The Vengeance of the Tau, page 17
Suddenly a new surge of bullets erupted from the other side of the lobby, fired in the direction of the twins. Blaine caught a glimpse of a man with a crew cut ducking back behind the cover of the front desk to avoid the twins’ return fire. Just as fast, the man bounced up again and opened fire with a fresh magazine, forcing the killers to scamper for cover of their own.
McCracken seized the opportunity to charge out of the hotel with the rest of the crowd, the rush absorbing him. On the sidewalk, though, he stopped. Inside, a man had saved his life. The man was a professional, just like the Germans who had tried to take Blaine with tranquilizers. He could be part of that team. He could have answers!
McCracken had to save him.
He swung his eyes desperately about the circular drive fronting the hotel, searching for something to make use of, something—
Blaine’s gaze locked on the lead tour bus in the procession of three. Its engine was still on, the driver having fled with the task of removing the luggage from the underneath compartment only half-completed. McCracken rushed to the open main door and up the steps and got the door closed before he had barely taken the driver’s seat. Then he shoved the big bus into gear and drove it straight forward.
The screeching of the engine almost drowned out the sound of the hotel’s glass front wall disintegrating upon impact. Glass was thrown everywhere as the bus roared right into the lobby, destroying everything in its path. The terrified bystanders managed to dive out of its way, as Blaine steered it for the front desk.
The twins’ bullets began pounding its frame just before the bus got there.
“Get in!” he screamed out the open driver’s vent. “If you want to live, get in!”
The man threw himself up over the counter and chanced a dash round the bus’s front, firing all the way. He lunged up the steps and Blaine jammed the bus into reverse, as the doors hissed closed again. Bullets turned them into spiderwebs of flying glass, and the man with the crew cut returned the fire with his pistol.
The bus’s tail end slammed through another section of the lobby’s wraparound glass, taking a hefty portion of a wall with it this time. Its front hadn’t made it all the way out when McCracken shifted into drive and tore off, turning the entire entryway into a ruined shell.
The windshield shattered under the force of the twins’ gunfire, which peppered the frame as the bus started away. Ducking low beneath the dashboard, Blaine heard a pair of thumps as at least two of its outside tires were shot out. But that wasn’t about to stop him from steering the bus straight onto the main road fronting the Büyük Efes.
“Who are they?” Blaine demanded of the man kneeling on the floor a yard away from him. “Who are you?”
“The man who’s going to tell you what’s going on,” the man said breathlessly in German-laced English. “The man who has the answers you need.”
Chapter 20
“I’M LISTENING,” MCCRACKEN SAID, watching the man’s gun.
“Not here. Not yet. They’ll be coming.”
He bent the bus into a screeching turn and sped on.
“You’re part of the team that came for me in the hotel.”
The man nodded. “Its leader.”
“One of your men was carrying a tranquilizer pistol.”
“It was never our intention to kill you. We need you alive. We need your help.”
“You could have asked for it.”
“You wouldn’t have given it.”
“Why?”
“Because we are Nazis, Mr. McCracken.”
The car’s rear doors were yanked open simultaneously.
“Go!” one of the Twins screamed.
“After the bus!” the other added.
“Now!” they followed in unison. “That way!”
The driver sped off before Billy Griggs could catch his breath. He had seen the bus first crash through the hotel lobby and then screech away, but had thought the Twins were responsible, for who else would have—
“Take a right here!”
“Don’t slow down!”
“A left now!”
“I see it!”
The Twins were out of the car again before it had come to a complete halt, rushing forward as if the traffic around them didn’t exist. It moved in stops and starts. The snarl, they saw now, had been caused by the battered bus being abandoned by McCracken in the middle of the avenue. The Twins checked it cautiously, knowing this might be a ruse to get them to lower their guard. McCracken could be hiding or lurking anywhere, setting a trap, waiting to strike.
Just as they would have.
But he was long gone, and not alone, either. They hadn’t killed the German team’s leader when the chance was there and now McCracken had rescued him. That error seemed certain to compound their failure. The Twins looked at each other.
“Shit,” they said together.
“At the dig, those were your men I found dead inside the find!” Blaine realized. “What was left of them anyway.”
They had abandoned the bus nearly ten minutes earlier. The German was driving one of the four cars he had planted in all directions from the hotel, as an added and ultimately fortuitous precaution. McCracken sat in the passenger seat tensely.
“Not my men, Mr. McCracken. If they were my men, things would not have progressed to the unfortunate heights they did.”
“They killed the head of the dig team.”
“Their orders were to do nothing of the kind. And they never, under any circumstances, should have entered the chamber. They exceeded the parameters of their mission.”
“And what about your mission?”
“My orders were to stabilize the situation in Ephesus and, once your involvement was uncovered, help you in any way possible.” He looked McCracken’s way. “I’m afraid I arrived too late to be of any service to you.”
“The helicopter!”
“Yes.”
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Tessen. Hans Tessen. At least, that used to be my name.”
“Until you were resettled after the war. Who by? ODESSA? The Comrades Organization?”
“We should not dwell on the past with the present in the peril it is.”
“But you were a soldier.”
Tessen’s neck stiffened. “I am a soldier, Mr. McCracken, just as you are, and our enemy this time is a common one.”
“Tweedledum and Tweedledee back at the hotel?”
“They killed my men, disrupted my orderly plan to establish contact with you.”
“Orderly?” Blaine raised disbelievingly. “Your men blew up the door of the room they thought I was in.”
“To take you by surprise, to give them a chance to explain.”
“Hope they were going to do a better job than you are, Hans.”
“Someone else sent those twins, Mr. McCracken. That someone is your true enemy.”
Blaine thought of Billy Griggs and the battle that had spread onto the Golden Gate Bridge. “And just who is that?”
“I don’t know, but if the past is any indication …”
“That’s twice you’ve mentioned the past, Hans. Why don’t we start there?”
Tessen pulled at his collar as if to stretch it. Clearly things were not proceeding in the order he had planned. His eyes drifted to the rearview mirror again, as if expecting the twins to appear at any moment.
“The beginning,” he muttered.
“That would do just fine.”
“A Catholic boys’ school in France during World War II. I do not remember the name.”
“Get on with it.”
“Our division was assigned to ferret out the many Jews such places were known to be hiding,” he continued, his voice soft and almost mechanical. “Our commanding officer was named Erich Stimmel. He was a proud man who felt that such toilsome work was beneath him. If he could not exercise his abilities on the front, then—” Tessen took a deep breath. “We pulled our trucks through the school’s front gate. I remember the day well. It was raining, cold. I was shivering. The trucks stopped and we dispersed. The schoolboys were rounded up and placed in orderly lines, along with the teachers. The school’s headmaster, a priest, stood not far from Stimmel in the front.” Tessen’s voice became harder, colder. “Edelstein, Sherman, and Grouche. …” He called them as if off a roll. Then his voice went flat again. “Those were the names of the boys we had come for. A local baker who delivered the school’s bread had informed. We had not come to investigate. We had come simply to punish.”
“Punish,” Blaine repeated.
“The school would be closed, the three boys taken away and shipped elsewhere.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me finish, please. The priest would not turn the boys over. When their names were called, they did not come forward. Stimmel was enraged. He insisted that three other boys would be shot in their place if the Jews did not step out.”
McCracken could see the bulge in his collar as Tessen swallowed hard.
“When they finally showed themselves, Stimmel had them shot. He lined them up against a brick wall and assigned six men to the firing squad. I didn’t think he would really do it, not until the very last when he said ‘Feuer!’ We had made our point. There was no reason to …”
“But you did.”
“Yes.” Tessen sighed. “First the boys, and then the priest. Only with him the firing squad was reduced to five. One still stood there but did not pull his trigger.” His eyes sharpened and peered toward Blaine. “Me, Mr. McCracken.”
“That wasn’t all,” Tessen continued. “Before the priest was shot, Stimmel let him speak.” The Nazi’s words seemed to be coming harder here, an undercurrent of fear rimming each and every syllable. “He placed a curse on us. He swore that he and the boys would be avenged for what we had done to them. He swore that his wrath would live beyond the grave, that we would pay horribly for the acts we had committed. Stimmel just smiled at him and gave the order to fire again. He died glaring at Stimmel. The colonel spit on his corpse and turned his back.”
“A curse …”
“None of us paid it any heed. Only those nearest the wall could hear the words clearly anyway. By the time the war ended in shame, we had forgotten, all of us.”
“But something made you remember, didn’t it?”
Tessen nodded, and the car wavered slightly out of control. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and pulled down a narrow side street. He parked in front of the closed storage bay of some sort of small factory or plant.
“Stimmel was the first,” he replied. “It was two years after the war had ended. He was living in Vienna, also under a new identity. They found what was left of him in a hotel room. He had been torn apart. The other five members of the firing squad were killed in similar fashion. I was the lone survivor, and I have tried to tell myself it was because I refused to aim my bullets as ordered. I have tried to tell myself that the powers that the priest’s curse unleashed spared me because they knew. But I always feared they would still come for me another time.”
“Because Stimmel and the members of his firing squad weren’t the only ones to get what they had coming to them, were they?”
Tessen nodded. “There were dozens of others, all with new identities chiseled for them by those in the party who wished to prepare the way for our rebirth. Some were protected, guarded. It didn’t matter. Nothing could stop whatever force was unleashed that rainy day by the priest. And now, now …”
“Now what?”
Tessen’s face had turned ashen. “It has started again.”
“What?”
“All over the world, vengeance is being dispensed in the same way it was in the years following the war. I have always feared as much,” Tessen said, terror underscoring his voice. “And in more recent days I have expected it.”
“Why?”
“The dig site that the Hazelhurst team uncovered. We were too late to stop them from opening the doorway. With a path reopened to this world, whatever fulfilled the priest’s original curse was able to return.”
Tessen turned and stared at Blaine. McCracken’s eyes returned the look skeptically without wavering.
“Refusing to believe was common among my fellows all those years ago, Mr. McCracken. I suppose some of them refused right up until the curse reached them. You see, the stories you have heard about Hitler’s obsession with the supernatural are underrated. I have spoken with members of the teams that he dispatched all over the world. One of them spent the last eighteen months of the war searching for the entrance to hell. By the time I met him, a month before he died, he was a raving drunk. But he claimed they found it in the end, when it was too late to mount an effort to explore and excavate it properly.”
“Oh, they explored it all right,” Blaine muttered.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. What else did this man say?”
“They hid all traces of their work and made a detailed map of how to find the site, a copy of which led both you and Hazelhurst to it. But the damage had already been done. The original discoverers had opened the same doorway Hazelhurst did, Mr. McCracken, and something emerged from it to extract the justice the priest had called for in his curse.” The Nazi took a deep breath. “The fact that it’s happening again proves the curse was real. We are talking about doorways here, invitations. As soon as Hazelhurst’s team reopened the same doorway, the killings began again, because whatever had laid dormant for all these years was free to return to this world. Perhaps it was summoned to do another’s bidding. Perhaps it is merely fulfilling its original mandate. But it is back.” Tessen paused to search Blaine’s emotionless eyes. “You must believe me. You must!”
“You’re close to the truth, Tessen, closer than you can possibly know.”
The Nazi’s lips quivered with his fear. His whole face paled and began twitching. “You went down there,” he realized. “You saw!”
“I saw, all right, but not monsters or demons—a whole cache of Nazi war machine remnants, stored in a secret chamber for the next Reich to make use of.”
“No, it can’t—”
“And some of the remnants were missing, maybe hundreds of crates worth. …” Blaine detailed what he and Melissa had uncovered. Tessen’s eyes bulged when he reached the part about finding the remains of the three Jews.
“So,” Blaine concluded. “Let’s say whatever was in those missing crates allowed the Jews to exact revenge on Stimmel and dozens of others like him. Let’s say when their work was done, they decided to destroy the crates and seal the chamber forever. Only someone killed them before they could finish the job, someone who knew about another passageway.”
Tessen looked utterly befuddled. “Then this person …”
“Very likely had something to do with the removal of the rest of the crates in the much more recent past.”
“Who? Who?”
Blaine looked the old Nazi in the eyes. “Anyone with a desire to see this world rid of scum. Take your pick.”
Tessen stiffened. McCracken didn’t give him a chance to respond.
“Just tell me how you knew I was here, how you knew I was at the site.”
“I didn’t, not at first. I was reached when word filtered out of Turkey that one of Hazelhurst’s teams had at last unearthed what many of us had lived in fear of since the end of the war. If the doorway was opened again, then perhaps none of us would be safe. Perhaps the forces summoned by the original curse would return to finish the job they started forty-five years ago. We dispatched a team to seal the newly found entrance. That was supposed to be the team’s only mission, I swear it! Word that they had not reported in reached us at the same time we learned of your presence in Izmir. The reason for it seemed obvious.”
“The entrance is sealed again now.”
“I saw. Thanks to you and the woman.”
“Jesus,” Blaine muttered, chilled suddenly. “Turn this car around!”
“But—”
McCracken grabbed the old Nazi’s arm. “Listen to me, Tessen. Turn this car around. Back toward Bahribaba. The Archaeological Museum there.”
“I must—”
“Do it!”
Chapter 21
MELISSA DID HER BEST to deflect questions about her father at the Archaeological Museum in Bahribaba, the name given to Izmir’s town center. Broaching the subject at all could only complicate matters further and cause her more hurt, so she simply smiled at the staff’s pleasantries while tearing herself up inside. Her father was still alive, as far as the museum was concerned. He was well known here, one of the facility’s largest benefactors. Favors were owed, and it was time to call at least one of them in.
She showed the tattered book to some of the research assistants, who frowned at the state of its decomposition.
“We can treat the ink to make it readable again,” one explained. “But the problem lies with the condition of the paper. It’s so brittle and parched, chances are the writing won’t fluoresce even when treated.”
“On the other hand,” another said, “we could have a go at this with the electron microscope. Take about a week if—”
“No,” Melissa said abruptly. “Today. It has to be today.”
The two men looked at each other and shrugged.
“Let’s have a go with the pages, then,” the first said.
“Process takes about an hour,” the second added.
And just that much later, Melissa found herself in a small closetlike cubicle with a single counter and chair. She was wearing special glasses that would allow her to see once the cubicle’s black light was turned on. The pages of the book had been treated with a fluid that interacted with what remained of the ink and its lingering impressions to make the words readable again.
“We’ll be right outside if you need anything,” one of the research assistants offered.
“Thank you.”
The door closed and Melissa locked it before sliding her chair beneath the counter and activating the black light attached to a swinging arm above her. She placed a pad of paper just to her right, so she could make notes on whatever she was able to decipher. Then she opened the book. There, on the inside cover page, the magic of technology revealed a name in bold, blue-tinted writing:
