Echo of the Reich

28

24 July 2012

Bronson drove over the canal-the bridge looking precisely as he remembered it-and into Spreenhagen. He didn’t need further confirmation, so as soon as he was able to do so, he turned the car around and headed back the way he’d come. Once over the canal, he eased the car to the right, down the minor road that joined the Hauptstra?e. A short distance further on was another junction, where he again remembered that the BMW had slowed down to cross the carriageway. He checked for other traffic-there was none in either direction-and then continued north along the arrow-straight road that had been cut through the wood.

The trees grew densely on either side of the road, with no apparent breaks at first. But then he saw a cleared area on the right-hand side where a large building-some sort of industrial structure, he guessed-had been erected. That was obviously not what he was looking for, and he continued driving steadily down the road, a road that a sign had already told him was named Rothen.

Shortly after that building, the wood petered out on the left-hand side of the road, and fields and farmland extended out to the west. To the east of the road, the wood appeared just as dense as the other section he’d driven past, and Bronson guessed that the house he was searching for had to be somewhere on that side.

And then he saw the end of the driveway, and the gravel section of the drive running up to the garage doors. And beyond it, in the same instant, he saw the house itself, looking deceptively innocent in the sunlight, its exterior giving no hint of the horrors that had been perpetrated within.

Bronson didn’t slow down. In fact, he did little more than glance over to his right-the kind of half-curious look any passing motorist might bestow upon a large secluded house. Instead he drove on, along straight stretches of road punctuated by gentle bends, until he estimated he was at least half a mile beyond the house. Then he stopped the car, did a swift U-turn in the road and began driving back, retracing his steps.

On his right now, where the trees gave way to open farmland, the fields were bordered by hedgerows, but were apparently uncultivated, at least for the moment. On the left-hand side of the road, the same side as the house itself, Bronson could see a small copse of trees, and beyond that a stretch of open land that ran all the way to the edge of the wood. As he drove along, Bronson spotted the end of a rough and rutted track that ran along one side of a kind of thin extension of the wood. At that end, a line of trees and bushes extended from the wood toward the road, the track running beside it.

Without hesitation, he steered the car across the carriageway and onto the track, the suspension working hard to cope with the ruts and furrows. Wide and deep tire prints, presumably made by tractors or other heavy farm machinery, were visible all the way along the track, and Bronson presumed that it was a regular route used by a local farmer to get from one of his fields to another. The ground was dry and hard, and the car’s tires had little difficulty in finding enough grip to keep going.

He drove on, trying to pick the smoothest path that he could, while taking frequent glances at the line of trees beside him, so that he would know when he’d reached the boundary of the main part of the wood. Quite suddenly, the wood darkened, and he knew that he’d gotten to the right area, a good starting point for him to approach the house.

He picked a gap between two trees that was obviously wide enough to accommodate the car and stopped. Then he climbed out and stepped past the treeline, to make sure that there were no holes, boulders or other hazards lurking in there which could do serious damage to the vehicle. In fact, beyond the trees lay a small clearing, perhaps thirty feet square, which was largely open, just a few small bushes dotted here and there. More important, a line of bushy shrubs was growing on one side of the pair of trees, and Bronson knew that if he parked his car close to them, it should be invisible to anyone walking along the track.

He strode back out of the wood to the car and checked all around him. On the road below, a small motorcycle appeared, traveling quite quickly and possibly heading for one of the houses at the end of the road, its exhaust note a belligerent rasp that shattered the quiet of the early afternoon. As the sound faded, Bronson concentrated on listening, as well as looking. From somewhere out of sight, perhaps on the other side of the low hill in front of him, he could hear the noise of a tractor engine, the sound rising and falling as the vehicle maneuvered. He checked the track again, in both directions, but there was still nobody in sight. No farmers out shooting, no couples walking dogs. Nobody at all, which was just what Bronson wanted.

He climbed back into the Hyundai, turned the car and then backed it between the two trees and into the clearing, positioning it close to the shrubs that he’d noticed previously. He wanted the vehicle to be facing in the right direction to get away from the wood, just in case he had to beat a hasty retreat.

For a few moments he sat in the car, trying to decide his next move. First, he switched off the interior light. It was full daylight now, but he didn’t know how long it would take to find the house, let alone find some way of getting inside it. If he came back to the car after dark, opening the door and having the interior light coming on would be a particularly stupid way of betraying his presence. For the same reason, when he left the car, he would lock it with the key, not the remote control. The characteristic flashing of the hazard lights would act as a beacon to anybody searching for him.

He stepped out of the car and eased the door closed as quietly as he could. Sound tends to travel in the countryside, although the trees around him would help to deaden the noise. He walked around to the trunk of the car and opened it. In a plastic carrier bag was the item he’d bought earlier in the garage-a pair of compact binoculars. He slung the cord around his neck and tucked the binoculars inside his jacket, so they wouldn’t swing about. Also in the bag were two bottles of water and some chocolate bars, and he took one of each. He checked that he had his new mobile phone in his jacket pocket, with the vibrate function turned off and the ringer set to “silent.” Finally, he slid the Llama pistol into the rear waistband of his trousers, under his leather jacket. The magazine was fully charged with ten rounds of. 22 Long Rifle ammunition, and he had the remainder of the box in another pocket.

That was one advantage of carrying a small-caliber pistol. He had fifty rounds with him, and was barely aware of the weight. Fifty nine-millimeter Parabellum rounds would be bulky and heavy, as would the weapon used to fire them. And at close range, in a competent pair of hands, both weapons were equally deadly, as the assassins employed by the Israeli Mossad service had demonstrated on numerous occasions.

Bronson walked across to the twin trees and looked out of the wood again, checking for anyone who might have seen him, but the track was empty. The only sound was the noise of the distant tractor, but it was still somewhere out of sight.

He had no doubt that he could get close to the house quite easily. Approaching a target premises over open ground was always difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve without being spotted, but doing the same thing through a wood or forest was comparatively straightforward. Unless they’d surrounded the house with a network of antisurveillance and counterintrusion devices, such as tripwires and infrared sensors, he should be able to get close enough to observe whatever was going on, and hopefully find his way inside without being detected.

It all depended on what he found when he got there.

Bronson shrugged his shoulders, took a final glance around the clearing, and then set off in the direction he thought the house must lie. Finding it wouldn’t be difficult; he guessed he could probably walk from one end of the wood to the other in about half an hour, and as long as he could see the sunlight through the branches of the trees, he’d have a reasonable idea about which direction he was heading. Locating the house, and finding his way back to the car, come to that, should be easy.

The ground was solid underfoot, the hard soil softened somewhat by a layer of leaf mold, which would serve to deaden the sound of his footsteps. The tree growth inside the wood was much less dense than it had appeared from the outside, a phenomenon Bronson had noticed before; quite often, the thickest growth of trees and bushes was at the very edge of a wood or forest. Somebody had told him that it was dictated by the amount of sunlight that penetrated the canopy to stimulate new growth, but he’d no idea if that was true or not.

At first, Bronson moved fairly quickly, taking care that he didn’t step on a fallen branch that could break or make any other noise that could be detected by audio sensors in his vicinity. One of the most obvious sounds that sentries are taught to listen for is the regular tramp, tramp, tramp of a walking man, so he took care to vary his stride, to ensure that his footfalls were as silent as possible, and he paused at frequent intervals just to look and listen.

After he’d penetrated about fifty yards he stopped and again checked all around him. He was looking for any sign of human presence, obviously, but also staring at the trees, checking to ensure that there were no cameras or microphones visible, and at the ground, looking for tripwires. He saw nothing, and walked on, moving from tree to tree, and stopping beside each one to make a further check before proceeding.

It was slow progress, but by taking his time Bronson believed he had the best possible chance of reaching the house without being detected.

He was heading approximately southwest, and after he’d covered about a hundred yards, he saw the first signs of a break in the treeline over to his right. It looked like a clearing or perhaps a fire break, and he guessed that he’d reached the edge of the wood that surrounded the property.

Now he moved even more cautiously, checking absolutely everywhere, because if the house was protected electronically, this was where the first of the devices would probably be positioned. He’d only covered about twenty yards when he saw the unmistakable shape of a house roof almost directly in front of him, and stopped in his tracks.

For almost ten minutes, Bronson stood virtually motionless beside the trunk of a large tree, assessing the situation. He couldn’t see very much of the house itself, only a section of the rear wall, the ridge of the roof and a part of one side, but he was satisfied that it was the right building. He worked slowly and methodically, carrying out a visual search of all the trees he could see between his position and the edge of the wood where the house was standing. He let his eyes roam slowly up and down each trunk and along the principal branches, looking for the telltale sign of a camera or sensor. He was looking for anything that looked either unnaturally round or equally unnaturally square-shapes not normally found in nature.

But he saw nothing, which surprised him. He had been expecting, at the very least, a PIR detector or surveillance camera. Then he thought for a few moments and guessed the possible reason. He didn’t know what kinds of wildlife lived in this area of Germany, but he assumed that there were probably deer, maybe wild boar, and possibly even wolves and bears, any of which would have about the same heat signature as a man, and would trigger any electronic alarms they installed. It also meant that tripwires wouldn’t work, because animals that size would simply walk through them, and Marcus’s men would have to continually reset them.

Reassured by both his logic and the complete absence of any visible anti-intruder devices, Bronson crouched down and then began making his way slowly toward the edge of the wood. He stopped a couple of yards short of the side of the clearing, where several shrubs provided a natural barrier between him and his objective, and lowered himself onto his stomach. He eased himself slowly forward, sliding his body under the lowest branches of the bushes, until he had a clear and unobstructed view of the house.

He was about twenty yards from the back wall of the house, and the first thing that struck him was how quiet it was. There were no people visible in the grounds and no signs of movement within the property-though obviously all he could see were the curtains on those windows where the shutters had been opened. There was no way of telling whether the house was occupied, because any cars would presumably have been parked in the large garage that lay on the side of the property closest to the road.

Bronson pulled the binoculars out of his jacket, and for several minutes just studied the building in front of him, making sure that his face was always in shadow to eliminate any chance of a stray reflection from the lenses of the instrument. Although they’d been cheap, the binoculars weren’t bad quality, and he was able to see the property in sharp detail. But even without anything to enhance his vision, it would have been immediately clear that entering the house would not be easy. There were seven windows in the back wall-three on the lowest level, another three directly above them, and one at the top, underneath the ridge of the roof-and each of them, except the very top one, had been fitted with a steel grille between the panes of glass and the wooden shutters. At least, that was Bronson’s assumption, because only one of the windows on the lowest level and two on the middle level had the shutters folded back, but it was a reasonable guess that what had been done to one window in a row would also have been done to the others. The very top window had neither shutters nor a steel grille, but its height above the ground made reaching it almost impossible without a very long ladder. And Bronson didn’t think Marcus and his men were the kind of people who would leave a long ladder somewhere in the grounds for the convenience of any passing burglar.

Bronson tucked the binoculars away again, eased himself slowly backward, away from his vantage point, and retreated about five yards into the wood. Then he began moving around to his left, taking extreme care not to do anything that might attract the attention of anyone watching from inside the house. Now that he was closer to the building, he was also even more alert for the presence of tripwires or sensors, because they might have installed them close to the building, where wild animals would be less likely to roam.

It took him another fifteen minutes of slow and cautious progress, but finally he was able to look at the left-hand side of the house. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a much more encouraging sight than the back of the building had been. Over half of the windows had the shutters open, but each one had the same kind of metal grille fitted to it.

The only possible entry point he could see was a single door positioned more or less in the middle, but which through the binoculars he could see was fitted with two locks: a Yale or its German equivalent, and some kind of a dead bolt, to judge from the shape of the keyhole. The Yale, like most locks of that type, would probably yield to a bit of gentle pressure against the latch from a credit card, but the dead bolt was an entirely different proposition, and Bronson had neither the tools nor the skill even to attempt to open it.

He lowered the binoculars from his face and considered his next move. He dismissed the idea of working his way around to the other side of the building; he’d seen the level of security on two sides of the house; he doubted very much if he’d find an easy way in anywhere else. Whoever had designed the property’s passive defenses-the openings that formed the doors and windows-seemed to have done a good job, and they would certainly not have left the remainder of the house unprotected.

Although he’d still seen nobody, he knew he daren’t risk walking across the open space around the house and trying the door. It would be locked, he was certain, but there was also a good chance it would be alarmed, so even if by some miracle it had been left unlocked, the moment he stepped inside, the siren would go off. The previous evening he’d noticed a square box on the front wall of the house bearing a three-letter legend, which he was almost certain belonged to a monitored alarm company. He had much the same system in his own home back in Kent.

He hated to admit it, but it looked as if his plan to get inside the house wasn’t going to work. About all he could do was observe, and unless somebody appeared soon, that wasn’t going to achieve any results either.

Then another thought crossed his mind, something that gave him a glimmer of hope for the first time since he’d arrived at the house.

There was one door to the property that definitely wasn’t secured with a dead bolt, and that would probably be opened wide at some point during the day: the electric garage door. There was a chance he might be able to force it, but even if that proved impossible, if anybody arrived or left the house, the door would have to be open long enough to allow them to drive in or out of the garage. And when the door was opened, there was at least a chance that he could sneak inside undetected.

That was a kind of a plan, he supposed, and it was the only one he had, so Bronson slid backward away from his observation post and slowly, with infinite care, began to work his way around the perimeter of the clearing toward the front of the house.

When he reached a spot from which he could see that part of the property clearly, he wriggled into position in the undergrowth and began his observation. As he’d expected, the garage door was shut, and there was still no sign of activity anywhere in the property. He focused the binoculars on the box he’d noticed on the front wall, and could clearly see the logo. It showed the company trigraph inside a stylized fortress wall, and there was a small red light flashing regularly in the center, which just confirmed his suspicions.

He guessed that showed that the system was armed, and that probably meant the house was empty, because most homeowners would set their alarms only when they left the premises. And if it was empty, with any luck somebody would be coming back to it during the afternoon-or the evening, if he was unlucky. If it was a single man, Bronson hoped he’d be able to overpower him, and force him to hand over the Walther and the recording made by the camera.

He was aware that there were a rather large number of variables and uncertainties in the scenario he’d envisaged, but he was optimistic. He also knew it was probably going to be a long afternoon, so he made himself as comfortable as he could, placed the binoculars to one side, and rested his head on his crossed arms.

It was a hot day, the sun was warm on his back, and the sound of buzzing insects and birdsong was gently soporific. Ten minutes later, Bronson was sound asleep.