Come tomorrow morning, Cort Jantzen would
own
the front page of
The Vancouver Times.
Editor Ed was so pleased with the stories his golden boy was hammering out that once the edition had been put to bed, he actually unlocked the right-hand drawer of his cluttered desk and offered Cort one of the Havana cigars that he hoarded in a wooden box.
“Go home. Smoke this. And get some rest. You’ll wake up to your byline on the scoop of scoops.”
Before he left the newspaper building, Cort checked his inbox one more time to see if there was another e-mail from the Swastika Killer.
There wasn’t.
What did that mean?
* * *
The Walther PPK lay hidden from sight under the driver’s seat of the empty car. The myth among the post-war Nazi fugitives who had slipped in and out of the bunker beneath Fritz Streicher’s mansion was that the gun had once belonged to the führer himself, and had been presented to Ernst Streicher for his unflinching devotion to the Fatherland. Somehow the gun had survived the fall of the Third Reich and made its way to Vancouver in the 1950s, where it was presented to the new paymaster of the Swastika.
From father to son to grandson, the Walther PPK had passed through three generations, and now it lay in the car outside
The Vancouver Times
building, waiting for the moment when it would blow out Cort Jantzen’s brains.
* * *
The rain was coming down so hard when Cort exited the building that he could see nothing but blurry outlines in front of him. Popping open his umbrella as a shield from the biblical deluge, he sloshed in the general direction of his car. Climbing in without getting soaked took some maneuvering—a dance of unlocking the door and swinging it wide, protecting himself with the umbrella as he swiveled into the driver’s seat, and then furling the umbrella and giving it a good shake to fling off the raindrops before depositing it in the foot well of the passenger’s seat.
As Cort reached back to close the driver’s door and shut out the raging storm, he felt a circle of cold steel press against his temple.
“Straighten up slowly,” Swastika’s voice commanded. “If you try anything, I’ll empty your skull.”
Carefully, Cort sat up in the driver’s seat. As he caught a quick glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror, he spied the Walther PPK aimed at his brain.
“You drive,” Swastika ordered.
* * *
Even on high speed, the windshield wipers of Dane’s car couldn’t sweep the glass fast enough for him to be able to absorb any more than a vague outline of the mansion on University Hill. In driving around the property on odd-angled hillside streets, the sergeant deduced what he couldn’t take in because of the curtain of rain: that this estate on grounds that swept down the slope of Point Grey would offer breathtaking views of the ocean, the mountains, the park, and the harbor on a good-weather day. He parked his car a block away and walked back through the blustery storm to the foot of the rear driveway.
Time to flex the law.
No way would he get a warrant on the basis that a couple who specialized in Nazi Germany and Greek myths had resided on this property prior to 1989. Nor could he do a perimeter search to see if he was able to spot something suspicious in plain sight. He’d have to get really lucky to find that farm truck with its broken tail light, and already he could see that there were no vehicles parked outside.
So hidden by the deluge and trees alongside the driveway, Dane crept up the gurgling black ribbon to what seemed to be a coach house tucked in an evergreen thicket. The windows were dark. Circling around to the side of the building most shrouded with greenery, Dane shone his penlight in through the glass and …
“Yep, that’s a farm truck,” he whispered.
Still, all Dane could see was a side silhouette. He couldn’t swear that this was
the
truck.
Not without breaking in.
Burglarizing the coach house was a snap, thanks to the laser beam device he’d seized from the Pentagon spooks. Cutting out the window, the Mountie climbed in.
The flatbed of the truck reeked with the stench of death. From the tool box just behind the cab all the way back to the tailgate was a smear of blood. From there, the smear continued across the floor and around the side of the truck, seeming to disappear under the wall in front of the windshield. Before following the trail any farther, Dane checked to make sure that one of the truck’s tail lights was cracked exactly as it was in the snapshot taken outside Cabaret Berlin.
It was.
Raindrops on the hood meant that the truck had been out in the storm. The engine was still warm.
A quick call to a justice of the peace and a little creative editing to avoid telling
how
the farm truck was spotted secured Dane the legal right to search the wolf’s lair under a telewarrant.
* * *
“Mmm?” Jackie mumbled into the phone.
“Wake up, sleepyhead. I found the farm truck.”
“Uh. Bad connection.”
“No, it’s the rain. My head’s sticking out a window, and I’m whispering to muffle this call.”
“Where are you?”
“Got a pen?”
Dane gave her the address.
“We have a telewarrant to toss this estate. Secure the perimeter as quickly as you can so no one can escape. But don’t send the gangbusters storming in until I give the word. And you’d better call Cort so he can be in on the action.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Scout around.”
As soon as Jackie disconnected from Dane, she punched in the number for Cort’s cellphone.
No answer.
* * *
Cort Jantzen turned his car off the street and drove halfway around the U in front of the sprawling Point Grey mansion. The porte-cochère welcomed visitors to the university side of the residence while the coach house lurked out back, where the bluff fell away.
“Get out,” Swastika ordered, waving the pistol.
* * *
The moment he unlocked the door and stepped into the front vestibule of his hideout, Swastika knew that the Aryan was lurking downstairs.
The alarm system wasn’t engaged.
Only one other person on the face of the earth knew the code to shut it off. Ever since that dark day when Hans Streicher’s East German son had rapped on the door to the post-war domain inherited by Fritz Streicher’s Canadian son, Swastika had lived under the constant threat of exposure. By using the tattoos from both their fathers, the Aryan—for that’s what he called himself—had found a cache of mysterious documents in their grandfather’s Sudeten headquarters. The Europunk had squirreled away the documents, along with a handwritten letter detailing Streicher family Nazi secrets revealed to him by Fritz moments before he died, in a safe new hidey-hole, and there they would remain so long as no one tried to betray him.
“Do we understand each other, Cousin?”
“Yes,” Swastika had replied.
“If I go down, you go down. And it’s goodbye to all of this.”
In the end, they had divided their legacy in half. The country cousin got the Phantom Valley Ranch in the Cariboo; the city cousin got this mansion near UBC. The Fourth Reich bunker they had to share, with Swastika gaining access by way of the hidden staircase from the mansion upstairs and the Aryan by way of the underground passage from the coach house in which he stayed whenever he came to town. The Aryan also relieved his cousin of Ernst Streicher’s sword, while Swastika retained the dagger and this gun.
If the Aryan had been content to putter around like a low-profile hick, the Mounties of Special X would not now be cinching this double noose around their necks. But instead, he had been compelled by whatever demons tormented his psyche to drive down to the city periodically to pick up prey in the tenderloin district of boy’s town.
As soon as it became evident that they had picked up the Aryan’s trail, Swastika had done his best to keep the bloodhounds at bay. The vigilante killings had given him a sense of Nietzschean purpose, and they had also diverted the Horsemen from the exploits of his reckless cousin. But now the Aryan had stolen that from him too, by using the bison head that Swastika had left in the map room to usurp
his
Minotaur myth.
Cort Jantzen had betrayed him.
So had the Aryan.
The time was nigh to execute
both
traitors.
The Fourth Reich wasn’t big enough for two supermen.
* * *
The blood on the floor of the garage could mean only one thing: another victim had been dragged into this lair. If the victim was dead, Dane could afford to wait until Jackie had the perimeter cordoned off. But if the victim was alive, and he or she died because of some hesitation on Dane’s part, the Mountie would never be able to wash that guilt from his mind.
He followed the smear to where it seemed to vanish under the wall, then felt around the panel until it gave way under his fingers. Unaware that by dislodging the door he would cause warning lights to flash in the bunker, he swung the camouflaged entrance wide to reveal a subterranean passage that swallowed the beam of his penlight.
Racked and ready to point and shoot, Dane drew his gun.
The Mountie was inward bound.
* * *
The Aryan was ready for whoever came to get him. Pentagon pigs or Mounted pigs, he’d pigstick them all the same.
Hours ago, he had run a whetstone along the blade of his grandfather’s sword until the cutting edge was as sharp as a razor. For well over a decade, his cousin had lived in fear that the Aryan would expose the secrets that bound them together like Siamese twins. Although it was possible that his ploy to extort a billion dollars from the Pentagon had lured the pair of hit men to the Skunk Mine, he suspected that his cousin had betrayed him to the Yanks. Pay me handsomely for the treasure trove the Aryan will hand over if you squeeze his balls hard enough, he imagined him saying, and you can have whatever he retrieved from the Sudeten castle.
Well, no more.
The documents were gone.
Before returning to the bunker to die like a hero, just as the führer did, the Aryan had removed the Streicherstab blueprints from their current hidey-hole and done with them what would do the most damage to the Pentagon.
Then, having set a trap in this version of Hitler’s bedroom, he sat waiting to kill.
* * *
The penlight in one hand and his Smith & Wesson in the other, Dane followed the blood smear along the dank tunnel, closing on the flashing light ahead. As his footsteps echoed within the claustrophobic confines of the underground passage, he reached an open steel door with a punch-coded lock and stepped across the threshold of time into Hitler’s bunker underneath the chancellery garden.
Sweeping the gun before him, he almost opened fire on three people who appeared in the flashing pulse of the 1940s-vintage overhead bulbs. But he realized in time that one was just a boy, and then it sank in that all three were wax figures.
Hitler.
Eva Braun.
And their illegitimate son?
The corridor straight ahead presented no immediate peril. If an attack were launched, it would come from one of two doors in the wall to his right. As Dane sidestepped to clear the first chamber, like a dancer slinking through a strobe light in a disco, the steel door swung shut behind him and he heard the beep, beep, beep, of the punch code imprisoning him within the bunker.
* * *
The alarm informed Swastika that the tunnel door was ajar, so the Nazi hit the button that closed it by remote control and then entered the security code.
Beep … beep … beep … beep.
If the Aryan was down in the bunker and wanted out, undoing the alarm would give him away. If the Aryan was out on one of his prowls, disarming the alarm would announce his return.
Walther in hand, Swastika crossed to the secret panel in the side of the vestibule and popped it open to expose the staircase to the bunker below.
He waved the gun.
“You first,” he ordered.
With the muzzle of the firearm pressed against his skull, Cort Jantzen stepped into the hollow wall and, step by step, began the cold descent into the pit of University Hill.
* * *
The first door to the right ushered Dane into a mock-up of the map room where the führer had married Eva Braun. A table and chair to the left, a settee to the right. Nowhere to hide except under the table, and a quick crouch convinced the cop that no one hid down there. The tabletop was bare but for a wooden box with the words “SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher” engraved on the lid. Dane flipped it open to reveal perhaps the finest dagger he had ever seen.
Stepping out of the map room, he hugged its outer wall with his gun hand extended, ready to fire at anything that emerged from the next door.
The closer he got to the wax figures, the sharper the features became. Dane could see now that the Hitler mannequin bore the face of the UBC professor, whose photograph Professor MacKissock had retrieved from faculty files. The wax sculpture of Eva Braun, he assumed, resembled the wife of the history professor, the Siren. The third figure was a boy in a Hitler Youth uniform, and the blood trail ended directly at his feet. The large sail needle and threads of black cord in the blood suggested that that’s where the Swastika Killer had sat to stitch the bison head onto the Pentagon hit man.
The Swastika Killer?
Or the Stealth Killer?
It no longer mattered which, for this was clearly where the man who’d grown out of the waxworks lad split into a pair of Nazi killers. This bunker, thought Dane, is where the psycho does his identity switch.
Under the throbbing overhead lights, Dane switched the gun to his left hand and swung it around the jamb of the adjacent door.
Nothing.
Darting into the antechamber, the Mountie shielded himself behind the wall that separated it from Hitler’s study, waiting for a counterattack that didn’t come.