Echo of the Reich

20

23 July 2012

Bronson pulled into the station car park at Rangsdorf, about twenty miles south of the center of Berlin, at twenty past six the following evening. The town was probably a good location for a rendezvous, being easy to find even for a stranger, and very close to the Berliner Ring, the city’s ring road, which offered easy access to the autobahn system. And the station car park was also a good choice, with plenty of parking spaces when Bronson arrived. He guessed that most of the vehicles belonged to local residents who commuted into Berlin; by the time of the rendezvous-seven o’clock-the area would be almost deserted.

He was right. The car park emptied around Bronson as men and women emerged from the railway station, climbed into their cars and drove away, and by six forty-five there were only a handful of vehicles left.

At six fifty, two cars-both dark-colored BMWs-drove into the car park and stopped, one at either end, their occupants remaining inside the vehicles. Watchers, Bronson presumed, there to make sure that the meeting would be neither observed nor interrupted. It looked to him as if there were at least two men in each of the cars. He guessed they already knew he was there, because his was the only vehicle in the place with British registration plates.

Precisely at seven o’clock, another car, this one a light gray Mercedes saloon, entered the car park and stopped in a space close to Bronson’s car. For a few seconds, there was no movement from any of the new arrivals, then both front doors of the Mercedes opened. Two heavily built men got out and strode across to Bronson’s vehicle.

As they approached, Bronson climbed out and stood waiting.

The two men stopped a couple of paces away, motioned him to take a step forward, and then to lift his arms up to shoulder level. Bronson complied, and one of the men stepped behind him and expertly frisked him. Then the man opened Bronson’s jacket, checked the inside pockets and then his shirt, presumably to make sure he didn’t have a miniature microphone taped to his skin.

“I’m not wearing a wire, and I’m not armed,” Bronson said, assuming the men would speak English.

The second man nodded. “We still have to check. Nothing personal.”

Then the searcher stepped away from Bronson and nodded.

“So far, so good, Mr. Bronson. You’re in the right place at the right time, and you seem to have followed Georg’s orders accurately. Welcome to Berlin.”

“Thanks. What now?”

“Now we take you somewhere else.” He gestured to the Mercedes. “Get in the car,” he said.

Bronson looked at the two men, now standing side by side near the car, and shrugged. He didn’t like the idea of getting into the Mercedes with two men he was quite sure were armed and extremely dangerous, but he had no option. Or, rather, the only options he had were either to go with them or to get back in his car and return to Britain and whatever uncertain welcome might be waiting for him there.

So it wasn’t really a choice. He was certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, that these men were involved in something deeply, deeply dangerous and injurious to his native land, some kind of a terrorist act, and whatever happened he was determined to stop them, or at the very least find out enough about their plans to pass on the information to somebody who could stop them.

“Okay,” he said, walking over to the Mercedes. “You’ll bring me back here later?” he asked.

“That depends on what happens.”

It wasn’t quite the reassurance Bronson had been hoping for, but it was too late to argue.

“In the front seat,” he was instructed.

Bronson changed direction slightly, pulled open the front passenger door of the car and sat down. One of the men took the backseat directly behind him, and the other got into the driver’s seat. The man in the back reached over Bronson’s shoulder and handed him a pair of sunglasses with black, impenetrable wraparound lenses.

“Put these on, and make sure you keep them on.”

“No problem,” Bronson said.

With the sunglasses in place, Bronson could see almost nothing; obviously the lenses had been treated somehow to make them virtually opaque. The interior of the Mercedes was barely visible, and the view outside the windows was completely obscured.

The driver started the car and slipped it into “drive,” and moments later the vehicle began to move forward. With his eyes essentially useless, Bronson tried to use his ears to work out where the car was going, though he realized this was a fruitless exercise unless the vehicle happened to drive past some local feature that emitted a really distinctive sound. But there was one thing he could do. Although the sunglasses obscured his vision ahead, the lower part of the lenses didn’t quite touch his face, and there was a thin sliver between the glasses and his cheek that was unobstructed, and that was just wide enough for him to be able to look down and see his watch.

He noted the time: nine minutes past seven. When they finally stopped, he would at least know how long the journey had taken, and that would provide a rough search area, though, of course, the longer the drive, the larger that area would become.

Bronson remembered the route he had taken to get to the rendezvous position, and at first he believed they were retracing his steps, but when they reached the Berliner Ring they turned right not left, and from that point on he had no idea where he was going. Judging solely by the sensation of speed in the Mercedes, he guessed that for some time the car stayed on the autobahn, but he didn’t know if they were still somewhere on the Berlin ring road or had turned off it.

Just over thirty minutes after the journey had started, he knew he’d been right, as the big saloon car slowed down virtually to a walking pace, and he caught just the briefest glimpse of the shadow of a barrier lifting ahead of the Mercedes, which meant they’d just passed through a toll booth. And because they hadn’t come to a complete stop, he guessed the car was equipped with one of the electronic devices that recorded the date, time and place where the vehicle entered and left the toll road system. That might be a helpful piece of information to identify where he was being taken, and he memorized the exact time on his watch.

After that, the vehicle drove for a further fifteen minutes or so on the normal roads, negotiating roundabouts and stopping at traffic lights, and then finally came to a halt. The noise of the engine echoed strangely as the car slowed down, and Bronson was aware of a sudden darkness outside the windows. He wondered if the Mercedes had been driven into a garage or a warehouse, or something of that sort. He glanced down again at his watch, and memorized that time as well.

The doors opened and the other occupants of the vehicle stepped out.

“We’re here,” one of them said, and tugged on Bronson’s arm to show that he should get out of the car.

As Bronson complied with the instruction, he heard a banging sound from somewhere behind the Mercedes, and guessed that the outer doors of whatever building they were in were just being closed.

“You can take off the glasses,” he was ordered.

Bronson slipped the glasses into the breast pocket of his jacket and looked around. It wasn’t a warehouse-which he supposed made a change after his recent experiences-but a large garage, perhaps forty feet long by thirty wide, with four other vehicles parked neatly against one wall. It obviously wasn’t a public parking facility, and he guessed that it was either part of the customer parking area of a commercial garage or maybe even a garage for a company or a large private house. The floor was concrete, painted light gray, while the walls and ceiling were made of the same material but painted white. Fluorescent lights were evenly spaced across the ceiling, and provided stark illumination.

He glanced behind him and saw that one of the two BMWs from the station rendezvous had followed them into the garage and had parked directly behind the Mercedes. Two men had just climbed out of it, and one of them was aiming a remote control at a pair of wide metal doors through which the vehicles must have driven. The second door was just swinging closed. At the other end of the open space another metal door, presumably a fireproof door, was set into the wall between two of the parked cars.

“This way.”

The man opened the fire door and led the way down a short passage, again fabricated from concrete, painted white and lit by another pair of fluorescent ceiling lights.

At the end was a small lobby, a concrete staircase ascending on the left-hand side, while on the right were the unmistakable steel doors of a lift. The man walked across to the control panel and pressed one of the buttons, which immediately illuminated. Bronson heard the sound of an electric motor, and a few seconds later the doors slid to one side to reveal the interior of a small lift, probably intended to hold only five or six people. The three of them stepped inside it, and moments later the doors slid closed and the lift began to go up.

Bronson guessed they’d only ascended perhaps two or three floors when the lift stopped and the doors opened again.

They stepped out into another small lobby, about the same size as the one they’d just left, but that was where the resemblance ended. This room was paneled in wood-Bronson thought it might be mahogany, but he frankly didn’t know-with a thick carpet on the floor and a high ceiling featuring ornate cornices and a single crystal chandelier in its center. A handful of easy chairs were dotted about the room, perhaps so that people waiting for the lift would have somewhere to sit. Opposite the lift was a short flight of steps, at the top of which two tall wooden double doors stood open, and beyond them another room beckoned.

The man who seemed to be in charge led the way up the stairs and through the doors. The new room was much larger than the lobby, about three times its size, but shared the same ornate decoration and comfortable-looking furniture. Three chandeliers cast a clear light over the room, which reminded Bronson of pictures he’d seen of Victorian withdrawing-the name later shortened just to “drawing”-rooms, with easy chairs grouped around low tables where people could gather after formal dinners and enjoy a coffee or a liqueur.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. He could have been a guest in a country mansion somewhere in England, rather than in a house-he assumed that’s where he was-on the outskirts of the German capital.

“Good evening, Mr. Bronson,” a cultured voice said from somewhere in the room, the greeting sounding uncannily similar to the way the villain always seemed to address the hero in the James Bond films. The man’s German accent was unmistakable, but his English was perfectly understandable.

Bronson looked around, and as he did so a slight individual, probably no more than five feet seven or eight, and with a very slim build, stood up from an easy chair a few feet away. He was wearing an immaculately tailored dark brown suit and gleaming black shoes. He had a fair complexion, his hair an indeterminate shade of blond, and very blue eyes. Bronson estimated the man’s age at something over fifty, though he guessed he could easily be ten years out either way. But the overwhelming impression was one of youth. Somehow he seemed much younger than he looked.

The man stepped forward briskly to where Bronson was standing and extended his hand.

“My name is Marcus,” he said, giving Bronson’s hand a vigorous shake, “and Georg has told me quite a lot about you. He said you’d actually shot your way out of a police ambush. Not the sort of behavior one would expect to witness in the Home Counties, Mr. Bronson, but perhaps indicative of the kind of man you seem to be. Georg was very impressed.”

Bronson shook his head slightly. “It was actually a lot less dramatic than it sounds,” he replied. “All I did was shoot out one of the tires of the police van, just to immobilize it.”

Marcus looked at him for a moment, then smiled slightly. “If you say so,” he replied. “Anyway, Georg seems to be quite satisfied that you are who you say you are, but for me there’s still something of a question mark above your head. As you might have guessed, our organization operates below the surface, shall we say, of polite society. We take extreme care that none of our personnel ever come to the notice of the forces of law and order, though of course our work is on display for all to see.”

It was a somewhat surreal conversation. Bronson knew, perfectly well, that the German was talking about acts of terrorism, or acts of sabotage at best, but he could have been the director of a legitimate company discussing its products and public image with a fellow businessman.

“And that, you see, is the problem with you. As I said, we avoid the police as much as we can, but you are a former police officer, which puts us into something of a quandary. You wouldn’t be here at all without Georg’s strong recommendation.”

Bronson shook his head. “Look,” he said, “Georg sent me to meet you here in Berlin. It wasn’t my choice, though it did suit me to get out of the country for a while, just because of what had happened at the industrial estate. If you’re unhappy with my being here, I can just go back. That’s no problem for me.”

Marcus smiled, but there was no humor in his expression.

“It might not be a problem for you,” he said, “but it certainly would be for us. You know my name, you’ve seen my face and those of several members of this organization, and you’ve been inside my house, so it’s far too late for you to just go back, as you put it. You will be leaving here, but what we have to decide is whether you walk out or if it would suit our interests better to ensure you never walked or talked again.”

It was neither more nor less than a casual death sentence, delivered in the same urbane, conversational manner as everything else Marcus had said, and Bronson felt a chill run through him. He was acutely aware that he was completely unarmed, surrounded by a group of men, all of whom were probably carrying pistols, and that nobody outside the building had the slightest idea where he was.

If Marcus decided to have him shot down there and then, Bronson knew there was almost no chance that anyone would ever find out about it or discover his body. His corpse could be stripped, loaded into the trunk of one of the cars, driven out into the countryside and dumped down a well or mineshaft or just left deep in the woods to rot. And if they cut off his head and hands, identification would be virtually impossible.

Even Angela-who was absolutely the only person he was sure he could trust-only knew that he had been intending to travel to Germany, and Germany was a very big country. All Bronson had been able to tell her was that he had a meeting in Berlin. If he didn’t call her within about a day, she would raise the alarm, certainly, but that probably wouldn’t do any good. By that time he would simply have vanished without trace.

Despite these extremely unpleasant thoughts coursing through his brain, Bronson remained outwardly calm and unruffled.

“You’re right,” he said, “I was a police officer, but I was kicked out of the force months ago.”

“I know,” Marcus replied. “Georg checked.”

That was a small comfort. Obviously somebody in the Met had faked the records to show his dismissal when Davidson had decided to send him undercover. Whether those records would be altered to reflect the truth of his situation now that there really was a warrant out for his arrest on firearms charges was another matter entirely. All Bronson could hope was that Georg wouldn’t decide to probe any more deeply.

“So you’ll know that I have no love for my former employers,” he stated. “And Georg should also have told you how I came to meet his group in the first place.”

Marcus smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Doing a bit of minor vandalism at the Olympic sites. Hardly the Great Train Robbery, Mr. Bronson, was it? And then you attacked that bulldozer with a hammer, a somewhat inadequate weapon if you were being serious.”

“That was about all we had to hand,” Bronson said defensively. “And you can do a lot of damage if you know how. I probably smashed it up enough to write it off.”

“Bravo,” Marcus muttered ironically, “so the sum total of your efforts to disrupt the London Olympic Games amounts to the possible financial destruction of one piece of earthmoving equipment that might at some point have been used on the site. Obviously there’s no way of telling, because all the major construction work was completed some time ago. Not particularly impressive.”

“I did what I could,” Bronson replied, then decided that perhaps attack was the best form of defense. “And as far as I could see, Georg and his merry men weren’t doing much better, and there were about a dozen of them.”

Marcus nodded. “Actually, they were doing exactly what we wanted them to do. They were just providing a diversion, making the police think that the biggest threat to the Games was this kind of minor vandalism.”

That tied up with what Georg had told Bronson earlier, and implied that the German was planning something else, something darker and much more dangerous.

“So you’ve got something else in mind?”

Marcus shook his head. “Before we decide to share that information with you-if we ever do, that is-we need to be sure exactly where your loyalties lie.”

“I would have thought I’d established that by now. I’m wanted by the British police for assault and whatever other charges they’ve been able to drum up against me. If I go back to England, there’s a strong chance I’ll be arrested as soon as I get there and then spend several years in prison. I’ve no option but to throw in my lot with Georg and the rest of the group in their campaign against the Olympic Games, and that’s why I’m here now.”

Marcus nodded patiently. “I know, but what you don’t understand is that we really don’t care about the Olympics except as a convenient vehicle for what we intend to do. And if you are going to play any part, however small, in our operation, then, as I said a few moments ago, we must be certain of your loyalty.”

“And how are you going to achieve that?” Bronson asked.

“A simple test, that’s all. You’ll be performing a small service for us, but one that will satisfy me that you can be relied upon.”

Again, this echoed what Georg had said to him back in England, and Bronson didn’t like the sound of it any more the second time round. But there was nothing he could do except go along with whatever Marcus had planned.

“Follow me,” the German said.

Marcus gave a slight nod, then turned away and began walking toward a set of double doors at the far end of the room, the two men who had accompanied Bronson following on behind. Bronson was led down a flight of stairs, and then down another flight, by which time he was certain that they were below ground level. At the end of a short corridor was a steel door, standing partially ajar.

As Marcus approached, the door swung open to reveal a brightly lit room, the walls and ceiling painted brilliant white, in which about half a dozen men were standing waiting. But unlike the opulent surroundings Bronson had just left, this chamber was almost bare. The floor was gray-painted concrete, and the only objects in the room were bright lights-almost like floodlights-set in each corner, and a heavy wooden chair, the back, arms and legs fitted with leather straps, bolted to the floor in the center, the area around it scuffed and discolored with dark stains. A professional-looking movie camera was positioned at one side of the room, its lens pointing directly toward the chair.

Bronson was walking into what looked like a film studio intended for a very particular type of action, and he had a sudden, disturbingly clear idea about exactly what Marcus intended.