The supersonic test plane that had taken Smith on as a passenger by direct order of the President of the United States screamed at 60,000 feet toward the Key West Naval Station.
He folded the printout. He didn't need to see file #36121055. He had written it.
Molokai, 1962. It was one of his last assignments for the CIA, and he had failed then, as he had failed in Buenos Aires in '55. Lustbaden had eluded him all his professional career.
But Zoran Lustbaden had had help. SPIDER, the network of Nazi officers organized just before the end of the war to aid their members in escaping justice for their crimes, had everything: money siphoned from the Third Reich's remaining funds after Hitler's death, escape routes through Europe and South America and the little-known, practically unexplorable islands of the Pacific, and bodies— young, secret recruits from all over the western world who had been brainwashed into believing Hitler's ideal of Aryan supremacy. These young men willingly left their homes, jobs, and families to serve SPIDER's exiled leaders as bodyguards, drivers, servants, consultants, and, when necesary, soldiers.
SPIDER's chain was unbreakable. For thirty-six years it had protected Josef Mengele himself, the white-gloved "Angel of Death" whose experiments with children at Auschwitz had caused the world to wail in horror and grief. And Mengele's face was well known, photographed often and reprinted in publications from Berlin to Shanghai.
Zoran Lustbaden, Mengele's assistant, was less visible. Or perhaps just smarter. Conspicuous in the Nazi ranks for his modesty among a group of officers famous the world over for their arrogance, Lustbaden always declined to be photographed, even on state occasions. Likewise, his name was rarely mentioned in Mengele's numerous reports to Hitler and Goebbels. He had no wife and no children to write to, no one Smith could use as leverage against him. Lustbaden was the perfect SPIDER protégé: No ties, no records, no one to remember him.
No one but the few concentration camp survivors who still carried scars from the wounds Zoran Lustbaden had inflicted.
Smith opened his briefcase, placed the computer printout inside, and extracted a yellowed print of a photograph taken nearly fifty years before. It was a blowup of one face in a group portrait of the 1932 graduating class of the Heidelberg University Medical School.
The face was that of a boy. The young genius Lustbaden had been only twenty when it was taken. He had stood, with typical self-effacement, at the far edge of the group, his face darkened by shadows and turned slightly inward toward the rest of the class, so that he was in three-quarter profile.
Still, it was a face Smith had stamped indelibly into his brain: the pale, cold eyes, eerily translucent in the grainy black and white photograph, the stooping shoulders, the stocky body already going to fat, the sly half-curve of the mouth. A man who smiled without his eyes.
The Prince of Hell.
That was how Lustbaden was known at Auschwitz, where his victims, convulsing from his injections into the glands in their throats, watched the cold eyes and the half-moon smile as they listened, in the spaces between their own screams, to his soothing lies.
Smith closed his eyes. They burned from fatigue. Except for a few scattered moments on the sofa in his office, he had not slept in two days. CURE was becoming so big, so complex. The small secret organization that had been formed to deter crime had become a massive responsibility. Even with a human weapon like Remo at his disposal, Smith needed the skill of a magician, the patience of a monk, and a brain as tireless as the computers at Folcroft to get through each day. There was simply too much crime, and Smith was feeling his age. Tasks that had once seemed effortless were becoming monumentally difficult, and his reflexes were slowing.
He had possessed enviable reflexes once. Not like Remo's, of course, but as good as those of any man in the OSS, which had its share of good men. In the blurry red images of nearsleep, Smith saw himself running, running through the gutted, Nazi-infested streets of Warsaw in January of 1943, with the twang of bullets at his back and the acrid smell of spent gunfire all around him. His cover had been blown sky high in the middle of a delicate maneuver with a group of Polish Resistance fighters.
One of them had been working for the Nazis all along. By the time Smith found out about it, every member of the tough little group had been killed, and the SS was closing in on him fast.
It had been pure chance that had brought him to the dead-end alley strewn with the clotheslines and garbage of the poor. A wall stood— inexplicably, he remembered thinking— at the far end of the alley. The gunshots at its open end were too close for escape. There was nowhere to go.
Above him, a wiry, small man in black trousers and a ragged overcoat, with a face like so many Poles in those days— thin, creased, bearing a permanent expression of crushing anxiety— sat smoking on the fire escape of a crumbling brick building. Without a word, Smith had held his hand up to him. The man saw the gesture, stood up, and walked into the building.
It was Smith's last, desperate card, and he had drawn a joker. There was nothing left to do but wait for the Luger that would fire the first shot at him. And hope that first shot killed him.
Then, out of the sky, a rope fell within inches of him. The man on the fire escape, his handrolled cigarette dangling from his mouth, was tying his end around his waist. When he was done, he clasped the rope with his powerful, slender hands and nodded to Smith.
The man moved with the calm swiftness of one who'd grown accustomed to the necessities of war. He helped Smith over the landing and pushed him into the building while he yanked up the rope with ease.
Inside the shabby apartment, a woman and three children, a teenage girl and twin boys around six years of age, accepted him without question, even though he was not in uniform and had not spoken a word. The woman wrapped a blanket around him. Till then, Smith hadn't even realized he was cold.
Once safe in the shadows of the dark apartment, however, he allowed himself to shiver. The woman adjusted the threadbare blanket around him more tightly and gave him a motherly smile at the end of her ministrations. Like her husband, she was thin, but Smith could see from the excess skin around her face and neck that thinness was not her proper state. In better times she would have been one of those women who complain good-naturedly about needing to go on a diet while serving platters heaped with piroghi and halupki.
The girl, a breathtaking beauty even at her young age, with blonde hair and enormous seagreen eyes, brought him soup. Smith refused it, guessing it was all they had, but the mother insisted. He drank it gratefully and, afterward, slept.
He awoke in a cold sweat, uncertain for the moment where he was, confused by the darkness of the tiny apartment. He must have cried out in his sleep because, as soon as his panic subsided, he noticed the man's arm on his.
"Whoever you are, you are safe," the man said in Polish.
"Why did you help me?" Smith asked.
"Because the Nazis were after you."
"Is that why you used a rope?"
The man nodded. "I do not trust the neighbors on the ground floor."
"Do you belong to the Resistance?" Smith asked.
The man looked Smith squarely in the eye. "We are Jews," he said.