Threatcon Delta

by Andrew Britton

  “That doesn’t matter,” Phair said. “If word of the miracle spreads now, it doesn’t matter how many people saw it, or didn’t see it. Rumor becomes fact in the telling. That dates back to the oral tradition at the dawn of these civilizations.”

  “A foolproof plan,” Kealey reflected. “It doesn’t even matter whether the staff is real.”

  “Actually, it might,” Phair said, typing into the iPad. “These people may have screwed up.”

  Kealey prodded him with an inquisitive look.

  “This probably isn’t the work of a Muslim holy man,” Phair went on. “According to the Koran, the staff is simply said to have swallowed ‘falsehoods,’ which the serpents represented.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “It’s a metaphor,” Phair said. “The staff wasn’t supernatural. But the people behind this appearance of the staff have presented a case that it is.”

  “Can’t it be both?”

  “Not to Muslims,” Phair said. “They may rally at Mt. Sinai to judge for themselves, they may come carrying hope, but they will be less impressed by tricks than by a feeling. They will want to know that the man and the relic are holy.”

  “How will he prove that?”

  “By what he says, not so much by what he can transform. Our problem is that most of these people are so disenfranchised by tyranny, poverty, war, and tribal conflict that it won’t take much to convince them that the Gharib Qawee is a leader worth following, even if they have doubts about his pedigree.”

  “But you’re saying there’s a good chance this staff is a fake,” Kealey said, “and that by presenting it as a miracle worker this prophet has, perhaps inadvertently, announced that fact and left it vulnerable.”

  “Right. He did what was expedient. He got the attention of local Muslims, and that was perhaps more important.”

  “Do we know what is supposed to have happened to the real Staff?” Kealey asked.

  “According to the Bible and historical texts, Moses gave it to his successor, Joshua, who gave it to Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, who buried it in Jerusalem. That much is probable, or at least plausible. What’s less likely is that the Staff was later unearthed by Joseph, who took it to Egypt, where it made its way into the hands of James, the brother of Jesus. There, it was supposedly stolen by Judas and used as the transverse beam of the Cross.”

  “It makes a good story,” Kealey observed.

  “It makes the events seem predestined, part of God’s great plan,” Phair said. “The more so if you accept that Moses’s Staff, originally his shepherd’s staff, was hewn from the Tree of Knowledge in Eden.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No, but I want to,” Phair admitted.

  The cleric closed the Web address of an academic archaeology site. It did not have what he wanted. He had actually gone to this site before, in Iraq, while trying to identify bricks beneath a building that had been bombed in an airstrike. He discovered that the kind of straw used had been discontinued at least five centuries before. It saddened him that it took a war to unearth a treasure. And that might prove ironic before their work here was done.

  Hunting and pecking, Phair continued the search he had started before Kealey was called away to his superior’s office. After another false start—he was directed to the personnel managing an art collection endowed by a philanthropist named Moses—he found what he was looking for.

  “Heiliges Geheimnisvoll Produktprogramm,” he read in adequate German.

  “I recognize product and program,” Kealey said.

  “It’s the Occult Relics Program of the Nazis,” Phair read. “It was organized by Heinrich Himmler in 1937. Agents were sent in search of artifacts to give them a supernatural edge in world conquest.”

  “You mean that wasn’t just in the movies?”

  “It was very real,” Phair said. “Part of that undertaking was to find ancient religious items that could produce similar effects.”

  “You mean like the Ark of the Covenant or the True Cross, which was supposed to do—something.”

  “Protect the army wielding it from all harm,” Phair said. “It says here that Himmler’s SS itself was modeled after the Knights Templar, the religious warriors who were thought to possess the Holy Grail. The identification is more than just symbolism,” Phair read thoughtfully. “The Grail was said to have once held the blood of Christ. Blood—as in bloodline, the cornerstone of the notion of the Aryan master race.”

  “What about the Staff of Moses?”

  “It was one of the objects they reportedly sought.”

  “With no indication whether it was found.”

  “It says here that Himmler established a meetinghouse-slash-museum for the Occult Relics Program in the castle at Wewelsburg in Westphalia,” he went on. “After the war, the Allies examined every stone and floorboard for evidence of tampering. The grounds were searched and X-rays taken. No significant religious or occult artifacts were found. However, the fact that we knew to go there suggests something else.”

  “What?”

  “That the Allies found at least one of the people who was involved in this highly secret program and debriefed him.”

  “Sixty-plus years ago,” Kealey said.

  “There may be files, records, maps,” Phair said.

  Kealey considered this for a moment, then went to the landline. He punched a single number.

  “Sir,” Kealey said. “We’re going to need some information.”

  Phair noticed the sir Kealey used, and the faint twist he put on the word. But for the rest of the phone call he was a paragon of a busy agent, recapping what Phair had told him. He said he wanted any data pertaining to the Allies’ debriefing of anyone involved in the Occult Relics Program and one thing more.

  “I want to know if there are any survivors,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Chief Librarian Trey Dunlap was pouting.

  He loved his job for three reasons. The first was that he could help people. Not “outside” people, the ordinary citizens whose lives and security depended on what they did here, but “inside” people—his coworkers, the men and women who could actually pat his back and boost his career and inflate his ego. It was something a nerd needed in order to define his uniqueness as an asset instead of a liability.

  The venue was the second reason he loved his job. He sat in a small, private, out-of-the-way room, with low overhead lighting illuminating a team of six people cramped in small cubicles, four men and two women who were uninterruptedly lit by the glow of their computer monitors. It was like ruling over a hell of information. But he was the lord. Though it was not permitted to make political statements through stickers, buttons, or even coffee mugs, he had a Libertarian Party symbol—the Statue of Liberty on a blue field—with the name boldly written in Klingon.

  The Devil was supposed to be devious, after all.

  Finally, the thirty-six-year-old loved his job because it gave him access to information that few people knew or could know. He had read, for example, the scanned, redacted, original draft of the Declaration of Independence handwritten by Thomas Jefferson, with marginal notations and cross-outs by John Adams and James Franklin. He had read a file called “Rollover” which was compiled in 1939—a list of secret information about journalists to be used against them if they ever reported on the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t walk. Then there were the files on Roswell, New Mexico. It wasn’t a weather balloon or a flying saucer that crashed there. It was an airborne listening device monitoring Soviet nuclear tests.

  The requests that came to him were varied and were made available based on a three-part number. First, there was the level of security clearance: one was highest, five was the lowest. Second, there was the division number: one was the Oval Office, two was the State Department, ten was the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Reserve, and other specialized divisions. Finally, there
was urgency factor: five was this week, one was yesterday.

  This request was 101. The ‘zero’ indicated it was from your own team.

  This one was for Ryan Kealey, okayed by Jonathan Harper, and it was about Nazis. Which was why Dunlap was pouting. The information that Ryan Kealey needed was not information to which he had direct access. That meant Dunlap had to go to someone and ask a favor. It meant that now he was a number, and not necessarily a high one. He hated that, and he hated how it made him act and feel when he had to ask.

  No, beg, he thought ruefully.

  Most of the records of the Nazi regime had been given to various Holocaust museums around the world. But many of the more sensitive debriefings were still on file with military intelligence, mostly those that dealt with aborted weapons programs. Dunlap had seen some of those. The U.S. government did not want to give potential enemies access to the most devious minds of the Third Reich, men and women who had come up with notions like acoustic cones that would deliver jolts to fault zones, typewriter ribbons that would release airborne bacteria when struck, and chemically treated roads to compromise rubber integrity and cause blowouts.

  With a sigh, Dunlap sent an urgent e-mail to his counterpart Wendy Norris at the Directorate of Intelligence, the wardens of sensitive military information stored by and for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The records dated back to 1903, when the Joint Army and Navy Board was first established. An official request for information had to be in writing. Archived, the e-mail would constitute that. Then he videophoned her.

  “Is this for a TV special?” the young, pretty woman asked suspiciously.

  “Not this time,” Dunlap replied. A movie and TV buff, he was also the go-to guy for U.S. military and espionage history by any number of documentary filmmakers. If the Communications Division approved the script, the government provided those services for free on a low-priority basis. Dunlap bumped the priority up because it got him invites to parties and premieres.

  “There’s not a lot on Hitler’s Occult Relics Program,” Wendy said. “The menu doesn’t say anything about individual discoveries, only about the history and organization of the program.”

  “What about debriefings?” Dunlap asked, checking his own videocast to make sure he looked his best. He was sweating despite the robust air-conditioning, and his thick features stared back at him moodily. He mollified his expression slightly, absently pushed hair onto his forehead to give him that virile man-at-work look. One day he might even ask her on a date.

  “The overview says the data is mostly operational details from maps and logs, primarily geographical areas the five SS units covered,” the woman said.

  “They were all Schutzstsaffel?” Dunlap remarked.

  “Apparently,” she said. “I’ll read the July 1945 summary. ‘The captured enemy does not say much, which is not surprising since they were Hitler’s most elite and trusted soldiers. Neither Hitler nor Himmler would have wanted to put such power in the hands of those who might use it against them.’ This is interesting,” she remarked. “The interviewer goes on to say, ‘The interviewee wasn’t boastful but seemed almost sad. I got the impression they finally did find such objects but never got to use them in the service of the cause.’ ”

  “Wow. I wonder if they found the Holy Grail or Excalibur or any of those things,” Dunlap said.

  “Are you looking for something in particular?”

  “I was told to try and find out about the Staff of Moses and anyone who might still be alive who had a hand in this program.”

  “There’s nothing about the Staff,” she answered, running a search, “and there are only three prisoners mentioned.”

  “Status?”

  “One committed suicide in 1946, one died in 1998, and the other was still alive as of 2005—the last time the file was updated.”

  “Name?”

  “Nope. For security purposes, in case of Soviet moles, they were listed as Subjects Alpha, Beta, and Delta.”

  “How do they know Delta is still alive?”

  “He made a computer transfer from a long-standing Swiss bank account to another in Germany,” she said. “There was obviously a tickler on his account number and this transaction was registered. The transfer was recorded in the minutes of the United Nations War Crime Commission.”

  Dunlap ughed. The UNWCC was a seventeen-nation body that had investigated Nazi atrocities from 1946 to 1949, and still updated their files as news—typically filed by Israeli law enforcement agencies—became available. Unfortunately, their findings were sealed and accessible only in the face of a clear and present danger. While Israel maintained that the existence of extremists represented just such a peril and demanded the files be opened, the United Nations would not participate in what they described as a process of “harassment and persecution of octogenarians or their families who may have knowledge of criminals, but who may not themselves have committed illegal acts.” The United Nations was historically anti-Israeli. However, Dunlap wondered if they might not be willing to provide the name of this individual if Egypt requested it.

  Dunlap noted the name of the bank and transaction number, though he felt a little like the impoverished young fairy-tale lad who had been sent to sell the precious family cow for money and returned with a handful of beans.

  He thanked Wendy, asked what she planned to do that night, and utterly failed to follow up when she said, “watching TV with my dog.” Deflated and perspiring even more, he sent the banking information to Deputy Director Harper along with an evaluation of the available DOI—depth of information—which he rated one out of a possible twenty. There was nothing about the specific artifact, very little about the program itself, and only one clear option for potentially acquiring additional information. That was about as unhelpful as things got.

  As he composed the e-mail, Dunlap didn’t have an opinion about the Staff or the Nazi operation, though he did have a thought about faith.

  If there really is a God, He’ll have Wendy undergo an epiphany, e-mail and ask what I’m doing tonight, and when I say, “Nothing,” she’ll ask me over to watch TV with her.

  It didn’t happen.

  Exhaling displeasure loudly through his little domain, Dunlap forwarded the bank information to Ned Hull at the Computer Access Division. He had a feeling that would be Jonathan’s next stop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  On his way to a General Assembly meeting, Egyptian ambassador to the United Nations Osman al-Obour went to the fourteenth-floor office of the United Nations War Crimes Commission. The current director of the committee was Asef Shiyab of Jordan. Shiyab had only been in America for three months and the men did not know each other very well.

  That didn’t matter.

  Al-Obour was directly descended from a merchant who had negotiated trade routes for the Eighteenth Dynasty four thousand years ago. His brother Arab, Shiyab, once remarked that his own ancestors had worked that route selling timber and probably knew al-Obour’s forebears. Whether or not Shiyab was being even remotely truthful, the men had bonded over the idea. Kinship, like religion, did not always need archaeological records to make it a de facto reality.

  As it was in the days of horse-trading, personal contact was the most effective tool of any diplomat. Honored by the visit, Shiyab stopped what he was doing and checked the files.

  “The holder of the bank account is Herr Lukas Durst, who lists his residence as Berlin,” al-Obour was told. “However, that is simply a mail drop at the post office on Schillstrasse.”

  Indicating for al-Obour to wait, Shiyab phoned the German ambassador seeking help in tracking the owner. Ambassador Hirsch regretted that issues of privacy made that prohibitive, though Shiyab had expected nothing more. At a cocktail reception honoring a new children’s initiative in Africa, Shiyab learned that the German ambassador was descended from aristocrats who had warred on Shiyab’s own forebears in 1918 as advisers to the Ottoman Empire. A new world it might be,
but old battles were constantly being refought.

  Shiyab had simply wanted to show his brother Arab that he had made every effort.

  One day, Ambassador al-Obour knew, he might be asked to return such a favor.

  “It does not seem like much of a lead, but it is something,” the Jordanian apologized.

  “It is more than I entered with,” al-Obour said graciously. “I will pass this information along.”

  En route to the General Assembly, al-Obour texted the information to the Egyptian minister of defense in Cairo. He promptly sent the information to the CIA in Washington, D.C., attention Deputy Director Jonathan Harper, who had made the request.

  Both al-Obour and the minister imagined they were doing the American a favor, and Harper was annoyed to hear from the minister how flattered they were that the powerful American organization had made an OD request of them.

  He let it pass.

  One day, he knew, he would get to tell them the truth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MCLEAN, VIRGINIA

  It was what Kealey called “orderly disorder.”

  True to Kealey’s prediction, Task Force 777 had sent over a grainy, night-vision video of the Staff of Moses turning into a serpent. To him, the miracle was inconclusive. Shrunk in size, posted on the Web—he had every confidence it would somehow make its way there—the effect might be more persuasive.

  Kealey left Phair studying it on a laptop when he received a call from Hamish Dean of the CIA Linguistics Lab.

  “The text does seem to say ‘mail drop for Lukas Durst in Berlin,’ ” Dean informed him.

  “That’s it?”

  “In its entirety,” said the caller.

  Kealey had forwarded the e-mail in question, that was in coded Egyptian, to Dean nearly a half hour before. It wasn’t simply a matter of translating the words but ascertaining the exact meaning and context. For example, mail drop, translated to Egyptian and then to English, could have been a mail box to begin with in its native German, which would have been an entirely different thing.