She eyed him for a moment. “The author, Hitler’s servant, was secretly Jewish.” The appropriate shock registered on Michel’s face.
“You are certain?”
“Quite,” Gage replied.
Michel’s chest rose and fell with his deep breaths. “I have the feeling there’s more,” he whispered.
Monika took Michel’s hand, squeezing it. “He was having an affair with her, Michel. Adolf Hitler, Jew-hater, was screwing a Jewish woman, and he didn’t even know it.”
Michel disentangled his left hand from hers. His right hand slid carefully away from the diary. He stared down at it as if it might crumble to dust any second. “I…I don’t even know where to begin,” was all he could mutter. He quickly slid on a pair of rubber gloves, gently touching the book as his breath now came in quick rasps.
“Go on,” Gage said, encouraging her.
“Michel, focus for a second…there’s one more thing.”
The book dealer jerked his head up, his brown eyes wide on his cousin. He closed his mouth, struggling to swallow.
Monika poked her finger in the direction of the diary, her voice a reverent whisper. “Michel, the servant was pregnant when she wrote this. Pregnant by Adolf Hitler. We’ve got stacks of her diaries to prove it, each written as beautifully as this one.”
“Would that classify them as rare, valuable books?” Gage asked dryly.
Michel held a gloved hand to his heart, tightly squeezing Gage’s forearm with his other. “Je vous aime, Gregory, je vous aime!”
***
While Monika enjoyed a well-deserved late afternoon nap, Gage sat alone in the small brasserie around the corner from the hotel. In front of him were a mineral water and an untouched crepe. The door bell jingled occasionally, the customers a mix of locals and tourists. Most drank their coffee inside, chatting amiably or relaxing with a newspaper or book. Gage didn’t converse with anyone. There was no novel in his hand. He simply sat there, his narrowed eyes hidden by the sunglasses.
The owner checked on him every few minutes, a worried frown on her aged face. Gage would glance up, force a smile, tell her he was fine in his simple French. His sweaty palms were flat on the table; it was the only way he could keep them from shaking.
There was no explaining why the panic attacks came when they did.
Earlier, after the meeting with Michel, Gage and Monika had killed time by window shopping. A toy store displayed its hottest items in a large plate glass window, no doubt trying to snag the early Christmas shopper. Reminiscing, Gage stopped to stare at the old-fashioned train set as the engine pulled a long set of cars through the cornucopia of toys that seemed of higher quality than what one might see back in the States.
It was then that what must have been a brother and sister pushed by him, mashing their faces into the glass. Gage didn’t have children and wasn’t around them often, making it difficult for him to be able to guess their age. This pair was surely under ten, the sister probably a few years older than the brother. In her flowing French, it was readily apparent she was bossy, ordering her brother to look at one toy, then another. The young boy dutifully obeyed, rosy cheeks alight, a smile dominating his face. Gage enjoyed watching their delight, thinking back to his own childhood, remembering the time he’d received his first electric train. Then, another memory forced its way through.
No, please. Not now.
Crete, and all hell that came with it, blew into his mind like a raging wildfire on a windy summer’s day.
“Why don’t you go take a nap?” he had said somewhat forcefully to Monika. His face was pale and, despite the cold, a film of sweat had appeared on his forehead. He slipped on his dark, wraparound sunglasses, struggling to swallow.
“Gage, are you okay?”
“Not really.” He tried to soften his face, not succeeding. He pulled her aside. “Back there, with your cousin. I guess I’m concerned that we told him too much.”
Monika seemed hurt. “I trust Michel, Gage. He won’t do anything but help us.”
“This is big, Monika. Bigger than you can imagine because of the man trying to find me. While Michel might be trustworthy, from here on we need to contain any information about what we’ve found, and especially about who I am.”
“Why are you just now saying all this?”
He squeezed his temples with his hands, angered with himself for displacing his anguish on Monika. She was only trying to help.
“Please…just go back to the hotel, Monika. I need an hour alone.”
Monika opened her hands, perplexed, finally turning from him, staring down the hill toward the river and snowy countryside.
“I need to think some things through, and when I do, I’ll feel better. Go to the room, take a nap. I’ll come get you later.” His tone left room for no argument. Monika pulled her bag tightly to her shoulder and hurried off to the hotel.
Gage had staggered to the Moselle River, leaning over the railing as his mind opened the floodgates of dreadful remembrance. It wasn’t unlike a disturbing movie he despised but was forced to watch anyway. He clenched his eyes shut, shaking his head violently, pushing the thoughts backward.
There was no use. He was trying to dam a raging river with twigs. The memories barged in…it had been a brutally hot day in June; the kind of scorcher that came with intense, dry heat that burns a man’s nostrils, baking the soft tissues of his sinuses with every breath. Gage and three others, their faces stained orange from the powdery island dirt, had been chosen to take part in the insertion. Word had come down from high that they wanted the terrorists taken before sunset, due to their usual nocturnal activities. The people in question were accused of bombing a U.S. Navy barracks in Manila, tracked over a period of years to their Crete hideaway. Radicals, they drew their funding from several sources, each with an axe to grind with the U.S. and most of the western world.
Hunter’s team was chosen because the assault wasn’t going to be claimed. The terrorists were wanted by the Dutch, the English, the Japanese, and the Israelis. But Uncle Sam wanted them all to himself, and he wasn’t in the mood to ask anyone’s permission. The Greeks were quietly cooperating from a distance, probably the recipient of something in trade in order to keep the operation secret. The team had orders (if at all possible) to take the terrorists alive; they possessed needed information, especially about their funding sources. As Gage and the rest of the team well knew, every other time they had been told to take anyone alive, after they were turned over to the shadowy men whose eyes they never saw, the object of their mission was never seen or heard from again. Probably taken to some God-awful place, tortured and questioned until they resembled a sponge with no remaining water.
And then, useless, they were surely eliminated.
No one on Hunter’s team cared. It wasn’t their job to care.
Gage lay prone behind a grouping of rocks with a low-lying cactus pricking his thigh. He had the scope in his hands, watching. Upstairs in the dingy apartment, one of them sat at the table slicing a green apple with a combat knife. They knew his identity—he was their so-called leader, a man with Manson-like values and oddball magnetism. The news played on a television behind him, CNN International, and through the powerful scope Gage could even see the fabric pattern on Becky Anderson’s attractive suit.
In the other room a man slept. The highly-educated intel man. He was thought to have sought out the group’s sinister objectives and used his intelligent brain for the worst possible reasons—probably the most valuable of their targets on that day. His beard and face were filthy and, in the two hours that Gage and the team watched, he would occasionally stir, laughing to himself and glancing down at the floor before falling back into his slumber. They wondered whether he might be drunk or high because there wasn’t any logical reason for his odd behavior.
Two others moved about occasionally, a man and a woman. The man was the lowest priority target, a so-called weapons expert. The woman was the fourth member of their troupe—she tr
aveled with them but had never been witnessed participating in any of their attacks. The team was told to take her anyway.
The terrorists were all of Danish origin. The oldest, the man with the apple, was nearly forty. The three others appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties. The girl’s face was not classically attractive, but as she moved about the apartment, Gage noticed the swells of her breasts and wondered if one, or perhaps all, of the men were intimate with her. He watched her break into laughter as she rubbed the oldest man’s shoulders while he sat there eating the apple. Twenty minutes later, confirming his suspicions, Gage saw her kissing the other one who was awake. Something odd, and communal, had been going on in that apartment.
After the pictures were relayed to Washington, Gage and the team waited, silently, each man in his own little world of taciturn readiness. Waiting was the primary component of their job; the impatient needed not apply.
As he lay there quietly, the scope in his hand, there was something in that apartment that bothered Gage. He’d seen the pictures of the suspected terrorists, matching them beyond a shadow of a doubt with the ones from Manila. He had no doubt it was them. But there was something about their actions in the apartment, and the dozing man on the sofa that tugged at his brain. The man on the sofa’s actions, and the woman’s, bothered him. Gage smelled trouble.
“I don’t like this,” he muttered to Randy Vasquez, the mission leader. Vasquez was a small man with intense green eyes and a high IQ. Known for his shooting prowess and his ability to rapidly dissect a critical situation, Vasquez also knew when to listen to his charges. He inched closer to Gage, his voice a hoarse whisper.
“What exactly don’t you like?”
Gage turned to him. “Not sure, Vazzy. You know when you just get that deep-in-the-gut feeling that something’s off? Well, that’s what I have right now. Can’t really give you specifics, but it’s there.” He lifted the scope as he spoke. “I’ve got a positive on every one of them, and the place looks isolated, but I really wish they’d let us allow them to leave before we take them.”
Vasquez didn’t respond for a moment. “If we do that, then there’s a chance we all get made.” He lifted his own binoculars and stared at the apartment for several minutes, nibbling on his bottom lip. Finally he lifted the small satellite radio and stared at Gage.
“Golf-six, Whiskey-two, over.”
“Golf-six, go.”
“Whiskey-two, break,” he removed his thumb from the button and licked his dusty orange lips. After a few seconds he depressed it again. “Recommend delay action. Say again, recommend delay action, delta-alpha, over.”
A pause then a crackle. “Golf-six, wait one, over.” The man on the radio sounded like a robot, completely devoid of any emotion, and his mechanical tone made Gage want to teleport himself across the Atlantic and beat the ever-loving shit out of him. He and Vasquez stared at the apartment until the radio popped again.
“Whiskey-two, golf-six, it’s out of my hands. That call will come from on high, and unless there is a logical reason you can give me now, you’re soon to get the green. What’s the prob, over?”
Vasquez turned his eyes to Gage. Gage glanced again into the apartment with his scope. It would be dark in an hour. The man at the table was now reading a paper; the man on the couch was still sleeping; the woman appeared to be fixing dinner; the other man walked by the window, a beer in his hand as he rubbed his belly. It appeared to be prime time to move in.
“Anything?” Vasquez asked, urgency in his voice.
Gage’s internal voices screamed that something was wrong. But the sensible side of him, the one who saw a primed terror team ripe for a quiet picking, had no evidence whatsoever. He turned to Vasquez and shook his head. “Just a gut.”
Vasquez cut his eyes impatiently, keying the radio.
“This is Whiskey-two, negative to the problem. It’s just a…just a feeling we’re getting. Objective is clear to our knowledge, over.”
There was a long pause as Gage knew Colonel Hunter was probably sitting there, his eyes narrowed at the radio, wondering what was going on with Vasquez’s team for him to make such a request based on someone’s feeling. Finally the radio operator came back. “Whiskey-two, golf-six, exactly why the request, over?”
Gage remembered staring at Vasquez as he closed his eyes, wincing at what was probably going on at the other end of the line. Other than Hunter, the Pentagon and Langley brass were surely listening in, speaking in Hunter’s other ear. Vasquez keyed the mike. “Golf-six, this is whiskey-two, an old-fashioned hunch, nothing more, over.”
Gage knew Hunter would normally respect such a request, but only if he could. The team’s many successes were not to be credited to sheer ability; intuition often came into play. Without instinct, a soldier’s abilities were mechanical at best, and he would eventually be defeated by a thinking soldier. It’s why drones hadn’t replaced the human on the battlefield—the situational reasoning by a real-live brain had yet to be equaled.
The radio chirped and it was Hunter speaking. “This is Golf-six, prepare to move, Whiskey-two. The order’s coming down, so you might have ten mikes to prove your hunch. Otherwise, be prepared to un-ass your AO, over.”
“Whiskey-two, roger.”
“Golf-six, out.”
The stark cold of France contrasted with the horrors dominating his mind. Staring out over the Moselle, Gage neared the end of the gruesome flashback, feeling his insides churn. He staggered down the French promenade, allowing the sickening catharsis to play out in his mind. Two children had died as a result of the concussion grenade. Gage had thrown it. Their diminutive bodies, strangely unscathed, had been lifeless as the medics carefully loaded them onto the gurneys. Vasquez had sat in the corner of the room, listlessly relaying the full story to Hunter and the bureaucrats on the satellite uplink. Gage Hartline had sat huddled in another corner, numb, watching as the medics prepared the children’s remains for transport. Vasquez stopped speaking three times to tell Gage it wasn’t his fault; Gage never heard him. Before the paramedics removed the children, Gage stood, placing his hands on the white sheets, staining them from the orange dust, muttering over and over that he was sorry. Since that moment, his life had been off axis.
Months later, back at Fort Bragg, it seemed every counselor in the Army had met with Gage, murmuring over and over inane little nuggets about combat guilt. The last night Hunter’s team was officially intact, Gage had lost it, wrecking the day room of their small facility. Singlehandedly, he tore apart a pool table and four hundred square feet of ceiling tile. He then knocked out three plate-glass windows, slicing his arms to ribbons. Five men, his teammates, could barely hold him down, two of them, along with Gage, needing stitches afterward. They’d strapped him to a bed after that, the Army getting him under control the old fashioned way—pharmacologically.
As he had stared at the ceiling from that private hospital bed, his tongue and lips full of holes from his own teeth, something finally snapped inside him and Gage knew he would have to pull it back together. Or at least fake it. Had he not, he might have been eliminated as well. It took months, but in the end he passed all their tests, their ink blots, their fucking questionnaires. He accepted his new fate like a prisoner might his new polyester suit following parole.
Because what choice did he have?
Back in Metz, the panic attack had faded. After the proprietor checked on him for the fourth time, he wiped the sweat from his head and hands with a napkin, eating the crepe and swilling his water. Slowly, he removed his sunglasses, blinking rapidly and deciding he could stand to go without them.
Gage Hartline, because of the incident in Crete, was no longer a violent man. He plied his trade the peaceful way, avoiding any job which might result in bloodshed.
He’d not killed anyone since that blazing June day.
But on this day, things would soon change.
***
While Gage gathered himself and Monika napped, and wh
ile U.S. Army Investigator Damien Ellis was stepping off the train at the baroque Gare de Metz train station, Michel Brink was having another cup of coffee in the back of his book store, attempting to approximate the value of the diary find. Gerard was out front, dusting the stacks of books, humming to himself. The bell at the front door jingled. Michel perked his ears.
He heard deep, scraping voices before Gerard stepped into the back room, a disdainful look on his face. He stood unblinking for a moment before saying, “It’s those men.”
“What men?”
“You know. The cob-rough hoodlums you make me pretend I don’t know about.”
Michel pinched the bridge of his thin Gallic nose. Damn. He’d simply needed a bridge loan to get over that rough patch back during the summer. His spring trip to the Med had run far over budget, and the coke (the damned coke!) had gotten a little out of hand. It had been the young Irishman, curse him. So witty and seemingly innocent with his green eyes and freckled nose, he’d known precisely what he was doing, playing Michel along while acting like a slow-witted schoolboy. When Michel had returned to Metz busted and dragging a broken heart, ten thousand euro was all he had needed to prop his finances up until things picked up at the shop. With maxed-out credit cards and a business line that had been running interest-only for years, he’d had to turn to the street, to the Glaives. They were known as small-timers in Metz, without much presence, but were rumored equally as nasty as their brethren in Paris.
Michel stood, speaking in a whisper as he sent Gerard out the back for another walk. He smoothed his shimmering shirt before he breezed into the front. It was the two he had been dealing with each month: Leon and Bruno. Leon was the little one who always did the talking, rumored to be the cousin of Nicholas “Nicky” Arnaud, infamous boss of Les Glaives du Peuple. He had greasy hair and wore a perpetual scowl under his heavy brow. The big one, Bruno, hardly ever spoke, sporting an omnipresent thick shadow of facial hair on the jowls of his lumpy, creviced face.
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