The Apocalypse Watch

  “Enough. Let the two others inside.”

  Karin and Lieutenant Anthony ran through the shattered dual gates heading for the central entrance. “He said to go up the staircase!” yelled De Vries, in front of the lieutenant.

  “For Christ’s sake, will you please wait for me? I’m supposed to protect you!”

  “If you’re slow, Gerry, that’s not my fault.”

  “If you get shot, Cons-Op will blow my privates off!”

  “I’ve got a gun, Lieutenant, don’t you worry about a thing!”

  “Thanks a bunch, amazon. My God, this arm hurts!”

  Suddenly they both stopped, arrested by what they saw on the third-floor landing. A blond-haired guard held a young woman in his arms, carrying her down the staircase, tears in his eyes. “She’s hurt quite badly,” he said in German, “but she is alive.”

  “You were the man in the window, ja?” asked Anthony, also in German.

  “Yes, sir. She and I were friends, and she should never have been in this terrible place.”

  “Take her downstairs and tell the others to get her to a doctor,” said the lieutenant. “Hurry up!”

  “Danke.”

  “Sure, but if you’re a liar, I’ll kill you myself.”

  “I am not a liar, sir. I have been many bad things, but I do not lie.”

  “I believe him,” said Karin, “let him go.” They reached the top floor, but there was no way to open the steel door, no bell, no signal, nothing at all. “Drew was emphatic, he wanted me here, but how do I get in?”

  “Trust a young old lieutenant,” replied Anthony, having spotted the palm-release space in the wall. “We’re going to set off an alarm.… These things were old hat a couple of years ago.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Watch me.” Gerald Anthony inserted his hand in the opening and pressed his palm down. In seconds the steel door was opened by a startled Latham, the alarm inside ear-shattering.

  “What the hell have you done?” shouted Drew.

  “Shut the door, boss man, and it will go off.”

  Latham did so and the bell went off. “How did you know that?” he asked.

  “Hell, it’s not even high tech. Simple circuit breakers that don’t roll over.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I didn’t actually, but rollovers in these systems are relatively new. This is a pretty old place, so I took a chance. What the hey, we’ve got the place secured anyway.”

  “Don’t argue with him, Drew,” said Karin, briefly embracing Latham. “I know, I know, it’s no time for emotions. Why do you want me here so quickly?”

  “There’s a room—two rooms actually—all filled with computers. We have to break into them.”

  * * *

  An hour passed and a perspiring Karin de Vries walked out of the door. “You caught it in time, my dear,” she said, standing in front of Latham. “On the premise that this isolated château in the Loire Valley could never been unearthed, all the records are kept here. There are nearly two thousand printouts, who is and who isn’t a member of the Nazi movement. All over the world.”

  “Then we’ve got them!”

  “Many of them, yes, my darling, but not all, never all. These are merely the leaders who shout and scream, rousing crowds to hate, to despise anyone but their own. And many do it in subtle ways, pretending generosity on the surface but hating underneath.”

  “That’s philosophical, lady, I’m talking about indictments, goddamned Nazis!”

  “Those you now have, Drew. Go after them, but understand what follows them.”

  In a top-secret government laboratory in the hills of the Shenandoah Valley, a besmocked doctor of forensic pathology looked across the table at his much younger colleague, both studying their computer screens. “Are you coming up with what I am?” asked the first pathologist quietly.

  “I don’t want to believe it,” said the second. “A switch, the switch of all history!”

  “The reports from Berlin can’t lie, young man, they’re right before our eyes. DNA wasn’t known in the forties, it is now. They match.… Start the fires, Doctor, the world doesn’t have to put up with this. We’d only fuel a legend, and that obscene old man died last night.”

  “Exactly my thoughts. You fuel a legend, you only transfer the fuel, giving rise to other legends.”

  “Worse you glorify them, immortalize them.”

  “Right on, Doctor. Hitler shot himself in that bunker over fifty years ago. We’re all screwed up enough without believing the impossible, which the fanatics would latch on to in a second, glorifying it. The worst son of a bitch in the world swallowed cyanide and put a bullet in his head when the Russians were outside of Berlin. Everyone believes it, why contradict accepted history?”

  The contrary evidence was destroyed by two Bunsen burners in the Shenandoah Valley.

  EPILOGUE

  The directors of the intelligence agencies of France, England, Germany, and the United States, under the instructions of their civilian leaders, moved swiftly, silently, and finally efficiently throughout their countries, for they had the truth, not speculation. Over two thousand computer printouts identifying the bona fide adherents to Die Brüderschaft der Wacht. According to the combined agreements among the four nations, the government press releases would essentially say the same thing, as exemplified by the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. Backbone of Neo-Nazi Movement Broken.

  All the articles went on to report that numerous men and women in and out of governments had been taken secretly into custody, their names, known only to a few, withheld until indictments were returned. The frenzied media went briefly apoplectic, but the government authorities would not budge in the area of naming names, which only the few could provide but did not, and eventually the frustrated media went on to other, more fruitful “exposés.” Within two months the attention spans of their readers, listeners, and watchers waned, and the Nazi witch-hunts withered as rapidly as had the paranoid search for Communists when the loathsome McCarthy fell from power. The entrepreneurs understood that you did not get advertisers or ratings when you bored the public. So it was back to partisan political-bashing, and maybe that was Elvis Presley in a cornfield!

  “I’m a goddamned millionaire!” exclaimed Drew Latham, walking hand in hand with Karin up the dirt road in Granby, Colorado. “I still can’t get over it!”

  “Harry loved you very much,” said De Vries, looking above, awestruck at the majestic Rocky Mountains. “You never doubted that, did you?”

  “I never verbalized it either. Except for a few hundred thousand for Mother and Dad, which they’ll never use, he left it all to me.”

  “What surprises you so?”

  “Where the hell did he get it?”

  “The lawyers explained that, my dear. Harry was a single man with few expenses, studied the various markets both here and in Europe, and made some rather brilliant investments. That’s not unlike him.”

  “Harry,” mused Drew quietly, drawing out the name. “Kroeger implanted that goddamned awful thing in his brain. The autopsy said that it was a new science and could be duplicated. Then it blew his head apart—after he died. Suppose he hadn’t?”

  “The doctors and the scientists say it could not be perfected for decades, if ever.”

  “They’ve been wrong before.”

  “Yes, they have.… I forgot to tell you, we received a telegram from Jean-Pierre Villier. He’s reopening Coriolanus and wants us both there in Paris on the first night.”

  “How can you put it gracefully that a lot of French caterwauling doesn’t exactly thrill me?”

  “I’ll phrase it another way.”

  “Christ, there are still so many questions!”

  “You don’t have to burden yourself with them, my darling. Ever. We’re free. Let others do the cleanup, your work is finished.”

  “I can’t help it.… Harry said a nurse in the Brotherhood valley alerted the Antinayous tha
t he was coming out. Who was she, and what happened to her?”

  “It’s in the Mettmach report, the one you only glanced at—”

  “It was too painful,” Latham broke in. “I will one day, but all that medical stuff about my brother—well, I just didn’t want to read it.”

  “The nurse was an assistant to Greta Frisch, Kroeger’s wife. She had been forced to sleep with von Schnabe, the commandant, on orders from the new Lebensborn. She got pregnant, and took her own life in the Vaclabruck forest.”

  “The Lebensborn, such a lovely pastoral sound, yet so brutal, so warped.… Still, we found Mettmach in the Vaclabruck. My God, almost a full-blown military base in a backwoods wilderness!”

  “It’s become a five-thousand-acre penal colony where the prisoners, male and female, are issued only neo-Nazi uniforms, red armbands included. The armbands, however, are sewn in the front of their clothing, not on their arms, the way they made the Jews wear the Star of David during the Third Reich.”

  “It’s wild, really wild.”

  “It was Ambassador Kreitz’s idea. He said it will remind them why they are there as prisoners, not privileged members of society.”

  “Yes, I know, and I’m still not sure I buy it. Couldn’t it work the other way, uniformed prisoners of war bonding together? Swearing undying loyalty to their cause?”

  “Not with their workloads, schedules, and constant lectures about the Nazi past which are accompanied by films and slides of the most brutal atrocities. They’re instructed to write papers on what they observed. We hear that many come out of those lectures weeping and falling on their knees in prayer. Remember, Drew, the heavy work aside, no one acts harshly toward the inmates. Everything is completely firm but courteous.”

  “The head doctors are going to have a prolonged psychiatric field day. It could be the beginning of a whole new prison system.”

  “Then something decent could come out of an indecent madness.”

  “Maybe, but don’t count on it. There are always others waiting in the wings. Their names may be different, the cultures different, but the common denominator is always the same. ‘Do it our way, under our authority, no deviations permitted.’ ”

  “So we must, all of us everywhere, be on the alert for such people, such causes, hoping our leaders will perceive them and have the courage to move swiftly, but not irrationally.”

  “Don’t you get tired of always summing things up so well?”

  “My husband—when he was my husband in the early days—usually said, ‘Will you please stop being so boringly academic.’ I guess he was right. The only life I ever had was academic, it was all that was offered me.”

  “I’d never say anything like that to you.… By the way, you did more of the follow-up than I did—”

  “Naturally,” interrupted Karin, “you had to fly back to your mother and father. They need their surviving child in their grief.”

  “Yes.” Latham looked at her in the bright afternoon Colorado sunlight. “Yes.…” He took his eyes off her and continued. “Did Knox Talbot find out who broke into the AA computers?”

  “Of course, they were on the Eagle’s Nest printouts. A man and a woman who’d worked their way up for sixteen years in the Agency. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, church acolytes, one from a farm—Four H, whatever that is—and the other the offspring of a suburban couple who taught Sunday school.”

  “Sonnenkinder,” said Drew.

  “Precisely. Right down to choir practice and your Rotary Clubs.”

  “What about the files on Monluc that were stolen from the OSI?”

  “One of the directors who posed as a Jewish historian. Who could suspect him?”

  “Sonnenkind.”

  “Naturally.”

  “What about that financial shark in Paris who was buying up real estate in the Loire Valley with German money?”

  “His house of cards collapsed. Bonn stepped in with some very creative foreign accounting procedures that saved a lot of German money. He was a swindler praying upon old misguided loyalties.”

  Karin glanced up at Latham. “Why are you looking at me like that? So questioningly?”

  “A moment ago you mentioned my mother and father, and that made me suddenly think. You’ve never told me about your parents, your mother and father, who gave you all that academic training. I don’t even know what your name is, your maiden name. Why is that?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Hell, no! But I’m curious, isn’t that normal? I guess, in my imagination, I always thought that when and if I was ever going to ask a woman to marry me, I’d have to go to her father and say something like, ‘Yes, sir, I can support her and I love her’—in that order. Can I do that, Karin?”

  “No, I’m afraid you can’t, so I might as well tell you the truth.… My grandmother was a Danish woman, abducted by the Nazis and forced into the Lebensborn. When her daughter, my mother, was born, she stole her away, and with a tenacity that is beyond understanding, she made her way back into Denmark with that child, and hid herself in a small village on the outskirts of Hanstholm on the North Sea. She found a man, an anti-Nazi, who married her and accepted the child, my mother.”

  “So what you’re saying—”

  “Yes, Drew Latham, but for the driven stubbornness of a woman’s ferocity, I might have become a Sonnenkind, not unlike Janine Clunes. Unfortunately, the Nazis kept meticulous records, and my grandmother and her husband had to keep running, never having a permanent home of their own, or access to normal educational facilities. Finally, after the war, they moved to Belgium, where the barely literate child grew up, got married, and had me in 1962. Because my mother had been denied any formal education, my schooling became an obsession with her.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “My father deserted us when I was nine years old and, looking back, I can understand why. My mother had my grandmother’s intensity of purpose. As her mother had risked everything, including a public hanging, to steal her own child away from the Lebensborn, my mother was consumed by me. She had no time for her husband, her whole focus was on her daughter. I had to read constantly, feverishly, attain the highest grades of anyone in the academies, study, study, study, until I myself caught the fever. I became as obsessed with my scholarship as she was.”

  “No wonder you and Harry got along. Is your mother alive?”

  “She’s in a nursing home in Antwerp. You could say she burnt herself out, and now barely recognizes me.”

  “Your father?”

  “Who knows? I never tried to find him. Later I thought often of trying, for, as I say, I understood why he left. At the first chance, you see, I myself left before I was completely smothered, and how accurately does the English language create that word. Then Freddie came along and I was ‘out like a shot,’ as you Americans say.”

  “Well, that’s over with!” said Drew, smiling and squeezing her hand. “Now I feel I know you well enough to carry on the Latham dynasty.”

  “How generous of you, I’ll try to be worthy.”

  “Worthy? For you it’s a step or two down, but I want you to know that the first thing I’m ordering for the library is a set of encyclopedias.”

  “What library?”

  “In the house.”

  “What house?”

  “Our house. Right around the bend on this old road, which, naturally, I’ll have surfaced now that I can afford to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is kind of a back entrance to the property.”

  “What property?”

  “Our property. You said you liked mountains.”

  “I do. Look up there, they’re so grand, so breathtaking!”

  “Then, come on, mountain lover, we’re almost there.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, you see,” said Drew as they walked left around the dirt curve, “I have a friend in Fort Collins who told me about this place. ‘Nails’ is really rich—we called him Nails in c
ollege ’cause he could nail down anything, from a date to a deal—and he said it was the only acreage left, if I could come up with the price. Then, also very much like Nails, he added that he could help me if it was a problem.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I don’t think anyone really knows. He has a bunch of computers and deals in stocks and bonds and commodities, those kinds of things. But the proudest moment came when I said to him, ‘It’s no problem, Nails. If I like it, I’ll buy it.’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “ ‘On a government salary, buddy?’ And I said, ‘No, old buddy, I’ve put a lot of my per diems into the European markets, and he said, ‘Let’s have lunch, or dinner, or stay at my place for as long as you like.’ ”

  “You’re shameless, Drew Latham!” They rounded the bend in the road, and what lay before them caused Karin to flush with astonishment. It was a huge, pristine blue-green lake, several white sails skimming the water, and in the distance a number of exquisitely designed houses with protruding docks below their manicured lawns. Above, glistening in the sunlight, were the receding mountains, like heavenly fortresses protecting a beautiful earthly enclave. And to their right was a large expanse of lakefront fields, uninhabited, filled with high grass and wildflowers.

  “There you are, lady, that’s our house. Can’t you see it? A couple of miles over there is the southwest entrance to the Rocky Mountain National Park.”

  “Oh, my darling, I can’t believe it!”

  “Believe, it’s there. It’s ours. And in a year the house will be there—after you approve the plans, of course. Nails got me the finest architect in Colorado.”

  “But, Drew,” laughed Karin, racing down the hill of grass toward the water’s edge and the stream that bordered the property. “It will take so long, what are we going to do?”

  “I was thinking of pitching a pretty big tent, like squatters, but it wouldn’t work!” yelled Latham, catching up with her.

  “Why not? I’d love it!”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Drew, breathless, holding her by the shoulders. “Guess who’s flying out to oversee the initial construction because the chłopak isn’t capable?”