Natalia started after him; he held up a hand. ‘No, wait out here,’ he told her. ‘If he’s inside, go and get those cops.’
‘Eddie, I can help you,’ she insisted. ‘I can talk to him — in German. If I can convince him that our country has rejected everything the Nazis stood for, he may give up without violence.’
‘Wouldn’t bet on it,’ he said. But she had a point. He was unarmed, while Nina’s kidnapper had a gun, so if there was any chance of rescuing her without anyone getting hurt, he had to take it. The coldly tactical part of his mind also pointed out that if the Nazi was listening to Natalia, he would be distracted…
‘Okay,’ he said finally, ‘come on. But stay behind me, and when we find him, keep in cover. I don’t want to risk you getting shot.’
‘Nor do I!’ she replied, with a faint smile. Eddie grinned, then headed into the building.
There was little light inside the unfinished structure, but still enough for him to find his way to a stairwell. He doubted that the kidnapper would be holding Nina on the ground floor — instinct would compel him to find safer, higher ground, and the young man was unlikely to have enough real-world experience to overcome it. Nevertheless, he still paused at the foot of the stairs to listen. There were no noises nearby.
‘All right,’ he whispered, ‘follow me up. Quiet as you can.’ Natalia nodded.
They ascended the stairs, stopping briefly to check each landing. ‘Eddie!’ Natalia hissed on the third floor.
‘Yeah, I hear it.’ Bangs and thumps were coming from somewhere above—
A voice. He couldn’t make out the words, but knew instantly that it was Nina’s.
He continued upwards, taking the steps two at a time. Natalia scurried along behind him. The noises continued; the Nazi didn’t know they were coming. At the fifth floor, Eddie pressed himself against the wall beside the exit from the stairwell and glanced around it. A hall led deeper into the building. Apartments lined it — but which one held his wife?
Faint daylight came into the hallway through the gaping doorways. All the patches of illumination were steady — except one. A shadow drifted across the hazy light from the sixth door along, at the end of the passage.
‘Wait here,’ he told Natalia. ‘I’m going in.’
‘You promised your friend that you would tell the police if you found Nina!’ she said, somewhat accusing.
‘Yeah, but I didn’t say I’d do it straight away, did I?’ He gave her a quick disarming grin, which vanished as he became all business, ready for action. ‘If we wait for the cops, he might hurt Nina — and our baby,’ he explained. ‘I’m not gonna let that happen. If I wave like this,’ he held up his left hand in a particular gesture, ‘then call out to him, try to keep his attention. Otherwise, stay back and keep quiet.’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘I’ll work that out when I get there!’
He began to creep down the corridor. A look into the first apartment revealed that what he assumed would be the lounge of the finished residence was about twenty-five feet long, the windows in the far wall. The diffuseness of the moving shadow in the hall made him suspect that the Nazi was at the other end of the sixth room. It would take a couple of seconds to reach him — too long against an armed man.
But there was something else: a narrow gap running from floor to ceiling in the side wall, a stack of rectangular ductwork sections ready to be installed nearby. He could see what he assumed was the neighbouring apartment through the opening, which was confirmed when he reached the next door to find a mirror image of the first flat. The third apartment also had a hole in the wall…
A plan was already forming by the time he passed the fourth door. He slowed, listening to the sounds from ahead. A man was grunting with exertion, something heavy scraping over the concrete floor—
‘You don’t have to do this!’ Nina’s voice again: pleading, fearful.
Eddie felt a fear of his own. Whatever the Nazi was doing, it was about to come to a fatal conclusion. He looked into the fifth apartment. There was another narrow gap in the wall, as he’d hoped. He glanced back down the hallway, seeing Natalia peering worriedly after him, and gave her his signal before ducking into the room.
‘You don’t have to do this!’ Nina said, with growing desperation. Kroll had forced her into a corner by the windows, keeping his gun in one hand as he used the other to pull down more electrical cables from the ceiling. He had spent the last few minutes winding the various lengths around each other, forming a crude rope… the end of which he had just tied into a noose.
He shoved the crate into the middle of the room, then stepped up on to it to hook the rope over a metal pipe. She saw a chance to knock him down from his perch while he was preoccupied—
The gun locked on to her before she had even completed the first step. The Nazi’s expression made it clear that while he wanted to fulfil his more grandiose plan, he would still simply shoot her if necessary. ‘Get back,’ he growled. She retreated.
He let the noose drop from the pipe, then secured it about six feet above floor level. A chill ran through Nina. She was five and a half feet tall. The ceiling was not high enough for the fall from the crate alone to kill her; Kroll meant for her to strangle to death with her feet kicking helplessly mere inches above the floor.
Just as his father had intended in Argentina. A nightmarish flashback: hate-filled faces screaming at her as the noose was tightened around her throat…
The horrifying vision vanished as Kroll jumped down from the wooden box, replaced by one smaller in scale but no less terrifying. The makeshift hangman’s rope dangled from the ceiling, waiting for her. ‘Come here,’ he demanded.
‘Screw you,’ she said, trying to sound defiant, but her voice betrayed her fear.
‘You will walk to me, or I will shoot you in the knees and drag you. Either way, you will come.’ He lowered his aim. ‘I will count to three. One. Two—’
‘Herr Kroll? Können Sie mich hören?’
A woman’s voice, from outside the apartment. Kroll whirled, darting into one of the side rooms and taking cover in its entrance as he aimed at the hallway. ‘Who is there?’ he barked. ‘Do not come any closer, or I will kill her!’
The woman spoke again in German. Nina didn’t know what she was saying, her knowledge of the language limited, but she realised who it was: Natalia! That meant Eddie was here as well — but where? If he had let the young woman get this close, then he had to be closer…
Eddie crept to the opening in the wall, peeking warily through.
Nina was in the far corner of the room. She didn’t see him, looking towards Kroll, who replied to Natalia with a bark of ‘Nein!’ He followed up with an angry tirade, the Englishman picking out enough to get the gist of what he was saying — that the Nazis would never be defeated.
Determined to prove him wrong, he leaned out a little further, both to survey the rest of the room and to try to catch Nina’s attention without drawing Kroll’s.
A flash of horror at the sight of the noose. The Nazi was going to finish what had been started in Argentina three months earlier. But this time, Eddie didn’t have a gun or a Molotov cocktail to even the odds, only his fists and feet.