Freedom Bridge: A Cold War Thriller (22 page)

“Drive to the furthest and darkest part of the tarmac and stop when I tell you,” Kiril told Rogov. “Aleksei, I want you to unholster your revolver—slowly—and hand it to Mrs. Brenner butt first.”

To underscore his orders, Kiril lightly scratched Luka’s neck with the letter opener. A tiny droplet of blood dribbled out.

“Kurt, please tell our brother Aleksei whether Rogov is bleeding and whether the cut is serious.”

“Yes about the blood, no about the serious,” Brenner said—and on his own added, “Not yet.”

Adrienne held Aleksei’s revolver by the butt, resting it in her lap.

“Mrs. Brenner,” Kiril said, “do you know what the hammer on a revolver is—the piece just above your thumb?”

Adrienne almost smiled. “I’ve seen enough movies. You want me to pull the hammer back?”

“Yes. Then put the end of the gun’s barrel into Aleksei’s side. If he so much as burps, I want you to pull the trigger. Can you do that?”

Her answer came slowly. “The hammer, yes. I’ve just done it. The rest? Maybe. I’m not sure.”

Half a loaf. Well, Aleksei can’t be sure either.

“Sit on your hands, Aleksei,” Kiril said.

Aleksei did as he was told.

By now Rogov had driven at least two miles deep into the airport. The tarmac was enveloped in darkness, the car’s headlights providing the only light. Before them were dense stands of trees. To the left there appeared to be a dirt trail, maybe an old logging road.

“Aleksei, tell Rogov to stop slowly, turn off his bright lights, and turn on the parking lights.”

Both men complied.

Kiril slowly moved his free right hand to Adrienne’s, took Aleksei’s revolver from her, and put it at the back of Luka’s head while replacing the letter opener in his belt.

“Kurt,” Kiril said, “Rogov’s revolver is holstered on his right side, next to you. See it? I want you to open the holster, remove the weapon, pull back the hammer, and step out of the car. Then go around to the door behind you, open it, and press the barrel against our KGB brother’s head. Can you do that?”

“With pleasure,” Brenner responded with undisguised enthusiasm.

“Kurt, step back so Aleksei has room to get out of the car. He will walk about ten feet—backwards. As you walk backwards
behind
him, aim at the lumbar spine. If he makes any sudden moves, put two bullets in his spine.”

“My pleasure,” Brenner said—and had to admit that the mere thought of crippling the sonofabitch was delicious.

“Mrs. Brenner,” Kiril said, “get out of the car through the r
ight
door and step about ten feet away.”

She did.

Kiril spoke to Luka Rogov in Russian. “I am about to get out of the car. The gun in my hand will be aimed at your head. If you make any move I don’t like, I will blow your head off and then do the same to Colonel Andreyev. Nod if you understand.”

Rogov, his bushy eyebrows creased in a frown, nodded.

“I’m not finished, Luka. Once you’re out of the car, you will walk backwards until I tell you to stop.”

Rogov nodded again, left the car, and started walking backwards.

“Now stop and turn around,” Kiril told him.

“No, don’t. Don’t kill him! He can’t harm you now!” Aleksei cried out.

“Listen to me, Rogov,” Kiril said, ignoring Aleksei’s anguished plea. “I want you to remove your tie, your belt, the straps that hold your equipment, the shoelaces from your boots—all of it. You too, Aleksei.”

As soon as they were done, Kiril asked Adrienne to collect whatever items would effectively bind their hands and feet.

Walking Luka to roughly ten feet from where Brenner guarded Aleksei, Kiril told both men to drop their trousers.

Luka just stared at him, not comprehending.

Not so Aleksei. Realizing they weren’t about to die after all, he made a crude joke.

“Explain what I want—what Rogov must do next—and why, Aleksei.”

He did, and they did.

Kurt Brenner was amazed that such a simple expedient virtually froze the two Russians in place. Unable to walk, let alone run, all they could do was hop like kangaroos!

Kiril signaled Adrienne to bring him what she’d sorted. There were more than enough sturdy items to secure both Aleksei and Luka Rogov.

Kiril tied up Rogov, Brenner doing the same with Aleksei.

“What now?” Brenner asked cheerfully.

“My original plan, of course,” Kiril replied, making no effort to lower his voice. “We’ll hijack the executive jet and fly to Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin.”

Kiril had no such intention—but no way yet to let the Brenners know what he really planned to do.

With a touch of alarm, he realized that he was slipping into a state of deep fatigue, every last ounce of adrenalin draining out of him . . .

So much had happened without respite. Knocking Brenner out and taking his place. Fear that Adrienne Brenner would realize who he was. His exhilaration when the plane landed him in Zurich. The painful discovery that his long-sought freedom was illusory. The stunning realization that he’d found his mother but simultaneously caused her unbearable pain. The bleak resolve to go back for his brother. The disgust he’d felt when he learned what Aleksei had been holding over Kurt Brenner’s head. The desperate hope, as he and Adrienne returned to East Berlin, that he could come up with a workable escape plan.

“Before you truss me up like some pig,” Aleksei said, “why don’t we brothers share a last cigarette. After all, before long one of us will be dead. You, if we catch your merry threesome. Me, if we don’t.”

Kiril took a crushed pack of cheap Russian cigarettes out of his pocket, offered one to Aleksei, and without thinking used his lighter. When it failed to spark he tried again—and only then noticed Aleksei staring at the lighter, his expression half-shock, half-knowing.

“So
you
were the source of the microfilm,” he said. “It was
you
who gave it to Stepan Brodsky.
You
who was his backup. And inches from my face is the last surviving copy of the microfilm that would prove you are guilty of treason, you—”

Kiril shrugged. “Now there really are no more secrets between us.”

“Let’s finish up here,” he told Brenner.

As soon as Aleksei and Rogov were tied and gagged, Kiril took Brenner and Adrienne thirty feet away. “My original idea was to hijack the executive jet once Aleksei got us on board. It would have been hard but it might have worked. Without Aleksei, it’s impossible.”

“What
can
we do?” Brenner asked.

“We have at least four hours lead time, maybe more, before someone finds them or before they manage to free themselves and get to a telephone or a radio.”

“Then let’s end it here and now.”

“What’s the matter with you, Kurt?” Adrienne snapped. “We should stand by while you blow their brains out?”

“Don’t worry about Aleksei’s plane,” Kiril said in an effort to defuse the tension. “In the meantime, we’ll figure out a way to get to Potsdam.”

“You have friends in Potsdam?” Brenner asked.

“I think so.”

Kiril was remembering a handshake. A look of profound gratitude in a man’s eyes. Letters carved in dirt by a miniature scalpel.

Adrienne smiled. She was remembering it too.

And thanks to a strong retentive memory, Kiril thought he could recall an address . . .

“For now,” Kiril told them, we have to hide out until it gets dark tomorrow night.”

“Why”? Brenner pressed.

“Because Aleksei will be looking for this automobile.”

Chapter 45

T
hey made good time. It was almost dawn when they arrived at the outskirts of Potsdam in the powerful ZIN-110.

Knowing they had to get off the road soon before Aleksei sounded a quiet alarm, Kiril had pushed the automobile so hard it overheated twice and their petrol was almost gone.

He pointed out other factors in their favor. Aleksei would have to concoct some story about why he was looking for them—something that would take him off the hook for losing them in the first place. Which meant a large-scale search—lots of people in lots of places—was unlikely.

As the sun rose, they spotted a farmhouse deep off the road. “We have to chance it,” Kiril told them.

He drove down the road and parked behind a barn. The farmhouse was two stories of gray fieldstone with the top floor boarded up. The place looked abandoned. No farm animals. No outbuildings apart from the barn and a dilapidated shed.

But a plot of rich black soil in the back was plowed. Kiril smiled.

“We’re in luck,” he whispered as he moved to a window and looked inside. “A man and a woman. Retired farmers, probably. Too old to be put into a collectivization program.”

He took out his handkerchief. “Put your dollars and jewelry in this.”

“All of it?” Brenner asked. “Shouldn’t we save something for your pals in Potsdam?”

“If they help us it won’t be for money.”

Brenner looked skeptical but he emptied his pockets.

Adrienne unwrapped her scarf and handed Kiril a wad of greenbacks and a handful of jewelry.

Her gold-and-diamond wedding band included, Brenner noticed.

“Do we all go in?” he asked.

Kiril shook his head. “I’ll come back for you.”

In a few minutes he returned with food, water, and no jewelry.

“They were farmers. Owned a lot of land here. After the war, the East Germans seized most of it while the Russians took off with whatever animals and equipment they had left. ‘Reparations’ they called it,” Kiril said with disgust. “They’ve managed to eke out a living by cultivating the small plot in back and husbanding a few animals. We’re to hide the car in their barn. We’re leaving it for them, along with our money and jewelry. Their hope is to bribe their way out of East Germany. As soon as it’s dark, we’ll walk up to the house so they can help us get out of here safely.”

“Can we trust them?” Brenner asked.

“Maybe. Maybe not. But I can tell you this much. They detest communists.”

As soon as the three of them settled down in the barn, fatigue began to overtake Kiril. He started to doze on the hay-covered floor.

Adrienne shivered. The draft from under the barn door made her long for the cape she’d left behind in East Berlin.

“Cold?” Brenner whispered.

Without waiting for an answer, he covered her body with his.

“Kurt, don’t.”

“He’s asleep.”

“How do you know?”

“Listen to his breathing. Then listen to mine . . .”

“What if he wakes up?”

“What if we’re all dead tomorrow or the day after? I want you, Adrienne.”

But I don’t want you. Not now. Not ever again
.

“Damn it, Kurt,” she hissed, trying to edge him off her body without making noise.

“You’re my wife. Ever heard of conjugal rights?”

As he bent to kiss her, she turned her head abruptly in the opposite direction—and saw that Kiril Andreyev was no longer lying flat on the floor of the barn. Were his eyes open?

. . . Did it matter even if they were? She knew Kiril wouldn’t feel free to intervene. Not when he had yet to call her “Adrienne” instead of “Mrs. Brenner.”

She struggled to free herself.

But her resistance had become a challenge. The more she fought each wordless demand on her flesh, the more she was convinced that Kiril’s eyes were wide open.

She jammed hers shut and concentrated on her first glimpse of him at an airport terminal. The look on his face as he crossed a banquet room to meet her. She pictured the morning his shadow had fallen across her body and blotted out the sun. His tortured expression as he kissed her passionately in the privacy of an airport lounge in Zurich—

Despite the hay, the floor was cold against her back, the night air colder. Neither were cold enough to bank the liquid heat that rushed into her limbs.

Oh no
, she thought, realizing too late that the images of Kiril had betrayed her senses. Wanting
him
, not the man who was forcibly entering her body. Her fingers dug into the hay, her body arching, pushing past her protesting mind, greedily reaching for the unreachable and, with a shudder, finding it.

Afterward she lay on the cold ground, eyes open to the sky.

Kiril
, she whispered, but only in her mind.

She wept as silently as she had fought.

* * *

It was dawn when the farmer rapped his knuckles on the barn door.

“You can change clothes in the house while I’m getting the bicycles,” he told them.

The room they entered was all wood—floor, ceiling, walls, furniture. But no firewood to spare, Adrienne realized. The stone fireplace was pristine. The place smelled of raw potatoes. An old woman, indifferent to their presence, was slicing the potatoes at a pitted sink. Adrienne turned her back and slipped into the clothes Kiril handed her. The hem of the long dress—a faded yellow—stopped just below her knees, the fabric straining under her arms and over her breasts. “I have my own scarf,” she told Kiril, turning around—then smiled mirthlessly even as Kiril shook his head.

A designer scarf from Bloomingdale’s? Yes indeed, Adrienne.

S
he folded a square of rough yellow cotton and tied it, babushka-style, on her head.

“Good fit, even if they’re slightly threadbare,” Brenner remarked as he examined the trousers he’d just pulled on.

Kiril wore a similar pair—coarse serge, wide and gathered at the waist.

Both he and Brenner put on formless grey caps.

“Ready?” he asked, holding the back door open.

A tall dignified man with thick steel-gray hair waited outside. He looked more like a businessman than a farmer, Kiril thought.Three bicycles leaned against the back of the house, their scrawny tires and tinny-looking bodies giving them the look of pre-war relics. The old man rattled off a few sentences in German and went back into the house.

“He wished us good luck,” he told Adrienne. “He said this is a good hour to enter the town because people will be leaving work.”

“Let’s hope he meant it,” Brenner said drily.

“They need the money. The jewelry’s worth a lot on the black market. They won’t turn us in,” Kiril reassured him.

But will
you?
Adrienne wondered silently as a man on a motorbike with slicked-back hair and no helmet fixed them with a curious stare as he passed.

Will
you
turn us in? she asked a shabbily clothed family who examined them closely before pedaling off in the opposite direction.

Will you be the ones?
she wondered, her question aimed at a couple of Vopos who stood just inside the Potsdam city limits while she tried to ignore a sign too prominent to miss:

UNDYING FRIENDSHIP AND ALLIANCE

WITH THE SOVIET UNION!

Don’t turn us in
, she pleaded whenever Kurt or Kiril paused to ask directions, leaving her to envy them their flawless German.

They walked their bicycles down narrow cobblestone streets, every face, every frown, looming as a potential threat. Even the unbroken gray stucco on both sides of the street seemed less like rows of connecting houses than solid impregnable walls.

Only when gray stucco gave way to red brick did Adrienne’s fear give way to hope. She saw signs of a cheerful Dutch influence in the high rounded tops of the attached houses. In the black shutters with their white trim.

It was she who spotted the sign on an iron post: Hollandische Siedlung.

She who spotted number “13.”

When Kiril pulled the bell cord, she slipped her hand into his. The tightness of his answering grip became a substitute for breathing.

The door opened. A pair of expressionless blue eyes looked them over, curiously at first, then intently.

“Come in. Quickly!” Albert Zind said.

Adrienne was stunned. Not because she thought Albert Zind and his family wouldn’t help them. After taking his measure in East Berlin, she had felt sure that he would.

What she
hadn’t
expected was that he spoke English!

As soon as all three of them were inside, the door was closed and bolted behind them.