The Madagaskar Plan Read Online Free PDF Page B

hallway, and it had been intentionally amplified. He crept toward it, straining to hear, over the jowly intonation, anything that might indicate where someone was hiding: the creak of a floorboard, a suppressed cough.
    “… We must not allow the continent to become a German dominion,” declared Churchill. In the background, a crowd was split between applause and jeers. “I therefore urge the prime minister to reconsider the clever, shameful compromise of his foreign secretary…”
    The hallway was empty, doors opening off it onto sunless rooms. Burton glanced up the staircase: there was no face peering through the banister. On the side table was a Grundig transistor radio, one of those new portable devices from Germany that everyone seemed desperate to own and that neither Burton nor Madeleine was interested in.
    “… to appeal instead across the Atlantic to the new president. The Nazis will only be contained with the assistance of the United States—”
    He flicked the off switch with the muzzle of his Browning. Africa was the land of his birth, where he’d spent most of his life: first in Togo, then, after his parents’ deaths, in the Sahara as a soldier of the French Foreign Legion. During the Nazi conquest, he’d fought across the continent as a mercenary. He hoped never to hear the name of the place again.
    Burton sensed a rush of air. He lurched backward as a crowbar smashed into the wall. It swung a second time, wielded by a man in a suit who glided silently across the floor. Iron thumped Burton’s shoulder. He dropped his Browning, watched it clatter past his assailant’s socked feet: he wasn’t wearing shoes.
    Burton stamped on his foot.
    The man tumbled forward, grabbing him. They both crashed into the table, then the floor, knocking over the radio. Churchill’s voice boomed out again— “Britain is weaker than we admit; we need American might” —followed by a rainstorm of static.
    Burton was on his back, a chubby weight on top of him, fists blurring his vision. He scooped up the radio and smashed it into the other man’s head. His hand came away full of bloody transistor parts.
    Upstairs, a door opened. Floorboards groaned.
    In the hallway, the suit was already on his feet. He kicked Burton and sent him sprawling. Burton landed hard, something digging into his back. Through his jacket he could make out a metal L-shape; he reached for it.
    The man in the suit towered over him, wagging the crowbar. “Lyall,” he shouted up the stairs. “I got the bastard.” He turned to Burton. “You broke my fucking radio. You know how much it cost me?”
    Burton shot him in the kneecap.
    The man dropped, clutched his spewing leg.
    “Where’s Madeleine?”
    “Lyall!”
    “What did you do to her?”
    A hiss and nick of plaster as the wall behind him exploded. Lyall was at the top of the stairs, a revolver in his hand. He wore an identical black suit and dainty, slip-on shoes, his lips and chin masked behind a thick beard. Burton aimed the Browning and let off two blasts before charging after him.
    By the time he reached the landing, Lyall had vanished; all the bedrooms were shut. It was like a game he’d played with Hochburg as a child: the three doors of the washhouse, Onkle Walter reducing him and his mother to terror and giggles as he burst from one with his lion roars. Burton’s father had been a trusting doter to let Hochburg into their lives. He checked Alice’s room first, pistol raised in front of him. It was dank, stripped bare except for a sleeping bag that didn’t belong here; through the window the fields were growing dark gray. He wondered what lies Cranley had told Alice about her mother.
    Burton moved to the next room—also empty—then the master bedroom. The axe that savaged the orchard had been at work here.
    There were gashes in the walls and the wardrobe, one of its doors hanging from the hinges like a broken jaw. The bedsheets had been ripped off and the mattress slashed open.