Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “Believe what, Big Bill?” Caitlin asked him, not sure she wanted to hear the answer. “Who was Gunther Haut?”

  The old Ranger didn’t hesitate at all. “The son of Adolf Hitler.”

  PART TEN

  We don’t have an official uniform. It’s Western dress—a hat, boots, a solid-colored shirt, a tie, and a jacket, depending on the occasion. [Department of Public Safety] gives us a clothing allowance of $100 a month, so a $500 hat and a $400 pair of boots cuts into your yearly budget pretty quick. But the way we look is important. I learned early on in my Ranger career that when you approach a crook you’re about to interview and you’re dressed like a Ranger, he immediately sits up and takes notice and, in most cases, shows you respect.

  —Texas Ranger Captain Barry Caver as quoted in Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss Jr., University of North Texas Press, 2013

  90

  ROUND ROCK, TEXAS

  “I don’t believe it,” Cort Wesley said when Caitlin told him over the phone.

  “My grandfather sure did, and he took the secret to his grave.”

  “That’s not what I meant. When I paid that visit to Darl Pickett, I thought the old man was crazy ’cause he told me Cliven Fisker had confessed to him in prison over moonshine that Hitler was his grandfather. That makes Gunther Haut his father, and the timeline matches up perfectly when you think about it.”

  “It also makes Armand Fisker Hitler’s great-grandson. So I guess there’s a lot to be said for genetics, Cort Wesley.”

  “You think he knows?”

  “I don’t know how he could, unless his father, Cliven, told him at some point, which I sincerely doubt.”

  Caitlin heard Cort Wesley sigh on the other end of the line. “I wonder what Boone Masters would’ve thought if he knew he’d killed the grandson of Adolf Hitler.”

  “Maybe he heard the story, too. Maybe Darl Pickett spilled the beans to him. Maybe that’s really why your father shanked Cliven Fisker: because he believed it was true.”

  “The question being, Ranger, do you believe it?”

  “I know a whole bunch of men died in Texas in 1944 because of Gunther Haut. I know it would have taken more than a rumor or wives’ tale to bring J. Edgar Hoover himself out here, along with a decorated captain in the Special Air Service all the way from England.”

  Caitlin could almost feel Cort Wesley thinking on the other end of the line. “You mean like the stories I’ve heard over the years about Hitler having a son with a French prostitute or something during World War I when the Germans were fighting over there?”

  “That’s the rumor that had the most validity, but there are others, including a waitress in Hamburg a few years before that. According to his file, Gunther Haut was an SS officer attached to Rommel’s Afrika Korps.”

  “Hitler’s eyes and ears, in other words.”

  “Not a job he would have trusted to just anyone,” said Caitlin. “And sending Haut to North Africa would’ve kept him away from the front.”

  “Relatively safe, in other words.”

  “Haut must’ve stuck around there after the Allies defeated Rommel at El Alamein in 1942 and then was finally taken prisoner in the wake of the Tunisian Campaign in May of 1943. That’s how he ended up in Texas, along with tens of thousands of other German soldiers.”

  “Except he didn’t turn up in Hearne until the spring of 1944, nearly a year later,” Cort Wesley noted.

  “Because he must not have been captured immediately. After the Tunisian Campaign, Allied sea and air superiority made it difficult to bring supplies in or get someone of Haut’s stature out. My guess is he was kept hidden by French officials in Tunis who were either spies or Nazi sympathizers, before he was caught in one of the sweeps that followed over the next year.”

  “No wonder the Germans worked so hard to get him out of Camp Hearne.”

  Caitlin nodded. “And they got plenty of bang for their buck. Gunther Haut, son of Adolf Hitler, started a family under the name of ‘Rolf Fisker.’ Cliven was born in 1947, Armand Fisker twenty-four years later in 1971. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  She heard Cort Wesley sigh. “We don’t know shit about the world, do we, Ranger?”

  “No, we don’t. Not in the big picture anyway, Cort Wesley.”

  “That’s the only picture is. If I’ve learned nothing else from you, it’s that.”

  “There’s more,” Caitlin said, feeling the tension kneading through her muscles.

  “I’m still listening.”

  “I got Frank Doyle to admit David Skoll was the man who raped me. Turns out Skoll’s father owned the townhouse where the party took place eighteen years ago. He lived in a neighboring one, was friendly with the students who hosted the party. Doyle said Skoll volunteered to bartend, too, so he could spike the drink of whoever Doyle brought up to him.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I’m on my way back to San Antonio right now to pick up a warrant for Skoll’s arrest.” She felt herself squeezing the steering wheel tighter. “Why’d he pick me, Cort Wesley?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All those coeds at that party, lots of them pretty as hell, why did he single me out?”

  “Having not known you at the time, I can’t say.”

  “I can,” Caitlin told him. “Because I looked vulnerable and out of place, my status as a social misfit coming back to haunt me.”

  “So you’re blaming yourself?”

  “I never should have gone to the party. I was trying to be something I wasn’t. And, you’re right, now I’m falling into that trap.”

  “What trap would that be?”

  “Believing that my actions precipitated what happened. It’s why so many women never report being assaulted; they believe, out of guilt and pain mostly, that they were somehow to blame for what happened, somehow responsible. They feel that’s how the world will judge them if they come clean.”

  “They or you, Ranger?”

  “I came forward, Cort Wesley, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t racked my brain over showing up at the party every day of my life since.”

  “So showing up made you complicit in the crime, a party to your own assault? Will you listen to yourself, please, Caitlin?”

  “I’ve listened to plenty of other women in the same situation. What I’m saying is that I fit the pattern. I’m not responsible for what happened, but I am responsible for being the person I was at the time. I was responsible for me playing with guns instead of dolls, out shooting when other girls were playing soccer or volleyball. I’m not suggesting I would’ve changed a goddamn thing, Cort Wesley. I’m saying that showing up at that party I might as well have worn a sign that said VULNERABLE in all caps.”

  “Which leaves me wondering why you didn’t shoot Frank Doyle the other day when you had the chance. You certainly would’ve been within your rights, yet you didn’t even draw your gun.”

  “I was feeling a different kind or rage at the time, Cort Wesley. I wanted to hurt him, wanted to feel myself hurt him. Does that make any sense?”

  “Makes plenty, if it’s the truth.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Because I’m wondering if you wanted your white whale alive. Leave that chapter of your life open just enough to keep the past at arm’s length, instead of tucked away for good. Almost like you’d be afraid of losing hold of the rage thinking about that night has allowed you to wield like a jackhammer all these years. I’m wondering if that explains your edge.”

  “I didn’t know I had an edge.”

  “Sharp enough to cut like a knife, Ranger. But if I ever hear you suggest again that what happened eighteen years ago was your fault, I’ll hurt you a lot worse.”

  “A romantic as always, aren’t you?”

  “Going up against Armand Fisker will do that to you.”

  Caitlin wished he was next to her in the SUV. “Yup, here we go again.”


  91

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley stopped at a convenience store before setting off for the staging area to meet up with Paz and his men. He bought a pair of Hires original root beers, twisted the tops off both bottles, and stuck them in the console’s cup holders.

  “You trying to bribe me, bubba?” Leroy Epps said from the passenger seat, after Cort Wesley had given up waiting for him to appear.

  “Be a lot cheaper if you preferred Dr Pepper, like everyone else around here.”

  “What you want in exchange for that Hires?”

  “For you to tell me why my father killed Cliven Fisker in Huntsville.”

  “Why you figure I’d know?”

  “’Cause it’s square in your area.”

  “Like the dead all know each other, you mean? There’s a lot more of us around than you living folks; you’d be wise to remember that, bubba. Time may move differently where we at, but that doesn’t mean there’s opportunity or cause to meet everyone.”

  “I thought maybe my dad killed Cliven Fisker because he learned he was Hitler’s grandson.”

  “Now, that’s a mouthful.”

  “It isn’t true?”

  “Didn’t say that, only that it’s a mighty big world on both ends of the spectrum that finds its own balance. Your dad shanking Cliven Fisker, you about to go to war with his son.”

  “Drink your root beer, champ.”

  “I’ll get around to it in my time, bubba, because time’s all that I’ve got. And anytime you try changing the subject, it’s like sticking a NO TRESPASSING sign in my face.”

  “Sometimes you get on to things I have trouble following.”

  “You mean, like fate? ’Cause that’s what this smacks of, if anything ever did. Like you and Armand Fisker came out of the womb destined for this day. And I know what you’re gonna say next, so spare yourself the bother.”

  “You mean, how it was his boy who pushed things to the cliff we’re hanging off now?”

  “Fact that it’s true doesn’t make this any less fated. That’s one of the things I’ve learned over on this side I’m allowed to talk about. Folks like to think life’s about filling in the blank pages, when it’s really about turning the pages that have already been filled.”

  Cort Wesley cocked his gaze briefly toward Leroy, who was leaning forward in the passenger seat, not wearing his seat belt. “You feel like telling me what those pages say about tonight?”

  “What, and ruin all the fun that’s a-comin’?” Leroy grinned, holding his Hires bottle now. “No way, bubba, no way at all.”

  92

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Armand Fisker stood in the center of what had once been Elk Grove’s meeting chambers, where the town elders, selectmen, councilmen, or whatever they’d called themselves, voted on policy for the town. He gazed toward the short platform on which rested a hardwood, semicircular raised desk. Behind that desk, six chairs waited to be occupied by six men Fisker had never met in person.

  The representatives from France, Germany, and Britain had already arrived, having flown into different airports nearby, as arranged. Although helicopters would’ve made the remaining trek faster, their use would have also attracted the kind of attention Fisker wanted to avoid at all costs, especially with the Texas Rangers breathing down his throat. Leave it to his dumbass dead son not just to pick a fight with an ex–Green Beret, but an ex–Green Beret with a Ranger as a girlfriend.

  With those three countries all accounted for, he was awaiting only Spain, Austria, and Italy. Their planes had all landed and they were en route to Elk Grove right now. A few other countries Fisker had invited had been unable to travel on such short notice. And, in the case of several more of the leaders of movements beholden to his drugs for their power, being present on the terrorist watch list precluded them from making the trip overseas.

  Fisker had placed placards to match the position of all six chairs, identifying the planned meeting’s participants by their countries instead of names none of them would want shared. While he’d never met any of these men, he knew them inside and out from the files he’d practically committed to memory. Not just to get to know them better, but also to learn the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that would allow him to control them and negotiate the most favorable terms possible for all the product he was providing.

  Fisker had accumulated so much cash that he had begun offering the pills he supplied at bargain prices, in return for profit-sharing arrangements. Tying up less funds in up-front costs allowed his international partners to expand their networks and hire the kind of operatives who specialized in eliminating all vestiges of competition. Then, to avoid increased scrutiny, on Fisker’s instructions, his partners would run those operations as if nothing had changed. That way, governments in the host countries seldom caught on to the concentration of criminal power they were facing. And Fisker’s partners were well positioned to bribe inquiring or less cooperative officials with sums easily sufficient to enlist them as willing partners. From there, they were able to build a political power base on which to choose candidates from their own ranks or, even more, become the primary backers of candidates of like minds and values. Fisker, in fact, could see a day where the nationalistic movements he had championed became a unified force running pretty much the whole world.

  Business at its best.

  Staring up at those six placards now, Fisker wondered if his father ever had an inkling he was building something that would reach such a level. Fisker had never sat down to figure the total gross proceeds his operation generated worldwide, but imagined they were comparable to any number of Fortune 500 companies.

  Without the need to pay taxes, of course, or file paperwork, or account for any of their practices.

  He should have felt more grief over the killing of his son. Instead, he felt rage. But that rage was tempered with the realization that he’d let his son down. He barely knew his own father. That, coupled with the fact that he, similarly, barely knew Ryan, filled Fisker with an emptiness that made him figure that he hadn’t bothered counting all that money he’d amassed because the money meant relatively little to him.

  The war hero Masters and Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong represented everything that had dragged down his life. They represented the establishment that had harnessed his father to a jail cell, the very government he had skirted in rebuilding Elk Grove into his own private kingdom where the only rules that mattered were the ones he made up, free from scrutiny and judgment.

  But why stop there?

  Elk Grove was a microcosm of what people who thought as he did could do with the world if they got ahold of it. From the established order to the chaos that would precede a sea change in the parties holding true power. And now, thanks to Davey Skoll, that chaos had a name: Axiol, or Lot U257F. A disaster in one respect, but a genuine miracle in another, to be distributed across the world as he saw fit to fuel a new level of power rising out of a chaos that was his to dispense. That deadly drug had the potential to unleash chaos across the globe, creating power vacuums with those politicians backed, and controlled, by his associates prepared to step into the void. The life of his son had meant nothing to the likes of the war hero and the Texas Ranger. And so the lives of those like them, from one end of the world to the other, would be given the same weight by Fisker’s associates who would now have a weapon of mass destruction at their disposal.

  He would be able to measure his success by the number of established governments that fell to a combination of collapse and the rise of populist-style leaders to replace them. Prepared to seize an opportunity that was theirs because Armand Fisker was giving it to them, starting with the six he’d be meeting with tonight.

  So while Armand Fisker had never taken much delight in counting all the cash he was making, counting bodies was something else entirely. Starting with Caitlin Strong, Cort Wesley Masters, and Masters’ two sons.

  Payback was a bitch. That much hadn’t changed.

 
; 93

  WACO, TEXAS

  David Skoll wasn’t at his mansion in Alamo Heights when Caitlin drove straight from the judge’s house to serve the warrant for his arrest. So she headed back to the Redfern Pharmaceuticals manufacturing plant in Waco in the hope that he was there. For all she knew, with the walls closing in around him, Skoll was in the wind by now, sliding into some fake identity he’d spent a fortune to make ironclad. Or maybe he’d just fly off to some country that lacked an extradition treaty with the United States.

  But something told her that wasn’t the case at all; something else told her that this was about more than she was seeing and had been all along. So, with some time to kill and needing a fresh take on what she was missing, she called Young Roger, the honorary Ranger who was a technology expert, over the Bluetooth in her SUV just as the late afternoon sky began to bleed light.

  “I owe you a bigger debt than I can ever pay, Rog,” she told him. “You helped me catch a ghost from my past who’s been haunting me for almost twenty years.”

  “Thank the computer, Ranger. I just plugged in the data as you gave it to me.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. And I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Hold on, while I fasten my seat belt.”

  “You driving?”

  “No, ma’am. But when you say you need to ask me a question, I know I better anchor myself tight.”

  “You sound like my captain.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “So long as you don’t take up smoking,” she told him. “There’s something else I can’t figure out here I want to pick your brain about. By all indications, David Skoll overpaid for Redfern Pharmaceuticals because of a cutting edge anti-rejection drug that went from boom to bust in a heartbeat. What I can’t figure is why he did that, even though investment experts I’ve asked have told me that, even if the drug had worked, his profits would’ve been marginal at best in comparison to the debt he incurred to purchase the company. So what am I missing?”