Deliver Us From Evil (4 page)

S
HAW WAS IN
P
ARIS
, just having finished an intense day of prep work. He changed into long shorts and a loose-fitting white T-shirt and went
for a run along the Seine, passing the Jardin des Tuileries, the Orangerie Museum, and the Grand Palais. His feet pounded along the Avenue de New York before he cut across a bridge, passed over the famous river that bisected Paris, and a few minutes
later ran underneath the wide base of the Eiffel Tower. He slowed, jogging through the green space before picking up his pace
again. Eventually he ended up in the Saint-Germain section of Paris, on the Left Bank where his small hotel was situated.
He normally preferred the adjacent Latin Quarter while in the city, but Frank had made other arrangements.

He showered, changed his clothes, and met Frank for dinner at a restaurant near the Orsay Museum. They sat in the rear corner
of the outside eating area, which was cordoned off from the sidewalk by rectangular flower planters set on tall wrought-iron
stands. Before leaving Frank gave him a slip of paper.

“What’s this?”

“A phone number.”

“For who?”

“Just call it.”

Frank wedged his hat down on his head and walked off. Shaw could see him pause at the doorway to light one of his favored
small cigars before quickly disappearing into the mass of people threading their way along the crowded street.

Shaw walked back to his hotel, trying to lift his spirits by absorbing the magic of one of the most enchanting cities on earth,
but the effect was exactly the opposite. It was in a hospital in Paris, where he was fighting for his life after having his
arm nearly hacked off by a neo-Nazi, that he’d learned of Anna’s death. It was shortly after he’d asked her to marry him,
and she’d said yes. She was a gifted linguist and had actually said yes in multiple languages. Shaw had even gone to the little
town in Germany where her parents lived to formally seek her father’s permission for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

And then she was dead.

Shaw’s path took him along the river. He crossed over to the island where Notre Dame Cathedral stood. It had been recently
cleaned, centuries of grime scraped off with pressurized water. For some reason Shaw had preferred it dirty. He checked his
watch. It was nearly nine and the church shut down at 6:45 on weekdays. Tourists still roamed around taking shots of the famed
exterior and themselves in front of it. He was not a particularly religious man and he wasn’t sure why he was even here.

For prayer? Well, he was out of luck. God apparently was closed for the night.

Shaw walked back to his hotel, unlocked the door to his room, and sat at a small desk chair, pulling out the slip of paper.
He picked up his cell phone and punched in the number.

“Hello?”

Shaw hadn’t heard that voice in months. Unprepared for it, his finger hit the disconnect button.
Damn you, Frank
. Shaw had thought the phone number had something to do with the current mission. But it hadn’t.

That was Katie James’s voice.

He lay back on the bed and stared at the pale blue ceiling.

Their last day together had not worked out exactly as Shaw had wanted it to. Well, maybe it had, since at the crack of dawn
he’d left the hotel in Zurich where they’d been staying, grabbed a shuttle to the airport, and took the next flight out; he
didn’t really care where it was going. She’d woken up, gone down to breakfast to meet him, as they had planned, and probably
become frantic when he didn’t show. She’d tried to call him, but he’d never called her back. He’d changed his number. He didn’t
really know why he’d done all this. He’d never run from anything or anyone before. But he’d woken up in Switzerland on a chilly
morning and just knew that he had to be alone.

So I just ran.

He stared at the slip of paper again. He should at least give her a chance to bitch at him for what he’d done. Yet an hour
went by and he didn’t move.

Then he sat up and punched in the number.

“Hello, Shaw,” she said.

“How did you know it was me?”

“You called over an hour ago and then hung up.”

“You couldn’t know that. I’ve got caller block.”

“I still knew it was you.”

“How? You don’t get other calls?”

“Not on this phone. The only person I gave the number to was Frank so he could give it to you.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “So why didn’t you try to call back? You just had to hit redial on my number.”

“I figured I’d let you work it out. How have you been?”

“Don’t you want to scream at me?”

“Why, would that be productive?”

That didn’t sound like the Katie James he knew. She was all emotion, wearing her heart on her sleeve and in her news stories.
The lady was impulsive, something that Shaw both objected to and admired about her because it was so different from who he
was. Or at least who he’d thought he was. As it turned out, around her he could be pretty spontaneous.

Shaw got up and walked over to the window overlooking the cobblestone courtyard of the hotel as night fell solidly over Paris.
“I’m okay. How have you been?”

“Back doing freelance. I got some permanent job offers but none of them really interested me.”

“Bunch of rags?”

“
New York Times
.
Der Spiegel
in Germany, even
Rolling Stone
, real bottom dwellers.”

“I thought you wanted to get back in the game.”

“I guess I was wrong. How’s Frank?”

“The same.”

“So you’re back in
your
game, apparently.”

“I guess so,” he mumbled.

“Where are you?”

“Working.”

“I’m in San Fran for now. So when do you think you’ll get a break from work?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure if you’ll survive the next job, or something else?”

He didn’t answer.

“Well, if you ever want to talk you have my number.”

“Katie?”

“Yes?” Shaw could hear her breaths coming a little more quickly.

“It was good to hear your voice.”

“Take care of yourself. And remember, you don’t have to do everything Frank tells you to.”

She clicked off and Shaw tossed the phone on the bed.

D
OMINIC LOWERED
his glass of beer and tapped Reggie on the arm.

“I’m sorry, Dom, what were you saying?” she asked sheepishly.

They were at a restaurant a few blocks from her London flat and her mind had drifted to other things while he’d been speaking.

“That I knew Whit talked to you about what was coming up.”

“He stopped me outside the shooting range. Did he tell you he was going to?”

“I was actually the one who suggested he go to you.”

“Why me? He could have gone directly to the professor.”

“He and Whit don’t always get on.”

Reggie frowned. “None of us get on all the time. It’s the nature of the beast.”

She swallowed some tea and played with a biscuit on her plate. It was gray and drizzly outside, and a sharp wind smacked against
the window, apparently trying to force its way inside. Across from them an ill-nourished fire sputtered in the soot-caked fireplace. Reggie knew if the weather stayed like this through the summer, half of London
would become suicidal and the other half would seriously contemplate it. Ordinarily, a trip to warm, sunny Provence would
be a godsend.
Ordinarily.

“You know he wanted a frontline place with Huber but the professor objected?”

She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “That was Huber. Whit going in guns blazing wasn’t going to work in that situation.
The old Nazi wanted boobs and ass, not a touchy Irishman with tats and a Glock.”

Dominic raised an eyebrow. “Whit has tattoos?”

Reggie sighed wearily. “Get on with it, Dom. I’m tired.”

“But perhaps with Kuchin Whit can participate?”

“I told Whit I’d talk to Mallory, and I will.” She eyed him over her cup. “What about you? What part do you want to play?”

Dominic shrugged. “I’ve been reading up on the Holodomor ever since our first meeting. I really want to get this bastard.”

“Just don’t let your emotions run away with you. That makes you lose your focus, and that’s where mistakes come in.”

“How do you turn it off? How do you not feel?”

She leaned still closer and her lovely eyes grew wide and her smile seductive. “I’ll tell you how. Every time Huber put his
hand on my ass I pretended it was you, Dom, feeling me up. And that got me through it.” She tongued a piece of biscuit into
her mouth.

Dominic blinked and looked confused, his cheeks tinged red.

Reggie laughed. “I’m just kidding. I’m taking Whit’s advice to lighten up more. Seriously, when he did that he wasn’t touching
me, he was grabbing Barbara, his German bimbo. I had to play the role in order to take him down. One step at a time. It was
just a role. That’s how I got through it. I get emotional and lose it, he walks. That’s the best motivation not to ever lose
it. Because then they win.”

Dominic swallowed the rest of his beer. “What was it like?”

She stared dully at him. “What, when he had his bloody hand up my skirt?”

“No, I meant when you, you know?”

“I really didn’t think about it, to tell you the truth. I just did it.”

“I’ve never had to do it yet. I was just wondering.”

“When the time comes you’ll deal with it, Dom. Everyone does it differently, but you’ll finish the job. I have no doubt.”

He was silent for a moment and then said in a low voice, “The other Nazi hunters turned them over to the police and they were
tried in court. Why don’t we do it that way?”

Reggie leaned forward and said in a near whisper, “Those are just the cases you read about in the newspapers. And do you really
think there aren’t groups that turned the Germans directly over to the Israelis? And do you think the Jews gave them their
day in court? And people are losing interest. The Americans have a division at their Justice Department devoted to the Nazis.
Funding and personnel have been slashed because everyone believes the old Hitler lovers are mostly dead. As if the bloody
Third Reich had a monopoly on evil. I’ve seen genocide in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe that would bugger the imagination.
Evil has no geographic boundaries. Anyone who thinks otherwise is barmy.”

After a few moments of silence Dominic changed subjects. “So how do you see the plan formulating?”

She gave him a stern look. “In a way that I don’t want to discuss in a public place.”

“Sorry. I’m heading out to Harrowsfield tonight.”

Reggie relaxed. “So am I. The professor wants to start early. And the couple in the flat above mine are screwing their brains
out every hour. All I hear is ‘Oh God, oh God, yes, do me!’ I turn my wireless up all the way, but it’s still driving me mad.
Do you want to ride out together?”

“No, I’ll take my motorbike.”

“You mean your crotch rocket?” she said wryly.

“What? Oh, you’ve been talking to Whit about more than missions.”

“Pretty rainy to be doing the two-wheeler, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got all-weather gear.” He added wistfully, “I like it better at Harrowsfield than I do my place in Richmond.”

“I like it that I’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep.”

“I’ll see you there then. I have to stop for some petrol first. Cheers.”

As they got up to leave she put a hand on his shoulder. “Dom, when the moment comes all you need to focus on is that justice
is finally being done. That’s all. And you’ll be fine. I promise.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Reggie woke early. She sat up in her bedroom on the third floor of Harrowsfield and shivered. This part of the house was
never heated. She looked out the window. The rain had passed and she thought she could actually see some sunlight breaking
through the cloud cover. She washed her face with water from the tap, changed into sweats and sneakers, left the mansion through
the rear, and started her run. Five miles later, sweaty and her lungs percolating nicely, she returned to the house. The smells
of coffee brewing and bacon and eggs cooking drifted out from the kitchen. She quickly showered, enduring the last minute
of rinsing with only cold water as the old pipes muttered and clanked in protest of their usage. She changed into jeans, flats,
and a black V-neck sweater with a white tee underneath and headed downstairs.

There sometimes could be as many as twenty people at Harrowsfield, though today she knew the number was closer to ten, some
of them historians doing research in the library or in a set of offices set up on both the main and second floors. Their one
goal was to identify the next monster the team would go after. There were linguists immersing themselves in some language
from lands where new evil lurked. Still other researchers were poring over old cable communications, pilfered diplomatic records,
and handwritten accounts of atrocities smuggled out of third world countries. The task was harder now, she knew. The Nazis
had been meticulous record-keepers. Subsequent sadists, operating in many different places, weren’t nearly as accommodating
in leaving a trail of their pervasive wickedness.

Mallory had used great care in vetting all of the people who worked here. There was no formal recruitment, of course. One
couldn’t put an advertisement in the paper seeking justice-minded vigilantes comfortable with killing folks who desperately
deserved it.

In her case, Mallory had sought Reggie out at university where he was a visiting scholar. After a months-long courtship of
sorts, he’d broached the subject of bringing to justice Nazis who’d fled Germany before the fall. When she’d enthusiastically
agreed with the goal, he’d gone a bit further, finally ending with the theoretical possibility of saving the world the price
of a trial by also playing the roles of judge, jury, and executioner.

More months had passed while he allowed her to stew on that. When she’d voluntarily returned to him with more questions, he’d
answered them, to a certain extent. When he could sense her commitment deepening he’d let her meet with some other folks.
Whit was one and Liza another. Another month passed and then Mallory brought her some news clippings of an old man who’d been
found slain in his lavish home in Hong Kong. Though it had never been made public, Mallory told her that the fellow had been
identified as a former concentration camp commander and one of Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand men. They had talked long into
the night of the ethics involved in such an action. It was never explicitly said, but Reggie suspected that the professor
and other people she’d met through him had been behind the killing. By then she desperately wanted to be part of it.

It was only then that he had brought her to Harrowsfield. She went through an array of tests to determine if she had the psychological
makeup to be a member of the group. She passed that barrier easily enough, demonstrating a rigid coldness that surprised even
her. Next was physical fitness. A fine athlete, she was pressed to levels of strength and endurance she never knew she possessed.
Her lungs near collapse, she willed her battered body over treacherous terrain she didn’t realize existed in the bucolic English
countryside. To his credit, Whit Beckham was next to her every step of the way, though he’d already endured this when he first
signed up. After that was the specialized training: weapons, martial arts, and survival skills in myriad challenging conditions.

In the classroom she learned how to research a target and study their background to gain valuable intelligence. She was taught
foreign languages and how to lie with aplomb; how to act out roles and discern when other people were doing the same. She
came to learn how to trail someone so stealthily that they would only know they were being followed when she walked up to
them. These and dozens of other skills were drilled into her to such an extent that she no longer had to think about them.

After her training was complete she’d acted as support on three missions, two where Whit was the lead and another where Richard
Dyson, an experienced Nazi exterminator and since retired, had completed the final act. Her first mission in the lead had
involved an elderly Austrian living in Asia who’d helped Hitler kill hundreds of thousands of people simply because they worshipped
under the Star of David. She’d gotten into his circle by becoming a nanny to his young wife’s child. The monster had been
married five times. He had enough wealth obtained through the theft of antiquities during the war that he could keep divorcing
and remarrying and still live in great luxury. They had one child, a five-year-old boy conceived through artificial insemination
using donated sperm. Reggie suspected that the old Nazi had selected the sperm donor based on the color of his skin, hair,
and height—namely, white, blond, and tall.

She’d worked with them for one month, and in that time the husband had made a half dozen passes at her. From what he’d told
her once while he was in a drunken stupor, she could easily become wife number six if she played her cards right. One night
she came by prearrangement to visit him in his bedroom—by his choice he and his wife kept separate boudoirs. He was again drunk and easily handled by Reggie. When he was tightly
bound and his mouth gagged, she pulled the pictures from a hiding place and showed him the faces of some of his victims, a
strict requirement of all the missions. At the end of their lives the monsters had to know that justice had finally caught
up to them.

The fear he showed had amused her at first. But when the time came to finish the job, Reggie had hesitated. She’d never told
anyone this. Not Whit and certainly not the professor. Her encouraging words to Dominic had also left out this piece of personal
history. The monster had looked at her with pleading eyes. His gaze begged her not to do it. During her training she’d been
told that this moment would come. And she’d also been instructed that no training in the world could fully prepare her for it.

And they’d been right.

Her resolve seemed to pour out of her with each tear shed by what was now a harmless old man. As she lowered the knife, she
saw the relief in his eyes. She could just say that her cover had been blown and the mission was a failure. No one would ever
know.

There were two things that prevented that from happening. One was the mocking sneer that emerged in the man’s eyes as he saw
her weaken. The second was the picture of Daniel Abramowitz, age two, with a bullet hole in his small head. The photo had
come from the monster’s own archives, which he’d lovingly assembled over the years he ran the camp.

She had plunged the knife into his chest until the hilt smacked his sternum. She gave the blade first an upward and then a
downward jerk, and performed the same motion horizontally, severing arteries and destroying heart chambers, as she’d been
taught to do. The sneer was gone from the old man now. For one long second, while life still remained, she saw in his countenance
hatred, fear, rage, fear again, and then simply the flat, glassy stare of death.

“May God understand why I do this,” she whispered, the words that had become a ritual for her at the end of each mission.

Reggie had never hesitated again.