The Julian Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  The Agency man gallantly held the door for Gurt. "Wherever, Ijes' hope this damned drizzle stops 'fore I mildew."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Heidelberg, Germany (Hauptstrasse)

  Hauszum Ritter

  That evening

  The eighty-four-kilometer drive from Frankfurt had been uneventful. Their newly minted identities showed them to be Mary and Joel Couch of Macon, Georgia. The stamp on the passports showed they had arrived at Frankfurt that very morning. The document was given careless scrutiny by a desk clerk wearing striped pants and a cutaway coat. The Agency-issued credit, card was duly imprinted and returned. The only question was whether they wished to reserve a table at the hotel's restaurant for dinner. Lang's response had been an immediate affirmative.

  From the windows of their third-floor suite, Lang could see across the empty marktplatzto the fourteenth century church and, beyond, the slow-moving waters of the Nekar reflecting the dull sky of the dying-day. Gurt, smoking what Lang hoped was only her first cigarette of the day, was less interested in the view than observing how a home built in 1592 had been converted into a luxury hotel.

  She was studying a gilt sconce that had lightbulbs screwed into what had

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  once been candleholders. "You did not even think when asked about dinner. You have eaten here before?"

  Lang was leaning to his left in a vain attempt to get a glimpse of the bluff behind the town, the one crowned with the ruins of a castle. ''Years ago, the Agency had a research team here, German college professors who had studied the Russkies, figured out what the Commies would do in certain situations. I came about once a month, always stayed here. One of our tame Germans recommended the restaurant. Best sauerbraten in Germany. They use apples."

  Gurt made a face at the mention of the traditional dish of marinated beef served with dumplings in a rich brown sauce. ''You will go home fat."

  He gave her an exaggerated leer, running his eyes from her to the bed.

  "I'm planning on you keeping me slim."

  "You can eat more often than you can love."

  He sat on the Federbett, the soft eiderdown that served as top sheet and cover on German beds, pulling her with him. "Really? Let's try a predinner workout."

  She lay beside him. "Should we not call Herr Blucher? He is the reason we are here, no?"

  Lang sighed as the romance of the hotel in the old city evaporated like the morning mist. Gurt's priorities were always in order. They were also frequently a nuisance.

  "Okay, okay, I've got his number right here."

  He scrolled down the list on his BlackBerry and handed the cell phone to Gurt.

  She spoke for a few minutes before asking, "What is this place named?"

  "Hauszum Ritter on Hauptstrasse. Does he want to come here?"

  She shook her head and spoke a few more words, ending with a cheery auf Wiedersehen, turned the phone off, and handed it back. "No, ten o'clock tomorrow at the castle."

  "The castle, not here? Or his house? He wants plenty of people around, doesn't trust us yet despite Jacob's introduction."

  Gurt pushed him back against the comforter. "And your workout?"

  Lang ate too much.

  "Now I know what a Thanksgiving turkey feels like," he said as they drained the last of their after-dinner schnapps. "Let's take a walk."

  Outside, the day's drizzle had washed the skies clean. A myriad of stars hovered just out of reach of the town's lights. Hand in hand, they walked the block over to the church, its Gothic facade gleaming in strategically placed spotlights. A block over, Lauerstrasse fronted the river in the periphery of the town's lights. Swaying gently at their moorings, two glass-canopied tour boats, each a hundred or so feet long, rocked gently at their moorings.

  "Do you have with you the gun you took from the policemen at the Frankfurt airport?" Gurt's question was so out of place in the peace of the night, Lang thought he had misunderstood.

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  "Huh?"

  "The gun, the one from the airport, you have it with you?" Instinctively, Lang's hand went to small of his back to touch the hard metal of the Glock he had jammed into his belt. ''Yeah, but why?"

  Gurt laughed, the sound of a woman enjoying an amorous evening. She nuzzled Lang's face as though to give him a kiss. "One, perhaps two, men follow us," she whispered.

  The surroundings suddenly became threatening rather than romantic. The darkness, the absence of any other strollers, even the black river, all seemed the perfect spot to kill and escape. His left hand still in hers, leaving his right free to use the gun if necessary, he moved in a seemingly aimless fashion so their backs were against a wall rather than unprotected.

  Other than the river's sucking at the pilings along the dock and an occasional automobile a block over, there was no sound. A quick glance around confirmed Lang's impression: an ideal spot for an ambush. The church was between the river and town, shielding the riverside area from the town's lights. Only shops, shuttered for the night, lined the dock. It was unlikely there was another living soul within blocks.

  Other than whoever was following them.

  Backing deeper into the doubly dark shadow, Lang took the Glock from his belt and released the clip. By touch, he counted the shells in the magazine before pushing it back into the grip with a resounding click.

  The sound of a clip being loaded, into an automatic pistol is both unmistakable and authoritative. In the quiet night, it also carried farther than would ordinarily be the case.

  Almost instantly, a blurred figure stepped into an area where a small stream of the town's glow leaked onto the cobblestones beside the river.

  He held both hands high. "Don't shoot, Mr. Reilly.

  It's me, Franz Blucher."

  Wordlessly, Lang handed the Glock to Gurt and walked away at an angle to avoid her line of fire toward the stranger. "Stay where you are, Herr Blucher," he said. ''And keep your hands where I can see them."

  Franz Blucher was a smallish, elderly man in worn tweed pants, a sweater missing one elbow, and unruly hair that caught just enough illumination to form a halo around the man's head.

  It took Lang only a few seconds to ascertain that he was unarmed.

  "SprechenSieEnglese?"

  He asked -mainly as a courtesy, Blucher having already spoken in English. Lang was unable to remember the last time he encountered a German, at least a West German, who did not speak English far better than Lang spoke their language.

  "I speak English reasonably well," the old man said, pulling a pair of wireless spectacles from the pocket of his sweater and giving Lang a stare. "You are Mr. Reilly, are you not?"

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  The English had a trace of upper-class British in it.

  "Just as you are Franz Blucher."

  Blucher nodded slowly, probably remembering a time

  when showing one's papers was common. He fumbled in a hip pocket and produced a worn passport.

  With it in his hand, Lang walked closer to the light flowing around the corner of the church. He still couldn't read it.

  He handed it back to Blucher. "I'm Lang Reilly, all right. And this," he motioned to where Gurt was emerging from the shadows, "is Gurt Fuchs. You spoke to her on the phone earlier this evening."

  Blucher held up the glasses again, surveying Gurt. "Yes, yes, I did." Lang slid his hands into his pockets and shook his head. "Sneaking up on somebody in the dark might not be good for your health, Herr Blucher."

  Apparently satisfied with what he saw, Blucher returned the eyeglasses. to a pocket. "I apologize. Frau Fuchs ..."

  "Fraulein," Gurt corrected.

  "Fraulein Fuchs told me where you are staying. I decided not to wait until tomorrow and called the hotel, who said you were at dinner. By the time I got there, the man in the restaurant said you had just left. I was trying to catch up."

  Lang and Gurt started walking back toward the hotel, the old man between them. Blucher kept looking over his shoulder, his head turning in short,
nervous jerks. He reminded Lang of a mouse deciding whether to leave the security of its hole.

  ''You are expecting someone else, Herr Blucher?" he asked.

  Blucher shook his head emphatically. "Expecting? No. I worry there may be someone else, though. The same someone who killed your friend Donald Huff."

  "And that would be ... ?"

  The old man drew his sweater closer around him, although the night was warm. "I do not know his-or their-name, but you can be sure it is someone who did not want Huff's book published."

  Lang caught himself looking over his own shoulder. Paranoia was contagious. "I'd say they have accomplished that goal, so why . . . ?"

  Blucher stopped, looking up into Lang's face. "They do not wish their secret told." Lang was glad the hotel was now in view. "What secret?"

  "I am not sure, but it has to do with something in Huff's research, something I was helping him with."

  Gurt broke her silence. "Herr Blucher, we can have a drink at the bar and discuss-"

  He shook his head again. "No, too dark."

  The vomRitter's bar and restaurant were unusually dark, even given the murky atmosphere preferred by eating and dining establishments. Ancient polished wood and tiny, weak tabletop lamps gave the appearance more of a cave than a room.

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  "Our room, then," Gurt suggested. "We have a suite, an area where we can sit and talk."

  Minutes later, the three were seated around a low table, a room-service carafe of coffee and three cups in front of them.

  "Exactly what was Don's book about?" Lang asked, pouring. ' Blucher held up a hand to decline the sugar Gurt offered. "War criminals, German war criminals."

  "And you were helping him research?"

  The old German made a sound that could have been a mirthless laugh.

  "Research? I had little need to research. I knew most of them."

  ''You mean like Himmler, Goring?" Lang asked.

  Blucher shook his head. "No, no. The ones never punished. "And you knew them?" Lang was fascinated. "Oh, not well. I was only seven or eight when the war ended. It was my father. He worked for a newspaper taken over by Herr Goebbels's propaganda ministry. He interviewed a number of these men for the radio or newspaper. Often they would come by our apartment in Berlin for an initial discussion. My father said I should meet them, someday they would be famous."

  Prescient if not exactly on target. The professor stared at something only he could see and continued, "It was these 'famous' men that was the end of my father. He was drafted into the Volksturm, the army of boys and old men who were to defend Berlin from the Russians there at the last. He deserted to make sure my mother, brother, and I got safely out of the city, to go west toward the Allies. For this he was hung from a lamppost by order of one of these 'famous'

  men."

  "Why would these men go unpunished?" Gurt wanted to know.

  "Because they were useful. What would you say should be done with a man who employed slave labor to build a weapons system to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians, including women and children?"

  "I would have thought he would have been in the dock at Nuremberg" Lang said.

  "Wernher von Braun, the founder of your aerospace program? His were the V-I and V-2 rockets that struck London. He used Jews, Poles, anyone from the camps as workers until they dropped from exhaustion and starvation. Yet he was too valuable to pros ... er ..."

  "Prosecute," Lang supplied, his coffee cup frozen halfway between the table and his mouth. ''You are telling me this is the same von Braun who was responsible for the U.S.'s space program?"

  The old man's head bobbed. "It was a race between the Russians' German scientists and your German scientists as to who would reach the moon first. Von Braun surrendered to American troops. Others of his group were not so fortunate. They fell into the hands of the Communists."

  Lang set his cup down untouched. "There were others?" Once again, an emphatic nod. "Many. Your intelligence organization ..."

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  "OSS," Lang suggested.

  "The Oss and its successor slipped a number of Nazis out of Germany, those they thought might be helpful in spying or revealing Russian spies. There was even a name for the operation-Operation Paper Clip."

  The sheer banality made Lang smile for a second. "And you think it is these old Nazis who don't want the information Don had to get out?"

  "It cannot be," Gurt interjected. "Whoever they were, eighty or ninety would be their age now. Don Huff was not over run by a wheelchair or clubbed with a crutch."

  Blucher took a long sip from his cup and set it back down. "There was such an organization, Die Spinne, the spider, that aided escapes from Germany. People like Bormann, Hitler's personal secretary, and Mengele, who conducted medical experiments on live inmates of the camps. Many also escaped on Vatican passports."

  Lang glanced at Gurt, remembering her reference to the same organization. "But you don't think ... ?"

  "I don't think some Nazi organization killed your friend, no. As Fraulein Fuchs says, the old men are either dead or nearly so. There is perhaps other information your friend was about to reveal, perhaps without even knowing it."

  Not much help, Lang thought. "What about you, what's your connection to all this? I mean, I know what you said about your father, but how did you and Don hook up?"

  Blucher slumped as though someone had placed a weight on his shoulders. He stared straight ahead. "After the war, I finished school, went to university right here in Heidelberg. I became interested in history and got a doctorate in it." He smiled sadly. "I almost didn't receive my degree. I wrote my dissertation on the war criminals who escaped justice, not exactly a popular subject. In fact, I think had the administration not feared the world would learn they had in essence censoredsuch a work, they would not have awarded my Ph.D." He turned to give Lang a painful look. "The Germans have national amnesia where the war is concerned. It is not a popular subject, nor was I a popular professor. Fortunately, I was invited to teach at Cambridge in England, where I spent the rest of my academic career.

  "By the time I retired, most of the faculty and all of the students I had known here were gone. My wife died a year after our return, and I feared I was to die of boredom. Then, somehow, your friend found a copy of my dissertation. He called and asked if I was interested in helping with his book. I was tired of gardening and the other activities of the old, so I agreed. We e-mailed each other and talked on the phone almost every day. Every day until ... until he was killed."

  All three were quiet, their coffee getting -cold as each thought.

  Lang stood. "I've got some pictures I'd like you to see." He went to the bedroom and returned with a number of prints. "I had these made from a CD

  that Dan's killer didn't get. Take a look and see if you recognize anyone."

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  Blucher produced the glasses again, placing them firmly on his nose and deliberately hooking the frame around his ears. Through the lenses, Lang could see his eyes widen. "Skorzeny!"

  "Who?"

  "The man Jessica said her father was writing of,"

  Gurt reminded him. "Otto Skorzeny."

  Blucher held the picture up, the one of the man in uniform standing in front of the Vatican. "That's him, Otto Skorzeny."

  Lang settled back into his chair. "Tell us about him."

  Blucher put the picture down and unhooked the spectacles from his ears before he spoke. ''Austrian, college educated, got that scar in a Schmisse, student duel. Passionately pro-Hitler, SS, sometimes called Hitler's commando. He was the one who flew gliders onto a mountaintop to rescue Mussolini without a shot being fired. Organized the parachute drop onto Cypress that took the British completely by surprise. It was Skorzeny that Hitler sent to Montsegur ..."

  "Where?" Lang asked, the word faintly familiar. "The place in the Languedoc in France. It was on one of Don's cards, too," Gurt said. Lang had the feeling he was getting somewhere, but he had no idea where. "Excuse m
e. Please continue." Blucher nodded. "Montsegur. It was the last holdout of the Cathars, a here ... here ..."

  "Heretical sect," Lang said, remembering his adventure in the region last year with something less than fondness.

  ''Yes, heretics," the professor continued. "They were victims of one of the Crusades declared by the Pope in the early thirteenth century. Slaughtered to a man. Question was, what was their heresy? Were they like the Gnostics, who believed Christ rose from the dead spiritually rather than in body? Or was their problem that they had something the Pope wanted or did not want known? With Hitler's obsession with things of a supernatural nature-he was continually searching for the Holy Grail, for instance-he sent Skorzeny to the remnants of the old fortress and cave-"