“You vould be surprised, Herr Captain,” said Thiessen with a smile. “Sometimes we get vork crews from the highways or cowboys from cattle drives dropping in when they are camped nearby. Ve have had no serious trouble here, but I have a gun check in the lounge. You don’t hand over your veapon, you don’t drink here, and if I sink you are too drunk to be responsible, you don’t get it back until you are sober.” This was the one common-sense restriction on firearms the Northwest Republic allowed, in the face of some protest from the purists; proprietors and managers of any place that served alcohol had the right at their discretion to ban guns or require them to be checked at the door. Most did, since customers gunning one another down might make for exciting Western movies, but in real life it was bad for business. The Northwest Republic was a nation of gun enthusiasts, but mostly responsible ones who understood that gunpowder and alcohol don’t mix.
“Okay, who left after Miss Sutcliffe?” asked Campbell.
“I believe it vas Herr Speidel, a few minutes later,” said Thiessen. Tom and Bob glanced at one another. Dave Speidel the power guy’s name was popping up with strange frequency.
“You close at midnight?” asked MacPherson. “And you stayed behind for a few minutes locking up?”
“Yes, Detective Sergeant.”
“That was about the time we believe the homicide may have occurred,” said MacPherson. “The indoor pool is down that long hallway from reception, and the stairs and elevators are right by the reception desk. So if you stayed behind for a few minutes to close, you wouldn’t have seen anybody slip down the corridor into the pool area?”
“Unfortunately not, I’m afraid,” said Thiessen, shaking his head.
“We’ll have to grill the hell out of all of them on that,” said MacPherson. “Will they tell us the truth, sir?” Bob shrugged. He honestly didn’t know.
“Did you notice or did anyone report any strange cars in the parking lot, anyone who isn’t staying in the lodge hanging around?” asked Tom.
“No,” said Thiessen. He looked at his wife. “Anna?”
“No, I saw no strangers and no one else did so far as I know,” she said.
“Do you have any night security, Herr Thiessen?” asked Campbell. “Any alarm systems that would go off if an intruder broke in or forced a door?”
“Vy vould ve need such a thing?” the German asked with a shrug. “Zis is de Northwest Republic.”
“Times like these, I wish we weren’t such a free country and we had spy cameras all over the place like the Americans do,” sighed MacPherson.
“I understand that dere were such things here before de Revolution, but when de state took over zis place, dey pulled all of de alarms and de cameras out,” said Thiessen. “With no niggers or Mexicans, dere vas no need. Colonel, do you believe this woman was killed by someone staying here in de hotel?”
Campbell answered carefully. “We believe we know in a general way who killed Miss Sutcliffe, a person we only know by a nickname, and we have no idea who that person is, or why they murdered her. It is of course possible that the killer came in from the outside.”
“But not likely?” asked Thiessen.
“I just don’t know,” said Campbell frankly. “We need some solid evidence one way or the other.”
Thiessen sighed, went to a drawer, and pulled out two small but heavy-caliber automatic pistols in clip-on holsters. He stuck one on his belt and handed the other to his wife. “I understand dat of course you haven’t ruled out Anna and myself as suspects, Colonel, so you cannot officially involve us in de investigation, although ve certainly vould have no motive to murder a complete stranger ve met only yesterday. But if dere is a murderer living in my hotel, zis fact displeases me very much. My vife and I must safeguard our guests and ourselves, so ve vill keep a sharp eye out and tell you immediately if anything appears in any vay suspicious or unusual.”
“Thank you, Herr Thiessen,” said Campbell. After they left the office, he said, “Mac, you and Botha go give Bella Sutcliffe’s room a full going over from top to bottom. You’re looking for anything indicating she had contact with anyone local or anyone in the whole Republic for that matter. Let me know what Tech comes up with from her phone. Once you finish there, get back on with the canvas. Staff and NAR guests first, for elimination purposes. I doubt if any of them have anything to do with this. Only Doctor Wingard has any connection with Lost Creek, and I honestly think we can rule him out. Tom and I will take the foreigners and see if we can track their movements from the bar to their rooms, and see if any of them will admit to seeing anything off kilter, anyone slipping in or out of that corridor that leads to the indoor pool. In the meantime, could you ask all the EPs to gather in the lounge? I need to give them a pep talk. Jesus, in all the hurly burly I completely forgot to ask, has anyone even thought to notify Jason Stockdale as to what the hell’s going on?”
“I took the liberty of doing so while I was waiting for you with the copter, sir,” said Tom. “He will have informed the other EPs by now.”
“Good. That means I don’t have to. Also, Mac, could you find David Speidel from Northwest Power and Light and ask if he can stick around and not go out on his rounds or whatever today before we speak with him?”
“Yes, sir,” said MacPherson. After he and Botha left, Horakova turned to Bob. “So what now? Do we have a word with Speidel?”
“Not quite yet. Contact your office, Tom, and I’ll contact mine, and have them send anything they have on Mr. Speidel either criminal or security-wise to our phones. We’re not Americans, and we don’t keep files on people unless they’ve actually done something, so it may not be much, but this guy seems to be the only local connection to emerge so far between the victim and the Lost Creek Site and the scene of the crime, so it’s the most promising lead we’ve got. We need to know as much as we can about him before we tackle him.” Bob’s phone beeped, and he answered it. “Yes? When? Beautiful. I’m looking forward to it with joyous anticipation.” He hung up. “That was Jason. The rest of the EPs are on their way down here. The university arranged a copter for them and they’re already in the air, so they’ll be here soon. They’d been told what happened to Bella, and some of them appear to think we had something to do with it.”
“Us? Why, for pity’s sake?” demanded Tom. “What possible motive could we have to do any of them in, given the PR disaster?”
“Logic has got nothing to do with it, Tom,” said Campbell morosely. “These people are convinced that we are all demons from the ninth circle of hell. They’ve been told that all their lives. They’ll probably pack their gear and run,” said Tom morosely. “Maybe that’s the object of the exercise, to warn the whole group off. Let’s make those calls about Speidel and go talk to the others. Maybe we can persuade them to stay and complete their job, although God knows what they’ll say about us when they get home, never mind how this will affect their whole report on Lost Creek. The excavation will probably get lost in all the hysterical screaming.”
“I think that may be what our buddy boy from Out There has in mind,” suggested Tom.
On their way to the lounge they were waylaid in the lobby by Dr. Arne Wingard. He looked stricken. “Colonel, what the hell is happening? Who did this? Who murdered Doctor Wyrick’s assistant?”
Campbell sighed. “We think it is a foreign intelligence operative, most likely from the Office of Northwest Recovery, who has orders to screw up the visit of the Eminent Persons Delegation and discredit the Lost Creek site and its findings in the eyes of the world.”
“How do you know that?” demanded Wingard.
“All right, I suppose at this point you need to know,” said Tom Horakova with a sigh. “Recently the Bureau of State Security was made aware that virtually every bit of information about Lost Creek, including a complete list of all the artifacts you’ve recovered, full schematics of the dig including subsonic ground surveys, all the chemical and Carbon-14 dating results, a complete list of everyone working on the di
g, photos, the whole nine yards, have been transmitted to the Office of Northwest Recovery in the past few weeks. There is apparently an enemy agent using the code name Scorpius who is very, very close to this project.”
“Mother of God!” gasped Wingard. “Who do you suspect?”
“No one, so far,” said Campbell. “We haven’t got a line on him or her yet, although I promise you, sir, we will.”
“What can I do?” Wingard asked in a dazed voice.
“Keep Lost Creek going and prove to the world that the white man was here on this continent first, in spite of all their murder and treachery,” said Campbell.
“Done!” said the archaeologist without hesitation.
“In the meantime I will be posting Guardsmen all around the site, and here in the Fairmont, and everywhere else where there’s any possibility this son of a bitch might strike again,” said Campbell grimly.
“But why on earth would he kill Bella Sutcliffe?”
“We don’t know, Doctor Wingard,” said Campbell. “But by God, we’re going to find out!”
Detective Botha materialized at Campbell’s side. “Colonel, a helicopter has just landed outside, with the rest of the foreign delegation on board.”
“Great,” sighed Bob. “Show them into the lounge with the others. I suppose I might as well talk to them all at once. In the meantime, you and Sergeant MacPherson get on with it, starting with Bella Sutcliffe’s room. Tear it apart. She must have been communicating with Scorpius, and we have to find out how!”
When the four of them walked into the small, cozy lounge bar of the Fairmont, they were met by nine pairs of eyes. The French couple were wary. The British were cold and alert, even the previously friendly Doctor Frederick Haskins. The Canadian and American faces were angry and hostile, and Doctor Amanda Wyrick had been weeping.
There was something else, an undercurrent of fear. Bob Campbell understood that he now faced not just a homicide investigation; he had run up against more than a century of history. In these nine people, he faced generation after generation of carefully inculcated hate propaganda, racial stereotyping, social engineering and the officially sanctioned, collective vilification of any white person, especially any white male, who dared to disagree with the blind dogma of the Western world’s religion of secular humanism, of liberalism and multiculturalism. His enemy now was not a single killer, but the deranged moral absolutes no longer even of equality, but of inherent and irredeemable white male evil. These visitors themselves were white, and yet through some dark alchemy, political correctness had separated them from their genes and their heritage and any awareness of their identity. He suddenly understood that to these people, the black and brown things that swarmed their own lands were at least on some level “us,” while the white people of the Northwest, their very brothers and sisters in blood, were the Other. For them, quite literally, white was black and black was white, This was how the Third Reich, South Africa, Rhodesia, and the American South had perished; their white peoples had been turned into the Other in the eyes of the rest of their race. Not for the first time, Bob marveled in his mind at what the Jew had accomplished.
These people had been warned that they were coming to a land of savages, of sick and homicidal bigots and brutes, and now the bloody proof was before them in the form of Bella Sutcliffe’s murdered body lying out beside the pool. Campbell knew he didn’t just have to find a killer. He had to save Lost Creek.
He opened his mouth to speak, but before he did Amanda Wyrick leaped to her feet and shouted, “Did you do this? Did you people kill her? Why?”
Bob Campbell fought back the urge to argue, to expostulate, to try and reason with the woman. He knew from his own knowledge, from the memory of his own few horrible months Out There, that this was something beyond reason. For once, the truth was something that had to be felt and not thought. He hoped he could make them all feel it. “No, ma’am,” he told her simply. “We did not.” He looked at them all. “I won’t try to convince you. If all of you truly do believe in the privacy of your own thoughts that we are some kind of devils in human form, then I can’t convince you otherwise. I told you before that you are all free to go anywhere you want while you’re in this country, and that includes being free to leave it. If you genuinely believe that for some bizarre and inexplicable reason we decided to murder one of your group and throw her into a swimming pool, then of course I don’t expect you to stay with homicidal hosts. By all means, pack your things and leave. Chancellor Stockdale will arrange for your passage back to your own countries, and there will be no delays or any attempt to prevent you.
“But I hope you won’t do that,” Bob went on. “We believe that Bella Sutcliffe was murdered in order to throw sand and cast a cloud over the entire Lost Creek project and distract the attention of the world from the meaning of what is being discovered there. I regret to say that the killer may have achieved his object in doing so. There’s nothing like the murder of an attractive young woman to upstage a scientific discovery, no matter how earth-shaking, especially in societies which long ago decided to substitute scandal, sensation and voyeurism for news and serious thought. I am asking you not to let this murderer win. I am asking you to stay and continue observing the work at Lost Creek, and when you get home to write a fair and objective critique of what you see here, because I’m convinced that is why Bella Sutcliffe died, to make sure you don’t do that.”
“How do we know the rest of us will be safe?” demanded Letitia Haines.
“You don’t,” said Campbell. “If you choose to stay, you will have a choice. You can accept protection from the Civil Guard—the regular police, not BOSS, and yes, we carry weapons when need be and I assure you, we know how to use them. Or if you’re more distrustful and afraid of us than the real killer, you can choose not to have such protection. I told you before, we believe in freedom and individual responsibility here. But if you want our help, it’s yours. That’s what this Republic is here for, in everything.”
Detective Botha entered the room and whispered into Bob’s ear. Campbell spoke up. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to ask all of you to step outside, back out to the helicopter pad, please,” he told them. “We’re evacuating the lodge.”
“Why?” demanded Amanda Wyrick.
“We’ve just found something concealed in Bella Sutcliffe’s room. It appears to be a bomb.”
* * *
The Northwest Civil Guard had always maintained a notably expert and efficient bomb squad. There were several reasons for this, starting with the fact that back when the Guard was first organized in the months after Longview, its personnel comprised both bomb disposal officers from the old régime’s multiple police forces who had disarmed and dismantled NVA explosive devices, and some of the same men who had made and planted those devices. There had been numerous calls on the Squad’s expertise down through the intervening years. During the Seven Weeks’ War, when the Guard had been subsumed into the NDF for the duration, their EOD people had disarmed and neutralized everything from artillery and mortar shells on up to unexploded Cruise missile and Predator drone warheads, and sometimes still did so when these were found buried in the dirt in out-of-the-way places or the wreckage of aircraft brought down by Bluelights.
Periodically the Office of Northwest Recovery and various small factions and cells, some of them minuscule gangs of Christian Zionist lunatics, some of them fronts financed and operated by NGOs with credible deniability like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Ant-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, would conduct bombing campaigns within the Northwest Republic. The purpose of these murder sprees was not so much to overthrow the government and force reunification with the United States, as it was to maintain a propaganda illusion in the U.S. and East Canada that there was some kind of indigenous pro-American or pro-Ottawa resistance movement within the NAR, and to use that illusory notion as a fund-raising device. Just as the old FBI and BATFE had regularly fabricated legal cases against so-called white sup
remacists any time there was a threat of a budget cut to the Spokane or Seattle office, as in the infamous Edgar Steele case, so these old-line liberal and Jewish outfits fabricated secret cells of loyal red-white-and-blue freedom fighters who of course needed immense amounts of funding to continue their heroic resistance against the evil, hatemongering “racist entity.”
Given the blind hatred which the Jewish and liberal world felt for the NAR, it worked fairly well: the Southern Poverty Law Center’s cash reserve, long fabled in song and story, now stood at an estimated half-billion dollars. Its white and Jewish directors and staff lived in their own posh suburb of Montgomery, Alabama called Deestown, a self-contained and heavily fortified enclave with its own power plant, food production, educational system and paramilitary police force to protect the apostles of tolerance and diversity from all that bloody diversity seething and raging just beyond the barbed wire and corrugated steel barricades.
The result was that every few years a few bombs went off, a few NAR citizens were killed and maimed, a few of the paid assassins were caught before they could escape the country and swung on the gallows on the six o’clock news, and the WPB planted a few retaliatory bombs in appropriate spots around the U.S., not forgetting to pay a visit to Deestown, of course. After a few such incidents re-introduced the guilty parties to the fascinating concepts of personal responsibility for one’s actions and what goes around comes around, what was left of the American authorities would rein in the ONR or the NGOs and get them to cool it for a few years. This meant that Guard Lieutenant Rod Whistler had hands-on experience in virtually every type of explosive and detonation system in current use, but this time he was stumped. “I don’t know what the hell it is,” he admitted to Bob Campbell, roughly an hour after the Fairmont Lodge had been evacuated. “I’m not even sure it’s a bomb. It might be some kind of EMP device.”
“Electromagnetic pulse?” asked Campbell. “They want to disrupt our computers and electronics?”
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