by Alex Archer
Score one for the good guys, Annja thought. While she was pleased with her moral victory, she took even greater solace in the knowledge that they could search her all they wanted, but she would still have a weapon within arm’s reach that they would never find.
And if this is the viper’s nest I think it is, I’m going to be glad I have it handy.
Satisfied that they were unarmed, the guard took a cell phone out of his pocket, placed a call and said a few words in German to whoever answered. Finished, he turned and led them down the hall to another door, which, when opened, revealed a staircase leading downward. The thundering crash of heavy metal music rose to greet them.
“There’s a door at the back of the club,” the guard said, indicating with an outstretched hand that they should proceed down the stairs.
Below, the party was in full swing. The underground club was large and rectangular in shape, with a mirrored bar to the left, a raised DJ booth to the right and a dance floor in between. Strobe lights flashed overhead, making everyone seem to be moving in fits and starts like puppets on strings. The bartender was another blond, blue-eyed Aryan and given the oversized Nazi flag hanging from the DJ booth, it wasn’t all that hard to figure out that the clientele consisted of neo-Nazi extremists and those who wanted to curry favor with them. The pounding pulse of the music was even louder down there than it had been on the stairs, making it nearly impossible for Annja, Garin and Paul to speak to one another. Garin didn’t even try; he turned toward the dance floor and began carving a path with his broad shoulders through the writhing bodies of the dancers, heading for the office in the back. Annja followed in his wake, with Paul bringing up the rear.
Another set of guards stood in front of the door to the office on the far side of the room. They saw Garin coming and opened the door, ushering the three of them into the room beyond.
When the door was pulled closed behind them, the sound of music was mercifully cut off. Annja didn’t think she’d ever been more thankful for soundproofing in her entire life.
Annja took a look around and almost immediately wished she hadn’t.
The room was practically a shrine to the Nazi Party circa 1945. A framed portrait of Adolf Hitler hung on the wall in the position of honor behind the desk, a Nazi flag on a stand on either side. Memorabilia covered the walls: battle flags and photographs and a number of combat medals from a variety of units. Annja leaned in to take a closer look at one of the photographs and recoiled in horror when she recognized it as an image of the famed entrance gate to the Auschwitz death camp, the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes One Free, clearly visible above the gate.
It took all of her effort to keep her expression neutral as she turned from the photo and looked toward the man they had come to see.
He was blue-eyed and blond like the guards, but nowhere near as imposing a figure with his soft body and thinning hair. He tried to offset these traits with his wardrobe; if Annja wasn’t mistaken, he was wearing a full Waffen SS colonel’s uniform, minus the hat, which was sitting on the corner of his desk, the Werhmacht eagle and Death’s Head insignias facing his guests and polished to a high shine. Annja wanted to be sick, but refused to give him the satisfaction.
Their host was not alone. Several of his followers lounged on chairs and sofas spread throughout the room, and Annja felt their attention like a physical thing.
The man they had apparently come to see smiled across the room at them. “Mr. Albrecht!” he said to Garin. “Good to see you again! I see you’ve brought guests. Come, come.”
He snapped his fingers and two of his flunkies brought chairs for the three of them to sit on, placing them in front of the desk.
Annja took note of the way the chairs were arranged and of how they were at a lower height than the one their host was sitting in, making them seem like penitents before a throne, and thought, What a petty little man.
Garin pretended not to notice the arrangement, stepping forward and extending his hand to shake the club owner’s as if they were old friends before taking the middle seat. Paul settled into the one on his left and Annja into the one on his right.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your companions?” their host said teasingly.
“Ah, forgive me, of course,” Garin replied in a near-perfect Texas accent.
“Paul, Annja…this is Hans Stuggart.”
Annja nodded and smiled, despite the fact that for all his pleasantness, Stuggart was giving her a case of the major creeps.
“Hans’s father served the Fatherland in the war and Hans has done what he can to maintain his father’s ideals. I believe he is the perfect man to help us with our task.”
Smiles all around.
“What can I do for you, Klaus?” Stuggart said, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers, like a schoolmaster listening to the conclusions of those less intelligent than he.
“The three of us were going through the papers in a private collection, cataloging it for the client, when we came upon something written in a kind of code that we’ve not seen before.
“Remembering your fondness for this sort of thing, I thought we’d ask for your assistance in identifying it.”
Stuggart frowned, clearly feeling the task was beneath him. “German military codes are well-documented. I’m sure you can find someone—”
Garin interrupted. “Based on other evidence at our disposal, we have reason to believe that this particular code was used between the Führer and only his most trusted associates.”
That piqued Hans’s interest; Annja could see it in his eyes.
“You’ve brought it with you?”
Garin nodded. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a piece of paper and passed it over to Stuggart. As he did so, Annja got enough of a glimpse of it to know that it was just a small portion of the actual coded message they had found in Hitler’s letter.
Inwardly, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Stuggart glanced at the paper after taking it from Garin and then, sitting up straighter, looked at it again, this time with much more focus and intensity. His excitement was obvious. As the others looked on, Stuggart pulled a pad of paper from elsewhere on the desktop and began writing something on it in earnest, then he made a note on the paper itself.
Annja looked over at the other two with a raised eyebrow and then back at Stuggart, who was now muttering to himself as he continued making notes.
After a few minutes Stuggart stopped, took a deep breath and looked up at Garin.
“May I ask where you acquired this?”
“As I said, we were cataloging—”
“I know that!” Stuggart snapped. “Whose collection and what else was contained with it?”
It was as if a curtain of steel dropped over Garin’s face. He sat back, expressionless, and simply stared at their host without saying anything.
Far greater men had withered under that stare, Annja knew, and it didn’t take Stuggart long to feel the menace now emanating from Garin.
He smoothed his tie and put on a gracious face once more.
“Klaus,” he said, in an obsequious tone, “please forgive me. I let my excitement get the better of me.”
Garin’s brow furrowed in indecision. “Perhaps we should be going…”
“I won’t hear of it,” Stuggart said firmly. “I have offended you and for that I apologize. It will not happen again, I promise you. As chance would have it, I do know something of this code. May I share that with you?”
Annja looked on as Garin played the man like a fiddle, appearing to be thinking about it a second time and then agreeing in the interests of maintaining their relationship.
“If I’m not mistaken, and I don’t believe that I am, what you have here is a fragment of a message using one of the Innenkreis codes.”
Paul spoke up for the first time. “Innenkreis?”
Stuggart glanced in his direction and frowned. “You look German. What’s your surname?”
“Krug
mann.”
“With an Aryan name like that I would think you would speak your native tongue.”
Paul opened his mouth to say something, but Annja jumped in so as to distract Stuggart’s attention away from him. She and Garin might be used to this kind of subterfuge, but she doubted that Paul was.
“It means inner circle, doesn’t it?”
Stuggart turned his pale blue eyes on her. “Yes, that’s correct.”
“Whose inner circle?” she asked.
She knew the answer, but figured she might as well play to the man’s ego.
It seemed to do the trick. Their host looked smug as he said, “Hitler’s.”
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Stuggart went on. “It has been rumored for many years that the Fürher developed a set of codes that were specifically designed for the men in his inner circle, those he trusted beyond all others. Each code was unique to its owner, so that no one other than that individual could read it. Himmler, Goebbels, Brandt, Bormann, Hewel—they all had codes assigned to them.
“The Führer blended his love of the esoteric into the functionality of the codes, making use of magical symbolism, ancient texts and runic characters, which was one of the reasons that the codes were supposedly so difficult to crack.”
“You say supposedly,” Garin remarked, leaving the question open.
Stuggart nodded. “As I said, for many years the codes were just rumor, nothing more. Then a fragment of a letter using such a code turned up in an auction of wartime papers in East Berlin in 1979. Later analysis showed that it was the code assigned to Himmler.”
Annja put two and two together. “You were the specialist who broke the code, weren’t you?”
Stuggart nodded.
Annja wasn’t fooled by his air of humility; it was as fake as a three-dollar bill. But if he could help her break this code…
Their host directed their attention to the code fragment in front of them. “Himmler’s code combined the letters of two different alphabets—in that case ancient Greek and Coptic—to create a third and it was in this language that all correspondence was written.”
“Similar to the way the Americans used Navajo code talkers,” Paul piped in.
“Correct. This code seems to do the same.” He pointed to the third symbol from the left. “Take this character, for instance. This would appear to be a combination of the old Nordic rune for Y, this rake-looking section here, with the Enochian letter for M, which is this B-like portion here.”
Annja could feel her pulse quickening. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see the individual letters and how they were combined to create the third, new symbol.
“And these here, the Enochian P with the Norse F perhaps.”
“What’s Enochian?” Paul and Garin asked, almost simultaneously.
Without looking up, Stuggart replied, “The language of the angels.”
At their looks of disbelief, Annja filled in a bit more detail. “In the late sixteen hundreds, a mystic by the name of John Dee claimed that the language of the heavens had been revealed to him by a group of angels. In concert with his partner, a spiritual medium named Edward Kelley, Dee wrote down the alphabet that made up this so-called language and named it Enochian, after the Book of Enoch, a protocanonical text.”
Stuggart worked in silence for a few moments and then looked up.
“Is there more?” he asked Garin.
“More what?”
“More of this coded message.”
Garin shook his head. “No, that’s all we’ve found to date.”
Stuggart stared at him as if judging whether or not he was telling the truth. Garin met his gaze with a calm look of his own that gave nothing away.
“That’s…unfortunate,” Stuggart said at last.
Annja slid forward to the edge of her seat, readying herself in case Stuggart decided to stop being the gracious host and tried to muscle a bit more information out of them with the help of his flunkies. “Unfortunate? Why’s that?” she asked.
“It seems that this is an incomplete sample. While it would appear to make use of both Norse runes and Enochian script, the resulting translation is utter gibberish. It doesn’t actually say anything.”
“So how would a larger sample help?” Paul wanted to know.
“It would tell us if there was a third language mixed in with the others, for one.”
“That seems rather complicated, doesn’t it?”
Stuggart laughed. “Maybe for you, but the Führer was a genius.”
A genius? No, Annja thought. A megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur and an inflated sense of self-worth? Yes.
“So you’re saying that you can’t decipher this?” Garin’s tone had decidedly cooled, but Stuggart didn’t seem to pick up on it.
“Not without the rest of the document,” their host replied. “Go back and search those archives again. I’m sure it’s there somewhere. When you find it, bring it back here and I’ll be happy to crack it wide open for you. Without it, well, my hands are tied.”
Annja didn’t believe him for a second. He’d crack the code, she had no doubt about that. But he didn’t seem like the kind of individual who would simply do so out of the kindness of his heart, regardless of his past relationship with Garin.
That’s another thing, she thought. What the heck has Garin been doing associating with the likes of this fool?
She considered asking him when they were alone later, but ultimately decided against it. She knew Garin had his share of shady business dealings; perhaps it was better that she didn’t know the details.
Stuggart rose, signaling the end of their meeting and the others got reluctantly to their feet. Annja reached across the desk and took back the piece of paper with the fragment of the code on it. Stuggart gave her a dirty look, but she simply smiled in return.
If he thought they were leaving a sample of the code in his hands…
He still had his notes, but without the original she didn’t think they would be all that helpful. If he did manage to figure it out later, using what he had at his disposal, he would still need the rest of the message to do anything with it, so she decided not to push things.
“Thank you for your help, Hans,” Garin said, leaning across the desk to shake the man’s hand again. “If we find anything else, you’ll be the first to know.”
The man smiled graciously. “A pleasure as always, Klaus. Please, enjoy the club while you are here. On the house.”
Garin said they might just do that and then the the three of them were escorted out by a pair of Stuggart’s thugs.
Annja could feel the club owner’s stare even after the door had closed behind them.
Chapter 17
“All right, so now what?” Paul asked.
The three of them were seated at an outdoor table in front of a quaint little Parisian café in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. They’d gone straight there from Stuggart’s underground club, needing a change of scenery to help them forget about the place as quickly as possible.
“We keep trying,” Annja answered while looking over the menu. It had been hours since she’d eaten and even the distaste she felt for Stuggart and his cronies couldn’t quite dampen her appetite.
Besides, fueling up now, she knew, was simply smart tactics. Who knew what lay ahead of them?
“That’s all well and good, but it seems like we’re at a dead end. Where do we go from here?” Paul asked.
Annja wasn’t sure. Her initial wave of excitement at seeing how the separate alphabets were combined into one had swiftly passed when Stuggart revealed that the knowledge didn’t really help them. The translated “text” wasn’t text at all but gibberish.
She supposed she could consult some of her friends in academia, experts in ancient languages and the like, to see if they might have any suggestions, but that would take time, and time wasn’t a commodity they had a lot of. Even sitting there and eating felt like a betrayal. Here she was, enjoying
a late dinner beneath the lights of the Eiffel Tower, and somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic her friend was spending another evening in captivity. She wanted to be doing something, wanted to feel as though they were making headway, but she didn’t know where to turn.
Paul was right. Now what?
She didn’t know.
The server came with their meals and they dug in. As hungry as she was, Annja finished before the other two, so while she waited she decided to once again tackle the puzzle in front of them.
She dug out the scrap of paper Garin had given to Stuggart and stared at what the man had written there. There were four groups of symbols that Stuggart had broken down into their component parts, one from each of the two ancient alphabets. He had written the corresponding English letters beneath them and when viewed that way they certainly didn’t say anything recognizable.
But then an idea hit her.
What if there was more than one code? What if you had to solve the first layer in order to get the key to solving the second?
She stared at the collection of symbols, both the first set and the translated English letters beneath, looking for some connection between them. She didn’t see anything off the top of her head, but she didn’t have either the Norse runic alphabet or the Enochian alphabet in front of her for reference.
That, she could fix.
“Paul, give me your phone,” she said, as she pulled her own out of her pocket.
A quick internet search brought up a picture of the runes of the Old Norse alphabet on her phone. A similar search brought up an image of the letters in the Enochian alphabet on Paul’s. She began checking letters against symbols, looking for a pattern.
“You’ve got something, haven’t you?” Garin asked.
Annja nodded, but didn’t look away from the information in front of her. It was there, she knew it was, she could feel it in her bones. Right there in front of her, waiting to be…
“I’ve got it!” she shouted, and then ducked in embarrassment when she realized everyone nearby was now staring in her direction thanks to her outburst.
