The Sphinx

CHAPTER 18

Turcotte had the MP-5 tucked inside of the long coat that Yakov had given him. He was pressed back in the shadows under the Moskvorestkiy Bridge, which spanned the Moskva River near the walls of the Kremlin. Katyenka was farther down Kremlevskaya Naberezhnaya, hiding in the vegetation on the slope that came down from the walls of the Kremlin to the river, while Yakov was in the open, waiting for Lyoncheka.

Turcotte had almost called in Billam’s team for support, but he knew doing that would take them away from being able to support Duncan, and he had just received word from her of the assassination of Sterling prior to leaving the hotel they were staying at. Until he absolutely needed the team, he wanted to leave it untasked.

At the appointed time, a figure appeared, down the walkway from the north, from the direction of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square. Turcotte slipped the submachine gun’s safety off. He could hear intermittent traffic going across the bridge, but otherwise all was quiet.

Yakov turned to face the newcomer, arms out from his side.

“Good evening, comrade,” Yakov greeted Lyoncheka.

“Whoever you have covering you,” Lyoncheka said, “bring them into the open. Now.”

Yakov signaled for Turcotte to come out.

Lyoncheka turned, hand snaking inside his coat, only to have Yakov’s massive paw grab his arm. “Easy, comrade. He’s a friend.”

Lyoncheka shook his head. “There are no friends.” He peered as Turcotte came up to them. “And an American… you are the one who destroyed the alien fleet.”

It was a statement, not a question, so Turcotte remained silent.

“I will have to trust that since you did that,” Lyoncheka said, “you are not working for either of the alien groups or the Watchers.”

“That is good,” Yakov agreed. “What do you have for us?”

“Come with me.” Lyoncheka pointed to the west, where the walls of the Kremlin loomed. “I will show you what you want to see.”

They began walking along the river, the sounds of their boots echoing off the Kremlin walls.

Yakov paused. “There is someone else here. Another friend.”

“You have too many friends for the business you are in.” Lyoncheka’s voice revealed his anger and fear. “Where and who?”

Yakov signaled, and Katyenka appeared out of the darkness.

Lyoncheka shook his head as he recognized her. “She’s GRU! This is too much. I promised to help you”… he tapped Yakov on the chest… “not a committee.”

“We’re in this together.”

“No, I’m not,” Lyoncheka argued.

Turcotte curled his finger around the trigger of the MP-5, but he didn’t pull the gun out. He waited for Yakov to defuse the situation.

“Comrade, you have come this far,” Yakov said. “Sooner or later, you are going to have to take a stand against these aliens and their minions. Take one now. Stratzyda will be over the United States in less than twelve hours.”

Lyoncheka spit. “On your head be it. There is no time for games. Come.” He clambered up the slope toward the Kremlin. They reached the large wall that surrounded the compound and Lyoncheka turned west, the other three following.

When he reached a portal through the wall blocked by a steel gate, Lyoncheka pulled out a plastic card. “We have modernized from the locks and chains that used to secure the compound.” He slid the card into a small opening, then punched in a sequence of numbers on a numeric keypad.

The gate slid open and he led them in. A second steel gate blocked the way into the Kremlin proper, but Lyoncheka turned to the left where another keypad was located. He slid another card through that, entered a new code, and the stones rumbled back, revealing a descending stairway.

“Come, quickly,” Lyoncheka urged them.

They crowded down the stairs to a landing. The stones shut behind them. The only illumination came from a couple of flickering fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Turcotte tightened his grip on the gun, fearing an ambush in the confined space. The only other apparent exit was a solid steel door at the end of the landing.

Lyoncheka leaned over a new security device next to the door. Turcotte recognized it as a retinal scanner, the top of the line in identity checking. Lyoncheka waited as the laser scanned across his eyes, then the door opened, revealing a descending corridor. “Come.”

Lyoncheka led them into the corridor. The walls were painted a dull green, the floor gray. It went straight as far as they could see in the dim lighting. The steel door shut with a thud.

“During the Great Patriotic War,” Lyoncheka said as they walked, “Stalin had a very large bomb shelter built under the Kremlin. Then, during the Cold War, the various premiers continued building deeper and deeper shelters. The desire was to have a command-and-control center and living quarters that could survive a nuclear attack on the Kremlin itself. This was eventually expanded to have underground connections to various other government agencies.

“Billions and billions of rubles were spent. This network we’re in connects to many places under Moscow. There is even a secret underground rail line that goes over eighty kilometers outside of the city to the alternate national command post.”

Lyoncheka opened a heavy door. “This way. We are under the Great Kremlin Palace right now. About eighty feet below the surface.”

The tunnel was smaller and older. Cut right out of the rock, the walls were not finished and a thin sheen of moisture glistened in the faint glow of naked lightbulbs strung every twenty feet. Several of the lights were burned out.

They went about a hundred meters, then another door blocked their way. This one was wooden and very old, with iron bands across it. Turcotte noted a small electronic eye to the left and above the door, a strange thing given the apparent age of the tunnel and door.

Lyoncheka waved at the eye. With a hiss of hydraulics, the door swung open and they entered.

A sheet of thick, bullet- and blast-proof glass bisected the room and the top of a desk. A door made of the same thick glass was to the right.

A middle-aged woman, her hair gray, her body stout, looked up from a video screen on the desk. “Look what the wind has blown in,” she said. Her words carried to their side via a small speaker. Her hands were not visible.

“Pasha!” Lyoncheka greeted her.

The woman was all business. “Step forward, through the metal detectors.” Behind her, two large steel doors were closed.

Turcotte noticed the detectors on either side of the door. He stepped through, the alarm beeping and a red light going off. Each of the others did the same, with the same results.

“Your friends carry weapons. Tell them to slowly remove them and place them in the bin or they will be dead in five seconds.”

A panel on the front of the desk slid up, revealing two antipersonnel mines, pointed at them, and a metal bin.

“Nine.” Pasha’s voice was cold.

“Do as she says,” Lyoncheka advised.

Turcotte glanced at Yakov.

“Eight.”

The large Russian pulled his submachine gun from under his coat and placed it on the desk. Turcotte and Katyenka did the same. All weapons had been deposited by the time she got down to four.

“Back through the detector,” Pasha ordered.

Each stepped onto the elevator and back off. This time there was no alarm. “You vouch for these people?” Pasha asked Lyoncheka.

“I would not be here if I did not.” Lyoncheka pulled a Western cigarette out of a pack and placed it in the bin. The door slid shut. Pasha reached down, and her hands appeared for the first time, the cigarette in one, an AKSU folding-stock submachine gun in the other. She slipped the sling for the AKSU over her shoulder and picked up a lighter from the desktop, firing up the cigarette.

Turcotte recognized the weapon… top-of-the-line commando issue in Russia. A shortened version of the AK-74, an updated model of the venerable AK-47, but firing a smaller 5 .45 mm round, more in line with modern thinking that a smaller, faster bullet was more devastating in causing wounds than a slower, larger bullet. She picked up a large satchel, which she looped over her shoulder.

“You have not been here for months,” Pasha said. She took a deep drag, then eyed him through the smoke and thick glass.

Lyoncheka spread his arms. “Ah, Pasha, you know the life of the spy. We are always being ordered to go here and there and… ”

Turcotte was surprised at the change in the FSB man. He almost seemed human. “I checked on you,” Pasha said. “You have been in Moscow for the past three months.”

The glass door clicked open.

“Ah.” Lyoncheka walked through the door and around the desk, almost bumping his head on a low beam that cut across the ceiling. He placed his large hands on her equally large shoulders. “Pasha, Pasha, Pasha. I’ve thought of you. On those cold nights when… ”

“Oh, stop it.” She nodded at Yakov. “I know of him. He is Section Four. There are whispers of trouble at Stantsiya Chyort.”

“It was destroyed,” Lyoncheka confirmed. “Everyone killed.”

Pasha’s eyes immediately flickered toward the tunnel door and back. “They are getting closer.”

“‘They’?” Yakov asked.

Pasha ignored him. “Things are still very strict here, Lyoncheka. There are still screams coming through the pipes.” She nodded toward a small heating vent on the wall.

“There are larger dangers now,” Lyoncheka said. “We need to access the Archives.”

Lyoncheka reached inside of his shirt and pulled out a key. Pasha did the same. They walked to opposite ends of the room where two control boxes were bolted to the wall. Each inserted their key, then Lyoncheka counted to three. They turned at the same time.

“If we do not do this correctly,” Lyoncheka said, “the Archives will be buried.”

The steel doors slid open, revealing a large elevator. The five of them entered, Pasha pushing the button to close the doors.

Turcotte felt a slight lessening of his weight as they descended. “How deep are we going?”

“A half mile,” Pasha replied.

“Who runs this place?” Yakov asked.

“I do,” Lyoncheka said. “The Alien Archives were established by the KGB right after the Great Patriotic War. Section Four was the official response, but of course the KGB trusted no one. As did the GRU, the military’s intelligence service,” he added with a sideways glance at Katyenka. “So we had three organizations trying to keep things secret from each other as much as anyone else.

“As we became aware of the alien organizations and their infiltrations into human society, we in the KGB realized we had to reduce the number of people aware of the Archives to a minimum.” A smile without humor crossed Lyoncheka’s dour face. “After many years and purges, Pasha and I have become the minimum. Even the current director does not know of the existence of these Archives.”

Turcotte thought about that. What good had it done the Russians to bury their knowledge like this? In a way, he knew that Lyoncheka had played into the aliens’ hands while trying to protect what he had access to from them. The cult of paranoia had a very high price.

The elevator halted with a slight jar. The doors rumbled open. A dank corridor, lit with an occasional light, beckoned.

“We do not have much money for maintenance,” Lyoncheka said. “And what little we have, we spend on security devices.” He stepped off the elevator. “This way.”

He led the way down the corridor fifty meters from the door.

“How much farther?” Katyenka asked.

“The Archives are much deeper,” Lyoncheka said. “The elevator was the easiest descent. It gets harder from here.”

“Any more gates or security devices?” Katyenka asked.

“No,” Lyoncheka said. “We are… ” He didn’t finish the sentence, as Katyenka slashed the sharpened point of a plastic ice-scraper across Pasha’s neck, severing the carotid artery in a spray of blood. Even as Pasha’s body fell, Katyenka’s other hand grabbed the AKSU and brought it to bear on the three men.

“I told you!” Lyoncheka turned toward Yakov. “I told you not to… ” He never finished the sentence, as Katyenka fired a single round. It hit the side of Lyoncheka’s head, a small black hole on entry, and ripped out the other side, taking a large portion of brain, blood, and skull with it.

Turcotte had not moved throughout, and he remained still as Lyoncheka’s body slumped to the floor.

“Katyenka.” The resignation and disgust in Yakov’s voice expressed how he felt. “Why?”

Katyenka had the gun trained on the Russian, but Turcotte knew she would stitch him full of holes before he made half the distance to her.

Katyenka shook her head. “I do not need you, comrade, so do not irritate me.” Turcotte noticed movement. He forced himself not to look directly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Pasha, lying in a pool of expanding blood, slowly moving a hand down her side.

“I thought you trusted her,” Turcotte said loudly. “You Russian pig!”

“Shut up, both of you.” Katyenka shifted the muzzle between the two. “You are children groping in the dark.”

Yakov turned and grabbed Turcotte’s coat by the lapels. “Don’t talk to me like that, you American slime.”

Turcotte could see that Pasha had pulled something small and black out. A thumb flipped open a red cover, revealing a switch. At that moment, Turcotte knew what she was going to do and he almost alerted Katyenka, but his discipline prevailed.

With her dying effort, Pasha pushed down on the remote switch. The charges that lined the elevator shaft they had just departed went off in rapid succession. Farther down the corridor, a secondary explosion fired less than a second after the first, destroying the tunnel and trapping them.

Katyenka howled in rage and spun about, firing at Pasha on automatic. The bullets slammed into the already dead body, pushing it down the corridor. Yakov took advantage of that lapse to attack her by the expedient method of tossing Turcotte at her.

Turcotte was prepared for that, twisting in the air and grabbing at the gun as he hit her. He bit back a curse as his right hand closed on the hot, stubby barrel of the AKSU, flesh searing, just as it had in Germany months before.

He ripped the gun out of her hands as Yakov grabbed her arms, pinning her against the wall of the tunnel. The last of the charges went off and the elevator doors buckled as rock and stone filled the shaft. Dust billowed out from both ends of the tunnel, further decreasing visibility.

“Who are you?” Yakov yelled at the woman struggling in his arms.

Turcotte trained the weapon on her, even as she kicked at the large Russian holding her captive. Yakov solved that by snapping one of her arms like a twig. Katyenka hissed in pain.

“Do it again and I break the other,” Yakov warned. “Who are you? Who do you work for?”

Katyenka spit at him. Her body spasmed, then her eyes rolled back. She went limp.

Yakov held her with one hand while he checked the pulse in her neck with the other. “Ahh!” He laid her on the floor. “She’s dead.”

“How did she do that?” Turcotte asked.

Yakov was staring down at her sadly. “I trusted her. Almost.”

Turcotte knelt next to the body. He pulled up her eyelid and felt… a contact. He pulled it off. Below was a red iris in a red pupil. “The Ones Who Wait.”

Yakov nodded. “They wanted whatever is in the Archives. Lyoncheka must have fooled them all these years, and we led her straight to him.” Yakov went over to Pasha’s body. He grabbed the satchel off her shoulder. He pulled out a pistol, which he stuck in his belt, and several grenades, both fragmentation and flash-bang, dividing them between himself and Turcotte. Then he covered her face with her jacket.

Turcotte stood and checked his watch. The clock was still running. In a perverse way he was bolstered by the attempt by Katyenka to betray them. It meant there was a very good chance they were on the right path. After all the delays once they had reached Russia, this one was the most positive.

“Let’s go.” Turcotte strode off down the corridor. Yakov followed, leaving the bodies lying on the floor.

Colonel Tolya waited as his men pried open the elevator doors. As soon as they were far enough apart, he leaned in, shining a powerful light down. Through the cloud of dust he could see the shaft blocked by rubble. He pulled back and signaled for his men to let the door shut.

Tolya was a colonel in the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian army. He took his orders… and the money for him to follow them… from Katyenka, and she had been most specific about how far behind he was to follow and what he was to do.

This destruction of the elevator had not been in the instructions, but he did have a backup plan.

He had a metal case slung over his shoulder that he swung around to his chest. He thumbed the combination to the right setting and opened the lid. He pressed the on button and an active matrix display came alive. The screen was split, and a dot glowed on both sides. The left showed horizontal displacement, while the right vertical. The object that the tracker was ranging in on was a highly radioactive isotope.

“Who has the plans?” Tolya yelled.

“I do, sir.” A young engineer lieutenant hesitatingly came forward, looking out of place among the heavily armed GRU commandos clustered around Tolya.

The engineer unrolled a set of yellowing paper on Pasha’s desk. “These are very old, sir. I do not know if they have been updated. The underground tunnels and chambers below the city have been the province of numerous organizations, some of which did not want others to know what they were doing.”

Tolya simply stared at the lieutenant, then used a pencil to point at the plans. “North of us about three hundred meters. Down about eight hundred meters.”

The engineer bit his lip as he made the mental adjustments while looking at the charts. “This shaft is listed. It intersects a deeper cross-tunnel, here. That leads to this intersection, which runs to the point you want.”

“Can we get down there?” Tolya asked.

“It will take a while. We have to go to this downshaft below the Armory in the Kremlin,” the lieutenant said. “And then…” The lieutenant paused when he realized no one was listening. Tolya was already moving.

Duncan was once more watching the desert flit by below, this time through the skin of the bouncer. “Before we go to Egypt, there is one last thing I must do,” she informed Mualama. “There is a man I must talk to. His name is Werner von Seeckt.”

Mualama nodded. “Von Seeckt was with the German party in 1942 that recovered the Airlia atomic weapon from inside the Great Pyramid.”

Duncan was startled. That information had been close-held. “How did you know that?”

“I have been many places over the years in my travels,” Mualama said. “The Giza Plateau I have visited many times. I believe Sir Burton knew something of the black box von Seeckt recovered.”

Duncan could see the Nellis Air Force Base hospital coming up quickly as the pilot directed them to the helipad. “Why didn’t he let people know?”

“He made a promise. Everything I have discovered, I have done so by tracking his movements and unraveling the riddles he left to get around his promise. The manuscript should yield more information.”

Duncan shook her head. “The English and their sense of honor.”

“Honor is a good thing,” Mualama said. “It might be the most important thing in the path leading to truth.”

The sun shone down on Easter Island, revealing a ghastly scene. Several of the clusters of subjects the guardian had gotten from the Washington were dead. On orders from the guardian, the mech/biomanipulator checked that by sticking a needle into the bodies. There was no response. But other clusters of subjects were more promising, the bodies obviously still alive, given the cries for help and the struggling against their bonds.

But it was the living clusters that simply lay there that interested the guardian most. The mech/biomanipulator stalked up on steel legs to one group. The imager noted the steady rise and fall of the chests. Eyes were open, but staring up, slightly averted from the sun’s rays.

The guardian took the slightly averted eyes as a good sign… it meant the autonomic nervous system was still working properly, taking care of the body. It instructed the mech/biomanipulator to remove the U restraints pinning one group of this type to the ground. The ten men remained motionless, despite the restraints being removed.

Then the guardian accessed a new program, sending out commands.

One by one, the men began to stagger to their feet. One couldn’t do it. He collapsed, tried to get up, then the body was still. Two made it to their feet but then crumpled to the ground and rose no more.

The other seven remained standing. With jerky motions they began moving. Over half fell on the first step. Two didn’t get up. Within three minutes, all ten were down and dead.

But the guardian had learned much. It issued new instructions to its nanovirus-producing robots.

Caught in the thrall of the alien computer, Kelly Reynolds’s mind was still alive, although her body was thoroughly invaded by various nanoviruses. The mind was connected to the guardian via the golden electromagnetic field, and she received information from the computer even as it extracted it from her.

Like a withering vine, she was kept against the side of the pyramid. As her mind received the same images the guardian did of the men of the Washington being tested and tossed, a tear rolled down one cheek, the only sign she was alive.

She studied the data as the guardian did. As the guardian spewed out a series of orders to the various nanoviruses that had been implanted, recovering the effective ones, directing the ineffective to be broken down and reconfigured, Kelly focused her mind, mimicking the process by which the guardian had drawn information from her.

The tears on her cheeks mingled with sweat as the extreme effort to get a coherent thought into the proper format strained her to the utmost.

It was a small command, insignificant in the flow of hundreds of thousands of decisions and orders being calculated and sent by the guardian every second. It fell into the stream, a small blip, and raced along the pathways.

Duncan stared down at the old man in the bed for several moments as the drugs did their work and brought him into consciousness.

“You’ve lied to us all along.” Duncan wasted no time on greetings. “Have you ever told the truth?”

“I have told you more truth than you know,” von Seeckt said.

“Did you tell me the truth about the Spear of Destiny?”

“Yes.”

Duncan wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not, but she wanted to get to what she had just learned. “There was more to the SS, wasn’t there?” Duncan asked. “A secret rite of passage, wasn’t there?”

When von Seeckt didn’t respond, Duncan pulled out a piece of paper. “I had your blood analyzed against the blood we drew from the hybrid STAAR personnel. You have traces of the alien blood in you. Tell me how.”

“After all these years it is still there?” von Seeckt marveled.

“How did you get it?”

“When I joined the SS, I was given an injection. To purify me, to bring me back to my roots, I was told. You tell me how much I lie… think of that lie that the Nazis perpetrated. Purity of the race, we were told, when in fact the opposite was being attempted.

“In a way, though, most people have never realized what the purity concept was about. Historians have focused on the efforts by the Nazis the eradicate the unpure in the camps, but never much on the efforts to develop the pure.

“Again, List was in on it. He had a partner named Lanz, who was a defrocked Cistercian monk. Lanz’s group was called the Order of the New Templars.”

“Templars?” Mualama interrupted. “I have heard much of the Templar Knights interwoven with the history of the Ark. The original Templars… ”

Duncan kicked Mualama, out of sight of von Seeckt. Getting the archaeologist’s attention, she shook her head very slightly. “Tell me about Lanz,” she said to von Seeckt.

Von Seeckt’s eyes shifted between Duncan and Mualama.

“Answer,” Duncan snapped.

“Lanz was from Vienna, the bitch city that eventually gave birth to the Hitler of the Third Reich. Lanz desired to become a Knight Templar, even though that group had officially been disbanded for many centuries. He chose the next best thing… at age nineteen he entered the Cistercian Monastery of the Holy Cross. A year after being in the order he wrote a bizarre paper about a vision he had from the time of the Crusades, of a godly man treading upon an animal-like human being. He believed that vision delineated the pure line of man treading on the unpure.

“After he was kicked out of the monastery for carnal desires, he founded his order. The symbol was the swastika. The slogans: Race fight until the castration knife, and Love thy neighbor as thyself… if he’s a member of your own race!

“He bought a castle in lower Austria and flew the swastika flag above it. He believed that his pure beings had electromagnetic-radiological organs and transmitters which gave them special powers.”

“Like foo fighters or a guardian computer?” Duncan asked.

Von Seeckt spread his hands. “This is all secondhand knowledge to me. I am repeating what I have read and heard from others. I don’t know exactly what Lanz meant by that. Hitler and Lanz first ran into each other in 1909. They met several times after that. Most interestingly, Hitler had Lanz barred from publishing anything after the Nazis took over Austria in 1938. List and Lanz together had a very strong influence on Hitler, something he turned his back on after his rise to power.”

“What exact influence did Lanz have on Hitler?” Duncan asked.

“Lanz did what you’re trying to do,” von Seeckt said. “He looked backward in time. To the origin of mankind, or at least his version of it. He divided early man into two groups. The ace-men and the ape-men. The former, of course, were white, blond, and blue-eyed, and responsible for everything noble and good. The latter was every other racial trait. In German the ace-men were called the Asings and the others the Afflinge. The Afflinge always threatened to contaminate the purity of the Asings through interbreeding.” Von Seeckt coughed. “The image of the Aryan woman being raped by the impure was one Hitler and his minions used in many posters to rally support to his cause.”

“Lanz developed a scorecard by which he could grade candidates for his organization. So many points for eye color, skin, hair, even the size and shape of the skull. It was called the Rassenwertigkeitindex.”

Von Seeckt’s mouth twisted in an evil smile. “They urged members to breed with women of the same traits, but even then they knew women could not be trusted, Ms. Duncan. Women were the source of all evil.”

“Spare me the lecture and give me the facts,” Duncan said.

“That is a fact,” von Seeckt replied. “That is the way the groups that eventually formed the Nazis felt. It was brought out in the purification rights of the SS.”

“How did the SS get the Airlia blood?” Duncan asked.

Von Seeckt shrugged. “I assume from one of those hybrid creatures. What I was injected with was a negligible amount.”

“But enough to still be present over fifty years later,” Duncan noted. “Does it have anything to do with the fact you are still alive? The doctors can’t understand why you haven’t succumbed yet to your illnesses.”

“Perhaps,” von Seeckt admitted. “I don’t know. I was very young at the time and… ”

“Don’t start with the lies again,” Duncan warned. “Was The Mission running Hitler?”

“No one ran Hitler,” von Seeckt said. “I believe The Mission… through List or Domeka, if you wish to call him that… got Hitler started. But he went too far. Hess was Hitler’s partner, the man who shared his prison cell, who helped write Mein Kampf. Everything went well for a while, but then Hitler began spinning out of control. When Hess saw what was happening, he flew to England in 1941. No one has ever adequately explained why he did that. I will tell you why. He was looking for The Ones Who Wait. Seeking help in stopping Hitler.”

“Why England?” Mualama spoke for the first time. “Why would he seek those alien-human creatures there?”

“I don’t know,” von Seeckt said. “Hess was a true believer; Hitler an opportunist. They did find a small syringe on Hess when he landed in England,” von Seeckt noted. “But nothing more was ever said of it. Perhaps he brought a sample of the blood the SS was using.”

“It was reported the syringe held poison, so Hess could kill himself if his mission failed.”

Von Seeckt laughed. “No one knows exactly what his mission was, so how could anyone know that? Besides, he obviously didn’t kill himself.” Von Seeckt shook his head. “It was crazy. Hitler sent an expedition to Tibet to search for the remains of giants who he believed had walked the Earth in ancient times. Herr Hitler, our mighty Fuhrer, listened to his occult advisers who told him the winter of 1941 would be a mild one and he need not equip the troops on the eastern front. History tells us what a fantastic mistake that was. Thousands upon thousands of Germany’s finest troops froze to death because of that ‘vision.’

“But we fought and we believed. We were trained to. We had Kadavergehorsam… cadaver obedience. That is steps beyond what you Americans call blind obedience. I was an SS scientist, but my training was just as difficult. We had to do brutal things to teach us not to feel. To obey without question.

“There was an inner circle to the SS. Twelve officers who met at a monastery in Wevelsburg where Himmler would preside.”

“Twelve?” Duncan repeated, thinking of Majestic having the same number. “Were they Guides?”

“I do not know,” von Seeckt said. “Probably.”

“Was there a guardian in Wevelsburg?”

“I don’t think so,” von Seeckt said. “People whispered the inner circle met at Wevelsburg, but who knows where they really went. Hitler and the SS spent the war searching, always searching.”

“For what?” Duncan asked.

“To find where the true Spear of Destiny went,” von Seeckt said. “Hitler knew it was a key. A key to something very powerful. Hitler thought it must be to a weapon. With that weapon, he would rule supreme on the face of the Earth. Ah…” Von Seeckt sighed. “But he never found where the Spear went.”

“I will ask you one more time,” Duncan said. “Have you told me all you know about the Spear?”

“Yes.”

“You believe it is in Russia?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go,” Duncan said to Mualama.

“Where are you off to?” von Seeckt asked.

“That need not concern you.” Duncan paused at the door. “One last question. You stopped the mothership flight because you worked for The Mission. Even they couldn’t allow the ship’s drive to be detected. Isn’t that so?”

Von Seeckt nodded. “I worked for The Mission as a young man. The mothership not flying was the one, absolute rule.”

“So there is a danger out there in space,” Duncan said.

“So it is written, and so it has been passed down even among The Mission.”