Origins of the Prime

by Christopher Vale

  Dawn narrowed her eyes at him. “It doesn’t take a psychic to know that an uptight, white Jewish boy like you would only wear white underwear.”

  Axel stared at her for a long moment before starting to laugh. He sat back down in his chair. “She’s feisty at least,” he said to Ian.

  Everyone sat as the tension abated. Tom looked across the table at Martha. “Martha, if you were taking minutes on that discussion, let the record reflect that Agent Williams failed her first psychic test.” He then turned to look at Dawn. “All of Axel’s underwear are pink. Most of them are frilly.”

  The entire table laughed at that. Then Rolf nudged Axel with his elbow. “She’s pretty,” he attempted to whisper much too loudly for it to be effective. “Be nice.”

  Dawn smiled broadly at Rolf. “Thank you,” she said. Rolf blushed, having not intended for her to hear him. He quickly looked away, hiding his face behind his massive hand.

  “Alright,” Ian smiled back and forth. “Now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way…” He cleared his throat as he leaned forward. “Our new friend Sava, has provided us with some information that has already prompted your next mission,” Ian smiled excitedly. He couldn’t be more thrilled that the President was once again entrusting his office with such high priority missions. Axel and Tom raised their eyebrows as they stared at the Director. “Apparently, the Soviets have just captured a Nazi,” Ian continued as Martha opened a manila folder and pulled out a black and white photograph, sliding it to Dawn who glanced at it and then slid it across the table to Tom. “Normally when a high-ranking Nazi wanted for war crimes is arrested, the news is made public and goes international instantly. The Soviets are keeping this one under wraps because this particular Nazi has extremely valuable information that could cause a shift in global power.”

  Tom looked at the picture and then slid it over to Rolf. Rolf glanced down at the photograph and his face went white. He leapt to his feet as if the photo were a snake coiled to strike, and his chair went crashing to the floor. Everyone was startled and Axel and Tom immediately leapt up as well, attempting to calm Rolf. Axel noticed tears in his brother’s eyes as Rolf backed away from the table mumbling. He was trembling and refused to turn back around.

  “It’s okay, Rolf, it’s just a photograph,” Axel assured him before stealing a glance at the picture. When he did he understood Rolf’s reaction. He slid the photograph back across the table to Martha. “Put that damn thing away,” he commanded.

  “Martha, why don’t you leave the file here and take Rolf to the break room and get him a bottle of soda,” Ian suggested. “Would you like that Rolf?”

  The large man nodded as he wiped tears from his eyes.

  “Of course,” Martha said as she quickly stood and walked around the table, taking Rolf by the arm. He liked Martha. She was very sweet and motherly, having raised three children herself. “Come on sweetie,” she said. “I think there is some left over birthday cake, too.”

  Rolf brightened immediately at the mention of cake and allowed Martha to guide him from the room as he wiped his nose with the sleeve of his shirt.

  The others watched them leave and waited for the door to close behind them before speaking. “What the hell just happened?” Ian asked.

  Axel adjusted himself in his chair before speaking. “This is Colonel Hans Arnulf,” Axel said. Tom nodded, now also understanding why Rolf was so upset.

  “I know who it is, Axel,” Ian said. “But what about it?”

  “We’ve met Herr Colonel before,” Axel said. He glanced from Ian to Dawn. “He’s not a nice guy.”

  “Very few Nazis are nice guys, Axel,” Ian retorted.

  Axel took a deep breath. He looked at Tom who nodded for Axel to explain what happened. Axel turned back to look at Ian and Dawn. “When Rolf and I were not quite five years old, we were sent to demonstrate our abilities to Colonel Arnulf. The Colonel wanted to make sure we were obedient, cold killers. So among other things, he pitted Rolf against another genetically engineered boy in a fight to the death.”

  “Jesus,” Ian mumbled. Axel’s eyes darted to Dawn and he saw her place a hand over her mouth to cover a gasp. “Did Rolf kill this boy?” Ian asked softly, as if he was afraid to hear the answer.

  Axel shook his head. “No,” he said as he fought back tears. “The other boy won the fight. He and Rolf were friends and Rolf didn’t want to fight him. The other kid beat him down. So this guy,” he said, reaching across the table and tapping Arnulf’s file, “handed the other kid a sledge hammer and told him to kill Rolf.”

  “Thank God he didn’t,” Dawn said as she placed a hand on her chest.

  “God had nothing to do with it. I fried Arnulf’s ass with a lightning bolt,” Axel said, his face tense as he attempted to suppress an inner rage. Ian and Dawn were wide-eyed in shock. Tom puffed a cigarette. He already knew this story. “I thought he was dead.”

  “Well, apparently you should have deep fried him,” Tom said as he blew a stream of smoke from his nostrils, “because he appears to be very much alive.”

  “And the Soviets have him now,” Ian said gravely.

  “Good,” Axel said. “The KGB may be a bunch of assholes, but they certainly know the proper way to treat a Nazi war criminal.”

  Ian leaned forward and spoke softly, almost fatherly. “I understand how you feel Axel, but we cannot let him stay there. If he tells the Soviets what he knows…” he let it trail off.

  “Fine,” Axel said. “So we go in and kill him. It’ll be my pleasure, Ian.”

  “No, Axel,” Ian said as he looked the young man in the eyes. “We’re going to go in, break him out of prison, and bring him back here.”

  Axel looked away for a moment, but then brought his eyes back on Ian. They were full of intensity. “This guy is the devil,” Axel said as he tapped the point of his finger against the table.

  “Maybe he is, Axel,” Ian said, “but I feel quite certain that if our government could get its hands on Satan himself, they’d want to interrogate him. Wouldn’t you agree? Think of all the information we could get from him.”

  “Alright,” Axel replied not wanting to argue and knowing that he had no hope of winning. Ian wanted Arnulf alive. The President wanted Arnulf alive. No one really gave a crap about what Axel wanted.

  “Alright?” Ian asked. He felt Axel may have relented a bit too quickly. “You’re going to be okay with this?”

  “Yes,” Axel replied.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Axel said his hands held up and his voice betraying the exasperation he felt. “Do you want me to swear on a stack of bibles?”

  Tom laid a calming hand on Axel’s arm. “Calm down,” he said softly.

  Ian removed his glasses and laid them gently on the table. He leaned back in his chair to stare at Axel as he crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m in a tough position, Axel. This guy is being held in a highly secure prison in Siberia. I don’t have another team capable of busting him out of there. At the same time, I don’t want to tell the President that we’re not up for this. But what I really cannot afford is to have you go rogue and kill this guy.” Ian paused as he stared at Axel. “What he knows…”

  “I said alright, and I meant alright,” Axel told the director. “We’ll rescue the son of a bitch.” With that Axel stood and strode out of the room.

  Ian looked across the table at Tom who knew exactly the question the director was going to ask. “He’ll be fine,” Tom assured the director, preempting the question. “He won’t kill him.”

  “Are you sure?” Ian asked. “And what about Rolf? I mean the way he reacted. Jesus, Tom.”

  “I know. I’ll talk to Axel, it’ll be alright,” Tom said as stamped out his cigarette and stood. “As for Rolf…” he held out his hands and smiled. “You should have seen that kid in action. He was spectacular.”

  Ian nodded. “Alright Tom, you know these two better than I do. I’ll trust your judgment. But you’re
running this mission and if they screw it up, I’m going to hold you responsible.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Tom smiled.

  Chapter 10

  The smoke hung thick in the air, forming a blue and white haze to be navigated by patrons. The music blended in with the background which allowed customers to easily carry on conversations. The bar was a hot spot for the local Washington young professional scene and one Axel frequented regularly. It served as a good pick-up spot for a young and handsome man like Axel. Tonight he wasn’t mingling, however. He was deep in thought.

  Axel sat at the bar staring down at the vodka martini in front of him. He lifted his glass and took a sip. It was good. He quickly drained the glass and placed it back on the bar. “Another, please,” he called to the bartender and a new martini soon appeared while the empty glass was swept away.

  Just as Axel was taking a sip of the drink he felt a soft hand on his shoulder and turned to see a stunning woman in a blue dress staring at him. She had soft blond curls which laid gently upon her shoulders and her bright red lips curved into a smile as she spoke. “Hey there,” she said.

  “Hi,” Axel replied with a confident smile.

  “Buy me drink?” she asked coyly.

  Axel looked her up and down, deciding that he would enjoy the company and was just about to answer that he would be happy to, when a voice on his other side answered for him. “I’m afraid he won’t be very good company tonight, love.” Axel turned to see Tom leaning against the bar lighting a cigarette.

  Axel turned back to the woman whose lips had formed a pout. “Are you sure?” she asked him.

  Axel sighed. He cut his eyes to Tom and then back to the woman. “I am afraid he may be right,” he said.

  “Your loss,” the woman said with a shrug and then turned and walked away.

  Axel watched her go, suddenly regretting his decision, and then turned back to Tom spreading his arms wide. “What the hell was that?” he asked. “Do you just hang around waiting in the shadows for me to have a chance with a beautiful woman so that you can pop out and spoil it?”

  Tom chuckled, but otherwise ignored the question. Instead he snapped his fingers at the bartender. “Scotch and soda, please” he said. The bartender nodded. “And put it on my friend’s tab,” Tom smiled as he pointed to Axel.

  Axel rolled his eyes. “Great, Tom. First you chase off the hottest thing in the bar and now I have to thank you by paying for your drink?”

  Tom sat down on the stool beside Axel. “After I saved your tail in Cuba, it’s the least you could do,” he said lightheartedly.

  “Saved my tail?” Axel asked with an incredulous smirk. “You and I have very different memories of the mission.”

  Tom took a sip from his newly arrived scotch. “In any event, you’ll have a chance to return the favor in Siberia.”

  “Yeah,” Axel replied as he sipped his martini.

  “Look, Axel, I promised Ian that I’d talk to you,” he said.

  “About what?” Axel asked.

  “You know what,” Tom said firmly.

  “I promise not to kill him,” Axel replied. “Not on purpose anyway.”

  “Dammit, Axel!” Tom barked before leaning in and lowering his voice. “If you kill him, not only will you have hurt your country, the country that rescued you from this bastard and gave you and your brother a new shot at a good, meaningful life…” he paused and slid an arm around Axel’s shoulder in a fatherly manner. “You’ll also have let the service down. This is our big shot, Axel. If we blow this, we may not get another one. Ian says we need this guy alive. Please don’t let your petty desire for vengeance cloud your judgment.”

  “You don’t understand what he…” Axel began, but Tom interrupted.

  “Yes, I do understand, Axel. You think you had it rough? You should have seen the squalor of the concentration camps. You should have seen the dead bodies. I’m not even talking about the millions they shot and gassed. I’m talking about the ones they just left to die of starvation and disease. There was nowhere to even bury the bodies. Their friends and family had to just leave them lying in the mud.”

  Axel turned to look at his friend and saw tears building in Tom’s eyes. “You should consider yourself lucky you did not have to live through that. Your brief existence under the Nazis was a damned picnic by comparison.”

  “Well, I have no doubt that Arnulf was involved in that too,” Axel said.

  “Oh, I’m sure he was,” Tom said. “He’s a bastard, no one is disputing that Axel, but what do you think the Soviets will do with the knowledge they gain from him? What did the Soviets do to the Poles, to your mother’s people?”

  Axel gazed down into his glass. He knew what had happened. When he was old enough to understand he became almost obsessed with the Holocaust, the war, his family, his countrymen, everything. A child denied any knowledge of his background was determined to know everything he could about it. Though he had not experienced it personally, as he had with the Nazis, Axel was well aware of the horrors the Red Army had inflicted upon Poland.

  “If we leave Arnulf in Russian hands, then you’re just giving these monsters another chance at world domination.” Tom straightened on the stool and turned back to the bar, taking a sip of his drink.

  “You’re right,” Axel said after a long silence. “Whatever knowledge Arnulf has, we can’t let it fall into the hands of the commies.”

  Tom turned and smiled at his friend, patting him on the back. “Now, the next question is whether Rolf can handle this. He showed great fortitude in Cuba, but facing the ghosts of his past is something different entirely. If he reacted like he did this afternoon to seeing a picture of Arnulf, how will he react when he sees the real man, live and in person? He’s liable to either pound Arnulf into the floor or run off screaming into the night, never to be seen again.”

  Axel shrugged. “Only one way to know,” he said before throwing back his head and draining his martini. “Let’s go ask him.” With that, he set his empty glass on the bar and stood.

  ***

  Axel sat on an ugly blue couch staring over the coffee table at his brother who sat cross-legged on the floor. Even sitting on the floor, Rolf’s head was level with Axel’s. “It’s your turn, Rolf,” Axel reminded him and Rolf smiled broadly before drawing a card with a number signifying the number of spaces he was allowed to move his game piece upon the game board of different colored squares.

  Rolf counted out three spaces and then moved his blue piece up the board. “Your turn, Axel,” he smiled.

  Tom sat on the couch beside Axel, watching them play. Bored, he stood. “I think I’ll step outside for a smoke,” he said.

  “Alright,” Axel replied.

  Rolf lived in a government facility known simply as “the Home.” It was originally built to house aging spies and others with sensitive information that the government would not want to be accidentally spilled by an aging mind. The staff had top secret clearance and, thus, if anything did slip out it would be mostly harmless.

  Over the years, however, more and more younger people such as Rolf began to turn up. None of them with Rolf’s power of course—at least not to Axel’s knowledge—but with mental handicaps or diseases. Axel did not know who they were or where they came from as that information was sensitive.

  Rolf and Axel had both lived at the Home most of their lives, but when he was old enough, Axel moved out. Rolf remained there though, as he was not considered mentally capable of caring for himself all of the time and Axel was not able to care for his brother by himself. The CSOS certainly did not want Rolf talking to some civilian caregiver about what he did when he went to work.

  Due to the experimentation performed on Rolf by the Nazis, his mind never fully developed. Axel was told by doctors that his brother had the mental capacity of a twelve-year old. In normal situations Rolf would appear no different—mentally anyway—than other adults. That sometimes made it difficult for people to remember that h
e was really just a big kid. Following Rolf’s coolness under fire in Cuba, even Axel and Tom had more-or-less forgotten that Rolf could sometimes be fragile emotionally. The man that charged into a minefield and crushed Cuban military motorcycles while being pelted with gun fire was the same man that was frightened to tears by a mere photograph of a man.

  Axel took a card from the top of the stack, glanced at the number and then moved his red game piece the appropriate number of spaces. “Your turn,” he smiled at Rolf. Rolf took another card. “Is everyone still treating you alright here?” Axel asked his brother.

  Rolf nodded as he moved his game piece. “They’re nice.”

  “The food’s alright?”

  Rolf smiled at him. “Not as good as a burger and fries at the drive-in,” he smiled. It was a hint and Axel knew it.

  “Maybe we can go get a burger later this week.”

  Rolf smiled at him. “Okay Axel,” he said, happy Axel had picked up on the hint.

  “Rolf, I wanted to talk to you about Arnulf,” Axel said, changing topics suddenly.

  Rolf laid down his game piece and his eyes turned upward toward his brother. “I don’t like him,” Rolf said.

  “I know. Neither do I. No one likes him Rolf, but it is very important for us to go and get him from the Russians.”

  “And put him in jail?” Rolf asked.

  Axel nodded with a smile. “Yes, Rolf, we’ll put him in jail.”

  “Okay,” Rolf said with a shrug, clearly more interested in playing the game than chatting about Arnulf.

  “Are you going to be alright?” Axel asked.

  Rolf nodded. Axel reached over the coffee table and placed a hand on his brother’s massive shoulder. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  Rolf’s eyes raised from the game board to look at Axel. “Are you and Tom going to do it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Axel nodded.

  “Then I’ll go, too. To protect you like last time.”

  Axel smiled broadly. “Are you sure?”