But of Fritz Streicher’s two Swiss-held estates—this city mansion and that Cariboo ranch—the latter better suited the Aryan’s psychology, because he’d grown up on an East German pig farm. So for more than a decade, ever since he’d come to B.C. after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the Fatherland, the psycho had spent most of his time at the old Phantom Valley ranch house, guarding the entrance to the mine.
To amuse himself, and because German was his mother tongue, he had begun experimenting with the Streicherstab blueprints that he had recovered from Castle Werewolf in the Sudeten Mountains. What the Aryan had discovered about himself as he tinkered around in the Phantom Valley mine was that, like Nikola Tesla, he was blessed with an intuitive grasp of electromagnetic quantum mechanics. Only when he had learned to tap into the zero-point energy in the Skunk Mountain lab did he comprehend the full space-age potential of the Streicherstab treasure trove.
By luck and family background, fate had given him the means to fulfill his Nazi fantasies.
Revenge against the Russians was the be-all and end-all of the Aryan’s existence. With growing anticipation, he had watched America shift toward the political right. To his mind, the war in Iraq was simply a war of revenge. America had far deadlier enemies in the nuclear states of North Korea and Iran than it did in the tinpot dictatorship of Iraq. With all its satellites and state-of-the-art spy technology, America must certainly have known that there were no weapons of mass destruction moving around that landscape of flat, visible sand. No, that war was perpetrated to fix the mistake of not having crushed Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and to wipe the smirk off that nose-thumbing Untermensch’s face.
Give America the means to disarm the Russians, and to exact revenge for Soviet anti-Americanism throughout the Cold War, and the hawks in the Pentagon today would pull the payback trigger in an instant.
It was to further his own desire for Götterdämmerung for Russia that the Aryan had sent the Pentagon a peek at the Streicherstab blueprints, with an offer to forward the mother lode in exchange for a billion dollars.
A billion dollars was a drop in the bucket to Uncle Sam, while no amount of money, no matter how big the pile, could ever compensate the Aryan for the post-war hell that he and his family had endured at the hands of a Soviet colonel.
All because of the line between.
But instead of welcoming him with open arms, what had been the Pentagon’s response?
They had tried to kill him!
He figured the hit men had traced him through Switzerland. He had used a dummy address to forward his extortion demand to U.S. authorities—a subterfuge that had worked so well for Fritz Streicher, the post-war paymaster, when he needed to contact Third Reich refugees—but the Pentagon must have leaned on the Swiss postmaster to find out the source of the package. When that was exposed as a post office in central British Columbia, someone must have linked the location to the 1947 Skunk Mine explosion.
Or had he been betrayed?
Only one person knew his Nazi secret.
* * *
The Aryan’s trips to Vancouver to find stand-ins for the psychodramas he acted out in the mine always involved the same ritual. First, he dropped off the soap-makings at the rendering plant. It thrilled him to think of all those pampered human pigs rubbing their porcine bodies with luxury soap made from Untermenschen fat. Then he passed a day or two at Fritz’s mansion, sleeping in the living quarters of the coach house and sneaking into Hitler’s bunker to fantasize about what it must have been like to be the spoiled Über-child of Fritz Streicher and his bleach-blonde wife. And finally, he would set out on another hunt for a boy’s town youth to pigstick back at the Skunk Mine, for that gave him his only temporary release from the horrors of his past in East Germany.
But no more.
Pentagon hit men would return to the mine to finish the job, so he knew he could never go back to the Phantom Valley Ranch. That’s why he had left the spooks a surprise up there, and why he had dropped off soap-makings harvested from one of the gunmen at the rendering plant earlier today. If the Americans were tailing him, he wanted them to know that one of their own had been converted into bars of human soap. That’s why he had talked up his link to the ranch at the reduction works.
This time, instead of coming to town to hunt for another victim, he had brought a victim down with him. The pigstuck hit man was stored in the tool box behind the cab. Might as well let the Pentagon think that he had a hostage squealing all their secrets—and use the body to confront his betrayer, if this was a turncoat’s game.
To make sure no one tracked the truck to the coach house—the last thing he needed was to have the ranch connected to the mansion—he had switched the license plate, then parked the vehicle at a beach where gardeners were pruning the trees. Having watched the lot for hours from woods bordering the shore, he felt it was safe to drive the truck up to the top of the bluff and—shrouded by this misty drizzle—along the shadowed driveway to the coach house garage, where he now alighted from the cab.
With a box and a book under one arm, the psycho crossed directly to the entrance to the subterranean tunnel. Swinging wide on oiled hinges, the door opened into a dank passage. He followed a flashlight beam into the heart of University Hill, his footsteps echoing as he walked, until he reached a steel door with a punch-coded lock. In went the code, and in went the Aryan.
A flick of the wall switch and Hitler’s bunker was flooded with murky light. Ahead of him ran what would have been the conference passage. The entrance to this bunker was by the door that had led up to the chancellery garden where the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun were burned and buried. The first door to the right ushered the Aryan into the map room where the two had married.
He almost tripped over the bison head on the floor.
Another switch flicked and the map room jumped to life. Standing over the table, he took in its arrangement, then he sat down on the chair and shuffled items around. Along the far edge of the cluttered surface, he placed the oblong box that he had brought down from the mine; sheathed within was the bloody sword of SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher. On top of that he piled the box that was already on the table, the case storing the general’s companion dagger, which had remained here at the UBC mansion.
In front of that, he displayed the two tattoos: the one he himself had skinned from Fritz Streicher’s heart and tanned into a circle, and the one from the skin of Hans Streicher that had bound his copy of Mein Kampf. The outline of the castle in Fritz’s tattoo had, after a little pictorial research about German medieval strongholds, lured him to Castle Werewolf, where the cross above the mantel in Hans’s tattoo had taken him to the hiding place.
Having read the newspaper clippings and the story of the Minotaur in the UBC book, the Aryan studied the layout of the labyrinth, just a mile or so from here.
Then he went out to the truck to drag in the corpse.
* * *
“The good Nazi,” Dane said, “is the general consciousness of our killer’s split identities. He’s no different from the millions of German civilians who embraced the Nazi Party before and during the war, but didn’t know about Nazi atrocities and weren’t involved in the killings. The evil Nazi is the half who embodies all of that, and he’s involved in his own ‘final solution’ vendetta using ‘subhuman’ stand-ins for the one responsible for his early sexual abuse. And that was all kept secret while the Stealth Killer preyed in boy’s town for far too many years.”
“So where do I come in?” Cort asked.
“It wasn’t just you. It was Special X too. But the threat began with the series of Times articles that you and Bess McQueen did on ‘disposable people.’ Bess’s piece on the boy’s town disappearances, especially, threatened to bring to light the Stealth Killer’s crimes.”
“Blame Bess,” said the reporter.
“Not so fast,” Dane countered. “Threatening the Stealth Killer also threatens the good Nazi, for even though
they see themselves as separate people, they share the same haunt—the home where they live—when they do their switch. So if the Stealth Killer, the evil Nazi, screwed things up and led the cops to their door, he would also expose the secrets of the good Nazi.”
“Like Siamese twins,” said Cort.
“Right. They’re subconsciously joined. So it was self-preservation that turned the good Nazi into a killer as well. To distract attention from the missing boys, he killed someone who deserved to die in a spectacular fashion.”
“The Congo Man.”
“Which gave you a story.”
“So why did he carve the swastika?”
“To repatriate the Nazi symbol. He’s the good Nazi. The other guy is the evil Nazi. And if he needed reinforcement in that twisted thinking, he got it in spades when you wrote up his crime as a vigilante killing on a par with a Greek myth.”
“You’re saying that’s why he killed again?”
“No,” replied Dane. “By then, we had told the Times that Special X was after the Stealth Killer too. The good Nazi had ample motive to keep us looking his way. Through murder, his fate was in his own hands, and not the other Nazi’s. And when you and the Times kept writing him up as a Greek hero, ridding the earth of monsters who prey on innocent people, that meshed with his view of himself as an Aryan superman.”
“Why would both identities reintegrate now?”
“Because that’s what dissociated multiples do when they have no further need for the split-off identity. In psychological therapy, that’s the goal. Here, the good Nazi has become a killer too, so if the Swastika Killer can take over victimizing the stand-ins for whoever sexually abused him as a boy, what further need is there for the split-off evil Nazi?”
“It fits,” said Jackie, by way of punctuation.
Cort held out his wrists for handcuffs. “Does that mean I’m off to jail as a journalistic abettor?”
“No,” said Dane. “You’re embedded with us. Just like reporters on a modern battlefront.”
“Why?”
“Because that was our deal, and I like to keep my word. And when I ran it past the brass, they agreed. Find the Stealth Killer and—if my theory proves true—we’ll find the Swastika Killer as well. Still, there might be hostages from the boy’s town abductions. And if the evil Nazi is integrating into the good Nazi, you’re the one he’ll trust for hostage negotiations.”
“Another myth,” Jackie said as she parked the car in the lot of the RCMP runway.
“How so?” the reporter asked.
“You’re our Trojan Horse.”
* * *
Air Services had several aircraft warmed up on the Tarmac. The PC12 Pilatus, which would hold eight assault cops with their duffle bags of gear. A Twin Otter. A Eurocopter. And a LongRanger. Air Services had mount-ups like this one down to a science. Each ERT cop had been weighed with his weapons to “weight and balance” the aircraft. Before he let a passenger board his bird, each pilot asked, “Have you got your minimum specs?” to make sure that his part of the air cavalry “stayed within its envelope.”
Cort buckled in with a grin plastered on his face. If the gods were smiling, he would have the byline of the year. Not only would the cops take down his killer—the Swastika Killer—at the Cariboo ranch tonight, but in doing that, they would also take down Bess McQueen’s killer—the Stealth Killer—and he would royally scoop the queen bitch.
The plane took off.
* * *
As the Aryan dragged the dead weight of the Pentagon killer into Hitler’s bunker, the RCMP planes and helicopters droned northeast toward the Cariboo ranch, their engine noise muffled by the buffer of earth. Dropping the body onto the floor in front of the trio of waxworks that represented the ideal Aryan family, the East German returned to the map room for the hollowed-out bison head and the sail-sewing kit in the tool box beside it. Then he came back and knelt down by the corpse.
While the vacant eyes of the wax figures watched him work—the man in Hitler’s uniform, the woman in Eva’s black dress, the boy in his Hitlerjugend clothes—the Aryan fitted the Mounties’ bison head over the dead spook. With a big sail needle and threads of black cord, he began to sew the mutant monster together to mimic the myth of the Minotaur, half bull and half man.
Zero Point
The Cariboo
May 28, Now
With the gunning down of Mr. Clean in Sergeant Winter’s condo, the shit had hit the fan for the white world of the Pentagon. Fingerprints and photographs taken from and of the corpse—along with images of the high-tech gadgets seized by the cops—were being circulated among U.S. authorities by RCMP investigators hoping to identify the gunman on the floor. Uncle Sam’s black world rested upon plausible deniability, and now not only was Big Bad Bill’s Weird Shit Division being exposed to prying minds outside and inside the Pentagon, but there was a possibility—a probability, maybe—that Bill had fumbled the ball on the two blackest secrets of the Second World War.
Bill’s main concern, however, wasn’t Mr. Clean. It was the silence from Ajax and Lysol up at the Skunk Mine. “Bill, we found a saber box labeled ‘SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher,’” Ajax had phoned in. “There’s static in the mine. I’ll report once we’re out.” And since then, nothing.
Slowly, Bill had started to put the pieces together. The Pentagon had received a demand from Switzerland for one billion dollars in exchange for the secret of zero-point energy. The note was clipped to a sheaf of random photocopies that the extortionist claimed were notes and blueprints from a Nazi think-tank that General Patton’s Third Army had failed to find in Czechoslovakia. The true mailing address behind the Swiss front was in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, where the Weird Shit Division had covered up the Phantom Valley mine explosion of 1947. In that same valley, a Nazi punk was now raising pigs out front of the abandoned mine where Ajax had found Streicher’s sword.
Conclusion: That Nazi had the mother lode of Streicherstab papers, and the only way to seize them if Ajax and Lysol were dead was to send in a strike force.
Like Bill had done when the Stealth fighter crashed in 1986.
And like Hardware had done in 1947, when alien monsters had crashed at Roswell, New Mexico.
* * *
If you want a job done right, do it yourself.
That’s why Bill had scrambled a jet from Arlington up to Alaska, where he was met by a surgical strike team and a chopper with the authorization to pass through B.C. airspace in the black of night. Just your friendly hawkish neighbor flying a little hardware from state forty-nine to the lower forty-eight.
A report of mechanical problems was radioed to the Canucks as the chopper flew over the Phantom Valley Ranch, and permission to set down and check things out was granted. Bill would have preferred to have backup surveillance from his eyes in the sky, but storm clouds over the Cariboo had blinded the satellites. Still, he had stale-dated intel from Ajax and Lysol’s reconnoitering the night before, so he figured he knew the lay of the land.
“Let’s go!” Bill ordered.
The helicopter came swooping down out of the clouds like a bird of prey. It landed beside the ranch house, spraying needles of rain out as a starburst. The red team jumped down into the mud and hit the building hard, bursting in doors, front and back, to storm the Nazi’s home. Moments later, they rushed out and signed the all-clear, then sloshed past the pigpen to the mouth of the mine. With a sharp bang and a soggy flash of light, the portcullis was blown open by an explosive device. Gung ho, the Pentagon red team got swallowed into Skunk Mountain.
The pilot remained in the chopper as Bill splashed off toward the mine. The ranch was hauntingly dark. With night-vision lenses over his eyes so he could see, a communication plug in his ear so he could hear, and a pistol in his fist so he could kill, Bill lurked outside the yawning hole until he was summoned.
“Colonel, you gotta see this!”
Stepping into the tunnel, Bill recoiled from the stench. An X-sha
ped frame with swastika arms was the source, and upside down on it were the rotting remains of a gutted teen. Pressing on, Bill entered the ruins of what looked like a mad scientist’s lab. It had been torn asunder, as if Frankenstein’s monster had gone berserk. At a constricted hole in the facing wall, the soldier who had summoned Bill crooked his arm in a “come here” motion.
At first, Big Bad Bill didn’t recognize Ajax. All he saw was a body impaled to the concave rock by a rusted, barnacled anchor that would need three men just to lift it. One prong of the anchor was spiked through the skull, so the body hung from it like a limp rag doll. The stripped-off clothes lay jumbled on the ground amid shattered teeth and shards of bone. Like the youth on the X-shaped frame, the dangling man had been gutted, scooped out like a human canoe, the offal carried away. He’d been repeatedly branded with swastika marks, and among them Bill spotted Ajax’s military tattoo. The clothes on the floor were black world camouflage.
“Weird, huh?” the soldier said.
“Yeah,” Bill grunted.
“It would take Superman to hurl an anchor like that.”
This anchor had been hurled by a superman. A Nazi superman tapped into quantum mechanics. The force behind the hurling—of this, Bill had no doubt—was the Holy Grail of aerospace engineers: zero-point energy.
ZPE, thought Bill.
Germany was the place where quantum mechanics was born. Nazi physicists looked at gravity from a perspective unlike everyone else’s. They saw space as a plenum filled with energy, where particles flashed in and out of existence around their zero-point baselines. Even at the zero point of existence—a vacuum chilled to absolute zero, or -273.15°C—ZPE was present. From the atoms of our bodies to the outer limits of the cosmos, the quantum vacuum was a quantum sea full of quantum foam. Billions of fluctuations occurred every second from particles popping in and out of existence.
Zero-point energy could not be seen.
But it could be heard in the background hiss on a transistor radio.
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