“Into the house,” the tall man ordered, waving his revolver at us. Both guns were pointed at us again. I followed orders.
Inside, the house looked even smaller than it had appeared from the exterior. But it was all Richter needed. In a moment, after the tall gunman had called for him, Richter came into the room from the kitchen.
“Well,” he said when he saw us, “What a pleasant surprise.” He reached for the radio that the tall man had placed on a table. “You almost got it, didn’t you?”
“So far you’ve been just a step ahead of us,” I said. “But your luck can’t hold out forever, Richter.”
I saw the hirelings glance at me when I used his real name. Apparently he was known to them only as Blücher. Richter grinned at me and then moved over and slugged me in the face.
I fell heavily to the floor. Ursula gasped and bent over me. A trickle of blood ran from my mouth. I lay there and looked up at Richter and hated him. That hatred would make me try a little harder if I ever got any chance to move against him.
Ursula looked up at Richter. “Nazi butcher!” she hissed.
Anger flushed Richter’s face. He slapped her hard across the face, and she fell down beside me.
Richter turned to the men who had brought us. “Handcuff them there and there.” He pointed to a room divider that had a series of thin iron bars built adjacent to the doorway of the kitchen, and to an old iron radiator on a side wall. “So they are separated.”
The broken-nosed man cuffed both of Ursula’s wrists to the radiator, and the tall man chained me to the outside post of the room divider. My hands were in back of me, with each wrist cuffed and the connecting chain around the bar. I had to stand and Ursula was obliged to sit on the floor, her back against the radiator.
“All right, get it,” Richter ordered to the tall gunman.
The tall man disappeared into a small bedroom and returned a moment later with a home-made bomb. There was enough dynamite attached to it to blow up two houses the size of the one we were in. Richter glanced at me with a grin, took the bomb from the tall man’s hands, and set the device on a table in the center of the room, about halfway between Ursula and me.
“André is very good with these things,” Richter remarked as he set the clock that was the trigger for the bomb. “A bullet would be neater, of course, but this is so much more complete. It is highly unlikely that the authorities will be able to identify your bodies after the explosion and fire. I hope this example will be a warning to any who might come after you.”
“I expect it will make them think,” I said. I looked carefully at the bomb, which was set and ticking. Richter was right. There would be little left for examination if that thing went off.
“We will never give up until you are in the custody of the people whose name you blemished,” Ursula said in a tight voice.
Richter glanced at her. “I blemished?” he said acidly. “It is too bad you were not around when it was all going on, fräulein. The Third Reich did not depend on me alone to accomplish its goals. All of us were Nazis then. When we were defeated, a few weak ones turned on the rest and suddenly became anti-Nazi.”
“You’re a lying dog,” Ursula hissed.
“Now it is fashionable to befriend former enemies and run about with socialists and betray old ideals,” he continued slowly.
“And Nazis end up working with Communists,” I reminded him.
He turned hard eyes on me. “That is business, pure and simple. It is what a man has to do when he is hunted like a dog by those who turned on him.”
“Killing us will not save you, Herr Richter!” Ursula said loudly. “You will be apprehended, and you will pay for what you have done.”
He gave her a bitter grin. “You now have less than twenty minutes to convince yourself of that.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to his henchmen. “Disable the Lamborghini. We will take the Fiat down to the Dragoman Pass station at Crveni Krst. It should be safe to get aboard the train there.”
“Yes, Herr Blücher,” the tall man said. The two turned and went outside.
As the gunmen tampered with the Lamborghini outside, Richter turned once more to me. “You have temporarily aborted my deal with the Russians. But only temporarily. For that you will now pay with your lives.”
So he knew about Lubyanka.
“When I leave here, I will not only have all the time I want in Sofia to resume negotiations for the sale of the satellite monitor, but I will have the Bonn government off my neck for quite some time. You see, everything works out very well for me, as usual.” He walked to the door. Outside, the Fiat engine was started. “Auf wiedersehen. Or perhaps I should just say, goodbye?”
He turned and was gone. In a moment the Fiat pulled away, and the sound gradually diminished as they drove back to the main road.
Ursula and I looked at the ticking bomb simultaneously and then at each other. Ursula was biting her lower lip and shaking her head. “I should have killed Richter the moment I recognized him.”
“Cool it,” I said. “We have less than fifteen minutes left now. That doesn’t leave much time for deep thinking.”
“I can’t move,” Ursula said, rattling her handcuffs against the radiator.
“Try to relax,” I told her, calmly. “Your anxiety can be contagious, and I have to work something out here.”
The damned ticking of the bomb on the table was like our heartbeats ticking out their last. I tuned it out and twisted to look at the bars behind me. I pulled on the one I was attached to, and it bent and then sprung back. I frowned and scraped the chain of the handcuffs against the bar. It made a soft sound, not the sharp, grating one that metal makes. The bars were not metal after all, but wood painted to look like black iron. Then I remembered Hugo. They had not found Hugo, my stiletto.
Hope sprung into my chest and caused my gut to tighten even more. I moved my right arm, but nothing happened. I was greatly handicapped in my movements. I moved around facing Ursula and leaned away from the slim wooden bar.
“What are you doing, Nick?”
“Trying to save our lives,” I said curtly. I had no time for chatter.
I moved my arm again, and Hugo slipped down into my palm. I worked the knife into position so that my grip was firm on the handle. Twisting my wrist sharply, I managed to apply the sharp edge of Hugo’s blade to the wood of the bar just under my hands. I cut at the bar and felt the knife blade bite into the wood. The wood was hard, but Hugo was honed to a fine edge for cutting. I made small whittling motions with the blade and could feel a couple of chips fall away.
I glanced over at Ursula. “I’m trying to chop this damned bar down,” I explained. I could not see the face of the clock on the bomb. “How much time is there?”
“Just over ten minutes,” Ursula said, craning to see the face of the clock.
“Jesus,” I said, angry that so much time had elapsed.
I whittled away. I did not care to cut all the way through the bar. I just wanted to weaken it. There were a lot of chips on the floor. I stopped chopping and pulled hard on the bar. There was a tiny crackling noise, but the wood did not break. The cuffs had now cut deeply into my wrists. I whittled some more until I could finally feel a deep gash in the wood. I steeled myself for the pressure of the cuffs against my wrists and looked over at Ursula.
“Time,” I said.
“Six minutes.”
I braced my feet under me and pulled with all my strength. There was a loud cracking noise as the wooden bar splintered. I plunged headlong onto the floor and almost hit the table where the bomb was resting.
My hands were still cuffed behind me, but I struggled to my feet. I could feel blood on my wrists. I stood beside the table to get a look at the bomb. If I knew Richter, and I thought I was beginning to, he would have the bomb rigged so that any jarring of it such as picking it up would set it off ahead of time. I leaned down to check out the wiring and saw that I was right. I either had to disarm the bomb without moving it or get Ursula free somehow of the radiator.