Traitor's Gate by Newton Charlie

Author:Newton, Charlie [Newton, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2015-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

October, 1938

Nine hours ago at midnight, Saba’s chance to kill Erich Schroeder had come as hoped. Had her plan held together another four minutes, she would have cut his throat midstreet where he stood. At midnight, Santa Cruz de Tenerife’s cobbled Calle San Jose had been alive with soldiers and police, women and tobacco, men drunk with wine and beer and possibilities. Guitars played behind open windows and doors. Men shouted, “Flamenco!” as if it were their anthem. Saba tracked Erich Schroeder from behind. She would die on this street tonight but it would be with the Nazi’s blond, blue-eyed head in her hand. Saba gripped the straight-blade fighting knife under her beggar’s clothes. Her other hand gripped the cocked revolver. The Nazi wished to “prove the Arab’s long reach.” She would murder him here in the next few minutes and make his wishes fact. Others would see the symbolism as irony, but Palestine would see it as the truth of who had bombed Haifa, that the Nazis were merely another European invader, a competing colonial master who saw the Arab as fodder.

Schroeder was alone, fifty feet ahead in the loud, crowded street. A man jostled him. Schroeder shoved the man away. Four bodyguards materialized on Schroeder’s perimeter, two ahead, two behind. The bodyguards were discreet, ordinary to the untrained eye. Saba hung back. She had anticipated one bodyguard, two at the most, not four. Four would be impossible to defeat and still kill the Nazi. A revolver bullet from outside Schroeder’s perimeter could not be trusted. Gun or knife, it had to be with her hands on him. There would be but the one chance.

Schroeder continued up the narrow street. Saba allowed him to extend the distance between them. He passed the loud commotion and Nationalist soldiers and Armada police outside the Bar Atlántico, then stopped and spoke to a young man. Stoop-shouldered, Saba mooched through the crowd, her hand extended, closed the distance, and glanced at Schroeder from behind.

The young man facing him was Eddie Owen.

She stumbled, stepping back. Eddie here was a complication, not an improvement. The Nazi and Eddie walked to a café across Calle San Jose. Saba found a beggar’s wall at the mouth of an alley opposite the café. She squatted there, unimportant and unwashed in the brown on brown, hands under her robe on her knife and revolver. Arab and European men passed her but said nothing.

To the Nazi’s left, a table of polished military men and attractive young European women enjoyed their night of finery and laughter. A strong young man, in denim pants and a white T-shirt, approached the Nazi’s table. The young man’s posture was military. He spoke. Schroeder made what appeared to be apologies to Eddie Owen, rose, and walked toward the waterfront. The Nazi’s four security men closed around him. Saba rose to follow. An Arab man interrupted her line of sight. He spoke to her in caustic Arabic, the dialect unknown. Saba squatted back to her original spot and did not answer.

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