And then, without immediately understanding what it meant, I saw the mark on the left side of the road. It was about six feet up the thick trunk of a tree I couldn’t identify. The bark had been scraped away and in the foot-square space a red cross had been painted, the upper part of the vertical much longer than the lower. The Antichurch’s upturned cross. Eureka.
I got down from the SUV and took out my cell phone to send a text to Quincy.
No signal. That was hardly surprising, given the tree cover. He would be able to track me with the responder, as long as it functioned in this environment. Too bad—I wasn’t going to wait. My heart rate had accelerated. I was going to find the bastard Rothmann and tear his head off. I got back into the car and drove down a narrow track. As soon as I saw a gap in the trees, I turned in and got the Mercedes as far out of the way as I could. When I opened the door, I noticed a fleshy plant where I was going to put my feet. A putrid smell rose from it, attracting flies and other insects.
It seemed I was close to the rotting heart of darkness.
Putting the pistol and knife in my pockets, I struck off through the woods, keeping the track to my right. I took cover behind a tree when I heard a vehicle approach and watched as a pair of worryingly severe guys in a pristine pickup negotiated the track. The vehicle soon vanished behind the foliage. I headed after it.
The first rustle in the bushes ahead didn’t bother me. The following ones did—they got louder and shook the leaves. I stopped and pulled out the Glock. A bundle of bristles with two wickedly curved tusks on the front pelted toward me, swerving at the last moment. I found myself on my backside, breathing heavily. That must have been one of the feral hogs mentioned in the pamphlet. I laughed out loud, having not come across heavily armed suckling pig before.
I should have kept quiet. That way I might have heard what came up behind me. As it was, I turned too late and caught only a glimpse of a demon’s face with fangs much bigger than the hog’s.
Then I lost the light.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our most generous sponsor, Mr. Rudi Crane!’
The toastmaster gave the small man to his right on the raised table a wide and disingenuous smile. Crane did not return it. One of the many blessings that the Lord had conferred upon him was the ability to detect insincerity instantly. That had been a useful tool in his rise to the upper echelons of American business, as well as in his church. He knew exactly which senior Southern Baptists were worthy. Unfortunately, there were very few.
Rudi Crane looked out over the elite of Chicago and tried not to blink. He had started wearing contact lenses a few months earlier, and his eyes still rebelled on occasion. He knew how important it was to maintain a steady gaze, so he had disciplined himself not to react to the prompting of his nerves. As usual, his mind prevailed over his body, for which he gave silent thanks. He started out on the address he had memorized—he didn’t like to refer to notes when speaking in public, nor did he allow himself to extemporize. As often happened, the words came out without conscious effort, allowing him to spend the time on more profitable conjectures. Over the years, he had come up with many important ideas while speaking, most frequently when he preached at the church he had built near the family mansion outside Birmingham. He wished he was there now, taking in the winter sun of Alabama, far away from the high society of Chicago, hypocrites all. He only contributed to their ridiculous charitable foundation because it raised his profile in the North and was essential for his business.
Rudi Crane’s thoughts ran parallel to his speech for several seconds. He was explaining how Hercules Solutions had an integrated approach to every contract, and how much the company valued the work it carried out for the U.S.A. Integration was the key. The word had been misused for so many years, he reflected. Racial integration wasn’t important in the modern world. What really mattered was full control of everything. Religion based on the words of great men directed the minds and souls of the people; relationships between great men led to mutually beneficial business activities; great men organized the world according to their desires and rights. He had never had the slightest doubt that he was a great man.
‘My friends,’ he said, moving into the section of his speech that people came to hear, ‘I have been fortunate enough in my time to know many leaders, in many different fields. I have paid homage at the feet of religious leaders, I have had dealings with the kings of industry, I have known the most powerful of statesmen. When I saw the secretary of defense last weekend, he said to me, “Rudi, how do you do it? Hercules Solutions offers the best service with the best personnel for the best price. It’s a miracle.” I took it upon myself to correct the secretary, as only the Lord our God can bring about miracles. But it is true that Hercules Solutions takes its work very seriously, not least because we are responsible for American lives in the most dangerous parts of the world.’
As he let his voice convey the joyous message of faith-based profit and success tempered by financial and moral accountability, Rudi Crane allowed himself to revel in what he had achieved. In ten years, Hercules Solutions had become the largest private military contractor in the world, providing experienced personnel to support U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous other countries. The company trained armies and police forces on every continent, as well as undertaking private security work for the world’s wealthiest people. True, there had recently been legal problems in Iraq and the company had been forced to restrict its operations to nongovernment work. But in the U.S. it still trained hundreds of law enforcement officers every year. The world was one country now—wasn’t that the point of globalization? It didn’t matter where the profits were made.
He took a sip of water and raised his glass to his listeners, the majority of whom were drinking vintage champagne. He liked to end speeches with the emotional surge he employed in the pulpit. He exhorted them to be true to the Lord in all their thoughts and deeds. That way, their efforts would prosper and their lives would be full of joy. It always amazed him how people took his words, their expressions rapt, their eyes closed. No one was ever concerned that Hercules Solutions employed professional killers by the thousand. The Company was protected by the Lord.
Quincy Jerome had parked in a narrow space between two buildings on the eastern edge of Warren. He was watching the junction with 1943. According to the tracking device, Matt had turned off that road roughly five miles ahead and was now moving northward. The plan was that Quincy would get a text when he was to move up. He checked his cell and saw that the signal was at medium strength. If nothing had come in two hours from the time Matt turned off the road, he would go ahead regardless. A lot could happen in two hours.
A rattling Volkswagen Beetle came up to the crossroads, driven by an elderly man with a white beard. Quincy took a photograph of it, as he had with all vehicles that passed. He might as well use the time profitably. He looked at his watch. Twelve-thirty. Another hour to wait. He looked around, breathing in the air. What he’d grown up with in Mobile was different—the taste of pomegranates and pecans had never left him—but, still, this place smelled of the South, made him think he was home. He swallowed a laugh. What kind of home could a black Jew have expected to make in Dixie? He’d have been better off relocating to New York, but he’d had nothing to relocate with. When his mother died, he had sold the house and contents and taken a single bag of family mementoes back to camp.
Quincy was keeping watch on the junction, so he didn’t notice the slim figure in blue denim slip up the lane behind him and take cover behind the SUV. But he did see the woman with bright yellow dreads who drove a blue LandRover Discovery up to the junction. She obviously wasn’t a local, as she was consulting a map and turning her head frequently in each direction.
Quincy thought he’d parked far enough back to be invisible, but the woman suddenly stared at the gap between buildings. Then she glanced in the mirror, before spinning the wheel and moving her vehicle rapidly toward him.
He di
dn’t like the look on her face one little bit.
Twenty-One
A pungent smell—mustard cut with burning rubber—filled my nostrils and I came round gasping for breath. White light made me immediately jam my eyelids shut again. When I reopened them, slowly, I discovered that the source of the light had been directed away from me. I tried to move, but my arms and legs were tightly secured.
A face moved into my line of vision and I blinked to clear the dampness. My eyes hadn’t deceived me.
‘Matt Wells,’ said Heinz Rothmann, his aquiline nose as prominent as ever. Otherwise, he looked different—his head had been shaved and there was a livid scar on each of his cheeks. ‘Welcome.’ He smiled in the humorless way I remembered. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘Where am I?’ I tried to remember what I’d been doing before I lost consciousness. Whatever he’d used to wake me up had faded and there was now a familiar metallic taste in my mouth. What was it?
‘You are where no one can find you,’ Rothmann said, the smile still playing on his thin lips. ‘In a place where I am the sole master.’ He tapped my forearm and I felt a stabbing pain. ‘You were good enough to advise us of the positioning device beneath your skin. It is currently being taken deep into the Big Thicket. In the meantime, you have been moved to another location.’
I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of what he was saying. The bastard was way ahead of me. My memory finally fired and my brain rebooted. He had lured us to the road between Warren and Fred. The inverted cross on the tree had been a setup. But that meant Nora Jacobsen had been primed to deceive us via her daughter. It wasn’t so strange; Rothmann would have known that the Feds and I would go to them—there wasn’t anyone else. Then I thought of Quincy—what had happened to him? Shit. Now I realized what the steely taste was. It had been in my mouth at the camp in Maine after indoctrination sessions. What else had I revealed while I was out?
‘Matt?’ Rothmann took hold of my chin with the latex-covered fingers of one hand. ‘Come back to me.’
The command was irresistible. I opened my eyes immediately, my whole body stiffening as if I was coming to attention.
‘Yes, my Führer.’
Jesus, did I say that? I really had been conditioned.
Rothmann took his hand away and stepped back. ‘That’s better.’ He looked at his watch, a curiously old-fashioned silver thing. ‘Twenty-three hours have passed since we liberated you and put you back through coffining. What do you remember?’
So I had been subjected to the drugs and the machine that robbed people of their souls. ‘Nothing,’ I said, which was the truth. The fact that I was still able to reason with myself showed that the conditioning process hadn’t been fully completed. Yet.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘It is gratifying that my late sister’s process has remained deep in your subconscious, waiting for enhancement. You have been good enough to describe the measures taken by the FBI’s scientists to counteract the conditioning. It would appear they have been—how shall I put it?—rather deficient.’
I let him believe that. The fact was, I had no idea how long I’d be able to fight the process.
‘Ah, come in,’ Rothmann said, turning to his left. ‘Our friend is awake.’
The familiar face of Gordy Lister came into view. He seemed to have lost weight and there were dark rings round his eyes.
‘Hey, asshole,’ the small man said. ‘Bet you hoped you’d never see us again.’
I was submissive without wanting to be, but whatever look was on my face enraged him. He moved his hand forward rapidly and grabbed my throat.
‘Whaddya know about my brother?’ he demanded, squeezing with surprising strength.
I tried to place his brother, but the pain made that impossible.
‘Let him go!’ Rothmann ordered.
That had an immediate effect. I panted for breath.
‘Sorry,’ Lister said, his eyes avoiding the other man’s.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Sorry, Master,’ the small man said, with a degree of reluctance. So, Rothmann’s megalomania hadn’t decreased since I’d last seen him.
‘Answer him, Matt,’ Rothmann commanded.
I felt the tingling throughout my body again as the conditioning kicked in. I recited the report about Lister’s brother being killed in a hit-and-run incident in Florida.
‘Is that it?’ Lister said, clearly disappointed.
I nodded. ‘There were no witnesses.’
‘No witnesses, my ass. You think people are dumb enough to talk to the Feds about a hit?’
‘It was a hit?’ I tried to disguise my curiosity.
‘Oh, yeah. Some bitch with short blond hair deliberately ran him down. You sure you don’t know anything more about it?’
I glanced at Rothmann. He was following the exchange with interest. That was hardly surprising, since an attack on Lister’s brother might well have been an indirect attack on him. But I didn’t care about that—what did worry me was the reference to the woman with short blond hair. Could she be—?
‘I’ll take that as a no, then,’ Gordy said, frowning at Rothmann. ‘Our boy here’s going to need some more sessions. His brains are scrambled to shit.’
He was right, but not in the way he thought. My thought processes were all over the place. Where was Quincy? Had he completely lost track of me? Had Rothmann managed to cancel out the hatred I felt for him in under twenty-four hours? Was I going to be turned into one of his brainwashed killers? Had Sara been one of the women in Maine? How long would it be until she found me wherever I was now?
‘Oh, by the way,’ Rothmann said, ‘you told me earlier what happened to our former subject Karen Oaten and your son.’ He gave a short, punctilious bow. ‘My sympathies.’
That was enough to bring back everything I had felt about the Nazi fucker. I was going to rip his heart out, no matter how many times I was coffined.
Peter Sebastian had planned to spend the morning in the J. Edgar Hoover building. He got in before the Washington Beltway filled up and was surprised to find Arthur Bimsdale already installed in the office.
‘Morning, sir,’ his assistant said, with great enthusiasm.
Sebastian gave him a weary nod. He had quarreled with his wife the night before and ended up sleeping in the guest room, so Bimsdale’s good cheer was as welcome as a cup of acid. The problem was, the young agent had come up with a potentially useful lead. They had been looking into Heinz Rothmann’s companies since the massacre at the cathedral, but even the financial crime experts had been unable to identify all his backers—he had used a London-based investment bank to create an impenetrable web of foreign and offshore companies around his U.S. operations.
‘How can you be sure about this?’ Sebastian asked, after reading the report.
‘I have a friend in Immigration. Also, I called the Willard. Sir Andrew is there until Friday.’
‘I hope they haven’t passed on that we’re interested in him.’
‘No chance. I said I worked for Senator Austiner—I saw from the latter’s schedule that they’re lunching on Thursday.’
Sebastian shook his head. ‘I don’t want to know the details. All right, Sir Andrew Frogget is chairman of Routh Limited. He’s been personally involved in dealings with Woodbridge Holdings, Rothmann’s holding company. The London Metropolitan Police have already questioned him at length, in the presence of FBI representatives, and got nowhere. What makes you think he’ll break the banker’s confidence now?’
‘The recent killings. If you tell him Rothmann’s involved, you’ll bring him around, sir, I’m sure of that.’
‘Are you?’ Sebastian said icily. ‘As far as I recall, we have no direct evidence that Rothmann is involved in the Hitler’s Hitman killings.’ On the other hand, he thought, there had been no major developments in any of the four cases and Matt Wells hadn’t made contact for over twenty-four hours. Things were looking bad—maybe a bit of lateral thinking was what he neede
d. Bimsdale put a folder down on the desk like a poker player with an unbeatable hand.
Sebastian opened it. ‘Nice, Special Agent,’ he said, riffling through the color photos. ‘Very nice.’ They showed the Routh employee Gavin Burdett as he looked after he’d been dragged from the Anacostia River, ironically during the search for Rothmann himself. It hadn’t been easy to identify him, but his brother found a small scar on his ankle. ‘All right, let’s give it a try.’
It wasn’t much after eight when they got to the hotel. They were hoping that the English gentleman wouldn’t have already left. That was confirmed by the duty manager, who looked concerned when they showed their ID, but gave them the relevant room number without delay. Sebastian told him not to let Sir Andrew know they were on their way up.
The Englishman showed neither surprise nor concern when they identified themselves and asked them to make themselves comfortable. He was wearing a hotel robe and had a towel round his neck. The suite was large and luxurious.
‘Lucky you caught me, actually,’ he said, in the effortless drawl Sebastian had noted before in upper-class Brits. ‘I went out for a run.’
Bimsdale couldn’t contain himself. ‘You were captain of the Cambridge University athletics team.’
Sir Andrew smiled. ‘Several decades ago.’ He wiped his patrician face and smoothed back ash-blond hair that was longer than the average banker’s. ‘Now, let me guess. You’re here about Jack Thomson, also known as Heinz Rothmann.’
The Nameless Dead Page 18