by Ahern, Jerry
will achieve nothing.
“In order to protect our interests,” John Rourke went on slowly, “we have placed our half of the trade in cryogenic sleep.” Hauptsturmfuhrer Spitz’s eyes hardened, brightened with some inner passion, perhaps hatred. His face was otherwise expressionless. “In addition to the usual cryogenic gas, there’s a second gas, in a canister inside the cryogenic chamber. That second gas is cyanide gas. You’re familiar with its properties?”
SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Spitz nodded curtly, said nothing.
“Then you realize, Captain,” John Rourke continued, refusing to use the SS rank, “that even with the vastly decelerated metabolic rate of a cryogenic sleeper, one whiff would still kill the occupant of the chamber before any remedial action could be taken. I have a control, so does Mr. Rubenstein, so do the other two members of our party. As a backup system, if the cryogenic chamber is not opened in a specific, rather unnatural fashion, the cyanide gas will be released into the chamber’s atmosphere, regardless of the condition of the control units. If you enjoy chess, then you’re in luck because it’s your move,” John Rourke concluded.
Hauptsturmfuhrer Spitz said nothing, did nothing for a very long moment, then rocked back on his heels once. “You will forgive me, Herr Doctor General, but I must consult my superiors.”
“Virtually everybody in the human race is your superior, pal,” Paul Rubenstein said through clenched teeth.
Spitz glared at Rubenstein for an instant, saluted John Rourke with the riding crop, then turned on his heel and walked back the way he had come, toward his tracked vehicle—and, presumably, a private radio communication.
Deitrich Zimmer’s king was in check.
Twenty-one
Deitrich Zimmer read the message as it was handed to him.
He’d been perusing Sarah Rourke’s chart, and, after returning the message blank to the man who had brought it, he continued reading Sarah Rourke’s chart. All vital signs, all signs of electrical activity within the brain, everything was promising. He looked at the physician he had stationed by her side in the recovery room. “She is doing satisfactorily. Be vigilant.”
“Yes, Herr Doctor!”
The physician saluted, of course, but Deitrich Zimmer merely raised his right hand palm outward, then turned away.
The messenger was still waiting for him, by the door leading into the recovery room of the clinic. “Herr Doctor! There is a reply?”
Deitrich Zimmer smiled. “I will deliver my reply personally, not to the Hauptsturmfuhrer, but to the good Herr Doctor instead.”
Zimmer said nothing more, turned on his heel and
began walking along the grey corridor. The clinic here was the best he had ever had, ideally suited to all his purposes. Required subjects were brought to him, as many as needed for the perfection of a new surgical technique. The process by which he had, he was quite certain, saved the life of Sarah Rourke had required the use of sixteen persons, the last nine of them women. The last four remained alive, the final two in excellent condition, as well as they were when brought to him for surgical experimentation. The others who lived experienced various degrees of disability, but all in the quest for perfection, their sacrifices, however personally great, insignificant in the grander scheme of things.
With his new procedures, he could not only successfully enter into the deepest recesses of the human brain to remove some object, he could also place something there. That idea intrigued him.
As a young man, Deitrich Zimmer had read many banned books, and the great majority of those were from among the works of science fiction written throughout the Twentieth Century. The theme of many works dealt with man creating man. The engineering requirements for the construction of a manlike robotic entity had not yet been met. Doubtless, had five centuries of warfare not intervened, either civilization would have collapsed of its own weight or entered into a new era of technology Before the Night of the War and now undreamed of.
Yet, if a man could be made to perform independently of his own free will, perhaps that would be the greatest robotic creation of all.
A man.Or a woman.
Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna sat a little distance away from John Rourke, her eyes on the Alpine troops. The men—at least from her Twentieth Century perspective she assumed that they were all men— seemed impervious to the cold. She was not. A silk scarf was tied over her hair and ears, bound closed at the nape of the neck, covering part of her forehead as well. A similar scarf covered her from the bridge of the nose to where the heavy turtleneck she wore over her jumpsuit rose to beneath it at her throat. The snow goggles which protected her eyes covered what little exposed skin there was between the two bandannas.
Her M-16 rifle lay beside her on the open cargo platform. She sat there on a warmed air cushion, wiggling her toes inside her boots, drawing up her fingers inside her gloves, folding them into the palms.
She looked at John Rourke. The man she had wanted as her lover for five centuries would, if they survived, be her father-in-law.
Life and insanity were synonymous.
She had always heard about women who tried to remold the men with whom they fell in love. She had always thought that this was disgraceful. Now she felt slightly differently. She hoped that she could just ever so slightly remold Michael Rourke. She loved his brashness, feared his contemplative self-sacrifice. Natalia could not let the son become the father, for his sake more than her own.
Had John Rourke been the character in a Shakespearean tragedy, his fatal flaw would have been his perfection. Unlike the creations of Shakespeare,
however, this fatal flaw would not be his undoing—she hoped.
John’s face was masked in a toque, his dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses replaced with goggles similar to her own. Although she could not see him clearly she knew what lay in those eyes and that face: the reckless uncertainty of improvisational genius.
And, if he had been wearing mittens rather than gloves, she might have guessed that he was keeping his fingers crossed.
Twenty-Two
John Rourke’s eye muscles tensed.
The man exiting from one of the seven newly arrived tracked vehicles was Deitrich Zimmer—the man who had kidnapped his son, turning the boy into something vile, evil—the man who had also nearly murdered Sarah. Reflexively, John Rourke reached toward his guns, but did not touch them.
Natalia whispered, “Easy.”
Annie came up to stand beside John Rourke, between him and her husband. “If I’d never understood the concept of revenge, I’d understand it now, I think.”
“And we can’t touch him,” Paul said, an edge to his voice.
“Not yet,” John Rourke almost whispered. “Not yet.”
The years had, evidently, been kind to Deitrich Zimmer. Although logic indicated that Zimmer was, chronologically, in his sixties—these days essentially middle-aged—Zimmer looked more like a vigorous man in his late forties. What was visible of Zimmer’s
hair from beneath the foraging cap he wore was yellowish white. There were lines in his face, but somehow they denoted strength.
Deitrich Zimmer stopped just a few yards from them, and through the goggles Zimmer wore his eyes looked bright blue and clear. As he spoke, his teeth almost sparkled. “You know who I am.”
“Of course,” Rourke nodded.
“And I know you would wish to kill me, but do not because I hold the power of life and death over your wife.”
“As do I over the man in the cryogenic chamber,” Rourke responded. “Your flunkey mentioned Wolfgang Mann. But we haven’t seen him yet.”
“Yes,” Zimmer said, smiling almost conspiratorially, as if he were about to share a secret with them. “Well, you see, we had not anticipated your charming little ploy with the cyanide gas. I assume you were not misleading my officer?”
“You assume correctly. The gas cylinder has been designed so that you can test its contents, should you feel that is actually necessary,” Rourke told h
im.
“No,” Zimmer shrugged. “I would never doubt you, a colleague. No, but there is a bit of a problem with the little surprise I had arranged for you with Generaloberst Mann. But back to that in a moment. A question, first, if you will.”
Rourke’s eyes were on Zimmer’s eyes. And those eyes were madness incarnate. “Of course.”
“Do you expect to escape with your lives?”
John Rourke smiled. He took one of the thin, dark tobacco cigars from a pocket within his parka and lit it in the blue yellow flame of his battered Zippo. Rourke answered through an exhalation of blue grey smoke. “Of course.”
“Very good!” Zimmer seemed genuinely pleased. “I have learned that one should never accept defeat, even when it seems that all else but defeat is impossibly elusive. I applaud you.”
“Generaloberst Mann. You were going to tell us about him,” Paul said.
John Rourke exhaled smoke through his nostrils. “Yes.”
“I will have him come to you now, as a symbol of good faith. Because, you see, I have a little added request before I release to you Sarah Rourke.”
“Request,” Natalia said, just repeating the word.
“What kind of request?” Annie asked, her voice almost a whisper.
Doctor Zimmer smiled at her, his eyes like death. “I believe that you have brought—” and he looked at John Rourke when he said this—“our son back to me with the added touch of the cynanide gas in order to force me to perform an operation on your lovely wife, our son’s mother. Anticipating that, I performed such an operation.”
John Rourke’s hands balled into fists and he did not know whether to shoot the man or—“She’s—”
“Your wife will be fully restored,” Zimmer said, smiling, Rourke breathing, Annie grabbing at his arm, Paul clearing his throat. “In a few days, she should be up and around and active. She’s already been walked a bit, to promote proper circulation.”
“And Sarah’s faculties?” Natalia asked, her voice barely audible.
“As best I can ascertain, she is as she was before she
was shot. Whenever one enters the brain, there is always the possibility of some very minor damage, the loss of a small memory byte here or there. But that can be restored. There was little cosmetic damage from the entry wound, but that has been taken care of as well. I believe the old Americanism was, ‘good as new’?”
“I don’t know whether to thank you or kill you,” John Rourke said, his voice a low rasping whisper.
“Thanking me would be out of character to the situation would it not? And, certainly, prematurely killing me would only precipitate your own deaths in the same instant as my own. I will have Generaloberst Mann brought to you. He can even assist you in the little task I have in mind.”
“What is that task?” Paul asked.
Zimmer laughed. “One that you in particular, as a Jew, should find most morally challenging. You see, you will have the choice, Herr Rubenstein, of failing your friends, your family, or being the greatest traitor to your rather disgusting kind who has ever lived.”
Paul started forward.
Annie, already holding his arm, grabbed at him harder. John Rourke said nothing.
Deitrich Zimmer said, “In effect, it is poetic irony. A Jew helping to restore to the world of the living—Adolf Hitler.”
Twenty-Three
Wolfgang Mann walked with the same almost casual, natural straightness John Rourke remembered from their first encounter more than a century and a quarter ago outside the Eden Project encampment.
He wore a black parka over black fatigue pants, his trouser bottoms Moused into black jackboots.
The hood of Generaloberst Mann’s parka was down. Mann’s sandy colored hair, with just a hint of grey, looked very short, shorter than Mann’s usual modified military cut, almost as if the hair were just growing back from being shaved away.
But that was impossible, of course, because Mann had only been in Zimmer’s hands for days, not weeks.
John Rourke very suddenly had an icy cold feeling in the very pit of his stomach.
Mann walked toward them without blinking, without acknowledging them, the high-cheekboned face expressionless.
Mann stopped a few feet from them.
“What is wrong with him?” Natalia whispered, tak
ing a step toward him, the M-16 in her hands shaking slightly.
“I had originally programmed your Generaloberst to kill Herr Rubenstein as a—”
“What?” Rourke rasped, walking between Zimmer and the others, going up to Mann.
“As the Jew, I naturally felt Herr Rubenstein was the least important among you. But, since your introduction of the cyanide gas, I decided to alter that program. Generaloberst Mann is quite harmless to you now. See?” And Rourke’s eyes flickered toward Zimmer as Zimmer looked at Mann and commanded, “Kneel in the snow, Herr Generaloberst!”
Wolfgang Mann dropped to his knees.
“Kiss the boot of Herr Doctor Rourke, Generaloberst!”
Wolfgang Mann lowered his face toward John Rourke’s feet, but John Rourke dropped to his own knees, grabbing Mann’s head, drawing Mann’s head against his chest, his eyes scanning over Mann’s scalp beneath the close cropped hair. There was a spot closer cropped still, but there was no scar. Mann tried pulling away from him, tried carrying out Zimmer’s order. Rourke held him tighter, but his eyes shifted upward toward Zimmer.
Zimmer was laughing. “He is quite perfected.” Then Zimmer called toward the vehicle which had brought him over the snow, “Send out the captured American pilot.”
For a moment John Rourke held his breath. There was an answering reply, and as Rourke looked toward the vehicle, a youngish woman—Emma’s age—stepped from the vehicle. Wearing only a dark blue knee-length shift, barefoot and seemingly oblivious to the cold, she walked toward them. “Stop, Lieutenant Klein,” Zimmer called.
It was then that John Rourke noticed the pistol in the woman’s bare right hand.
“Put the pistol to your head and pull the trigger, Lieutenant Klein.”
John Rourke was up, moving, running toward her, a blur of motion beside him as Paul and Annie started toward the girl.
The pistol was an ordinary cartridge arm, and in the same instant as the shot echoed across the frigid air the left side of the girl’s temple blew out and away from her head, and her body began to crumple lifelessly into the snow.
John Rourke stopped running.
Annie and Paul passed him.
John Rourke looked at Natalia. The muzzle of her weapon had shifted, now halfway between Wolfgang Mann—his face was in the snow, his lips trying to kiss the boot that was no longer there—and Zimmer, who was laughing.
John Rourke said nothing.
Zimmer very abruptly stopped laughing. “You see, Lieutenant Klein was an earlier experiment. She was really very automationlike. On the other hand, Generaloberst Mann, Herr Doctor General Rourke, is perfectly natural in everything he does, unless I order otherwise. If you fail me, Herr Doctor General, I will reenter the brain of your wife and she will be like this, ready to obey my slightest whim, even at the cost of
her own life.”
Rourke started walking very slowly, across the glacier, toward Zimmer.
Zimmer kept talking. “On the other hand, if you cooperate, assuming Martin is well, I will not only restore to you Sarah Rourke but I will disable the device within the brain of Generaloberst Mann.”
John Rourke’s face was so close to Zimmer’s face when Rourke stopped walking that the glowing tip of Rourke’s cigar was inches from Zimmer’s skin.
Zimmer kept smiling. “I should inquire concerning your other son. He is well?”
John Rourke said, “Yes.”
“I take it he was otherwise occupied? I do not see him with you.”
“Michael suffered an arm wound in an assault against a group of Nazi saboteurs a little while ago. It was a knife. There was risk of infection.” Rourke did not lie, be
cause all of what he said was true enough. Zimmer would draw whatever conclusions he might.
“I almost asked myself if you would attempt, Dr. Rourke, to substitute your boy for mine.”
“And what did you almost answer yourself?” John Rourke said, exhaling, breathing, actually feeling lighter in spirit than he had for some time. The truth did that.
“You would not allow the boy to be so foolish, because then you might indeed have your wife restored to you, but your son would be in my hands.”
“A man would have to be a fool to risk losing so much of his family,” John Rourke almost whispered.
“You will bring me the frozen remains of Adolf
Hitler. From those remains, I will gain the genetic material with which to recreate him.”
“What sort of horror or science fiction have you been into recently, Zimmer? Robbing graves? Building a Frankenstein’s monster?”
“No, a savior.”
Twenty-Four
Lifeless-looking, Wolfgang Mann stood on the glacier, almost at attention.
Deitrich Zimmer, hood up now against the growing cold, a cigarette lit between his gloved fingers, said, “At the close of World War II, when the Fuhrer knew full well that he would be hideously tortured at the hands of the Allied invaders, and that all sorts of confessions of lies would be attributed to him, he did the courageous thing.”
“He shot himself in the head with a Walther PP series pistol,” Natalia whispered.
Zimmer smiled. “You know your history, Fraulein Major. The Allies knew, however, that even in death the power of the Fuhrer would only continue to grow. So that his body might not become the object of the veneration it so deserved in future generations, it was spirited out of Germany aboard a B-17 bomber, flown to a secret airfield in the eastern portion of the United States, then taken by truck in dead of night to a
location in the northern portion of the state of New York, near what was then the St. Lawrence River. It was a mountainous area. Deep within the mountain there was a storage facility.
