The Keep

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Rado L. Lencek, professor of Slavic languages at Columbia University, for his prompt and enthusiastic response to a very odd request from a stranger.

The author also wishes to acknowledge an obvious debt to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Robert Ervin Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith.

F. Paul Wilson

April, 1979 -- January, 1981

PROLOGUE

Warsaw, Poland

Monday, 28 April 1941

0815 hours

A year and a half ago there had been another name on the door, a Polish name, and no doubt a title and the name of a department or bureau in the Polish government. But Poland no longer belonged to the Poles, and the name had been crudely obliterated with thick, heavy strokes of black paint. Erich Kaempffer paused outside the door and tried to remember the name. Not that he cared. It was merely an exercise in memory. A mahogany plaque now covered the spot, but smears of black showed around its edges. It read:

SS-Oberfü hrer W. Hossbach

RSHA—Division of Race and Resettlement

Warsaw District

He paused to compose himself. What did Hossbach want of him? Why the early morning summons? He was angry with himself for letting this get to him, but no one in the SS, no matter how secure his position, even an officer rising as rapidly as he, could be summoned to report "immediately" to a superior's office without experiencing a spasm of apprehension.

Kaempffer took one last deep breath, masked his anxiety, and pushed through the door. The corporal who acted as General Hossbach's secretary snapped to attention. The man was new and Kaempffer could see that the soldier didn't recognize him. It was understandable—Kaempffer had been at Auschwitz for the past year.

"Sturmbannführer Kaempffer," was all he said, allowing the youngster to take it from there. The corporal pivoted and strode through to the inner office. He returned immediately.

"Oberführer Hossbach will see you now, Herr Major."

Kaempffer breezed past the corporal and stepped into Hossbach's office to find him sitting on the edge of his desk.

"Ah, Erich! Good morning!" Hossbach said with uncharacteristic joviality. "Coffee?"

"No thank you, Willhelm." He had craved a cup until this very moment, but Hossbach's smile had immediately put him on guard. Now there was a knot where an empty stomach had been.

"Very well, then. But take off your coat and get comfortable."

The calendar said April, but it was still cold in Warsaw. Kaempffer wore his overlong SS greatcoat. He removed it and his officer's cap slowly and hung them on the wall rack with great care, forcing Hossbach to watch him and, perhaps, to dwell on their physical differences. Hossbach was portly, balding, in his early fifties. Kaempffer was a decade younger, with a tightly muscled frame and a full head of boyishly blond hair. And Erich Kaempffer was on his way up.

"Congratulations, by the way, on your promotion and on your new assignment. The Ploiesti position is quite a plum."

"Yes." Kaempffer maintained a neutral tone. "I just hope I can live up to Berlin's confidence in me."

"I'm sure you will."

Kaempffer knew that Hossbach's good wishes were as hollow as the promises of resettlement he made to the Polish Jews: Hossbach had wanted Ploiesti for himself—every SS officer wanted it. The opportunities for advancement and for personal profit in being commandant of the major camp in Romania were enormous. In the relentless pursuit of position within the huge bureaucracy created by Heinrich Himmler, where one eye was always fixed on the vulnerable back of the man ahead of you, and the other eye ever watchful over your shoulder at the man behind you, there was no such thing as a sincere wish for success.

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Kaempffer scanned the walls and repressed a sneer as he noted more lightly colored squares and rectangles where degrees and citations had been hung by the previous occupant. Hossbach had not redecorated. Typical of the man to try to give the impression that he was much too busy with SS matters to bother with trifles such as having the walls painted. It was so obviously an act. Kaempffer did not need to put on a show of his devotion to the SS. His every waking hour was devoted to furthering his position in the organization.

He pretended to study the large map of Poland on the wall, its face studded with colored pins representing concentrations of undesirables. It had been a busy year for Hossbach's RSHA office; it was through here that Poland's Jewish population was being directed toward the "resettlement center" near the rail nexus of Auschwitz. Kaempffer imagined his own office-to-be in Ploiesti, with a map of Romania on the wall, studded with his own pins. Ploiesti... there could be no doubt that Hossbach's cheery manner boded ill. Something had gone wrong somewhere and Hossbach was going to make full use of his last few days as superior officer to rub Kaempffer's nose in it.

"Is there some way I might be of service to you?" Kaempffer finally asked.

"Not to me, per se, but to the High Command. There is a little problem in Romania at the moment. An inconvenience, really."

"Oh?"

"Yes. A small regular army detachment stationed in the Alps north of Ploiesti has been suffering some losses—apparently due to local partisan activity—and the officer wishes to abandon his position."

"That's an army matter." Major Kaempffer didn't like this one bit. "It has nothing to do with the SS."

"But it does." Hossbach reached behind him and plucked a piece of paper off his desk top. "The High Command passed this on to Obergruppenführer Heydrich's office. I think it is rather fitting that I pass it on to you."

"Why fitting?"

"The officer in question is Captain Klaus Woermann, the one you brought to my attention a year or so ago because of his refusal to join the Party."

Kaempffer allowed himself an instant of guarded relief. "And since I'll be in Romania, this is to be dumped in my lap."

"Precisely. Your year's tutelage at Auschwitz should not only have taught you how to run an efficient camp, but how to deal with partisan locals as well. I'm sure you'll solve the matter quickly."

"May I see the paper?"

"Certainly."

Kaempffer took the proffered slip of paper and read the two lines. Then he read them again.

"Was this decoded properly?"

"Yes. I thought the wording rather odd myself, so I had it double-checked. It's accurate."

Kaempffer read the message again:

Request immediate relocation.

Something is murdering my men.

A disturbing message. He had known Woermann in the Great War and would always remember him as one of the stubbornest men alive. And now, in a new war, as an officer in the Reichswehr, Woermann had repeatedly refused to join the Party despite relentless pressure. Not a man to abandon a position, strategic or otherwise, once he had assumed it. Something must be very wrong for him to request relocation.

But what bothered Kaempffer even more was the choice of words. Woermann was intelligent and precise. He knew his message would pass through a number of hands along the transcription and decoding route and had been trying to get something across to the High Command without going into detail.

But what? The word "murder" implied a purposeful human agent. Why then had he preceded it with "something"? A thing—an animal, a toxin, a natural disaster—could kill but it could not murder.

"I'm sure I don't have to tell you," Hossbach was saying, "that since Romania is an ally state rather than an occupied territory, a certain amount of finesse will be required."

"I'm quite well aware of that."

A certain amount of finesse would be required in handling Woermann, too. Kaempffer had an old score to settle with him.

Hossbach tried to smile, but the attempt looked more like a leer to Kaempffer. "All of us at RSHA, all the way up to General Heydrich, will be most interested to see how you fare in this ... before you move on to the major task at Ploiesti."

The emphasis on the word "before," and the slight pause preceding it were not lost on Kaempffer. Hossbach was going to turn this little side trip to the Alps into a trial by fire. Kaempffer was due in Ploiesti in one week; if he could not handle Woermann's problem with sufficient dispatch, then it might be said of him that perhaps he was not the man to set up the resettlement camp at Ploiesti. There would be no shortage of candidates to take his place.

Spurred by a sudden sense of urgency, he rose and put on his coat and cap. "I foresee no problems. I'll leave at once with two squads of einsatzkommandos. If air transport can be arranged and proper rail connections made, we can be there by this evening."

"Excellent!" Hossbach said, returning Kaempffer's salute.

"Two squads should be sufficient to take care of a few guerrillas." He turned and stepped to the door.

"More than sufficient, I'm sure."

SS-Sturmbannführer Kaempffer did not hear his superior's parting remark. Other words filled his mind: "Something is murdering my men."

Dinu Pass, Romania

28 April 1941

1322 hours

Captain Klaus Woermann stepped to the south window of his room in the keep's tower and spat a stream of white into the open air.

Goat's milk—gah! For cheese, maybe, but not for drinking.

As he watched the liquid dissipate into a cloud of pale droplets plummeting the hundred feet or so to the rocks below, Woermann wished for a brimming stein of good German beer. The only thing he wanted more than the beer was to be gone from this antechamber to Hell.

But that was not to be. Not yet, anyway. He straightened his shoulders in a typically Prussian gesture. He was taller than average and had a large frame that had once supported more muscle but was now tending toward flab. His dark brown hair was cropped close; he had wide-set eyes, equally brown; a slightly crooked nose, broken in his youth; and a full mouth capable of a toothy grin when appropriate. His gray tunic was open to the waist, allowing his small paunch to protrude. He patted it. Too much sausage. When frustrated or dissatisfied, he tended to nibble between meals, usually at a sausage. The more frustrated and dissatisfied, the more he nibbled. He was getting fat.

Woermann's gaze came to rest on the tiny Romanian village across the gorge, basking in the afternoon sunlight, peaceful, a world away. Pulling himself from the window, he turned and walked across the room, a room lined with stone blocks, many of them inlaid with peculiar brass-and-nickel crosses. Forty-nine crosses in this room to be exact. He knew. He had counted them numerous times in the last three or four days. He walked past an easel holding a nearly finished painting, past a cluttered makeshift desk to the opposite window, the one that looked down on the keep's small courtyard.

Below, the off-duty men of his command stood in small groups, some talking in low tones, most sullen and silent, all avoiding the lengthening shadows. Another night was coming. Another of their number would die.

One man sat alone in a corner, whittling feverishly. Woermann squinted down at the piece of wood taking shape in the carver's hands—a crude cross. As if there weren't enough crosses around!

The men were afraid. And so was he. Quite a turnaround in less than a week. He remembered marching them through the gates of the keep as proud soldiers of the Wehrmacht, an army that had conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium; and then, after sweeping the remnants of the British Army into the sea at Dunkirk, had gone on to finish off France in thirty-nine days. And just this month, Yugoslavia had been overrun in twelve days, Greece in a mere twenty-one as of yesterday. Nothing could stand against them. Born victors.

But that had been last week. Amazing what six horrible deaths could do to the conquerors of the world. It worried him. During the past week the world had constricted until nothing existed for him and for his men beyond this undersized castle, this tomb of stone. They had run up against something that defied all their efforts to stop it, that killed and faded away, only to return to kill again. The heart was going out of them.

They ... Woermann realized that he had not included himself among them for some time. The fight had gone out of his own heart back in Poland, near the town of Posnan ... after the SS had moved in and he had seen firsthand the fate of those "undesirables" left in the wake of the victorious Wehrmacht. He had protested. As a result, he had seen no further combat since then. Just as well. He had lost all pride that day in thinking of himself as one of the conquerors of the world.

He left the window and returned to the desk. He stood at its edge, oblivious to the framed photographs of his wife and his two sons, and stared down at the decoded message there.

SS-Sturmbannführer Kaempffer arriving today with detachment einsatzkommandos. Maintain present position.

Why an SS major? This was a regular army position. The SS had nothing to do with him, with the keep, or with Romania as far as he knew. But then there were so many things he failed to understand about this war. And Kaempffer, of all people! A rotten soldier, but no doubt an exemplary SS man. Why here? And why with einsatzkommandos? They were extermination squads. Death's Head Troopers. Concentration camp muscle. Specialists in killing unarmed civilians. It was their work he had witnessed outside Posnan. Why were they coming here?

Unarmed civilians ... the words lingered ... and as they did, a smile crept slowly into the corners of his mouth, leaving his eyes untouched.

Let the SS come. Woermann was now convinced there was an unarmed civilian of sorts at the root of all the deaths in the keep. But not the helpless cringing sort the SS was used to. Let them come. Let them taste the fear they so dearly loved to spread. Let them learn to believe in the unbelievable.

Woermann believed. A week ago he would have laughed at the thought. But now, the nearer the sun to the horizon, the more firmly he believed... and feared. All within a week. There had been unanswered questions when they had first arrived at the keep, but no fear. A week. Was that all? It seemed ages ago that he had first laid eyes on the keep...

ONE

In Summation: The refining complex at Ploiesti has relatively good natural protection to the north. The Dinu Pass through the Transylvanian Alps offers the only overland threat, and that a minor one. As detailed elsewhere in the report, the sparse population and spring weather conditions in the pass make it theoretically possible for a sizable armored force to make its way undetected from the southwest Russian steppes, over the southern Carpathian foothills, and through the Dinu Pass to emerge from the mountains a scant twenty miles northwest of Ploiesti with only flat plains between it and the oil fields.

Because of the crucial nature of the petrol supplied by Ploiesti, it is recommended that until Operation Barbarossa is fully under way, a small watch force be set up within the Dinu Pass. As mentioned in the body of the report, there is an old fortification midway along the pass which should serve adequately as a sentry base.

DEFENSE ANALYSIS FOR PLOIESTI, ROMANIA Submitted to Reichswehr High Command 1 April 1941

Dinu Pass, Romania

Tuesday, 22 April

1208 hours

No such thing as a long day here, no matter what the time of year, thought Woermann as he looked up the sheer mountain walls, an easy thousand feet high on either side of the pass. The sun had to climb a 30-degree arc before it could peek over the eastern wall and could travel only 90 degrees across the sky before it was again out of sight.

The sides of the Dinu Pass were impossibly steep, as close to vertical as mountain wall could be without overbalancing and crashing down; a bleak expanse of stark, jagged slabs with narrow ledges and precipitous drops, relieved occasionally by conical collections of crumbling shale. Brown and gray, clay and granite, these were the colors, interspersed with snatches of green. Stunted trees, bare now in the early spring, their trunks gnarled and twisted by the wind, hung precariously by tenacious roots that had somehow found weak spots in the rock. They clung like exhausted mountaineers, too tired to move up or down.

Close behind his command car Woermann could hear the rumble of the two lorries carrying his men, and behind them the reassuring rattle of the supply truck with their food and weapons. All four vehicles were crawling in line along the west wall of the pass where for ages a natural shelf of rock had been used as a road. The Dinu was narrow as mountain passes go, averaging only half a mile across the floor along most of its serpentine course through the Transylvanian Alps—the least explored area of Europe. Woermann looked longingly at the floor of the pass, fifty feet below to his right; it was smooth and green and pathed along its center. It would have been a smoother, shorter trip down there, but his orders warned that their destination was inaccessible to wheeled vehicles from the floor of the pass. They had to keep to the ridge road.

Road? Woermann snorted. This was no road. He would have classed it as a trail or, more appropriately, a ledge. A road it was not. The Romanians hereabouts apparently did not believe in the internal combustion engine and had made no provisions for the passage of vehicles using it.

The sun disappeared suddenly; there was a rumble, a flash of lightning, and then it was raining again. Woermann cursed. Another storm. The weather here was maddening. Squalls repeatedly swooped down between the walls of the pass, spearing lightning in all directions, threatening to bring the mountains down with their thunder, dumping rain in torrents as if trying to lose ballast so they could rise over the peaks and escape. And then they would be gone as abruptly as they had arrived. Like this one.

Why would anyone want to live here? he wondered. Crops grew poorly, yielding enough for subsistence and little more. Goats and sheep seemed to do well enough, thriving on the tough grasses below and the clear water off the peaks. But why choose a place like this to live?

Woermann had his first look at the keep as the column passed through a small flock of goats clustered at a particularly sharp turn in the path. He immediately sensed something strange about it, but it was a benign strangeness. Castlelike in design, it was not classified a castle because of its small size. So it was called a keep. It had no name, and that was peculiar. It was supposedly centuries old, yet it looked as if the last stone had been slipped into place only yesterday. In fact, his initial reaction was that they had made a wrong turn some where. This could not possibly be the deserted 500-year-old fortification they were to occupy.

Halting the column, he checked the map and confirmed that this indeed was to be his new command post. He looked at the structure again, studying it.

Ages ago a huge flat slab of rock had thrust itself out from the western wall of the pass. Around it ran a deep gorge through which flowed an icy stream that appeared to spring from within the mountain. The keep sat on that slab. Its walls were sleek, perhaps forty feet high, made of granite block, melting seamlessly into the granite of the mountainside at its rear—the work of man somehow at one with the work of nature. But the most striking feature of the small fortress was the solitary tower that formed its leading edge: flat-topped, jutting out toward the center of the pass, at least 150 feet from its notched parapet to the rocky gorge below. That was the keep. A holdover from a different age. A welcome sight in that it assured dry living quarters during their watch over the pass.

But strange the way it looked so new.

Woermann nodded to the man next to him in the car and began folding the map. His name was Oster, a sergeant; the only sergeant in Woermann's command. He doubled as a driver. Oster signaled with his left hand and the car moved forward with the other three vehicles following. The road—or trail, rather—widened as they swung farther around the bend, and came to rest in a tiny village nestled against the mountainside south of the keep, just across the gorge from it.

As they followed the trail into the center of the village, Woermann decided to reclassify that as well. This was no village in the German sense; this was a collection of stucco-walled, shake-roofed huts, all single-story affairs except for the one at the northernmost end. This stood to the right, had a second floor and a sign out front. He didn't read Romanian but had a feeling it was an inn of sorts. Woermann couldn't imagine the need for an inn—who would ever come here?

A few hundred" feet or so beyond the village, the trail ended at the edge of the gorge. From there a timbered causeway supported by stone columns spanned the 200 feet or so across the rocky gorge, providing the keep's sole link to the world. The only other possible means of entry were to scale its sheer stone walls from below, or to slide and rope-hop down a thousand feet of equally sheer mountainside from above.

Woermann's practiced military eye immediately assessed the strategic values of the keep. An excellent watchpost. This entire stretch of the Dinu Pass would be in plain view from the tower; and from the keep's walls fifty good men could hold off an entire battalion of Russians. Not that Russians would ever be coming through the Dinu Pass, but who was he to question High Command?

There was another eye within Woermann, and it was assessing the keep in its own way. An artist's eye, a landscape lover's... to use water colors, or to trust oil pigment to catch that hint of brooding watchfulness? The only way to find out would be to try them both. He would have plenty of free time during the coming months.

"Well, Sergeant," he said to Oster as they halted at the edge of the causeway, "what do you think of your new home?"

"Not much, sir."

"Get used to it. You'll probably be spending the rest of the war here."

"Yes, sir."

Noting an uncharacteristic stiffness in Oster's replies, Woermann glanced at his sergeant, a slim, dark man only slightly more than half Woermann's age.

"Not much war left anyway, Sergeant. Word came as we set out that Yugoslavia has surrendered."

"Sir, you should have told us! It would have lifted our spirits!"

"Do they need lifting so badly?"

"We'd all prefer to be in Greece at the moment, sir."

"Nothing but thick liquor, tough meat, and strange dancing there. You wouldn't like it."

"For the fighting, sir."

"Oh, that."

Woermann had noticed the facetious turn of his mind moving closer and closer to the surface during the past year. It was not an enviable trait in any German officer and could be dangerous to one who had never become a Nazi. But it was his only defense against his mounting frustration at the course of the war and of his career. Sergeant Oster had not been with him long enough to realize this. He'd learn in time, though.

"By the time you got there, Sergeant, the fighting would be over. I expect surrender within the week."

"Still, we all feel we could be doing more for the Führer there than in these mountains."

"You shouldn't forget that it is your Führer's will that we be stationed here." He noted with satisfaction that the "your" slipped right by Oster.

"But why, sir? What purpose do we serve?"

Woermann began his recitation: "High Command considers the Dinu Pass a direct link from the steppes of Russia to all those oil fields we passed at Ploiesti. Should relations between Russia and the Reich ever deteriorate, the Russians might decide to launch a sneak attack at Ploiesti. And without that petrol, the Wehrmacht's mobility would be seriously impaired."

Oster listened patiently despite the fact that he had heard the explanation a dozen times before and had himself given a version of the same story to the men in the detachment. Yet Woermann knew he remained unconvinced. Not that he blamed him. Any reasonably intelligent soldier would have questions. Oster had been in the army long enough to know that it was highly irregular to place a seasoned veteran officer at the head of four infantry squads with no second officer, and then to assign the entire detachment to an isolated pass in the mountains of an ally state. It was a job for a green lieutenant.

"But the Russians have plenty of their own oil, sir, and we have a treaty with them."

"Of course! How stupid of me to forget! A treaty. No one breaks treaties anymore."

"You don't think Stalin would dare betray the Führer, do you?"

Woermann bit back the reply that leaped to mind:

Not if your Führer can betray him first. Oster wouldn't understand. Like most members of the postwar generation, he had come to equate the best interests of the German people with the will of Adolf Hitler. He had been inspired, inflamed by the man. Woermann had found himself far too old for such infatuation. He had celebrated his forty-first birthday last month. He had watched Hitler move from beer halls, to the Chancellory, to godhood. He had never liked him.

True, Hitler had united the country and had started it on the road to victory and self-respect again, something for which no loyal German could fault him. But Woermann had never trusted Hitler, an Austrian who surrounded himself with all those Bavarians—all southerners. No Prussian could trust a bunch of southerners like that. Something ugly about them. What Woermann had witnessed at Posnan had shown him just how ugly.

"Tell the men to get out and stretch," he said, ignoring Oster's last question. It had been rhetorical, anyway. "Inspect the causeway to see if it will support the vehicles while I go over and take a look inside."

As he walked the length of the causeway, Woermann thought its timbers looked sturdy enough. He glanced over the edge at the rocks and gurgling water below. A long way down—sixty feet at least. Best to have the lorries and the supply truck empty but for their drivers, and to bring them across one at a time.

The heavy wooden gates in the keep's entrance arch were wide open, as were the shutters on most of the windows in the walls and in the tower. The keep seemed to be airing out. Woermann strolled through the gates and into the cobblestone courtyard. It was cool and quiet. He noticed that there was a rear section to the keep, apparently carved into the mountain, that he hadn't seen from the causeway.

He turned around slowly. The tower loomed over him; gray walls surrounded him on every side. He felt as if he were standing within the arms of a huge slumbering beast, one he dared not awaken.

Then he saw the crosses. The inner walls of the courtyard were studded with hundreds of them ... thousands of them. All the same size and shape, all the same unusual design: The upright was a good ten inches high, squared at the top and lipped at the base; the crosspiece measured about eight inches and had a slight upward angle at each end. But the odd part was the height on the uprights at which the crosspiece was set—any higher and the cross would have become an upper-case "T."

Woermann found them vaguely disturbing ... something wrong about them. He stepped over to the nearest cross and ran his hand over its smooth surface. The upright was brass and the crosspiece nickel, all skillfully inlaid into the surface of the stone block.

He looked around again. Something else bothered him. Something was missing. Then it hit him—birds. There were no pigeons on the walls. Castles in Germany had flocks of pigeons about them, nesting in every nook and cranny. There wasn't a single bird to be seen anywhere on the walls, the windows, or the tower.

He heard a sound behind him and whirled, unsnapping the flap on his holster and resting his palm on the butt of his Luger. The Romanian government might be an ally of the Reich, but Woermann was well aware that there were groups within its borders that were not. The National Peasant Party, for instance, was fanatically anti-German; it was out of power now but still active. There might be violent splinter groups here in the Alps, hiding, waiting for a chance to kill a few Germans.

The sound was repeated, louder now. Footsteps, relaxed, with no attempt at stealth. They came from a doorway in the rear section of the keep, and as Woermann watched, a thirtyish man in a sheepskin cojoc stepped through the opening. He didn't see Woermann. There was a mortar-filled palette in his hand, and he squatted with his back to Woermann and began to patch some crumbling stucco around the doorframe.

"What are you doing here?" Woermann barked. His orders had implied that the keep was deserted.

Startled, the mason leaped up and spun around, the anger in his face dying abruptly as he recognized the uniform and realized that he had been addressed in German. He gibbered something unintelligible—something in Romanian, no doubt, Woermann realized with annoyance that he'd have to either find an interpreter or learn some of the language if he was going to spend any time here.

"Speak German! What are you doing here?"

The man shook his head in a mixture of fear and indecision. He held up an index finger, a signal to wait, then shouted something that sounded like "Papa!"

There was a clatter above as an older man with a woolly caciula on his head pushed open the shutters of one of the tower windows and looked down. Woermann's grip tightened on the butt of his Luger as the two Romanians carried on a brief exchange. Then the older one called down in German:

"I'll be right down, sir."

Woermann nodded and relaxed. He went again to one of the crosses and examined it. Brass and nickel ... almost looked like gold and silver.

"There are sixteen thousand eight hundred and seven such crosses imbedded in the walls of this keep," said a voice behind him. The accent was thick, the words practiced.

Woermann turned. "You've counted them?" He judged the man to be in his mid-fifties. There was a strong family resemblance between him and the younger mason he had startled. Both were dressed in identical peasant shirts and breeches except for the older man's woolly hat. "Or is that just something you tell your tour customers?"

"I am Alexandra," he said stiffly, bowing slightly at the waist. "My sons and I work here. And we take no one on tours."

"That will change in a moment. But right now: I was led to believe the keep was unoccupied."

"It is when we go home at night. We live in the village."

"Where's the owner?"

Alexandra shrugged. "I have no idea."

"Who is he?"

Another shrug. "I don't know."

"Who pays you, then?" This was getting exasperating. Didn't this man know how to do anything other than shrug and say he didn't know?

"The innkeeper. Someone brings money to him twice a year, inspects the keep, makes notes, then leaves. The innkeeper pays us monthly."

"Who tells you what to do?" Woermann waited for another shrug but it did not come.

"No one." Alexandru stood straight and spoke with quiet dignity. "We do everything. Our instructions are to maintain the keep as new. That's all we need to know. Whatever needs doing, we do. My father spent his life doing it, and his father before him, and so on. My sons will continue after me."

"You spend your entire lives maintaining this building? I can't believe that!"

"It's bigger than it looks. The walls you see around you have rooms within them. There are corridors of rooms below us in the cellar and carved into the mountainside behind us. Always something to be done."

Woermann's gaze roamed up the sullen walls, half in shadow, and down to the courtyard again, also deep in shadow despite the fact that it was early afternoon. Who had built the keep? And who was paying to have it maintained in such perfect condition? It didn't make sense. He stared at the shadows and it occurred to him that had he been the keep's builder he would have placed it on the other side of the pass where there was a better southern and western exposure to the light and the warmth of the sun. As it was situated, night must always come early to the keep.

"Very well," he told Alexandru. "You may continue your maintenance tasks after we settle in. But you and your sons must check with the sentries when you enter and leave." He saw the older man shaking his head. "What's wrong?"

"You cannot stay here."

"And why not?"

"It is forbidden."

"Who forbids?"

Alexandra shrugged. "It's always been that way. We are to maintain the keep and see to it that no one trespasses."

"And of course, you're always successful." The old man's gravity amused him.

"No. Not always. There have been times when travelers have stayed against our wishes. We do not resist them—we have not been hired to fight. But they never stay more than one night. Most not even that long."

Woermann smiled. He had been waiting for this. A deserted castle, even a pocket-sized one such as this, had to be haunted. If nothing else, it would give the men something to talk about.

"What drives them away? Moaning? Chain-rattling spectres?"

"No... no ghosts here, sir."

"Deaths then? Gruesome murders? Suicides?" Woermann was enjoying himself. "We have more than our share of castles in Germany, and there's not a one that doesn't have some fireside scare story connected with it."

Alexandra shook his head. "No one's ever died here. Not that I know of."

"Then what? What drives trespassers out after only one night?"

"Dreams, sir. Bad dreams. And always the same, from what I can gather ... something about being trapped in a tiny room with no door and no windows and no lights ... utter darkness ... and cold ... very cold ... and something in the dark with you ... colder than the dark... and hungry."

Woermann felt a hint of a chill across his shoulders and down his back as he listened. It had been on his mind to ask Alexandra if he himself had ever spent a night in the keep, but the look in the Romanian's eyes as he spoke was answer enough. Yes, Alexandra had spent a night in the keep. But only once.

"I want you to wait here until my men are across the causeway," he said, shaking off the chill. "Then you can give me a tour."

Alexandra's face was a study in helpless frustration. "It is my duty, Herr Captain," he said with stern dignity, "to inform you that no lodgers are allowed here in the keep."

Woermann smiled, but with neither derision nor condescension. He understood duty and respected this man's sense of it.

"Your warning has been delivered. You are faced with the German Army, a force beyond your power to resist, and so you must step aside. Consider your duty faithfully discharged."

This said, Woermann turned and moved toward the gate.

He still had seen no birds. Did birds have dreams? Did they, too, nest here for one night and never return?

The command car and the three unloaded trucks were driven across the causeway and parked in the courtyard without incident. The men followed on foot, carrying their own gear, then returned to the other side of the gorge to begin bringing over the contents of the supply truck—food, generators, antitank weapons—by hand.

While Sergeant Oster took charge of the work details, Woermann followed Alexandra on a quick tour of the keep. The number of identical brass-and-nickel crosses inlaid at regular intervals in the stones of every corridor, every room, every wall, continued to amaze him. And the rooms... they seemed to be everywhere: within the walls girding the courtyard, under the courtyard, in the rear section, in the watchtower. Most of them were small; all were unfurnished.

"Forty-nine rooms in all, counting the suites in the tower," Alexandra said.

"An odd number, don't you think? Why not round it off to fifty?"

Alexandra shrugged. "Who is to say?"

Woermann ground his teeth. If he shrugs once more...

They walked along one of the rampart walls that ran out diagonally from the tower then angled straight back to the mountain. He noted that there were crosses imbedded in the breast-high parapet, too. A question rose in his mind: "I don't recall seeing any crosses in the outer aspect of the wall."

"There aren't any. Only on the inside. And look at the blocks here. See how perfectly they fit. Not a speck of mortar is used to hold them together. All the walls in the keep are constructed this way. It's a lost art."

Woermann didn't care about stone blocks. He indicated the rampart beneath their feet. "You say there are rooms below us here?"

"Two tiers of them within each wall, each with a slit window through the outer wall, and a door to a corridor leading to the courtyard."

"Excellent. They'll do nicely for barracks. Now to the tower."

The watchtower was of unusual design. It had five levels, each consisting of a two-room suite that took up all of the level save the space required for a door onto a small exposed landing. A stone stairway climbed the inner surface of the tower's northern wall in a steep zigzag.

Breathing hard after the climb, Woermann leaned over the parapet that rimmed the tower roof and scanned the long stretch of the Dinu Pass commanded by the keep. He could now see the best placements for his antitank rifles. He had little faith in the effectiveness of the 7.92mm Panzerbuchse 38s he had been given, but then he didn't expect to have to use them. Nor the mortars. But he would set them up anyway.

"Not much can go by unnoticed from up here," he said, speaking to himself.

Alexandra replied unexpectedly. "Except in the spring fog. The whole pass gets filled with heavy fog every night during the spring."

Woermann made a mental note of that. Those on watch duty would have to keep their ears open as well as their eyes.

"Where are all the birds?" he asked. It bothered him that he hadn't seen any yet.

"I've never seen a bird in the keep," Alexandra said. "Ever."

"Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

"The keep itself is odd, Herr Major, what with its crosses and all. I stopped trying to explain it when I was ten years old. It's just here."

"Who built it?" Woermann asked, and turned away so he wouldn't have to see the shrug he knew was coming.

"Ask five people and you will get five answers. All different. Some say it was one of the old lords of Wallachia, some say it was a defiant Turk, and there are even a few who believe it was built by one of the Popes. Who knows for sure? Truth can shrink and fancy can grow much in five centuries."

"You really think it takes that long?" Woermann said, taking in a final survey of the pass before he turned away. It can happen in a matter of a few years.

As they reached courtyard level, the sound of hammering drew Alexandra toward the corridor that ran along the inner wall of the south rampart. Woermann followed. When Alexandru saw men hammering at the walls, he ran ahead for a closer look, then scurried back to Woermann.

"Herr Captain, they're driving spikes between the stones!" he cried, his hands twisting together as he spoke. "Stop them! They're ruining the walls!"

"Nonsense! Those 'spikes' are common nails, and there's one being placed only every ten feet or so. We have two generators and the men are stringing up lights. The German Army does not live by torchlight."

As they progressed down the corridor, they came upon a soldier kneeling on the floor and stabbing at one of the blocks in the wall with his bayonet. Alexandra became even more agitated.

"And him?" the Romanian said in a harsh whisper. "Is he stringing lights?"

Woermann moved swiftly and silently to a position directly behind the preoccupied private. As he watched the man pry at one of the inlaid crosses with the point of his heavy blade, Woermann felt himself tremble and break out in a cold sweat.

"Who assigned you to this duty, soldier?"

The private started in surprise and dropped his bayonet. His pinched face paled as he turned to see his commanding officer standing over him. He scrambled to his feet.

"Answer me!" Woermann shouted.

"No one, sir." He stood at attention, eyes straight ahead.

"What was your assignment?"

"To help string the lights, sir."

"And why aren't you?"

"No excuse, sir."

"I'm not your drill sergeant, soldier. I want to know what you had in mind when you decided to act like a common vandal rather than a German soldier. Answer me!"

"Gold, sir," the private said sheepishly. It sounded lame and he evidently knew it. "There's been talk that this castle was built to hide papal treasure. And all these crosses, sir ... they look like gold and silver. I was just—"

"You were neglecting your duty, soldier. What's your name?"

"Lutz, sir."

"Well, Private Lutz, it's been a profitable day for you. You've not only learned that the crosses are made of brass and nickel rather than gold and silver, but you've earned yourself a place on the first watch all week as well. Report to Sergeant Oster when you've finished with the lights."

As Lutz sheathed his fallen bayonet and marched away, Woermann turned to Alexandra to find him white-faced and trembling.

"The crosses must never be touched!" the Romanian said. "Never!"

"And why not?"

"Because it's always been that way. Nothing in the keep is to be changed. That is why we work. That is why you must not stay here!"

"Good day, Alexandra," Woermann said in a tone he hoped would signal the end of the discussion. He sympathized with the older man's predicament, but his own duty took precedence.

As he turned away he heard Alexandra's plaintive voice behind him.

"Please, Herr Captain! Tell them not to touch the crosses! Not to touch the crosses!"

Woermann resolved to do just that. Not for Alexandra's sake, but because he could not explain the nameless fear that had crept over him as he had watched Lutz pry at that cross with his bayonet. It had not been a simple stab of unease, but rather a cold, sick dread that had coiled about his stomach and squeezed. And he could not imagine why.

Wednesday, 23 April

0320 hours

It was late by the time Woermann gratefully settled into his bedroll on the floor of his quarters. He had chosen the third floor of the tower for himself; it stood above the walls and was not too hard a climb. The front room would serve as an office, the smaller rear room as a personal billet. The two front windows—glassless rectangular openings in the outer wall flanked by wooden shutters—gave him a good view of most of the pass, and the village as well; through the pair of windows to the rear he was able to keep an eye on the courtyard.

The shutters were all open to the night. He had turned off his lights and spent a quiet moment at the front windows. The gorge was obscured by a gently undulating layer of fog. With the passing of the sun, cold air had begun to slip down from the mountain peaks, mixing with the moist air along the floor of the pass, which still retained some heat from the day. A white drifting river of mist was the result. The scene was lit only by starlight, but such an incredible array of stars as seen only in the mountains. He could stare at them and almost understand the delirious motion in Van Gogh's Starry Night. The silence was broken only by the low hum of the generators situated in a far corner of the courtyard. A timeless scene, and Woermann lingered over it until he felt himself nodding off.

Once in the bedroll, however, he found sleep elusive despite his fatigue, his mind scattering thoughts in all directions: cold tonight, but not cold enough for the fireplaces ... no wood for them anyway ... heat wouldn't be a problem with summer coming on ... neither would water since they had found cisterns full of it in the cellar floor, fed continuously by an underground stream... sanitation always a problem ... how long were they going to be here anyway? ... should he let the men sleep in tomorrow after the long day they had just finished? ... maybe get Alexandru and his boys to fashion some cots for the men and himself to get them off these cold stone floors ... especially if they would be here into the fall and winter months ... if the war lasted that long...

The war ... it seemed so far away now. The thought of resigning his commission drifted across his mind again. During the day he could escape it, but here in the dark where he was alone with himself it crept up and crouched on his chest, demanding attention.

He couldn't resign now, not while his country was still at war. Especially not while he was stationed in these desolate mountains at the whim of the soldier-politicians in Berlin. That would be playing directly into their hands. He knew what was on their minds: Join the Party or we'll keep you out of the fight; join the Party or we'll disgrace you with assignments like watchdog duty in the Transylvanian Alps; join the Party or resign.

Perhaps he'd resign after the war. This spring marked his twenty-fifth year in the army. And with the way things were going, perhaps a quarter century was enough. It would be good to be home every day with Helga, spend some time with the boys, and hone his painting skills on Prussian landscapes.

Still... the army had been home for so long, and he could not help but believe that the German Army would somehow outlast these Nazis. If he could just hang on long enough...

He opened his eyes and looked into the darkness. Although the wall opposite him was lost in shadow, he could almost sense the crosses inlaid in the stone blocks there. He was not a religious man, but there was unaccountable comfort to be found in their presence.

Which brought to mind the incident in the corridor this afternoon. Try as he might, Woermann could not completely shake off the dread that had gripped him as he had watched that private—what was his name? Lutz?—gouging that cross.

Lutz ... Private Lutz ... that man was trouble ... better have Oster keep an eye on him...

He drifted into sleep wondering if Alexandra's nightmare awaited him.

TWO

The Keep

Wednesday, 23 April

0340 hours

Private Hans Lutz squatted under a naked low-wattage bulb, a lone figure perched on an island of light midstream in a river of darkness, pulling deeply on a cigarette, his back against the cold stone of the keep's cellar walls. His helmet was off, revealing blond hair and a youthful face marred by the hard set of his eyes and mouth. Lutz ached all over. He was tired. He wanted nothing more than to climb into his bedroll for a few hours of oblivion. In fact, if it were just a bit warmer down here in the cellar he would doze off right where he was.

But he could not allow that to happen. Getting first watch for the entire week was bad enough—God knows what would happen if he got caught sleeping on duty. And it was not beyond Captain Woermann to come strolling down the very corridor where Lutz was sitting, just to check up on him. He had to stay awake.

Just his luck for the captain to come by this afternoon. Lutz had been eyeing those funny-looking crosses since he first set foot in the courtyard. Finally, after an hour of his being near them, the temptation had been too great. They had looked like gold and silver, yet it seemed impossible they would be. He'd had to find out, and now he was in trouble.

Well, at least he had satisfied his curiosity: no gold or silver. The knowledge hardly seemed worth a week of first watch, though.

He cupped his hands around the pulsating glow of his cigarette tip to warm them. Gott, it was cold! Colder down here than in the open air up on the rampart where Ernst and Otto were patrolling. Lutz had come down to the cellar knowing it was cold. Ostensibly, he hoped the lower temperature would refresh him and help keep him awake; actually, he wanted a chance for a private reconnaissance.

For Lutz had yet to be dissuaded from his belief that there was papal treasure here. There were too many indications—in fact, everything pointed to it. The crosses were the first and most obvious clue; they weren't good, strong, symmetrical Maltese crosses, but they were crosses nonetheless. And they did look like gold and silver. Further, none of the rooms was furnished, which meant that no one was intended to live here. But far more striking was the constant maintenance: Some organization had been paying the upkeep of this place for centuries without interruption. Centuries! He knew of only one organization with the power, the resources, and the continuity for that—the Catholic Church.

As far as Lutz was concerned, the keep was being maintained for only one purpose: to safeguard Vatican loot.

It was here somewhere—behind the walls or under the floors—and he'd find it.

Lutz stared at the stone wall across the corridor from him. The crosses were particularly numerous down here in the cellar, and as usual they all looked the same—

—except perhaps for that one off to the left there, the one in the stone on the bottom row at the edge of the light ... something different about the way the wan illumination glanced off its surface. A trick of the light? A different finish?

Or a different metal?

Lutz took his Schmeisser automatic from its resting place across his knees and leaned it against the wall. He unsheathed his bayonet as he crawled across the corridor on his hands and knees. The instant the point touched the yellow metal of the cross's upright he knew he was on to something: The metal was soft... soft and yellow as only solid gold can be.

His hands began to tremble as he dug the tip of the blade into the interface of cross and stone, wedging it deeper and deeper until he felt it grate against stone. Despite increasing pressure, he could advance the blade no farther. He had penetrated to the rear of the inlaid cross. With a little work he was sure he could pop the entire thing out of the stone in one piece. Leaning against the handle of the knife, Lutz applied steadily increasing pressure. He felt something give and stopped to look.

Damn! The tempered steel of the bayonet was tearing through the gold. He tried to adjust the vector of force more directly outward from the stone, but the metal continued to bulge, to stretch—

—the stone moved.

Lutz withdrew the bayonet and studied the block. Nothing special about it: two feet wide, about a foot and a half high, and probably a foot deep. It was unmortared like the rest of the blocks in the wall, only now it stood a full quarter inch out from its fellows. He rose and paced the distance down to the doorway on the left; entering the room there, he paced the distance back to the wall within. He repeated the procedure on the other side in the room to the right of the loose stone. Simple addition and subtraction revealed a significant discrepancy. The number of steps didn't match.

There was a large dead space behind the wall.

With a tight thrill tingling in his chest, Lutz fairly fell upon the loose block, prying frantically at its edge. Despite his best efforts, however, he could not move it any farther out of the wall. He hated the thought, but finally had to admit that he couldn't do it alone. He would have to bring someone else in on this.

Otto Grunstadt, patrolling the wall at this moment, was the obvious choice. He was always looking for a way to pick up a few quick and easy marks. And there were more than a few involved here. Behind that loose stone waited millions in papal gold. Lutz was sure of it. He could almost taste it.

Leaving his Schmeisser and bayonet behind, he ran for the stairs.

"Hurry, Otto!"

"I still don't know about this," Grunstadt said, trotting to keep up. He was heavier, darker than Lutz, and sweating despite the cold. "I'm supposed to be on duty above. If I'm caught—"

"This will only take a minute or two. It's right over here," Lutz said.

After helping himself to a kerosene lamp from the supply room, he had literally pulled Grunstadt from his post, talking all the while of treasure and of being rich for life, of never having to work again. Like a moth catching sight of a light, Grunstadt had followed.

"See?" Lutz said, standing over the stone and pointing. "See how it's out of line?"

Grunstadt knelt to examine the warped and lacerated border of the stone's inlaid cross. He picked up Lutz's bayonet and pressed the cutting edge against the yellow metal of the upright. It cut easily.

"Gold, all right," he said softly. Lutz wanted to kick him, tell him to hurry up, but he had to let Grunstadt make up his own mind. He watched him try the bayonet point on all the other crosses within reach. "All the other uprights are brass. This is the only one that's worth anything."

"And the stone that it's in is loose," Lutz added quickly. "And there's a dead space behind it six feet wide and who knows how deep."

Grunstadt looked up and grinned. The conclusion was inescapable. "Let's get started."

Working in concert they made progress, but not quickly enough to satisfy Lutz. The stone block canted infinitesimally to the left, then to the right, and after fifteen minutes of backbreaking labor it stood less than an inch out from the wall.

"Wait," Lutz panted. "This thing is a foot deep. It'll take all night like this. We'll never finish before the next watch. Let's see if we can bend the center of the cross out a little more. I've got an idea."

Using both bayonets, they managed to bulge the gold upright out of its groove at a point just below the silver crosspiece, leaving enough space behind it to slip Lutz's belt through between the metal and the stone.

"Now we can pull straight out!"

Grunstadt returned the smile, but weakly. He seemed uneasy about being away from his post for so long. "Then let's get to it".

They put their feet on the wall above and beside the block, each with both hands on the belt, then threw their aching backs, legs, and arms into extracting the stubborn stone. With a high-pitched scrape of protest, it began to move, shimmying, shuddering, sliding. Then it was out. They pushed it to the side and Lutz fumbled for a match.

"Ready to be rich?" He lit the kerosene lamp and held it to the opening. Nothing but darkness within.

"Always," Grunstadt replied. "When do I start counting?"

"Soon as I get back." He adjusted the flame, then began to belly-crawl through the opening, pushing the lamp ahead of him. He found himself in a narrow stone shaft, angled slightly downward ... and only four feet long. The shaft ended at another stone block, identical to the one they had just struggled so long and so hard to move. Lutz held the lamp close to it. This cross looked like gold and silver, too.

"Give me the bayonet," he said, reaching his hand back to Grunstadt.

Grunstadt placed the handle of the bayonet into the waiting palm. "What's the matter?"

"Roadblock."

For a moment, Lutz felt defeated. With barely room for one man in the narrow shaft, it would be impossible to remove the second stone that faced him. The whole wall would have to be broken through, and that was more than he and Grunstadt could hope to accomplish on their own, no matter how many nights they worked at it. He didn't know what to do next, but he had to satisfy his curiosity as to the metals in the inlaid cross before him. If the upright was gold, he would at least be sure that he was on the right track.

Grunting as he twisted within the confinement of the shaft, Lutz dug the point of the bayonet into the cross. It sank easily. But more, the stone began to swing backward, as if hinged on its left side. Ecstatic, Lutz pushed at it with his free hand and found that it was only a facade no more than an inch thick. It moved easily at his touch, releasing a waft of cold, fetid air from the darkness beyond it. Something in that air caused the hair on his arms and at the base of his neck to stand on end.

Cold, he thought, as he felt himself shiver involuntarily, but not that cold.

He stifled a growing unease and crawled forward, sliding the lamp ahead of him along the stone floor of the shaft. As he passed it through the new opening, the flame began to die. It neither flickered nor sputtered within its glass chimney, so the blame could not be laid on any turbulence in the cold air that continued to drift past him. The flame merely began to waste away, to wither on its wick. The possibility of a noxious gas crossed his mind, but Lutz could smell nothing and felt no shortness of breath, no eye or nasal irritation.

Perhaps the kerosene was low. As he pulled the lamp back to him to check, the flame returned to its former size and brightness. He shook the base and felt the liquid slosh around within. Plenty of kerosene. Puzzled, he pushed the lamp forward again, and again the flame began to shrink. The farther into the chamber he pushed it, the smaller it became, illuminating absolutely nothing. Something was wrong here.

"Otto!" he called over his shoulder. "Tie the belt around one of my ankles and hold on. I'm going further down."

"Why don't we wait until tomorrow ... when it's light?"

"Are you mad? The whole detail will know then! They'll all want a share—and the captain will probably take most of it! We'll have done all the work and we'll wind up with nothing!"

Grunstadt's voice wavered. "I don't like this anymore."

"Something wrong, Otto?"

"I'm not sure. I just don't want to be down here anymore."

"Stop talking like an old woman!" Lutz snapped. He didn't need Grunstadt going soft on him now. He felt uneasy himself, but there was a fortune just inches away and he wasn't going to let anything stop him from claiming it. "Tie that belt and hold on! If this shaft gets any steeper, I don't want to slip down."

"All right," came the reluctant reply from behind him. "But hurry."

Lutz waited until he felt the belt cinch tight around his left ankle, then began to crawl forward into the dark chamber, the lamp ahead of him. He was seized by a sense of urgency. He moved as quickly as the confined space would allow. By the time his head and shoulders were through the opening, the lamp's flame had dimmed to a tiny blue-white flicker ... as if the light were unwelcome, as if the darkness had sent the flame back into its wick.

As Lutz advanced the lamp a few more inches, the flame died. With its passing he realized he was not alone.

Something as dark and as cold as the chamber he had entered was awake and hungry and beside him. He began to shake uncontrollably. Terror ripped through his bowels. He tried to retreat, to pull his shoulders and head back but he was caught. It was as if the shaft had closed upon him, holding him helpless in a darkness so complete there was no up or down. Cold engulfed him, and so did fear—a combined embrace that threatened to drive him mad. He opened his mouth to call for Otto to pull him back. The cold entered him as his voice rose in an agony of terror.

Outside, the belt Grunstadt held in his hands began to whip back and forth as Lutz's legs writhed and kicked and thrashed about in the shaft. There was a sound like a human voice, but so full of horror and despair, and sounding so far away, that Grunstadt could not believe it came from his friend. The sound came to an abrupt gurgling halt that was awful to hear. And as it ceased, so did Lutz's frantic movements.

"Hans?"

No answer.

Thoroughly frightened, Grunstadt hauled back on the belt until Lutz's feet were within reach. He then gripped both boots and pulled Lutz back into the corridor.

When he saw what he had delivered from the shaft, Grunstadt began to scream. The sound echoed up and down the cellar corridor, reverberating and growing in volume until the very walls began to shake.

Cowed by the amplified sound of his own terror, Grunstadt stood transfixed as the wall into which his friend had crawled bulged outward, minute cracks appearing along the edges of the heavy granite blocks. A wide crevice jagged up from the space left by the stone they had removed. The few puny lights strung along the corridor began to dim, and when they were nearly out, the wall burst open with a final convulsive tremor, showering Grunstadt with shards of shattered stone and releasing something inconceivably black that leaped out and enveloped him with a single smooth swift flowing motion.

The horror had begun.

THREE

Tavira, Portugal

Wednesday, 23 April

0235 hours (Greenwich Mean Time)

The red-haired man suddenly found himself awake. Sleep had dropped away like a loosened cloak and at first he did not know why. It had been a hard day of fouled nets and rough seas; after turning in at his usual hour, he should have slept through until first light. Yet now, after only a few hours, he was awake and alert. Why?

And then he knew.

Grim faced, he pounded his fist once, twice, into the cool sand around the low wooden frame of his bed. There was anger in his movements, and a certain resignation. He had hoped this moment would never come, had told himself time and again that it never would. But now that it was here, he realized it had been inevitable all along.

He rose from the bed and, clad only in a pair of undershorts, began to roam the room. He had smooth, even features, but the olive tint of his skin clashed with the red of his hair; his scarred shoulders were broad, his waist narrow. He moved with feline grace about the interior of the tiny shack, snatching items of clothing from hooks on the walls, personal articles from the table beside the door, all the while mentally planning his route of travel to Romania. When he had gathered up what he wanted, he tossed everything onto the bed and rolled it up in the bed blanket, tied the roll with string at both ends.

After pulling on a jacket and loose pants, he slung the rolled blanket across his shoulder, grabbed a short shovel and stepped out into the night air, cool, salty, moonless. Over the dunes, the Atlantic hissed and rumbled against the shore. He walked to the landward side of the dune nearest his hut and began to dig. Four feet down the shovel scraped against something solid. The red-haired man knelt and began to dig with his hands. A few quick, fierce movements brought him to a long, narrow, oilskin-wrapped case which he tugged and wrested from the hole. It measured five feet or so in length, was perhaps ten inches wide and only an inch deep. He paused, his shoulders slumping as he held the case in his hands. He had almost come to believe that he would never have to open it again. Putting it aside, he dug farther and came up with an unusually heavy money belt, also wrapped in oilskin.

The belt went under his shirt and around his waist, the long, flat case under his arm. With the onshore breeze ruffling his hair, he walked over the dune to where Sanchez kept his boat, high on the sand and tied to a piling as proof against the unlikely possibility of its drifting away in a freak tide. A careful man, Sanchez. A good boss. The red-haired man had enjoyed working for him.

Rummaging in the boat's forward compartment, he pulled out the nets and threw them on the sand. Next came the wooden box for tools and tackle. This joined the nets on the sand, but not before he had extricated a hammer and nail from its jumbled contents. He walked toward Sanchez's piling, drawing four Austrian hundred-kronen gold pieces from his money belt. There were many other gold coins in the belt, different sizes from different countries: Russian ten-ruble chevronets, Austrian hundred-shilling pieces, Czech ten-ducats, U.S. double eagles, and more. He would have to depend heavily on the universal acceptance of gold in order to travel the length of the Mediterranean in wartime.

With two swift, powerful strokes of the hammer, he pierced the four coins with a nail, fixing them to the piling. They'd buy Sanchez a new boat. A better one.

He untied the rope from the piling, dragged the boat into the quiet surf, hopped in, and grabbed the oars. When he had rowed past the breakers and had pulled the single sail to the top of its mast, he turned the prow east toward Gibraltar, not far away, and allowed himself a final look at the tiny starlit fishing village at the southern tip of Portugal that had been his home for the past few years. It hadn't been easy to work his way into their trust. These villagers had never accepted him as one of their own, and never would; but they had accepted him as a good worker. They respected that. The work had accomplished its purpose, leaving him lean and tight-muscled again after too many years of soft city-living. He had made friends, but no close ones. None he could not walk away from.

It was a hard life here, yet he would gladly work twice as hard and stay rather than go where he must and face what he must. His hands clenched and unclenched tensely at the thought of the confrontation that awaited him. But there was no one else to go. Only him.

He could not allow delay. He had to reach Romania as quickly as possible and had to travel the entire 2,300-mile length of the Mediterranean Sea to get there.

In the recently disturbed corner of his mind was the realization that he might not get there in time. That he might already be too late ... a possibility too awful to contemplate.

FOUR

The Keep

Wednesday, 23 April

0435 hours

Woermann awoke trembling and sweating at the same instant as everyone else in the keep. It was not Grunstadt's prolonged and repeated howling that had done it, for Woermann was out of earshot of the sound. Something else had ripped him gasping with terror from his sleep ... the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.

After a moment of confusion, Woermann shrugged into his tunic and trousers and ran down the steps to the base of the tower. The men were beginning to trickle out of their rooms and into the courtyard as he arrived, to gather in tense, muttering groups listening to the eerie howl that seemed to come from everywhere. He directed three of the men toward the arch that led to the cellar stairs. He had just reached the top of the stairs himself when two of them reappeared, white faced, tight lipped, and trembling.

"There's a dead man down there!" one said.

"Who is it?" Woermann asked as he pushed between them and started down the steps.

"I think it's Lutz, but I'm not sure. His head's gone!"

A uniformed corpse awaited him in the central corridor. It lay on its belly, half covered with stony rubble. Headless. But the head had not been sliced off, as with a guillotine, or hacked off—it had been torn off, leaving stumps of arteries and a twisted vertebra protruding within the ragged edge of the skin of the neck. The soldier had been a private, and that was all he could tell at first glance. A second private sat nearby, his wide, blank, staring eyes fixed on the hole in the wall before him. As Woermann watched, the second soldier shuddered and emitted a loud, long, wavering ululation that raised the fine hairs along Woermann's nape.

"What happened here, Private?" Woermann asked, but the soldier did not react. Woermann grabbed his shoulder and shook him but there was no sign in the eyes that he even knew his commanding officer was there. He seemed to have crawled into himself and blocked out the rest of the world.

The rest of the men were inching down the corridor to see what had happened. Steeling himself, Woermann leaned over the headless figure and went through its pockets. The wallet held an identity card for Private Hans Lutz. He had seen dead men before, victims of war, but this was different. This sickened him in a way the others had not. Battlefield deaths were mostly impersonal; this was not. This was horrible, mutilating death for its own sake. And in the back of his mind was the question: Is this what happens when you deface a cross here in the keep?

Oster arrived with a lamp. When it was lit, Woermann held it before him and gingerly stepped through the large hole in the wall. The light bounced off blank walls. His breath puffed white in the air and drifted away behind him. It was cold, colder than it should be, with a musty odor, and something more ... a hint of putrescence that made him want to back away. But the men were watching.

He followed the cool draught of air to its source: a large, ragged hole in the floor. The stone of the floor had apparently fallen in when the wall collapsed. There was inky blackness below. Woermann held the lamp over the opening. Stone steps, strewn with rubble from the collapsed floor, led downward. One particular piece of rubble looked more spherical than the others. He lowered the lamp for a better look and stifled a cry when he saw what it was. The head of Private Hans Lutz, open eyed and bloody mouthed, stared back at him.

FIVE

Bucharest, Romania

Wednesday, 23 April

0455 hours

It did not occur to Magda to question her actions until she heard her father's voice calling her.

"Magda!"

She looked up and saw her face in the mirror over her dresser. Her hair was down, a glossy cascade of dark brown that splashed against her shoulders and flowed down her back. She was unaccustomed to seeing herself so. Usually, her hair was tightly coiled up under her kerchief, all but a few stubborn strands tucked safely out of sight. She never let it down during the day.

An instant's confusion: What day was it? And what time? Magda glanced at the clock. Five minutes to five. Impossible! She had already been up for fifteen or twenty minutes. It must have stopped during the night. Yet when she picked it up she could feel the mechanism ticking away within. Strange...

Two quick steps took her to the window on the other side of the dresser. A peek behind the heavy shade revealed a dark and quiet Bucharest, still asleep.

Magda looked down at herself and saw she was still in her nightgown, the blue flannel one, tight at the throat and sleeves and loose all the way down to the floor. Her breasts, although not large, jutted out shamelessly under the soft, warm, heavy fabric, free of the tight undergarments that imprisoned them during the day. She quickly folded her arms over them.

Magda was a mystery to the community. Despite her soft, even features, her smooth, pale skin and wide brown eyes, at thirty-one she remained unmarried. Magda the scholar, the devoted daughter, the nursemaid. Magda the spinster. Yet many a younger woman who was married would have envied the shape and texture of those breasts: fresh, unmarred, unsuckled, untouched by any hand but her own. Magda felt no desire to alter that.

Her father's voice broke through her reverie.

"Magda! What are you doing?"

She glanced at the half-filled suitcase on the bed and the words sprang unbidden to her mind. "Packing us some warm clothes, Papa!"

After a brief pause her father said, "Come in here so I don't wake up the rest of the building with my shouting."

Magda made her way quickly through the dark to where her father lay. It took but a few steps. Their street-level apartment consisted of four rooms—two bedrooms side by side, a tiny kitchen with a wood-burning stove, and a slightly larger front room that served as foyer, living room, dining room, and study. She sorely missed their old house, but they had had to move in here six months ago to make the most of their savings, selling off the furniture that didn't fit. They had affixed the family mezuzah to the inside of the apartment's doorpost instead of the outside. Considering the temper of the times, that seemed wise.

One of her father's Gypsy friends had carved a small patrin circle on the outer surface of the door. It meant "friend."

The tiny lamp on the nightstand to the right of her father's bed was lit; a high-backed wooden wheelchair sat empty to the left. Pressed between the white covers of his bed like a wilted flower folded into the pages of a scrapbook lay her father. He raised a twisted hand, gloved in cotton as always, and beckoned, wincing at the pain the simple gesture caused him. Magda grasped the hand as she sat down beside him, massaging the fingers, hiding her own pain at seeing him fade away a little each day.

"What's this about packing?" he asked, his eyes bright in the tight, sallow glow of his face. He squinted at her. His glasses lay on the nightstand and he was virtually blind without them. "You never told me about leaving."

"We're both going," she replied, smiling.

"Where?"

Magda felt her smile falter as confusion came over her again. Where were they going? She realized she had no firm idea, only a vague impression of snowy peaks and chill winds.

"The Alps, Papa."

Her father's lips parted in a toothy smile that threatened to crack the parchment-like skin stretched so tightly over his facial bones.

"You must have been dreaming, my dear. We're going nowhere. I certainly won't be traveling far—ever again. It was a dream. A nice dream, but that's all. Forget it and go back to sleep."

Magda frowned at the crushed resignation in her father's voice. He had always been such a fighter. His illness was sapping more than his strength. But now was no time to argue with him. She patted the back of his hand and reached for the string on the bedside lamp.

"I guess you're right. It was a dream." She kissed him on the forehead and turned out the light, leaving him in darkness.

Back in her room, Magda studied the partially packed suitcase waiting on the bed. Of course it had been a dream that had made her think they were going somewhere. What else could it be? A trip anywhere was out of the question.

Yet the feeling remained ... such a dead certainty that they were going somewhere north, and soon. Dreams weren't supposed to leave such definite impressions. It gave her an odd, uncomfortable feeling ... like tiny cold fingers running lightly along the skin of her arms.

She couldn't shake the certainty. And so she closed the suitcase and shoved it under the bed, leaving the straps unfastened and the clothes inside ... warm clothes... it was still cold in the Alps this time of year.

SIX

The Keep

Wednesday, 23 April

0622 hours

It was hours before Woermann could sit with Sergeant Oster and have a cup of coffee in the mess. Private Grunstadt had been carried to a room and left alone there. He had been placed in his bedroll after being stripped and washed by two of his fellow privates. He had apparently wet and soiled his clothes before going into his delirium.

"As near as I can figure it," Oster was saying, "the wall collapsed and one of those big blocks of stone must have landed on the back of his neck and torn his head off."

Woermann sensed that Oster was trying to sound very calm and analytical, but inside was as confused and shocked as everybody else.

"As good an explanation as any, I suppose, barring a medical examination. But it still doesn't tell us what they were up to down there, and it doesn't explain Grunstadt's condition."

"Shock."

Woermann shook his head. "That man has been through battle. I know he's seen worse. I can't accept shock as the whole answer. There's something else."

He had arrived at his own reconstruction of the events of the preceding night. The stone block with its vandalized cross of gold and silver, the belt around Lutz's ankle, the shaft into the wall ... it all indicated that Lutz had crawled into the shaft expecting to find more gold and silver at its end. But all that was there was a small, empty, blind cubicle ... like a tiny prison cell... or hiding place. He could think of no good reason why there should be any space there at all.

"They must have upset the balance of the stones in the wall by removing that one at the bottom," Oster said. "That's what caused the collapse."

"I doubt that," Woermann replied, sipping his coffee for warmth as well as for stimulation. "The cellar floor, yes: That weakened and fell into the subcellar. But the corridor wall..." He remembered the way the stones had been scattered about the corridor, as if blown out by an explosion. He could not explain that. He set his coffee cup down. Explanations would have to wait.

"Come. Work to do." He headed for his quarters while Oster went to make the twice daily radio call to the Ploiesti defense garrison. The sergeant was instructed to report the casualty as an accidental death.

The sky was light as Woermann stood at the rear window of his quarters and looked down on the courtyard, still in shadow. The keep had changed. There was an unease about it. Yesterday the keep had been nothing more than an old stone building. Now it was more. Each shadow seemed deeper and darker than before, and sinister in some unfathomable way.

He blamed it on predawn malaise and on the shock of death so near at hand. Yet as the sun finally conquered the mountaintops on the far side of the pass, chasing the shadows and warming the stone walls of the keep, Woermann had the feeling that the light could not banish what was wrong. It could only drive it beneath the surface for a while.

The men felt it, too. He could see that. But he was determined to keep their spirits up. When Alexandra arrived this morning, he would send him back immediately for a cartload of lumber. There were cots and tables to be made. Soon the keep would be filled with the healthy sound of hammers in strong hands driving good nails into seasoned wood. He walked to the window facing the causeway. Yes, there was Alexandra and his two boys now. Everything was going to be all right.

He lifted his gaze to the tiny village, transected by the sunlight pouring over the mountaintops—its upper half aglow, its lower half still in shadow. And he knew he would have to paint the village just as he saw it now. He stepped back: The village, framed in the drab gray of the wall, shone like a jewel. That would be it ... the village seen through the window in the wall. The contrasts appealed to him. He had an urge to set up a canvas and start immediately. He painted best under stress and most loved to paint then, losing himself in perspective and composition, light and shadow, tint and texture.

The rest of the day went quickly. Woermann oversaw the placement of Lutz's body in the subcellar. It and the severed head were carried down through the opening in the cellar floor and covered with a sheet on the dirt floor of the cavern below. The temperature down there felt close to freezing. There was no sign of vermin about and it seemed the best place to store the cadaver until later in the week when arrangements could be made for shipment home.

Under normal circumstances, Woermann would have been tempted to explore the subcellar—the subterranean cavern with its glistening walls and inky recesses might have sparked an interesting painting. But not this time. He told himself it was too cold, that he would wait until summer and do a proper job of it. But that wasn't true. Something about this cavern urged him to be gone from it as soon as possible.

It became apparent as the day progressed that Grunstadt was going to be a problem. There was no sign of improvement. He lay in whatever position he was placed and stared into space. Every so often he would shudder and moan; occasionally, he would howl at the top of his lungs. He soiled himself again. At this rate, with no intake of food or fluid and without skilled nursing care, he would not survive the week. Grunstadt would have to be shipped out with Lutz's remains if he didn't snap out of it.

Woermann kept close watch on the mood of the men during the day and was satisfied with their response to the physical tasks he set for them. They worked well despite their lack of sleep and despite Lutz's death. They had all known Lutz, known what a schemer and a plotter he was, that he rarely carried his full share of the load. It seemed to be the consensus that he had brought on the very accident that had killed him.

Woermann saw to it that there was no time for mourning or brooding, even for those few so inclined. A latrine system had to be organized, lumber commandeered from the village, tables and chairs made. By the time the evening mess was cleared, there were few in the detachment willing to stay up for even an after-dinner cigarette. To a man, except for those on watch, they headed for their bedrolls.

Woermann allowed an alteration in the watch so that the courtyard guard would cover the corridor that led to Grunstadt's room. Because of his cries and moans, no one would spend the night within a hundred feet of him; but Otto had always been well liked by the men and they felt an obligation to see that he did himself no harm.

Near midnight, Woermann found himself still wide awake despite a desperate desire to sleep. With the dark had come a sense of foreboding that refused to let him relax. He finally gave in to a restless urge to be up and about and decided to tour the guard posts to be sure those on sentry duty were awake.

His tour took him down Grunstadt's corridor and he decided to look in on him. He tried to imagine what could have driven the man into himself like that. He peeked through the door. A kerosene lamp had been left burning with a low flame in a far corner of the room. The private was in one of his quiet phases, breathing rapidly, sweating and whimpering. The whimpering was followed regularly by a prolonged howl. Woermann wanted to be far down the hall when that occurred. It was unnerving to hear a human voice make a sound like that... the voice so near and the mind so far away.

He was at the end of the corridor and about to step into the courtyard again when it came. Only this wasn't like the others. This was a shriek, as if Grunstadt had suddenly awakened and found himself on fire, or pierced by a thousand knives—there was physical as well as emotional agony in the sound this time. And then it cut off, like pulling the plug on a radio in mid-song.

Woermann froze for an instant, his nerves and muscles unwilling to respond to his commands; with intense effort he forced himself to turn and run back down the corridor. He burst into the room. It was cold, colder than a minute ago, and the kerosene lamp was out. He fumbled for a match to relight it, then turned to Grunstadt.

Dead. The man's eyes were open, bulging toward the ceiling; the mouth was agape, the lips drawn back over the teeth as if frozen in the middle of a scream of horror. And his neck—the throat had been ripped open. There was blood all over the bed and splattered on the walls.

Woermann's reflexes took over. Before he even knew what he was doing, his hand had clawed his Luger from its holster and his eyes were searching the corners of the room for whoever had done this. But he could see no one. He ran to the narrow window, stuck his head through, and looked up and down the walls. There was no rope, no sign of anyone making an escape. He jerked his head back into the room and looked around again. Impossible! No one had come down the corridor, and no one had gone out the window. And yet Grunstadt had been murdered.

The sound of running feet cut off further thought—the guards had heard the shriek and were coming to investigate. Good ... Woermann had to admit to himself that he was terrified. He couldn't bear to be alone in this room much longer.

Thursday, 24 April

After seeing to it that Grunstadt's body was placed next to Lutz's, Woermann made sure the men were again kept busy all day building cots and tables. He fostered the belief that there was an anti-German partisan group at work in the area. But he found it impossible to convince himself; for he had been on the corridor when the murder had occurred and knew there was no way the killer could have got by him without being seen—unless he could fly or walk through walls. So what was the answer?

He announced that the sentries would be doubled tonight, with extra men posted in and around the barracks to safeguard those who were sleeping.

With the sound of insistent hammering rising from the courtyard below, Woermann took time out in the afternoon to set up one of his canvases. He began to paint. He had to do something to get that awful look on Grunstadt's face out of his mind; it helped to concentrate on mixing his pigments until their color approximated that of the wall in his room. He decided to place the window to the right of center, then spent the better part of two hours in the late afternoon blending the paint and smoothing it onto the canvas, leaving a white area for the village as seen through the window.

That night he slept. After interrupted slumber the first night, and none on the second, his exhausted body fairly collapsed onto his bedroll.

Private Rudy Schreck walked his patrol cautiously and diligently, keeping an eye on Wehner on the far side of the courtyard. Earlier in the evening, two men for this tiny area had seemed a bit much, but as darkness had grown and consolidated its hold on the keep, Schreck found himself glad to have someone within earshot. He and Wehner had worked out a routine: Both would walk the perimeter of the courtyard within an arm's length of the wall, both going clockwise at opposite sides. It kept them always apart, but it meant better surveillance.

Rudy Schreck was not afraid for his life. Uneasy, yes, but not afraid. He was awake, alert; he had a rapid-fire weapon slung over his shoulder and knew how to use it—whoever had killed Otto last night was not going to have a chance against him. Still, he wished for more light in the courtyard. The scattered bulbs spilling stark pools of brightness here and there along the periphery did nothing to dispel the overall gloom. The two rear corners of the courtyard were especially dark wells of blackness.

The night was chilly. To make matters worse, fog had seeped in through the barred gate and hung in the air around him, sheening the metal surface of his helmet with droplets of moisture. Schreck rubbed a hand across his eyes. Mostly he was tired. Tired of everything that had to do with the army. War wasn't what he had thought it would be. When he had joined up two years ago he had been eighteen with a head full of dreams of sound and fury, of great battles and noble victories, of huge armies clashing on fields of honor. That was the way it had always been in the history books. But real war hadn't turned out that way. Real war was mostly waiting. And the waiting was usually dirty, cold, nasty, and wet. Rudy Schreck had had his fill of war. He wanted to be home in Treysa. His parents were there, and so was a girl named Eva who hadn't been writing as often as she used to. He wanted his own life back again, a life in which there were no uniforms and no inspections, no drills, no sergeants, and no officers. And no watch duty.

He was coming to the rear corner of the courtyard on the northern side. The shadows looked deeper than ever there ... much deeper than on his last turn. Schreck slowed his pace as he approached. This is silly, he thought. Just a trick of the light. Nothing to be afraid of.

And yet... he didn't want to go in there. He wanted to skirt this particular corner. He'd go into all the other corners, but not this one.

Squaring his shoulders, Schreck forced himself forward. It was only shadow.

He was a grown man, too old to be afraid of the dark. He continued straight ahead, maintaining an arm's length from the wall, into the shadowed corner—

—and suddenly he was lost. Cold, sucking blackness closed in on him. He spun around to go back the way he had come but found only more blackness. It was as though the rest of the world had disappeared. Schreck pulled the Schmeisser off his shoulder and held it ready to fire. He was shivering with cold yet sweating profusely. He wanted to believe this was all a trick, that Wehner had somehow turned off all the lights at the instant he had entered the shadow. But Schreck's senses dashed that hope. The darkness was too complete—it pressed against his eyes and wormed its way into his courage.

There was someone approaching. Schreck could neither see nor hear him, but someone was there. Coming closer.

"Wehner?" he said softly, hoping his terror didn't show in his voice. "Is that you, Wehner?"

But it wasn't Wehner. Schreck realized that as the presence neared. It was someone—thing—else. What felt like a length of heavy rope suddenly coiled around his ankles. As he was yanked off his feet, Private Rudy Schreck began screaming and firing wildly until the darkness ended the war for him.

Woermann was jolted awake by a short sputtering burst from a Schmeisser. He sprang to the window overlooking the courtyard. One of the guards was running toward the rear. Where was the other? Damn! He had posted two guards in the courtyard! He was just about to turn and run for the stairs when he saw something on the wall. A pale lump... it almost looked like...

It was a body ... upside down ... a naked body hanging from a rope tied to its feet. Even from his tower window Woermann could see the blood that had run down from the throat over the face. One of his soldiers, fully armed and on patrol, had been slaughtered and stripped and hung up like a chicken in a butcher's window.

The fear that had so far only been nibbling at Woermann now asserted an icy, viselike grip on him.

Friday, 25 April

Three dead men in the subcellar. Defense command at Ploiesti had been notified of the latest mortality but no comment had been radioed back.

There was much activity in the courtyard during the day, but little accomplished. Woermann decided to pair the guards tonight. It seemed incredible that a partisan guerrilla could take an alert, seasoned soldier by surprise at his post, but it had happened. It would not happen with a pair of sentries.

In the afternoon he returned to his canvas and found a bit of relief from the atmosphere of doom that had settled on the keep. He began adding blotches of shadow to the blank gray of the wall, and then detail to the edges of the window. He had decided to leave out the crosses since they would be a distraction from the village, which he wanted to be the focus. He worked like an automaton, narrowing his world to the brushstrokes on the canvas, shutting away the terror around him.

Night came quietly. Woermann kept getting up from his bedroll and going to the window overlooking the courtyard, a useless routine but a compulsion, as if he could keep everyone alive by maintaining a personal watch on the keep. On one of his trips to the window, he noticed the courtyard sentry walking his tour alone. Rather than call down and cause a disturbance, he decided to investigate personally.

"Where's your partner?" he asked the lone sentry when he reached the courtyard.

The soldier whirled, then began to stammer. "He was tired, sir. I let him take a rest."

An uneasy feeling clawed at Woermann's belly. "I gave orders for all sentries to travel in pairs! Where is he?"

"In the cab of the first lorry, sir."

Woermann quickly crossed to the parked vehicle and pulled open the door. The soldier within did not move. Woermann poked at his arm.

"Wake up."

The soldier began to lean toward him, slowly at first, then with greater momentum until he was actually falling toward his commanding officer. Woermann caught him and then almost dropped him. For as he fell, his head angled back to reveal an open, mangled throat. Woermann eased the body to the ground, then stepped back, clamping his jaw against a scream of fright and horror.

Saturday, 26 April

Woermann had Alexandru and his sons turned away at the gate in the morning. Not that he suspected them of complicity in the deaths, but Sergeant Oster had warned him that the men were edgy about their inability to maintain security. Woermann thought it best to avoid a potentially ugly incident.

He soon learned that the men were edgy about more than security. Late in the morning a brawl broke out in the courtyard. A corporal tried to pull rank on a private to make him give up a specially blessed crucifix. The private refused and a fight between two men escalated into a brawl involving a dozen. It seemed there had been small talk about vampires after the first death; it had been ridiculed then. But with each new baffling death the idea had gained credence until believers now outnumbered nonbelievers. This was, after all, Romania, the Transylvanian Alps.

Woermann knew he had to nip this in the bud. He gathered the men in the courtyard and spoke to them for half an hour. He told them of their duty as German soldiers to remain brave in the face of danger, to remain true to their cause, and not to let fear turn them against one another, for that would surely lead to defeat.

"And finally," he said, noticing his audience becoming restive, "you must all put aside fear of the supernatural. There is a human agent at work in these deaths and we will find him or them. It is now plain that there must be a number of secret passages within the keep that allows the killer to enter and leave without being seen. We'll spend the rest of the day searching for those passages. And I am assigning half of you to guard duty tonight. We are going to put a stop to this once and for all!"

The men's spirits seemed to be lifted by his words. In fact, he had almost convinced himself.

He moved about the keep constantly during the rest of the day, encouraging the men, watching them measure floors and walls in search of dead spaces, tapping the walls for hollow sounds. But they found nothing. He personally made a quick reconnaissance of the cavern in the subcellar. It appeared to recede into the heart of the mountain; he decided to leave it unexplored for now. There was no time, and no signs of disturbance in the dirt of the cavern floor to indicate that anyone had passed this way in ages. He left orders, however, to place four men on guard at the opening to the subcellar in the unlikely event that someone might try to gain entrance through the cavern below.

Woermann managed to sneak off for an hour during the late afternoon to sketch in the outline of the village. It was his only respite from the growing tension that pressed in on him from all sides. As he worked with the charcoal pencil, he could feel the unease begin to slip away, almost as if the canvas were drawing it out of him. He would have to take some time tomorrow morning to add color, for it was the village as it looked in the early light that he wished to capture.

As the sun sank and the fading light forced him to quit, he felt all the dread and foreboding filter back. With the sun overhead he could easily believe it was a human agent killing his men; he could laugh at talk of vampires. But in the growing darkness, the gnawing fear returned along with the memory of the bloody, sodden weight of that dead soldier in his arms last night.

One safe night. One night without a death, and maybe I can beat this thing. With half of the men guarding the other half tonight, I ought to be able to turn this around and start gaining ground tomorrow.

One night. Just one deathless night.

Sunday, 27 April

The morning came as Sunday mornings should—bright and sunny. Woermann had fallen asleep in his chair; he found himself awake at first light, stiff and sore. It took a moment before he realized that his night's sleep had gone uninterrupted by screams or gunshots. He pulled on his boots and hurried to the courtyard to assure himself that there were as many men alive this morning as there had been last night. A quick check with one of the sentries confirmed it: No deaths had been reported.

Woermann felt ten years younger. He had done it! There was a way to foil this killer after all! But the ten years began to creep back on him as he saw the worried face of a private who was hurrying across the courtyard toward him.

"Sir!" the man said as he approached. "There's something wrong with Franz—I mean Private Ghent. He's not awake."

Woermann's limbs suddenly felt very weak and heavy, as if all their strength had suddenly been siphoned away. "Did you check him?"

"No, sir. I—I'm—"

"Lead the way."

He followed the private to the barracks within the south wall. The soldier in question was in his bedroll in a newly made cot with his back to the door.

"Franz!" called his roommate as they entered. "The captain's here!"

Ghent did not stir.

Please, God, let him be sick or even dead of a heart seizure, Woermann thought as he stepped to the bed. But please don't let his throat be torn. Anything but that.

"Private Ghent!" he said. There was no evidence of movement, not even the easy rise and fall of the covers over a sleeping man. Dreading what he would see, Woermann leaned over the cot.

The bedroll flap was pulled to Ghent's chin. Woermann did not pull it down. He did not have to. The glassy eyes, sallow skin, and drying red stain soaking through the fabric told him what he would find.

"The men are on the verge of panic, sir," Sergeant Oster was saying.

Woermann daubed color onto the canvas in short, quick, furious jabs. The morning light was right where he wanted it on the village and he had to make the most of the moment. He was sure Oster thought he had gone mad, and maybe he had. Despite the carnage around him, the painting had become an obsession.

"I don't blame them. I suppose they want to go into the village and shoot a few of the locals. But that won't—"

"Begging your pardon, sir, but that's not what they're thinking."

Woermann lowered his brush. "Oh? What, then?"

"They think that the men who've been killed didn't bleed as much as they should have. They also think Lutz's death was no accident... that he was killed the same as the others."

"Didn't bleed...? Oh, I see. Vampire talk again."

Oster nodded. "Yessir. And they think Lutz let it out when he opened that shaft into the dead space in the cellar."

"I happen to disagree," Woermann said, hiding his expression as he turned back to the painting. He had to be the steadying influence, the anchor for his men. He had to hold fast to the real and the natural. "I happen to think Lutz was killed by falling stone. I happen to think that the four subsequent deaths had nothing to do with Lutz. And I happen to believe they bled quite profusely. There is nothing around here drinking anyone's blood, Sergeant!"

"But the throats..."

Woermann paused. Yes, the throats. They hadn't been cut—no knife or garroting wire had been used. They had been torn open. Viciously. But by what? Teeth?

"Whoever the killer is, he's trying to scare us. And he's succeeding. So here's what we'll do: I'm putting every single man in the detachment on guard duty tonight, including myself. Everyone will travel in pairs. We'll have this keep so thickly patrolled that a moth won't be able to fly through unnoticed!"

"But we can't do that every night, sir!"

"No, but we can do it tonight, and tomorrow night if need be. And then we'll catch whoever it is."

Oster brightened. "Yessir!"

"Tell me something, Sergeant," Woermann said as Oster saluted and turned to go.

"Sir?"

"Had any nightmares since we moved into the keep?"

The younger man frowned. "No, sir. Can't say that I have."

"Any of the men mention any?"

"None. You having nightmares, Captain?"

"No." Woermann shook his head in a way that told Oster he was through with him for now. No nightmares, he thought. But the days have certainly become a bad dream.

"I'll radio Ploiesti now," Oster said as he went out the door.

Woermann wondered if a fifth death would get a rise out of the Ploiesti defense command. Oster had been reporting a death a day, yet no reaction. No offer of help, no order to abandon the keep. Obviously they didn't care too much what happened here as long as somebody was keeping watch on the pass. Woermann would have to make a decision about the bodies soon. But he wanted desperately to get through one night without a death before shipping them out. Just one.

He turned back to the painting, but found the light had changed. He cleaned his brushes. He had no real hope of capturing the killer tonight, but still it might be the turning point. With everyone on guard and paired, maybe they'd all survive. And that would do wonders for morale. Then an ugly thought struck him as he placed his tubes of pigment into their case: What if one of his own men were the killer?

Monday, 28 April

Midnight had come and gone, and so far so good. Sergeant Oster had set up a checkpoint in the center of the courtyard and as yet there was no one unaccounted for. The extra lights in the courtyard and atop the tower bolstered the men's confidence despite the long shadows they cast. Keeping all the men up all night had been a drastic measure, but it was going to work.

Woermann leaned out one of his windows overlooking the courtyard. He could see Oster at his table, see the men walking in pairs along the perimeter and atop the walls. The generators chugged away over by the parked vehicles. Extra spotlights had been trained on the craggy surface of the mountainside that formed the rear wall of the keep to prevent anyone from sneaking in from above. The men on the ramparts were keeping a careful eye on the outer walls to see that no one scaled them. The front gates were locked, and there was a squad guarding the break into the subcellar.

The keep was secure.

As he stood there, Woermann realized that he was the only man in the entire structure who was alone and unguarded. It made him hesitate to look behind him into the shadowy corners of his room. But that was the price of being an officer.

Keeping his head out the window slot, he looked down and noticed a deepening of the shadow at the juncture of the tower and the south wall. As he watched, the bulb there grew dimmer and dimmer until it was out. His immediate thought was that something had broken the line, but he had to discard that notion when he saw all the other bulbs still glowing. A bad bulb, then. That was all. But what a strange way for a bulb to go dead. Usually they flared blue-white first, then went out. This one just seemed to fade away.

One of the guards down there on the south wall had noticed it too and was coming over to investigate. Woermann was tempted to call down to him to take his partner with him but decided against it. The second man was standing in clear view by the parapet. It was a dead-end corner down there anyway. No possible danger.

He looked on as the soldier disappeared into the shadow—a peculiarly deep shadow. After perhaps fifteen seconds, Woermann looked away, but then was drawn back by a choked gurgle from below, followed by the clatter of wood and steel on stone—a dropped weapon.

He jumped at the sound, feeling his palms grow slick against the stone windowsill as he peered below. And still he could see nothing within the shadow.

The other guard, the first's partner, must have heard it too, for he started over to see what was wrong.

Woermann saw a dull, red spark begin to glow within the shadow. As it slowly brightened, he realized that it was the bulb coming back to life. Then he saw the first soldier. He lay on his back, arms akimbo, legs folded under him, his throat a bloody ruin. Sightless eyes stared up at Woermann, accusing him. There was nothing else, no one else in the corner.

As the other soldier began shouting for help, Woermann pulled himself back into the room and leaned against the wall, choking back bile as it surged up from his stomach. He could not move, could not speak. My God, my God!

He staggered over to the table that had been made for him only two days ago and grabbed a pencil. He had to get his men out of here—out of the keep, out of the Dinu Pass if necessary. There was no defense against what he had just witnessed. And he would not contact Ploiesti. This message would go straight to High Command.

But what to say? He looked at the mocking crosses for inspiration but none came. How to make High Command understand without sounding like a madman? How to tell them that he and his men must leave the keep, that something uncanny threatened them, something immune to German military power.

He began to jot down phrases, crossing each out as he thought of a better one. He despised the thought of surrendering any position, but it would be inviting disaster to spend another night here. The men would be nearly uncontrollable now. And at the present death rate, he would be an officer without a command if he stayed much longer.

Command ... his mouth twisted sardonically at the word. He was no longer in command of the keep. Something dark and awful had taken over.

SEVEN

The Dardanelles

Monday, 28 April

0244 hours

They were halfway through the strait when he sensed the boatman beginning to make his move.

It had not been an easy journey. The red-haired man had sailed past Gibraltar in the dark to Marbella where he had chartered the thirty-foot motor launch that now pulsed around him. It was sleek and low with two oversized engines. Its owner was no weekend captain. The red-haired man knew a smuggler when he saw one.

The owner had haggled fiercely over the fee until he learned he was to be paid in gold U.S. double eagles: half on departure, the rest upon their safe arrival on the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara. To traverse the length of the Mediterranean the owner had insisted on taking a crew. The red-haired man had disagreed; he would be crew enough.

They had run for six days straight, each man taking the helm for eight hours at a stretch, then resting for the next eight, keeping the boat at a steady twenty knots, twenty-four hours a day. They had stopped only at secluded coves where the owner's face seemed well known, and only long enough to fill the tanks with fuel. The red-haired man paid all expenses.

And now, alerted by the slowing of the boat, he waited for the owner, Carlos, to come below and try to kill him. Carlos had had his eye out for such a chance ever since they had left Marbella, but there had been none. Now, nearing the end of their journey, Carlos had only tonight left to get the money belt. The red-haired man knew that was what he was after. He had felt Carlos brush against him repeatedly to assure himself that his passenger still wore it. Carlos knew there was gold there; and it was plain by its bulk that there was a lot. He also appeared to be consumed with curiosity about the long, flat case his passenger always kept at his side.

It was a shame. Carlos had been a good companion the past six days. A good sailor, too. He drank a bit too much, ate more than a bit too much, and apparently did not bathe anywhere near enough. The red-haired man gave a mental shrug. He had smelled worse in his day. Much worse.

The door to the rear deck opened, letting in a breath of cool air; Carlos was framed briefly in starlight before closing the door behind him.

Too bad, the red-haired man thought, as he heard the faint scrape of steel being withdrawn from a leather sheath. A good journey was coming to a Sad end. Carlos had expertly guided them past Sardinia, sped them across the clear, painfully blue water between the northern tip of Tunisia and Sicily, then north of Crete and up through the Cyclades into the Aegean. They were presently threading the Dardanelles, the narrow channel connecting the Aegean with the Sea of Marmara.

Too bad.

He saw the light flash off the blade as it was raised over his chest. His left hand shot out and gripped the wrist before the knife could descend; his right hand gripped Carlos's other hand.

"Why, Carlos?"

"Give me the gold!" The words were snapped out.

"I might have given you more if you'd asked me. Why try to kill me?"

Carlos, gauging the strength of the hands holding him, tried a different tack. "I was only going to cut the belt off. I wasn't going to hurt you."

"The belt is around my waist. Your knife is over my chest."

"It's dark in here."

"Not that dark. But all right..." He loosened his grip on the wrists. "How much more do you want?"

Carlos ripped his knife hand free and plunged it downward, growling, "All of it!"

The red-haired man again caught the wrist before the blade could strike. "I wish you hadn't done that, Carlos."

With steady, inexorable deliberateness, the red-haired man bent his assailant's knife hand inward toward his own chest. Joints and ligaments popped and cracked in protest as they were stretched to the limit. Carlos groaned in pain and fear as his tendons ruptured and the popping was replaced by the sickening crunch of breaking bones. The point of his knife was now directly over the left side of his chest.

"No! Please... no!"

"I gave you a chance, Carlos." His own voice sounded hard, flat, and alien in his ears. "You threw it away."

Carlos's voice rose to a scream that ended abruptly as his fist was rammed against his ribs, driving the blade into his heart. His body went rigid, then limp. The red-haired man let him slip to the floor.

He lay still for a moment and listened to his heart beat. He tried to feel remorse but there was none. It had been a long time since he had killed someone. He ought to feel something. There was nothing. Carlos was a cold-blooded murderer. He had been dealt what he had intended to deal. There was no room for remorse in the red-haired man, only a desperate urgency to get to Romania.

Rising, he picked up the long, flat case, stepped up through the door to the rear deck, and took the helm. The engines were idling. He pushed them to full throttle.

The Dardanelles. He had been through here before, but never during a war, and never at full speed in the dark. The starlit water was a gray expanse ahead of him, the coast a dark smudge to the left and right. He was in one of the narrowest sections of the strait where it funneled down to a mile across. Even at its widest it never exceeded four miles. He traveled by compass and by instinct, without running lights, in a limbo of darkness.

There was no telling what he might run into in these waters. The radio said Greece had fallen; that might or might not be true. There could be Germans in the Dardanelles now, or British or Russians. He had to avoid them all. This journey had not been planned; he had no papers to explain his presence. And time was against him. He needed every knot the engines could put out.

Once into the wider Sea of Marmara twenty miles ahead, he'd have maneuvering room and would run as far as his fuel would take him. When that got low, he would beach the boat and move overland to the Black Sea. It would cost him precious time, but there was no other way. Even if he had the fuel, he could not risk running the Bosporus. There the Russians would be thick as flies around a corpse.

He pushed on the throttles to see if he could coax any more speed from the engines. He couldn't.

He wished he had wings.

EIGHT

Bucharest, Romania

Monday, 28 April

0950 hours

Magda held her mandolin with practiced ease, the pick oscillating rapidly in her right hand, the fingers of her left traveling up and down the neck, hopping from string to string, from fret to fret. Her eyes concentrated on a sheet of handwritten music: one of the prettiest Gypsy melodies she had yet committed to paper.

She sat within a brightly painted wagon on the outskirts of Bucharest. The interior was cramped, the living space further reduced by shelves full of exotic herbs and spices on every wall, by brightly colored pillows stuffed into every corner, by lamps and strings of garlic hanging from the low ceiling. Her legs were crossed to support the mandolin, but even then her gray woolen skirt barely cleared her ankles. A bulky gray sweater that buttoned in the front covered a simple white blouse. A tattered scarf hid the brown of her hair. But the drabness of her clothing could not steal the shine from her eyes, or the color from her cheeks.

Magda let herself drift into the music. It took her away for a while, away from a world that became increasingly hostile to her with each new day. They were out there: the ones who hated Jews. They had robbed her father of his position at the university, ordered the two of them out of their lifelong home, removed her king—not that King Carol had ever deserved her loyalty, but still, he had been the king—and replaced him with General Antonescu and the Iron Guard. But no one could take away her music.

"Is that right?" she asked when the last note had echoed away, leaving the interior of the wagon quiet again.

The old woman sitting on the far side of the tiny, round, oak table smiled, crinkling up the dark skin around her black Gypsy eyes. "Almost. But the middle goes like this."

The woman placed a well-shuffled deck of checker-backed cards on the table and picked up a wooden naiou. Looking like a wizened Pan as she placed the pipes to her lips, she began to blow. Magda played along until she heard her own notes go sour, then she changed the notations on her sheet.

"That's it, I guess," she said, gathering her papers into a pile with a small sense of satisfaction. "Thank you so much, Josefa."

The old woman held out her hand. "Here. Let me see."

Magda handed her the sheet and watched as the old woman's gaze darted back and forth across the page. Josefa was the phuri dai, the wise woman of this particular tribe of Gypsies. Papa had often spoken of how beautiful she had once been; but her skin was weathered now, her raven hair thickly streaked with silver, her body shrunken. Nothing wrong with her mind, though.

"So this is my song." Josefa did not read music.

"Yes. Preserved forever."

The old woman handed it back. "But I won't play it this way forever. This is the way I like to play it now. Next month I may decide to change something. I've already changed it many times over the years."

Magda nodded as she placed the sheet with the others in her folder. She had known Gypsy music to be largely improvisational before she had started her collection. That was to be expected—Gypsy life was largely improvisational, with no home other than a wagon, no written language, nothing at all to pin them down. Perhaps that was what drove her to try to capture some of their vitality and cage it on a music staff, to preserve it for the future.

"It will do for now," Magda replied. "Maybe next year I'll see what you've added."

"Won't the book be published by then?"

Magda felt a pang. "I'm afraid not."

"Why not?"

Magda busied herself with putting her mandolin away, not wishing to answer but unable to dodge the question gracefully. She did not look up as she spoke. "I have to find a new publisher."

"What happened to the old one?"

Magda kept her eyes down. She was embarrassed. It had been one of the most painful moments in her life, learning that her publisher was reneging on their agreement. She still stung from it.

"He changed his mind. Said this was not the right time for a compendium of Romanian Gypsy music."

"Especially by a Jewess," Josefa added.

Magda looked up sharply, then down again. How true. "Perhaps." She felt a lump form in her throat. She didn't want to talk about this. "How's business?"

"Terrible." Josefa shrugged as she set the naiou aside and picked up her tarot deck again. She was dressed in the mismatched, cast-off clothes common to Gypsies: flowered blouse, striped skirt, calico kerchief. A dizzying array of colors and patterns. Her fingers, as if acting of their own volition, began shuffling the deck. "I only see a few of the old regulars for readings these days. No new trade since they made me take the sign down."

Magda had noted that this morning as she had approached the wagon. The sign over the rear door that had read "Doamna Josefa: Fortunes Told" was gone, as was the palmar diagram in the left window and the cabalistic symbol in the right. She had heard that all Gypsy tribes had been ordered by the Iron Guard to stay right where they were and to "deal no fraud" to the citizens.

"So, Gypsies are out of favor, too?"

"We Rom are always out of favor, no matter the time or place. We are used to it. But you Jews..." She clucked and shook her head. "We hear things ... terrible things from Poland."

"We hear them, too," Magda said, suppressing a shudder. "But we are also used to being out of favor." At least some of us are. Not her. She would never get used to it.

"Going to get worse, I fear," Josefa said.

"The Rom may fare no better." Magda realized she was being hostile but couldn't help it. The world had become a frightening place and her only defense of late had been denial. The things she had heard couldn't be true, not about the Jews, or about what was happening to Gypsies in the rural regions—tales of round-ups by the Iron Guard, forced sterilizations, then slave labor. It had to be wild rumor, scare stories. And yet, with all the terrible things that had indeed been happening...

"I do not worry," Josefa said. "Cut a Gypsy into ten pieces and you have not killed him; you have only made ten Gypsies."

Magda was quite certain that under similar circumstances you would only be left with a dead Jew. Again she tried to change the subject.

"Is that a tarot deck?" She knew perfectly well it was.

Josefa nodded. "You wish a fortune?"

"No. I really don't believe in any of that."

"To tell the truth, many times I do not believe in it either. Mostly the cards say nothing because there is really nothing to say. So we improvise, just as we do in music. And what harm is there in it? I don't do the hokkane baro; I just tell the gadjé girls that they are going to find a wonderful man soon, and the gadjé men that their business ventures will soon be bearing fruit. No harm."

"And no fortune."

Josefa lifted her narrow shoulders. "Sometimes the tarot reveals. Want to try?"

"No. Thank you, but no." She didn't want to know what the future held. She had a feeling it could only be bad.

"Please. A gift from me."

Magda hesitated. She didn't want to offend Josefa. And after all, hadn't the old woman just told her that the deck usually told nothing? Maybe she would make up a nice fantasy for her.

"Oh, all right."

Josefa extended the pack of cards across the table. "Cut."

Magda separated the top half and lifted it off. Josefa slipped this under the remainder of the deck and began to deal, talking as her hands worked.

"How is your father?"

"Not well, I'm afraid. He can hardly stand now."

"Such a shame. Not often you can find a gadjé who knows how to rokker. Yoska's bear did not help his rheumatism?"

Magda shook her head. "No. And it's not just rheumatism he has. It's much worse." Papa had tried anything and everything to halt the progressive twisting and gnarling of his limbs, even going so far as to allow Josefa's grandson's trained bear to walk on his back, a venerable Gypsy therapy that had proven as useless as all the latest "miracles" of modern medicine.

"A good man," Josefa said, clucking. "It's wrong that a man who knows so much about this land must... be kept ... from seeing it ... anymore..." She frowned as her voice trailed off.

"What's the matter?" Magda asked. Josefa's troubled expression as she looked down at the cards spread out on the table made Magda uneasy. "Are you all right?"

"Hmmm? Oh, yes. I'm fine. It's just these cards..."

"Something wrong?" Magda refused to believe that cards could tell the future any more than could the entrails of a dead bird; yet under her sternum was a pocket of tense anticipation.

"It's the way they divide. I've never seen anything like it. The neutral cards are scattered, but the cards that can be read as good are all on the right here"—she moved her hand over the area in question—"and the bad or evil cards are all over on the left. Odd."

"What does it mean?"

"I don't know. Let me ask Yoska." She called her grandson's name over her shoulder, then turned back to Magda. "Yoska is very good with the tarot. He's watched me since he was a boy."

A darkly handsome young man in his mid-twenties with a porcelain smile and a muscular build stepped in from the front room of the wagon and nodded to Magda, his black eyes lingering on her. Magda looked away, feeling naked despite her heavy clothing. He was younger than she, but that had never intimidated him. He had made his desires known on a number of occasions in the past. She had rebuffed him.

He looked down at the table, where his grandmother was pointing. Deep furrows formed slowly in his smooth brow as he studied the cards. He was quiet a long time, then appeared to come to a decision.

"Shuffle, cut, and deal again," he said.

Josefa nodded agreement and the routine was repeated. This time with no small talk. Despite her skepticism, Magda found herself leaning forward and watching the cards as they were placed on the table one by one. She knew nothing of tarot and would have to rely solely on the interpretation of her hostess and her grandson. When she looked up at their faces, she knew something was not right.

"What do you think, Yoska?" the old woman said in a low voice.

"I don't know... such a concentration of good and evil... and such a clear division between them."

Magda swallowed. Her mouth was dry. "You mean it came out the same? Twice in a row?"

"Yes," Josefa said. "Except that the sides are different. The good is now on the left and the evil is on the right." She looked up. "That would indicate a choice. A grave choice."

Anger suddenly drove out Magda's growing unease. They were playing some sort of a game with her. She refused to be anyone's fool. "I think I'd better go." She grabbed her folder and mandolin case and rose to her feet. "I'm not some naive gadjé girl you can have fun with."

"No! Please, once more!" The old Gypsy woman reached for her hand.

"Sorry, but I really must be going."

She hurried for the rear door of the wagon, realizing she wasn't being fair to Josefa, but leaving all the same. Those grotesque cards with their strange figures, and the awed, puzzled expression on the faces of the two Gypsies filled her with a desperate urge to be out of the wagon. She wanted to be back in Bucharest, back to sharp, clear lines and firm pavements.

NINE

The Keep

Monday, 28 April

1910 hours

The snakes had arrived.

SS men, especially officers, reminded Woermann of snakes. SS-Sturmbannführer Erich Kaempffer was no exception.

Woermann would always remember an evening a few years before the war when a local Hohere SS-und Polizeiführer—the high-sounding name for a local chief of state police—held a reception in the Rathenow district. Captain Woermann, as a decorated officer in the German Army and a prominent local citizen, had been invited. He hadn't wanted to go, but Helga so seldom had a chance to attend a fancy official reception and she glowed so when she dressed up, that he hadn't had the heart to refuse.

Against one wall of the reception hall had stood a glass terrarium in which a three-foot snake coiled and uncoiled incessantly. It was the host's favorite pet. He kept it hungry. On three separate occasions during the evening he invited all the guests to watch as he threw a toad to the snake. A passing glance during the first feeding had sufficed for Woermann—he saw the toad halfway along its slow, head-first journey down the snake's gullet, still alive, its legs kicking frantically in a vain attempt to free itself.

The sight had served to make a dull evening grim. When he and Helga had passed the tank on their way out, Woermann saw that the snake was still hungry, still winding around the inside of the cage, looking for a fourth toad despite the three swellings along its length.

He thought of that snake as he watched Kaempffer wind around the front room of Woermann's quarters, from the door, around the easel, around the desk, to the window, then back again. Except for his brown shirt, Kaempffer was clad entirely in black—black jacket, black breeches, black tie, black leather belt, black holster, and black jackboots. The silver Death's Head insignia, the SS paired thunderbolts, and his officer's pins were the only bright spots on his uniform ... glittering scales on a poisonous, blond-headed serpent.

He noticed that Kaempffer had aged somewhat since their chance meeting in Berlin two years ago. But not as much as I, Woermann thought grimly. The SS major, although two years older than Woermann, was slimmer and therefore looked younger. Kaempffer's blond hair was full and straight and still unmarred by gray. A picture of Aryan perfection.

"I noticed you only brought one squad with you," Woermann said. "The message said two. Personally, I'd have thought you'd bring a regiment."

"No, Klaus," Kaempffer said in a condescending tone as he wound about the room. "A single squad would be more than enough to handle this so-called problem of yours. My einsatzkommandos are rather proficient in taking care of this sort of thing. I brought two squads because this is merely a stop along my way."

"Where's the other squad? Picking daisies?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes." Kaempffer's smile was not a nice thing to see.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Woermann asked.

Removing his cap and coat, Kaempffer threw them on Woermann's desk, then went to the window overlooking the village. "In a minute, you shall see."

Reluctantly, Woermann joined the SS man at the window. Kaempffer had arrived only twenty minutes ago and already was usurping command. With his extermination squad in tow, he had driven across the causeway without a second's hesitation. Woermann had found himself wishing the supports had weakened during the past week. No such luck. The major's jeep and the truck behind it had made it safely across. After debarking and telling Sergeant Oster—Woermann's Sergeant Oster—to see that the einsatzkommandos were well quartered immediately, he had paraded into Woermann's suite with his right arm flailing a "Heil Hitler" and the attitude of a messiah.

"Seems you've come quite a way since the Great War," Woermann said as they watched the quiet, darkened village together. "The SS seems to suit you."

"I prefer the SS to the regular army, if that's what you're implying. Far more efficient."

"So I've heard."

"I'll show you how efficiency solves problems, Klaus. And solving problems eventually wins wars." He pointed out the window. "Look."

Woermann saw nothing at first, then noticed some movement at the edge of the village. A group of people. As they approached the causeway, the group lengthened into a parade: ten village locals stumbling before the proddings of the second squad of einsatzkommandos.

Woermann found himself shocked and dismayed, even though he should have expected something like this.

"Are you insane? Those are Romanian citizens! We're in an ally state!"

"German soldiers have been killed by one or more Romanian citizens. And it's highly unlikely General Antonescu will raise much of a fuss with the Reich over the deaths of a few country bumpkins."

"Killing them will accomplish nothing!"

"Oh, I've no intention of killing them right away. But they'll make excellent hostages. Word has been spread through the village that if one more German soldier dies, all those ten locals will be shot immediately. And ten more will be shot every time another German is killed. This will continue until either the murders stop or we run out of villagers."

Woermann turned away from the window. So this was the New Order, the New Germany, the ethic of the Master Race. This was how the war was to be won.

"It won't work," he said.

"Of course it will." Kaempffer's smugness was unbearable. "It always has and always will. These partisans feed on the backslapping they get from their drinking companions. They play the hero and milk the role for all it's worth—until their friends start dying, or until their wives and children are marched off. Then they become good little peasants again."

Woermann searched for a way to save those villagers. He knew they'd had nothing to do with the killings. "This time is different."

"I hardly think so. I do believe, Klaus, that I've had far more experience with this sort of thing than you."

"Yes ... Auschwitz, wasn't it?"

"I learned much from Commandant Hoess."

"You like learning?" Woermann snatched the major's hat from the desk and tossed it to him. "I'll show you something new! Come with me!"

Moving swiftly and giving Kaempffer no time to ask questions, Woermann led him down the tower stairs to the courtyard, then across to another stairway leading down to the cellar. He stopped at the rupture in the wall and lit a lamp, then led Kaempffer down a mossy stairway into the cavernous subcellar.

"Cold down here," Kaempffer said, his breath misting in the lamplight as he rubbed his hands together.

"It's where we keep the bodies. All six of them."

"You haven't shipped any back?"

"I didn't think it wise to ship them out one at a time ... might cause talk among the Romanians along the way... not good for German prestige. I had planned to take them all with me when I left today. But as you know, my request for relocation was denied."

He stopped before the six sheet-covered figures on the hard-packed earth, noting with annoyance that the sheets over the bodies were in disarray. It was a minor thing, but he felt the least that could be done for these men before their final burial was to treat their remains with respect. If they had to wait before being returned to their homeland, they ought to wait in clean uniforms and a neatly arranged shroud.

He went first to the man most recently killed and pulled back the sheet to expose the head and shoulders.

"This is Private Remer. Look at his throat."

Kaempffer did so, his face impassive.

Woermann replaced the sheet, then lifted the next, holding the lamp up so Kaempffer could get a good look at the ruined flesh of another throat. He then continued down the line, saving the most gruesome for last.

"And now—Private Lutz."

Finally, a reaction from Kaempffer: a tiny gasp. But Woermann gasped, too. Lutz's face stared back at them upside down. The top of his head had been set against the empty spot between his shoulders; his chin and the mangled stump of his neck were angled away from his body toward the empty darkness.

Quickly, gingerly, Woermann swiveled the head until it sat properly, vowing to find the man who had been so careless with the remains of a fallen comrade, and to make him regret it. He carefully rearranged all the sheets, then turned to Kaempffer.

"Do you understand now why I tell you hostages won't make a bit of difference?"

The major didn't reply immediately. Instead, he turned and headed for the stairs and warmer air. Woermann sensed that Kaempffer had been shaken more than he had shown.

"Those men were not just killed," Kaempffer said finally. "They were mutilated!"

"Exactly! Whoever or whatever is doing this is utterly mad! The lives of ten villagers won't mean a thing."

"Why do you say 'whatever'?"

Woermann held Kaempffer's gaze. "I'm not sure. All I know is that the killer comes and goes at will. Nothing we do, no security measure we try, seems to matter."

"Security doesn't work," Kaempffer said, regaining his former bravado as they re-entered the light and the warmth of Woermann's quarters, "because security isn't the answer. Fear is the answer. Make the killer afraid to kill. Make him fear the price others are going to have to pay for his action. Fear is your best security, always."

"And what if the killer is someone like you? What if he doesn't give a damn about the villagers?"

Kaempffer didn't answer.

Woermann decided to press the point. "Your brand of fear fails to work when you run up against your own kind. Take that back to Auschwitz when you go."

"I'll not be returning to Poland, Klaus. When I finish up here—and that should only take me a day or two—I'll be heading south to Ploiesti."

"I can't see any use for you there—no synagogues to burn, only oil refineries."

"Continue making your snide little comments, Klaus," Kaempffer said, nodding his head ever so slightly as he spoke through tight lips. "Enjoy them now. For once I get my Ploiesti project under way, you will not dare to speak to me so."

Woermann sat down behind his rickety desk. He was growing weary of Kaempffer. His eyes were drawn to the picture of his younger son, Fritz, the fifteen-year-old.

"I still fail to see what attraction Ploiesti could hold for the likes of you."

"Not the refineries, I assure you—I leave them to the High Command to worry about."

"Gracious of you."

Kaempffer did not appear to hear. "No, my concern is the railways."

Woermann continued staring at the photo of his son. He echoed Kaempffer: "Railways."

"Yes! The greatest railway nexus in Romania is to be found at Ploiesti, making it the perfect place for a resettlement camp."

Woermann snapped out of his trance and lifted his head. "You mean like Auschwitz?"

"Exactly! That's why the Auschwitz camp is where it is. A good rail network is crucial to efficient transportation of the lesser races to the camps. Petroleum leaves Ploiesti by rail for every part of Romania." He had spread his arms wide; he began to bring them together again. "And from every corner of Romania trains will return with carloads of Jews and Gypsies and all the other human garbage abroad in this land."

"But this isn't occupied territory! You can't—"

"The Führer does not want the undesirables of Romania to be neglected. It's true that Antonescu and the Iron Guard are removing the Jews from positions of influence, but the Führer has a more vigorous plan. It has come to be known in the SS as 'The Romanian Solution.' To implement it, Reichsführer Himmler has arranged with General Antonescu for the SS to show the Romanians how it is done. I have been chosen for that mission. I will be commandant of Camp Ploiesti."

Appalled, Woermann found himself unable to reply as Kaempffer warmed to his subject.

"Do you know how many Jews there are in Romania, Klaus? Seven hundred and fifty thousand at last count. Perhaps a million! No one knows for sure, but once I start an efficient record system, we'll know exactly. But that's not the worst of it—the country is absolutely crawling with Gypsies and Freemasons. And worse yet: Muslims! Two million undesirables in all!"

"If only I had known!" Woermann said, rolling his eyes and pressing his hands against the side of his face. "I never would have set foot in this sinkhole of a country!"

Kaempffer heard him this time. "Laugh if you wish, Klaus, but Ploiesti will be most important. Right now we are transferring Jews all the way from Hungary to Auschwitz at a great waste of time, manpower, and fuel. Once Camp Ploiesti is functioning, I foresee many of them being shipped to Romania. And as commandant, I shall become one of the most important men in the SS ... in the Third Reich! Then it shall be my turn to laugh."

Woermann remained silent. He had not laughed ... he found the whole idea sickening. Facetiousness was his only defense against a world coming under the control of madmen, against the realization that he was an officer in the army that was enabling them to achieve that control. He watched Kaempffer begin to coil back and forth about the room again.

"I didn't know you were a painter," the major said, stopping before the easel as if seeing it for the first time. He studied it a moment in silence. "Perhaps if you had spent as much time ferreting out the killer as you obviously have on this morbid little painting, some of your men might—"

"Morbid! There's nothing at all morbid about that painting!"

"The shadow of a corpse hanging from a noose—is that cheerful?"

Woermann was on his feet, approaching the canvas. "What are you talking about?"

Kaempffer pointed. "Right there... on the wall."

Woermann stared. At first he saw nothing. The shadows on the wall were the same mottled gray he had painted days ago. There was nothing that even faintly resembled ... no, wait. He caught his breath. To the left of the window in which the village sat gleaming in the sunrise ... a thin vertical line connecting to a larger dark shape below it. It could be seen as a hunched corpse hanging from a rope. He vaguely remembered painting the line and the shape, but in no way had he intended to add this gruesome touch to the work. He could not bear, however, to give Kaempffer the satisfaction of hearing him admit that he saw it, too.

"Morbidity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder."

But Kaempffer's mind was already moving elsewhere. "It's lucky for you the painting's finished, Klaus. After I've moved in, I'll be much too busy to allow you to come up here and fiddle with it. But you can resume after I'm on my way to Ploiesti."

Woermann had been waiting for this, and was ready for it. "You're not moving into my quarters."

"Correction: my quarters. You seem to forget that I outrank you, Captain."

Woermann sneered. "SS rank! Worthless! Worse than meaningless. My sergeant is four times the soldier you are! Four times the man, too!"

"Be careful, Captain. That Iron Cross you received in the last war will carry you only so far!"

Woermann felt something snap inside him. He pulled the black-enameled, silver-bordered Maltese cross from his tunic and held it out to Kaempffer. "You don't have one! And you never will! At least not a real one—one like this, without a nasty little swastika at its center!"

"Enough!"

"No, not enough! Your SS kills helpless civilians—women, children! I earned this medal Fighting men who were able to shoot back. And we both know," Woermann said, his voice dropping to a fierce whisper, "how much you dislike an enemy who shoots back!"

Kaempffer leaned forward until his nose was barely an inch from Woermann's. His blue eyes gleamed in the white fury of his face. "The Great War ... that is all past. This is the Great War—my war. The old war was your war, and it's dead and gone and forgotten!"

Woermann smiled, delighted that he had finally penetrated Kaempffer's loathsome hide. "Not forgotten. Never forgotten. Especially your bravery at Verdun!"

"I'm warning you," Kaempffer said. "I'll have you—" And then he closed his mouth with an audible snap.

For Woermann was moving forward. He had stomached all he could of this strutting thug who discussed the "liquidation" of millions of defenseless lives as matter-of-factly as he might discuss what he was going to have for dinner. Woermann made no overtly threatening gesture, yet Kaempffer took an involuntary step backward at his approach. Woermann merely walked past him and opened the door.

"Get out."

"You can't do this!"

"Out."

They stared at each other for a long time. For a moment he thought Kaempffer might actually challenge him. Woermann knew the major was in better condition and physically stronger—but only physically. Finally, Kaempffer's gaze wavered and he turned away. They both knew the truth about SS-Sturmbannführer Kaempffer. Without a word, he picked up his black greatcoat and stormed out of the room. Woermann closed the door quietly behind him.

He stood still for a moment. He had let Kaempffer get to him. His control used to be better. He walked over to the easel and stared at his canvas. The more he looked at the shadow he had painted on the wall, the more it looked like a hanging corpse. It gave him a queasy feeling and annoyed him as well. He had meant for the sunlit village to be the focus of the painting, but all he could see now was that damned shadow.

He tore himself away and returned to his desk, staring again at the photograph of Fritz. The more he saw of men like Kaempffer, the more he worried about Fritz. He hadn't worried this much when Kurt, the older boy, had been in combat in France last year. Kurt was nineteen, a corporal already. A man now.

But Fritz—they were doing things to Fritz, those Nazis. The boy had somehow been induced to join the local Jugendführer, the Hitler Youth. When Woermann had been home on his last leave, he had been hurt and dismayed to hear his son's fourteen-year-old mouth regurgitating that Aryan Master Race garbage, and speaking of "Der Führer" with an awed reverence that had once been reserved for God alone. The Nazis were stealing his son from him right under his nose, turning the boy into a snake like Kaempffer. And there did not seem to be a thing Woermann could do about it.

There didn't seem to be anything he could do about Kaempffer either. He had no control over the SS officer. If Kaempffer decided to shoot Romanian peasants, there was no way to stop him, other than to arrest him. And he could not do that. Kaempffer was here by authority of the High Command. To arrest him would be insubordination, an act of brazen defiance. His Prussian heritage rebelled at the thought. The army was his career, his home ... it had been good to him for a quarter century. To challenge it now...

Helpless. That was how he felt. It brought him back to a clearing outside Posnan, Poland, a year and a half ago, shortly after the fighting had ended. His men had been setting up bivouac when the sound of automatic gunfire came from over the next rise, about a mile away. He had gone to investigate. Einsatzkommandos were lining up Jews—men and women of all ages, children—and systematically slaughtering them with fusillades of bullets. After the bodies had been rolled into the ditch behind them, more were lined up and shot. The ground had turned muddy with blood and the air had been full of the reek of cordite and the cries of those who were still alive and in agony, and to whom no one would bother to administer a coup de grâce.

He had been helpless then, and he was helpless now. Helpless to make this war into one of soldier against soldier, helpless to stop the thing that was killing his men, helpless to stop Kaempffer from slaughtering those Romanian villagers.

He slumped into the chair. What was the use? Why even try anymore? Everything was changing for the worse. He had been born with the century, a century of hope and promise. Yet he was fighting in his second war, a war he could not understand.

And yet he had wanted this war. He had yearned for a chance to strike back at the vultures who had settled upon the Fatherland after the last war, saddling it with impossible reparations, grinding its face into the dirt year after year after year. His chance had come, and he had participated in some of the great German victories. The Wehrmacht was unstoppable.

Why, then, did he feel such malaise? It seemed wrong for him to want to be out of it all and back in Rathenow with Helga. It seemed wrong to be glad that his father, also a career officer, had died in the Great War and could not see what atrocities were being done today in the name of the Fatherland.

And still, with everything so wrong, he held on to his commission. Why? The answer to that one, he told himself for the hundredth—possibly the thousandth—time, was that in his heart he believed the German Army would outlast the Nazis. Politicians came and went, but the army would always be the army. If he could just hold on, the German Army would be victorious, and Hitler and his gangsters would fade from power. He believed that. He had to.

Against all reason, he prayed that Kaempffer's threat against the villagers would have the desired effect—that there would be no more deaths. But if it didn't work ... if another German was to die tonight, Woermann knew whom he wanted it to be.

TEN

The Keep

Tuesday, 29 April

0118 hours

Major Kaempffer lay awake in his bedroll, still rankling at Woermann's contemptuous insubordination. Sergeant Oster, at least, had been helpful. Like most regular army men, he responded with fearful obedience to the black uniform and the Death's Head insignia—something to which Oster's commanding officer seemed quite immune. But then, Kaempffer and Woermann had known each other long before there was an SS.

The sergeant had readily found quarters for the two squads of einsatzkommandos and had suggested a dead-end corridor at the rear of the keep as a compound for the prisoners from the village. An excellent choice: The corridor had been carved into the stone of the mountain itself and provided entry to four large rooms. Sole access to the retention area was through another long corridor running at an angle directly out to the courtyard. Kaempffer assumed that the section originally had been designed as a storage area since the ventilation was poor and there were no fireplaces in the rooms. The sergeant had seen to it that the entire length of both corridors, from the courtyard to the blank stone wall at the very end, was well lit by a new string of light bulbs, making it virtually impossible for anyone to surprise the einsatzkommandos who would be on guard in pairs at all times.

For Major Kaempffer himself, Sergeant Oster had found a large, double-sized room on the second level within the rear section of the keep. He had suggested the tower, but Kaempffer had refused; to have moved into the first or second level would have been convenient but would have meant being below Woermann. The fourth tower level involved too many steps to be taken too many times a day. The rear section of the keep was better. He had a window overlooking the courtyard, a bed-frame commandeered from one of Woermann's enlisted men, and an unusually heavy oak door with a secure latch. His bedroll was now supported by the newly made frame, and the major lay within it, a battery lamp on the floor beside him.

His eyes came to rest on the crosses in the walls. They seemed to be everywhere. Curious. He had wanted to ask the sergeant about them but had not wanted to detract from his posture of knowing everything. This was an important part of the SS mystique and he had to maintain it. Perhaps he would ask Woermann—when he could bring himself to speak to him again.

Woermann ... he couldn't get the man off his mind. The irony of it all was that Woermann was the last person in the world Kaempffer would have wished to be billeted with. With Woermann around he could not be the type of SS officer he wished to be. Woermann could fix his gaze on him and pierce right through the SS uniform, through the veneer of power, and see a terrified eighteen-year-old. That day in Verdun had been a turning point in both their lives...

... the British breaking through the German line in a surprise counterattack, the fire pinning down Kaempffer and Woermann and their whole company, men dying on all sides, the machine gunner hit and down, the British charging ... pull back and regroup, the only sane thing to do, but no word from the company commander ... probably dead ... Private Kaempffer seeing no one in his entire squad left alive except a new recruit, a green volunteer named Woermann sixteen years old, too young to fight... motioning to the kid to start moving back with him ... Woermann shaking his head and crawling up to the machine gun emplacement ... firing skittishly, erratically at first, then with greater confidence ... Kaempffer crawling away, knowing the British would be burying the kid later that day.

But Woermann had not been buried that day. He had held off the enemy long enough for the line to be reinforced. He was promoted, decorated with the Iron Cross. And when the Great War ended he was Fahnenjunker, an officer candidate, and managed to remain with the minuscule remnant of the army that was left after the Versailles debacle.

Kaempffer, on the other hand, the son of a clerk from Augsburg, found himself on the street after the war. He had been afraid and penniless, one of many thousands of veterans of a lost war and a defeated army. They were not heroes—they were an embarrassment. He wound up joining the nihilistic Freikorps Oberland, and from there it was not far to the Nazi Party in 1927; after proving his volkisch, his pure German pedigree, he joined the SS in 1931. From then on, the SS became Kaempffer's home. He had lost his home after the first war and had sworn he would never be homeless again.

In the SS he learned the techniques of terror and pain; he also learned the techniques of survival: how to keep an eye out for weaknesses in his superiors, and how to hide his own weaknesses from the aggressive men below him. Eventually, he maneuvered himself into the position of first assistant to Rudolf Hoess, the most efficient of all the liquidators of Jewry.

Again, he learned so well that he was elevated to the rank of Sturmbannführer and assigned the task of setting up the resettlement camp at Ploiesti.

He ached to get to Ploiesti and begin. Only the unseen killers of Woermann's men stood in his way. They had to be disposed of first. Not a problem, merely an annoyance. He wanted it taken care of quickly, not only to allow him to move on, but also to make Woermann look like the bumbler he was. A quick solution and he would be on his way in triumph, leaving Klaus Woermann behind, an impotent has-been.

A quick solution would also defuse anything Woermann might ever say about the incident at Verdun. If Woermann should ever decide to accuse him of cowardice in the face of the enemy, Kaempffer would need only point out that the accuser was an embittered, frustrated man striking out viciously at one who had succeeded where he had failed.

He turned off the lamp on the floor. Yes ... he needed a quick solution. So much to do, so many more important matters awaiting his attention.

The only thing that bothered him about all this was the unsettling, inescapable fact that Woermann was afraid. Truly afraid. And Woermann did not frighten easily.

He closed his eyes and tried to doze. After a while he felt sleep begin to slip over him like a warm, gentle blanket. He was almost completely covered when he felt it brutally snatched away. He found himself wide awake, his skin suddenly clammy and crawling with fear. Something was outside the door to his room. He heard nothing, saw nothing. Yet he knew it was there. Something with such a powerful aura of evil, of cold hate, of sheer malevolence, that he could sense its presence through the wood and the stone that separated it from him. It was out there, moving along the corridor, passing the door, and moving away. Away....

His heart slowed, his skin began to dry. It took a few moments, but he was eventually able to convince himself that it had been a nightmare, a particularly vivid one, the kind that shakes you from the early stages of sleep.

Major Kaempffer arose from his bedroll and gingerly began removing his long underwear. His bladder had involuntarily emptied during the nightmare.

Privates Friedrich Waltz and Karl Flick, members of the first Death's Head unit under Major Kaempffer, stood in their black uniforms, their gleaming black helmets, and shivered. They were bored, cold, and tired. This was not the sort of night duty they were accustomed to. Back at Auschwitz they had had warm, comfortable guardhouses and watchtowers where they could sit and drink coffee and play cards while the prisoners cowered in their drafty shacks. Only occasionally had they been required to do gate duty and march the perimeter in the open air.

True, here they were inside, but their conditions were as cold and as damp as the prisoners'. That wasn't right.

Private Flick slung his Schmeisser behind his back and rubbed his hands together. The fingertips were numb despite his gloves. He stood beside Waltz who was leaning against the wall at the angle of the two corridors. From this vantage point they could watch the entire length of the entry corridor to their left, all the way to the black square of night that was the courtyard, and at the same time keep watch on the prison block to their right.

"I'm going crazy, Karl," Waltz said. "Let's do something."

"Like what?"

"How about making them fall out for a little Sachsengruss?"

"They aren't Jews."

"They aren't Germans, either."

Flick considered this. The Sachsengruss, or Saxon greeting, had been his favorite method of breaking down new arrivals at Auschwitz. For hours on end he would make them perform the exercise: deep knee bends with arms raised and hands behind the head. Even a man in top condition would be in agony within half an hour. Flick had always found it exhilarating to watch the expressions on the prisoners' faces as they felt their bodies begin to betray them, as their joints and muscles cried out in anguish. And the fear in their faces. For those who fell from exhaustion were either shot on the spot or kicked until they resumed the exercise. He and Waltz couldn't shoot any of the Romanians tonight, but at least they could have some fun with them. But it might be hazardous.

"Better forget it," Flick said. "There's only two of us. What if one of them tries to be a hero?"

"We'll only take a couple out of the room at a time. Come on, Karl! It'll be fun!"

Flick smiled. "Oh, all right."

It wouldn't be as challenging as the game they used to play at Auschwitz, where he and Waltz held contests to see how many of a prisoner's bones they could break and still keep him working. But at least a little Sachsengruss would be diverting.

Flick began fishing out the key to the padlock that had transformed the last room on the corridor into a prison cell. There were four rooms available and they could have divided the villagers up; instead, they had crowded all ten into a single chamber. He was anticipating the look on their faces when he opened the door—the wincing, lip-quivering fear when they saw his smile and realized they would never receive any mercy from him. It gave him a certain feeling inside, something indescribable, wonderful, something so addictive that he craved more and more of it.

He was halfway to the door when Waltz's voice stopped him.

"Just a minute, Karl."

He turned. Waltz was squinting down the corridor toward the courtyard, a puzzled expression on his face. "What is it?" Flick asked.

"Something's wrong with one of the bulbs down there. The first one—it's going out."

"So?"

"It's fading out." He glanced at Flick and then back down the corridor. "Now the second one's fading!" His voice rose half an octave as he lifted his Schmeisser and cocked it. "Get over here!"

Flick dropped the key, swung his own weapon to the ready position, and ran to join his companion. By the time he reached the juncture of the two corridors, the third light had faded out. He tried but could make out no details of the corridor behind the dead bulbs. It was as if the area had been swallowed by impenetrable darkness.

"I don't like this," Waltz said.

"Neither do I. But I don't see a soul. Maybe it's the generator. Or a bad wire." Flick knew he didn't believe this any more than Waltz did. But he had had to say something to hide his growing fear. Einsatzkommandos were supposed to arouse fear, not feel it.

The fourth bulb began to die. The dark was only a dozen feet away.

"Let's move into here," Flick said, backing into the well-lit recess of the rear corridor. He could hear the prisoners muttering in the last room behind them. Though they could not see the dying bulbs, they sensed something was wrong.

Crouched behind Waltz, Flick shivered in the growing cold as he watched the illumination in the outer corridor continue to fade. He wanted something to shoot at but could see only blackness.

And then the blackness was upon him, freezing his joints and dimming his vision. For an instant that seemed to stretch to a lifetime, Private Karl Flick became a victim of the soulless terror he so loved to inspire in others, felt the deep, gut-tearing pain he so loved to inflict on others. Then he felt nothing.

Slowly the illumination returned to the corridors, first to the rear, then to the access passage. The only sounds came from the villagers trapped in their cell: whimpering from the women, relieved sobs from the men as they all felt themselves released from the panic that had seized them. One man tentatively approached the door to peer through a tiny space between two boards. His field of vision was limited to a section of floor and part of the rear wall of the corridor.

He could see no movement. The floor was bare except for a splattering of blood, still red, still wet, still steaming in the cold. And on the rear wall there was more blood, but this was smeared instead of splattered. The smears seemed to form a pattern, like letters from an alphabet he almost recognized, forming words that hovered just over the far edge of recognition. Words like dogs howling in the night, naggingly present, but ever out of reach.

The man turned away from the door and rejoined his fellow villagers huddled in the far corner of the room.

There was someone at the door.

Kaempffer's eyes snapped open; he feared that the earlier nightmare was going to repeat itself. But no. He could sense no dark, malevolent presence on the other side of the wall this time. The agent here seemed human. And clumsy. If stealth were the intruder's aim, he was failing miserably. But to be on the safe side, Kaempffer pulled his Luger from the holster coiled at his elbow.

"Who's there?"

No reply.

The rattle of a fumbling hand working the latch continued. Kaempffer could see breaks in the strip of light along the bottom of the door, but they gave no clue as to who might be out there. He considered turning on the lamp, but thought better of it. The dark room gave him an advantage—an intruder would be silhouetted against the light from the hall.

"Identify yourself!"

The fumbling at the latch stopped, to be replaced by a faint creaking and cracking, as if some huge weight were leaning against the door, trying to get through it. Kaempffer couldn't be sure in the dark, but he thought he saw the door bulge inward. That was two-inch oak! It would take massive weight to do that! As the creaking of the wood grew louder, he found himself trembling and sweating. There was nowhere to go. And now there was another sound, as if something were clawing at the door to get in. The noises assailed him, growing louder, paralyzing him. The wood was cracking so that it seemed it must break into a thousand fragments; the hinges cried out as their metal fastenings were tortured from the stone. Something had to give! He knew he should be chambering a shell into his Luger but he could not move.

The latch suddenly screeched and gave way, the door bursting open and slamming against the wall. Two figures stood outlined in the light from the hall. By their helmets, Kaempffer knew them to be German soldiers, and by their jackboots he knew them to be two of the einsatzkommandos he had brought with him. He should have relaxed at the sight of them, but for some reason he did not. What were they doing breaking into his room?

"Who is it?" he demanded.

They made no reply. Instead, they stepped forward in unison toward where he lay frozen in his bedroll. There was something wrong with their gait—not a gross disorder, but a subtle grotesquery. For one disconcerting moment, Major Kaempffer thought the two soldiers would march right over him. But they stopped at the edge of his bed, simultaneously, as if on command. Neither said a word. Nor did they salute.

"What do you want?" He should have been furious, but the anger did not come. Only fear. Against his wishes, his body was shrinking into the bedroll, trying to hide.

"Speak to me!" It was a plea.

No reply. He reached down with his left hand and found the battery lamp on the floor beside his bed, all the while keeping the Luger in his right trained on the silent pair looming over him. When his questing fingers found the toggle switch, he hesitated, listening to his own rasping respirations. He had to see who they were and what they wanted, but a deep part of him warned against turning on the light.

Finally, he could stand it no longer. With a groan, he flicked the toggle and held the lamp up.

Privates Flick and Waltz stood over him, faces white and contorted, eyes glazed. A gaping crescent of torn and bloodied flesh grinned down at him from the place where each man's throat had been. No one moved ... the two dead soldiers wouldn't, Kaempffer couldn't. For a long, heart-stopping moment, Kaempffer lay paralyzed, the lamp held aloft in his hand, his mouth working spasmodically around a scream of fear that could not pass his locked throat.

Then there was motion. Silently, almost gracefully, the two soldiers leaned forward and fell onto their commanding officer, pinning him in his bedroll under hundreds of pounds of limp dead flesh.

As Kaempffer struggled frantically to pull himself out from under the two corpses, he heard a far-off voice begin to wail in mortal panic. An isolated part of his brain focused on the sound until he had identified it.

The voice was his own.

"Now do you believe?"

"Believe what?" Kaempffer refused to look up at Woermann. Instead, he concentrated on the glass of kummel pressed between both palms. He had downed the first half in one gulp and now sipped steadily at the rest. By slow, painful degrees he was beginning to feel that he had himself under control again. It helped that he was in Woermann's quarters and not his own.

"That SS methods will not solve this problem."

"SS methods always work."

"Not this time."

"I've only begun! No villagers have died yet!"

Even as he spoke, Kaempffer admitted to himself that he had run up against a situation completely beyond the experience of anyone in the SS. There were no precedents, no one he could turn to for advice. There was something in the keep beyond fear, beyond coercion. Something magnificently adept at using fear as its own weapon. This was no guerrilla group, no fanatic arm of the National Peasant Party. This was something beyond war, beyond nationality, beyond race.

Yet the village prisoners would have to die at dawn. He could not let them go—to do so would be to admit defeat, and he and the SS would lose face. He must never allow that to happen. It made no difference that their deaths would have no effect on the ... thing that was killing the men. They had to die.

"And they won't die," Woermann said.

"What?" Kaempffer finally looked up from the glass of kummel.

"The villagers—I let them go."

"How dare you!" Anger—he began to feel alive again. He rose from his chair.

"You'll thank me later on when you don't have the systematic murder of an entire Romanian village to explain. And that's what it would come to. I know your kind. Once started on a course, no matter how futile, no matter how many you hurt, you keep going rather than admit you've made a mistake. So I'm keeping you from getting started. Now you can blame your failure on me. I will accept the blame and we can all find a safer place to quarter ourselves."

Kaempffer sat down again, mentally conceding that Woermann's move had given him an out. But he was trapped. He could not report failure back to the SS. That would mean the end of his career.

"I'm not giving up," he told Woermann, trying to appear stubbornly courageous.

"What else can you do? You can't fight this!"

"I will fight it!"

"How?" Woermann leaned back and folded his hands over his small paunch. "You don't even know what you're fighting, so how can you fight it?"

"With guns! With fire! With—" Kaempffer shrank away as Woermann leaned toward him, cursing himself for cringing, but helpless against the reflex.

"Listen to me, Herr Sturmbannführer: Those men were dead when they walked into your room tonight. Dead! We found their blood in the rear corridor. They died in your makeshift prison. Yet they walked off the corridor, up to your room, broke through the door, marched up to your bed, and fell on you. How are you going to fight something like that?"

Kaempffer shuddered at the memory. "They didn't die until they got to my room! Out of loyalty they came to report to me despite their mortal wounds!" He didn't believe a word of it. The explanation came automatically.

"They were dead, my friend," Woermann said without the slightest trace of friendship in his tone. "You didn't examine their bodies—you were too busy cleaning the crap out of your pants. But I did. I examined them just as I have examined every man who has died in this godforsaken keep. And believe me, those two died on the spot. All the major blood vessels in their necks were torn through. So were their windpipes. Even if you were Himmler himself, they couldn't have reported to you."

"Then they were carried!" Despite what he had seen with his own eyes he pressed for another explanation. The dead didn't walk. They couldn't!

Woermann leaned back and stared at him with such disdain that Kaempffer felt small and naked.

"Do they also teach you to lie to yourself in the SS?"

Kaempffer made no reply. He needed no physical examination of the corpses to know that they had been dead when they had walked into his room. He had known that the instant the light from his lamp had shone on their faces.

Woermann rose and strode toward the door. "I'll tell the men we leave at first light."

"NO!" The word passed his lips louder and shriller than he wished.

"You don't really intend to stay here, do you?" Woermann asked, his expression incredulous.

"I must complete this mission!"

"But you can't! You'll lose! Surely you see that now!"

"I see only that I shall have to change my methods."

"Only a madman would stay!"

I don't want to stay! Kaempffer thought. I want to leave as much as anyone! Under any other circumstances he would be giving the order to move out himself. But that was not one of his options here. He had to settle the matter of the keep—settle it once and for all—before he could leave for Ploiesti. If he bungled this job, there were dozens of his fellow SS officers lusting after the Ploiesti project, watching and waiting to leap at the first sign of weakness and wrest the prize away from him. He had to succeed here. If he could not, he would be left behind, forgotten in some rear office as others in the SS took over management of the world.

And he needed Woermann's help. He had to win him over for just a few days, until they could find a solution. Then he would have him court-martialed for freeing the villagers.

"What do you think it is, Klaus?" he asked softly.

"What do I think what is?" Woermann's tone was annoyed, frustrated, his words clipped brutally short.

"The killing—who or what do you think is doing it?"

Woermann sat down again, his face troubled. "I don't know. And at this point, I don't care to know. There are now eight corpses in the subcellar and we must see to it that there aren't any more."

"Come now, Klaus. You've been here a week ... you must have formed an idea." Keep talking, he told himself. The longer you talk, the longer before you've got to return to that room.

"The men think it's a vampire."

A vampire! This was not the kind of talk he needed, but he fought to keep his voice low, his expression friendly.

"Do you agree?"

"Last week—God, even three days ago—I'd have said no. Now, I'm not so sure. I'm no longer sure of anything. If it is a vampire, it's not like the ones you read about in horror stories. Or see in the movies. The only thing I'm sure of is that the killer is not human."

Kaempffer tried to recall what he knew about vampire lore. Was the thing that killed the men drinking their blood? Who could tell? Their throats were such a ruin, and there was so much spilled on their clothes, it would take a medical laboratory to determine whether some of the blood was missing. He had once seen a pirated print of the silent movie, Nosferatu, and had watched the American version of Dracula with German subtitles. That had been years ago, and at the time the idea of a vampire had seemed as ludicrous as it deserved to be. But now ... there certainly was no beak-nosed Slav in formal dress slinking around the keep. But there were most certainly eight corpses in the subcellar. Yet he could not see himself arming his men with wooden stakes and hammers.

"I think we shall have to go to the source," he said as his thoughts reached a dead end.

"And where's that?"

"Not where—who. I want to find the owner of the keep. This structure was built for a reason, and it is being maintained in perfect condition. There has to be a reason for that."

"Alexandra and his boys don't know who the owner is."

"So they say."

"Why should they lie?"

"Everybody lies. Somebody has to pay them."

"The money is given to the innkeeper and he dispenses it to Alexandru and his boys."

"Then we'll interrogate the innkeeper."

"You might also ask him to translate the words on the wall."

Kaempffer started. "What words? What wall?"

"Down where your two men died. There's something written on the wall in their blood."

"In Romanian?"

Woermann shrugged. "I don't know. I can't even recognize the letters, let alone the language."

Kaempffer leaped to his feet. Here was something he could handle. "I want that innkeeper!"

The man's name was Iuliu.

He was grossly overweight, in his late fifties, balding on his upper pate, and mustachioed on his upper lip. His ample jowls, unshaven for at least three days, trembled as he stood in his nightshirt and shivered in the rear corridor where his fellow villagers had been held prisoner.

Almost like the old days, Kaempffer thought, watching from the shadows of one of the rooms. He was starting to feel more like himself again. The man's confused, frightened countenance brought him back to his early years with the SS in Munich, when they would roust the Jew shopkeepers out of their warm beds in the early morning hours, beat them in front of their families, and watch them sweat with terror in the cold before dawn.

But the innkeeper was no Jew.

It really didn't matter. Jew, Freemason, Gypsy, Romanian innkeeper, what really mattered to Kaempffer was the victim's sense of complacency, of self-confidence, of security; the victim's feeling that he had a place in the world and that he was safe—that was what Kaempffer felt he had to smash. They had to learn that there was no safe place when he was around.

He let the innkeeper shiver and blink under the naked bulb for as long as his own patience would allow. Iuliu had been brought to the spot where the two einsatzkommandos had been killed. Anything that had even remotely resembled a ledger or a record book had been taken from the inn and dropped in a pile behind him. His eyes roamed from the bloodstains on the floor, to the bloody scrawl on the rear wall, to the implacable faces of the four soldiers who had dragged him from his bed, then back to the bloodstains on the floor. Kaempffer found it difficult to look at those stains. He kept remembering the two gashed throats that had supplied the blood, and the two dead men who had stood over his bed.

When Major Kaempffer began to feel his own fingers tingle with cold despite his black leather gloves, he stepped out into the light of the corridor and faced Iuliu. At the sight of an SS officer in full uniform, Iuliu took a step backward and almost tripped over his ledgers.

"Who owns the keep?" Kaempffer asked in a low voice without preamble.

"I do not know, Herr Officer."

The man's German was atrocious, but it was better than working through an interpreter. He slapped Iuliu across the face with the back of his gloved hand. He felt no malice; this was standard procedure.

"Who owns the keep?"

"I don't know!"

He slapped him again. "Who?"

The innkeeper spat blood and began to weep. Good—he was breaking.

"I don't know!" Iuliu cried.

"Who gives you the money to pay the caretakers?"

"A messenger."

"From whom?"

"I don't know. He never says. From a bank, I think. He comes twice a year."

"You must have to sign a receipt or cash a check. Whom is it from?"

"I sign a letter. At the top it says The Mediterranean Bank of Switzerland. In Zurich."

"How does the money come?"

"In gold. In twenty-lei gold pieces. I pay Alexandru and he pays his sons. It has always been this way."

Kaempffer watched Iuliu wipe his eyes and compose himself. He had the next link in the chain. He would have the SS central office investigate the Mediterranean Bank in Zurich to learn who was sending gold coins to an innkeeper in the Transylvanian Alps. And from there back to the owner of the account, and from there back to the owner of the keep.

And then what?

He didn't know, but this seemed to be the only way to proceed at the moment. He turned and stared at the words scrawled on the wall behind him. The blood—Flick's and Waltz's blood—with which the words had been written had dried to a reddish brown. Many of the letters were either crudely formed or were not like any letters he had ever seen. Others were recognizable. As a whole, they were incomprehensible. Yet they had to mean something.

He gestured to the words. "What does that say?"

"I don't know, Herr Officer!" He cringed from the glittering blue of Kaempffer's eyes. "Please ... I really don't!"

From Iuliu's expression and the sound of his voice, Kaempffer knew the man was telling the truth. But that was not a real consideration—never had been and never would be. The Romanian would have to be pressed to the limit, battered, broken, and sent limping back to his fellow villagers with tales of the merciless treatment he had received at the hands of the officer in the black uniform. And then they would know: They must cooperate, they must crawl over one another in their eagerness to be of service to the SS.

"You lie," he screamed and slammed the back of his hand across Iuliu's face again. "Those words are Romanian! I want to know what they say!"

"They are like Romanian, Herr Officer," Iuliu said, cowering in fear and pain, "but they are not. I don't know what they say!"

This tallied with the information Kaempffer had gleaned from his own translating dictionary. He had been studying Romania and its languages since the first day he had got wind of the Ploiesti project. By now he knew a little of the Daco-Romanian dialect and expected soon to be passably fluent in it. He did not want any of the Romanians he would be working with to think they could slip anything by him by speaking in their own language.

But there were three other major dialects which varied significantly from one another. And the words on the wall, while similar to Romanian, did not appear to belong to any of them.

Iuliu, the innkeeper—probably the only man in the village who could read—did not recognize them. Still, he had to suffer.

Kaempffer turned away from Iuliu and from the four einsatzkommandos around him. He spoke to no one in particular, but his meaning was understood.

"Teach him the art of translation."

There was a heartbeat's pause, then a dull thud followed by a choking groan of agony. He did not have to watch. He could picture what was happening: One of the guards had driven the end of his rifle barrel into the small of Iuliu's back, a sharp, savage blow, sending Iuliu to his knees. They would now be clustered around him, preparing to drive the toes and heels of their polished jackboots into every sensitive area of his body. And they knew them all.

"That will be enough!" said a voice he instantly recognized as Woermann's.

Enraged at the intrusion, Kaempffer wheeled to confront him. This was insubordination! A direct challenge to his authority! But as he opened his mouth to reprimand Woermann, he noticed that the captain's hand rested on the butt of his pistol. Surely he wouldn't use it. And yet...

The einsatzkommandos were looking to their major expectantly, not quite sure of what to do. Kaempffer longed to tell them to proceed as ordered but found he could not. Woermann's baleful stare and defiant stance made him hesitate.

"This local has refused to cooperate," he said lamely.

"And so you think beating him unconscious—or to death, perhaps—will get you what you want? How intelligent!" Woermann moved forward to Iuliu's side, blandly pushing the einsatzkommandos aside as if they were inanimate objects. He glanced down at the groaning innkeeper, then fixed each of the guards with his stare. "Is this how German troops act for the greater glory of the Fatherland? I'll bet your mothers and fathers would love to come and watch you kick an unarmed aging fat man to death. How brave! Why don't you invite them someday? Or did you kick them to death the last time you were home on leave?"

"I must warn you, Captain—" Kaempffer began, but Woermann had turned his attention to the innkeeper.

"What can you tell us about the keep that we don't already know?"

"Nothing," Iuliu said from the floor.

"Any wives' tales or scare stories or legends?"

"I've lived here all my life and never heard any."

"No deaths in the keep? Ever?"

"Never."

As Kaempffer watched, he saw the innkeeper's face light with a kind of hope, as if he had thought of a way to survive the night intact.

"But perhaps there is someone who could help you. If I may just get my registration book...?" He indicated the jumbled ledgers on the floor.

When Woermann nodded to him, he crawled across the floor and picked out a worn, stained, cloth-covered volume from the rest. He fumbled through the pages feverishly until he came to the entry he wanted.

"Here it is! He has been here three times in the past ten years, each time sicker than the last, each time with his daughter. He is a great teacher at the University of Bucharest. An expert in the history of this region."

Kaempffer was interested now. "When was the last time?"

"Five years ago." He shrank away from Kaempffer as he replied.

"What do you mean by sick?" Woermann asked.

"He could not walk without two canes last time."

Woermann took the ledger from the innkeeper. "Who is he?"

"Professor Theodor Cuza."

"Let's just hope he's still alive," Woermann said, tossing the ledger to Kaempffer. "I'm sure the SS has contacts in Bucharest who can find him if he is. I suggest you waste no time."

"I never waste time, Captain," Kaempffer said, trying to regain some of the face he knew he had lost with his men. He would never forgive Woermann for that. "As you enter the courtyard you will notice my men already busy prying at the walls, loosening the stones. I expect to see your men helping them as soon as possible. While the Mediterranean Bank in Zurich is being investigated, and while this professor is being sought out, we shall all be busy dismantling this structure stone by stone. For if we should obtain no useful information from the bank or from the professor, we shall already be started toward destroying every possible hiding place within the keep."

Woermann shrugged. "Better than sitting around and waiting to be killed, I suppose. I'll have Sergeant Oster report to you and he can coordinate work details." He turned, pulled Iuliu to his feet, and pushed him down the corridor, saying, "I'll be right behind you to see that the sentry lets you out."

But the innkeeper held back an instant and said something to the captain in a low tone. Woermann began to laugh.

Kaempffer felt his face grow hot as rage welled up within him. They were talking about him, belittling him. He could always tell.

"What is the joke, Captain?"

"This Professor Cuza," Woermann said, his laughter fading but the mocking smile remaining on his lips, "the man who might possibly know something that could keep a few of us alive... he's a Jew!"

Renewed laughter echoed from the captain as he walked away.

ELEVEN

Bucharest

Tuesday, 29 April

1020 hours

The harsh, insistent pounding from without rattled their apartment door on its hinges.

"Open up!"

Magda's voice failed her for an instant, then she quavered out the question to which she already knew the answer. "Who is it?"

"Open immediately!"

Magda, dressed in a bulky sweater and a long skirt, her glossy brown hair undone, was standing by the door. She looked over at her father seated in his wheelchair at the desk.

"Better let them in," he said with a calm she knew was forced. The tight skin of his face allowed little expression, but his eyes were afraid.

Magda turned to the door. With a single motion she undid the latch and jerked back as if fearing it would bite her. It was fortunate that she did, for the door flew open and two members of the Iron Guard, the Romanian equivalent of German stormtroopers, lurched in, helmeted, armed with rifles held at high port.

"This is the Cuza residence," the one toward the rear said. It was a question but had been uttered as a statement, as if daring anyone listening to disagree.

"Yes," Magda replied, backing away toward her father. "What do you want?"

"We are looking for Theodor Cuza. Where is he?" His eyes lingered on Magda's face.

"I am he," Papa said.

Magda was at his side, her hand resting protectively atop the high wooden back of his wheelchair. She was trembling. She had dreaded this day, had hoped it would never come. But now it looked as if they were to be dragged off to some resettlement camp where her father would not survive the night. They had long feared that the anti-Semitism of this regime would become an institutionalized horror similar to Germany's.

The two guardsmen looked at Papa. The one to the rear, who seemed to be in charge, stepped forward and withdrew a piece of paper from his belt. He glanced down at it, then up again.

"You cannot be Cuza. He's fifty-six. You're too old!"

"Nevertheless, I am he."

The intruders looked at Magda. "Is this true? This is Professor Theodor Cuza, formerly of the University of Bucharest?"

Magda found herself mortally afraid, breathless, unable to speak, so she nodded.

The two Iron Guards hesitated, obviously at a loss as to what to do.

"What do you want of me?" Papa asked.

"We are to bring you to the rail station and accompany you to the junction at Campina where you will be met by representatives of the Third Reich. From there—"

"Germans? But why?"

"It is not for you to ask! From there—"

"Which means they don't know either," Magda heard her father mutter.

"—you will be escorted to the Dinu Pass."

Papa's face mirrored Magda's surprise at their destination, but he recovered quickly.

"I would love to oblige you, gentlemen," Papa said, spreading his twisted fingers, encased as always in cotton gloves, "for there are few places in the world more fascinating than the Dinu Pass. But as you can plainly see, I'm a bit infirm at the moment."

The two Iron Guards stood silent, indecisive, eyeing the old man in the chair. Magda could sense their reactions. Papa looked like an animated skeleton with his thin, glossy, dead-looking skin, his balding head fringed with wisps of white hair, his stiff fingers looking thick and crooked and gnarled even through the gloves, and his arms and neck so thin there seemed to be no flesh over the bones. He looked frail, fragile, brittle. He looked eighty. Yet their papers said to find a man of fifty-six.

"Still you must come," the leader said.

"He can't!" Magda cried. "He'll die on a trip like that!"

The two intruders glanced at each other. Their thoughts were easy to read: They had been told to find Professor Cuza and see that he got to the Dinu Pass as quickly as possible. And alive, obviously. Yet the man before them did not look as if he would make it to the station.

"If I have the expert services of my daughter along," she heard her father say, "I shall perhaps be all right."

"No, Papa! You can't!" What was he saying?

"Magda ... these men mean to take me. If I am to survive, you must come along with me." He looked up at her, his eyes commanding. "You must."

"Yes, Papa." She could not imagine what he had in mind, but she had to obey. He was her father.

He studied her face. "Do you realize the direction in which we will be traveling, my dear?"

He was trying to tell her something, trying to key something in her mind. Then she remembered her dream of a week ago, and the half-packed suitcase still sitting under her bed.

"North!"

Their two Iron Guard escorts were seated across the aisle of the passenger car from them, engaged in low conversation when they were not trying to visually pierce Magda's heavy clothing. Papa had the window seat, his hands double gloved, leather over cotton and folded in his lap. Bucharest was sliding away behind them. A fifty-three-mile trip by rail lay ahead—thirty-five miles to Ploiesti and eighteen miles north of there to Campina. After that the going would be rough. She prayed it would not be too much for him.

"Do you know why I had them bring you along?" he said in his dry voice.

"No, Papa. I see no purpose in either of us going. You could have got out of it. All they need do is have their superiors look at you and they'd know you're not fit to travel."

"They wouldn't care. And I'm fitter than I look—not well, by any standard, but certainly not the walking cadaver I appear to be."

"Don't talk like that!"

"I stopped lying to myself long ago, Magda. When they told me I had rheumatoid arthritis, I said they were wrong. And they were: I had something worse. But I've accepted what's happening to me. There's no hope, and there's not that much more time. So I think I should make the best of it."

"You don't have to rush it by allowing them to drag you up to the Dinu Pass!"

"Why not? I've always loved the Dinu Pass. It's as good a place to die as any. And they were going to take me no matter what. I'm wanted up there for some reason and they are intent on getting me there, even in a hearse." He looked at her closely. "But do you know why I told them I had to have you along?"

Magda considered the question. Her father was ever the teacher, ever playing Socrates, asking question after question, leading his listener to a conclusion. Magda often found it tedious and tried to reach the conclusion as swiftly as possible. But she was too tense at the moment for even a halfhearted attempt at playing along.

"To be your nurse, as usual," she snapped. "What else?" She regretted the words as soon as she uttered them, but her father seemed not to notice. He was too intent on what he wanted to say to take offense.

"Yes!" he said, lowering his voice. "That's what I want them to think. But it's really your chance to get out of the country! I want you to come to the Dinu Pass with me, but when you get the chance—at the first opportunity—I want you to run off and hide in the hills!"

"Papa, no!"

"Listen to me!" he said, leaning his face toward her ear. "This chance will never come again. We've been in the Alps many times. You know the Dinu Pass well. Summer's coming. You can hide for a while and then make your way south."

"To where?"

"I don't know—anywhere! Just get yourself out of the country. Out of Europe! Go to America! To Turkey! To Asia! Anywhere, but go!"