Swastika (36 page)

Another peek convinced him to rush the mock room in which Hitler and Eva Braun had killed themselves. It, too, was vacant of life. The door to the left, which should have led to Eva Braun’s boudoir, was bolted shut. Faint music could be heard from the room to his right, where the beam from a film projector seemed to animate the ceiling.

Hitler’s bedroom.

Dane peered in.

The chamber was empty.

Or so he thought.

For what the Mountie didn’t see was the eyeball at the peephole in the false wall that hid the staircase to the mansion on University Hill.

Crouched in the well at the bottom of the secret staircase, the Aryan was ready to spring his trap. His eye followed the Mountie as he entered the bedroom and checked beneath the cot to make certain that no one lurked there. That done, the cop stood up and turned to face the bed, where the Aryan had arrayed a collage of artifacts on the blanket to distract the intruder so his back would be to the peephole.

Having searched the bunker for danger, Dane felt safe enough to let down his guard. His gun hand lowered to his side until the muzzle was aimed at the floor. Obviously, the Nazi killer was in the mansion above, where he had just reset the perimeter alarm, unaware of Dane’s presence down in the bunker. Because the blood smeared across the floor belonged to the Minotaur victim, there was no hostage for Special X to worry about. Dane could call Jackie and have the ERT team storm the mansion so the Mounties would once more get their man. And if it came to a prosecution, there was evidence spread all over this bed.

With footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will
flickering over his head, Dane perused the newspaper clippings from
The Vancouver Times.
Individual letters had been cut out and arranged to form the German word
Untermenschen.
They encircled a leather-bound book engraved with some sort of family crest. Only when he picked it up and flipped to the title page did Dane realize that the hide was human skin.

Another patch of flayed skin, with a different crest, stuck out from where the lid met the bottom of an oblong case like the one that held the dagger back in the map room. The plaque on the lid also bore the name of SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher. As he raised the lid to see the full tattoo, and noticed that the scabbard inside was empty, Dane thought, I wonder if the weapon is in the killer’s fist?

The answer to that question came swift and sharp. The split-second warning of a squeaky hinge galvanized Dane to action. But before he could whirl around to face whatever had caused that squeak, he felt the cold steel of a sword blade run him through from back to front.

The sharp pain caused Dane to drop his pistol to the floor. A moment later, as the sword was wrenched back from his midriff for a second lunge, he inadvertently kicked his only weapon and sent it spiraling under the bed. If only he hadn’t left those Pentagon gizmos back in the coach house! Before the swordsman could finish him off with a more severe stab, Dane dodged to his right through the door he had entered, grabbing the frame with his fingers to stop himself from crumpling to the floor and swinging about at ninety degrees to propel himself toward the corridor.

Again, he caught the jamb to break a sprawling tumble. The resulting quarter turn flung him along the corridor wall. Just behind, the tip of the sword scraped across his back as the lunging fencer overreached his mark.

His pursuer stumbled trying to recover from his forward motion, and that gave the bleeding cop a chance to claw along the wall toward the sealed tunnel door. In jerking sideways at the squeak of the hinge, Dane had caused the sword to miss his spine. The blade had passed through one kidney, and maybe his bowel, in the space between his ribcage and his pelvis. A potentially fatal wound if he didn’t get help soon, but it didn’t cripple him in this desperate run for his life, powered by the biggest surge of adrenaline he had ever felt.

Gasping, Dane pivoted around yet another doorframe. Crying out in pain, he stepped up onto the seat of the chair in the map room and scooped the SS dagger out of the open wooden case with his free hand.

With Ernst Streicher’s razor-sharp sword gripped in both hands to cut off the Mountie’s head, the Nazi rushed into the map room for the kill. But before he could take a swipe, he was struck from above by the plunging dagger. With all his might, Dane drove the dagger’s SS motto,
“Mein Ehre heisst Treue,”
down into the Aryan’s brain.

The dead man and the bleeding man crashed into the corridor, one on top of the other. Struggling to push himself away, Dane puzzled over this guy’s identity.

He had never seen him before tonight.

Right now, however, Dane had a greater concern, for he knew that his wound was potentially fatal, and that if he didn’t get medical attention soon, his blood pressure would plummet as his system bled out.

Luckily, he had phoned no one since his call to Jackie, so he fished his cellphone out of his pocket …

God, don’t let it have broken in the fall.

… punched the Send button, and was connected to her.

“Corporal Hett.”

The weak signal was barely audible in the bunker.

“It’s Dane. I’ve been stabbed, Jackie. I’m in a bunker beneath the address I gave you. The passageway in from the coach house out back is sealed. Break into the house and see if a dog can find another way down to me.”

“What about the killer?”

“I killed him,” said Dane.

“Keep the line open. We’re coming in.”

*    *    *

Dane thought he was hallucinating from loss of blood when he saw Cort Jantzen step into the corridor with a gun pointed at his head. Stark fear caused the reporter’s face to twitch, and his voice cracked with strain as he begged the wounded cop, “Don’t try anything stupid, Dane.”

It took a moment for the Mountie to grasp what was going on. The lawyer in him had outsmarted the cop in him by dreaming up a more exotic psychological profile for the Swastika Killer than was necessary. He should have remembered the principle of Occam’s razor: “Assumptions introduced to explain a thing must not be multiplied beyond necessity. When multiple explanations are available, the simplest version is preferred.”

The blood on the splinter from the stake in the Congo Man’s head had led Dane astray. The lab tech’s description of the DNA “twin within” had induced Dane to theorize that their quarry was two dissociated Hyde identities in one fractured mind. In fact, the Swastika Killer and the Stealth Killer were actually two separate and distinct psychos, both working out of this Nazi bunker.

Dane concluded that the blond lying dead on the bunker floor was the Stealth Killer. Not only did he match the descriptions of the Phantom Valley Ranch suspect provided by the upcountry Mounties and those at the rendering plant, but the sword he’d used to attack Dane would cause the kind of pigsticker wounds they’d seen in the Skunk Mine.

That left the Swastika Killer.

It took little imagination to conjure up the psychological traumas that the parents in the waxworks exhibit had inflicted on their son in the Hitler Youth uniform. His hard Nazi father and his oversexed mother had fractured the boy’s mind not into good and bad Nazi killers, as Dane had originally theorized, but into a good crime reporter and an evil Nazi killer.

Now that he saw them side by side in the flickering corridor, Dane caught the features of the waxwork boy in the flesh and blood of the man he knew as Cort Jantzen.

Who was aiming the pistol at his own temple.

*    *    *

The Germans have words for concepts that have no direct translations in English. Words like
angst, schadenfreude, zeitgeist,
and what was going on here.

Selbstmord.

The noise of glass smashing from an all-out ERT blitzkrieg on the mansion above echoed down into the bunker. As he watched the face before him “do the switch” between the Jekyll of Cort and the Hyde of the Swastika Killer, alternating almost as quickly as the light and dark throbbing of the bunker bulbs, the sergeant grasped the connection between the psychological Siamese twins.

To cope with whatever his parents had done to create an
Über
boy worthy of the master race, the kid had dissociated all that fascist trauma into a Swastika identity. The peril that came from being tied to the Stealth Killer had probably forced Cort to protect himself by working as a crime reporter for
The Vancouver Times.
The news media would be the first to know if Special X picked up the trail of the Stealth Killer. When that finally occurred, Cort’s stress level reached a crisis point, and the split-off identity of the Swastika Killer had to seize the spotlight and launch a spree of killings that would draw the attention of the psycho-hunters away from the Stealth Killer until both halves of the fractured mind figured out what to do.

What had Cort said as they were standing over the Minotaur in the UBC labyrinth?

“This killer is
really
into myths. I grew up on this stuff.”

So strongly dissociated were their separate identities that the Swastika Killer had ended up playing a cat-and-mouse game with Jantzen over the myth angle of the vigilante killings. Each identity remained so tightly locked in his mental bunker at this precise moment of the hostage-taking crisis that neither realized that they occupied the same brain.

A brain at which the muzzle of the pistol pointed.

“It’s over,” said Dane.

The sound of army boots descending the staircase from above filled the bunker.

“Then we’ll all die together,” snarled the Swastika Killer.

The lights pulsed brighter.

“No!” beseeched Cort, doing the switch. His face twisted with fright.

The lights dimmed to herald the fall of the Fourth Reich.

“Yes!” the
Über
man shouted triumphantly, switching back. “They didn’t take Hitler alive, and they won’t take me! A bullet for you, then a bullet for the cop, then a bullet in my brain!”

The lights pulsed brighter.

“No!” Cort screamed, caught in the spotlight of consciousness. “I don’t want to—”

Bwam!

May 29, Now

Editor Ed was in a foul mood as he ripped open the pile of morning mail on his desk. The identity of the Swastika Killer had not become clear until after last night’s deadline for today’s press run of
The Vancouver Times.
Tomorrow morning would see everything revealed on the front page of the paper for which Cort had worked. Hard to think of a worse case of investigative reporting than that.

How embarrassing.

While he was still in that funk, Ed tore open an envelope with no return address and read the Aryan’s letter detailing the history of the Streicher Nazis.

Who says you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?

Ed got up, opened his office door, and yelled across the newsroom to his golden girl, “Bess, get in here!”

Beijing, People’s Republic of China
June 5,
Now

In the world-view of the Red Guards, space belonged to China.

A crater on the moon is named for Wan Hu, a legendary Chinese explorer who was killed in an ill-fated attempt to reach the heavens by strapping forty-seven rockets to a chair. The Maoist anthem “The East Is Red” still broadcasts to the heavens from a satellite that was launched back when China began space exploration, in 1970. China’s program to reach the moon is called Chang’e, for the fairy that soared heavenward after mistakenly eating medicine that made her fly. “I will not disappoint the motherland,” said Yang Liwei, the first Chinese
taikonaut
to orbit the world, in 2003. “And I will gain honor for the People’s Liberation Army and for the Chinese nation.” His spacecraft, carried aloft by a Long March rocket, was named
Shenzhou,
meaning “divine vessel.” Plans were now afoot to send a rocket to the moon, to ring the globe with satellites aimed at improving the accuracy of Chinese ballistic missiles, and to build a space station within ten years.

Chairman Mao would have been honored.

In the world-view of the Red Guards, China should also dominate the earth.

For most of the four thousand to five thousand years of recorded time, China was history’s preeminent culture. The Chinese saw themselves as a middle kingdom between heaven and the rest of barbaric humanity. Their long humiliation began in the 1840s, when British invaders seized Hong Kong after the first Opium War and imported that addictive drug from India to foist on the Chinese. A pack of European and American plunderers had followed. Were it not for the revolution led by Chairman Mao, those jackals would still be feasting off the middle kingdom.

But no more.

Today, only one adversary persisted: the United States. America had assumed the threat where the Europeans left off. In addition to its military bases in Japan and South Korea, the U.S. was now aligning with the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the warlords of Central Asia. These alliances were supposedly meant to help the Americans hunt the terrorists of the post-9/11 world, but in reality they were designed to contain China within its present borders. Why else set up listening posts in Mongolia, just across the border from China’s Lop Nor missile- and nuclear-testing sites? Why else bury silos in Alaska for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Shield?

One reason.

To dominate China.

In the world-view of the Red Guards, a giant was rising in the East to overtake the globe.

China’s economy was expanding so fast that it would soon dwarf America’s. The People’s Liberation Army had several million boots on the ground, and it was firmly in control of China’s space program. In the 1960s, when Chairman Mao had loosed the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution on the land, the men in this room, then in their teens, had stomped out counterrevolutionary tendencies with bloodthirsty brutality. The Red Guards today, a faction of the People’s Liberation Army, were charged with arming China to the teeth. As a superpower, China would succeed in its fanatical quest for respect, and world dominance could be wrenched from the hands of the lesser race that had caused its humiliation.

In China, it was most important to “have face.”

And the Chinese take the long view when it comes to revenge.

It was to that end that these men met in the Beijing headquarters of China’s “black world” to assess the documents that had been delivered anonymously to the country’s consulate on Granville Street in Vancouver. Written in German and stamped with the Nazi swastika, the papers seemed to be Second World War blueprints and notes for an otherworldly war machine.

“What powers it?” one Red Guard asked the German translator.

“Anti-gravity.”

Beneath the red stars on their caps, these twenty-first-century warmongers passed curious glances around the circle of the new master race.

“What’s it called?” another asked.

“The Flightwheel,” replied the translator.