“Help me!” Sandler was on his knees on the platform, screaming to anyone who could hear. But the noise of the wheels silenced his voice. Michael put his foot down on Sandler’s rifle, then visored his hand over his eyes to cut the glare: ahead of the platform was the coal tender and the locomotive, the stack spouting a plume of black smoke. Sandler was crouched over, blood dripping from his face, crimson splotches all over his khaki jacket. “Help me!” he shouted, but his voice was feeble. He shivered and moaned, rocking himself back and forth.
“I’m going to kill you,” Michael said, in English. Sandler’s rocking abruptly stopped. He kept his head lowered, drops of blood tapping to the metal. “I want you to think about a name: Margritta Phillipe. Do you remember her?”
Sandler didn’t reply. The train was moving through a green forest once more, outside the boundaries of Berlin. From where Michael and the hunter were, neither the train’s engineer nor the fire stoker could see them. Michael prodded Sandler’s side with the toe of his shoe. “The Countess Margritta. In Cairo.” He felt drained, all used up, and his knees were in jeopardy of buckling. “I hope to God you remember her, because you had her murdered.”
Sandler finally looked up, his face lacerated, his eyes swollen into slits. “Who are you?” he rasped, speaking English.
“I was Margritta’s friend. Stand up.”
“You’re… not German, are you?”
“Stand up,” Michael repeated. He kept his weight on the rifle, but he’d decided against using it. He was going to break Sandler’s neck with his bare hands and throw him off the train like a garbage sack. “On your feet. I want you looking at me when I kill you.”
“Please…” Sandler moaned. His nostrils drooled blood. “Please… don’t kill me. I’ve got money. I’ll pay you a lot of money.”
“That doesn’t interest me. Get up!”
“I can’t. Can’t stand up.” Sandler shivered again, his body crouched forward. “My legs… I think my legs are broken.”
Michael felt a hot flare of rage course through him. How many men-and women-had Harry Sandler broken for the twisted cause of Nazi Germany? Had their cries for mercy been listened to? Michael thought not. Sandler was anxious to pay a price; so he would. Michael reached down, grasped the back of the hunter’s khaki jacket, and started to haul him to his feet.
And in doing so, Michael put his hand into a final snare.
Because Sandler-shamming again, just as he’d shammed his drunkenness-suddenly uncoiled, his teeth gritted with fury, and the blade of the knife he’d drawn from inside his right boot glinted with yellow sunlight.
The knife came up in a vicious blur, its point aimed at the center of Michael Gallatin’s stomach.
Less than two inches from penetration, the blade was checked. A hand seized Sandler’s wrist, clamping tight. Sandler stared at that hand, his slitted eyes stunned.
The hand was not quite human, but neither was it fully an animal’s claw. It was streaked with black hair, the fingers beginning to contort and retract into talons. Sandler gasped, and looked up into the man’s face.
The baron’s facial bones were shifting, the nose and mouth extending into a dark-haired muzzle. The mouth strained open, making room for the fangs as they slid, dripping saliva from amid the human teeth. Sandler was struck senseless; the knife clattered to the platform. He smelled an animalish reek, the odors of sweat and wolf hair. He opened his mouth to scream.
Michael, his spine already bending, thrust his face forward and sank his fangs into the hunter’s throat. With a quick, savage twist of his head, he ripped out flesh and veins and crushed Sandler’s windpipe. He pulled his head back, leaving a gaping hole where Sandler’s throat had been. The man’s eyes blinked and his face twitched, the nerves and muscles losing control. The scent of carnage overwhelmed Michael; he struck again, his fangs winnowing into the scarlet tissue, his head thrashing back and forth as he chewed all the way to the hunter’s spinal cord. His fangs crunched on the spine, burst it open, and kept gnawing past the splintered edges. When Michael pulled back from Sandler this time, the hunter’s head hung to the body by strands of tough muscle and connective tissue. A moan came from the windpipe’s hole, as Sandler’s lungs stuttered. Michael, his shirt ripping apart at the seams and his trousers drooping around his lower body, put a foot against the hunter’s chest and shoved.
What was left of Harry Sandler toppled backward, and slithered off the speeding train.
Michael spat out a mouthful of flesh and lay on his side, his body between its two poles. He knew he had yet to get to the locomotive and slow the train; a wolf’s paws couldn’t control levers. He held himself back from a complete change, the wild winds whirling in his mind and the muscles rippling beneath the dark-haired flesh under a human’s clothes. His toes ached in the stiff shoes, and his shoulders longed to burst free. Not yet! Michael thought. Not yet! He began to come back, over the primeval distance his body had already traveled, and in perhaps half a minute he sat up, his human skin slick with sweat and his wounded leg full of frost.
He grasped the rifle; there was a bullet in the chamber. Then he stood up, his brain and muscles sluggish, and climbed the ladder to the walkway that went across the top of the coal tender. He crouched to the locomotive, saw the engineer and fire stoker at work beneath the engine’s overhang, and then he eased down the ladder into the locomotive.
When the two men saw him, they instantly lifted their hands in surrender; they were drivers, not fighters. “Off the train,” Michael said, speaking in German again. He motioned with the rifle. “Now.” The fire stoker jumped, rolling down a bluff into the woods. The engineer hesitated, his eyes wide with fear, until Michael pressed the rifle barrel to his throat. Then, preferring a shock to the bones instead of a bullet through the neck, the engineer leaped from the locomotive.
Michael grasped the red-handled throttle and cut the engine’s speed. He leaned out and saw the bridge over the Havel River approaching. In the distance stood the towers of the Reichkronen. Here was as good a place as any. He throttled down and climbed up onto the top of the coal tender once more. The locomotive neared the bridge, its wheels grinding a slower rhythm. A steam valve was screaming, but Michael had no time to worry about that. The train was still going to cross the bridge at a good clip. He stood up, one hand clasped to his wounded thigh. The railroad bridge narrowed, and dark green water beckoned him. He spat out another piece of skin; Sandler’s flesh was caught in his teeth. He hoped the river was deep under the bridge. If not, he’d soon be kissing mud.
Michael took a deep breath, and jumped.
3
The morning sun was warm and placid on Chesna’s face, but inside a storm raged. She stood on the grassy riverbank in front of the Reichkronen, watching the rowboats slowly move with the current, then against it. They had been dragging the river for over four hours, but Chesna knew the nets would only find mud and river grass. Wherever the baron was, it was not at the bottom of the Havel.
“I tell you, it’s a lie,” Mouse said, standing next to Chesna. He was speaking quietly, because the search for the Baron von Fange had attracted a throng of onlookers. “Why would he have come down here, alone? And, besides, he wouldn’t have gotten drunk. Damn it, I knew I shouldn’t have let him out of my sight.” The little man scowled and fretted. “Somebody had to take care of the fool!”
Chesna’s tawny eyes watched the progress of the row-boats, the soft breeze stirring her golden hair. She wore a black dress: her trademark color, not her mourning suit. Soldiers had searched the banks several miles downriver, in case the body had washed up in the shallows. It was of no use, she thought. This was a sham; but whose sham, and why? One possibility had occurred to her, and sent shocks of alarm through her nerves: he’d been caught while exploring Jerek Blok’s suite and taken away for questioning. If that were so, Colonel Blok hadn’t given anything away when he’d told Chesna earlier this morning that the police had been summoned to start dragging the river. Other thoughts gnawed at her: if the baron broke under torture, he might tell everything he knew. Her own neck, and the necks of others in her finely tuned anti-Nazi organization, might be destined for piano-wire nooses. So should she stay here and continue to play the role of worry-wrought fiancée, or get out while she could? And there was the matter of Blok and Frankewitz, as well; the colonel had told a Gestapo doctor he wanted Theo von Frankewitz able to answer questions within twelve hours. That time limit was ticking away.