Mahoney eased the Jeep a foot closer to the road, anxious for the trucks to pass.
“Sergeant,” a familiar voice shouted from somewhere behind them. “Stop right now! Do not go any further.”
Recognizing the syrupy drawl, Judge spun to find Darren Honey some fifty yards away, jogging toward the Jeep. Mahoney patted him on the leg. “Nur ein moment.” Just a second.
But Judge didn’t have a second. The recollection of von Luck’s stiff corpse left no doubt about Honey’s intentions. Balling his fingers into a tight fist, he hit Mahoney in the jaw with a piston-like jab, then shouldered him out of the Jeep. The engine sputtered as the Jeep lost its gear. Judge slid behind the wheel before it stalled altogether, finding first gear and gunning the vehicle between the last two trucks. Ingrid yelled in time to the blaring horn, but by then they were over the grass berm and into the forest.
“What are you doing?” Ingrid shouted.
Judge couldn’t waste time explaining his actions. “You know your way through here?”
“Maybe, I’m not sure,” she answered, flustered.
“I need a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Now!”
“Yes,” she stammered.
“Then get us into the city. I don’t care where. We’ve got to disappear.”
Ingrid pulled herself into the front seat. Leaning forward against the dash, she extended an arm toward manicured walkways that lay in the headlights’ crescent. “Follow these paths. They’ll lead us out of the forest.”
“How far?”
“Five minutes. Maybe ten.”
Judge shifted his vision between the grassy landscape in front and the darkness that pursued. Just then, the first headlights appeared behind them and he knew they didn’t have that long.
Chapter 45
A half mile from the American command post, they had disappeared into a dense forest with a canopy so thick as to block out every sign of the sparkling night sky and the late rising moon. It was the forest his mother had described sitting on his bedside reading the Brothers Grimm. A deep, dark, living thing, scented of pine and oak, and teeming with hobgoblins and fairies and, yes, even werewolves though they looked more like the half-starved DPs crowding every road in Germany than any fanciful creature. It was the forest where Hansel and Gretel had gotten lost, but instead of a gingerbread house, there was a ruined flak tower, a crippled ten-storey superstructure where Hitler had positioned his anti-aircraft batteries to discourage the marauding hoards from raining destruction upon the capital of his thousand year Reich. It was the forest where Tristan wed Isolde, but all traces of its magical incarnations had disappeared, probably hauled off by the Russians, along with everything else.
The pair of headlights had expanded to a second, then a third, and Judge felt as if the entire army were after them. Two minutes into his fool’s run, his head start had been whittled down to three hundred yards and with every passing second was growing shorter. Rounding a sharp corner, he shot a glance over his shoulder. A bank of begonias momentarily blocked his view of the pursuing Jeeps. Spotting his chance, he steered the Jeep away from the security of the gravel walk and doused the headlamps. He was driving among the trees now, weaving in and out like a skier negotiating a slalom course, sure to keep a ninety degree heading away from the walkway. Beneath branches sagging with a summer’s bounty of nuts and cones, the ground was feathered with a crop of knee-high grass, and with every unseen rut and gully, he grunted, all the while accelerating madly. Abruptly, he cut the engine and coasted to a halt a hundred yards on.
Ingrid raised herself in the seat, staring into the dark wood. “Who are they?”
“Shh,” Judge cautioned, ear tuned to the highly revving engines. Their insistent whine grew, and suddenly he could make out the trace of their headlights. Wheels skidding on the clay and gravel, the Jeeps rounded the begonias. He held his breath, expecting the lights to bob as they, too, left the path, and a moment later to be illuminated in their beams. But the Jeeps roared on, advancing on a phantom prey.
“Who are they?” Ingrid demanded.
Judge answered as he restarted the engine, irritated by her obstinacy. “The same folks who arranged for the detour in Heidelberg. The fellas who want us to think Erich Seyss is dead. Is that good enough?”
Ingrid tucked in her chin, taken aback by his sharp response. “I suppose it has to be.”
Judge pushed the Jeep pell-mell through the trees, the howling engine a pitch-perfect echo of his own anxieties. Every few seconds, he turned his head to scout the encroaching dark. He saw nothing, but still his neck bristled. Overnight, he’d become the hunted, not the hunter, and the new role fit him as poorly as the lice-ridden clothing he’d picked up that morning. But there was more. At some point during the last twenty-four hours, he’d crossed over an interior meridian into unknown waters. He’d abandoned the rigid structure of his previous life, renounced his worship of authority, and forsworn his devotion to rules and regulation. He’d tossed Hoyle to the wind and he didn’t care. Yet it was this very betrayal of his past that confirmed his most closely held beliefs. That the rules man made were subordinate to those made for him. And when it came to choosing, a man had to use his heart not his head.
Fine summation, counselor, he added, mockingly.Tell me one thing, then. If you’re so damned sure of yourself why are you shaking in your boots?
Five minutes later, the curtain of forest parted and they came to a large clearing. A café was visible to their right, and next to it, a large man-made pond, the kind where he would have launched a sailboat with Ryan. Judge swung toward the squat building, dodging a line of birch trees, as Ingrid read the sign above the entry.
“Rumplemeyer’s,” she announced. “If we follow the path leading to the café, it’s only a few hundred meters to Zehlendorf.”
“You mean the city?”
“Yes, a residential quarter in the southwest corner of town.”
“We need a place to stay, somewhere reasonably safe. We can’t risk sleeping outside again tonight. It’s your city. Got any ideas?”
“Just our house in town and some of Papa’s friends.”
“Not good enough.” The presence of Honey in Berlin made it impossible for he and Ingrid to seek refuge in any of her old haunts. If Honey was working with Patton and Patton was close to Egon Bach, then Judge had to consider all those addresses blown. “Isn’t there someplace only you know about? At one of your old girlfriends maybe? A boyfriend, even?”
“There is a place I know,” Ingrid said haltingly, “an apartment not far from the university where I lived while a student there.”
He could read what was coming next. “But Seyss knows about it?”
“He was the reason I took it. It was our hideaway.”
“That was six years ago,” Judge said sternly. “Don’t you think they’ve found a new tenant by now?”
It was her turn to offer a rebuke. “No, Major, you don’t understand. I didn’t rent the place. I bought it.”
“And Egon? Does he know about it, too?”
“No,” Ingrid replied adamantly. “It was our secret. Erich’s and mine.”
Judge mulled over their options. Even if Seyss was in Berlin, the odds were against him hiding out at his and Ingrid’s old love nest. The UN war crimes dossier stated he’d been stationed at Lichterfelde Kaserne before the war. If Egon hadn’t already fixed him up with a place, he’d have a dozen of his own in mind. While Judge desperately wanted to find Seyss, the idea of getting the drop on him in the middle of the night without a weapon wasn’t what he’d exactly had in mind. Still, it might be an unexpected opportunity. Catch Seyss on the sly. Have him wrapped up and in custody by morning. To his realist’s eye, it sounded too pat. Either way, they didn’t have much choice.