Carter closed his eyes. He could use a nap himself.
Six
Dieter Klauswitz's hands beneath the black driving gloves were sweating slightly. That was understandable, and Klauswitz knew it wasn't fear. It was anticipation, the anticipation of properly executing a well-engineered plan with tremendous rewards at its end.
As Stephan Conway finished his speech, he stepped back from the podium. The sound of equal cheering and jeering from the crowd reached Klauswitz's ears, but he closed it out.
Now all of his attention was riveted to the top steps of the library. The three Germans, their wives on their arms, stood. In a line, vague smiles plastered on their faces, they moved forward toward Conway.
The woman in the red dress sat, immobile, as she had through all the speeches, including her husband's.
"Move, damn you, move!" Klauswitz hissed, seeing the frown on Conway's face.
At last the American stepped back, took his wife by one elbow, and tugged her forward with him. As the strains of the West German anthem filled the air, partially quieting the crowd, the tan suit and the red dress joined the line.
The F1 was a bolt-action rifle. The marksman slid the bolt back and then forward, jamming one of the deadly shells into the chamber. He disengaged the safety behind the trigger, and then caressed the trigger itself with his right index finger.
"Damn, damn, damn!" he hissed as the anthem went on and on and both of them remained closed off from his line of fire by others in the line.
Now the first thought of fear entered Klauswitz's mind.
What if they stayed like that through the American anthem? He would never get a clear shot. And then there would be milling around before moving down the steps to the limousines.
"Damn!"
The Star-Spangled Banner" built, and sweat popped out in beads on Klauswitz's forehead.
Then it happened. Conway took a step forward, his back ramrod straight, his big shoulders squared, his knuckles almost white where he gripped his wife's elbow.
She had no choice but to step forward as well.
Klauswitz inhaled, exhaled slowly, until nearly all breath was expelled and his entire body was relaxed.
Then he squeezed.
Horst Vintner was standing thirty feet in front of the podium and slightly to the side at the bottom of the steps. He made his body rigid as it reacted to the martial music.
But his eyes never stopped moving. They swept the steps and the people on them constantly.
It was Vintner who reacted first when he saw the red dress just above the woman's left breast explode.
The hand-held radio was at his lips and he was running up the steps as fast as his sixty-two-year-old legs would carry him.
"Seal off all the streets as far as two over from the Mehring! Stop all traffic from leaving the boulevard as well! The woman has been shot!"
Vintner saw everything at once as he plowed into Stephan Conway's gut.
The woman was already dead, her eyes still open, staring dumbly as she slipped to the steps.
His two men were running toward the center of the steps, and the others stood, staring and flatfooted. None of them had, as yet, realized what was happening.
Vintner and Conway hit the steps in a pile. They had barely stopped rolling when, less than a foot from Conway's shoulder, Vintner saw a long gouge appear in the concrete. He heard the ricochet, and saw a uniformed officer near the library door grab his right thigh.
Vintner covered Conway's body with his own. "Lie still! Don't move!"
"My wife…"
"Your wife is dead. He's still shooting!" Vintner rolled to his back, and heard Conway grunt from the weight.
Everything flashed through the veteran policeman's mind and across his eyes at the same instant.
The wide walk at the foot of the steps and the boulevard beyond were chaos. The two ends of the Mehring and the wider perimeter seemed calm other than massed traffic.
Everyone was doing his job.
Angle was from above… the woman wasn't lifted from her feet by the force of the slug… she was driven down and back… the second slug was also from above… nearly straight down into the concrete.
Vintner's eyes cased the roofs of the office buildings and high-rise apartment houses across the boulevard even as he barked this information into his radio.
"The roofs! Don't let anyone — man, boy, woman, or dog — out of the area!"
The replies came fast and furious.
"All building exits secured, sir!"
"Mehring secured!"
"Perimeter tight, sir!"
Vintner lowered the radio. "Bruchner!"
"Here, sir!"
The man was already crouching at Vintner's shoulder, his own body adding to the shield over Conway, his service revolver in his hand.
"There was a uniform hit, back by the door."
"Yes, sir, in the thigh. But he's dead."
"Good God, did it hit an artery?"
"No, sir, just a scrape on the side of the leg, but he's dead."
Vintner's experienced brain was already putting it together.
Flesh wound, but it killed.
Cyanide-tipped bullets.
A professional hit.
Dieter Klauswitz had barely seen the result of the second slug before the helmet was on his head and he was hurtling down the other side of the Insulaner.
He covered the distance to the swimming pool in seconds, and even though he had sprinted full tilt, he was breathing normally when he slowed to a walk.
He took the steps calmly to the street level, one at a time, and fired up the BMW. The traffic on that side of the Insulaner was not yet even aware of the chaos on the other side in front of the library.
He headed south on Tempelhofer Damm, past the old airport. Around him, going in both directions, were cyclists dressed exactly like himself. At the south end of Steglitz, he bore right.
In a huge arc that would take him nearly three quarters of the way around the city, he rode, using main arteries and side streets about equally.
Avoiding the east-west highway, he zigzagged through all side streets in smaller residential neighborhoods toward Zehlendorf. At the park, he struck north again toward Hallensee. Once there, he zipped onto the highway and ground the throttle open.
At eighty-five miles an hour it took him no time to reach the Muller Strasse cutoff and drop down into Wedding.
Wiebe Strasse was deserted except for one old man at its north end who didn't look up as Klauswitz idled past.
Inside the garage, with the door closed, he checked the time.
With the mobility of the motorcycle over a car, he had traveled practically three quarters of West Berlin's ring in fourteen minutes.
He stripped out of the leathers and threw them aside. The tie went on first, under the collar and knotted, then the jacket. He transferred the suitcase and briefcase to the front of the car, and two minutes after pulling into the garage on the BMW, he pulled out in the white Mercedes.
He turned north toward Tegel Airport, always moving away from the scene. As it had been with the BMW, there were white Mercedeses around him at almost every stoplight.
At the traffic circle in front of the airport, there was a roadblock.
He had expected it. He could have avoided it by using one of the smaller streets to go around Tegeler Lake, but instead he joined the line. There were only three cars in front of him.
"Guten Tag, mein Herr."
"Guten Tag. What's the trouble?"
"Just a check for insurance cards, mein Herr."
Deiter Klauswitz handed over the rental car papers. The officer scarcely glanced at them.