Heroes by David Hagberg (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📗

“We need help,” Schey said. “There are two of us.”

“Where are you?”

“Never mind. We’ll come to you.”

“Is your phone secure?”

“I’m in a booth. It’s secure. Can you help us?”

“We’re leaving this afternoon.”

“For where?”

“Home,” the speaker said, and Schey’s stomach flopped. He looked up at Eva waiting outside the booth for him. He would have to get her to Switzerland, somehow. He wouldn’t leave if that wasn’t possible.

“We’re coming with you, but there may be a complication,” Schey said.

“What are you talking about? Are they after you?”

“The second person is … not going home.”

“I said, what are you talking about?”

“The second person has to get to Switzerland. Do you understand?”

Schey could hear relief in the speaker’s voice. “Is that all? No problem. But your friend will have to cross himself. Sweden first, and from there to Switzerland. I’m not running a courier service there.”

“I understand,” Schey said.

“How soon can you be in front of St. Bartholomew’s?”

“I don’t know where it is?”

“Park Avenue and 50th.”

It wasn’t far. “About twenty minutes. Maybe sooner,” Schey replied.

“A brown delivery van with RCA markings will pull up from the south on Park Avenue. You’ll have to cross the street.”

“RCA, the radio company?”

“RCA … the Royal Canadian Army.”

“We’ll be there …” Schey said when Eva suddenly rapped on the window glass. She was highly agitated. Schey hung up and got out of the phone box.

He spotted the men before she had to point them out. A dozen of them in civilian clothes had rushed in the Eighth Avenue doors, and they were spreading out across the main hall. They obviously were in a big hurry, and just as obviously looking for someone. Four of them ran for the stairs to the trains.

Someone in Colorado had gotten to the train station and had discovered that he and Eva were scheduled to arrive here in New York on the Twentieth Century.

“Are they after us?” Eva asked fearfully.

“I think so,” Schey said. He took her by the elbow and steered her away from the phone booths, leaving their bags behind. They would no longer matter. They would only slow them down.

He put his hand in his pocket and felt for the .38 he had carried with him ever since he had taken it from the FBI agent in Eva’s Washington apartment; it seemed like years ago.

They hurried across the main hall, directly toward the Seventh Avenue exits, keeping within the heavier concentrations of people as much as possible. If they could make it out of the building within the next minute or so, Schey figured they might have a chance of getting free: Much longer than that and the FBI or whoever it was would have had a chance to settle their people into place.

Two men came through the Seventh Avenue doors at the same moment Schey and Eva had reached them. They had nowhere to go now.

For a split second the agents looked from Schey to Eva and back again, the expression on their faces changing from one of curiosity to surprise, and then to fear. They both started to reach inside their coats.

Schey shoved Eva aside, pulled out the .38, and fired two shots, the first hitting the agent to his right in the chest, driving him backward, and the second hitting the other agent in the abdomen, doubling him over.

Someone screamed.

Schey leaped forward, shoving the wounded agent out of the way, and as he hit the doors, he half turned to make sure Eva was coming..__

But she had shrunk back. Her mouth was opening and closing, but no sounds were coming out.

“Eva …” Schey shouted, halfway out the door, when the side of her head exploded in a mass of blood and bone. She was thrown violently to the left, her legs flying out from under her.

Schey brought the .38 around as a bullet smashed the glass door just to the right of his shoulder. He fired three shots in quick succession. One man went down, and two others fell back as pandemonium raged in the crowded station.

“Eva!” he shouted again. But she was lying in a bloody heap on the floor, her eyes open. She was dead! There was no question about it!

Schey fired his last shot; the second time he pulled the trigger, the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

He turned, stepped the rest of the way outside, let the pistol fall to the pavement at his side, and hurried across Seventh Avenue, dodging traffic.

“Stop!” someone shouted behind him. Horns were blaring, and someone was screaming; in the distance he could hear sirens.

But he did not turn around and look back.

Seconds later he was around the corner, and he ducked into the Statler Hotel, calmly walked across the lobby as if he belonged there, and stepped out the West 32nd Street exit where he got directly into a cab.

“St. Bartholomew’s Church,” he told the driver, and he sat back so that he could not easily be seen from outside, as the driver took off away from the station area.

“Sounds like some sort of trouble back there,” the cabby said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Schey mumbled, as the vision of Eva’s body being flung to the floor, her head erupting in blood, flashed into his mind. It began to build and pound, threatening to engulf him completely, but then changing so that her image seemed to meld with the image of poor Katy going down in their house in Oak Ridge.

He thought about his son back in Kentucky. He would never see him again. Never. He had come to this country alone. He would leave it that way. Behind him was death and destruction.

Had it been worth it? Had he served as an honorable soldier of the Reich? Would his father be proud of him?

Katy, he cried inside. Eva. What in God’s name had he done?

I Erwin Delbruck poured coffee for Baron Kaulbars, then for his Uncle Willi, and finally for himself. He sat down, “I can take care of Motte and the other horses out at