“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.
Anika wasn’t surprised to feel tears on her cheeks. Somehow this old soldier had kept a horrible secret, and at the end of his life, his silence had killed him. She slumped next to the body. The smoke had cleared, and the full horror of what had just happened was splashed against the garden walls and leached into the dirt between the flagstones.
With an effort, she firmed her jaw and forced herself to separate herself from what had just taken place. Anika had to think like a doctor and not a victim.
Okay, AK, get to work. There were three dead from multiple gunshot wounds and one injured. Her wounded leg was the first priority. The pain was something she could work through, but she would need stitches to close the gash. That meant a hospital. She knew that calling an ambulance would put her in the middle of a police investigation and that was out of the question. Once she explained her presence here, it was only a matter of time before Schroeder’s torturers learned her identity, and judging by their savagery, she would be killed long before they were apprehended. The nurse with the apartment next to hers could suture the wound, and Anika herself could get the drugs she needed for infection and pain if necessary.
Using the rough stone wall as a crutch to gain her feet, Anika swayed until her head cleared. It wasn’t blood loss accounting for the dizziness, she thought. It was the shock of Schroeder’s death and the others. She had to get out of here. Pausing at the gate, she considered the possibility of driving all the way home and knew she wouldn’t make it. Once she reached Ismaning, she would call her neighbor to come get her. She had to get her car away from the scene and knew that was something she could handle.
Anika was panting by the time she got to her car. She grabbed a towel from the backseat and tied a rough bandage around the foot-long slash with the strap from her backpack. The last of the water was like a flash flood on a dry desert when it reached her throat, cooling and nourishing and desperately needed. She used another towel to wipe the worst of the blood from her face, arms, and legs. In the rear-view mirror, her eyes shone with equal measures of fear and resolve.
Anika took one last look at the house, a single lamp in a front room casting a feeble glow into the night. She was certain her being here at the same time as the torturers wasn’t a coincidence. She dialed her opa’s number but cut the connection when she heard his gruff “Hello.” Anika sagged. He was all right. She’d feared that the gunmen had learned about Schroeder through Jacob Eisenstadt, using the same techniques they’d employed against the former soldier.
If the information hadn’t come from Opa, it had come from another source. When she was up to it, she’d talk to him about it. But not tonight. And that was only one of the mysteries that needed to be solved — that she needed to solve. Who had tipped off Schroeder’s killers? Who had saved her life by chasing them away? She felt they had to be the same people who warned Schroeder a week ago but she didn’t know how they knew to be here tonight. Who was this person he mentioned? Mercer? And how could he help? Finally and possibly most tantalizing, what was Pandora’s Curse?
She put her car into gear and pulled away, needing all of her concentration to keep the vehicle on the narrow road. One other question worked into the back of her mind. What could possibly be so valuable that Schroeder had dismissed an enormous shipment of gold as only “a small part of it”?
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Because his overnight stay in Manhattan wasn’t really planned, the airline had held Mercer’s luggage from Pennsylvania for him at Reagan National. He presented his identification and baggage claim checks when he deplaned from the New York flight, and a skycap retrieved his bags from storage. He had little trouble finding a cab to take him home. The flight to Washington had lasted an hour and it felt good to sit again. His legs were sore from hours of wandering the Natural History Museum.
It was nearing ten o’clock at night and traffic was light as the taxi threaded around Arlington Cemetery and hooked up with I-66. He’d lived in Arlington for a little over seven years, and the amount of growth near his neighborhood was astonishing. It was only a matter of time before the ten blocks of row houses around his brownstone were replaced with high-rises and strip malls.
From the outside, his building was similar to all the others on the quiet street. It stood three stories tall and was faced with ruddy stone that was corbeled over the windows and the front door. The entry steps were cement flanked by wrought iron railings.
Under the streetlights, he recognized two of the cars parked behind his black Jaguar. The battered Plymouth Fury belonged to Paul Gordon, a retired jockey and the owner of a neighborhood bar called Tiny’s, and the Ford Taurus was Mike O’Reilly’s, one of Tiny’s regulars. Mercer left his bags on the sidewalk and fished his car keys from his pocket, chirping open the locks as he approached the sleek English convertible. He peered in to check the odometer. The last three numbers were 823, exactly as they should be, and the tenth’s wheel was between the six and seven.
“I’ll be damned,” Mercer said aloud. He was certain Harry White would have taken the car for a spin while he was in Pennsylvania, which is why he’d memorized the mileage before leaving.