by Paul Johnson
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 didn’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 Fuhrer.’
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 needed. 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.’
‘That’s correct, sir,’ Sebastian said, glancing at his assistant to keep him quiet. ‘Have you heard about the murders that-’
‘I do read the papers,’ Frogget interrupted. ‘As far as I can gather, there’s nothing to tie them to Jack. It’s all-’
‘The FBI will make that judgment, Sir Andrew,’ Sebastian said, reluctant to cede control of the dialogue. ‘There’s every chance your former client will be connected to these horrific killings.’ He leaned forward across the ornate table. ‘Do you really want your bank to be painted with the blood of innocent victims-people, I might add, who worked tirelessly against injustice and intolerance?’
Frogget poured himself a glass of orange juice from the tray on the table and gestured to the others to help themselves. ‘Very good, Mr. Sebastian, very good. But I’m afraid Routh Limited has plenty of clients with-shall we say? — unsavory profiles. Client confidentiality is paramount to us.’
‘How about future business prospects in the most powerful country in the world?’ Sebastian said, trying a preliminary scare tactic. ‘Rothmann and his people tried to kill the President of the United States. Do you seriously want to go against us on this?’
The Englishman poured himself more juice. ‘You really should try this-it’s fresh.’ He looked at them both. ‘No? Very well. Listen, Mr. Sebastian. I should have our lawyer in here, but I’m willing to cut you some slack over this unannounced visit. However, once and for all, I am not able to discuss Woodbridge Holdings.’
Sebastian turned to his assistant, who took out a file and opened it in front of the Englishman.
‘Good God,’ Frogget said, his face whitening. ‘Is this-’
‘Your colleague and friend Gavin Burdett?’ Sebastian said harshly. ‘Who else? You know who killed him.’
‘I most certainly do not,’ Sir Andrew said, leaving the photos spread across the table.
‘Or had him killed.’ The senior FBI man stood up and went over to the windows. The sun was glinting on the glass of the capital’s buildings. ‘Sir Andrew, do you by any chance have an interest in devil worship?’
The Englishman’s chin jerked up, but he did not grace the question with an answer.
‘Your man Burdett did.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘He was in deeper with Rothmann than you think. You know about the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant, of course.’
Frogget’s lips twisted. ‘Infantile lunacy. I can’t believe Jack would be involved.’
‘You’d better believe it. It’s your worst nightmare. Routh Limited has been working for a Nazi Satanist.’
Sir Andrew got to his feet. ‘We do not judge the political and religious beliefs of our clients.’ He glanced down at the photos and shook his head. ‘It won’t do, gentlemen. Really, it won’t. I have rights. You can’t treat me like some tatterdemalion drug dealer.’
‘They have rights, too,’ Sebastian pointed out. ‘What you’ve got is contacts.’
‘Which I’ll be certain to use. Will that be all?’
‘Leave the photos of Mr. Burdett, Special Agent.’
As they approached the door, Arthur Bimsdale directed his gaze at the Englishman. ‘Good day to you, sir,’ he said. ‘I hope you find a suitable bodyguard.’
‘What bodyguard?’ Frogget said, his eyes widening.
‘Oh, I assumed you’d be hiring one,’ Bimsdale replied. ‘You see, we’ll be posting on the
Bureau’s website that you helped us this morning.’
As they walked to the elevator, Sebastian turned to him. ‘Jesus, Arthur, way to go.’
Bimsdale looked like a puppy whose belly was being stroked. ‘He was in the British army,’ he said diffidently. ‘That would explain why the photos didn’t really shock him.’
‘Now you tell me.’
Abaddon had stood on the Discovery’s brakes a couple of feet from the gap between the houses. The black guy at the driver’s seat of the big BMW stared at her, but he looked to be in control of himself. She took the Heckler and Koch pistol from the passenger seat and opened the door. Then she caught sight of the figure moving up the narrow space between the BMW and the wall of the house to the right. There was a black balaclava over the individual’s face and what looked like a Ruger machine pistol in their right hand. It only took Abaddon a moment to decide that she didn’t need to be here any longer.
She pulled the door shut and shifted into Reverse. A minute later she was on the other side of Warren, in a quiet side street. She needed to do two things. First: change her appearance. That didn’t take long. She removed the dreadlocks and put on a brown bob. Then she changed her clothes, putting on a floral dress. All she had to do now was find another vehicle. She fully expected to be tailing people who would be told about the Discovery, so it had to go. Her employer would understand the necessity. She looked in the mirror as a dumb-looking young white man in a dirty white T-shirt pulled up behind her in a nondescript blue pickup. Truly, the Lord Lucifer was benevolent.
Abaddon got out and gave the young man a broad smile. She hadn’t buttoned her dress up all the way.
