Vancouver
The labyrinth at UBC reminded Dane of the yew-treed maze at Hampton Court, King Henry VIII’s royal palace on the Thames, to the west of London. Dane had tried to maneuver his way through that twisting puzzle with a sexy Swede he’d met at a London club the night before. Dilly-dallying along the way, they had finally figured out that the trick to threading the maze was to keep your touch brushing the hedgerow to the right. Leaving Hampton Court, they had navigated the turns of London’s transportation system, until they’d finally ended up entwined with each other in bed in Dane’s hotel room.
He wondered where Kadriin was now.
Probably married, with three blond kiddies and a husband smiling in perpetual satisfaction.
He sighed.
Today, Dane entered another maze with another attractive woman. But this was strictly business, and Cort Jantzen was along as a third-wheel chaperone. The three of them had just flown down from the Cariboo, having been released to return south to this new murder scene. Landing out of an overcast sky sodden with rain, the trio had driven across the Fraser River to Point Grey and around the peninsula to the maze in the gardens out at the tip of the tongue.
“You three look bagged,” said Gill Macbeth as Dane, Jackie, and Cort splashed into the labyrinth. There was no danger that they would get lost as Dane had in England, for the body was sprawled in the mud just around the first turn. Ident had erected a makeshift tent over the victim to keep any forensic evidence from being washed away by the deluge.
“Didn’t sleep,” Dane responded over the downpour’s patter on the dripping tarp.
“None of you?”
“Uh-uh.”
“We were up north,” Jackie explained. “With the chief. Looks like the guy we were after was busy down here.”
The corpse in the labyrinth was garbed in the same midnight black camouflage as the two prior Pentagon spooks. But stitched over the head and shoulders of this cadaver was the bison head mascot of Special X.
“Another Greek myth,” suggested Gill.
“The Minotaur,” Cort expanded. “Half bull, half man, the creature was a monster that haunted the labyrinth under the palace of King Minos of Crete. This killer is
really
into myths. I grew up on this stuff. Odysseus, Jason, Perseus, Theseus—Greek heroes one and all. It was Theseus who slew the Minotaur.”
“How?” asked Jackie.
“The labyrinth was supposed to be impossible to escape, but Theseus unwound a ball of string that would later guide him back out. When he found the monster, he ran it through with his sword.”
“This victim was impaled too,” the pathologist said. “From the look of the wounds in the buttocks, he was spiked from back to front with a similar weapon.”
“Time of death?” Jackie asked.
“Judging from rigor and body temp, I’d say more than twenty-four hours ago. Sometime in the early morning of the night before last would be my rough guess. The body was found when a gardener walked into the maze earlier today to continue trimming the hedge. It wasn’t around when he quit work yesterday afternoon and cordoned off the entrance.”
“So the victim was killed elsewhere and dumped here overnight,” said Dane.
“Had to be,” Gill agreed.
Before flying down from the Cariboo, Dane had assumed the role of exhibit man. He’d carried with him the high-tech gadgets they’d recovered from the mine so that he could convey them to this crime scene and see if they matched the hardware still on this latest victim. Crouching beside the Minotaur, he compared them now, confirming that every device from the Cariboo had its twin here, and also that both twins had a triplet in what was seized off the spook who had burgled his condo.
“Is there a swastika gouged into the forehead of the bison?” Dane asked Gill.
The pathologist examined the matted fur.
“No,” she reported.
“Ident will want to examine the stitching and other forensic clues before the head is removed from the corpse, so after you do the autopsy, would you call me and confirm whether the Nazi signature is carved into the brow beneath?”
* * *
Dane, Jackie, and Cort returned to Special X for their respective cars. Before they parted company, the three laid out a game plan.
“The first thing we need to know,” Dane suggested, “is whether or not the Swastika Killer sent you another jpeg. When he saw that reversed swastika in this morning’s
Times,
did he slip up in a quick shoot-from-the-hip reply?”
“I’ll phone if he did—or if he does,” said Cort.
“Next, we need to anticipate where he will strike next time. It seems his MO is to choose his victims from the
Times.
So far, each victim was killed soon after a story about him or her appeared in the paper. This psycho picked up the myth angle in your Cyclops story, Cort, and that’s why he homed in on you as his confidant. So I think the name of his next victim is buried somewhere in the
Times.
”
“The body in the maze doesn’t fit your theory, though. There was no story about a Pentagon hit man in the paper until this morning. And even then, it was about the killer who came after
you.
”
“That proves my other suspicion. Remember what I said about the good and bad Nazi killers being one?”
“You told me it was off the record until we had proof,” said the reporter.
“Well, it’s on the record now. The proof is the guy dumped in the maze. The Stealth Killer Nazi has been playing out his revenge fantasies up at the Skunk Mine for years. The Swastika Killer Nazi came into play only recently, to throw us off the trail of the other identity. He’s the killer who communicates with you. For some reason, the Pentagon spooks want our Siamese twins, so they sent a hit man after me for the Swastika Killer’s file and two hit men after the Stealth Killer up at his home next to the Skunk Mine.”
“But he killed them both,” said Jackie.
“Right. In the mine. He left one for us to find and brought the other down with him in the back of that farm truck. While the three of us were flying up to the Cariboo last night, hoping to grab the Stealth Killer on his return to the Skunk Mine, he stayed down here in whatever hiding place he has in Vancouver and switched into his Swastika Killer identity to dump the second hit man.”
“He’s reintegrating,” said Cort. “The killers are fusing together.”
“And it’s probably a struggle between both identities, with neither actor willing to be upstaged.”
“So where do we find him?” asked Jackie.
“The only place left,” said Dane. “He won’t return to the Stealth Killer’s lair in the Skunk Mine, so we must locate the Swastika Killer’s hideout down here.”
* * *
Editor Ed was waiting to pounce when Cort rushed into the newsroom of
The Vancouver Times.
“What have you got?” he demanded. He almost drooled when his star reporter told him.
With his boss staring over his shoulder, Cort checked his e-mail for another jpeg from the Swastika Killer.
Nothing.
What did that mean?
As Cort reached for that morning’s
Times
to search for articles that might point to the next victim, Bess McQueen sidled up to his desk.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“The Stealth Killer and the Swastika Killer are the same guy, Ed,” Cort said, addressing their boss. “Since both have fused into one and I was at both scenes—the mine up north and the maze down here—I think the scoop and the byline should both be mine.”
“You got ’em,” said Ed.
“Hey, that’s not fair!” fumed the queen bitch.
“All’s fair in love and war,” said the old newshound gruffly. “And it’s a market-share war out there, Bess.”
* * *
“I’ll take the first watch,” said Jackie. “You go home and sleep. Both of us were up last night, but thanks to that hit man at your home, you lost the night before too.”
“You’ll phone if anything breaks?”
“Sure. Now go home to Puss and the kittens.”
As Dane was driving down Cambie Street, Gill Macbeth called his cell. “There was no swastika carved into the forehead underneath the bison mask. Does that make sense in light of the previous signatures?”
“Yes,” replied the sergeant. “This psycho is losing his shaky grip on the switch that controls his dissociated identities.”
“He no longer knows who he is?”
“And we don’t know either,” said Dane.
By the time he reached his condo, his imagination had come up with a way to kill two birds with one stone. Dr. Kim Rossmo was at work on a geographic profile that would reveal the most likely anchor points for the Swastika Killer. Dane was no profiler, but he had noticed something. The rattlesnake research lab, Medusa’s home, and the maze at the tip of Point Grey were all geographically linked to UBC. The university, he believed, also held a key to the next victim of the Swastika Killer. So before he climbed into bed to catch up on his lost sleep, the sergeant phoned the university. That done, he set the alarm on his clock-radio.
The moment his head hit the pillow, Dane was out.
* * *
Swastika stared in disbelief at the swastika on the front page of
The Vancouver Times.
The symbol sat front and center for readers to see, just as he’d demanded in his last e-mail communication with Cort Jantzen, but it was the
wrong
symbol, and that error had spun his message around 180 degrees.
The swastika in the Western world dates back to the Crux Gammata, a pre-Christian cross composed of four Greek capitals of the letter gamma. The arm of that third letter in the Greek alphabet bends to the right, so the swastika turns clockwise. When Hitler appropriated it for the Nazi Party, he twisted that swastika forty-five degrees. But instead of signifying the racial purity advanced by Hitler’s Third Reich, the swastika on the front page of the
Times
—with its counterclockwise arms—evoked the contentment sought by subhuman religions.
Hindus!
Buddhists!
Native Indians!
Untermenschen
all!
Because it wasn’t composed of the Greek letter gamma, the
Times
’ subhuman swastika—from the Sanskrit word
Svasti,
which means “happiness” or “well-being”—could turn either way. The most common Asian/Native version—the one used in the
Times
—turned in a counterclockwise direction, with the tip of one arm pointing straight up.
You stupid fools!
But as his rage began to cool down into cold, clear logic, Swastika grasped that he was being played for a fool. This mistake wasn’t caused by dyslexia or some printing screw-up. It was a deliberate betrayal by Cort Jantzen. Swastika had courted arrest by linking up with the reporter because he thought the newspaperman was a vigilante like himself, an Aryan crusader who understood that only the master race created Supermen.
Okay, thought Swastika. We’ll play it your way. If betrayal is the game, so be it.
His previous victims had all been chosen from stories published in
The Vancouver Times.
His next victim would come from the
Times
too.
From a byline.
The byline of Cort Jantzen.
Nordhausen, Germany
July
5,
1945
The formal handover of the Allied occupation took place in the roll-call square of Dora-Mittelbau. Beside the gallows and the
Pfahlhangen
post, liberated Poles had erected a huge crucifix to symbolize their suffering.
The Nazi POWs were lined up single file and flanked by a detail of GIs with automatic weapons. Hardware was about to command the column to march when Vlasov growled something in Russian to his interpreter.
“We demand our share,” the mouthpiece translated.
“Of what?” Hardware asked. The V-2s, he predicted.
“These prisoners of war.”
Hardware shrugged his shoulders and said, “Take your half.”
The two Allies stood face to face at the approximate center of the line of ragtag POWs. As the Russkie stepped back a few paces to count off from both ends of the line, Hardware studied the two youths directly in front of him. Both were sweating in the winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, and neither was more than fifteen. They were probably Werewolves, for they had been caught napping in the woods with their Panzerfaust bazookas. They might have carried out an attack if exhaustion hadn’t knocked them out and a U.S. patrol hadn’t pounced on them in their sleep. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, and with similar features, they could have been brothers.
The Pied Piper, thought Hardware.
The way the American saw it, Hitler was the Pied Piper of Kraut youth. He had put these punks under his spell by playing his seductive flute. They had only to listen, and they would follow him anywhere. Never before in history had a generation of young people lived and breathed the propaganda of war for so long that they couldn’t recall the innocence of childhood. As the Nazi war effort grew more desperate, and adult men were killed off, the SS had been forced to seek its recruits from the ranks of the Hitlerjugend. These two had been captured with no ID papers in their pockets. As Hardware wondered what hid behind their hateful glowers, Colonel Vlasov rejoined him in front of the prisoners and sliced his arm down like a guillotine to divide the line into equal shares.
The line between separated the two
Über
-Aryan youths.
Vlasov shoved his to the left.
Hardware moved his to the right.
Minutes later, the transfer complete, the Americans and their POWs left the roll-call square.
His job done, Hardware was going home.
* * *
Barbarossa—which sounds like “barbarism”—had been a fitting code-name for the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Droning bombers, diving Stukas, blitzkrieging panzers had torn into the flesh of the Motherland, launching the biggest battle in the history of the world. And in the wake of Hitler’s conquering army had come the Einsatzgruppen, Reinhard Heydrich’s mobile killing squads. The four “special action groups” had two orders: first, to “cleanse” Russia of its Jews; and second, to secure political order by liquidating every perceived enemy of the Reich.
Most of Vlasov’s family had gone to the pits. The Einsatzgruppen killers had herded them, along with thousands of other men, women, and children, to the edge of huge graves to be shot one by one in the presence of the others. Large
Aktions
that cleansed thousands in Lvov, in Rovno, in Kharkov. The one that took all of Vlasov’s family, except his sister, was the massacre at Babi Yar, near Kiev, where thirty-five thousand people were shot in just two days. The killing squads had to work in shifts to complete the job.
Vlasov had been a butcher before Barbarossa. It was hard enough to slaughter livestock day after day. But to slaughter
people,
to order them to strip naked and march them down to a mass grave … Well, Vlasov had learned to wreak revenge.
More than a million Russians had died to defeat the Nazis at the Battle of Stalingrad. Like Napoleon’s army, Hitler’s had misjudged the onslaught of winter, giving Vlasov and his troops the strength to push forward, slowly and remorselessly, in the teeth of retreating rifle fire, spitting machine guns, shrapnel bursts from hand grenades, and the shocking booms of percussion artillery shells. But on they had pressed, through rain, snow, freezing temperatures, and soft, muddy ground, while the beleaguered Nazis ran short of manpower, oil, and ammunition. And now, the Red Army at last had the Third Reich in its grasp and was ready to strip it of every armament. But when Vlasov had taken control of the rocket works, the spoils of war had all been stripped away by “American rules.”
The scheme was obvious.
The Americans were doing backroom deals with any Nazis who could help the United States create the most powerful arsenal the world had ever seen.
An arsenal they planned to use against Russia.
It all made sense.
So enraged was Vlasov by this capitalist deception that as soon as Hardware, his troops, and their half of the Nazi POWs had vanished from view, he whipped out the Nagant revolver holstered at his left hip—the gun he carried specifically for times like these, when the Tokarev semi-automatic pistol at his other hip wouldn’t do—and flipped open the cylinder to empty six of its seven chambers of bullets. After spinning the cylinder clockwise, he snapped it shut.
The first to feel the cold muzzle pressed up against the flesh at the bridge of his nose was the
Über
-Aryan youth. The eyes of the fourteen-year-old widened, but he didn’t flinch.
Click!
Vlasov moved left to the next POW and aimed at his brain.
The shaking man pissed his pants.
Click!
Five chambers left. The next POW was defiant.
Click!
The next.
Click!
The next.
Before Vlasov could pull the trigger on one of the last three chambers, the POW in front of him cried out in Russian—he must have learned it from Slavic slaves in the Mittelwerk—“Don’t kill me! I’ll buy my life from you!”
Vlasov paused. “With what?”
“Information.”
“Speak,” he demanded.
“Him!” the terrified man barked, pointing back to the
Über
-Aryan youth. “He’s Ernst Streicher’s son.”
The words so jolted Vlasov that he actually winced. His head jerked to the beginning of the rank, just this side of where his hand had marked the line between.
“Streicher’s son?”
“Hans Streicher. Can’t you see it in him?”
“Yes,” agreed the Russian, and he pulled the trigger. The revolver bucked in his hand as a blood red spray exploded out the back of the whistleblower’s skull.
On the Soviet colonel’s order, Hans Streicher was grabbed by two soldiers and hauled away from the line of POWs.
“Kill them,” Vlasov commanded, and the machine guns opened up on the prisoners with successive bursts of fire until Streicher’s son was the only one left alive.
Trinity Test Site, New Mexico
July 16, 1945
At 5:29:45 a.m. on this Monday morning, God spoke to Hardware for the first time. The lieutenant colonel—Hawke had been promoted for his new Pentagon job at Army Ordnance—was in New Mexico to prepare for the arrival of SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun and his team of rocketeers so that work could begin on beefing up the “arsenal of democracy.” Thanks to his top-secret clearance level, Hardware had earned a special invite to the Trinity test site to witness the birth of a weapon that promised to shock the world.
So here Hardware stood in the early dawn light, as tense as he had ever been in his entire life, counting down the longest ten seconds in history.
Three …
Two …
One …
BWAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
First, there were just a few streaks of gold to the east, and it was so dim that you could barely see your neighbor. Then suddenly there was an enormous flash of searing light, the brightest light that any living creature had ever witnessed. That first atomic explosion created a blinding fireball that fused the desert sand into a green glass-like solid. The sacred blast bored its way through Hardware and produced a vision that was seen by more than the eye. What was a measly burning bush compared with a crater nearly twenty-four hundred feet across and ten feet deep? Hardware heard the word of God in that two-second revelation.
Glory hallelujah!
* * *
Los Alamos produced two atomic weapons.
The first—nicknamed “Little Boy”—was a gun-style weapon that used uranium 235. A slug of U-235 was projected down a gun barrel into the center of another chunk of U-235. That collision produced a nuclear explosion.
At eight-fifteen in the morning on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber, the
Enola Gay,
dropped the Little Boy uranium bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Half of the city was leveled, and somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred and thirty thousand men, women, and children died instantly.
The Japanese had no idea that such a weapon existed.
On the night of the day that the world got news of this bomb, Hardware had a dream. In it, he saw an internment camp at Ground Zero. Prisoners scurried around like ants, and a huge chimney loomed up from the center. All at once, the bomb went off—its thirteen thousand tons of TNT like the world’s largest blast furnace. And when the face of God retreated back to heaven, all that remained of the camp conjured up by his mind was a swirl of ash and bits of bone.
Hardware awoke with a start, and the biggest erection he could ever remember.
Waking up the wife to get a little relief, he spread her legs and climbed on top and launched his own V-2—for that’s the sexual fantasy that sprang to his mind, a rocket like the one the Nazis of Dora-Mittelbau were going to build for the land of the free—and he came in a nuclear blast of his own.
* * *
The second weapon—nicknamed “Fat Man”—used implosion to detonate plutonium. Explosives surrounded a plutonium ball, and when they were detonated, they compressed the ball to cause a nuclear explosion.
With its large harbor and many hills, Nagasaki was called the San Francisco of Japan. On August 9, 1945, three days after Hiroshima, Fat Man dropped out of the belly of another B-29 to devastate more than two square miles of the city. Exploding with a force equal to twenty kilotons of TNT, the plutonium weapon was more powerful than Little Boy. Forty-five thousand citizens died instantly.
Five days later, Japan surrendered and the war was over.
* * *
Nine months after Hardware’s nuclear explosion inside his wife, his son was born.
They named the baby after his dad: Bill Hawke, Jr.
A chip off the old block, the kid required a nickname. Hardware considered calling him Little Boy.
But instead, the boy ended up with another handle.
Big Bad Bill.