Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [65]
The Opel accelerated to her walkway, then slowed. Two men in dark coats leaped out before it was fully stopped. The driver stayed in the car. Katrin braved a glance at them. Both wore belted coats and both carried pistols. One yelled at her to stop.
She thought vaguely that perhaps she could make it into her house. She climbed the eight steps to the porch, passing ivy planters on both sides. The home had been in Adam's family for eighty years, but she and Adam had planned after the war on finding a house with more light and fewer rooms. The enormous black oak door had a wrought-iron grate over a center portal. She uselessly fumbled for her keys. Maybe if she could get inside, look at their wedding portrait once more.
The Gestapo agents scrambled up the front steps and onto the porch behind her. Perhaps only because it was habit, the taller agent clubbed her with the butt of his handgun. Katrin sagged against the door, then slid to the mat.
The second agent caught her suitcase as it fell. He was a plug of a man, with his weight in his chest. He slipped his pistol into his belt and opened the suitcase. The plug grinned. "A pack radio."
The first agent said, "We've been looking for you a long while. You've kept a lot of us busy." He bent to dig roughly into her pockets.
He pulled out her one-time pad. "Looks like we've found ourselves a professional." He continued his search of her, patting her down, but found no weapons.
"They all talk down IN the cellar, professional or not." The plug laughed. "They talk and talk and talk."
The agents lifted Katrin by her elbows. She found she could focus her eyes. Pain from behind her ear poured down her neck and into the rest of her body. Her legs were rubbery, but the agents held her up. They carried her down the stairs and along the walkway toward the car. They chatted about something, but she could not think beyond the agony of her head. They approached the Opel, with its sweeping fenders and long hood shaped like a coffin. Darkness hid the driver.
The taller agent opened the back passenger door. Gestapo cars have the cab lights disconnected to hide comings and goings. The tall agent bent to enter the car first.
The plug waited behind Katrin. He said tonelessly "You can tell us about your radio broadcasts on the way to Prinze Albrecht Strasse. It'll save us time once we get there."
She thought she heard the tall agent cough from inside the cab. The plug put a hand on her head and pushed her down toward the door. He shoved her onto the back seat.
Everything inside the car was entirely wrong. Instead of the tall Gestapo agent, a blond, chop-jawed man sat in the middle of the leather seat, a knife in his hand. Blood dripped from the knife onto his trousers. The body of the tall Gestapo agent was pushed against the far door, crumpled and slack, blood gushing from a wound in his throat. In the front seat, the Gestapo driver was bent over his steering wheel, his hands loose at his sides. Katrin could hear blood from the driver's neck splashing onto the floor. The radio direction finder was on the seat next to the driver, its gauges glowing amber.
The blond man held a finger to his lips. He was smiling narrowly behind his hand. He wore a Wehrmacht major's uniform. For all his concern, he might have been sitting in a pew in church.
The plug had heard nothing When he bent to enter the cab, the blond reached across Katrin, gripped the agent by a coat lapel and jerked him into the car.
The agent did not even have time to register surprise. The blond brought the agent's head down over the knife, and the blade worked swiftly. The momentum of the plug's body carried him across Katrin. The agent shook violently and then relaxed in death, his last sound a liquid sigh. His body came to rest on the first agent. In one smooth motion, the agents had entered one door alive and ended up against the other door dead. The agents seemed a pile of leather. Less than ten seconds had elapsed since the first agent