Extending a hand towards her face, Finn brushed the pad of his thumb against her lips. ‘You got a clot of dried blood in the corner of your mouth.’
‘Somewhere between the crash and the foot race, I must have bitten my lip,’ she said when Finn showed her the blood on his thumb. ‘I was scared as a ninny. Although I’m not exactly sure what a ninny is. I only know that when the Mercedes drove past the alley, I thought –’ Kate self-consciously broke off in mid-babble, unnerved by the intimacy of his touch.
Earlier, at the Pentagon, when he had unexpectedly hopped into her Toyota, Kate had been convinced that there wasn’t a hint of a spark between them. Now she wasn’t so sure. Granted, it’d been a long time since she’d been with a man, but she definitely felt something when Finn touched her lip.
‘Make sure you disinfect that cut with some rubbing alcohol.’
‘Yes, I … I will.’ She unzipped her handbag and rummaged for her keys. ‘That’s strange. I can’t seem to find my –’ She glanced up, surprised to see her key ring dangling from Finn’s middle finger.
‘I lifted them from your bag when we first arrived at the embassy.’
The confession, uttered without a trace of recrimination, stunned her. From the onset, he’d been using her.
‘You mean that you stole them from me.’ She snatched the key ring off his finger. Sexual spark be damned. ‘Goodnight, Sergeant.’
‘See you around, Kate.’
She gave him a tight parting smile before ascending the front steps. About to insert the key in the door lock, Kate belatedly realized that she still had Finn’s suit jacket draped around her shoulders.
So much for a graceful exit.
‘Finn! Wait!’ She dashed down the steps, hurrying to catch up with him. ‘I forgot to give you –’
A blinding flash of light accompanied by a sonic boom! was the only warning Kate had before being violently hurled several feet into the air, lifted off her feet by a powerful explosion.
In a peripheral blur, she glimpsed a huge fireball shoot heavenward, emanating from her house. The destructive force of the blast thrust a length of wrought iron over the towpath and pelted the canal with brick chunks and shards of glass. And heaved wooden trim at nearby trees.
Who? Why? My God, how?
Kate gasped. It took her breath away. No – breath knocked out of her. She’d seen it. Heard it. And painfully felt it. But still couldn’t believe it. A gas main blew. Or perhaps an unventilated propane tank exploded. Something plausible, albeit shocking, just occurred. It couldn’t have been something so improbable, so horrific, as a detonated bomb. But even as she tried to rationalize what had happened, coloured lights began to swirl nightmarishly and fuse in front of her eyes, only to expand into a dark void.
In that instant, she lost all sense of gravity. Suddenly weightless.
Oh, no … I think I’m dead.
13
Sixth Arrondissement, Paris, France
Ivo Uhlemann gleefully took his opponent’s queen.
The field his, the battle won, he logged off the computer. Pushing the gilded Louis XV salon chair away from the desk, he rose to his feet. The sudden motion cost him, a bolt of pain bursting free and radiating to the back of his spine. Shuddering, Ivo placed a stabilizing hand on top of the desk, fighting the urge to gasp, well aware that a large intake of air would only intensify the agony.
Long moments passed, the pain finally ebbing to a tolerable level.
Ivo glanced at his right hand, palm still pressed against the smooth inlaid cherry desktop. Noticing the raised blue veins and splotchy, tissue-paper-like skin, he frowned. If only the body kept pace with the mind. Yet another battle he had to wage.
Chaos, destruction and death, the sum of each man’s journey through life. Ivo first experienced the brutal trinity at a tender age. Even now, all these years later, he could still vividly recall that night in 1943 when British RAF pilots rained deadly bombs on Berlin’s sleeping neighbourhoods. An act of callous savagery, thousands were immolated alive, with Ivo’s own grandparents among the victims. But to the Allies utter disbelief, Berliners rose up from the ashes, Phoenix-like, the firebird heroically transformed into a Reichsadler, the proud eagle of the Reich.
Seized with patriotic fervour, his own spirit burnished in the flames, Ivo straight away joined the Hitler-Jugend. Eleven years and three days of age, he proudly wore the black shorts, long-sleeved brown shirt and peaked cap. And though he couldn’t fully grasp the meaning of the slogan ‘Blood and Honour’, he nonetheless shouted it with great ferocity at war rallies. Assigned to an anti-aircraft crew, he was trained to use a flak gun. Bursting with pride, his mother Berthe showered him with adoring kisses. His father, stationed at the SS Headquarters in Wewelsburg, sent letters commending Ivo for his unparalleled bravery.
That bravery was put to a gruelling test seventeen months later when Ivo was issued a steel helmet, a Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon and a bolt-action rifle with one hundred rounds of ammunition. Marching in perfect unison, heel to toe as they’d been trained, Ivo and his regiment of Hitler-Jugend were ordered to take up a position on the Pichelsdorf Bridge. Part of the last German defence, the ‘boy brigade’ was to halt the Russian advance and prevent the enemy from entering Berlin.
For two gore-filled days, they held their ground. Of the five thousand boys sent to the bridge, only five hundred remained standing at the end of those horrific forty-eight hours. Just as the jubilant Red horde stormed across the bridge, Ivo was severely wounded in a mortar blast.
When he finally regained consciousness in an American field hospital, the Führer was dead, Germany a conquered nation. Bandaged from head to foot, immobilized in a traction device, Ivo was filled with shame.
If I’d only fought harder. Fired more bullets. Killed more Russians.
Six months would pass before he was discharged from the military hospital with a wooden cane, a Hershey’s chocolate bar and a silver Reichspfennig coin. Oskar Baader, a grey-haired, bespectacled man who’d been his father’s colleague in the physics department at Göttingen University, met him at the hospital gate. On the train ride to Göttingen, the professor informed Ivo that his mother had been killed during the Russian attack on Berlin and that his father, who’d risen within the SS to the rank of Oberführer, was a wanted fugitive. The shock more than he could bear, Ivo burst into tears.
As the months passed, Ivo settled into his new life in Göttingen with the elderly Baader couple, marching drills and combat practice replaced with violin lessons and science tutorials. Eventually the sorrow faded. In its stead was a wide-eyed curiosity as encoded letters from his father – postmarked from such far-flung places as Lisbon, Genoa and Cairo – began to arrive at the flat.
With each encoded letter, more and more of an incredible tale began to unfold. According to the missives, his father had been assigned to a highly-classified research project under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe. The project, which involved an ancient relic known as the Lapis Exillis, had been sanctioned by the Führer himself. Even more amazing, although the war had ended and the surviving members of the Ahnenerbe were either on the run or facing a military tribunal in Nuremberg, Friedrich Uhlemann still actively sought the relic. His father claimed that this relic contained unique properties that could be used to harness a heretofore untapped energy.