The Soldier Spies (Men at War 3)

“Well, then, go ahead and throw up,” Fulmar said. “Just do it where I can see you.”

She looked at him with horror and loathing, but she did not throw up.

There was a knock five minutes later at the door.

“Is that your father?” Fulmar whispered.

She shook her head.

"He would have a key,” she whispered, and then raised her voice. “Who is there?”

“Hauptsturmführer Peis, Fräulein Dyer,” Peis called.

Gisella looked at Fulmar to see what to do.

Fulmar walked on the balls of his feet to the door, then gestured for Gisella to open it.

She walked to the door and opened it.

“Guten Tag,” she said politely.

“I understand we have a visitor from Berlin,” Peis said. “I thought I would ask if I could be of any—”

Fulmar killed him as he had killed the Gestapo agent on the train, quickly, soundlessly, by inserting the narrow, very sharp Fairbairn blade into his skull so quickly that brain death was virtually instantaneous. Peis’s body, as Lorin Wahl’s had, flopped around in his arms for a moment before the nerve reflexes died. Then Fulmar let Peis’s body slide to the floor.

He bent over him, put his boot on his face, and pulled the baby Fairbairn from Peis’s skull. He wiped the blade on Peis’s jacket and sheathed the knife. He looked at Gisella. She met his eyes for a moment, then turned her head.

Fulmar dragged the body into the living room, putting it where it would be out of sight of someone standing at the door, but making no other effort to conceal it. Then he straightened the rugs he’d put into disarray dragging the body.

“Did you have to kill him?” Gisella asked, very low.

“It was necessary,” he said, then thought that sounded a little too harsh. He wanted her afraid of him, not hysterical.

“I knew him, you remember. He would have remembered me. I haven’t changed that much.”

She laughed nastily at that.

“My God,” she said,“if they catch us, they’ll kill us.”

Fulmar didn’t reply. He went to the window and looked down at Burgweg. There was a small, diesel-engined Mercedes parked by a No Parking sign.

“Does Peis have a driver?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Then as soon as your father gets here, we’ll take his car to Frankfurt and catch the Vienna train.”

“Why are we going to Vienna?” she asked. “It’s in the opposite direction.”

“Because it’s safer,” he told her.

They were going to Budapest, but if they were caught on the way, it was better that neither she nor her father knew their ultimate destination.

“My father’s liable to have a heart attack when he sees Peis,” Gisella said. It was not a cliché; she meant it.

Fulmar shrugged.

“When you… left Marburg, the last time,” she said,“and he questioned me, he burned my breasts with lighted cigarettes. The pain… I should feel something now that you’ve killed him. But I don’t. I just can’t believe any of this is happening.”