Black Order

by James Rollins

  Gray stood off to the side as the funeral ended. In the distance, overlooking the clutch of black-suited mourners, rose the Tomb of the Unknowns, eighty tons of Yule marble quarried from Colorado. It represented loss without a name, a life laid down in service to the country.

  Logan Gregory was now one of them. Another unknown. Few would know of his heroism, the blood shed to protect all of us.

  But some did.

  Gray watched the vice president pass a folded flag to Logan’s mother, draped in black, supported by his father. Logan had no wife, no kids. Sigma had been his life…and his death.

  Slowly, after some milling, amid condolences and good-byes, the service broke up. Everyone wandered toward black limousines and Town Cars.

  Gray nodded to Painter. He limped with a cane, recovering from his debilitation, stronger every day. At his side, Dr. Lisa Cummings had an arm hooked around his elbow, not supporting him, just being near him.

  Monk trailed as they headed together toward the waiting line of cars.

  Kat was still in the hospital. The funeral would have been too much for her anyway. Too soon.

  Upon reaching the parked cars, Gray stepped up to Painter. They had some matters to settle.

  Lisa kissed the director on the cheek. “I’ll see you there.” She stepped back with Monk. They would be taking another vehicle to the Gregorys’ home, where a small gathering would take place.

  Gray had been surprised to learn that Logan’s parents lived only blocks from his own parents in Takoma Park. It just showed how little he really knew about the man.

  Painter crossed to a Lincoln Town Car and opened the door. They climbed into the backseat. The driver lifted the privacy screen as he pulled from the curb.

  “Gray, I read your report,” Painter finally said. “It’s an interesting angle. Go ahead and follow up on it. But it would mean another trip to Europe.”

  “I’ve some personal matters to settle there anyway. It’s what I came to discuss, to ask for a few extra days.”

  Painter lifted one eyebrow in tired levity. “I don’t know if the world is ready for another one of your working vacations.”

  Gray had to concede that might be true.

  Painter shifted, plainly still suffering some aches. “And what about the report from Dr. Marcia Fairfield? Do you think…believe that the Waalenberg lineage…?” Painter shook his head.

  Gray had read the report, too. He remembered when he and the British doctor had been skulking about the embryonic lab at the deepest levels of the subbasement. Dr. Fairfield had once claimed that the greater the treasure, the deeper it was buried. The same could be said for secrets, especially those kept by the Waalenbergs. Like their experiments with chimera, mixing human and animal stem cells in the brain.

  But even that was not the worst.

  “We checked the corporate medical records from the early 1950s,” Gray said. “It’s been confirmed. Baldric Waalenberg was sterile.”

  Painter shook his head. “No wonder the bastard had been so obsessed with breeding and genetics, continually battling to bend nature to his will. He was the last of the Waalenbergs. But his new children…the ones he used in the experiments? Is it true?”

  Gray shrugged. “Baldric was involved intimately with the Nazi Lebensborn program. Their Aryan breeding program. Along with other eugenics projects and early attempts to store eggs and sperm. At the war’s end, it seems the Xerum 525 program was not the only secret project that ended up in Baldric’s lap. One other did. One frozen inside glass straws. And once thawed, Baldric used the samples to inseminate his young wife.”

  “And you’re sure of this?”

  Gray nodded. Down in the subterranean lab, Dr. Fairfield had viewed the real family tree of the new-and-improved Waalenberg clan. She saw the name typed next to Baldric’s wife. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Black Order. The Nazi bastard might have killed himself after the war, but he had a plan to live on, to birth the new Aryan supermen, a new line of German kings, out of his own corrupted seed.

  “And with the Waalenberg clan eradicated,” Gray said, “that monster is finally laid to rest, too.”

  “At least we hope so.”

  Gray nodded. “I’m in contact with Khamisi. He’s keeping us informed on the cleanup at the estate. So far they’ve rounded up several of the guards. He fears some of the estate’s menagerie may have escaped into the deeper forest, but most were likely destroyed during the blast. But the search continues.”

  Khamisi had been named interim head warden for the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi reserve. He had also been given emergency policing authority by the South African government, helping coordinate local tribal support with Chief Mosi D’Gana. Drs. Paula Kane and Marcia Fairfield were providing him with technical support in handling the international intelligence communities’ response to the attack on the mansion and bombing.

  The two women had settled back into their home on the reserve, happy to discover each other alive and well, but they had also opened their house to Fiona. The two spies had even helped Fiona get into an early-acceptance program at Oxford.

  Gray stared out at the flashing scenery. He hoped Oxford had everything nailed down very securely. He suspected the petty crime rate around the university was about to have a sudden and significant uptick.

  Thinking about Fiona, Gray was reminded that he needed to check on Ryan. With the murder of Ryan’s father, the young man had put his family estate on the auction block, determined at long last to escape the shadow of Wewelsburg.

  Just as well.

  “And what about Monk and Kat?” Painter asked, drawing back his attention. His voice was brighter, shedding some of the sorrow over the loss of his friend, or at least setting it aside. “I heard they got engaged yesterday.”

  Gray found himself smiling for the first time today. “They did.”

  “Heaven help us.”

  Again Gray had to agree with the man. They shared this small bit of happiness. Life rolled on. They went over a handful of other details, and eventually the driver wound their Town Car through the tree-lined streets of Takoma Park, settling to a stop before a small green-shingled Victorian.

  Painter climbed out.

  Lisa was already there.

  “Are we done here?” Painter asked Gray.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me know what you find in Europe. And take those extra days.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Painter held out an arm. Lisa slipped into it. The pair headed toward the house together.

  As Gray climbed out, Monk joined him and nodded to the woman and the director. “Any bets?”

  Gray watched them climb the porch stairs. The two had been almost inseparable since leaving the Waalenberg estate. With Anna dead and Gunther vanished, Lisa was now the only living source for information on the Bell’s operation. She had been spending many hours at Sigma, being questioned. Yet Gray suspected the debriefings were also an excuse for Painter and Lisa to spend more time together.

  It seemed the Bell had done more than just heal the flesh.

  Gray stared a moment at their joined hands as they reached the porch. He pondered Monk’s question. Any bets? At this point, maybe it was too early to tell. If life and consciousness were a quantum phenomenon, then maybe love was, too.

  To love or not to love.

  The wave or the particle.

  Maybe for Painter and Lisa, it was still both, a suspended potential that only time would settle.

  “I don’t know,” Gray mumbled, answering Monk’s inquiry.

  He headed toward the house, thinking about his own future.

  Like everyone else, he had his own reality to measure.

  EPILOGUE

  6:45 P.M.

  WROCLAW, POLAND

  He was late.

  As the sun sank toward the horizon, Gray marched across the green cast-iron bridge. The baroque span forded the River Oder, a flat green expanse polished to a mirror’s sheen by the setting sun.


  Gray checked his watch. Rachel should be landing right about now. They were set to meet at the coffeehouse across the street from their hotel in the old historic district. But first he had one last thread to tie up, one last interview.

  Gray continued across the pedestrian bridge. Below, a pair of black swans sliced across the waters. A few gulls swept across the sky, reflected in the river. The air smelled of the sea and the lilacs growing along the edges of the waterway. He had started this journey at a bridge in Copenhagen, and now it ended at another.

  He lifted his gaze to the ancient city of black spires, copper-roofed turrets, and renaissance clock towers. The city of Wroclaw was once named Breslau, a fortified township on the border between Germany and Poland. Large sections of the city had been flattened during World War II as the German Wehrmacht fought the Russian Red Army.

  The aftermath of that attack had also drawn Gray here…some sixty years later.

  Ahead rose Cathedral Island. The twin gothic towers of the island’s namesake, the Cathedral of John the Baptist, glowed fiery as the day ended. But the cathedral was not Gray’s destination. There were scores of other smaller churches huddled on the island. Gray’s goal lay only steps from the bridge.

  His boots crossed from iron grate to stone street.

  The Church of Saints Peter and Paul squatted humbly to the left, easy to miss, merging its rear facade with the brick river wall. Gray spotted a small coal door that led from the waterway’s rocky bank to the back of the church rectory.

  Had a certain child once played along there?

  A perfect child.

  Gray knew from recently unsealed Russian records that the motherless boy had been raised at the orphanage once run by the Church of Saints Peter and Paul. There were many such abandoned children after the war, but Gray had narrowed the possibilities by age, sex, and hair color.

  The last of these parameters was most certainly white-blond.

  Gray also found records of the Russian Red Army’s search of the city, of their scouring of the mountains for the Nazis’ subterranean weapons labs, of their discovery at Wenceslas Mine. They had come close to capturing SS-Obergruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg, Anna and Gunther’s grandfather, as he evacuated the Bell. Lisa had learned from Anna that it was in this city, in this river, that Tola, Hugo’s daughter, had drowned the baby.

  But had she?

  It was this one possibility that had Gray and a handful of Sigma research experts delving into old records, following a trail long gone cold, pieced from bits and shreds. Then the discovery…a priest’s diary, the one who ran the orphanage here, telling of a baby boy, cold and alone, found with his dead mother. She was buried in a cemetery near here, nameless until now.

  But the boy had lived, grown up here, entering the seminary under the tutelage of the same priest who rescued him, gaining the name Father Piotr.

  Gray crossed to the rectory door. He had called in advance to interview the sixty-year-old priest, posing as a reporter researching wartime orphans for a book. Gray lifted and tapped the iron knocker on the nondescript plank door.

  He could hear singing rising from the church itself, a service under way.

  After a few moments, the door opened.

  Gray knew instantly who greeted him, recognizing from old photos the lineless old face and bushy white hair parted down the middle. Father Piotr was casually dressed in jeans, black shirt, white Roman collar of his profession, and a light, buttoned sweater.

  He spoke English with a thick Polish accent.

  “You must be Nathan Sawyer.”

  Gray wasn’t—but he nodded, suddenly uncomfortable lying to a priest. But such subterfuge was necessary, as much for the old priest’s sake as his own.

  He cleared his throat. “Thank you for granting me this interview.”

  “Certainly. Please come in. Be welcome.”

  Father Piotr led Gray through the rectory hall to a small room with a warm coal stove in the corner. He had a pot of tea brewing atop it. Gray was motioned to a chair. Once seated, Gray took out a pad containing a handful of questions.

  Piotr poured two cups and settled to a worn wingback, the cushions long contoured to the man’s body. A Bible rested on a table beside a glass-shaded lamp, along with a few tattered mystery novels.

  “You’ve come to inquire about Father Varick,” the man asked with a soft and genuine smile. “A great man.”

  Gray nodded. “And about your life here at the orphanage.”

  Piotr sipped his tea and waved fingers at Gray to continue.

  The questions were not that important, mostly filling in blanks. Gray already knew almost everything about the man’s life. Rachel’s uncle Vigor, as head of the Vatican’s intelligence branch, had supplied Sigma with a complete and detailed dossier on the Catholic father.

  Including medical records.

  Father Piotr had lived an unassuming life within the church. There was nothing especially noteworthy about his accomplishments beyond steadfast devotion to his flock. His health, though, remained exceptionally good. Little to no medical history. A broken bone when he was a teenager, falling off a rock. But other than that, routine physicals showed a perfectly fit individual. He wasn’t massive like Gunther or wickedly agile like the Waalenbergs. Just stolidly healthy.

  The interview turned up nothing new.

  Gray eventually closed his notebook and thanked the father for his time. Just to be thorough, he would obtain blood and DNA samples when the priest went for his next physical, again coordinated through Rachel’s uncle. But Gray didn’t expect anything much to come of it.

  Hugo’s perfected child turned out to be simply a decent and thoughtful man with resoundingly good health. Maybe that was perfection enough.

  As Gray was leaving, he spotted an unfinished jigsaw puzzle spread on a table in the room’s corner. He nodded to it. “So you like puzzles?”

  Father Piotr smiled guiltily, disarmingly. “Just a hobby. Keeps the mind sharp.”

  Gray nodded and headed out. He thought of Hugo Hirszfeld’s interest in the same. Had some insubstantial essence of the Jewish researcher been passed to the boy, imparted through the Bell? As Gray left the church and headed back over the river, he pondered such connections. Fathers and sons. Was it just genetics? Or was there something more? Something at the quantum level?

  The question was not a new one for Gray. He and his father had never had a good relationship; only lately had bridges started to build. And then there were other issues, worrisome concerns. Like Piotr’s jigsaw puzzle, what had Gray inherited from his father? He certainly could not deny his fear of Alzheimer’s, a real genetic possibility, but it went deeper than that, back to their hardscrabble relationship.

  What type of father would he be?

  Despite being late, the question stopped Gray cold on the iron bridge.

  In that one question, reality shifted for him. He remembered Monk challenging him on the plane ride to Germany, about Rachel, about their relationship. His words returned to Gray on the bridge.

  I mention Kat’s pregnant and you should’ve seen your face. Scared the crap out of you. And it’s my kid.

  Here was the root of his panic.

  What type of father would he be?

  Would he be his father all over again?

  Gray found his answer in the most unlikely place. A girl strode past him on the bridge, tucked into a hooded sweater against the river’s breeze. He flashed upon Fiona. He remembered the days of terror, her hand gripping his, needing him, but forever fighting him. He recalled how that felt.

  He gripped the rails of the bridge, hard.

  It had felt wonderful.

  And he wanted more.

  A short laugh escaped him at the realization, just a madman on a bridge. He didn’t have to be his father. While the potential was there to follow in his father’s footsteps, he also had free will, a consciousness that could collapse potential in either direction.

  Freed at last, he headed again
across the bridge, slowly allowing this one reality to collapse other potentials, falling like a chain of dominoes, one after the other, leading to one last teetering unresolved potential.

  Rachel.

  He stepped off the bridge and headed toward their rendezvous.

  When he reached the coffeehouse, she was already waiting on the patio. She must have just arrived herself. She had not spotted him. He paused, shocked at how beautiful she was. It hit him anew every time. Tall, long-limbed, an inviting curve of hip, bosom, and neck. She turned, finding him staring. A smile bloomed. Her eyes, caramel colored, glimmered warmly. She combed a hand through her ebony hair, almost shyly.

  Who wouldn’t want to spend the rest of their life with her?

  He crossed, closing the gap, reaching a hand out for her fingers.

  In that moment, Monk’s challenge again returned to him. It seemed so long ago. A challenge about where Gray and Rachel were headed. A challenge raised on three fingers.

  Wife, mortgage, kids.

  In other words, reality.

  A relationship couldn’t be suspended forever as pure potential. Both loving and not loving. Evolution would not stand for it. Reality must eventually measure it.

  And so it did now for Gray.

  Wife, mortgage, kids.

  Gray had his answer. He was ready for the challenge of all three. And with this realization, that last domino toppled inside his heart.

  To love or not.

  The wave or particle.

  Gray took Rachel’s fingers. He saw it with clarity, yet the result still surprised him. He pulled her toward the small table, noting that a plate of scones rested atop it, along with two dark steaming mugs of caffe latte, already waiting for them.

  Rachel’s usual thoughtfulness.

  He drew her down to one seat. He took the other.

  He stared into her eyes. He could not keep the sorrow and apology out of his voice, but he allowed his firm resolution to ring forth, too.

  “Rachel, we need to talk.”

  Gray then saw it in her eyes, too. Reality. Two careers, two continents, two people with separate paths from here.

  She squeezed his fingers. “I know.”