The Jericho Pact Page 26

  Soult was speaking not as President of the European Commission but as a would-be Napoleon, Müller realized. And now he was threatening to use nuclear weapons against Germany.

  “Germany will not be cowed, Monsieur Soult.”

  Soult’s gaze was unbending. “Then let a united Europe be la fleur de guerre.”

  The man was insane, Müller thought later as he looked out the window of the Konrad Adenauer, the Airbus A310-304 that was the Bundeskanzler’s official aircraft. Whatever glaze of normalcy had once shielded Soult’s ambitions had long since given way.

  “Let a united Europe be la fleur de guerre?” Müller asked himself. It was madness. The only flowers of war were death, destruction and misery.

  He climbed from his seat and walked to the secure communications center onboard the aircraft. “I need to speak to the Prime Minister of England, and then to the President of the United States.”

  “Yes, Herr Bundeskanzler,” the man said.

  Soult’s nuclear threat left Müller no choice. He would have to ensure that he had allies. Allies who could not only match Soult’s nuclear capability but overmatch it, to the point where Soult would not dare to deploy such weapons.

  For beyond that door lay the end of Europe itself.

  Rome, Italy

  “What happened?” Renate asked as she and Lawton entered the small restaurant.

  The journey to Rome had been painful. While the uniforms of Handwerksburschen had largely allowed them to travel undisturbed and unnoticed, Lawton’s wound had not. Ulla Viermann had left specific instructions that were as necessary as they were agonizing.

  A bruised rib could be a life-threatening injury. The temptation, born of long-evolved pain aversion, was to breathe shallowly, to minimize movement. But prolonged shallow breathing allowed fluid to build up in the bottoms of the lungs, creating the very real risk of pneumonia. Worse, the racking coughs caused by trying to clear the fluid could exacerbate the injury, and prolong the suffering and danger.

  The only remedy, Ulla had explained, was for Lawton to perform regular deep-breathing exercises. Before their departure, she had gone to the hospital to purloin a small plastic instrument that measured inhalation. Lawton was to inhale deeply enough to push the counter to a minimum of seventeen-hundred-fifty milliliters. Ten repetitions, every five hours.

  Every repetition was self-induced agony, as his rib cage expanded against the wrapping around his torso, compressing bruised and angry muscle and bone, eliciting groans that made Renate cringe. An old German woman riding beside them from Frankfurt to Mannheim had patted Renate’s hand and offered an understanding, maternal smile. It was a small comfort, Renate thought, but at times those were the only comforts life offered.

  They were passing through the Po Valley in northern Italy when the time had come for another set of exercises.

  “Please, no,” Lawton had whispered. The grayness of his face had worried her. Even the incredible smoothness of modern European rail travel must have been agony for him.

  She had squeezed his hand, and the memories of what had nearly happened in the Berlin hotel room flooded in. She fought them down. It had been a mistake. A mutual mistake born of transitory need. Yet as she squeezed his hand and implored him to do the exercises, she could not forget the emotions that had surged through her, emotions she had buried deep in an icy glacier since coming to Office 119.

  For those few glorious moments before the door burst open, she had been a woman again. A real woman. That interruption alone had been cause enough to kill the man who’d barged in.

  “You must,” she had said. “I will hold your hand.”

  And she had, trying in vain to close her mind to his groans and the way his fingers curled around hers, that most basic, childlike request not to be alone when the pain came. From midwife to mother, lover to friend, nurse to soldier and even to enemy, the impulse ran deep through the core of the human species. She could no more resist answering than he could resist asking.

  And the pain of it chipped at the icy walls she had built around her heart.

  Thankfully, after that he had slept until they reached Rome, husbanding his strength for the most difficult part of their journey, the part that, by dint of their disguises, had to be made on foot. For while journeymen might ride a train over a long distance, to hire a taxi would attract attention. It was a life of walking, and walk they must, whatever the pain that emanated from every step.

  Finding quick and cheap lodging had been easy. They had simply followed along with four other journeymen who had also made the trip. The others were hoping to find work on the restoration of one of the city’s many old and priceless buildings, learning a kind of craftsmanship that had not changed in centuries, skills that would set them apart as true masters when their time of journeying ended and they returned to their homes to set up businesses.

  She had conversed little with them, and Lawton even less. His injury—incurred on a job in Hamburg, she’d said—made it difficult for him to talk. They had given nods of understanding, for theirs was a profession in which workplace injuries were not uncommon. It was the nature of working with one’s hands, shaping wood or stone into form and structure and beauty.

  The transient connection made, they had not objected when she trailed along in their quest for lodging. While she knew the city better than any of them, she and Lawton were still in disguise and could not shed the charade until they were alone. So she let the others guide her to a hostel where she and Lawton settled into a room that was ideally anonymous, if only passably clean.

  Thirty-six tense, painful hours later, Jefe had answered her ad in La Repubblica, refusing to talk details on the telephone. Not until she entered the familiar restaurant and was directed to the upstairs room did she have any clue what had become of Office 119. The Muslims from whom they had often bought food now provided safe haven. Her heart jolted repeatedly as she helped Lawton up the stairs to find a small group of operatives working on computers and realized they were a Saif Alsharaawi cell stationed to observe and protect Office 119.

  “We’ve confirmed that the bombers were working for Soult,” Jefe said in response to her immediate question. “We think they latched onto Margarite when she met her contact in Paris.”

  Renate seethed. “I told her.”

  Jefe held up a hand. “Don’t even go there, Renate. Whatever she did, she was one of us.”

  “Was?” Renate asked.

  He nodded, his lips tight. “She was in the front office when they came in. She never had a chance.”

  Everything inside Renate froze. She wanted to feel anger. She wanted to offer some cutting phrase—“served her right”—or anything to wash away the kick that sent her stomach reeling.

  Instead, she heard Margarite’s laughter when Renate had strode into the office talking of her Italian lover, the excitement in Margarite’s voice as they’d talked through the problem in Berlin. Even their last moments together, when Margarite had told Renate to give herself over to her feelings for Lawton.

  Whatever she had done, whatever tradecraft she had overlooked in Paris, she hadn’t deserved to be cut down by assassins, her body not even given a proper burial but instead reduced to charred ash as fire tore through an anonymous warehouse in a foreign land.

  “Renate,” Jefe said, reaching out to her, as if reading her thoughts.

  She shook his hand away, collapsing into a folding chair, her lips white, her jaw screaming until she realized she was clenching her teeth to fight back the river of rage that threatened to erupt. Rage at herself. Rage at Jefe. Rage at Office 119. Rage at a world that bent and twisted every ideal, every notion of goodness and duty and honor, until the idealist was nothing but a disposable part in the evil machine that was life, a machine that ran on cross and double-cross, plot and counterplot, promise and betrayal and all too casual death.

  It was Lawton’s touch that pushed through the storm within her, a tactile lighthouse in the hurricane of her thoughts. It was
Lawton’s touch that brought the tears.

  “What are we doing?” she asked between sobs.

  “We’re reorganizing,” Jefe said. “Officially, we’re closed down. They’ll be working on a new site. Probably here in Europe, but we’re not sure yet. In the meantime, we’re working with Saif, piggybacking their infrastructure.”

  She had no desire to hear institutional jargon. “No. What are we doing?”

  “We’re tracing the money that bought the hit on the warehouse. We’ll get them.”

  She pounded her fists on the table, drawing a curse from Assif as the laptops jumped. “No. You don’t get it. What. Are. We. Doing? What is the point of all this, Jefe? We swing at shadows, and the shadows swing back. Karen dies and my family dies, and Margarite dies, and when it’s all over, where are we? What have we accomplished? What. Are. We. Doing?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’ll tell you what we’re doing,” she continued. “We’re pushing at the ocean. And every time we push, the ocean drowns someone else. And it always will. I never dreamt I would see war in Europe, and it’s going to happen, no matter what we do or anyone else does. Why? Because Jules Soult, and men in Frankfurt and Tehran and Washington and Darfur, want to fight to prove their manhood and enrich their businesses and prove that their race, their god, their economy, their belief, is superior to someone else’s. We push against this ocean, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and all we end up is awash in more bodies than we can count, piled up to the heavens and rotting with the stench of our hubris and our justice and our fear and our selfishness.

  “So how many?” she pressed on, screaming now. “How many dead bodies is enough? How many dead friends and dads and moms and nieces and Margarites? How many do we need to stack one upon the other, until we can climb over them all the way to God and say ‘I did my best’? How many?”

  The room was silent as she sagged back into the chair. Ahmed Ahsami had come up from the restaurant below, a look of alarm on his face. Jefe looked as if he had been punched in the chest. Assif stared. Lawton seemed to be fishing for words and finding none.

  “Give that speech,” Ahmed finally said. “Give that speech in every town and every city in every country in the world. Maybe Allah will open their ears. But until he does, Frau Bächle, we are the levee between good people and the ocean of evil in the hearts of men. And we will never hold back the whole of that ocean so long as men’s hearts turn to darkness. But if we allow ourselves to break beneath that ocean, what is left?”

  She could not answer.

  Ahmed held out a small cup. “It is good coffee.”

  She took the cup wordlessly. At that moment, good coffee was the best life had to offer.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.

  He nodded silently, his eyes fixed on hers. They were the eyes of a soldier. Eyes that understood. “It is strong and good, yes?”

  She followed his eyes to the cup in her hand and beyond it into the smoking landscape of her soul. She took a sip. “Yes. It is good coffee.”

  30

  Strasbourg, France

  “H e thinks you are insane,” Hector Vasquez said, sitting opposite Soult’s desk. He had listened to the discussion with Chancellor Müller—the conference room was bugged, of course—and wondered if Soult had played his chosen role too well. “There is a fine line you must walk, Monsieur President. Are you sure you did not step across it?”

  Soult was watching the television, where the news showed a gaggle of protestors gathering on the Pont de l’Europe. “I do not think I went too far, Colonel. Why do you suspect I did?”

  “It was the mention of nuclear weapons,” Vasquez said. “Chancellor Müller will doubtless carry that implied threat to London and to Washington. It will help him to gain allies at a time when we would rather he was forced to stand alone.”

  Soult nodded the colonel to go on.

  “Our plans called for a skirmish with Germany, Monsieur President,” Vasquez continued. “Not a long and destructive war that could cripple Europe and reduce us again to rubble. A quick, decisive skirmish will boost our war industries and energize our economy, making us ready to challenge the Americans for dominance. But a prolonged war will only leave us exhausted.”

  “I am aware of our plans,” Soult said. “I helped to craft them, Colonel.”

  “Forgive me,” Vasquez said. “It is simply that the mention of nuclear weapons makes it less likely that we can contain this skirmish. We knew the Americans would defend their bases. That is why we defined the borders of the European Zone to exclude those bases. So long as we do not threaten their bases, the Americans will only posture in support of Müller without actually giving him any material support. That posturing will work to our benefit, by drawing the rest of Europe to us out of their resentment for American bullying. So long as we can keep this war small and brief, the British and Americans will stand by impotently. But if there is a nuclear threat…”

  “You think the British and Americans will commit their forces in defense of a small slice of southern Germany, when France has also ceded an equal portion of its own land to the Union?” Soult asked.

  “No, of course not,” Vasquez said. “But they will promise to commit their forces if they think you may employ nuclear weapons. Their nuclear capability is far greater than yours. They know you cannot employ your weapons under such a threat. We will be back to the days of mutually assured destruction, hamstrung at the very time when you need the freedom to act.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” Soult said. “I should not have mentioned the nuclear weapons.”

  “Alas,” Vasquez said, “you cannot unring that bell.”

  “No, I cannot. What do you suggest, Colonel? Where do we go from here?”

  “What is the Islamic population in the German part of the European Zone?” Vasquez asked.

  “It is negligible,” Soult said.

  “So it is already secure, yes?”

  Soult turned to him and smiled. “Yes, it is already secure, Colonel. So long as the Germans do not remove any Muslims into that zone.”

  “And Müller has already announced an end to the removal policy in Germany.”

  “Yes,” Soult said. “He has.”

  “Then, while our troops must stand ready in case any threat should develop, there is no immediate cause to send forces across the Rhine.”

  “Unless we are provoked,” Soult said, smiling.

  “Yes,” Vasquez said. “And if we are provoked, no one can condemn us for taking steps to protect ourselves.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Soult asked.

  Vasquez walked over to the large-scale topographic map on the wall of Soult’s office. “Allow me to show you.”

  Querbach, Germany

  Hans Neufel had been watching the people arriving for hours now. From the French side, they came on foot. From the German side, a few were dropped off from buses, but many more had ridden the train to the city and walked from there. At first they were only a trickle, then a steady stream. Among the gathering crowd were men who wore the cassocks of priests, the dark hats and beards of Orthodox Jews, and men who wore the knit skullcaps of Muslims. The Muslims, he had noticed, were all old men, one with a walker, another in a wheelchair. Probably to avoid being mistaken for terrorists.

  All day long the gathering had steadily been growing, and scouts had reported that religious and even lay people were arriving not only from Germany and France, but from other European countries, too. There were perhaps three hundred as evening gave way to dusk, but three hundred on the bridge was enough to draw the attention of the world.

  Those who wanted to were sleeping on the bridge. Those who sought more comfortable lodgings would have no trouble finding them, for the citizens of Kehl and its suburbs had been packing their belongings and leaving throughout the day. The few residents who remained were mostly men and mostly armed with whatever they could find: rifles for huntin
g, pistols that were family mementos from past wars. All were committed to one thing: ensuring that the French did not cross the Rhine.

  On the one hand, Neufel admired their courage, and that of the protesters. On the other hand, their presence complicated his mission. If the French rolled onto that bridge—no, when the French rolled onto the bridge—the situation would very quickly get out of hand. Having three hundred religious protestors squarely in his sights might make a gunner, or a tank commander, hesitate. And that moment of hesitation might get the tank destroyed and its crew consigned to ugly, fiery deaths.

  Very quickly, Neufel was able to pick out three leaders among the protestors: a priest, a rabbi and an imam. That fact was not lost on Schulingen, who had christened them der Vorsichtige, der Unschuldige und der Weise—the cautious, the innocent and the wise—after the punchline to a common joke. The joke and the christening had sent echoes of laughter through the tank, and though Neufel knew he should scold his gunner for such humor, not even he could resist laughing.

  Now, watching the clerics move among the ranks of the protestors, calming those who seemed at the point of turning peaceful protest to something else, Neufel realized he, too, was speaking of them in terms of Schulingen’s nicknames.

  In an odd way, it made Neufel feel as if he knew the clerics. And that troubled him still more. For now, having named them, he would be even more likely to hesitate if the order came to fire.

  He didn’t know what he resented most: the clerics for being there, Schulingen for humanizing them, his fear that he might put their safety above that of his crew, or the insanity of a species and a situation that could set all of the above against each other.