‘Better me than you — or Nina,’ he said grimly. ‘Come on. We need to find a cab.’
The blond man forced Nina upwards through the building at gunpoint. They ascended an emergency stairwell that lacked both guardrails and lights, dim daylight leaking in from the unfinished floors higher up. Once they had picked their way up to the fifth floor, he ordered her to leave the staircase and enter a hallway.
She moved cautiously down the passage. Shells of apartments greeted her, empty doorways letting in light from the windows. She realised with alarm why he had brought her to this floor rather than going higher: the double-glazing would block any sounds from reaching the street five storeys below.
He pointed into the last room. ‘Go in there,’ he said, with another jab of the gun.
‘Nice place,’ she muttered sarcastically as she entered. The room was all barren concrete and drywall, bare wires protruding through holes where electrical outlets would eventually be fitted. A narrow vertical gap the height of the room marked where the heating system was waiting to be installed, sections of metal ducting visible in the neighbouring apartment beyond the hole. A wooden crate held more of the sheet steel pieces.
Nina looked towards the window, wondering if she could alert someone outside or in one of the buildings opposite—
Her captor shoved her into a corner, hard. She almost stumbled, barely catching herself before whirling to face him. ‘Son of a bitch!’ she snarled, unleashing her anger in an attempt to cover her fear — for both herself and her unborn child. ‘Who the hell are you? What do you want with me?’
The man kept his gun locked on her. ‘You do not remember me, Dr Wilde?’ he said. His accent was distinctly Germanic, instantly giving her a horrible answer to her first question. ‘I am surprised. We have met before… at the Enklave.’
Even forewarned, the revelation still sent a chill of terror through her. ‘The… the Enklave,’ she echoed. Malignant satisfaction was clear on the man’s face at her fearful stammer. ‘You’re one of Kroll’s people.’
‘I am more than that,’ he snapped. ‘My name is Ulrich Kroll. I am a son of the Führer!’
Nina knew he was speaking the truth even before he finished the sentence. In most physical respects, he was very different from the leader of the colony of escaped war criminals; after seventy years in hiding, even with the water from the Spring of Immortality to slow his ageing, Erich Kroll had become bald and morbidly obese, while his offspring was fit, with the honed body of a soldier. But their eyes were the same: intense, hard, cold. She had been shown a photograph of the older Kroll at the time of his brief capture by the Allies after the war, and the more she looked at his son, the more she saw the resemblance.
‘Yes, now you know me,’ he said. ‘And I know you. I was there when you were sentenced to death by the Führer. And I was there when your friend was executed.’
The words were like a hammer blow to her heart. For a moment she was incapable not merely of speech, of action, but even of thought as the nightmare that had tortured her played out in her waking mind as vividly as if it was happening for real. The bloated monster Kroll raising his gun, pointing it at the helpless Jared Zane — then whirling to aim at Macy’s chest and pulling the trigger. The young woman convulsing, squeezing Nina’s hand so hard that she could feel it all over again, staring at her with shocked disbelief and pain… before collapsing to the floor.
Reality returned along with her horror and grief, the younger Kroll’s features replacing his father’s. Now she knew him, now she remembered him amongst the guards the Nazi leader had summoned. Some had dragged the surviving prisoners back to their cell, others taking Macy’s body away with no more respect or care than if they were removing garbage.
Her kidnapper had been one of the latter. Her anger returned, this time accompanied by deep loathing. ‘You took her away. You dumped her in a pit.’
‘She was an enemy of the New Reich.’
‘She was an innocent young woman!’
Kroll sneered. ‘She would not have died if you had obeyed the Führer. Her death was your fault.’
‘Fuck you!’ she roared, with such sudden fury that the Nazi was momentarily shocked. ‘I didn’t kill her — Kroll did! That fat psychopathic bag of shit pulled the trigger, not me!’ She glared at him, breathless — and only belatedly realising that she had just rejected responsibility for Macy’s death for the first time.
But there was no opportunity to celebrate the psychological breakthrough. Kroll flushed with a rage of his own and thrust the gun at her. Nina flinched, but he caught himself before squeezing the trigger and instead lunged to backhand her across the face, sending her staggering. ‘Schlampe!’ he growled. ‘You will not insult my father!’
Nina put a hand to her stinging cheek. ‘I’ve done worse than that to him!’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean? What happened to my father and the others? Where are they?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
Something about his shift in attitude told Nina that while he wanted answers, he was also afraid to hear them. Rather than ask directly, he said instead: ‘I left the Enklave aboard the train with the other members of the New Reich—’
‘Apart from the children you left to burn to death in a locked building,’ she said with disgust. She, Eddie and Zane had gone in to rescue them, delaying their pursuit of the Nazi forces.
Kroll seemed not to care. ‘You attacked us — you, the Engländer and the Jew. Many of us were killed when the truck carrying our weapons exploded. I was thrown from the train, knocked out. When I woke, I found the bodies of my brothers around me — and the Argentine police moving in. I hid until I was able to make my escape, but I had lost contact with the leaders. I know that they reached Iran, but I do not know what happened to them there.’ He leaned closer, raising the gun threateningly. ‘You are going to tell me.’
‘You want to know what happened to them?’ Nina replied, with another surge of anger. ‘They died! They all died!’
Even if he had been expecting it, he was still shocked to have it confirmed. ‘No! No, that cannot be true. Not all of them. You are lying!’
‘I’m not lying,’ Nina insisted. ‘They found the Spring of Immortality — after I did. They went in… and not one of them came out. They’re all dead.’
Kroll stared at her, the muscles in his face and neck clenching ever tighter until he began to shake with rage. ‘No!’ he roared. He stormed away, circling the room in a rapid march before darting back to Nina and jamming the gun into her face. ‘You are lying, you are lying! Tell me what really happened!’
‘I’m telling you the truth!’ she shouted back. ‘The whole place was full of booby traps! Anyone who wasn’t killed by them was taken out by the Mossad, or my husband… or by me.’
He shook his head. ‘You could not kill them. You are a woman.’
‘Oh, top marks for observation! But I did kill them. I led them into the biggest trap of all, the one they couldn’t resist — that your father couldn’t resist. He was so greedy and desperate to get his hands on the water from the spring, he never thought for a moment that the people who built the place might not have wanted anyone to have it!’
Kroll straightened, struggling to bring his emotions under control. ‘What happened to the Führer… my father?’
‘He tried to kill me,’ said Nina, almost feeling the bloated Nazi leader’s hand clamping around her throat as he pushed her underwater. ‘I hit his head with something, trapped his leg under a sarcophagus lid… and watched him drown.’