Joe pulled his Colt Anaconda from its holster under the desk. He leaned forward and loosed off three shots. It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t yet sent the information he’d just gathered to his secure server.
“Not even close,” came the woman’s voice—she sounded very young. “Have a pleasant evening, sir.”
Joe heard another voice in the background, this one deeper—a man’s. Then there was movement toward the door.
After a short time, the reporter crawled backward from under the desk and got to his feet, holding his weapon in a two-handed grip. Then he saw the black box by the door, a red light flashing on its side. He grabbed the data stick from his computer and rushed to the rear window. After he’d opened it, he hardly had time to breathe before his life was blown to fragments.
I spent an hour in a different café in central D.C. There were no references to Larry Thomson on any sites apart from the North American National Revival’s. I went through what there was for Woodbridge Holdings, aware that Joe would have done so, too, by now, but maybe something would jog my memory about the camp. All I found were endless details about the company’s interests, none of which pointed directly to the depths of the Maine wilderness.
A little bleary-eyed, I decided to give Joe a call and see how he was getting on. A voice said the subscriber had turned off the cell—I sent him a text in case he turned it on again soon. After ten minutes I grew impatient. I left the café, found a pay phone and called his landline. Again, unobtainable. I began to get a bad feeling. Joe had said he would stay at his computers until he found something. He hadn’t been intending to go out and, besides, it was nearly midnight. I hailed a passing cab and told him a street behind Joe’s place. I didn’t have to risk using the front entrance—I could approach via the yards, as we’d done a couple of nights back.
I heard the sirens as soon as I got out of the cab. Jesus, what had happened? I jumped a low fence and ran across the unkempt gardens. As I got nearer to my friend’s building, the smell of hot dust became more intense. I could see a cloud of smoke and steam in the air ahead. Shit, what had I got Joe into? It was only when I saw the firemen in the yard behind Joe’s apartment that I stopped and took cover. They were directing hoses at the windows on the second floor. In their shouts the word bomb came up more than once.
I retraced my steps and cautiously turned the corner to his street. I needn’t have worried about breaking cover. A crowd had gathered in front of the fire trucks and police cars. I joined it and pushed toward the front. Beyond men in heavy clothes, carrying oxygen tanks, I made out the solid form of Clem Simmons. I didn’t have his cell-phone number so I had no option but to attract his attention. After he’d finished talking to an attractive red-haired woman, I managed that. Looking away from me, he bent under the barrier tape and walked down the street. I gave him a minute and then followed. He was waiting for me at the corner.
“What happened?” I asked breathlessly.
“We’re pretty sure it was a bomb.” His eyes lowered. “A powerful one, too. There’s nothing left of Joe’s apartment. The fire chief has taken his men out as he thinks the whole building might come down.”
“Any human remains?”
He nodded slowly. “Small pieces. No identification possible yet.”
I knew it had to be Joe. “Fuck,” I said. “I’m responsible for this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I got him into this, didn’t I?”
“You’re saying that a reporter with his track record wouldn’t have gone after these creeps if you hadn’t been involved? Don’t be so goddamned conceited.”
I thought about that. He was right. Joe was already on the ball about Woodbridge Holdings, and he would have looked out for me and Karen even if I hadn’t gone to him. It was a slight to my friend’s memory to suggest otherwise.
“You want to come in, Matt?” Clem Simmons asked, his expression softening. “If they got him, they’ll be after you, too.”
“Let them come,” I muttered.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any clearer idea of who they are yet?” He knew I wasn’t telling him everything, but it didn’t seem to be bothering him unduly.
“Put it this way,” I said. “We’ve been looking at a company called Woodbridge Holdings. Heard of them?”
He nodded. “They own the Star Reporter.”
“As well as a range of other companies—logging, property, pharmaceuticals—you name it, they’re into it.”
“Got any evidence linking them to Joe’s death? Or to the other murders? Or to what happened to you?”
“Watch this space,” I said. “Or rather…” I took out my cell phone. “Give me your number.” I saved it. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Don’t do anything illegal, will you?” The words sounded more like an invitation than a warning.
I snorted and turned away. Typical cops. They wanted you to do their dirty work. Then a picture of Karen rose up before me. She was in the Metropolitan Police uniform she rarely wore and she was smiling, one hand on her gently convex belly. I swallowed a sob and turned away.
The blonde woman span round and emptied the magazine of her semiautomatic pistol into a life-size human target twenty yards away. The man in gray next to her took off his ear-protectors and clapped slowly.
“Very good,” he said, watching as the target was pulled in. “Three to the head, three to the chest and three to the abdomen. I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”
The woman nodded and handed the weapon over. She had only started target shooting five days before and she had been surprised at how proficient she was. She had impressed the instructors at judo and karate, too, and had taken to knife-fighting with alacrity. At first she had been worried that the baby she was carrying would slow her down, but that hadn’t been the case. The doctors monitored her every day and the little boy was doing well. She wished she could remember who the father was, but it didn’t matter. The people in the camp would look after her and her child. They were a real family.
“They’re waiting to take you to the lab, Karen,” the shooting instructor said, pointing to the door.
Karen followed the other personnel in gray uniforms down the passages to the place where she had recently spent so much time. The machine was ready for her, lights flashing and tubes pulsing above the bed. At first she’d been frightened by it, worried that its close proximity to her body would harm the baby, but now she looked forward to the daily sessions. She could never remember what happened when the humming got louder, apart from a feeling of deep satisfaction and belonging. The music, which she had originally found discordant, now brought her a calm desire to participate, to strive for something glorious; and the rhetoric that she had once found disturbing now increased her devotion every time that she heard it. As for the images of men in field-gray and women in white blouses and black skirts, they inspired her.
She was one of them, and always would be.
In time, her son would join the movement, too.
Thirty-Six
I went back to my hotel across the river, and ate the burger and fries I’d bought. The food tasted like nothing, but I needed to keep my strength up. I was down, hit badly by Joe’s death, but I knew I had to keep searching, had to find Karen. But how was I to do that without Joe’s help? I had received e-mails from him with useful material, but nothing that broke the case. He had hinted he was on the brink of discovering something hot, but the bomb would have destroyed all his equipment and records.
Or would it? I thought about that. Joe had security cameras and a warning system. They must have been disabled to enable his killer or killers to get in, but he might still have had time to react before the explosion. I tried to put myself in the dead man’s place. The obvious thing to do would have been to call the police. Or me. Clem would have told me if Joe had contacted him. Perhaps Joe realized it was too late for that; perhaps his landline had been disabled, too. So what other options did he have? I found it
hard to believe that he would have waited patiently for death like an animal in a slaughterhouse, even if it had only been a matter of seconds. He was proficient with computers, but they had all been atomized, as had his cell phone. He no doubt had an off-site backup facility, but he hadn’t given me access. What else could he have done? I had a vision of Joe in the bar, his keys on the table by his glass. There were two memory sticks attached. Could that be the answer? Could he have tried to get a memory stick out of the apartment?
I pulled on my jacket and left the room in a rush. Joe’s place was on the second floor. His office had windows to the front and rear of the building. Was it possible he had got a window open and thrown a stick out?
I ran across the bridge and caught a cab in Georgetown, getting the driver to let me off at the street behind Joe’s. I walked to the corner and looked round cautiously. The barrier tape was still up and police personnel were in evidence, despite the late hour. But the firemen had gone, and they had been the ones in the yard out back. I decided to try there first.
I moved silently over the low fences and made it to the space behind Joe’s apartment. There was tape around it, but no one was on watch. I took in the area. I reckoned Joe would have thrown a stick as far as he could, so I started at the rear of the yard, using the flashlight I had brought with me. The surface of the area was broken and covered in rubble from the walls, so I had to run my fingers through each handful. After ten minutes, during which I kept looking toward the building in case someone approached, I had found nothing. Before I moved closer to the source of the blast, I looked over the wall that separated Joe’s yard from the one on the parallel street. Bingo. Hanging from a tattered shrub was a black memory stick. I grabbed it and made my exit.
I tried to contain my excitement on the journey back to the hotel. Maybe the stick wasn’t even Joe’s. If it was, it might not contain anything significant. But I remained hopeful. If Joe had made the effort to dispose of it during what he probably knew were the last seconds of his life, it had to be of some importance. I examined the small plastic-covered device. It didn’t show any signs of damage. Better, it looked very like the ones I had seen on Joe’s key ring.
I booted up my laptop impatiently and put the memory stick into a USB port. There were a few seconds of extreme tension, then an icon opened. It contained two files, one titled “NANR” and the other “Woodbridge Holdings.”
And felt icy fingers walk up my spine. Joe had discovered that NANR were not just the initials of the relatively mild-mannered North American National Revival. That had been deliberately chosen to obscure a group with a much more chilling name—the North American Nazi Revival. Joe had found an obscure civil-rights Web site run by an elderly Jewish couple in South Dakota. They had been threatened by a businessman who had been trying to buy their land. When they turned him down, he had let slip the alternative significance of the letters. They had reported the incident to the local police, who said that the man was just a well-known drunk.
I sat back in the hotel room’s uncomfortable chair and thought about that. The gray-uniformed bastards at the camp in Maine certainly behaved like Nazis. The place itself was redolent of concentration camps—I had a flash of the man who had been summarily shot for helping me over the fence. So, was this what was behind everything? Far-right supremacists with a taste for Hitler? How did that square with the occult killings in Washington? The first victim had been a neo-Nazi himself.
I looked at Joe’s other file. He had certainly been busy. I would definitely have bought champagne because what he had in the Woodbridge Holdings file was vintage investigative research. He had tapped a source who used to work in the CIA. Apparently Woodbridge had been set up in 1972 and had originally only been involved in property—primarily the acquisition of Maine forest land. But gradually it had acquired interests in a pharmaceutical firm that it eventually took over in 1982. Woodbridge had bought its first newspaper, a local rag in Massachusetts, a year later. Logging and paper production soon followed, as did a major expansion into news media, including the supermarket tabloid Star Reporter in 1987. The paper was almost defunct, having been badly hit by the thrusting style of its rivals. But soon it became the most imaginative of them all in its coverage of showbiz scandal and outlandish news.
What was most interesting was the near impossibility of identifying the main shareholders of Woodbridge. They had hidden themselves behind a raft of other company names and were always represented by lawyers at meetings. It was indisputable that Woodbridge had been highly profitable from the start, but it was unclear who was banking the proceeds. That in itself was hardly unusual in the financial world, but Wall Street gossip said that the directors were nothing but placeholders, that the real power was wielded by people who remained resolutely behind the scenes. The final entry in Joe’s file was that one of those individuals was none other than Larry Thomson.
So where did that leave me? Woodbridge Holdings was run by a man who was also in charge of an organization that purported not to be racist, but seemed to have a Nazi alter ego. Nazi meaning what? People tended to use the term to suggest anti-Semitic and anti-federal government tendencies, or just anyone who was really strict. But what if there was a real Nazi involvement? My memory, now firing on more cylinders, came up with Operation Paperclip—I had read about that when I was researching a still unfinished novel set during the Cold War. Operation Paperclip had been the CIA’s plan to bring Nazi scientists illegally to the U.S.A. Could Woodbridge Holdings have been set up by scumbags like that? The camp in Maine suggested that was within the realms of possibility. But that would mean people in high places, in particular the CIA, knew about the people behind the company—and Joe’s contact had worked for the Agency. My stomach flipped as I realized that I wasn’t only up against the FBI. Had Joe been blown up by some shady branch of his own government?
I decided to follow the Nazi angle further. I did an Internet search and found a site that claimed to have an encyclopedic coverage of German history from 1923 to 1950. But what was I looking for? I typed in Woodbridge. Predictably, there was no data. I went to another site that offered translation to German and came back with Holzbrücke and several variants. No data. This was going nowhere. For want of a better idea, I typed in North American Nazi Revival. Zilch. I got up and walked around the room, my head pounding. I told myself that I was wasting my time, that I’d never find Karen this way. But what alternative did I have? I could spend weeks combing Maine for the camp and, even if I found it, I would be seriously outnumbered by the gray-clad guards. And I didn’t even have any evidence that Karen was there.
I sat down again and played with the keys. Without giving it much thought, I deleted all but the initials NANR. No data. I looked closer. There was a hyperlink to another site, one which listed significant Nazi party members. I went there and tried NANR again. This time I had a hit. NANR were the initials of one Nikolaus Andreas Nieblich Rothmann—party number, 1925670; date of birth, September 30, 1915; place of birth, Berlin; date/place of death, unknown. I went back to the site I’d bookmarked and entered Rothmann’s full name. I got another hit. As I read, my stomach went very queasy indeed.
Even though the place smelled bad, the floor was uneven and the furniture was cheap, the rented room suited. The name on the agreement was Marlon Hyde. The owner never came upstairs if the rent was paid on time. Hyde had fixed a heavy padlock to the outside of the door and two bolts and a chain to the inside. No one could get in or out without doing a lot of damage.
The crumbling walls were decorated with cuttings from the newspapers. They concerned the so-called occult killings. The death-metal singer Loki’s demise covered one wall. The space around the single cracked window was covered with stories about Monsieur Hexie. Behind the bed were clippings about Professor Abraham Singer, while opposite were pages about the last victim, the tarot reader Crystal Vileda. Hyde had put those up earlier in the evening. It was interesting that the FBI had found prints incriminating the Englishm
an Matt Wells at Monsieur Hexie’s apartment.
There were books piled high on the floor, old books full of strange pictures. They showed demons and witches, priests and zombies, Norse gods and Jewish mystics. There were also a Washington, D.C., Yellow Pages and several local maps. In a box under the bed, the killer had collected numerous pairs of weapons—skewers, knives, pieces of piping. There were even chopsticks. They had proved unexpectedly effective.
But Marlon Hyde was tired and dispirited. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be, this wasn’t what all the training had been for. There was a greater purpose, one for which every sacrifice was justified. But could that really be right? Most human beings were worthless, that was indisputable. But what about family? Was it ever acceptable to take the lives of parents, of siblings, of children? As time passed, that had become harder to take. It had been emphasized that no one was innocent, that even the children of the enemy had to be wiped out, so there would be no future for their kind. But what of the children of the just? What of siblings who failed the test? Did they deserve to be discarded—no, that word was a lie. Why did they have to be executed by those closest to them?
Hyde remembered the scenes in the Antichurch—the hyena-headed celebrant and the cloaked figure with features of stone, the chanting of the naked faithful, the mist of blood from the victims’ opened throats. Those had been ecstatic occasions.
It had been a long time before the horror came, and the realization that the death of a brother had to be mourned; that blood would have blood, no matter what else had been taught; that nothing could ever justify the murder of a loved one.
Killing came easy. It always had done for Marlon Hyde. The hard thing had been to feign respect for human life; respect for the poor and needy; respect for the vulnerable. The tarot woman could have been a problem. The gross Loki, the pathetic Monsieur Hexie and the Jew professor hadn’t raised a qualm. In any event, neither did Crystal Vileda. Using chopsticks had added an incongruous element that helped, and the need to hurry had removed any lingering doubt. But now, what was left? The pull was still there, the urge to submit to the coffining. Hyde had been fighting it, but confusion sometimes prevailed. To make things worse, Matt Wells had stolen the glory for two of the murders.
Maps of Hell Page 26
