"I have no idea what you're talking about," Matt said. He wanted to slap the blond man's pleased smile right off his face.
"The powders in Conor Flynn's dungeon. All kinds of crazy stuff. MKULTRA mixtures from the internet, ancient voodoo-zombie mind-control crap, Aztec sacred-trance mixtures." He tapped one entry. "Hell, you know what that is?"
Matt shook his head.
"Yeah, neither did I, until I borrowed some time on the NSA's data-crunchers. Some Damaran king in the seventeen-eighties tried to achieve apotheosis—"
"Apo-what?"
"Apotheosis. He tried to become a god. And this is the mixture he came up with. Legend says he could see the future and would have lived forever if jealous priests hadn't cut off his head within the month."
"Huh," Matt said. "Guess he couldn't see it very well."
The tech removed another paper from the manila envelope, set it on the desk, and lined it up with the first one. "The computer stumbled upon this, too."
Matt compared the list of compounds and mixtures. "Same list?"
"The acid in Flynn's stuff is more modern, but other than that, yeah. Same list."
Matt sat up straight. "So, the chance of this being a coincidence is . . . ?"
"As close to zero as you can get."
"And where'd this come from?"
"I had to circumvent some firewalls to figure it out, but that same mixture of chemicals was pulled from a bombed-out Nazi bunker under Dresden in the nineteen-fifties."
"I thought Hitler hated religion," Matt said. "Why would he be messing around with this kind of stuff?"
"Philipp Lenard, his chief scientist, got into all kinds of crazy shit. Haven't you seen Raiders of the Lost Ark? The Deutsch Physik guys thought that with proper geometries and machines and stuff they could channel God's power to whatever they wanted; open doors to Hell or Heaven, summon demons or angels, call down the Wrath of God on the impure races. Some really fucked up shit."
Matt tried not to seem too interested at the mention of angels. "Did any of it work?"
He snorted. "Of course not."
Matt sat back.
"There were rumors, of course. Secret laboratories in secret bunkers, black masses in churches desecrated by human sacrifice, Űbermenschen imbued with divine Aryan power . . . some conspiracy-minded folks say that was the whole reason for the concentration camps. But all that mystic hoo-hah didn't stop Patton, did it?"
"Yeah." Matt leaned back. "Don't know why I asked."
"Still," said the tech. "It tells you just how fucked in the head Flynn was."
Matt prided himself on his lack of a murder record, so he didn't snap the little guy's neck. "So Conor just followed random crazy rumors from the web?"
The tech shrugged. "I'm just a research chemist. I have no idea where he got it from . . . but that bunker's still there."
* * *
They pulled up to the Brulische Terassen on the Elbe River at ten-fifteen local time in a pair of rented BMWs. The cobblestone streets had made for a loud, vibrational ride, and Matt shook the numbness out of his limbs as he got out of the car. Akash let out a low whistle at the architecture. The brick-and-stone Standehaus had been restored to how it looked before being utterly flattened by allied bombing in 1945, and every building in the vicinity looked like a riverside palace.
Brian Frahm sat in the back, his hands on this thighs, talking to Jeff Hannes in a low voice. Brian had asked for a ride-along, and once his boss decided to go, Jeff couldn't help but tag along. For his part, Matt wasn't even sure what any of them were doing there, but in good conscience he couldn't pass up a lead, no matter how odd and unlikely.
They got out as a gray-haired man in a brown suit approached their cars, eyebrows raised in expectation. "Herr Rowley?"
"That's me," Matt said, and stuck out his hand. "Thanks for agreeing to meet with us, Herr Gottschalk." He recognized the curator's voice from their conversation the day before.
"It's the least I could do, given that you've come all this way." Matt had an easier time navigating his thick accent in person than over the phone. "Though I wonder what it is you expect to find."
"Me, too," Matt replied.
Gottschalk gave Brian a puzzled look, which he returned. Instead of speaking, he led them on foot under a masonry arch, through a small iron portcullis, and into a hallway lined with faded, yellow-brown tile. "It's not often we get requests to see the Reichbunkersystem. Tourists don't know of it, and most German citizens would prefer to forget." He ran his fingertips along the wall as he walked. "Even after the war there were no records of it, and its discovery in 1957 took the restoration workers, and everyone else, by surprise."
He reached an unstained oak door and turned around, hands clasped at his waist. Matt turned with him and surveyed his team. Akash's eyes wandered, though what he expected to see on the blank walls Matt could only guess. Blossom's eyes didn't leave Gottschalk. Garrett stared at the door, and both Jeff and Brian looked at Matt.
"Excuse me, Herr . . . Frahm, is it?" Gottschalk asked. Brian raised his eyebrows at him. "Have we met before?"
Brian shrugged, a small grin on his face. "I don't think so. I've never been to Dresden."
"You look familiar."
Brian shrugged again. "I get that a lot, actually. Common genes, I guess."
"No matter," Gottschalk said. He gestured to the door two-handed, reminding Matt of Vanna White. "This is the entrance. The bunker is deep, the only reason we have not yet restored it and turned it into some kind of museum. The excavation crew took most everything decades ago. I'm afraid there's not much to see."
He opened the door to reveal an unadorned concrete stairway with flat concrete walls. He heaved a large, Frankenstein's-lab-type switch up, and an orange-white glow struggled to illuminate the featureless stairs from periodic, naked bulbs hanging from black iron fixtures, connected by a long black cable that dangled as far down as Matt could see.
Gottschalk touched the cable with one finger, then pulled away. "In 1969 they moved the lights up here for convenience."
They said nothing as they descended, until five flights down they encountered a massive swastika inlayed into the wall, bright red ceramic on a painted white background, surrounded in a ring by German words in gold filigree. Even after most of a century, to see the symbol not in a book or movie but on a wall raised goosebumps on Matt's arms.
"What's it say?" Blossom asked.
"For the glory of the Fuhrer and the Thousand Years Reich, today's work echoes to eternity." Gottschalk dropped his eyes and continued down into the gloom. The whispers mourned the optimistic lie.
"Tell that to the US Army," Garrett muttered in Matt's ear.
Six more flights, these with murder holes in the walls of every landing, and they reached the bottom. The weight of all the earth above them pressed on Matt's mind, and the thought of bombs sealing them in chilled his spirit. That he recognized the fear as a psychological trick didn't help.
Jeff breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped off the last stair. "Ow."
"Wait until we have to go back up," Matt said.
Jeff's second sigh held no relief.
The massive steel door to the bunker complex lay on the floor, the deep, jagged cuts through its hinges caked with old rust. Ten feet behind it the hall took an abrupt right turn, exposing two more murder holes five feet off the ground.
"You'd think they wanted to keep people out, eh?" Akash asked.
"Imagine the number of people you'd lose just taking the stairs," Garrett said. "A dozen men could hold this place forever, if they had enough ammo and stores."
Blossom stooped to run her finger along the floor, and held it up to examine the dry, gray dust. "I expected mold."
Gottshalk nodded. "Yes, when it was uncovered they scoured a great deal of mold from every surface. The museum installed enormous dehumidifiers to control the problem, and they've run ever since."
Gottschalk produced a massive flashlight and led them thr
ough the facility, a complex warren of dusty, empty rooms, not counting the narrow ladders that climbed up six floors to each of the pill boxes overlooking the stairs. "The team that uncovered the Reichsbunkersystem found many skeletons. The stairs had to be excavated, with many tons of rock and broken concrete burying the only entrance . . . best guess is that the occupants committed suicide when they learned they had been buried alive."
Good riddance, Matt thought, but he said, "Were any of the bodies identified?"
"No," Gottschalk shook his head. "Most of what we know came from their uniforms. Among the bodies were an Oberarzst, a chief surgeon, and strangely enough an Heeresoberpfarrer, a senior army Chaplain. Many of the bodies wore the uniforms of the SS, but investigators found no records to indicate who these men were or what they were doing here—not one scrap of paper." He stepped into an enormous room and spread his arms wide as if to banish the shadows from the vacant corners. "This was the main theater, and documents say it was full of medical devices, cots, surgical suites . . . ." He turned to Matt. "As I told you on the telephone, there is nothing to see."
As Matt followed Gottschalk through the empty chamber and into the next, a rising sense of frustration crawled through him. The vacant warren of concrete rooms held no clues to Conor's psychopathy. He had trailed Gottschalk through the next room, and the next, when he noticed that Jeff and Brian were no longer with them.
He leaned over to Akash and whispered in his ear. "Where'd the bosses go?"
Akash looked behind them, brow furrowed. "No idea."
"I'll be right back," Matt said.
He let their guide lead the rest of them into the next room, then turned around and retraced their steps. In the darkness of the huge room, his infrared vision picked up two heat blobs, human figures standing toward the back next to a metal square in the wall that shimmered with their reflected heat.
He crept forward, taking care not to be heard, but they stopped talking before he got close enough to hear. He stood back as Jeff helped Brian to his feet. But why had he been kneeling in the first place? Jeff opened his phone and bathed them in the pale screen light. Behind them, the metal square on the wall read VERBRENNUNGSOFEN in faded crimson.
Brian dusted off his knees, and they walked toward the rest of the group. "We'd better get back."
Matt cut around them, avoiding the light from the phone, using the infrared spectrum to navigate the concrete chambers. He joined the others moments before Jeff and Brian did. Gottschalk, still walking and talking, didn’t seem to have noticed.
Blossom stared daggers at Matt, but her eyes flicked to Brian and Jeff and she said nothing.
Matt reached out to cut off Akash before he spoke, but didn't get there in time.
"Where'd you two go, eh?"
Gottschalk stopped talking in mid-sentence and turned around, mouth still open.
Brian's eyes flicked to Matt for a near-imperceptible moment, then to Jeff. "My shoe came untied."
"Ah," Akash said. "Don't want to trip in a place like this, you'll get filthy." He nodded to Brian's dusty knees.
Brian gave him a sheepish grin. "It'll wash out."
A few minutes later they arrived back at the entrance. Gottschalk turned off the light and gave an apologetic smile. "That's all there is to it, unless you wish to peruse the pillboxes." He knocked on the metal ladder leading up into the darkness.
"I think I'm about walked-out," Jeff said, ignoring the stairs with vigor. Brian nodded in agreement.
"I'd like to see them," Blossom said. "But don't need a guide." She grabbed the rung and disappeared up the ladder.
"Me, too," Matt said and climbed up after her, eyes squinting against rust that flaked off in her wake.
She waited for him three floors up, peering out the horizontal slit onto the stairs. She spoke softly, without preamble and without turning to look at him. "Where were they?"
"The big room, next to a metal door with a word I don't know," he said. "Verbrennungsofen." He knew his accent couldn't be helping, so he spelled it. "What's it mean?"
She frowned out at the stairwell. "It means 'incinerator.'" She glanced down the ladder toward the group below, who paid them no mind. "Frahm knows you went back for them. Was he tying his shoe?"
"Um . . . I don't know. He was on his knees, but they were a good twelve meters from where we were walking."
"And he didn't say, 'wait.' Something's funny."
"Yup," he replied. But what?
They climbed up the rest of the way, saw nothing other than more empty concrete rooms, and climbed back down.
"Anything exciting?" Garrett asked as Matt's foot hit the floor.
"No," Blossom said.
Jeff looked at the massive staircase. His theatrical sigh echoed through the complex.
"I know you're thinking 'piggy back,' eh?" Akash said. "But that's not going to happen."
* * *
On the flight back to D.C., Matt couldn't figure out a way to breach the subject without calling his bosses liars. He settled into a disturbed slumber to the droning of jet engines.
Chapter 9
Matt shifted Ted off his lap and picked up his cell phone on the second ring. "Rowley speaking." 8:02 am wasn't quite too early to call on a Tuesday.
"Morning," Janet LaLonde said. Director of Information and Computing at ICAP, Janet's job reached into every dark corner of the international organization. "You ever heard of Lake Barnacle, Georgia?"
"What do I win if I have?"
She didn't reply.
"No, I haven't. What's up?"
"You put in a requisition for warrants on Conor Flynn's financial activity. The warrant cleared, and we pulled up his info. The only thing interesting is several credit-card purchases from Lake Barnacle. He spent three days at the Alligator Moon Motel four years ago February, or at least his credit cards did, and in that time he spent almost a grand on food, drink, and hardware supplies. Mostly the latter."
"Where is this place?"
"Not too far outside Forsyth, off Route 83."
He drew a blank trying to bring it to mind. "Nope. Not ringing a bell."
"The internet's pretty spotty on it, too. Population eighty, no post office, no church, no stores. A commune, they're Ben Case's 'family,' who moved there after being ousted from Savannah in '89." He could downright hear the quotations around "family."
"Why does 'Ben Case' sound familiar?"
"He claimed he was the love child of Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and Marnie Reeves, whose real name is Patricia Krenwinkel."
"Krenwinkle. You mean Katie Krenwinkle?"
"That's right."
Patricia "Katie" Krenwinkel had killed several people, including Abigail Folger of coffee fame, on the orders of Charles Manson in the late nineteen-sixties. "So this guy's a whackjob, and Flynn spent time with him?"
"Nobody stays at Lake Barnacle without his permission. It's a closed commune."
"Of whackjobs," Matt said.
"Not my place to judge," Janet replied.
"Are these guys dangerous?"
"Doesn't look like it. No complaints, no warrants for anything serious besides a tax evasion case back in '94, which they resolved peacefully."
"But they're a Manson cult, right?"
"No, not really. They rejected Helter Skelter in favor of something called the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a Scientology spinoff Manson incorporated but ultimately rejected. You know it?"
"Never heard of it."
"Well, you'll have to Google it, then. Apparently Case left the Process Church to form his own splinter in the mid-eighties—extreme pacifists, vegans, mostly harmless. That's all I got."
"Thanks," Matt said, and hung up. He called operations and booked a flight to Atlanta for 6:10 the next morning. His phone rang forty minutes later while he read up on the Process Church. The Caller ID said, "Hannes, Jeff."
He hit Talk. "Hello."
"Hey, buddy. I just got a requisition for a solo flight to Atlanta?"<
br />
"Yup, you did."
"All right. What am I putting on the paperwork?"
Matt thought about it for a moment. "Tell them I'm following a lead on Conor Flynn's psychotic break."
Silence, then, "Is that what you're doing?"
"Yeah. I and C just got word that Flynn spent three days with Ben Case down in Georgia four years ago. I'm going to go check it out."
"Ben Case the Manson kid?"
"That's the one."
"Why the hell would Flynn—"
"That's what I'm going to find out."
"You really think that's a good use of your time? We've got Dawkins intel—"
"Yeah, I do. Dawkins can wait a couple days."
"You sure, buddy?"
"I wouldn't have booked the flight if I wasn't."
"All right. I'll sign it."
* * *
Matt touched down in Atlanta at 8:32 am, grabbed his duffel out of the overhead compartment, and headed to the Hertz desk. He took the rented XTerra south into wooded nothing, following the GPS to Lake Barnacle. Just outside of town he came to a one-lane bridge, blocked by a chain, over a tiny splash of water not quite worthy of the name "creek."
He got out to read the sign that hung from it, letting the engine idle.
Welcome to Lake Barnacle Commune.
This land is the property of Benjamin Case, Lord Processean and Prophet of Jehovah, Lucifer, and Satan, may they be Reconciled on the last of days.
Visitors wait to be admitted.
Matt leaned against the hood of the car and pretended he didn't see the heat signatures of the two people lurking in the brush on the other side. A few minutes later, a man pulled up in an old Jeep with peeling army-green paint. He got out and stood so that the door obscured most of his body, but his disheveled, curly red hair and beard stood out over it.
"Help you?"
"Morning," Matt said, hands in his pockets. "I was hoping to talk to Mr. Case—"
"PROPHET Case," the man corrected.
"Prophet Case. I don't have an appointment."
"Yes, you do. All supplicants are welcome to the presence of the prophet."
Jade Sky Page 9