Read Online The Seventh Secret by Irving Wallace - Free Book Online

for many prominent leaders of the Third Reich, but Tovah had the feeling that the entire area was being phased out as a hunting ground. All of the most wanted Nazis were now in their seventies and eighties, and one by one they were dying off. Soon there would be few left to pursue, catch, prosecute. Still, even though Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas chambers, had escaped them through natural death, there was from time to time a Klaus Barbie to be found in this area and extradited to France to stand judgment. Remembering this alleviated one's discouragement.
    Tovah had taken a LATN flight from Concepción to Asunción, and a minibus from Presidente General Stroessner Airport the fifteen kilometers into Asunción. The arrangement had been that she would have a single room at the Guarani Hotel for the day, meeting Shertok in the lobby, and together they would go out to a restaurant for lunch where she could make her report. However, upon her arrival at the Guarani reception desk, where she had a reservation as Helga Ludwig (the name on her passport, a German name more appropriate for a Latin country hospitable to Germans but wary of Jews), she found a telex waiting for her. Ben Shertok requested that they lunch in her room and talk. This sounded more sensible to her, the desire for privacy, and she looked forward to room service.
    Now she considered the time. It was still morning, ten after eleven. Shertok would not be here until two o'clock. This gave her at least a full two hours to spend on her own. She did not know Asunción well. She had been in the capital city twice before: once for a week, eight years ago when she was nineteen and trying to polish up her Spanish during a six-month tour of South America, and again just recently for two days before she had undertaken her travels through Paraguay as a Mossad agent. She had the urge now to walk about the center of the city for a closer and more leisurely look. And maybe pick up a few gifts, trinkets for her parents and brothers in Tel Aviv, with whom she would be reunited the day after tomorrow.
    She reached into her suitcase for something to wear, something light, a sleeveless blouse, cotton skirt, sandals, for it was warm outdoors and becoming more humid. Once downstairs, she walked into the Parque Independencia . The palacha trees of the plaza were all pink on this day, and the avenues lined with Spanish Colonial buildings were lovely with their jacaranda and orange trees. There were gleaming high-rises every-where, and small whitewashed stuccoed buildings, mostly shops, with red-tiled roofs. She studied some new restaurants, several refurbished government buildings, and stopped to look at the goods the lace vendors had for sale. She purchased some handkerchiefs for her mother and favorite aunt.
    In a roundabout way she headed for the Plaza de la Constitución, dutifully studied the Congressional Pal-ace, and sat down in a shady spot to cool off and watch the foot traffic, which had thinned out after the siesta period had begun at noon.
    Dreamily sitting on the bench, Tovah was in a mood to reconstruct the last three years that had brought her to this steamy, remote city. In school, earlier, her languages had been English (everyone among the young in Israel spoke English), Spanish (because it was challenging), and German (because her grandparents on both sides had been born in Germany, and lived and died there—died in concentration camps or gas chambers—but their children had been sent to Palestine, grown, met, married, and become her parents).
    To improve her Spanish she had taken that first vacation to South America, and had twice accompanied her father to West Berlin, on a matter of reparations. Her paternal grandfather had owned a prosperous department store, suffered its confiscation by Hitler, and met his own death in the Nazis' Final Solution. West Berlin had been an alien place to Tovah, and despite its liveliness and excitement she