For a moment the officer looked uncertain. Then he cocked his chin up and resumed his arrogant tone. “There’s no one back here but us. It won’t hurt to ring Lieutenant Luhr upstairs.”
He lifted the phone from its cradle, then leaned over Hans’s face and stared. Hans lay completely still, but it would not have saved them. Hauer could see what was coming. The policeman’s left hand was moving up to Hans’s wrist, searching for a pulse …
Hauer brought his right fist down like a hammer on the man’s temple. Hans’s eyes shot open when the body landed on him, but he stayed on the gurney. Hauer quickly wrapped the telephone cord several times around the stunned guard’s wrists, then, spying a cloth napkin on the desk, stuffed it into his mouth and let him fall to the floor. “Hang on!” he bellowed. He slammed the gurney through the heavy door that led to the rear parking lot.
The cold hit them like a wall of ice.
“Get up!” Hauer said. “We’ve got to steal a car. Mine’s parked in front of the station.”
“Mine’s back here,” Hans groaned, trying to rise.
“You’ve still got your keys?”
“No one took them.”
“Idiots! Give them to me!”
Hans fished the keys out of his pocket and handed them over. Hauer helped him off the gurney and into the car, then climbed into the driver’s seat and fired the engine. Incredibly, the Volkswagen kicked over without grumbling.
“This is our lucky day,” Hans croaked, still a bit silly from the blow to his head.
Hauer drove slowly out of the lot, turning south on the Friedrichstrasse to avoid the reporters, then shot down the first side street he came to. He had to make some decisions very fast, but he could think of nowhere safe to make them. Just drive, he thought. Head for the seedy section of the city and let my mind clear. Instinct would guide him. It always had. Maybe Hans could give him a direction. He reached over and jerked Hans’s chin up.
“Wake up! It’s time to talk.”
“My God,” Hans mumbled. “Weiss … what did they do to him?”
Hauer cruised past the Anhalter Banhof, then wrenched the VW into another side street. “That was play time,” he growled, “compared to what they’ll do if they find us. You’d better have some answers, Hans. I just threw away my badge, my reputation, my pension, and probably my life. If you mention our stupid agreement now, I’ll brain you myself. Now make yourself useful. Start watching for patrol cars.”
Praying that he would awaken from this nightmare, Hans slid up in his seat, put a hand to his throbbing head, and peered out into the icebound Berlin darkness.
9:55 P.M. British Sector: West Berlin
As Captain Hauer wheeled Hans’s Volkswagen out of Polizei Abschnitt 53, Professor Natterman stepped out of a taxi thirty blocks away, paid his cabbie, and hurried into the milling throngs of Zoo Station. He tried to walk slowly, but found it difficult. Missing his train would mean standing around the station for hours with nothing to do but worry about the nine sheets of onionskin taped into the small of his back. Sighting a ticket window with a short queue, he got into line and set down his heavy suitcase.
Ten minutes later Professor Natterman was safely berthed in a first-class car, poring over a short volume by Dr. J. R. Rees, the British Army psychiatrist who had supervised the first extensive examinations of “Rudolf Hess” after his famous flight. It made for tedious reading, and Natterman had trouble concentrating. His mind kept returning to the Spandau papers. He had no doubt that Prisoner Number Seven had told the truth—if only because, to date, the man had provided the only possible version of events that fit all the known facts.
The Rudolf Hess case, Natterman believed, shared one major similarity with the assassination of the American president John F. Kennedy. There was simply too much information. A surfeit of facts, inconsistencies, myth, and conjecture. Everyone had his pet conspiracy theory. If one accepted the medical evidence that “Number Seven” was not Hess, then two general theories held popular sway. Natterman dismissed them both out of hand, but like most farfetched theories, each was based upon a tantalizing grain of truth.
The primary theory—put forward by the British surgeon who first uncovered the medical evidence—held that one of the top Nazis (either Heinrich Himmler or Hermann Göring) had wanted to supplant Hitler and had decided to use Hess’s wartime double to do it. To accomplish this, either Göring or Himmler (or both) would have to have ordered the real Hess shot down over the North Sea, then sent his double rushing on to England. There the double would supposedly have asked the British government if it might accept peace with Germany, if someone other than Hitler reigned in Berlin. Natterman considered this pure fantasy. Both Nazi chieftains had possessed the power to give such orders, of course. And there was quite a body of evidence suggesting that both men had prior knowledge of Hess’s plan to fly to Britain. But the question Natterman could not ignore was why Himmler or Göring should have elected to murder Hess, then use his double for such a sensitive mission in the first place. It was a harebrained scheme that would have carried tremendous risk of discovery by Hitler, and thus was totally out of character for both the prudent SS chief and the flamboyant but wily Luftwaffe commander. Only a week before Hess’s flight, Himmler had sent a secret envoy to Switzerland to discuss the possibility of an Anglo-German peace, with himself as chancellor of the Reich. That might not be so exciting as murder in the skies, but it was Himmler’s true style.
The other popular theory held that the real Hess had reached England alive, but that the British government—for reasons of its own—had wanted him silenced. They supposedly killed Hess, then searched among German prisoners of war for a likely double, whom they brainwashed, bribed, or blackmailed into impersonating the Deputy Führer. Natterman considered this tripe of the lowest order. His researches indicated that a “brainwashed” man was little more than a zombie—certainly not capable of impersonating Hess for more than a few hours, much less for forty-six years. And as far as British bribes or blackmail, Natterman didn’t believe any German impersonator would sacrifice fifty years of his life for British money or even British threats.
Yet this theory, too, was partially based on fact. No informed historian doubted that the British government wanted the Hess affair buried. They had proved it time and again throughout the years, and Professor Natterman did not discount the possibility that the British had murdered Hess’s double just four weeks ago. It was also true that only a native German could have successfully impersonated Hess for so long. Not just any German, however, it would have to have been a German trained specifically by Nazis to impersonate Hess, and whose service was either voluntary, or motivated by the threat of some terrible penalty. A penalty like Sippenhaft.
Natterman felt a shiver of excitement. The author of the Spandau papers had satisfied all those requirements, and more. For the first time, someone had offered a credible—probably the only—answer to when and how the double had been substituted for the real Hess. If the papers were correct, he never had been. Hess and his double had flown to Britain in the same plane. It had been the double in British hands from the very first moment! Natterman recalled that a prominent British journalist had written a novel suggesting that, since the Messerschmitt 110 could carry two men, Hess might not have flown to Britain alone. But no one had ever suggested that Hess’s double could have been that passenger!
Natterman drummed his fingers compulsively as his brain shifted up to a higher plane of analysis. Facts were the