Prime Target (20 page)

‘So.' Chadwick jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘The guy back there with the camera, who is he?'

Now Philpott looked as if he had been asked something distasteful. ‘His name is Jonah Tait,' he said. ‘He's a journalist and publisher from New York.'

‘What kind of publisher?'

‘Books and a magazine or two. Something of a crank, some might say, but he undoubtedly has a following.'

The car turned smoothly into a long rising driveway. The chauffeur dropped the speed and manoeuvred past a group of cars parked irregularly at the front of a large pink-and-white house. Chadwick pressed his button again and the screen moved back.

‘Put it over by the trees,' he told the driver. ‘I don't want any of these hot-rodders putting marks on the paintwork.'

They got out and followed another group of new arrivals into the house. In a long reception
room with a sky-blue carpet, upwards of seventy people were standing in small clusters, murmuring and nodding and helping themselves to food and drink from a table running the length of the room. Waiters moved soundlessly among the guests taking empty glasses and providing replacements.

Philpott approached the widow, who was regally ensconced in a huge chair at the farthest corner of the room, surrounded by several other weepy-eyed women.

‘Mrs Gibson.' Philpott approached with folded hands, his eyes sorrowful. ‘My name is Derek Beamish, you have no reason to know who I am. I won't intrude any further on your grief than to say how sorry I am for your loss.'

Ginny thanked him in a whisper. She reached out and touched his hand. He closed his other hand over hers, then withdrew and found a drink. Chadwick and Pearce were beside him before he took the second sip.

‘You were saying,' Chadwick said, ‘about the journalist…'

‘Jonah Tait.'

‘He's doing something on Harold's death?'

‘Well.' Philpott frowned. ‘I gather he plans to produce a book, no less. An exposé. He wants to use the murder as the basis for an examination of Mr Gibson's way of life, his business practices, his relationships with other businessmen, and his financial connections with certain organizations unsympathetic to the Jew and other irritant
minorities. Mr Tait has said his book will offer society a remedy to the likes of Harold Gibson.'

‘Remedy.' Pearce seemed to stiffen at that. He leaned forward so he could look straight at Philpott. ‘How remedy? What's he advocating?'

‘The usual dreary socialist panaceas, inflated with topical hot air.'

‘But you believe he's dangerous, even so?'

‘Dangerous enough, because, as I say, he has followers. And I wouldn't underestimate his ability to argue or make a point. He is a rather gifted man, in a crowd-pleasing way.'

‘You're surely not an admirer of his?' Pearce said.

‘Quite the opposite. But it pays to have a balanced evaluation of the enemy. He's currently setting up a campaign. A friend of mine heard him discuss it at a reception in New York only last week.' Philpott looked across the room for a moment. ‘I'll be frank with you. Jonah Tait's campaign is partly the reason I came to Texas.'

‘Did you know he'd be at the cemetery?' Chadwick said.

‘I didn't expect to see him, no, but it didn't surprise me, either.'

‘Why did you warn me not to tangle with him?'

‘He has a knack of making a legitimate confrontation turn into a racist attack.'

‘So what's this campaign?'

‘He believes in the heavy advance sell. He'll go back to New York with whatever he can pick up
here. When he has manipulated his material to serve his arguments, he'll use it to promote his forthcoming book.'

‘Dangerous, indeed,' Pearce said.

For a minute the three men stood tasting their drinks, looking at each other.

Chadwick finally spoke. ‘Tell us more about this, Mr Beamish.'

‘Whatever I can.'

‘And while you're at it, maybe you'll explain why your interest in Tait's project has brought you to Texas.'

‘I'll be glad to,' Philpott said. ‘But please, call me Derek. It's always Derek to my friends.'

Whitlock rapped twice on the hotel room door and Philpott let him in.

‘You weren't seen?'

‘I'm disappointed you have to ask.' Whitlock took off his sunglasses. ‘I've been all over the hotel, in and out of shops, I even had a Coke in the bar. No one followed me. How did it go at the wake?'

‘Wheels are turning.'

They sat down in easy chairs at opposite sides of the marble-topped coffee table. Whitlock took a sheaf of papers from his pocket and put them down.

‘When I got back from the cemetery this afternoon,' Whitlock said, ‘there was e-mail waiting. Two items. One was a report from Sabrina via your secretary, who doesn't seem to know where you are.'

‘I told my staff they should route any important communiqués directly to you. To make sure they did, I left no address for myself.' Philpott swirled his drink. ‘Of course you may choose to
read that as an admission that I don't want to handle any more responsibility than I can avoid.'

‘As if I'd think that.' Whitlock took out his notebook and opened it at the marker. ‘Sabrina has done a good job. In essence, her report tells us that
JZ
stands for
Juli Zwanzig.
I'll get to that in a moment. She also established that an American, probably Harold Gibson, recruited the gunman, Yaqub Hisham, to murder Emily Selby.' Whitlock tapped the papers lying on the table. ‘A full printout is in there.'

‘So a man who hates Arabs almost as much as he hates blacks and Jews went and hired an Arab to do his killing for him?'

‘That seems to be the case, yes.'

‘Item two?'

‘A German computer file from Mike Graham. I've given you a rough translation. Sabrina could have translated it more stylishly but you've got all the facts. He struck gold.'

‘Give me a summary.'

‘The computer file contains the constitution and objectives of
Juli Zwanzig.'

‘That's July twentieth, right?'

‘Very good. The group consists of men and women, all of them Jews, whose objective is to dismantle a highly secret Nazi outfit called
Jugend von Siegfried -
the Siegfried Youth. I checked with records at Central Intelligence, there's no file on any such organization, so we're talking about a
seriously
secret outfit.'

‘How young are the Siegfried Youth?'

‘Not young at all. Not any more. They were the very last squad of the Hitler Youth, inducted by the Führer himself a few days before Berlin collapsed. Apparently when Hitler addressed the boys in the street at the back of the bunker, he told them they were the embodiment of Siegfried, and years later they adopted the name.'

‘And the men on Emily's list are the survivors of the group.'

‘Right again. She threw a lot of her life into getting that list together. The men on it are sworn to preserve the memory of Adolf Hitler and to suppress Jews by any and all means. A series of funds and other financial arrangements were used to keep the boys together during the formative years.'

‘And they managed to slip through the mid-part of the twentieth century without picking up tracers. That shows remarkable forward planning.'

‘There was a lot of smoke-screening,' Whitlock said. ‘Several of the mechanics of the old Nazi escape routes were the very people who kept the
Jugend von Siegfried
shielded from any kind of public scrutiny. They were brought up and educated together - again, very secretly, at various locations in Switzerland.'

‘They were always kept together?'

‘Yes, and their bonding persisted into adult life, as Hitler intended. But on official records there's no hint of that. Like any cross-section of Germans who were kids during the war, some of these men
have early records, some have none. Some appear to have been adopted, others apparently grew up with foster parents - but it's all meticulously fabricated bunkum. They stayed together until the time came to leak them into society, mostly into prearranged career paths.'

‘Have they lived up to Hitler's hopes?'

‘According to the file Mike sent, the Siegfried Youth is nowadays a well-established covert organization which systematically eliminates Jews and Jewish enterprises.'

‘And
JZ,
I suppose, is dedicated to wiping out the Siegfried Youth.'

‘They certainly are. They're a small amateur band, but they're dedicated.'

‘What's the connection with Emily Selby?'

‘Her father. Johannes Lustig. The organization was formed at his posthumous prompting. He was a scholar and an ardent Zionist, and he spent eleven years compiling a history of what he called “Hitler's other monsters”, the villains we don't hear so much about. During the war there were the
Kultur Büroangestellter,
among others. They were the culture clerks, the SS minions who went around evaluating antiques, pictures, sculpture - anything of value and artistic merit owned by Jews. They would catalogue the stuff then they would con-fiscate it. They ruined Lustig's own father, a couple of years before he was taken away to Buchenwald.'

‘Was the history ever published?'

‘Apparently not. Which is a pity, because wider
dissemination of the material would have alerted more people to the existence of the
Jugend von Siegfried,
who are apparently hinted at here and there. Lustig himself got the details of the group's beginnings from a diary kept by one of Hitler's aides, a General Albers. He gleaned the rest by combing police records and interviewing retired Swiss nationals who looked after the boys in the early years.'

‘So how did Lustig persuade people to set up the
JZ?'

‘In his last will and testament he directed that money be set aside, quote…' Whitlock consulted his notebook, ‘“to create a fellowship in remembrance of those spirits and lives which were dismantled; a fellowship with the central purpose of avenging the wrongs done by the
Jugend von Siegfried;
a fellowship to apply vengeance in full measure and assuage the torment of our beloved dead.”'

‘What about the group's name? Where does that come from?'

‘The twentieth of July was the date when Johannes Lustig and his son-in-law died in Lake Cayuga. Lustig's followers see symbolism in the fact that it was on the same date, in 1944, that the chief of staff to General Fromm, Claus von Stauffenberg, tried to blow up Hitler with a bomb under a map table.'

‘That attempt failed.'

‘I know, but I suppose the symbol's the thing, the defiance. You'll find a membership list among
the papers - Erika Stramm did the recruiting, and she didn't seem to have any trouble getting top people on her team.'

‘Do we know who
JZ
uses as executioner?'

‘There's no mention of a name.'

Philpott was frowning at his glass. ‘I find it hard to believe our computer man, Andreas Wolff, is a member of a latter-day Nazi death-squad.'

‘You've met him?'

‘Several times. I've also met quite a few racist fanatics. The two impressions don't gel. Wolff is a head-in-the-clouds kind of man, a greying hippie. His professional brilliance is a side issue with him. He is at his happiest using science to firm up his fantasies, his computer games, which all involve adventurer kings and distressed maidens and dragons and all that other mystical nonsense. He is bored by politics, bored by reality in general. Wolff is not bigot material.'

‘I'll get Mike to look into it.'

Whitlock rose and Philpott went with him to the door.

‘If you hear anything important from Mike, call me,' Philpott said. ‘Impress on him how necessary it is that we put a brake on
JZ
before things escalate. He has to find out who the blue-eyed executioner is.'

‘Maybe Sabrina could do us some good in Berlin.'

‘Maybe she could.' Philpott opened the door. ‘Remember to hold the good thought.'

‘Which one is that?'

‘We are here to create havoc.'

‘I was maybe ten seconds away from switching off the phone,' Mike Graham said. ‘If this is something that can wait until tomorrow, I'd rather it did.'

‘It won't take long, Mike.' Whitlock was on his balcony, watching the sun go down. ‘I want to update you on a couple of things. Where are you right now?'

‘In bed, in the Hotel Zipser. It's the middle of the night here.'

‘I'm sorry, I forgot -'

‘I was reading,' Mike said. ‘Lately I can't sleep. I have to wait until it lands on me all at once.'

‘We're in Texas.'

‘We?'

‘I'm with the old man. Maybe I'll explain later, if I survive this junket. Tell me, have you seen Andreas Wolff yet?'

‘Tomorrow, first thing. I used the formal approach and made an appointment. I figured it would be best to start out civilized.'

‘Philpott wants you to check something else while you're there.'

Whitlock explained what they had learned about
Juli Zwanzig
from Erika Stramm's computer file, and how Philpott had strong doubts about Wolff's legitimacy as a candidate for assassination. ‘I'm sure you'll think of some way to broach it.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Erika Stramm. Is she pliant?'

‘Um… The short answer is no.'

‘We need to know who the
JZ
executioner is. Stramm is the one to tell us.'

‘She'd never tell me. She wouldn't even admit she knows what
JZ
is. She also claimed she and Emily Selby were just friends.'

‘There's no chance she would relent and talk to you?'

‘If I got close enough to put a question to her, my suspicion is she'd put me in traction before I got my mouth open.'