Sleeper Agent (35 page)

A short, stocky man, hunched in a large SS greatcoat, turned-up collar effectively concealing his face beneath the peaked gray cap, bare of insignia, strode heavily and hurriedly toward the wharves. Around him swirled the hustle of desperate last measures, the death spasms of the vaunted Thousand Year German Third Reich. On the pier he paused briefly. He cast a quick glance back. There was nothing for him to look at. Nothing.

Abruptly he tore himself away and marched across the gangplank of a U-Boat, Type XXI, ocean-going,
Schnorchel
-equipped. He disappeared into its bloated metal womb.

Reichsleiter Martin Bormann had taken the first fateful step along the road of KOKON. The grim metamorphosis had begun. The fierce new entity, latent with might, would be ready to emerge irresistibly in all its power and mastery when the stimulus of one Rudi A-27 would transform it from its cocoon into a ruthless, unconquerable imago—the Fourth German Reich.

12

Bells. His universe was filled with bells. Chiming. Pealing. Clanging. Filling his every pore with sonorous sound.

He struggled up through the resounding clangor, up from the depths of the sleep of deep exhaustion. He opened his eyes.

The bells were still there. Church bells. Spreading a swelling, ringing cover of joyous thanksgiving over the entire country of Denmark.

Tom glanced at his watch. It was 0800 hours, Saturday, May 5th. It was Denmark’s hour of liberation.

The streets of the delirious city, reborn from oppression, were already swarming with excited people when Tom and Tove left the little flat. Tom had only one tenuous lead to the Sleeper Agent left—Wolff, the missing waiter from the Tosca. It was obviously useless to look for him at the gutted café, but Tove knew of another restaurant that catered to the Germans,
Rydbergs Kaeller
—Rydberg’s Cellar. It was barely possible that Wolff might have gone there, or that someone from the place knew of him and where to find him. It was worth a try.

The inner city was still crowded with exultant, joyful people. A red and white sea of flags—the white cross on the red field of the Danish flag,
Dannebrog
—waved and billowed triumphantly over their heads. But the mood was subtly different. The jubilant celebration was starkly punctuated with moments of panic and fear as snipers opened up from their hiding places and firefights broke out between the Freedom Fighters and the Danish
Hipo
traitors and their Nazi masters.

The Freedom Fighters were inexorably rounding up the hated informers and collaborators. Cars and trucks filled with grim armed and helmeted men roared through the streets, the names of underground groups proudly painted on their sides:
BOPA. Korps Aagesen. Holger Danske. Ringen.

Suspects were being cornered everywhere and checked against lists prepared in advance for this day of reckoning. The subjects stood shaking, hands high, facing the wall, while being examined.

Open flat-bed trucks crammed with white-faced
Hipo
men and other traitors and informers, arms held stiffly above their heads, guarded by patriots armed with machine pistols, lumbered toward prisoner collection points throughout the city, followed by the derisive howls and shouts of the onlookers.

Girls with swastikas crudely smeared across their chests were marched away—the despised and accursed “field mattresses,” the mistresses of the Nazis.

As Tom made his way with Tove toward Rydberg’s he realized bleakly that he was searching for the proverbial needle. Only this needle was different. It was deadly.

They were hurrying past a complex of German military barracks. The crowd was less dense here. In the broad square in front of the barracks several octagonal brick barricades had been constructed to afford protection for the guard posts. They looked exactly like squat Teutonic
pissoires.
Each was manned by two apprehensive German soldiers. Only their steel-helmeted heads and their field-gray shoulders were visible above the concealing breastwork.

Suddenly a shot rang out. And another. They were instantly answered by a quick volley. Sniper! At once the German sentries brought their guns to bear on the sound of the firing.

Tom pulled Tove into a doorway. Directly before them, out in the square, was a German brick barricade. The heads and shoulders of the uneasy Nazi soldiers barely showed above the shielding.

Suddenly Tove laughed. She pointed at the barricade. “Look!” she said. “Look what someone has written on it.”

Tom looked. In white paint, under the barely protruding heads of the German guards, a crude swastika had been painted on the wall of the barricade, and under it the words
NAZISTERNE HAR TABT BUKSERNE!

Tove giggled. “It means the Nazis have lost their pants!” she said.

Tom grinned. Danish humor was irrepressible. A few minutes later he found himself utterly devoid of any humor whatsoever.

Rydbergs Kaeller lay before him, devastated, ransacked, burned to a scorched and blackened empty cavern. His last lead had been obliterated.

Rudi felt uneasy. He did not like to be in the area around the demolished Café Tosca.

He’d spent the evening before in the Tivoli amusement park in the center of Copenhagen, losing himself effectively in the jubilant crowd celebrating the opening night of the garden with blazing lights. With music. Dancing. Singing. The thousands upon thousands of colored light bulbs strung overhead in garlands across the walks had made him feel as if he were diving in a sea of light and noise and sweating human flesh.

He had been there when the open air concert was abruptly interrupted and the message of the German surrender had been read over the loudspeakers. The throng had gone wild.

He had never in his life felt so depressed and bleak as he shouted and cheered with the rest and let himself be jostled through the park by the crush of frenzied people. But he solemnly resolved that
he,
Rudi A-27, would never surrender.
His
mission would be carried out!

When Tivoli finally closed, he’d gone to an all-night bar and spent the time drinking and carousing with new-found friends. As soon as the streets began to fill with people once again, he’d joined the crowds milling through town waving their stupid little flags and howling their stupid songs. Now he was only a few blocks from the Café Tosca.

The Freedom Fighters seemed to be more active in that section of town than anywhere else. Their trucks constantly roared through the streets. Patrols roamed the area searching for their victims. It was not an area he would have chosen to be in. But he had no choice. The time for his rendezvous with Wolff was drawing near. It was his last chance. He could not afford to lose it.

He shrugged off his feeling of foreboding. It was probably just his imagination. Being forced to be at a certain spot at a certain time robbed him of his own initiative. He did not like it at all.

He had seen the Freedom Fighters round up their suspects. Once caught, there was little chance of getting away, at least not without a thorough examination and a long delay. For him, both prospects would be disastrous.

He was walking quickly along one of the narrow streets in the old part of the city. There were not many people abroad. Not the crowds still rampant in the more open parts of town. That was another thing that bothered him. He felt too exposed without his cover of revelers. Ahead of him a group of half a dozen young men were hurrying down the street toward him.

Suddenly a small truck roared into the street behind Rudi. He whirled toward it. Several armed Freedom Fighters leaped from the truck. The pedestrians stopped dead in alarm.

In the same instant another truck came screeching to a halt in front of him, disgorging more grim-looking Freedom Fighters, guns trained on Rudi and the little group.

He and the others were effectively boxed. The young men instinctively huddled together, backing up against the wall of a building.

The Freedom Fighters shouted at them, “Up! Up! Up with the hands!” They gestured menacingly with their guns. “
Up!
”

The men raised their hands high above their heads. Rudi followed suit.

The gun stuck in his belt in back under the blue jacket suddenly felt like a cannon.

Verflucht!
he thought bitterly. Caught in a
verschissene
—stinking—dragnet! His thoughts raced. He
had
to get away.
How?

His eyes flew over his fellow captives as the Freedom Fighters ran toward them. They all looked apprehensive. Unsure. His trained mind took in each one of them. In detail.

Two of the young men stood quite close to him. One was barely into his teens. The other—Suddenly Rudi flew into action. He threw himself on the man next to him. He grabbed him in a painful armlock.

The startled man sank to his knees with a groan of pain.

“Here!” bellowed Rudi excitedly. “Over here! I got him!”

Several of the Freedom Fighters ran toward him.

“I got him!” he shrieked. “The
Hipo
swine! Look at his boots! His boots! The bastard is trying to hide them with his pants. But they are boots! Look!
German boots!
”

The Freedom Fighters grabbed the shaken man and slammed him roughly against the wall. “Papers!” one of them demanded brusquely.

The man began to fumble with his coat He was petrified.

Rudi leaped at him. “Swine!” he shrieked furiously. “Traitor!
Hipo
bastard!” He began to hit the man viciously with his fists. “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!”

Two of the Freedom Fighters pulled him off. “Hey, hey, hey, easy!” one of them said with a cold grin. “Easy. Leave him to us. He’ll get what’s coming to him!”

Rudi backed off.

The Freedom Fighters turned toward the battered, shaken young man, fumbling in his coat pocket. “Get those papers out, damn you!” one of them growled. “And make it fast!”

Rudi backed slowly away. He watched the Freedom Fighters. They were all absorbed in examining their victim. The victim
he
had given them. They did not notice as he quickly ducked into an alley and silently slipped away.

The bleak feeling of frustrated impotence lodged like a tight lump in Tom’s chest. Somewhere in this city of frenzy and turmoil was a man infected with a deadly disease that he would spread throughout the world if he were not stopped. Now.

Here. So close. And yet beyond reach.

He clenched his jaws. There
had
to be a way. There
had to
be another lead to Rudi A-27! He strained every cell of his brain. He fought to conjure up the key. He could think of nothing.

Rudi was able to masquerade as a native Dane. Even if he, Tom, knew his cover identity, which he did not, it would be impossible to ferret him out in the tumultuous chaos of the liberated city. His only possible lead remained Wolff.

To find
him,
he’d have to be too damned lucky. He did believe in luck. But only the kind you made yourself. He had always believed that
luck
was a tag given by the nondoers to account for the accomplishments of the doers. But there was nothing he could do. Nothing.

He suddenly tensed. He turned to Tove. “Who exactly are the men the Freedom Fighters are rounding up?” he asked. There was a new urgency in his voice.

She gave him a quick look. “
Hipos.
Traitors. Informers,” she said. “Collaborators. They have lists—”

“Who else?”

Tove frowned. “No one,” she said. “The girls . . .”

He shook his head impatiently. “What about Germans?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “No Germans.”

“What if a man—a German—was
thought
to be a Dane. A collaborator. Would he be on the lists?”

“Yes.”

“What happens to the men the Freedom Fighters pick up?”

“They . . . they will be investigated,” she said.

“Where?”

“At collection points. Throughout the city. That is where they are taken on the trucks.”

Tom frowned in concentration. “Is there . . . is there one point, one central place, where information about the captives would be coordinated?”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Arrestgaarden, near Domhuset—the court house. That is the main collection and detention point.”

“Take me there!” he said.

The area around Arrestgaarden teemed with curious people, watching and jeering the truckload after truckload of ashen-faced, fearful prisoners brought to the detention center.

All the shops and offices in the neighborhood had been closed up tight. One had a hastily scrawled sign prominently displayed on the door:
LUKKET PAA GRUND AF GLAEDE!—CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF JOY!

Inside, the center was a madhouse of controlled confusion. Tom and Tove were making their way through the flow of men and women when Tove spotted Klaus marching a pinch-faced young man toward a holding tank. The dark streaks from a bloody nose were still caked on the prisoner’s chin.

“Klaus!” she called.

The man stopped. They hurried to him. “Who do we see about the arrest lists?” Tove asked.

Klause shook his head. “No idea.” He nodded down the corridor. “Sven is here. In the main office. He may know. If you hurry, you might catch him before he is off again.”

They were already on their way.

Sven was pleased—and surprised—to see them. “Any luck?” he asked at once.

“We need your help,” Tove said urgently. “We need to look at some sort of master arrest list. Do you know if there
is
such a thing? And where?”

Sven frowned. “I know of no master list,” he said. He looked at Tom. “You think your man may be on it? He will not. He just arrived here, did he not?”

Tom nodded. “I know the Sleeper won’t be on any list. Under any name. I’m not concerned with him. I want Wolff!”

Sven and Tove glanced at each other. Sven nodded. “There is a chance. He was a waiter. A Dane. Working in a pro-German place. Yes. It is quite possible.”

He walked quickly to a desk. “I shall put out an alert. To notify me if the waiter Wolff is caught and brought in. Especially the patrols in the Tosca neighborhood must know. If Wolff is not on their list now, he will be.”

He scribbled something on a piece of paper. He gave it to Tom. “Take this, my friend. It is the telephone number of this office. If you are picked up, tell them to call here. You will be cleared.”

Tom took the paper. “Thanks,” he said.

“I cannot know where I will be,” Sven continued. “If you will go to the apartment, our meeting place, at”—he looked at his watch—”six o’clock tonight, I will call you there if I have any news.”

He started to leave. He turned, soberly. “Be careful,” he said. There is much fighting. SS troops and
Hipos.
Some parts of town are very dangerous. Stay away from them. The Guards Barracks. The Nyboder School. The gasworks. Lyngby Road. There are fire battles going on there.”