The Fourth Rising (Peter Brandt Thrillers Book 3)

by Martin Roy Hill

  I used my new cellular phone to call Jonathan Glasgow and told him I needed some background information on Nazi gold. He spent ten minutes pontificating on the history of the stuff before he had to take a breath, allowing me to ask him if I could come by and show him some photos. We set a time and he gave an address in Orange County, just north of San Diego County. I ended the call just as Jay came out of the darkroom and handed me a large manila envelope.

  “Here you go, Pete,” he said.

  I slid the photos out and studied each one. There were eight in all, one of each side of the bar, an enlargement of the Nazi eagle, and another blow-up of what I guessed were serial numbers.

  “They’re perfect, Jay,” I said as I slid them back into the envelope. “Always said you were the best shooter I ever worked with.”

  “Ah, shucks, ma’am,” Jay joked. “Say, if that movie friend of yours needs a photographer or videographer, maybe you could put in a good word for me? I sure wouldn’t mind getting into that business. I’m getting sick of photographing politicians and dead stiffs.”

  “Sure, I will,” I said, lying again. Then I thought of something. “By the way, a couple weeks ago there was a guy found dead in a field. A crispy critter. His name was Crane. You didn’t get that assignment by chance, did you?”

  “I sure did,” Jay said. “Got there before the ME and got some pretty gruesome shots of the guy. Nasty. I haven’t been able to eat meat since.”

  “Any chance I could get copies?”

  Jay looked at me askance. “Sure, I guess so,” he said, “but why?”

  “Just curious.” The lies were coming so easily. “I used to know him.”

  “Okay,” Jay said, drawing out the word and still looking at me funny as he ducked back into the darkroom.

  A half hour later, I had an envelope filled with ten pictures—eight of the gold ingot and two of the late Frank Crane. I nosed the Mustang out of the newspaper’s parking lot into the Mission Valley freeway traffic and headed downtown.

  CHAPTER 4

  FROM THE GLOVE COMPARTMENT of my Mustang, I took a police press pass identifying me as a correspondent for the national news magazine I freelanced for. I was their part-time, on-call reporter for all things San Diego and quite a bit south of the border. I dropped the card’s lanyard around my neck as I entered police headquarters and told the officer at the counter I was there to see Lt. Mike McCarty in Homicide. The officer, an attractive brunette in the dark-blue, PD uniform, buzzed me through the security door without a smile. A shame. I was willing to bet she had a smile that could dazzle any man, even if he were in handcuffs.

  McCarty had someone in his office, so I waited in the corridor until the person left. Mike saw me hovering around his door and, as soon as he was alone, called me in.

  “Peter Brandt,” he said. “Long time no see, amigo.”

  “Cowabunga, dude,” I said, holding my hand up with the index and little fingers extended. McCarty wasn’t only a good cop, he was a world-class competitive surfer and the only homicide detective who kept a long board and wet suit in his office. Other police officials decorated their walls and bookshelves with marksmanship awards or photos of them shaking hands with politicians. Mike’s bookshelves carried surfing trophies from around the world, and pictures of him on foreign shores surrounded by bikini-clad beauties. “Surf’s up, man.”

  “No, it’s not,” Mike said. “I was out earlier this morning. It was DFC.”

  “DFC?”

  “Dead flat calm.”

  “Grody, man.”

  “I told you before, Pete, surfers don’t talk like that anymore.” He gestured to a seat. “We’re not just a bunch of surf bums. We’re lawyers, accountants, and—”

  “And murder detectives,” I said, sitting down.

  “And murder detectives.”

  “Next you’ll tell me Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon don’t surf.”

  “They don’t as far as I know,” Mike said. He sported a sandy-brown moustache bleached by sun and salt water, like his longish sandy hair. His pale blue eyes looked sun bleached, too, as he gazed at me curiously. “So, what brings you to the police palace? I thought you weren’t covering blood and guts anymore.”

  “When I can avoid it,” I said. “But the news mag wants me to look into this guy who was murdered a couple weeks ago. Name of Crane.”

  Oh, the lies they just kept coming.

  “Yeah, Frank Crane,” Mike said. “The crispy critter.”

  “That’s the one.”

  Mike eyed me suspiciously. “What’s your news magazine want with a local murder?”

  “It’s the hook,” I said. “Frank Crane, owner of World-Wide Security, a company that provides security services to some of the biggest companies and people in the world, gets himself offed. Oh, the irony.”

  “Right,” Mike said, as if he weren’t buying any of it. Then he shrugged, typed a few commands into his desktop computer, and said, “What do you want to know?”

  “The basics,” I said, taking out an elongated reporter’s notebook.

  Mike read to me the already publicized basics of the case. A motorist reported spotting a fire in a field in the eastern part of the county. Responding firefighters knocked down the flames and discovered Crane’s burnt corpse. An autopsy showed Crane was shot twice in the base of the skull with a small-caliber weapon, the body dumped, soaked with gasoline, and set alight.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “You expected more?”

  I bit my lower lip a moment, then said, “Well, I’ll be honest, Mike. I talked to some other people before coming to see you, and I heard there were rumors Crane was tortured before he was shot.”

  An honest lie? Is there such a thing?

  Mike’s pale blue eyes narrowed. “What people did you talk to, Pete?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that, Mike,” I said. “But from your reaction, I take it my information is correct.”

  “That wasn’t released to the public,” Mike said.

  I held my hand up, notebook and pen wide apart. “Not for the record, Mike. Just between friends.”

  Mike finally nodded. “The autopsy showed Crane was beaten—severely beaten—and the fingers of one hand appeared to have been broken one at a time. Off the record, Pete.”

  “Off the record,” I assured him.

  “Suspects?”

  Mike looked at his computer screen. “Only the wife,” he said, “Joanne Crane. Apparently, they had some marriage difficulties. She filed for divorce just a few weeks before Crane died.”

  “You think a woman tortured Crane, shot him twice in the head, dumped his body, and set it on fire? Really?”

  “She could have hired someone, Pete,” Mike said. “She’s got the money.”

  “But she was getting a divorce,” I said. “This is a community property state. She’d get half of everything Crane owned.”

  “Unless there was a prenup,” Mike said.

  “Was there?”

  “Well, we haven’t found one—yet.”

  Mike looked at his computer screen again, and the color in his face changed. He glared at me.

  “It just happens that Mrs. Joanne Crane is the former Joanne Rice,” he said. “Isn’t that the Army MP you were mixed up with during that Consolidated Electronics scandal a few years ago? Didn’t you two have something going?”

  I put on my surprised face and said, “I had no idea. Haven’t seen Jo in years. Honest, Mike.” I crossed my heart with my pen hand.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Honest, Mike, I had no idea she was married to this guy Crane. I hadn’t even heard of his murder until the news mag called me.” I jotted some notes and changed the subject. “And the caliber of the gun used. You said it was a small caliber?”

  “Yeah, a .22 long rifle.”

  I stopped my note taking and looked at Mike.

  “Two .22 caliber rounds in the back of the head?” Mike nodded. “At the base of the skull,
you said?” He nodded again. “Was a suppressor used?”

  Mike blinked at me twice, looked at his screen, then back at me. His eyes narrowed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Ballistics said there was evidence a suppressor was used. Something about the wound showing signs the bullets’ speed was reduced, or something like that. How did you know, Pete?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I guessed. Two rounds in the base of the skull with a silenced .22. That’s a classic Israeli Mossad assassination tactic.” Mossad was Israel’s foreign intelligence service. I dug up something out of the past. “Mossad agents carry .22 caliber Barretta Model 70s that can be fitted with a suppressor.”

  “How would you know that?” Mike asked.

  “I spent enough time in the Middle East during Desert Storm to get acquainted with a few spooks from more than one country.”

  “Why would the Mossad want Crane dead?”

  I thought about the Nazi gold in Jo’s floor safe and the SS ring in my pocket and wondered. That first night in my living room, Jo said she suspected Crane was mixed up in some kind of conspiracy. Did it include Nazi gold? Was Crane involved with neo-Nazis and skinheads? I didn’t think so. Crane was too elitist to hang around with a bunch of sad-sack losers like that. But the gold? Where did it come from? And was there more of it? If so, where? And why would the Mossad torture and kill Crane over some World War II booty? Revenge? This long after the war? Or—and my brain went into a loop with this thought—could the Israelis be after the Nazi gold?

  “I haven’t the slightest idea, Mike,” I said.

  This time, I wasn’t lying.

  CHAPTER 5

  THAT EVENING I CALLED Jo and filled her in on my talk with Mike McCarty. Her tone told me she wasn’t pleased with what she heard.

  “There was no prenuptial agreement, Peter,” said she. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  I wasn’t one to jump to conclusions. I hadn’t seen Jo for years, and people change with time. They become harder, more cynical. Sometimes greedier. Jo had lived a life of wealth and elegance; the price she paid was a bad marriage. Often a spouse becomes more attached to the former than the latter. I’d seen that too many times as a crime reporter.

  Plus, I knew Jo had killed before.

  On the other hand, I had cared deeply for Jo and, I thought, she had cared deeply for me. I couldn’t see her becoming a cold-blooded murderer—in the heat of a fight, yes, but not in cold blood.

  Maybe Thackeray had it right. Love makes fools of us all.

  “Of course, I do, Jo,” I said.

  Jack finished his dinner, jumped into the chair with me, nudged the Scotch out of my phone-free hand, and insisted on a belly rub.

  “Do you really think the Israelis killed Frank?” Jo asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Two bullets in the back of the head is their MO. Not long before Desert Storm, the Mossad allegedly assassinated a Canadian engineer named Gerald Bull who was building Saddam Hussein a massive cannon—a Supergun, they called it—capable of lobbing shells into Israel. He was shot in the back of the head and torso with a silenced, small-caliber pistol.”

  “Jesus,” Jo muttered.

  “What could Frank have been doing that the Israelis didn’t like?”

  “Well, remember I said he had pretty extreme views,” Jo said.

  “He was anti-Semitic?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are still a lot of idiots in this world,” I said. “The Mossad isn’t going after all of them. Unless he was involved in some kind of conspiracy against Israel. Was he?”

  “Not that I know of,” Jo said.

  I shook my head. “The rest of Frank’s murder doesn’t fit the Mossad theory,” I said. “Why would the Israelis torture him, then dump his body and burn it?”

  “The gold bar?”

  “All that for a single ingot of gold?” I said. “It’s probably worth a lot, but not that much.”

  “Then why, Peter?”

  I mentally shrugged and said, “Well, tomorrow I’m driving up to Orange County to talk with Jonathan Glasgow, the conspiracy author I told you about. Perhaps he can enlighten me. After that, there’s a guy I know who also lives in OC. Ex-CIA. Think I’ll drop in on him, too.”

  “Be careful, Peter,” Jo said.

  “You’re the one who needs to be careful, Jo,” I said. “Whoever killed Frank could come after you. I’m an unknown. I doubt anyone knows you’ve even contacted me. So, I should be okay.”

  We hung up and for the next several minutes I concentrated on Jack’s tummy rub. Finally having enough, he nipped at my fingers, jumped down, and curled up on his cat bed. I finished my Scotch, poured another, and stood staring out the window, thinking about what I had told Jo about being safe.

  It’s amazing how wrong one person can be.

  ☼

  Jonathan Maynard Elliot Glasgow, PhD, was a big man—bigger, even, than his name. He stood well over six feet and was nearly as wide as he was tall. Thick waves of curly raven-colored hair fell to his shoulders, where it intermingled with a beard that matched it in every respect including length. His face, what I could see of it, was dark, with a thick, flat nose and black, beady eyes. He had a cavernous voice that added authority to whatever topic he spoke about, no matter how whacky the subject may be.

  “It is good to see you again, Peter,” he announced after showing me into a study crammed with books, magazines, and the kind of memorabilia you find only in the homes of people who don’t give a damn what the rest of the world thinks of them. “What has it been since we sat on that panel together? Two years?”

  I nodded. “Two years,” I said, “almost to the day.”

  Glasgow and I met at a writers’ conference when we sat on a panel discussing government conspiracies. I was wary about the panel, worried my own theory that government misdeeds too often resulted from illegal corporate influence was too extreme for a general audience. I needn’t have worried. Glasgow’s theories of world domination by mysterious secret societies like the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, the Bohemian Grove, and Skull and Bones made me look like a White House apologist. And his books also outsold mine ten to one.

  But it was Glasgow’s writings about an ongoing worldwide threat from Nazism that brought me to his house. Despite his conspiratorial theories, Jonathan was considered a world-class expert on the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and how plutocrats—including those from the United States and England—not only cheered that growth but supported it. While many of his books sat on the conspiracy shelves of bookstores, he also authored scores of peer-reviewed articles for some of the most prestigious academic journals in the world.

  Glasgow was a gracious host, and after getting us two cups of tea—he detested coffee—he lowered himself into a desk chair that looked far too small for his bulk and asked, “So, you want to know about Nazi gold, eh?”

  I took the photos of Crane’s gold bar out of my manila envelope and handed them to Glasgow.

  “I was hoping you could determine if this gold bar is genuine Nazi loot,” I said.

  Glasgow put on a pair of reading glasses and shuffled through the pictures.

  “I assume you’ve made certain this isn’t a gold-plated brick?” he asked, raising his heavy black brow in question.

  “First thing I did,” I said. “It’s gold all through.”

  Glasgow rummaged through a desk drawer and brought out a large magnifying glass, which he used to study each photograph. After a good fifteen minutes, he put the magnifier away, straightened the photos, and handed them back to me.

  “It appears genuine,” he announced. “Where did you get it?”

  I gave Glasgow an abbreviated version of Jo’s post-mortem discovery of Crane’s floor safe and its contents, leaving out any names or places. Glasgow listened, nodded, and thought about it.

  “Could be a bit of war booty,” he said. “A lot of GIs smuggled stuff home after the German surrender. Hitl
er’s silverware from the Eagle’s Nest was scooped up by members of the 101st Airborne. One soldier even came home with Hitler’s personal photo album.”

  “The gentleman who owned this bar was too young to serve in that war,” I said.

  “His father then?”

  “According to his widow, he never talked about his father,” I said. “Apparently, the father died when he was very young.”

  Glasgow grunted, a noise that sounded like a cross between a bear’s growl and a Bigfoot’s howl. He turned to his computer and began typing. After a few more minutes of animal noises, he leaned back and said, “Those numbers on the bar correspond to a mint in southern Germany that was known to … repurpose … looted gold, including the fillings taken from death camp victims.”

  That made my stomach churn.

  “Apparently, the gold from this particular mint was widely distributed as notfallreserve, or emergency reserve. As early as 1942, after Hitler made the mistake of declaring war on the United States, many in the senior Nazi leadership realized there was a very good chance Germany could lose the war. They began dispersing these notfallreserve around the world as emergency caches to use in the event of a Nazi defeat. A lot of it went to Swiss banks where it remains today unclaimed. Technically, it remains in secret, numbered accounts but Swiss bankers are known to use it for their own gain. Some of it was hidden or buried in stashes around the globe for future retrieval.”

  Glasgow sipped his tea.

  “The amount of gold hidden by the Nazis was staggering, too,” he continued. “Just after the war, the Allies discovered a horde of gold in a cave north of Frankfurt worth $520 million back then. Today, that horde would be worth more than $7 billion.”

  I whistled quietly in astonishment.

  “A few caches were found by treasure seekers. Others, no doubt, were retrieved by Nazis who got out of Germany via the infamous Ratlines established by SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny and others. But many remain lost. For instance, legend says there is a Nazi gold train still hidden in a cave, tunnel, or other underground location somewhere in Poland. Treasure seekers have been hunting it for decades.”