The Fourth Rising (Peter Brandt Thrillers Book 3)

by Martin Roy Hill

  “If I’d known,” I said, “you could have had mine.”

  “Not quite the same paper,” he said.

  A jetliner flew over and we walked toward the beach without speaking until the noise subsided.

  “Such a racket,” Tygard said. “I don’t see how you live with it.”

  “Speaking of living,” I said. “What did you mean by ‘keeping me alive’?”

  Tygard ignored my question. “Did you enjoy your trip to Playa de Cortés?”

  I stopped and turned to him. “You followed me all the way down there?”

  “Of course not,” he said, walking on. “We do have agents in Mexico, Mr. Brandt. Did you find the trip enlightening?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “And you learned about the mission of the auxiliary cruiser Danzig, aka the SS Dalsland?”

  “Jonathan told you about that?”

  “Heavens, no,” Tygard said. “I told him. We’ve known about the Danzig and Captain Müller’s secret mission for many years. You see, with the Danzig’s sinking, the young officer Müller sent to hide the gold—Weber was his name—became the sole survivor of that mission. He was an ardent Nazi, and when he made his way back to Germany, he left the navy for the SS and became an officer in one of the concentration camps—one of the worst camps, not that any of them were nice. Weber was declared a war criminal after the surrender, but Otto Skorzeny’s rat line helped him escape to South America before the Allies could prosecute him. We found him many years later and took him to Israel.”

  “Like Eichmann?”

  Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust and a wanted war criminal, escaped to South America after the war and went into hiding. In 1960, a team of Israeli agents captured Eichmann and took him to Israel to stand trial. An Israeli court sentenced him to death and hanged him two years later.

  “Yes, like Eichmann,” Tygard said. “After some persuasive questioning—”

  “You mean torture, don’t you?” I said.

  Tygard’s lips puckered in disgust. “After some persuasive questioning, he told us about the Danzig’s mission and the gold Captain Müller left behind when his ship sailed. He offered to take us to the gold, hoping to avoid a death sentence. Unfortunately, he decided to cheat the hangman and took his own life before telling us the location of the gold. Perhaps guilt drove him to it.”

  “Guilt over the Holocaust?”

  “Heavens, no,” Tygard said. “I think he felt he betrayed his Führer. Before he died, Weber provided us a great deal of information on how the Nazis were using hidden caches of looted gold and other treasures to establish political power bases in various countries in pursuit of their continuing effort at world domination.”

  “That’s Jonathan’s theory,” I said.

  “Unfortunately, it’s not just a theory,” Tygard said. “It is a very real threat.”

  “And next you’ll tell me Hitler is still alive.”

  “I would tell you no such thing, Mr. Brandt,” Tygard said, flicking the subject away with a wave of his hand. “Hitler has been dead for decades. He died in Patagonia in 1959.”

  I stopped and turned to him again.

  “Really?”

  “Really,” he said. “He escaped the Führerbunker through a secret tunnel to Tempelhof Airport. The SS sealed the tunnel off afterwards and it remained hidden for decades. From Tempelhof, Hitler flew to Norway, then to Spain. Despite proclaiming to be neutral, the Spanish fascist dictator Franco allowed the Nazis to use Spanish harbors to resupply their U-boats throughout the war, and Hitler sailed from Spain to Argentina on one of those submarines. Your own FBI and CIA searched for him well into the Fifties. As did the Soviet KGB and, of course, the Mossad.”

  Tygard took my arm. “Please, let’s continue walking. I fear we may draw attention standing here like this.”

  Another airliner howled overhead, and we said nothing until it was gone.

  “Anyway, we knew about the hidden gold but we did not know where it was hidden,” Tygard said. “There was little we could do. After all, we can’t go digging up the landscape in a foreign country. Then Mr. Crane found it.”

  “He had the latitude and longitude,” I said.

  Tygard eyed me suspiciously, then said, “Ah, yes, of course. The widow Crane probably gave you the coordinates. Correct?”

  “She found them hidden in a secret safe,” I said. “But how did Crane get the information?”

  “From the League for Freedom and Responsibility,” Tygard said.

  My heart skipped a beat. “So the League was involved with the gold. And Crane’s murder, too?”

  Tygard nodded.

  “How did the League get it?” I asked. “You said Weber was the only one left who knew where it was buried.”

  “No,” Tygard said. “I said he died before he could tell us. Before the Danzig left Mexico, Captain Müller radioed the coordinates to the German consulate in Tijuana. But with Mexico declaring war on Germany, the consulate staff left the city in a haste and burned many of the consulate’s documents, including the gold’s location. Unfortunately, agents of the League—operating under the guise of historical researchers—found a reference to the location in the wartime archives of the German navy.”

  “Why would the League give Crane the location?”

  “Because Mr. Crane worked for the League,” Tygard said.

  “You said ‘worked for,’ ” I said. “I thought he was only a member.”

  “Oh, no,” Tygard said. “Mr. Crane worked for the League for many years. His security company, World-Wide, was a front company used as a cover for the real work he did for the League.”

  “Which was?”

  “Head of security,” Tygard said. “Essentially, he was the League’s Himmler.”

  Again, I halted.

  “You mean he was running some kind of SS operation?” I said.

  “More of a Gestapo,” Tygard said. “Internal security, the occasional wet work.”

  I needn’t ask Tygard what he meant by ‘wet work.’ I’d been around enough spooks overseas to understand their jargon for assassination.

  “How the hell did he get involved with the League?”

  “Why, he was born into it, Mr. Brandt,” Tygard said. “He was born into it.”

  CHAPTER 28

  TYGARD GUIDED ME TO a cement bench overlooking the beach and the ocean beyond. He took off his hat and waved it to cool his face. Another jet boomed overhead. When the noise receded, Tygard handed me his newspaper.

  “Within that newspaper you will find some interesting reading—far more interesting than the news printed on its pages.” I started to open the paper, but Tygard stopped me. “Please, not here, Mr. Brandt. I will tell you what’s in the envelope, but I suspect you will need the actual documents to convince your lady friend, the widow Crane.”

  Tygard replaced his trilby and waited for a group of teenagers to pass before continuing.

  “When the Soviets retreated from the initial German onslaught of Operation Barbarossa, they left hundreds of covert agents in the Nazi-occupied areas. They called them stay-behinds. Their job was to provide intelligence, sabotage key facilities, and assassinate German personnel. To combat this threat, the SS formed specialized units trained to root out the stay-behinds. SS Hauptsturmführer Ernst Kran commanded one of the best of these units.”

  “Kran?”

  “Yes, Mr. Brandt, the same name on the ring you showed Jonathan,” Tygard said. “Kran, by the way, is German for crane.”

  Tygard smiled like a school master who’d just caught a student with a wrong answer. I must admit, just then I felt like an ignorant school kid.

  “Frank Crane’s father was an SS officer?” I said.

  Tygard nodded.

  “When the war ended, the Allied counterintelligence people highly valued Ernst Kran’s skills at ferreting out Soviet stay-behinds,” he said. “The Allies knew the Russians would leave stay-behinds in the areas they captured bef
ore the German surrender. They used Kran’s team to help identify them.

  “Kran eventually became an instructor for your Army’s CIC and, later, the CIA. They brought him to the United States, along with thousands of ardent Nazis, as part of Operation Paperclip. He Anglicized his name to Crane and married a young American girl of German descent. Yet, while he worked for the Americans, he never ceased to be a loyal Nazi and worked to—shall we say—keep the dream alive? When the old pro-Nazi American Freedom League resurfaced as the League for Freedom and Responsibility, Kran was immediately recruited.

  “Kran and his wife had a son and named him Frank. Shortly afterward, Kran died.” Tygard held up a hand. “I know how you consider people in my profession to be cold-blooded killers. So, before you ask, Kran died of entirely natural causes. Cancer, I believe. Too many of those terrible Russian cigarettes he smoked when he was in occupied Ukraine with the SS. Anyway, the widow Kran was not left to raise her son alone. Her family had been deeply involved with the German-American Bund prior to the war, and they, too, remained fiercely pro-Nazi. And that was the belief system young Frank Crane was raised in.

  “While in college, Frank Crane was recruited by the League. They paid for his education, nurtured his right-wing beliefs, and upon graduation, hired him to work for the League. Eventually, the League set up World-Wide as his cover business.”

  “What about the people who work for World-Wide?” I asked. “Are they all Nazis?”

  “No,” Tygard said. “Only those at the top, like Crane. Most of World-Wide’s employees are average work-a-day Americans who know nothing about the League and its ties to World-Wide. And, to ease your mind, Mrs. Crane had no idea about Frank Crane’s background or his proclivities.”

  “Proclivities?”

  “Many who hold extreme views about a subject are often enticed by that which they preach against,” Tygard said. “You read about it all the time in the newspapers. The fire-and-brimstone preacher who frequents prostitutes. The anti-homosexual activist who gets caught in an embarrassing encounter in some out-of-the-way men’s restroom. The family-values politician who uses campaign donations to buy his mistress expensive gifts. It is the lure of the forbidden, like Eve with the apple. Frank Crane was a man who believed in the supremacy of the Aryan race, but who secretly preferred sex with women of color. In his travels, he regularly patronized brothels that specialize in black women.”

  I remembered what Jo said about her relationship with Crane. “I was just his blonde, blue-eyed, combat-wounded, war-hero trophy wife. Emphasis on the blonde and blue eyed.”

  “The guy who heads up the League,” I said, “MacIntosh. He claims he is majority share owner in World-Wide.”

  “In a way, he is,” Tygard said. “As head of the League, he decided to set up World-Wide. The League, like the Nazi Party, practices Führerprinzip, the absolute rule of one leader. MacIntosh sees himself as the new messiah of the Nazi Party; its new Führer. Under Nazism everything, including the people, belonged to the government, and the Party was the government. So, in MacIntosh’s eyes, he owns everything the League owns.”

  “How widespread is the League?” I asked. “How powerful are they?”

  “The League has affiliates of one kind or another in nearly every country,” Tygard said. “Different names, perhaps, but all are the spawn of the insidious movement that rose from Bavaria in the 1920s. Unfortunately, their power and influence grow stronger each year, though those whose support they buy with large campaign donations and outright bribes, for the most part, have no knowledge they are dealing with a resurrected Nazi Party.”

  “And MacIntosh? Does he have a background like Crane’s?”

  “MacIntosh’s father was a major leader in the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s,” Tygard said. “When the Union was banned at the start of the war, MacIntosh and his family fled to Germany, where his father worked as a radio propagandist. Since MacIntosh faced treason charges in Britain after the war, the family immigrated to the United States. MacIntosh’s father helped found the League for Freedom and Responsibility a few years later.”

  “And the two guys running World-Wide now—William Chase and Clark Sterling—they have similar backgrounds?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Tygard said. “Chase’s father was a high-ranking member in the Bund before it was disbanded. Sterling’s father was a financier who was implicated in the failed 1933 coup d’état against your President Roosevelt. The leadership positions in the League tend to be handed down from father to son to keep both the bloodline and the philosophy pure.”

  Tygard stood and used his hands to brush the seat of his pants.

  “And now, Mr. Brandt, I have told you all I can,” he said. “The rest must come from the others.”

  “Others?” I said. “What others?”

  Tygard only smiled. He tipped his hat to someone behind me, turned, and walked away.

  “Hey, Brandt,” a New York-tainted voice behind me said. “It’s been a helluva long time, hasn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 29

  THE FACE THAT WENT with the voice was deceitfully youthful, but other than that, there was nothing particularly memorable about it. The height and weight of the body that went with the face were also average. The man was in his mid- or late-thirties with short, dark, curly hair that was a little grayer than the last time I met him. He had a grin like a homeboy from the Bronx and an accent to match. He could have been a lay preacher in a local church or a merchant in child pornography. The look was well suited for the kind of undercover work he did.

  “Special Agent Dick Sanders,” I said, not at all surprised to see him. It was Sanders who introduced me to Tygard years before. “Still prowling the underworld for U.S. Customs?”

  Sanders tugged at the sleeve of the conservative business suit he wore. “You don’t think I’d be wearing this fucking monkey costume if I weren’t, do you?”

  Sanders specialized in portraying corrupt businessmen, the type eager to do business with smugglers of technology or weaponry rather than drugs or people.

  “Why am I not surprised to see you so soon after meeting Tygard again?” I said.

  “You mean Epstein,” Sanders said.

  “Whatever.”

  “Come on.” Sanders gestured with his head. “We need to take a ride.”

  “Where to?”

  “Downtown federal building,” he said.

  “What for?” I said, not moving.

  “So you can see your fucking girlfriend, Joanne Crane,” he said. “That’s what for.”

  My stomach churned. I remembered what I told Jo the night before when she asked if she was no longer a murder suspect. Not as far as the SDPD is concerned. Murder is a state crime and not usually investigated by the feds. Why would they have Jo in the federal building in downtown San Diego?

  “This have to do with Frank Crane’s murder?” I said.

  “What do you think, Brandt?” My face must have betrayed my thoughts. Sanders softened his tone. “Don’t worry. She’s not a suspect. Come on. We’ll take my car. You can use the time to read that file hidden in the paper Tygard gave you.”

  I looked at the newspaper in my hand, shook my head, and followed Sanders to his car.

  ☼

  Tucked inside the paper was an envelope. Inside the envelope was a photocopy of the League’s personnel file on Frank Crane. That stopped me right there. How could the Mossad get a copy of a League document that was stamped SECRET? An idea formed in my head, and I let it hang there awhile before starting to read the file.

  Most of it was just as Tygard had explained—Frank’s father, Ernst Kran, his mother’s Bund affiliation, Crane’s work for the League as chief of security under the cover of World-Wide Security. I stopped there and realized what a perfect cover it was. As head of World-Wide, Crane could launch all sorts of sub-rosa operations—surveillance, investigations, bagman deliveries, even intimidation—under the guise of doing work for one of his clients. He could do the work
himself or farm it out to one of his hapless and unknowing employees.

  As I read on, I realized something else. Crane’s personnel record also included things I’m sure he didn’t think the League knew about him. Those “proclivities” Tygard had described, for instance. And also, that Crane was terrible at playing the stock market. Over the last few years, he had lost tens of thousands of dollars on bad investments. There were only two ways the League would know that—either Crane told them, or the League was spying on its spymaster. The odds were it wasn’t the former.

  I remembered what Jo said about Frank cleaning out their bank accounts—and the German passport made out to Franz Kran. Okay, I didn’t know Kran was German for Crane, but I did know Franz is German for Frank. Crane must have known the League was spying on him. He must have known that his sexual preferences and his mounting debts made him both a security and public-relations risk. And being a risk of either kind in something like the League was tantamount to a death sentence. Hitler had Ernst Röhm, head of the Brownshirts, executed during the Night of the Long Knives for less.

  “Frank Crane was going on the run,” I murmured.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Sanders said. “Any other brilliant revelations?”

  “The Mossad has a mole in the League,” I said.

  Sander’s didn’t respond.

  I turned my attention back to the file. The League didn’t only recruit Crane in college, they paid his tuition from the day he entered as a freshman. Obviously, they had targeted him from an early age. I remembered what Tygard said about leadership positions in the League being handed down from father to son to keep the philosophy and blood line pure.

  “Crane’s father was a founding member of the League,” I said.

  Sanders nodded.

  The car veered onto the freeway and I looked up. We were heading east on Interstate 8. Downtown San Diego was to the south and we should have turned onto the I-5.

  “What is this, Sanders?” I demanded. “You said we were going to the downtown federal building. This’ll take us into Mission Valley.”