The Apocalypse Watch (49 page)

“Does he really believe the Antis have been infiltrated?”

“He told me he was covering all our flanks; it can’t do any harm. We’ve got Kroeger and nobody can get near him. If anyone tries, we know we’ve got an exposed flank.”

“Could Janine be an asset there?”

“That’s Wesley’s job. I wouldn’t know how to get near it.”

“I wonder if Courtland told her about Kroeger.”

“He had to say something after we got him up at three o’clock in the morning.”

“He could have said anything, not necessarily the truth. All ambassadors are schooled in what and what not to tell their immediate families. Most of the time for their own protection.”

“There’s a flaw in that argument, Karin. He put his own wife in D and R, a hornet’s nest of classified information.”

“His marriage is relatively recent, and if what we believe is true, Janine wanted to be put there. It wouldn’t be very difficult for a new wife to persuade her husband. Heaven knows she had the qualifications, and no doubt she put it in terms of wanting to make a patriotic contribution.”

“True, or at least I have to take your word for it, Eve and the apple being your foundation—”

“Male chauvinist,” interrupted De Vries, laughing and gently jabbing his thigh.

“The apple wasn’t our idea, lady.”

“You’re being pejorative again.”

“I wonder how Wes is going to handle it,” said Latham, grabbing her hand and holding it while extinguishing his cigarette.

“Why not call him?”

“His secretary said he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, which means he went somewhere. He mentioned that he had another problem, a heavy one, so perhaps he went after it.”

“I’d think Janine Courtland would take precedence.”

“Maybe she did. We’ll know tomorrow—actually today. The sun’s coming up.”

“Let it come up, my dearest. We’re not allowed near the embassy, so let’s consider this our holiday, yours and mine.”

“I like that idea,” said Drew, turning to her, their bodies touching. And the telephone rang. “Some holiday,” added Latham, reaching for the abusively intruding phone. “Yes?”

“It’s one-something in the morning here,” said the voice of Wesley Sorenson. “Sorry if I woke you, but I got your hotel number from Witkowski and wanted to keep you up to speed.”

“What happened?”

“Your computer whizzes were on the mark. Everything panned out. Janine Clunitz is a Sonnenkind.”

“Janine who?”

“Clunitz is her real name—the Clunes is anglicized. She was brought up by the Schneiders in Centralia, Illinois.”

“Yes, we read that. But how can you be sure?”

“I flew out there this afternoon. Old Schneider confirmed it.”

“What the hell do we do
now
?”

“Not ‘we,’ me,” replied the director of Consular Operations. “The State Department is recalling Courtland for thirty-six hours for an emergency meeting with several other European ambassadors, the subject to await their arrival.”

“State
agreed
to this?”

“State doesn’t know about it. It’s a Four Zero directive, issued back-channel through this office to avoid any traffic interception.”

“I trust that makes sense.”

“Who gives a damn? We’ll pick him up at the airport and he’ll be in my office before Secretary Bollinger orders his eggs Benedict.”

“Wow, I think I hear an old case-officer talking.”

“Could be.”

“How are you going to handle Courtland?”

“I’m trusting he’s as bright as his service record says he is. I recorded Schneider—with his permission—and had him vocally confirm a very complete deposition. I’ll present
Courtland with everything, and hope he sees the light.”

“He may not, Wes.”

“I’m prepared for that. Schneider’s ready to be flown to Washington. He really doesn’t like where he came from—his words, incidentally.”

“Congratulations, my honcho.”

“Thanks, Drew, not bad, if I do say so.… Also, there’s something else.”

“What?”

“Contact Moreau. I spoke to him a few minutes ago and he expects your call this morning—your time.”

“I’m not comfortable going around Witkowski, Wes.”

“You won’t be, he knows everything. I reached him too. It’d be stupid to freeze him out; we need his expertise.”

“What’s with Moreau?”

“He and I went in different directions but came back with the same information. We’ve found our tunnel to the Brotherhood. It’s a man, a doctor in Nuremberg, where the trials took place.”

“Ironic. What goes around comes around.”

“Talk to you later, after you speak to Moreau.”

Latham hung up the phone and turned to Karin. “Our holiday’s been cut a tad short, but we’ve still got an hour or so.”

She held out her arms, her bandaged right hand lower than her left.

The night was dark and still, as, one by one, ten minutes apart, the speedboats swung into the long dock in the Rhine River. A dim red light on the highest pylon was their point of arrival, the erratic moon not helpful, for the sky was overcast. The operators of these swift craft, however, were familiar with the waterways and the estates they frequented. Engines were cut a hundred or so feet from the dock, the river tides gently ushering the boats toward their slips, where a two-man crew caught the thrown ropes and pulled them silently into their resting places. And, one by one, the men attending the conference
walked up the dock and onto a flagstone path that led to the mansion on the river.

The arrivals greeted one another on a huge candlelit veranda where coffee, drinks, and canapes were served. The conversation was innocuous—golf scores and tennis competitions, nothing of relevance; that would change abruptly. An hour and twenty minutes later the group was complete, the servants dismissed, and the formal meeting began. The nine leaders of Die Brüderschaft der Wacht sat in a semicircle facing a lectern. Dr. Hans Traupman rose from his chair and walked to it.

“
Sieg Heil!
” he shouted, thrusting his right arm forward in the Nazi salute.

“
Sieg Heil!
” roared the leaders in unison, rising as one and shooting out their arms.

“Sit, if you please,” said the doctor from Nuremberg. Everyone did so, their posture straight, their concentration absolute. Traupman continued. “We have glorious news to report. Across the globe, enemies of the Fourth Reich are in disarray, they tremble in fear and confusion. It is now time for another stage, an assault that will plunge them further into bewilderment and panic, while our disciples—yes, our
disciples
—are prepared to move cautiously but firmly into positions of influence everywhere.… Our action will require sacrifices from many in the field, risk of imprisonment, even death, but our resolve is strong, our cause mighty, for the future is
ours
. I shall turn the meeting over to the man we’ve chosen to be the
Führer
of the Brüderschaft, the Zeus who will guide our movement to fulfillment, for he is a man without compromise and with a will of steel. It’s an honor to ask Günter Jäger to address you.”

Again, as one, the small congregation rose, and once more their arms shot forward. “
Sieg Heil!
” they shouted. “
Sieg Heil
, Günter Jäger!”

A slender, blond-haired man of nearly six feet in height and dressed in a black suit, his neck encased in a pure white clerical collar, rose from a center chair and approached the lectern. His posture was erect, his walk a stride, his head that of a sculptured Mars. It was his eyes,
however, that demanded attention. They were gray-green and penetrating, at once cold, yet strangely alight with flashes of warmth as his gaze settled on individuals, which it did as those eyes roamed from chair to chair, each recipient bathed in the glory of his stare.

“I am the one who is honored,” he began quietly, permitting himself a gentle smile. “As you all know, I’m a defrocked father of my own church, for it finds my positions impolitic, but I have found a flock far greater than any in Christendom. You represent that flock, those millions who believe in our cause.” Jäger stopped and inserted his right forefinger between his clerical collar and his neck, adding in self-deprecating humor. “I often wish the elders of my misguided church had made my banishment public, for this white coil around my throat is suffocating. But, of course, they can’t; it would be bad politics. They conceal more infelicitous sins than the scriptures enumerate; they know it and I know it, so an accommodation was made.”

Softly, knowing laughter came from the audience. Günter Jäger continued. “As Herr Doktor Traupman has told you, we are about to enter our next phase of disorientation among our enemies. It will be devastating, an unseen army attacking the most vital source of life on earth.… Water, gentlemen.”

The response was now bewilderment; the congregation talked among themselves. “How is this to be accomplished, my defrocked brother?” asked the old Catholic priest, Monsignor Heinrich Paltz.

“If your church knew who and what you are, Father, we’d be joined at the hip.”

Laughter again. “I can substantiate our theories back to the book of Genesis!” the monsignor broke in. “Cain was obviously a Negro, the mark of Cain was his skin and it was black! And in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, both spoke of the inferior tribes who rejected the words of the prophets!”

“Let’s not get into a scholarly debate, Father, for we might both lose. The prophets, by and large, were Jews.”

“So were the tribes!”

“
Similias similibus
, my friend. That was two thousand years ago, and we are here now, two thousand years later. But you asked how this operation can be accomplished. May I explain?”

“Please do, Herr Jäger,” said Albert Richter, a dilettante turned politician, but with property and another way of life in Monaco.

“The
reservoirs
, gentlemen, the main water reserves for London, Paris, and Washington. As we convene, plans are being developed to drop tons of toxic chemicals into those central reservoirs from aircraft at night. Once they are dispersed, thousands upon thousands of people will die. Corpses will pile up in the streets, the governments of each nation will be blamed, for it is their responsibility to protect their resources. In London, Paris, and Washington, it will be nothing less than a catastrophic plague, leaving the citizenry terrified, outraged. As political figures fall, our people will take their places, claiming to have the answers, the solutions. Weeks, perhaps months, later, once the crises have been reduced through specific antitoxins introduced into the water in a similar manner, we shall have made considerable inroads within governments and their militaries. When relative calm has been restored, our disciples will be given the credit, for they alone will know and will order the chemical theriacs or counterpoisons.”

“When will this take place?” asked Maximilian von Löwenstein, son of the general and Wolfsschanze traitor executed by the SS but whose loyal mother was a mistress of Josef Goebbels’s, a devoted courtesan of the Reich who loathed her husband. “My mother constantly spoke of the extravagant promises emanating from the Chancellory without specifics. She felt they were most unfortunate and weakened the
Führer
.”

“And
our
history books will extol the contributions your mother made to the Third Reich; how she exposed her treacherous husband among them. However, in the current situation, tactics are being studied, including the payloads of radar-eluding, low-flying aircraft. Everything is in place within two hundred kilometers of the targets, our specialists on the scene. According to the latest projections,
Operation Water Lightning will occur between three and five weeks of this date, each national catastrophe taking place at the same moment, in the darkest hours of night on both sides of the Atlantic. It is now determined that it will be at four-thirty
A.M
. Paris time, three-thirty London, and ten-thirty
P.M
. of the previous evening in Washington. They are the most accommodating hours of darkness. That is as specific as I can be at this juncture.”

“It’s more than sufficient,
mein Führer
, our Zeus!” exclaimed Ansel Schmidt, multimillionaire electronics tycoon who had stolen the majority of his high technology from other firms.

“I see a problem,” said a heavyset man whose enormously large legs dwarfed his chair, his face balloonlike, devoid of lines despite his age. “As you know, I’m a chemical engineer by training before branching out. Our enemies are not fools; water samples are constantly analyzed. The sabotage will be revealed, and treatments prescribed. How do we handle that?”

“German inventiveness is the simplest answer,” replied Günter Jäger, smiling. “As several generations ago our laboratories created Zyklon B, which rid the world of millions of Jews and other undesirables, our people have developed another lethal formula employing soluble compounds of seemingly incompatible elements, made compatible by isogonic bombardment prior to mixture.” Here Jäger stopped and shrugged, continuing to smile. “I am a man of the cloth,
our
cloth, and do not pretend to be a master of the subject, but we have the finest chemists, a number of whom were recruited from your own laboratories, Herr Waller.”

“ ‘Isogonic bombardment’?” said the obese man, a thick-lipped smile slowly spreading across his large face. “A simple variation of isometric fusion, semetrizing the hostile elements, forcing compatibility, like a coating on aspirin. It could take days, weeks, to break down the compounds, let alone isolate them for specific counteractants.… Absolutely ingenious, Herr Jäger—
mein Führer
—I salute you, salute your talent for bringing together other brilliant talents.”

“You’re too kind, but I would not know my way around a laboratory.”

“Laboratories are for cooks, the visions must come first! Yours was in ‘attacking the most vital source of life on earth. Water.…’ ”

“The rich and even the less affluent will buy their Evians and Pellegrinos in the markets,” countered a short man of medium build and close-cropped dark hair. “The lower classes will be ordered to boil water for the prescribed twelve minutes for purification.”