by TR Kenneth
Stag gave him a blank stare, still trying to recall what had happened to him. He remembered his fight with Troost, and the searing pain to the side of his head. Then he remembered seeing Angelika. And then the black hole she’d put in Troost’s forehead.
He lay back, trying to absorb the meaning of it. If Angelika shot Troost while he was texting Portier, then that meant she was a double agent.
“I want to offer my condolences in the loss of your friend,” Duffy said.
Stag hesitated, still numb.
“I know you’re in pain, Mr. Maguire. I would like to leave you alone. However, when we sent our agents into Kehlsteinhaus, we found Troost’s phone. It was encrypted to erase all texts after sending them. We don’t know what the scuffle was about, but we have a very good idea.”
“Interpol …” was all Stag could manage.
“Yes. Sorry about that. Interpol has some very good agents. Excellent, in fact. Rarely are we bedeviled by an embedded holdout from an earlier ethos.”
Stag took a deep breath, trying to reconcile all the new information.
“We have an urgent need for information. You see, our best agent works at Tarnhelm under Portier. She found out this morning from Portier that Troost was taking a meeting there with you. She wanted to make sure to interrupt it. However … we believe we may have come too late.”
Angelika Aradi worked for NATO. And since these people had obviously saved his life, he had to trust them. There was no time to spare.
“There’s a bomb. Heydrich’s lost bomb. On the mountain above the Königssee. We’d just told Troost about it. We were hoping to retrieve it before Tarnhelm.”
Duffy’s face was hard. “I see.”
“We’ve got to send machinery out there to get it. Contact Mac. He knows where it is. Here’s his number.” Stag looked around, not seeing his phone.
“Are you talking about the mountain climber, Killburn’s the name? I’m sorry to tell you this, but he’s dead. They found his body at the bottom of a cliff.”
Stag squinted his eyes against the sunshine. It was suddenly killing his head. Without further thought, he untaped his arm and slid out the IV, grimacing.
“Take me there. I’ll show you.” Blood streamed from the IV wound. He hardly noticed. He slapped the old tape on it and went to the wardrobe to retrive his clothes.
The helicopter flew right atop the bend in the road where the SD truck had accidentally gone off the cliffside in the spring of 1942. From the air, Stag could make out the scarring in the rock where the truck had fallen down the cliff in the snow and landed on the ledge. Below that was another scarring. Where a large object had rolled from the truck bottom farther down the mountain.
But the crevice where the object had been lodged was empty.
Duffy sat in the back, humped against the helicopter window. They were both wearing headsets. Both connected to the intercom, but no words were necessary. The bomb was gone. Tarnhelm had gotten there first.
Stag swallowed his bitterness. If he’d only known who to trust. If he’d only tried NATO first.
Hell, if he’d only Googled Heydrich.
The helicopter landed on the roadside above. They got out and surveyed the pylons still left behind where Tarnhelm’s work crew had hurriedly lifted the bomb by sky crane and spirited it away.
NATO was on it. Stag had no doubt. But where the bomb was now and, more importantly, where it would end up was anybody’s guess.
“You don’t look too good,” Duffy said, stepping up to him.
“You don’t look too good yourself,” Stag answered.
There was nothing more to say.
Stag was rushed to a NATO plane for a meeting in Berlin. Duffy sat across from him in the rumpled raincoat.
“Is she an assassin or not?” Stag asked, accepting the two Motrin the man mercifully held out to him. He was bleeding through his head bandage, but there wasn’t time to care about it.
“We characterized her as such to keep her cover. We suspected a mole in Interpol for a while, only we could never quite identify him. It took you to bring Troost into the open. But no, she is Tarnhelm intelligence, and always has been. She grew up poor, her mother an outcast, her father caught in a Muslim genocide. But she was bright and street-savvy, and Portier grew to trust her more than anyone. He was instrumental in her daughter’s recovery. And she grew to trust him.”
“What made her flip?”
Duffy thought for a moment. “Time to fly straight, I imagine. Her daughter’s been given a second chance and I suspect she wants better things for her, if you forgive me the cheap sentiment.”
“What does she do for NATO?” Stag wanted all the information he could get.
“She’s an operative of what we call TWR, the NATO anti-genocide arm that was first developed specifically to fight nuclear threats. It now includes all others. It was meant to parallel the original White Rose first founded to fight Germany’s National Socialists.”
“The White Rose? You mean like in Sophie Scholl?”
“In her honor. We find we still have to focus on genocide. There were six million murdered Jews in the Holocaust. We thought we knew genocide after the Germans managed to mechanize it. But we fool ourselves. We don’t have mass murder under control. There have been fifty-five million targeted peoples murdered since 1945.” He shrugged. “And none of us have even used a nuclear device. It’s the world’s dirty secret. We kill those we don’t like. En masse.”
“Christ.”
“People want to see themselves as good. But the truth is all people are bad. The only good ones fight it.”
“I thought we’d gotten beyond the Holocaust.”
Duffy sighed. “We’re a species that needs groups and fears anything foreign. It is our biological necessity. But are we a school of fish moving in unison in the shallow waters or a school of piranha that scours the bones of our own? That we must decide one person at a time.”
Stag knew about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. It was an underground resistance group led by various students and a professor at the University of Munich. Sophie Scholl was twenty-one when she was beheaded after a Nazi show trial. Her judge had been Roland Freisler, one of the members of Heydrich’s Wannsee Conference.
It never failed. All good things led back to Heydrich, he thought.
“I take it she didn’t murder a NATO official?”
“No. Pure deza—what the Soviets called dezinformatsiya—disinformation on our part.”
“Does Portier suspect?”
Duffy wearily shook his head. “We don’t know. She took a terrible chance going to the Eagle’s Nest. As I said, she worked intelligence for Tarnhelm for years before she flipped. Now she’s our asset, not theirs, but they don’t know that.” He grew grim. “She’s in a bad situation. Very precarious. Very. With that bomb out there, I don’t need to tell you she is most vital.”
“We have to figure out who they sell it to. They don’t want it for themselves. They want it for a client.”
“Yes, well, that list is pretty long. But we’ve already got a good idea who the top contenders are. Now we just have to interrupt the transfer.” Duffy paused, looking uncomfortable. “On the face of it, our intelligence tells us the bomb is targeted to destroy an oligarch suburb of Moscow.”
“The face of it? There’s more?”
“Portier is planning to send out the documents of the strike to Moscow afterward. Proving it was a hired strike by the man in Washington. I don’t need to tell you, the Russians will retaliate once those documents are seen in Moscow.”
Stag went numb. Next it would be DC. Then it would be Moscow. And so on and so forth until they were just a black crumb whirling in space.
His nerves taut, he looked out the window. With stress numbing him, it was easy to just watch the ground go by below. They ducked through several mountain passes out of Berchtesgaden and headed north by northwest toward Munich. He thought about Jake and the guilt he felt over getting him involved. H
e was grateful that Angelika had taken the chance to save him, but he only wished the situation had been such to save them both. Now it seemed obvious that she was the shooter in the alley in Bali. While working for Tarnhelm and Portier, she’d also been watching out for him all along.
But no one could afford to think about personal safety any longer. Not while the bomb was out there, headed to parts unknown.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
“IT’S A GRAVITY bomb,” Sadler said in his library. “It has no guiding system, which accounts for the few number of wires on it, and no tail kit assembly. Needless to say, we will manage the operation from beginning to end.”
“The only thing we care about is that the town is destroyed and nothing ever gets traced to us.” The man from DC was back. Arriving with the same creepy smile and Brooks Brothers blazer, the Surrogate looked pleasantly malevolent. Like that inherited green wallpaper that you find out, too late, has been shedding copious amounts of arsenic.
As before, the Surrogate spent most of his time in the meeting looking at his phone.
And Sadler watched him, amazed. Hundreds of thousands were going to be affected by this meeting in his library, yet the man took it with all the seriousness of an inconvenient detail.
You had to love sociopaths. Fuck. They were chill. Sometimes, if he was honest with himself, he got weary being surrounded by them. Maybe because he held onto the small hope in his soul that he was just an outsider looking in.
“The money has been verified in our account in the Cook Islands. We now expect the deployment to occur in less than a week.” Sadler was pleased to see the man pause.
“That quickly?”
“The bomb, for all its weathering, was in excellent condition. We upgraded a few things in the renovation. It’s ready to go.”
“And there will be no tracing it?”
“Of course, there will be tracing. We’re renting a business jet, a Global 7000 for the range and the ability to handle the weight. Nothing unusual that hasn’t headed to Barvikha in droves. We’re installing the custom bomb door now.”
“Who will they trace the rental to?”
“The Black Plague.”
The crisp-blazered man smiled through his insincerity.
“Everyone loves a new villain,” Sadler commented archly. Especially if the yahoos can shiver in their trailers and look up to the autocracy to “keep them safe.” “It’s a win/win for your man, isn’t it?”
“But how will you keep the Russians from shooting the plane down after the bomb is dropped? They’ll collect a lot of evidence then.”
Sadler smiled. “What plane? The only reason for a lot of wires on this type of bomb is to slow the thing down long enough for the plane to get out of reach of the mushroom cloud. By dropping it with no guiding system, a gravity bomb doesn’t give enough time to get out of the explosion. There won’t even be an ash left of the plane.”
The other man nodded. Then something occurred to him. “Was Heydrich planning on his own kamikazes? For this bomb?”
“If anyone in Nazi Germany could have engineered it, it would have been that man. We are talking about Heydrich here.”
“Does the pilot know what he’s dropping or are you just going to pull the wool over—”
“Mr. Portier has his own army. If I might remind you.”
“I’d only heard of the Muscle Men as rumor.”
“And it will stay that way.”
“Yes. Yes.” It was the first time the cold Surrogate looked intimidated. Another thought occurred to him. He paused. “Isn’t the Global 7000 made by—”
“The business jet company named Bombardier?” Sadler stood to refill their glasses from the bar. “Yes. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Stag looked over the satellite photographs of the bomb clinging to the crevice. Size could easily be determined against the cliff face. Details as small as the shadow of wires on one side of the bomb were now apparent. They had been hidden by the view up top.
“We have to conclude that alterations will have been made. We can’t be sure what it will look like once this is done.” Admiral Buckner US Navy now assigned to NATO as an OF-9 tapped on the table in frustration. They were seated in a hyper-secure room called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or SCIF room. It was deep inside Devil’s Mountain, Teufelsberg, a former man-made mountain that was built to hide a Nazi military technical college. The NSA had used the hilltop as a listening post during the Cold War, but now the top was abandoned, its buildings in ruins and covered with graffiti. Deep inside the mountain, however, was another world entirely; a reconstruction of mazes, vaults, and US Marines standing guard 24/7.
“It could be transported as a gigantic machine part—or a tank of helium—and therefore allowed on private aircraft.” The engineer of the group looked sternly down at the pictures.
“We’ve gotten photos and warning memos out to all international airports.” It was Duffy’s turn to scan the photos. “But I think our best chance is the White Rose. They’ve got several people in Tarnhelm. On-the-ground intelligence is what’s going to save us here.”
“Have you a list of prospective clients, at least? That will help us narrow down the focus,” the admiral said.
“Here is the best we’ve been able to gather. Given the price of the bomb, it does eliminate several of them.” An aide handed out the paper.
The admiral glanced at the list, unsurprised by the groups on it, until he came to the last one.
“Is this correct?” he asked, pointing to the sole name.
Duffy stared at him. “I’m afraid so.”
“Goddamnit.”
“Yes, limiting the damage on this is going to be difficult,” Duffy said.
“Mutually Assured Destruction is what’s going to happen.” The admiral looked around the table at the few in the meeting. The only other American was Stag, and being introduced as a journalist didn’t make the admiral warm to him. “We need boots on the ground immediately,” he ordered.
“Not yet,” Duffy commanded, clearly the man in control. “We’ve got to be patient and wait for the intelligence. We can’t go flying off the handle now when the danger is so great—not only to our agents, but to the world.”
“Patience is not my virtue,” the admiral boomed.
Stag muttered under his breath, “Then you sure as hell don’t want to be a journalist.” He looked down at the bomb photo and wondered where Angelika was now. As much as he wanted to rush out and do something to protect her, some situations couldn’t be taken by force, no matter how awful the circumstances.
Duffy turned to him. “Stag, you’re the only man to have seen the bomb before it was taken off the mountain. We couldn’t get every angle from space. Did you see anything we might be missing? Were there any irregularities or signage—anything that can help us identify the thing from SAT?”
“There was another who saw it. Mac Killbur—” Stag’s words dwindled at the reminder. He’d forgotten. The man was dead.
Duffy’s mouth formed a hard line. “Mac Killburn was found at the bottom of a mountain. ‘Failure in the rope,’ I think they said it was. Tarnhelm was very careful. There was another death in town: a Herr Professor Hoening who was found facedown over a US military manual that outlined the locations and procedures of decomissioning enemy ordnance. I doubt they’ll determine his death was anything other than a heart attack.”
Another fuck you from Tarnhelm, Stag thought bitterly. He turned back to the satellite photos. “The only thing I remember was a faint marking on the nose cone. I could be wrong. It could have been just scratches from the fall down the cliff.”
“Can you describe it?” the admiral demanded.
“It was just scratches, really. Just scratches. Like a stick figure, I think.”
“Runes?” Duffy asked.
“Maybe,” Stag answered, scouring his memory to make sense of what he saw.
“Could they have looked like lightning bolts?” The admiral took a pen a
nd paper and began slashing SS runes on them.
Stag rubbed his jaw. “No. More like a stick figure. You know. Like a kid makes of a man.” He took the paper and drew a legless stick figure with the arms reaching skyward.
“What do you think, Duffy?” The admiral’s expression grew taut.
“I think it is a rune.” Duffy took the paper himself. He looked at it. “With the arms facing skyward, this is a Lebensrune, the life rune.” He turned the paper upside down. “But depending on which way the figure faces, it has a totally different meaning.”
“Enlighten us,” said the admiral.
“With the arms facing down, it is the Todesrune.” He looked at both men emphatically. “The SS death rune.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
PORTIER STUDIED THE copy of the flight plan. The plane was going to be taking off from the Munich Oberpfaffenhofen Airport. It was an airport used exclusively for business aviation and private jets. Without commercial aircraft, the security measures were much lighter. As long as the paperwork was correct—or rather looked correct—there would be no problem with unusual and not-quite-identifiable cargo.
Now he only had to decide the final details. The development at Barvikha, called Sputnik Luxe, was toast even if the pilot was a little inaccurate in dropping the bomb. The flight plan, the names and background of the crew and pilot, would all be traced back to the Black Plague, another arm of Daesh. Their signature would be all over it, from the Koran “mistakenly” left behind in the pilot lounge, to the manufacture of grieving “relatives.”
The client was certainly satisfied.
But if everyone thought he was now going to be serving clients, and taking their billions gratefully, when his piss dribbled out with excruciating pain ten times a day, they were all sadly mistaken.
At the scheduled hour an email with attachment would head to Moscow. Whoever was in control—and not unfortunate enough to be cavorting in their Barvikha mansion on the fateful hour—would be given photographic and written evidence of the order that came from their scheming loan-holder. It wouldn’t take the Russians long to put it together that they’d been duped.