Free Ratlines by Stuart Neville Page A

funeral. You and Johan Hambro must have had mutual acquaintances. Tell me where I can find them, and I will interview them.”
    Skorzeny shook his head. “Out of the question. My friends value their privacy. Even if I could tell you where to find these people, I cannot compel them to talk with you. They would simply refuse.”
    “They may have seen something, someone, that could help us,” Ryan said. “It’s the only route I can see.”
    “Then you will find another.”
    Ryan stood, placed the glass on the coffee table.
    “There is no other,” he said. “I’ll study the case notes, review my findings, and write up a report. Without your cooperation, that’s all I can do. Good evening.”
    Ryan left the suite, closed the door behind him, walked to the stairs. He was halfway down the first flight when Haughey called to him from above.
    “Wait there, big fella.”
    Ryan stopped, turned.
    Haughey descended the steps, thunder on his face.
    “Just who in the name of Christ do you think you are? You don’t talk to a man like Otto Skorzeny like that. Are you trying to make a cunt of me or what?”
    “No, minister.”
    Haughey came nose-to-nose with Ryan despite standing a step higher. “Then what are you trying to do?”
    “The job you assigned me, Minister. For that I need cooperation. Without it, you’ll get my report and that’s all.”
    “I put you in that nice suit, big fella. Now you repay me with back talk. The fucking cheek of you.”
    Ryan turned his back on the minister, left him huffing in the stairwell.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    O TTO S KORZENY CHECKED his wristwatch. Late enough, so he poured another glass of brandy.
    He found this Irishman Ryan interesting. A soldier who’d spent the majority of his career fighting for another nation, a nation most of his countrymen considered their enemy.
    Skorzeny sympathised with the G2 officer’s position. All his life he had felt a lack of nationhood. As a younger man, and an Austrian, he had sided with the Germans, supported their annexation of his own land. After the war, he had drifted from country to country, Spain to Argentina and back again, then here, to this rainy island.
    A nationalist without a nation.
    The idea struck Skorzeny as oddly romantic. It was true that many nationalist revolutionaries were not natives of the lands they fought for. Like the Egyptian militant, Yasser Arafat, who stoked the Palestinian flames, urging war against the Zionists. Or Ernesto Guevara, the Argentinean who helped steer the Cuban revolution. Or, indeed, Eamon de Valera, that most ardent Irish nationalist and republican who was in fact only half Irish by parentage, and had barely escaped being executed alongside his comrades of the 1916 uprising by virtue of being born in, and therefore a citizen of, the United States of America.
    Truth be told, Skorzeny would have preferred to be back in Madrid, enjoying his friend Francisco Franco’s hospitality. These killings might not have been quite so troubling had he been able simply to board a flight to Spain. But an Italian had brought an end to that. At least for the time being.
    It had been three months ago, a warm Tarragona evening, on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. Franco had invited a score of his closest friends to spend the weekend with him, enjoying the sea air of the Catalan coast, perhaps to take a walking tour of the city’s Roman ruins. Skorzeny had flown from Dublin to Paris, then on to Barcelona, before travelling south by train to join Franco at his hotel perched at the end of the Rambla Nova.
    A piano chimed inside the crowded hotel suite, mingling with the sound of the surf washing up on the rocks below, as Skorzeny enjoyed a white wine spritzer and a cigarette on the balcony.
    “Colonel Skorzeny,” a voice said.
    Skorzeny turned from the sea view, fading as the sun set, to see a well dressed man, blond-haired. For a moment, Skorzeny assumed him to be a former Kamerad , given his Aryan appearance, but