Weiss stopped. “Oh come, Albert, I thought you were smarter than that.”
“I don’t have to be that smart to see three men have been killed.”
Weiss leaned over Ryan like a patient schoolteacher. “But not by us. I told you already. No, we don’t want Otto Skorzeny dead. He’s no use to us dead.”
“Then what?”
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that a Lieutenant Colonel of the SS should have sufficient funds to live the way Skorzeny does? He is, by any measure, a very wealthy man, wouldn’t you say? How does a man escape from custody less than fifteen years ago, nothing to his name, then turn up just a few years later a multimillionaire? How does that work?”
“I don’t know.”
Weiss put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “You seem like a calm and rational man, Albert. I think if I take those cuffs off your wrists and ankles, you won’t try anything stupid. Am I right?”
Ryan stayed silent.
Weiss took a set of keys from his pocket and unfastened each of Ryan’s limbs in turn.
“Go on,” Weiss said. “Stand up if you want. Stretch your legs.”
Ryan gripped the chair’s armrests, pushed himself up. His knees buckled, and Weiss seized him in a bear hug.
“Easy, my friend. Put your hand on my shoulder. There you go.”
Ryan stood quite still for a time, breathing hard, before lowering himself back into the chair. Weiss took his seat once more.
“So, we were talking about Colonel Skorzeny’s money. The story is he set up a concrete business in Buenos Aires and got rich. Now, call me an old cynic, but I don’t buy that explanation for one second. If you scrape around in the dirt a little, you dig up all sorts of stories. We know, for example, that Martin Bormann siphoned off a huge fortune right out of Hitler’s pockets. In 1945, when the end came, as far as we know, Bormann never made it out of Berlin. But the money did. Eight hundred million dollars wound up in Eva Perón’s bank account, not to mention the gold bullion and the diamonds. We’re talking enough money to run a small country on. And who do you think was right there, whispering sweet nothings to Evita?”
Ryan remembered what Catherine Beauchamp had told him. “Skorzeny.”
“That’s right. And that’s just the start. Cash, precious metals, diamonds and every other kind of stone, paintings and sculptures. Every damn thing he and his friends could steal and smuggle out of Europe. Given what we know of the funds Otto Skorzeny has access to, it’s a wonder he lives as modestly as he does.”
“So what do you want from him?”
“Well, it’s how he uses this money that concerns us. We wouldn’t mind so much if he blew it on racehorses and sports cars and women, all the stuff the average ageing millionaire entertains himself with. But that isn’t what Skorzeny does. You see, strictly speaking, the money isn’t his. He’s more of a caretaker, a trustee if you like. Have you heard of ratlines?”
“No,” Ryan said.
“Most people haven’t. See, right at the end of the war, some Nazis, guys like Skorzeny and Bormann, they saw it coming. They knew that even if they escaped, hundreds of others wouldn’t. They needed to set up routes, channels, ways out for their friends. Ratlines. You know what Europe was like in the couple years after the war. A passport was worth shit. The borders were meaningless. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of displaced people wandering around with no place to go, and no way to prove their nationality. And Skorzeny’s kind exploited that. They’d just swap their uniforms for pants and a shirt, walk up to some GI and say, ‘Hey, I’m Hans, and my town got burned to the ground. Show me where to go.’ And they’re home free. Except once they find a place to settle, they need money.”
“Skorzeny’s money,” Ryan said.
“That’s right.” Weiss leaned over and patted Ryan’s thigh. “Well, the money he looks after, at any rate. I could tell you a dozen German and Austrian companies, million dollar international enterprises that were bankrolled by the funds Skorzeny controls. Companies you’ve heard of, companies whose products you’ve bought, household names. Of course, the free-for-all couldn’t last forever. Once the borders firmed up, once the European nations got the passport problem under control, then those routes, those ratlines needed to come into play. A lot of times through the church, or some government official or other. A letter of introduction, a little currency to ease the way, cash to set up a new life. Again, Skorzeny’s money.
“Since the end of the war, Otto Skorzeny and that fund have helped hundreds of murdering bastards escape Europe. And they aren’t all glorified office boys like Helmut Krauss. We’re talking about Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, the worst pieces of filth who ever walked this earth. Now, do you see why Otto Skorzeny is of so much interest to me?”
Ryan held his gaze. “Then why didn’t you go after him instead of those others? How did killing Helmut Krauss help you?”
“Albert, I’ve told you twice already, but let me tell you again. We did not kill Helmut Krauss, Johan Hambro or Alex Renders. Their deaths have rather compromised us, in fact. This business has spooked Skorzeny. If he wasn’t such a stubborn bastard, he’d have cleared out by now, gone back to Madrid and his buddy Franco. And our mission would be over. A failure.”
“So what is your mission?”
“We want those ratlines.”
Ryan smiled. “It seems to me the quickest way to close them down would be to kill Skorzeny.”
Weiss cringed. “You disappoint me, Albert. If Skorzeny died, control of the money and the ratlines would simply pass to someone else. No, I didn’t say we wanted to close down the ratlines. We want control of them. We want Skorzeny under our thumb, and we want to know every single person who tries to escape through the network, and everyone who got through in the past. We can let most of them go, the nobodies, but we can grab the big fish. We want them on trial. Failing that, we want them dead. Either way, we want justice to be done.”
“Why would Skorzeny ever give them up? You’ve got nothing to threaten him with.”
“Ah, but I do.” Weiss’s grin spread so wide it seemed to glow. “Skorzeny lives damn well on what he draws from the fund for himself. His friends gave him a pretty good allowance, plus he earned some on the side, running those mercenary training courses in Spain and so on. A CIA friend of mine attended one, said he learned a lot.
“But Skorzeny got greedy. We acquired some paperwork from Heidegger Bank, a little family-run institution just outside of Zurich. Some statements that were mislaid and found their way to me. You see, about seven or eight years ago, Skorzeny started channelling a little of his Kameraden’s money away. Not much at any one time, a few thousand from an interest dividend here, a hundred thousand from a lodgement there. Pretty soon, he’s got a few million stacking up in a little side account that his buddies don’t know about. He’s been skimming off the top, as they call it in Las Vegas.”
“You’re going to blackmail him?”
“Exactly. Now, we’ve spent a lot of time and resources on this mission, and we don’t want it destroyed by some hotheads with a grudge. Is that unreasonable?”
“No,” Ryan said.
“No, indeed. Some gang of rogues comes along and starts picking off Skorzeny’s friends. Skorzeny gets worried, involves the government, and here you are. Right in the middle of it all.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“The same thing your friend the Minister for Justice wants. I want it stopped.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Célestin Lainé knew Hakon Foss was strong, but still, he was shocked at the Norwegian’s resilience.