Kingdom of Darkness

by Andy McDermott

  ‘What about Grant? Or even Marvin?’

  ‘You’ve got Marvin’s business card, so I didn’t have his number. And would you really want Grant having the paparazzi follow him down here?’

  ‘Good point. Is Macy okay?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s fine. A bit shaken up, but seeing someone get killed right in front of you’ll do that.’

  ‘I know,’ she agreed gloomily. ‘I thought I’d left this kind of thing behind me. I’d hoped I had.’

  ‘Maybe you should’ve let more people know you’d left the IHA. That kid might have given his conspiracy theory to someone else. What was in those papers, anyway?’

  ‘Something about the dig in Alexandria. I didn’t have time to see much, but he’d definitely got inside information – there was a plan of the outer tomb with specific archaeological notations on it.’ She turned to the FBI agents. ‘Where are the papers now? Some of them got burned up in the limo, and the cops took the rest from me.’

  ‘They’ve already been taken away for analysis,’ was Beck’s reply. ‘They’ll be brought to you in New York.’

  The couple exchanged glances. ‘Okay, what’s going on?’ Eddie demanded. ‘We blow up half of Beverly Hills, and then get to walk away as if nothing’s happened? You said there was a situation – what situation?’

  Beck passed a photograph from a manila folder to them. ‘Is this the man who tried to kill you, Dr Wilde?’

  Nina stared at the picture. Though the printout was new and glossy, it was clearly from an old source, the image a grainy, dirt-specked monochrome.

  The face on it was instantly recognisable, however. Glaring into the camera was her would-be assassin, the scar across his face clearly visible. He was younger in the photograph – she guessed it had been taken about fifteen years earlier – but it was definitely the same man. ‘Yes, it’s him.’

  Eddie nodded in agreement. ‘That’s the ugly bugger, yeah. Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Maximilian Jaekel,’ said Beck. ‘There’s a standing arrest warrant on him from all international and US law enforcement agencies.’

  ‘Why?’ Nina asked. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He’s a wanted war criminal,’ Petrelli told her. ‘He got into the country undetected, but when the Beverly Hills police took fingerprints from his body to check his ID, they were immediately red-flagged.’

  ‘So what did he want with me?’ Neither agent had an answer.

  Eddie looked more closely at the photograph – not at the subject’s face, but his clothing. Only part of it was visible, the image cropped near the base of Jaekel’s neck, but the top of a dark raised collar still showed. ‘You said he’s a war criminal,’ he said slowly. ‘Which war?’ To Nina, it sounded as if he already knew the answer.

  Beck hesitated before replying. ‘World War Two.’

  ‘What?’ said Nina, with almost a laugh of disbelief. ‘The war ended in 1945! This guy was late thirties, forty at most. Someone’s made a mistake.’

  ‘That’s what we thought too, at first,’ said Beck. ‘But the fingerprints are a perfect match to the ones on file, and everything else confirms it: dental records, the facial scar – even the SS blood group tattoo on his left arm. The body’s already en route to Quantico for further testing, but it looks like the results will be the same.’ His expression became more grim. ‘The man who tried to kill you today was a Nazi war criminal . . . and was over ninety years old.’

  The flight back to New York brought Nina and Eddie into JFK airport in the early hours of the morning. A black SUV transported them and their FBI minders to the city.

  Nina peered at the rising towers of Manhattan as they approached the East River. ‘I didn’t think I’d be back here so soon,’ she said. Her body was weary, but her eyes never tired of the sight. Even after all her travels, New York was still home.

  ‘Just hope we can get refunds for the flights we’d already booked,’ Eddie grumbled. They were taking the Queensboro Bridge to 59th Street; the United Nations complex came into view on the far bank, the glass tower of the Secretariat building alight even in the pre-dawn gloom. ‘And that we can get right back to what we were doing without any pissing about.’

  There was a pointedness to his words, but she decided to ignore it. For now. ‘Is Seretse already at the UN?’ she asked Beck.

  ‘He’s there now, yeah,’ the agent replied. ‘He should be ready to meet you by the time we arrive.’

  ‘Good.’ She leaned back, rereading the file on the mysteriously youthful Maximilian Jaekel. ‘Did you look at this on the plane?’ she asked Eddie.

  He nodded. ‘Nice guy, him and all his SS mates. France, Yugoslavia, Greece; they committed atrocities in all of ’em. Scumbags. Can’t believe that most of his unit managed to get away after the war.’

  ‘They bribed their way out of being sent to trial, apparently.’

  A disgusted snort. ‘There isn’t any amount of money you could have paid me to let those Nazi bastards go. If I’d caught them, I would’ve shot ’em on the spot.’

  Nina was a firm believer in the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, but in this case, with the benefit of historical hindsight, she could entirely sympathise with the former soldier’s viewpoint. ‘It’s a shame someone didn’t do that at the time. It would have saved that kid’s life. Have you found out anything more about him?’ she asked Beck.

  ‘The victim had a US passport under the name Volker Koenig,’ said Beck, ‘but it was a fake. An extremely good fake – it held up when he arrived at JFK – but it means we don’t even know if that’s really his name. Jaekel also had a fake passport, from the same source.’

  ‘Koenig came to New York first?’

  ‘And then travelled on to LA, yeah.’

  ‘Looking for you,’ Eddie suggested. The idea did not make Nina any more comfortable.

  ‘Jaekel had been tracking him – we found texts on his phone listing the flights he’d taken,’ Petrelli noted. ‘We’re trying to identify the sender, but it looks like they came from a burner. All we know is that they originated in Italy.’

  They continued across the bridge into Manhattan, then headed to the United Nations. Nina expected them to go to the Secretariat building, home to the offices of both Oswald Seretse and the International Heritage Agency, but instead they stopped outside the much lower sweeping block of the General Assembly. The two FBI agents led the way in.

  ‘Wow,’ said Nina as she entered, stopping in momentary disorientation. The previous day she had been in a replica of the visitors’ lobby on the other side of the continent; now she was in the real thing. ‘It’s like I never left.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ Eddie muttered.

  Nina was about to ask him exactly what he meant by that when someone called her name. A tall figure in a blue suit strode towards the group. ‘Oswald!’

  ‘Good morning, Nina,’ said Oswald Seretse, shaking her hand. The Gambian diplomat, who in addition to his duties at the United Nations was acting as the IHA’s interim director following Nina’s resignation, was immaculately presented as always, despite signs of sleeplessness around his eyes. ‘I’m glad to see you again. Although obviously the circumstances are far from ideal.’

  ‘You’re not kidding,’ said Eddie. ‘Hey, Ozzy.’

  Vexation and amusement fought for dominance of Seretse’s expression, the latter just winning out. ‘Good to see you too, Eddie.’ The Englishman grinned and shook his hand.

  ‘Late night?’ Nina asked.

  ‘There was a Security Council meeting concerning the Iranian nuclear programme. As ever, these things do tend to drag on. I had to excuse myself to meet you.’

  ‘What happened to us must be a big deal, then,’ said Eddie.

  ‘It certainly is. If you’ll come with me, there’s an office where we c
an discuss matters.’ He headed back across the lobby.

  Eddie looked up at Foucault’s Pendulum as they followed. ‘Got to admit, Grant’s version of diplomacy is more interesting than the real thing. Even if his writers know fuck-all about how bullets work.’

  ‘If you mean “interesting” in the Chinese proverb sense, then yeah,’ said Nina. ‘I’d rather real-life diplomats stuck to sitting at tables talking things out, though.’

  ‘I dunno, sometimes you just have to shoot a bugger.’

  ‘That would explain the enormous backlog of IHA incident reports prominently featuring your name that I inherited from my predecessors,’ Seretse said as they reached the security checkpoint. IDs were quickly checked, and they went deeper into the building. ‘In here.’

  The windowless room was a secondary conference area, a place for the small print of treaties to be hammered out by functionaries while their masters argued the bigger picture in the far more impressive main hall nearby. ‘Before we start, Oswald,’ said Nina, ‘I want to thank you for acting on my phone call so quickly. If you hadn’t got the State Department to intervene, God knows how long we would have been stuck in a police cell.’

  The normally unflappable diplomat looked uncomfortable. ‘I must make an admission, Nina. I did call the State Department after we spoke in the hope of intervening on your behalf, yes . . . but they still have not replied to me. I suspect that I had little, if anything, to do with your release.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Eddie regarded the FBI agents. ‘You?’

  ‘We got orders from the top,’ said Petrelli. ‘But who gave them . . .’ He shrugged.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got friends in high places,’ the Englishman mused. ‘Makes a change.’

  ‘So what else do we have?’ Nina asked.

  Seretse took several files from his briefcase. ‘I can give you as much as I know so far. Firstly, concerning the apparent threat against the archaeological excavation in Alexandria: is this the plan you saw in Los Angeles?’

  He slid a sheet of paper across to her. Nina recognised it at once as the illustration of the tomb of Alexander the Great that Volker Koenig had thrust upon her. ‘Yes, although the one I saw had annotations. In German.’

  ‘German, eh?’ said Eddie, raising an eyebrow. ‘There’s a coincidence.’

  Seretse took back the plan. ‘This was sent to me by William Schofield in Egypt. It’s the most up-to-date survey of the outer tomb, made in preparation for the opening of the inner chamber two days from now. It has not been released to anyone outside the IHA or the Ministry of State for Antiquities.’

  ‘Somebody leaked it, then,’ said Nina. She knew most of the IHA employees on the dig personally, and couldn’t imagine any of them committing such a security breach.

  ‘So it would seem.’ He opened another file, revealing several sheets of creased paper in protective plastic sleeves. ‘These are the documents you managed to save after your limousine . . . caught fire and broke in half.’ The pause was accompanied by a faint sigh, though Nina wasn’t sure if it was disbelief at the outrageousness of the situation, or the same kind of ‘oh no, not again’ resignation that she herself had learned to adopt many years ago. ‘I had one of the UN’s translators read them. What you told me on the phone appears to be correct – they are part of a plan to raid the tomb.’

  The archaeologist felt a chill. ‘Have you warned Bill and the others in Egypt?’

  ‘Yes, we did so immediately. Unfortunately,’ Seretse leaned back, steepling his hands, ‘we do not know how the raid is to be carried out. There are references to an entrance, but it must have been described on one of the pages that was lost.’

  ‘They can’t just be planning to walk in through the front door, though,’ said Eddie. ‘There’s a lot of security, isn’t there?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Nina told him. ‘One of archaeology’s greatest long-lost sites, right in the middle of an Egyptian city? The whole dig’s been guarded from the moment the first tunnel was discovered. Half the country’s population fancies themselves as freelance relic hunters, especially after all the political upheavals. And by “freelance relic hunters”, I mean thieves,’ she added for the benefit of the two agents.

  Beck shot her a sardonic smile. ‘I kind of got the picture.’

  ‘I think it wise that we not tell the Egyptian ambassador you said that, Nina,’ said Seretse. ‘However, I am sure that Dr Assad will increase security still further in light of this threat.’

  ‘And what about security for Nina?’ Eddie asked. ‘Whoever this lot are and whatever they’re planning to do in Egypt, they came over here and tried to kill her too.’

  ‘Why, though?’ said Nina. ‘I don’t even work for the IHA any more, so I’m not connected to the dig.’

  ‘Perhaps the FBI has some more information,’ Seretse suggested.

  ‘We might,’ Beck replied. He opened a file he had been given after landing. ‘These are the preliminary results of Jaekel’s autopsy. We rechecked the fingerprints and other biometrics; they’re a match for everything the DoJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section has on record for him. He and the other surviving members of his unit were processed when they were captured at the end of the war, so we’ve mugshots, prints and so on.’

  He laid out eight photographs in a row on the desk. Jaekel’s was the first; the others were equally old and grainy. His finger tapped each one in turn. ‘Maximilian Jaekel, Garan Oster, Archard Walther, Herman Schneider, Steiner Henkel, Bren Gausmann, Ubel Rasche . . . and the leader, SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Kroll.’ The final picture showed a hard-featured man with close-cropped blond hair, a wide, downturned mouth and intense, malevolent eyes. ‘They committed war crimes across Europe – slaughtering civilians, murdering prisoners of war, stealing an untold amount of valuables – and Kroll was actually promoted for all of it just before the end.’

  ‘So what happened to them?’ Nina asked, taking a closer look at the faces from the past. None looked like anybody she wanted to meet.

  ‘No one knows. After they bribed their way free, they disappeared.’

  ‘Until one of them turned up in LA and tried to kill us,’ said Eddie.

  Nina shook her head. ‘It can’t be the same guy. It’s just not possible.’

  ‘The fingerprints say it’s him,’ said Petrelli.

  ‘Maybe he’s a clone,’ Eddie offered. ‘Like in The Boys from Brazil? There might be a whole army of cloned Nazis goose-stepping around somewhere.’

  ‘Be serious, Eddie,’ sighed Nina.

  ‘We did find something unusual,’ Beck admitted. ‘We don’t know what it means, though.’ He took out another picture, this one in colour. ‘The man who shot at you in LA, Jaekel – he died trying to reach this. BHPD thought he was going for a gun and took him down.’

  The image showed a flat silver flask lying on asphalt. ‘Yeah, I saw it,’ said Eddie. ‘I thought it was a gun too, from the way he was so set on reaching it.’

  ‘What was in it?’ asked Seretse.

  ‘Water,’ Petrelli replied, to his listeners’ surprise.

  ‘Water?’ Nina echoed. ‘Seriously? You’re telling me he was killed because he wouldn’t give up his flask of water?’

  ‘He was dying for a drink,’ Eddie said with a grin. ‘Dead thirsty.’

  She held in a groan. ‘Maybe the flask had some sentimental value.’

  Beck shook his head. ‘It’s silver, so it’s probably worth a few hundred bucks, but we didn’t find anything special about it.’ He paused, as if trying to convince himself of what he was about to say. ‘What was in it, on the other hand . . .’

  Eddie regarded him quizzically. ‘You said it was water.’

  ‘It was. But . . . it wasn’t normal water.’

 
‘How so?’ Nina asked.

  The FBI agent produced a thick document. ‘I’m a cop, not a chemist, so I don’t understand half of this. But our analysts gave me a cheat sheet.’ He flicked through the topmost pages. ‘Here: “The water sample contains a high level of colloidal silver, at over five hundred parts per million. Such levels run the risk of the user’s developing argyria with prolonged consumption, though the initial autopsy report shows no evidence of such a condition in the deceased. In addition, the water was discovered to hold a small electrical charge, though as yet the cause and mechanism for this remains unidentified. Finally, the water was also found to contain molecules of carbon-60, also known as buckminsterfullerene or buckyballs—”’

  ‘You just made that up!’ said Eddie. ‘That’s not a real name, surely.’

  Nina smiled. ‘Let me tell you about the problems archaeologists have with moronic acid sometime.’

  ‘I’m just reading what it says here,’ said Beck. ‘Okay, so: “The concentration of these molecules is far higher than previously discovered in any natural water source, though there is none of the expected purple colouration associated with carbon-60 content. Carbon-60 is believed to have potential for various medical treatments, including inhibition of the HIV virus and antioxidant neutralisation of free radicals, but all current research is still experimental.” Like I said, it’s not normal water.’

  ‘With all that crap floating about in it, it sounds as bad as New York tap water,’ Eddie joked, before noticing his wife’s thoughtful expression. ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve seen something like this before,’ she said. ‘In Egypt – when Khalid Osir was looking for the strain of yeast that extended the lives of the ancient Egyptian rulers. The yeast we found in the Pyramid of Osiris had very similar properties.’

  ‘Life extension?’ said Seretse. ‘You’re suggesting that this water may have somehow slowed the ageing process of these war criminals?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it would explain why this guy,’ she indicated Jaekel’s picture, ‘only looked forty rather than ninety.’

  ‘What, clones are out, but you’re fine with magic water?’ Eddie scoffed.