The Isis Covenant

XXXIII

Paul Dornberger jumped from the steps of the private jet onto the tarmac at Zurich airport and walked swiftly across the apron to his waiting car. Once inside the gleaming black Mercedes SUV he wasted no time.

‘Is everything in place, Sergei?’

‘Not yet, sir.’ The man beside him flinched at the blind rage in Dornberger’s eyes. ‘There are complications. The house is on a narrow strip of land between the lakeside road and the Zurichsee. It’s walled on all landward sides and covered by security cameras, which we have to assume are monitored twenty-four hours. Given the target’s area of expertise, we also have to plan for additional security precautions within the grounds themselves. None of that would matter if there was a suitable position nearby to use as a base for a surprise attack, but the lakeshore is heavily populated and short of taking over a neighbouring property there’s nowhere satisfactory. We would be compromised before we could get anywhere near the walls, never mind the house.’

Dornberger listened with growing anger. Like Oleg Samsonov’s security team, these men were all former Special Forces soldiers, but there the comparison ended. They were freelancers, Russian and east European mercenaries hired on a mission-by-mission basis and paid for by a special fund Paul had created over the years, and which he alone could access. These people were professionals, they were supposed to supply solutions, not whine about their problems. ‘I want to see for myself.’

It took thirty minutes to drive through the town and another twenty to reach the property, halfway along the lake’s twenty-mile east bank. One pass was enough to confirm what the Russian said. The attack would have to be at night and the first hint of a vehicle stopping would set the alarm bells ringing. There was no screened parking within a mile. Despite the grandeur of the house and those around it, the area was heavily built up, with homes, shops and factories bordering the roadside, each of them no doubt with their own security arrangements and CCTV cameras.

‘If you could give us another forty-eight hours to do a proper reconnaissance …’

‘No.’

Sergei nodded and his voice regained its confidence. ‘In that case, our only option is to come in from the lake. Two assault boats, four men each — we estimate a security team of not more than four men — we come in silent and make our landing among the trees beside the lake. I would suggest dawn, when experience tells us there will be a heavy mist on the water at this time of year. We approach the house in stealth, taking care of any opposition as we go, but when we reach it, we go in hard, stopping for nothing.’

‘You understand I want the old man alive?’

‘Yes, sir, that’s understood by everyone. What about the rest?’

‘Kill them all. I don’t want to leave any witnesses.’ Saintclair and the woman had done their part, they had led Sergei to the house. They were no longer required. In any case, it would have been only a matter of time. He already had Hartmann’s identity from the document trail the old fool had left as a result of the donations he had made to the Jews and to his family. ‘And for the withdrawal?’

‘We’ve identified a place for insertion two miles to the north, but we plan to withdraw to the opposite side of the lake in the exit phase of the operation. There’s a suitable landing ground that isn’t overlooked at a place called Vorder Au, directly opposite the target house. We’ll sink the boats and return separately to the rented accommodation.’

Paul Dornberger smiled for the first time since landing in Zurich. So close, after twenty years. He had feared the old man might already be dead and the trail gone cold, but he could almost smell the scent of Berndt Hartmann’s fear. The payments to the families in New York and London had been the start of a long paper trail. Electronic penetration of the company named as the proxy of the Jersey lawyer’s office had revealed first dozens, then hundreds of regular payments to Jewish support organizations and individual survivors of the so-called Holocaust. Not a Holocaust, his father would have said, but a reckoning. One of those payments had led them from a corporation that manufactured safes in the United States to a small holding company based in Zurich, Switzerland. After that, all it had taken was money.

Hartmann is soft, his father had said, he does not have our strength of will. He will reveal himself.

And now he had.

Twenty years. He could wait another twelve hours.

‘We go in at dawn.’