Secrets of the Last Nazi (30 page)

Suddenly, he felt his knee buckle. The joint collapsed beneath him, and he tumbled to the floor in agony. Pain was surging back. His ligament had ruptured again. Resisting the urge to cry out, he cursed himself for removing the neoprene support, and for pushing himself so hard.

The intense pain made him look up. And only then, noticing the glass above him, did he spot the opening in the dome. Workmen had removed one of the transparent panels. Myles couldn’t tell whether it was to clean the glass or do repairs, but there was now an access to the outside. It was a space large enough for someone to crawl through, and to get onto the roof. It was the only way that Dieter could have gone.

Myles pushed himself off the floor, just managing to stand on his one good leg. He edged towards the hole and grabbed the sides with his hands, then lifted himself up. Some of the tourists cued up photos, imagining Myles was performing a stunt or making a protest. Myles ignored them, concentrating on getting up. He squeezed out, suddenly feeling the wind blast against his skin, then clambered round the dome at the top of the building, until he saw the man he had expected to see.

Holding the bottle of clear liquid high, with his arm outstretched arm, Dieter was about to release the nerve agent.

M
yles tried to edge closer
, pulling himself along a rail with his arms, his weight on his one good foot as he dragged his useless leg behind him. He felt the wind blow hard against him as he tried to circle round the top of the dome. He wondered if he could catch Dieter unaware. Perhaps to grab his liquid, perhaps to push him off. Anything to stop the man setting off the wonderweapon.

Clumsy as ever, Myles gripped tightly to the steel frame. He heaved his leg around a metal bar trying to approach quietly.

Dieter was just a few metres away. The Frenchman’s back was turned. Myles had a chance.

‘…Don’t get blown off, now… that’s not your fate…’ It was Dieter’s voice.

Slowly, Dieter turned round, raising the clear liquid toward Myles as if he was making a toast. ‘Good morning, Myles. Glad you could make it…’

Myles froze in place. He didn’t know how to react.

‘… Don’t worry about being blown off the top of the dome. You can come closer if you want….’ Dieter saw Myles wasn’t moving. The Frenchman shrugged and began to smirk. ‘… Or you can stay where you are. Up here, we’re both close to the heavens. That’s why I added your name to the guest list for the Reichstag. I knew you’d come. Even though you’d been told you were about to die, I knew you’d come to the most dangerous place there could be.’

Myles kept gripping tightly to the metal frame. He tried to keep his voice calm and reasonable. ‘It doesn’t have to be dangerous, Dieter. We can both get out of this. Just because the machine said we’d both die today, it doesn’t mean we have to.’

Dieter grinned again. ‘You think? You really think that? Is that why you telephoned someone due to die in two days’ time, to warn them away?’

‘Helen?’

‘Yes. You did call her, didn’t you?’

Myles didn’t want to satisfy Dieter by confirming he was right. He remained silent, just tipping his head forward, encouraging Dieter to say more.

‘You’re wondering how I know, aren’t you, Myles? Shall I tell you how I know you called Helen?’

‘Go on.’

‘Because she’s there. Look.’ Dieter turned his head, pointing out towards the Platz der Republik – the large green space where Myles had waited just a few minutes before. There was Helen, directing a cameraman who was setting up his equipment. Helen hadn’t seen them. Myles’ call last night, telling her not to come, had only encouraged her. And when he said Berlin, she had naturally come to the city’s centre of government - to the Reichstag. Trying to make her safe had put her in danger. He kicked himself for not predicting how she would react. Even if he warned her away now, she’d only come closer. Typical Helen – always heading towards trouble…

Dieter saw Myles’ face and began to laugh. ‘You see - even when we try to cheat our fate, fate still wins. You know, Myles, after we all climbed out of the cavern in Landsberg, I climbed back in. The globes said Berlin was the place I’d change the world.’

Myles’ eyes fixed on the bottle of clear liquid in Dieter’s hand. ‘What do you want your fate to be, Dieter? You could still walk away from all this…’

‘Not anymore. Not with the websites, remember? I’m the humanitarian, you’re the terrorist.’ Dieter lifted the bottle up, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, and letting it sway in the wind. ‘If you try to take this liquid, my funeral will draw many more people than yours - probably even more than Helen’s, when she dies of Sarin poisoning the day after tomorrow.’ The Frenchman was still keeping himself a few metres clear from Myles. ‘You
are
trying to take this liquid from me, aren’t you, Myles?’

Myles paused before he answered, then decided to be honest. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘You see, Myles? You might say it’s your character, or because you want to save people – perhaps just to save Helen. But you’re completely predictable, too. Just as the machine assumed you were.’ Dieter began to smirk. Intellectually superior and he knew it. ‘You can’t leave here either…’

Myles refused to respond.

Dieter began to ponder. ‘… so let me predict, Myles. You’ll ask me to come down again. I’ll refuse. Then you’ll go for the Sarin. We’ll both fall all the way down there.’ He peered down. ‘You die from a great height. The bottle smashes, releasing the Sarin, so I die from multiple causes. Helen examines your dead body, inhales this stuff and dies tomorrow evening. All the machine’s predictions come true – every single one. I die a martyr, you die a terrorist, and Helen’s death means CNN runs the story for a whole week.’

Myles tried to shake his head, still gripping the metal. ‘Why are you so keen to know what’s going to happen, Dieter?’

‘We all are. It’s human nature.’

Myles thought about making a lunge for the liquid. It was exactly what Dieter was expecting, but what else could he do? In his mind, he calculated how far he was from Dieter – close enough for it to be worth a try.

Myles looked down: the surface of the glass dome curved away from him, down to a mid-level viewing platform. Some of the tourists were already gazing up, realising that Dieter and Myles were not on the top of the dome for any normal purpose.

Could Myles drag Dieter down to the rooftop without the glass bottle breaking? Unlikely: if they slid down the glass dome, he wouldn’t be able to keep hold of the liquid.

Dieter lowered the bottle slightly, holding it straight in front of Myles, taunting him. ‘I’m ready to die, Myles. I’ve found Stolz’s secret. And my death will help make Germany strong again.’

‘Is that why you did it all?’

‘No. I did this because Stolz’s secret belonged to Hitler. The Führer left it for the German people. When they hear I died trying to stop you releasing the Sarin, I’ll become a hero. They’ll respect the things I stood for.’

Now Myles understood: Dieter
wanted
him to attack.

Dieter grinned once more, gripping the neck of the bottle as if it was an old stick hand-grenaade. ‘No, Myles? Not coming towards me?’ Myles saw Dieter’s eyes pick out Helen on the green space below. The psychopath pulled his arm back, aiming, preparing to throw…

Something in Myles removed his capacity to choose. A deep instinct thrust him from the metal frame, lunging the small distance towards Dieter.

Dieter turned to meet him. As Myles’ body slammed into the Frenchman, Myles felt the bottle of liquid smash against his shoulder. Within an instant, liquid burst out, soaking his shirt and splashing onto his face.

Myles knew he was covered. He knew he had no chance of surviving the nerve agent. And, as he lost his footing on the roof, it was his instincts which made his grab Dieter on the way down.

Together, they began to slide off the glass dome. Faster and faster, Dieter and Myles accelerated as the curve of the dome became steeper. They began to freefall. Down towards the hard surface below.

Myles gripped Dieter as tightly as he could. He saw the viewing platform rushing up, towards his head. He knew both of them would die.

In the last moment before his skull smashed against the concrete, Myles got satisfaction from hoping he had saved Helen.

Hope that, in one small way, he had managed to beat the predictions.

A
s Sally Wotton
prepared to close down her computer, she took one last look at the image of Myles Munro. He had been quite good looking…

And he had been to so many places: Afghanistan, Libya, Iran… and that was just recently.

The Oxford University lecturer in military history had obviously lived an exciting life. Such a pity - that life was now over.

Her fingers touched the screen, wishing she could have saved him from the deadly fall. But she’d seen the live feed from the satellite. There was no way he could have survived. The paramedics had carried away two completely motionless bodies.

The public reports about him from several years ago, when he was sacked over a scandal involving terrorists from Africa, didn’t ring true to Sally. She could tell he had been a scapegoat. They always try to blame the misfits…

The fact that Myles had been a misfit was obvious. Myles had clearly suffered from some sort of high-performing learning disability. The CIA file on him confirmed it. From what Sally could tell about his popular lectures at Oxford, his radical theory about Clausewitz was one of the greatest advances in military theory in almost two centuries. He had certainly been very bright. Very bright indeed.

Sally sometimes felt a bit like a misfit herself, although she guessed she’d been luckier in life than poor old Myles Munro.

But at least there was one thing she could do for this man – although it seemed a bit late: she could prove he’d been made a scapegoat
again
.

Sally’s logic was simple. Myles Munro had been named as a terrorist on the
Mein Kampf Now
website – alongside some federal employee called ‘Glenn’. Sally knew both were innocent. She knew because she had quarantined the site, alongside the Humanitarian Pursuit site which had tried to negotiate with them. Both sites had been isolated from the world wide web, so the psychopath’s threats had been read by no-one. Or rather, no-one outside the CIA.

It meant whoever was behind
Humanitarian Pursuit
must also have been behind
Mein Kampf Now
. There was no other way the humanitarians could have known about the terrorist threats.

And by uploading Myles Munro’s details onto the
Mein Kampf Now
webpage, the psychopath had given Sally an important lead. It meant she had a name, so she could order a bug on Mr Munro’s home phone, in Oxford, England, and all the numbers associated with it. When Myles Munro himself had made a desperate call to his partner’s CNN mobile, warning her to stay away from the Reichstag in Berlin, it had given them just enough time to get the message where it needed to go. Enough time to send agents to central Berlin, although sadly not enough time to save Myles Munro himself.

And the other guy? It looked like the psychopath uploading the threats had been someone called Dieter. An easy news search had revealed who this Dieter person was: a radical fascist, brought up a German in Strasbourg half a century after the town was given to France as compensation for World War One. He was an agitator, a rebel, an ideologue who had been jailed for throwing pink paint at a far-right Euro-politician. Dieter had tried to become a new Hitler, but failed.

Dieter had uploaded his own picture to the
Humanitarian Pursuit
website. He’d tried to claim credit for making peace with a terrorist organisation responsible for all sorts of bad things – from the deaths of senators, to nuclear accidents, to economic depressions and even wars.

So why hadn’t this Dieter guy put it all behind him? Why the terrorist website? Why the bizarre threats, most of them way off in the future? Sally understood: because Dieter believed he could predict the future. It allowed him to claim credit for bad things which happened. So why not try to claim credit for bringing peace?

It was all nonsense. It must be. Nobody can predict the future – it was impossible.
Wasn’t it?

What if this dead Dieter person really
had
found a way to predict the future? Now the tech boys had found the real IP address and the location traces, she knew exactly where in Berlin this man had been. If Dieter had left paperwork – perhaps a machine or something - she could fly over, find it, and try to predict the future herself.

It would be far more interesting than her day job. She had just finished with the most interesting case her job would ever bring. She would close down her computer, only to power it up again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. She was about to leave the office, dissatisfied as ever, only to return the next day…

She went back to the computer screen to re-read the tech boys’ report on locations, but she couldn’t open it any more. Her security status didn’t allow it. Someone had changed the classification – it was now officially too sensitive for her to read. Even the traces from Dieter to contacts in Israel and England had gone. She slumped. No trip to Berlin. She wouldn’t be able to escape her job. She would have to close down her computer, leave the office, and be ready for another day there tomorrow.

As Sally Wotton left her computer and put on her coat, she finally understood how predictable her life was after all.

D
ieter tried
to tense his neck muscles to lift up his head, but blood in his hair had congealed to whatever he was lying on. He ignored the pain, and tugged several times until his scalp was free. As his vision cleared, he realised he must have been concussed from the fall.

Blearily, he looked around him. To one side, a paramedic in a yellow bio-chemical protection suit was preparing Myles Munro’s cadaver. Myles’ skin was grey, except for the ugly head wound from which his life had drained away. The paramedic was calmly removing the Englishman’s clothes and wiping the man’s tall body. Dieter allowed himself to smirk. He may have failed to save the last great secret of the Nazis, but he had at least killed the Englishman. And in doing so, he had proved Stolz’s wartime prediction computer – that triumph of Nazi science - was accurate.

He wobbled his head around to survey his own body, which was fixed in place on a medical bed. He realised he couldn’t move his legs. Worse, he couldn’t feel them. He reached his hand down to his pelvis, but there was no sensation at all.

Towards the far end of the sterile white room in which he lay, two men, also wearing full protective suits, stared at him.

‘Help me,’ he uttered. One of the men lumbered towards him.

Dieter hoped the man would treat him, even honour him – after all, he had just saved Germany. But instead of helping Dieter, the man produced a sidearm. Dieter knew the weapon: a SIG-Sauer P229, a handgun favoured by various parts of the US Federal government. Then he recognised the face inside the bio-mask: it was Glenn.

Glenn peered down, and pushed himself right up to Dieter. ‘Where’s the Sarin?’ he snarled.

Dieter glared back, refusing to answer.

Then he motioned towards Myles. ‘Death from a great height,’ he boasted.

Dieter saw Glenn’s non-reaction and laughed. ‘You believed the machine too, didn’t you…’

He grinned. Eyes still fixed on Glenn, Dieter’s fingers delved towards his pocket and found the old enamelled pillbox he had stolen from Stolz. Reassuringly, he felt the famous crooked cross on the cover, and marvelled at the German craftsmanship which had miniaturised the swastika so perfectly. He flicked the box open.

Glenn saw the movement and thrust his gun against Dieter’s temple. ‘Don’t think you can still release it - you’ll be dead before you try.’

But Dieter just smiled. Gently, he lifted the clouded capsule from his pocket into his mouth, carefully positioning it between his teeth.

‘Last chance,’ threatened Glenn.

Dieter replied with just a single word, ‘Führoxia.’

Dieter was just able to bite down on the cyanide pill before a bullet from Glenn’s pistol blasted through his brain, causing death from multiple causes.

And just as Dieter had managed to die like Hitler, he was also remembered like the Nazi-dictator: with no grave, no glory, and no monuments ever built in his honour.