Secrets of the Last Nazi (31 page)

E
ven though it
disturbed his regular daily schedule, Ludochovic did not hesitate to obey the first half of Zenyalena’s handwritten command:

Bring all the Stolz papers to the Berlin embassy immediately, where I will meet you…

The instant he had received the note – contained within a package sent in an ‘Imperial War Museum’ envelope from a postbox on the French-German border – Ludochovic had booked himself on a flight, and made his way to the German capital. An official car met him at the airport, and drove him straight to the Russian embassy. Police cordons and ‘bio-hazard decontamination’ barriers, which had surrounded part of the nearby Reichstag for some twenty-hours, delayed the last part of his journey only by a few minutes.

His trouble was: what to do about the second part of Zenyalena’s instructions?

… but if I don’t appear, then publish everything from Stolz.

The problem was Zenyalena
had
appeared, but not as Ludochovic had expected. Indeed, it was Ludochovic himself who had to receive the sodden body from the German diplomatic policy, identify Ms Androvsky formally, and ensure the death was handled as a consular matter under international protocols, rather than by the national authorities of Germany.

The whole affair seemed very unorthodox to Ludochovic. Just like his now deceased line manager, and the unorthodox international mission she had set up to investigate Stolz. He was sure there was more to all this than he knew – just as there had been when a predecessor of his had received Kirov’s dead body, the Soviet Liaison Officer who interviewed the last Nazi, back in 1945. Like Kirov, Zenyalena had been killed by a single bullet while working with ‘allies’ to investigate Stolz. And why was Zenylena’s body so wet? It was more than suspicious. As Zenylena would have said, ‘this one smells’.

Briefly, he considered visiting the East Berlin apartment where Zenyalena’s body was reported to have been found. He wondered about re-starting the international team with new members, or sending out another demarche to provoke a revealing reaction from the United States, as Zenyalena would have done.

But, as a dutiful servant of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Ludochovic understood his job was solely to obey. That meant he had three tasks. First, to repatriate the body of Ms Zenyalena Androvsky for cremation. The service would take place in Moscow, just in case there were any friends, family or loved one who might want to attend, although Ludovic suspected there would be none.

Second, he should put all the facts he knew on file, by writing a complete report about the whole affair. It would be as detailed as the reports from 1945, and archived, just in case it might be needed seventy years from now, as the report on Kirov had been.

And third, out of respect to his deceased line manager, he would carry out the last request he had received from her: he
would
publish online the material from Stolz.

Meticulously, he gathered all the papers he had, including the latest papers in the War Museum envelope and the documents Zenyalena had faxed through earlier. Even though some had been annotated by Ms Androvsky, and initialled ‘ZA’, he reckoned her handwriting was anonymous enough as to be untraceable. He crossed out the word ‘Secret’, then passed them on to the Information Management Officer at the Russian Embassy in Berlin, alongside the routine request that they be released - without attribution.

The Russian Information Management Officer counted the pages rather than read them. There was far too much for a clever leak, or for the items to be placed somewhere significant. Instead, he just passed them on to the tech team, who in turn posted some of the pages on their ghost blog sites – webpages with small readerships, masquerading as normal blogs, but used for the dissemination of official propaganda.

The instant Stolz’s papers went online, keywords within the documents were picked up by web monitoring software. That, in turn, triggered the automatic publication of other material. Philip Ford’s half-a-million pounds had been put to good use.

In fact, some of the money had been offered as a prize: Father Samuel and the Professor had united to offer a reward to whoever could provide evidence for the most unexpected correlation. Entrants had compared the divorce rate in South Carolina with the American bee population. Links had been found between the number of space missions and sociology degrees awarded. There was even a correlation between the marriage rate in Alabama and the annual death toll from electrical accidents.

Of course, no-one took any of the correlations seriously. They were ‘just for entertainment’, as the press release announced. Father Samuel said they showed that God had a sense of humour. It meant anyone who found Stolz’s papers online would have thought they were a joke too, which was exactly what Father Samuel intended.

Professor Cromhall continued to preach science, now confident he could pretend there was no mystery to the universe. The most dangerous mystery – the bizarre but powerful correlation between the planets and human affairs – had been buried. If necessary, the Professor could discredit and ridicule the link, which would save Cromhall from being discredited and ridiculed himself.

The banker, Philip Ford, could eat his prawns in peace, very content with the return on his small investment of half a million pounds. It had safeguarded a lifetime of financial gains.

And Father Samuel flew back to his monastery, finally satisfied that Stolz’s secret had been hidden again as much as it ever could be - under piles of spurious information, alongside false predictions and fabrications of the original papers, on a remote part of the internet. Even though Stolz’s big secret was secret no more, Father Samuel had discovered the perfect way to hide the truth.

T
he machine whirred
, then buzzed, then started clicking. Mechanical and electrical parts inside, connected by a tangle of wires, did their work. The experts sat beside it, waiting for the machine to spew out its information. They waited on its verdict, and waited, and waited…

Click… Click… Click…

It was the clicking which woke him. Myles found himself inside the large white tube of a full-body scanner. ‘Hello? Is anybody there?’

‘Bleiben Sie bitte still liegen..’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Remain still, please, Sir,’ replied the voice. It sounded official.

Myles waited, until the machine whirred again and his body was rolled out onto a trolley-bed.

One of the experts approached. ‘Mr Munro, you’ll be pleased to know everything seems fine,’ the man smiled, his hands relaxed in the pockets of his white coat. ‘Your head, Mr Munro. Specifically, your brain. No problems at all.’

Myles squinted, confused. ‘You mean… normal?’

‘We wouldn’t use that word, Sir. No damage, and everything else seems healthy. Within the range we would expect.’

Myles frowned. ‘But… another doctor told me I had… part of my brain was the wrong shape, or unusual. Something like that. He said it made me different.’

The medics looked at each other, one of them chuckling slightly. They reacted as if they’d heard the comment before. ‘We’re all different, Mr Munro.’

‘But, my brain…?’

‘Yes, it’s different too,’ confirmed the expert. ‘But nobody knows how the shape of brains affects people. There’s research going on into that.’

‘Yes, they asked me to take part.’

‘Good, Mr Munro. But even if the research allows people with brain scanners to predict what people will be like, we don’t want to label people – people with one sort of brain in one group, people with another sort in another. Sounds a bit like… what the Nazis used to do, don’t you think?’

‘But isn’t that what you medics do,’ suggested Myles. ‘Don’t you label things?’

‘Not brains. We don’t label brains, Sir. It would be too much like trying to predict how people were going to live. And we wouldn’t want to do that. People should decide their own lives for themselves. Don’t you think so, Mr Munro?’

Myles thought through what the medical expert had said.

He was still wondering about it when a man appeared. The figure sauntered over, confident and composed. Their face gazed down at Myles, blocking out the lights in the ceiling.

‘Glenn?’

Glenn rocked his head forwards with a grin. For the first time since Myles had known him, the American had allowed fine stubble to sprout through the toned skin on his scalp. The two medics who’d been viewing Myles’ MRI scan acknowledged Glenn and his senior rank. They left Myles and Glenn alone together.

‘Good to see you again, Myles. You feeling OK?’

Myles wasn’t sure. He looked around, realised he was in a hospital, and surmised correctly he wasn’t well. ‘So what’s wrong with me? Sarin poisoning?’

‘There was no Sarin. Stolz left only water in that bottle. It’s just your head got smashed and your knee – usual stuff.’

‘My knee? My knee - again?’

‘Other one this time,’ said Glenn, gesturing to his legs. ‘Although they both need to be fixed.’

Myles gazed down to see both his lower limbs were now in plaster. He was immobile again. ‘How long to heal this time?’

‘Longer than last time…’ Glenn smirked, and checked no-one else was within earshot. ‘… the difference is - now you can work out exactly when you’ll be fit again.’

‘So it’s real? Stolz – he really had worked out how to predict things?’

‘Of course,’ admitted Glenn. ‘Greatest secret of the Cold War.’

Myles was perplexed. ‘You mean, you were pretending all along not to believe it?’

Glenn shook his head. ‘It’s not something to believe or not believe. It just
is
. And let’s face it – some of it does sound pretty crazy. Hirohito didn’t declare war on Russia because he was born when Neptune was over Moscow? No-one can believe that. You just have to notice it’s true and live with it.’

Myles frowned, determined to argue the point. He tried to sit up, pulling on his headboard, but he strained. Pain surged through his newly-broken leg, which was attached to a wire suspended above the bed. He winced, then kept quiet as he realised one of the medical orderlies was looking towards him.

‘Try to lie still,’ insisted Glenn. ‘Let me know if you want me to get you some pain-killers.’

‘No, it’s alright. How do you mean, it just ‘is’?’

‘Planets make patterns in the sky, human affairs make patterns on earth, and some of the patterns match up. We’ve dumped billions into NASA, but we still don’t understand how it works. But all we know is that it just does. It’s accurate enough to make predictions which are much better than, say, weather forecasts.’

‘Predictions like when the Berlin Wall’s going to come down?’

‘Exactly.’ Glenn gently eased the trolley-bed along, wheeling it towards a wall. His mouth spoke close to Myles’ ear so he couldn’t be overheard. ‘Ronald Reagan was the President who used it most. Like the eclipse over Iceland in 1986 – eclipses are linked to military victories, so he held the summit in the eclipse zone – to win the Cold War through a deal with Gorbachev.’

‘Just Reagan?’

‘He was the only President to use it knowingly, although it’s public knowledge that we’ve also advised more than one First Lady. For the others, our advice was given through ‘forecasting agencies’ – one of them in Alaska.’

‘Corporal Bradley?’

Glenn nodded. ‘Bradley set it up. With help from Stolz, of course. All our forecasts have to be sanitised, so they seem based on computer models, statistics, agricultural output figures, that sort of thing. It means Presidents always have deniability. We wouldn’t want the public to know their officials were basing decisions on the position of the planets, would we?’

Myles still didn’t understand. ‘But what about Dieter? Wasn’t he putting all this stuff on the web – and making you and I out to be terrorists?’

Glenn grinned again. ‘Yes… sort of… and also, no.’

Myles cocked his head in disbelief.

Glenn felt the need to explain some more. ‘Dieter was using Stolz’s predictions to claim credit for things,’ he said. ‘But they were things which were going to happen anyway. So his terror website predicted nuclear accidents and the death of a senator. When those things actually happened, he hoped people would blame the terror group.’

‘So why didn’t they?’

‘They didn’t see his website. We quarantined it. It was only accessible to a few folks in Langley, and Dieter himself.’

‘And I guess Dieter is now dead?’

Glenn didn’t answer with words, but his face reacted in a way which confirmed Myles’ suspicion.

‘Your guys killed him?’

‘He tried to kill himself, actually.’ Glenn answered with his eyebrows raised. ‘He took a suicide pill – same type as Stolz. He probably stole it one of the times he burgled the old man’s Berlin apartment… although I put a bullet in him, too – just in case his cyanide capsule was some sort of chemical weapon.’

Myles could only vaguely remember fighting with Dieter on the glass dome of the Reichstag.

‘You got concussed.’ Glenn pointed at Myles’ forehead. ‘Then we sedated you as a precaution. You’ve been out cold for almost forty hours. Hence the brain scan.’

Myles lifted his fingers to feel bandages on his forehead. ‘Worse than in Vienna?’

‘Much worse. No inflatable this time. Both you and Dieter were pretty wasted when you fell down – into the authority of Berlin’s American Military Police.’

Myles looked around. He began to realise he wasn’t in a normal hospital. A doctor in fatigues, signs in English, an information poster telling people about veteran’s benefits. He was in a
military
hospital. ‘I’m under the authority of the American Military Police, too?’

Glenn winked, confirming Myles was right. ‘Allied War Powers Act. You’re in the old American sector of the city.’

‘You know, quite frankly Glenn, I’m glad to be anywhere. I thought I was going to die. And that’s what the machine predicted, too.’

‘The machine was wrong.’

Myles was puzzled. ‘You mean Stolz’s computer doesn’t work?’

‘Oh it works. We’re testing it right now. Pretty accurate so far. No, it was wrong because you gave it the wrong information.’

‘But I only put in the time and day I was born, didn’t I?’

‘Not quite, Myles. When you were born, you Brits were trying some Euro-experiment – living with the clocks one hour forward in winter time. It means the birth time entered into the machine for you was out by sixty minutes.’

While Myles digested the information, and wondered whether being born an hour earlier had really saved his life, Glenn signed. ‘Of course, this stuff isn’t secret anymore - when the Russians got Zenyalena’s body, they posted Stolz’s papers on the web.’

‘So know everybody knows?’ asked Myles, amazed that the Americans could let the secret out so easily.

‘Not exactly ‘knows’,’ laughed Glenn. ‘The information is public now, which is new. But our guys have directed search engines towards false predictions rather what the Russians put up. And all the statistical evidence about the connection between the planets and what people do: there are respected scientists and statisticians rubbishing that right now, because the whole scientific community knows this could blow their intellectual worlds apart. Some experts are dismissing it as a coincidence; others say it’s a joke. People won’t take astrology any more seriously than they did before, so we’re safe.’

Glenn’s tone became more serious. ‘You know, Myles, Heike-Ann’s not going to talk – she’s signed all sort of confidentiality agreements and is just looking forward to her new baby now. The French thought everything finished when Jean-François was killed. And all the public saw about the international team was a fire in Vienna and a rooftop accident in Berlin – they didn’t know we were chasing Stolz’s secrets.’

‘Accident? You mean people thought Dieter and I just slipped off the Reichstag?’

Glenn nodded. ‘And it means you can go back to teaching Oxford students about the past, not telling them how to predict the future. Right, Myles?’

Myles understood the obvious threat in Glenn’s suggestion. ‘Or?’

‘Or, Myles, some very respected people will say you’ve fallen for hogwash.’

Myles relaxed, dismissing Glenn with a shrug and a turn of his face. ‘Threats don’t do it for me, Glenn. I don’t care about my reputation.’

Glenn wasn’t surprised by Myles’ response. He certainly didn’t seem angry. ‘I know. But you will keep it secret, Myles. You’ve seen how dangerous it is. If people knew their future, they’d stop trying. They’d think they were invincible, like Dieter. Or go round doing stupid things. If people in America didn’t believe they could control their own lives, we would have lost the Cold War, and probably the Second World War, too. If you let this secret out, you’ll hurt every human being who ever wanted to make a decision for themselves. You’ll be taking their futures away from them. I know you’re a good man, Myles - you’re not going to do that to people.’

Myles absorbed Glenn’s words. Perhaps the American was right: like nuclear weapons, the power to know the future was just too dangerous to be out there. It had to be controlled, so people could enjoy the freedom to live as they wanted – even if that freedom was an illusion.

‘That’s why you think I’ll keep it secret?’

Glenn grinned. For a moment, Myles wondered if the American was about to pull out a gun, or inject him with a syringe full of poison. ‘Glenn?’

‘I’ve done your predictions, Myles Munro. You’ll be going on another mission in a few months. Probably when your legs are better, because there’s quite a bit of running, the machine said. More military history I think, terrorists with gold, something like that – I don’t know...’

Myles still didn’t understand. Why did accepting one more assignment – and a bizarre-sounding one at that – mean he wouldn’t reveal Stolz’s secrets?

‘…And between now and then, you’ll have other things on your mind.’

‘Glenn?’ Myles frowned, demanding an answer from the enigmatic American, but Glenn just strolled away. He gave Myles a casual salute from the end of the corridor, nodding his head in respect to the Englishman who had saved his life in Stolz’s bunker two days ago. Then he disappeared.

Myles lay on the trolley-bed, wondering about it all. He was distracted by a commotion – far off in another part of the hospital, but loud enough for Myles to hear.

‘… But I am a relative.’

‘No media, ma’am.’

‘Under US Federal law you have to let me through…look it up…’ It was a familiar voice. A few moments later, flanked by two US marine guards who seemed to be restraining her, Myles saw the television hair he had grown to love being marched towards him. Truly flustered for perhaps the first time since he had known her, Helen was standing beside his hospital trolley. ‘Myles, these men don’t believe we’re engaged to be married…’

One of the marines was about to say something when Myles noticed a ring sparkling on Helen’s hand. It was the first time he’d seen it. ‘That looks nice on you,’ he said.

The military men relaxed a little when they realised Myles really
did
know Helen Bridle – the woman from CNN wasn’t just there for an interview.

The taller marine tipped his camouflaged hat to Myles, who was still lying down. ‘Sir, this hospital is regulated by federal laws which only allow guests if they are related to the patient. Miss Helen Bridle claims to be your fiancée. Is that true, Sir?’

Myles paused, but only for a moment, looking at Helen as he answered. ‘Yes. It’s true.’

‘Thank you, Sir. Ma’am, my apologies.’ The marines left.

Helen bent down and kissed him. ‘Thank you, Myles.’