“Who are you?” the man who had grabbed her, Karl, asked. He was a near copy of the one with the gun, big and blond with shoulders like an executioner’s gallows. His partner was holding a long knife. In the fading light Anika saw crimson on the blade.
Her silence was from fright, not resistance. She knew that since she’d seen their faces, they would never let her live. The man with the knife had a container of salt in his free hand, and he poured a measure into the long gash in Schroeder’s thigh. The old soldier tried to fight the pain and failed. His scream echoed in Anika’s head. All the trauma experience in the world couldn’t inure her to this kind of human suffering. She prayed unconsciousness would spare him the agony.
“Who are you? Or do I dump the rest of this into his leg?”
“It doesn’t matter,” the man in the shadows said so quietly that Anika almost didn’t hear him. “Kill her.”
Karl had taken one step toward her when suddenly he flew back as if jerked on a string. Fragments of gore exploded from the side of his head. The sound of a shot came at the same instant. The man holding Anika pushed her away and wheeled toward where he thought the gunfire had originated. She fell heavily and tried to scramble under the bench, Schroeder’s blood smearing against her skin and clothes. Another shot rang out and a piece of stone above the bench exploded. The torturer who’d poured the salt into Schroeder’s leg had been at that spot a fraction of a second earlier. He had drawn his own weapon, a small machine pistol that had been under his dark jacket. He fired a long burst over the wall, the gun buzzing like a saw. Hot brass arced from the weapon in a tight necklace.
Anika pressed her hands to her ears as more shots rang out: high whipcracks of rifles, the deeper boom of handguns, and the staccato ratchet of the machine pistol. Chips of stone filled the air, carving visible streaks through the thickening gunpowder smoke. A fresh spray of blood landed on her, and she knew Schroeder had just been hit. Yet the former soldier hadn’t reacted. It was either a fatal shot or his body was now beyond pain. She peered into the smoky gloom and saw the leader of the torturers. He was backed against the house, a weapon in his hand. He spotted Anika and the pistol’s aim dropped to her position. Closing her eyes was a reflex.
She never heard the shot. A frantic burst of rifle fire covered all other sounds. She did feel the impact, a razor slash of fire that tore along her outer thigh. The fusillade pouring into the garden had distracted the leader and thrown off his aim. Crying out and clamping a hand over the long wound, she wriggled deeper under the bench. Her body was drenched in sweat. She was sobbing and didn’t care. A bullet ricocheted against a metal chair, and a burned ember of steel fell into the blood, sizzling obscenely as it cooled.
Out of the gloom, the torturer lurched toward her, his body spasming as the rifles found their mark. He took half a dozen hits before falling to his knees and then collapsing to the ground. His eyes were fixed in death. Anika noticed that his knife had fallen just out of her reach. She twisted to see if the leader was still there and saw two silhouettes running through the haze, racing toward the open farmhouse door. Bullets pounded into the building after them, sparking more shrapnel from the stone. An instant later, a car’s engine rumbled to life and the big Mercedes pulled from the house.
Just as quickly as the firefight had started, it was over. The echoes of gunfire faded even as Anika’s hearing returned.
She spat the taste of gunpowder from her mouth, not knowing if she should move from her hiding place. She wanted to lie there forever. Then she heard Schroeder moan above her and knew she had to tend to him. It was instinctive.
Okay, AK, move. Painfully, she rolled from under the bench, clutching at the oozing wound in her leg. Nothing happened when she raised her head, no gunfire, no shouts.
The bullet had caught Otto Schroeder in the lower chest. The blood bubbling from the neat hole appeared carbonated. A lung shot. Fatal if he didn’t get attention immediately. She looked into his face. Schroeder stared at her with the certainty of his own death.
“Help!” Anika shouted into the twilight, hoping to draw the attention of whoever had fired into the garden with rifles, the people who’d just saved her life. “Help us please!”
There was no response from beyond the garden walls. A minute might have passed — she didn’t know. Whoever had just saved her by killing two of Schroeder’s torturers and chasing off the others was not coming. Anika was on her own. Ignoring the throb radiating from the gash in her thigh, she turned to the old man. Schroeder’s breathing became more shallow, and less blood was coming from his injuries. Even if she called an ambulance right now, she doubted it would arrive before he died.
She knelt gingerly next to his head, taking one of his big farmer’s hands into hers. All she could offer was comfort.
“You’ll be okay, Mr. Schroeder.” Her sympathy felt flat. Both knew it was an empty platitude.
“I was told someone would come for me,” Schroeder breathed through bleeding lips. “But I beat them. They didn’t get what they wanted.”
“Who were they?” Despite everything that happened, Anika wanted to know.
“I don’t know. A call one week ago said people were coming to question me. It was a warning I ignored. Then I got two more calls, but nothing was ever said.” Anika thought that one of those calls must have been Opa Jacob. It was a favorite trick of his to make sure his quarry was around: just ring and hang up at hello. The other call could have been the torturers doing the exact same thing.
“But who are they?” She pressed, fearful that he would die before she understood what had just happened.
“My past.” Schroeder coughed up a clot of blood that Anika wiped away with her sleeve. “I was warned a week ago that it wouldn’t end with me. I thought I was the last to know.”
“Know what, Mr. Schroeder?”
“The truth.” Even with death rapidly approaching, he wouldn’t reveal why he had been tortured.
Inspiration struck her. “About the gold? They wanted to know about the gold, didn’t they?”
Pain had pulled his face in on itself, but he managed to open his eyes wide and stare at her. His voice quavered. “How do you know about that? Are you with the people who warned me?”
Anika ignored his questions. “The men who did this to you knew about the gold and wanted to know what happened to it. Is that right?”
“The gold is only a small part of it,” he dismissed and then fell silent. For a moment Anika thought he’d died, but then he squeezed her hand. “They wanted to know if I’ve told anyone about the rest of it.”
“Have you?”
“I always knew the secret was worth killing for.” He smiled a bloody smile. “I just never imagined I would have to die for it.”
“What secret?” Anika asked frantically. He wasn’t making sense. She had another minute or two before he was gone. “What secret, Mr. Schroeder?”
“Pandora’s Curse. I have prayed my entire life that the nightmare would end with me. But now I know it won’t. It’s going to continue.”
“What is Pandora’s Curse?”
Schroeder closed his eyes tightly, fighting death by force of will. “They told me there is a man who can help…”
“The people who warned you about these… torturers? They told you someone can help?” The old man nodded vaguely. “Who? Who can help?”
Schroeder’s chest rattled and he coughed another, larger mass of blood. “An American. Philip Mercer,” he wheezed, the words no more than a whisper. His grip on Anika’s hand relaxed. His arm fell off the bench and into the pool of their mingled blood. He was dead.