Through the swirling haze stepped three operators in dark gray tactical dry-suits, carbon-fiber ballistic helmets, and panoramic night-vision goggles, their suppressed weapons raised to their cheeks, moving with disciplined, synchronized precision.
And stepping through the threshold behind them, wearing an immaculate black loden-wool hunting coat over a gray tweed suit, holding a silver-handled cane, was Baron Friedrich von Hauff.
Advertisement
At sixty-five, the German aristocrat possessed the severe, aristocratic bone structure of a Prussian cavalry officer: silver hair cropped close as iron wire, a monocle fitted over his left eye, and thin, cruel lips that curved into an expression of absolute, contemptuous triumph.
"Mr. Whitfield!" von Hauff called down the brick vault, his English cultured, flawless, carrying the cold resonance of an Oxford lecture hall. "You have performed an admirable, peasant-like defense of this timber shed. But eighty years of post-war American theft concludes tonight. That cylinder contains the sovereign wealth of my family’s industrial trusts. Hand it to my men, and I will permit you to die of old age in this ditch."
Advertisement
