn khakis, and a brown felt hat that had seen better days tilted back on his head. Hawke kept expecting him to say “Aw, shucks,” or something similar, but he never did.
“Welcome to Oman,” Brock said, shaking Hawke’s hand as he climbed out of the Toyota.
“Is that yours?” Hawke said, eyeing the Royal Enfield motorcycle parked by the side of the building. It was a Bullet 350, black, a legendary bike among the cognoscenti.
“Yeah,” Brock said, “I just picked it up yesterday in Muscat. With these so-called roads, I thought maybe a bike was a good idea.”
Whatever else could be said about Harry Brock, he had excellent taste in motorcycles.
“Nice place,” Hawke told Brock, looking around at the bleak and sunblistered location. The restaurant, which for some mysterious reason was named the Al-Kous Whisper, was surrounded by a low garden wall of rough-hewn stone. There was a carved wooden portal through which you entered this little Shangri-la in the desert.
“Isn’t it? Ras al Hadd is considered one of Oman’s garden spots.”
“Because it’s got a tree,” Hawke said.
“Bingo.”
So far, from what Alex had seen of the benighted countryside, Oman didn’t have a lot of garden spots. It looked like Mars in the off-season. Reddish, stony ground, baked dry. Desolate riverbeds, cracked and empty. Abandoned villages hanging from the terraced mountainsides. Dead scenery, he thought, driving through the unremittingly hostile environment.