Swastika

by Michael Slade

  No salutes were exchanged.

  Vlasov’s cohorts didn’t fool the major one bit. Sure, they drove up in a jeep and packed pistols, but their new, oversized uniforms and lack of battlefield decorations betrayed them as closet civilians. U.S. Army Intelligence knew all about the Soviet “trophy battalions.” The job of these Russkie counterparts to Uncle Sam’s V-2 detectives was to ferret out Nazi rocket technology for Joe Stalin’s Chief Artillery Directorate. No doubt these thick-set peasants all carried Commie wish lists of Fatherland hardware and rocketeers.

  Tough luck, Colonel.

  Hardware sensed the growing tension as he ushered the colonel and his trophy hunters through the Mittelwerk. It was a lot colder in the tunnels than the temperature dictated. The Russkies got an eyeful of the factory assembly line, but just a few indications of what had been there when the Yanks arrived. When they emerged from the dark, shielding their eyes against the blazing sun, the Commies were no more enlightened than they’d been before they went in.

  “How many men did you lose in the war?” Vlasov asked through his interpreter.

  “Three hundred thousand,” Hardware said proudly.

  “We lost eight and a half million!”

  Hardware flicked out a Lucky Strike and offered it to Vlasov. The Russkie ignored the smoke.

  “When we took Berlin, where were you?” Vlasov asked in a voice shaking with clenched rage.

  Hardware ignited a match with the nail of his thumb.

  “Holding back on the Elbe,” Vlasov scoffed.

  “Ike gave you the glory. Be thankful,” the major said. No way was he going to take shit from this borscht-eating peon. “If it was up to me, the Stars and Stripes would have flapped on top of the Reichstag, not the hammer and sickle.”

  “This”—Vlasov jerked his thumb toward the tunnels—“is all we get!”

  The major stared the Russkie dead in the eye.

  “Be thankful you’re getting anything,” he said, winking.

  Official Secrets

  The Cariboo

  May 28, Now

  Time was ticking down on the deadliest secret in the Pentagon’s closet, and Bill was pissed that that time was being wasted by this straight-arrow Mountie. By the time Uncle Sam got through with him, Chief Superintendent DeClercq wouldn’t be able to get a job scooping poop at the Calgary Stampede.

  Bill paced the interview room.

  From the Phantom Valley Ranch, the Lone Ranger and Tonto had driven him in an unmarked police car along the Cariboo Highway toward the former ghost town of Barkerville. At Wells, the cops had locked him up in the hoosegow of the local redcoat detachment, and he was now heating his heels as he watched precious minutes tick away on the wall clock. With each jerk of the minute hand, Big Bad Bill imagined the secret cache of Streicherstab documents slipping further away.

  In frustration, he slammed his fist down hard on the table.

  Bill would tear the balls off this yokel.

  So where the hell was he?

  * * *

  DeClercq was decked out in the red serge tunic of Review Order No. 1. With a weaponless Sam Browne, riding breeches, high boots, brown leather gloves, the felt Stetson, and several medals on his chest, he came down the hall toward Dane, Jackie, and Cort. It was rare for commissioned officers to don the historic color—their everyday working uniform was blue—but the chief had carried his red serge north just in case he was called upon to address the media following the arrest of the Stealth Killer. The Vancouver Times had accused the Mounties of ignoring “the less dead,” “the disposable people,” so the chief had planned to give that case the full Monty.

  Instead, Special X had trapped a different quarry.

  And now DeClercq had a different use for the iconic uniform.

  “Chief,” said Jackie, standing up, “I just got a call. Another Greek-myth corpse was dumped overnight in Vancouver. A bunch of high-tech gadgets were found on the body.”

  “Dumped where?” DeClercq inquired.

  “In a maze at UBC. If you don’t need us here, we want to fly back down.”

  The chief turned to the reporter. “Do you have a camera on you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” replied Jantzen.

  “Good. Here’s what I want from you …”

  * * *

  Oh, sweet mother of Jesus, thought Big Bad Bill. What does this redcoat prick hope to do? Relive the War of Independence? Refight the Battle of Saratoga? Get real, pal.

  The Mountie crossed to the recorder and punched it on.

  “Chief Superintendent DeClercq has entered the room.” He turned to his suspect. “You know my name. What’s yours?” he asked.

  “That’s classified information,” Bill replied.

  “Classified by whom?”

  “That’s classified, too,” parried Bill.

  “Name, rank, and serial number. Let’s start with that.”

  Bill was sitting. The redcoat was standing. So Bill pushed back his chair and stood up to face the Mountie eye to eye.

  “I demand to speak to your commander-in-chief.”

  “So speak,” said DeClercq.

  “Not you. A military man. I demand to speak to someone with real authority.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Get off it. You’re just a cop. I want the man in command of your armed forces.”

  “It doesn’t work like that up here.”

  “It does where I come from.”

  “But you’re not down where you come from, are you? This is my jurisdiction. You will obey Canada’s laws. So I’m asking you one more time, what’s your name?”

  “I refuse to answer. Turn that thing off.” Bill crooked his thumb at the recording device.

  “This interview is terminated,” said DeClercq, and he punched off the recorder as requested.

  “Okay, Mountie-man, listen up,” said Bill. “You have no idea who you’re fooling with. You’ve got five seconds to read me my rights, then I want the American ambassador on the phone. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll quit jacking around. The last thing you want is a fight with Uncle Sam.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Is that your final answer?”

  “Give me my rights.”

  “What rights might those be? Only people have rights. So until I get a name out of you, those rights are in abeyance. And I will get your name—and get to the truth—one way or another. Just so you know what you’re fooling with, I’ll lay my cards on the table.”

  DeClercq opened his briefcase and withdrew several photos.

  “Yesterday, this unidentified hit man broke into the home of one of my officers and tried to kill him. No one does that unless they want to deal with me.”

  The redcoat dropped a crime scene photo of the dead Mr. Clean onto the table.

  “This high-tech spy gear was found with that body.”

  The redcoat dropped a photo of the contents of the black world’s cleaning kit onto the morgue shot.

  “The unidentified hit man was after a file containing photos of murder victims with swastikas gouged into their flesh. The question is, Did you order these killings?”

  The redcoat dropped photos of the Cyclops, the Golden Fleece, and Medusa onto the pile.

  “The swastikas in those photos led us to the Skunk Mine, and what did we find there but this gutted corpse branded with swastikas and stripped of clothes identical to those worn by the burglar killed in the condo.”

  The redcoat dropped a photo of Ajax onto the rapidly rising pile of images.

  “The high-tech spy gear seized in the mine matched the gear we found at the attempted hit.”

  The redcoat pulled a number of see-through evidence bags out of his briefcase.

  “These gadgets were ringed around this.”

  He dropped a photo of the blueprint scrawled with the words “You fucked up!” onto the table.

  “And around this.”

  He topped the pile w
ith a photo of the blueprint with “Roswell” smeared across it.

  “I’d say that looks like a flying saucer, wouldn’t you? And what I see stamped on both blueprints are Nazi swastikas. The same sort of swastikas as those carved into the bodies that brought you and your hit men here. Why, I wonder? But you’re not talking. So I have someone for you to meet.”

  The redcoat gathered up the photos and stuffed them into a brown manila envelope. Backtracking to the door, he swung it open to reveal a man with a digital camera. Bill couldn’t move fast enough to cover his face, so—flash!—the spook’s mug shot was captured by the lens.

  “Tell our suspect who you are,” the Mountie said.

  “Cort Jantzen,” replied the reporter, flashing a press card. “I work for The Vancouver Times.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Jantzen,” the redcoat said. “If you wait a minute, I’ll have a scoop for you.”

  DeClercq shut the door and held up the envelope. “That reporter is on his way down to Vancouver, where we’ve just discovered the body of the next swastika victim. I suspect that victim is another of your hit men, since we have recovered the same spy gear as that found with the other two.”

  Lysol, thought Bill. “Let me go!” he ordered. “This case is a matter of national security.”

  “So you did screw up?”

  “Get out of my way, Redcoat!”

  “One way or another, I will get to the truth. While you’re sitting in a cell thinking you pulled one over on me, the contents of this envelope will be published around the globe—along with the headshot just taken of you. Then we’ll see who’ll come forward with information that will rip the mask off your face.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Watch me,” said DeClercq.

  Big Bad Bill looked on as the Mountie moved toward the door. If what was in that envelope escaped from this room, he would never be able to get the genie back in the bottle.

  “Whoa!” said Bill as the Horseman opened the door.

  DeClercq turned.

  “Whoa who?” he asked.

  “Whoa, Chief Superintendent.”

  As Bill uttered those pacifying words, which came so hard to his lips, he prayed to America’s God that they had some sort of Official Secrets Act in this godforsaken wasteland.

  Minotaur

  Vancouver

  The labyrinth at UBC reminded Dane of the yew-treed maze at Hampton Court, King Henry VIII’s royal palace on the Thames, to the west of London. Dane had tried to maneuver his way through that twisting puzzle with a sexy Swede he’d met at a London club the night before. Dilly-dallying along the way, they had finally figured out that the trick to threading the maze was to keep your touch brushing the hedgerow to the right. Leaving Hampton Court, they had navigated the turns of London’s transportation system, until they’d finally ended up entwined with each other in bed in Dane’s hotel room.

  He wondered where Kadriin was now.

  Probably married, with three blond kiddies and a husband smiling in perpetual satisfaction.

  He sighed.

  Today, Dane entered another maze with another attractive woman. But this was strictly business, and Cort Jantzen was along as a third-wheel chaperone. The three of them had just flown down from the Cariboo, having been released to return south to this new murder scene. Landing out of an overcast sky sodden with rain, the trio had driven across the Fraser River to Point Grey and around the peninsula to the maze in the gardens out at the tip of the tongue.

  “You three look bagged,” said Gill Macbeth as Dane, Jackie, and Cort splashed into the labyrinth. There was no danger that they would get lost as Dane had in England, for the body was sprawled in the mud just around the first turn. Ident had erected a makeshift tent over the victim to keep any forensic evidence from being washed away by the deluge.

  “Didn’t sleep,” Dane responded over the downpour’s patter on the dripping tarp.

  “None of you?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “We were up north,” Jackie explained. “With the chief. Looks like the guy we were after was busy down here.”

  The corpse in the labyrinth was garbed in the same midnight black camouflage as the two prior Pentagon spooks. But stitched over the head and shoulders of this cadaver was the bison head mascot of Special X.

  “Another Greek myth,” suggested Gill.

  “The Minotaur,” Cort expanded. “Half bull, half man, the creature was a monster that haunted the labyrinth under the palace of King Minos of Crete. This killer is really into myths. I grew up on this stuff. Odysseus, Jason, Perseus, Theseus—Greek heroes one and all. It was Theseus who slew the Minotaur.”

  “How?” asked Jackie.

  “The labyrinth was supposed to be impossible to escape, but Theseus unwound a ball of string that would later guide him back out. When he found the monster, he ran it through with his sword.”

  “This victim was impaled too,” the pathologist said. “From the look of the wounds in the buttocks, he was spiked from back to front with a similar weapon.”

  “Time of death?” Jackie asked.

  “Judging from rigor and body temp, I’d say more than twenty-four hours ago. Sometime in the early morning of the night before last would be my rough guess. The body was found when a gardener walked into the maze earlier today to continue trimming the hedge. It wasn’t around when he quit work yesterday afternoon and cordoned off the entrance.”

  “So the victim was killed elsewhere and dumped here overnight,” said Dane.

  “Had to be,” Gill agreed.

  Before flying down from the Cariboo, Dane had assumed the role of exhibit man. He’d carried with him the high-tech gadgets they’d recovered from the mine so that he could convey them to this crime scene and see if they matched the hardware still on this latest victim. Crouching beside the Minotaur, he compared them now, confirming that every device from the Cariboo had its twin here, and also that both twins had a triplet in what was seized off the spook who had burgled his condo.

  “Is there a swastika gouged into the forehead of the bison?” Dane asked Gill.

  The pathologist examined the matted fur.

  “No,” she reported.

  “Ident will want to examine the stitching and other forensic clues before the head is removed from the corpse, so after you do the autopsy, would you call me and confirm whether the Nazi signature is carved into the brow beneath?”

  * * *

  Dane, Jackie, and Cort returned to Special X for their respective cars. Before they parted company, the three laid out a game plan.

  “The first thing we need to know,” Dane suggested, “is whether or not the Swastika Killer sent you another jpeg. When he saw that reversed swastika in this morning’s Times, did he slip up in a quick shoot-from-the-hip reply?”

  “I’ll phone if he did—or if he does,” said Cort.

  “Next, we need to anticipate where he will strike next time. It seems his MO is to choose his victims from the Times. So far, each victim was killed soon after a story about him or her appeared in the paper. This psycho picked up the myth angle in your Cyclops story, Cort, and that’s why he homed in on you as his confidant. So I think the name of his next victim is buried somewhere in the Times.”

  “The body in the maze doesn’t fit your theory, though. There was no story about a Pentagon hit man in the paper until this morning. And even then, it was about the killer who came after you.”

  “That proves my other suspicion. Remember what I said about the good and bad Nazi killers being one?”

  “You told me it was off the record until we had proof,” said the reporter.

  “Well, it’s on the record now. The proof is the guy dumped in the maze. The Stealth Killer Nazi has been playing out his revenge fantasies up at the Skunk Mine for years. The Swastika Killer Nazi came into play only recently, to throw us off the trail of the other identity. He’s the killer who communicates with you. For some reason, the Pentagon spooks want our Siamese twins, so
they sent a hit man after me for the Swastika Killer’s file and two hit men after the Stealth Killer up at his home next to the Skunk Mine.”

  “But he killed them both,” said Jackie.

  “Right. In the mine. He left one for us to find and brought the other down with him in the back of that farm truck. While the three of us were flying up to the Cariboo last night, hoping to grab the Stealth Killer on his return to the Skunk Mine, he stayed down here in whatever hiding place he has in Vancouver and switched into his Swastika Killer identity to dump the second hit man.”

  “He’s reintegrating,” said Cort. “The killers are fusing together.”

  “And it’s probably a struggle between both identities, with neither actor willing to be upstaged.”

  “So where do we find him?” asked Jackie.

  “The only place left,” said Dane. “He won’t return to the Stealth Killer’s lair in the Skunk Mine, so we must locate the Swastika Killer’s hideout down here.”

  * * *

  Editor Ed was waiting to pounce when Cort rushed into the newsroom of The Vancouver Times.

  “What have you got?” he demanded. He almost drooled when his star reporter told him.

  With his boss staring over his shoulder, Cort checked his e-mail for another jpeg from the Swastika Killer.

  Nothing.

  What did that mean?

  As Cort reached for that morning’s Times to search for articles that might point to the next victim, Bess McQueen sidled up to his desk.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “The Stealth Killer and the Swastika Killer are the same guy, Ed,” Cort said, addressing their boss. “Since both have fused into one and I was at both scenes—the mine up north and the maze down here—I think the scoop and the byline should both be mine.”

  “You got ’em,” said Ed.

  “Hey, that’s not fair!” fumed the queen bitch.

  “All’s fair in love and war,” said the old newshound gruffly. “And it’s a market-share war out there, Bess.”