Echo of the Reich

21

23 July 2012

Marcus stopped inside the room and gestured for Bronson to approach him.

“The test we’ve devised is very simple, and will only take a couple of minutes. Afterward, as long as you’ve passed it, I’ll decide exactly how much I should tell you about our operation.”

He turned away and made a gesture to one of the men standing beside the wall. The man nodded, then strode across to another door a few feet away, opened it and barked a command.

Two other men appeared from the open doorway, half carrying, half dragging, a third figure, another man wearing only a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, both garments heavily bloodstained. His face bore the unmistakable marks of a severe beating, and even from where Bronson was standing it was clear that several of his fingers had been broken, and his arms were covered in what looked like acid burns. Whoever he was, he had clearly suffered appalling torture, either as punishment for some infraction or, probably more likely, to extract information from him. He was muttering almost incoherently, in great pain, and the only words Bronson could make out were nein and bitte.

The man was hustled roughly across the room to the wooden chair and forced down into it, the straps tightened around his waist, arms and legs to secure him in place. The two men then maneuvered a heavy wooden frame into position directly behind the chair. The front of the frame was fitted with long, wide and thick strips of heavy rubberized material that were attached at the top. Bronson knew exactly what the device was, though he’d never seen a mobile version before. A short distance behind the rubberized strips there would be a heavy-duty steel plate, or perhaps even a sheet of Kevlar.

Marcus looked on, a slight smile playing over his lips. “This organization is small but we try to be as secure as possible,” he said. “We run what you British call a tight ship, and there are two things that we simply do not tolerate. One is failure, and the other is breaching our security. This man”-he gestured toward the bound figure-“was guilty of both. About a week ago we discovered from monitoring his phone calls that he was in contact with a member of the Berlin police force, and was preparing to pass information to him in exchange for a promise of immunity from prosecution and a substantial pay-off. Knowing the Berlin police as I do, I suspect he might have got the former, but certainly not the latter. So he breached our security, and you could also say that he’d failed, because he breached it in such a clumsy way that we were almost certain to find out about it.”

Marcus glanced back at the bound man, then looked again at Bronson.

“We’ve managed to persuade him to disclose everything of value that he knew, and now he’s of no more use to us. Or to anyone else, in fact. As you can see, our questioning had to be somewhat robust to persuade him to tell us what we wanted to know. He’s obviously suffering and your test, your initiation, if you like, is to ease his pain. We want you to kill him. Right here, and right now, in front of the camera.”

Marcus reached into his jacket and took out a clear plastic bag, much like the evidence bags used by the police, inside which was a semi-automatic pistol. He handed the bag to Bronson.

The weapon was an early model Walther P99, with the green polymer frame which was a characteristic of that pistol. He could tell immediately by the weight and balance of the Walther that either the magazine was empty or it wasn’t fitted at all. He quickly glanced down, half turning the weapon in his hand until he could see the base of the grip, and the empty black oblong that showed that the magazine was missing.

Bronson looked at the man in the chair, and then back at Marcus. The German seemed utterly unconcerned that he was ordering the death of another human being. If anything, he seemed slightly amused, and for the first time Bronson caught a glimpse of the kind of dispassionate and callous efficiency that had characterized the German administrators of the horrendous concentration and death camps of the Second World War.

As far as Marcus was concerned, the murder of the anonymous figure strapped to the wooden chair was of absolutely no consequence. It was simply a convenient tool, a device to guarantee Bronson’s loyalty, because the film of the execution would be all the proof that any jury, in any country, would need to convict him of cold-blooded murder.

“And if I refuse?” Bronson asked.

Marcus shrugged. “That’s entirely up to you,” he said, “but if you don’t do the job, I or one of my men will do it, and then you’ll replace that man in the chair.”

The German’s eyes betrayed no emotion whatsoever as he stared levelly at Bronson, the expression on his face unchanged. Despite the man’s meek and mild appearance-he was one of the most physically unthreatening people he had ever met-at that moment, Bronson knew that he was in the presence of sheer, calculating and unremitting evil.

Bronson also knew that there was only one thing he could do in the circumstances. He was hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, and he had absolutely no doubt that if he failed to carry out Marcus’s instructions, he would be dead within minutes. He had killed before, in the heat and confusion of a fight, and in self-defense, which he’d always thought was justifiable, or at the very least excusable. But that was a lifetime away from the cold and clinical execution of another human being.

Bronson dropped his gaze from Marcus’s face and looked around the concrete chamber. Eight men stared back at him, their expressions ranging from simply neutral to overtly hostile. Three of the men, he noticed for the first time, carried pistols in their right hands, and he had no doubt whatsoever that, at the first sign of any aggressive move on his part against Marcus or any of his other men, he would find himself looking down the barrels of multiple weapons.

As far as he could see, there was only one way that he could get out of that chamber alive without killing the bound man, and it all depended upon what Marcus did next. If he handed Bronson a full magazine for the Walther-he thought the weapon had a maximum capacity of fifteen rounds, much like the Browning with which he was much more familiar-and then stayed within reach, there was just a chance. Bronson would have to insert the magazine and cock the pistol, grab Marcus and stick the gun to his head, and then use him as a human shield to get out of the house. It was a plan born of desperation, but it was the only one he had.

“So what do you want me to do with this?” he asked, taking the pistol out of the bag and hefting it in his hand. “Beat him to death with it?”

“Nothing so crude,” Marcus said. He reached into his right-hand jacket pocket and produced a pistol magazine, also inside a clear plastic bag, the black shape unmistakable. He took a couple of steps backward and then lobbed the bag to Bronson, who caught it easily in his left hand.

“As you can see, Mr. Bronson, there’s only one round in it, so you’ve got just one shot, and just one chance.”

Bronson had been outmaneuvered, and he knew it. Marcus was now about ten feet away, and the silent men lining the chamber like grim sentinels would be able to cut him down before he could cover even half that distance. Two more had now produced pistols, and they were all aiming their weapons at him. He opened the bag, removed the magazine and slid it into the butt of the Walther, racked the slide back and then let it go to chamber the single round he’d been given, then glanced back at Marcus.

“Suppose I miss?” he asked.

“You’re ex-army and a former policeman, and it’s quite obvious from the way you’re handling the pistol that you’ve had weapons training. If you miss, we’ll assume it was deliberate. And if you do miss, the man in the chair will still die, and so will you.” Marcus made an impatient gesture. “The camera’s running-in fact, it’s been running ever since you walked into this room-so get on with it.”

Bronson looked over to his right, toward the camera, and noticed the tiny red light illuminated on the front of it, showing that it was operating.

“So you’ve also recorded our conversation,” he said, “including you forcing me to do this?”

Marcus smiled again. “Yes,” he replied, “but that won’t matter. My men will cut out those bits and produce a disk containing the edited highlights, as they say in the vacuous world of the media. Any more questions?”

Bronson shook his head. He was fresh out of options. There was only one thing that he could do.

Without even appearing to aim, he swung the pistol up toward the seated man and squeezed the trigger.