Maps of Hell

Thirty-Six

I went back to my hotel across the river, and ate the burger and fries I’d bought. The food tasted like nothing, but I needed to keep my strength up. I was down, hit badly by Joe’s death, but I knew I had to keep searching, had to find Karen. But how was I to do that without Joe’s help? I had received e-mails from him with useful material, but nothing that broke the case. He had hinted he was on the brink of discovering something hot, but the bomb would have destroyed all his equipment and records.

Or would it? I thought about that. Joe had security cameras and a warning system. They must have been disabled to enable his killer or killers to get in, but he might still have had time to react before the explosion. I tried to put myself in the dead man’s place. The obvious thing to do would have been to call the police. Or me. Clem would have told me if Joe had contacted him. Perhaps Joe realized it was too late for that; perhaps his landline had been disabled, too. So what other options did he have? I found it hard to believe that he would have waited patiently for death like an animal in a slaughterhouse, even if it had only been a matter of seconds. He was proficient with computers, but they had all been atomized, as had his cell phone. He no doubt had an off-site backup facility, but he hadn’t given me access. What else could he have done? I had a vision of Joe in the bar, his keys on the table by his glass. There were two memory sticks attached. Could that be the answer? Could he have tried to get a memory stick out of the apartment?

I pulled on my jacket and left the room in a rush. Joe’s place was on the second floor. His office had windows to the front and rear of the building. Was it possible he had got a window open and thrown a stick out?

I ran across the bridge and caught a cab in Georgetown, getting the driver to let me off at the street behind Joe’s. I walked to the corner and looked round cautiously. The barrier tape was still up and police personnel were in evidence, despite the late hour. But the firemen had gone, and they had been the ones in the yard out back. I decided to try there first.

I moved silently over the low fences and made it to the space behind Joe’s apartment. There was tape around it, but no one was on watch. I took in the area. I reckoned Joe would have thrown a stick as far as he could, so I started at the rear of the yard, using the flashlight I had brought with me. The surface of the area was broken and covered in rubble from the walls, so I had to run my fingers through each handful. After ten minutes, during which I kept looking toward the building in case someone approached, I had found nothing. Before I moved closer to the source of the blast, I looked over the wall that separated Joe’s yard from the one on the parallel street. Bingo. Hanging from a tattered shrub was a black memory stick. I grabbed it and made my exit.

I tried to contain my excitement on the journey back to the hotel. Maybe the stick wasn’t even Joe’s. If it was, it might not contain anything significant. But I remained hopeful. If Joe had made the effort to dispose of it during what he probably knew were the last seconds of his life, it had to be of some importance. I examined the small plastic-covered device. It didn’t show any signs of damage. Better, it looked very like the ones I had seen on Joe’s key ring.

I booted up my laptop impatiently and put the memory stick into a USB port. There were a few seconds of extreme tension, then an icon opened. It contained two files, one titled “NANR” and the other “Woodbridge Holdings.”

And felt icy fingers walk up my spine. Joe had discovered that NANR were not just the initials of the relatively mild-mannered North American National Revival. That had been deliberately chosen to obscure a group with a much more chilling name-the North American Nazi Revival. Joe had found an obscure civil-rights Web site run by an elderly Jewish couple in South Dakota. They had been threatened by a businessman who had been trying to buy their land. When they turned him down, he had let slip the alternative significance of the letters. They had reported the incident to the local police, who said that the man was just a well-known drunk.

I sat back in the hotel room’s uncomfortable chair and thought about that. The gray-uniformed bastards at the camp in Maine certainly behaved like Nazis. The place itself was redolent of concentration camps-I had a flash of the man who had been summarily shot for helping me over the fence. So, was this what was behind everything? Far-right supremacists with a taste for Hitler? How did that square with the occult killings in Washington? The first victim had been a neo-Nazi himself.

I looked at Joe’s other file. He had certainly been busy. I would definitely have bought champagne because what he had in the Woodbridge Holdings file was vintage investigative research. He had tapped a source who used to work in the CIA. Apparently Woodbridge had been set up in 1972 and had originally only been involved in property-primarily the acquisition of Maine forest land. But gradually it had acquired interests in a pharmaceutical firm that it eventually took over in 1982. Woodbridge had bought its first newspaper, a local rag in Massachusetts, a year later. Logging and paper production soon followed, as did a major expansion into news media, including the supermarket tabloid Star Reporter in 1987. The paper was almost defunct, having been badly hit by the thrusting style of its rivals. But soon it became the most imaginative of them all in its coverage of showbiz scandal and outlandish news.

What was most interesting was the near impossibility of identifying the main shareholders of Woodbridge. They had hidden themselves behind a raft of other company names and were always represented by lawyers at meetings. It was indisputable that Woodbridge had been highly profitable from the start, but it was unclear who was banking the proceeds. That in itself was hardly unusual in the financial world, but Wall Street gossip said that the directors were nothing but placeholders, that the real power was wielded by people who remained resolutely behind the scenes. The final entry in Joe’s file was that one of those individuals was none other than Larry Thomson.

So where did that leave me? Woodbridge Holdings was run by a man who was also in charge of an organization that purported not to be racist, but seemed to have a Nazi alter ego. Nazi meaning what? People tended to use the term to suggest anti-Semitic and anti-federal government tendencies, or just anyone who was really strict. But what if there was a real Nazi involvement? My memory, now firing on more cylinders, came up with Operation Paperclip-I had read about that when I was researching a still unfinished novel set during the Cold War. Operation Paperclip had been the CIA’s plan to bring Nazi scientists illegally to the U.S.A. Could Woodbridge Holdings have been set up by scumbags like that? The camp in Maine suggested that was within the realms of possibility. But that would mean people in high places, in particular the CIA, knew about the people behind the company-and Joe’s contact had worked for the Agency. My stomach flipped as I realized that I wasn’t only up against the FBI. Had Joe been blown up by some shady branch of his own government?

I decided to follow the Nazi angle further. I did an Internet search and found a site that claimed to have an encyclopedic coverage of German history from 1923 to 1950. But what was I looking for? I typed in Woodbridge. Predictably, there was no data. I went to another site that offered translation to German and came back with Holzbrucke and several variants. No data. This was going nowhere. For want of a better idea, I typed in North American Nazi Revival. Zilch. I got up and walked around the room, my head pounding. I told myself that I was wasting my time, that I’d never find Karen this way. But what alternative did I have? I could spend weeks combing Maine for the camp and, even if I found it, I would be seriously outnumbered by the gray-clad guards. And I didn’t even have any evidence that Karen was there.

I sat down again and played with the keys. Without giving it much thought, I deleted all but the initials NANR. No data. I looked closer. There was a hyperlink to another site, one which listed significant Nazi party members. I went there and tried NANR again. This time I had a hit. NANR were the initials of one Nikolaus Andreas Nieblich Rothmann-party number, 1925670; date of birth, September 30, 1915; place of birth, Berlin; date/place of death, unknown. I went back to the site I’d bookmarked and entered Rothmann’s full name. I got another hit. As I read, my stomach went very queasy indeed.

Even though the place smelled bad, the floor was uneven and the furniture was cheap, the rented room suited. The name on the agreement was Marlon Hyde. The owner never came upstairs if the rent was paid on time. Hyde had fixed a heavy padlock to the outside of the door and two bolts and a chain to the inside. No one could get in or out without doing a lot of damage.

The crumbling walls were decorated with cuttings from the newspapers. They concerned the so-called occult killings. The death-metal singer Loki’s demise covered one wall. The space around the single cracked window was covered with stories about Monsieur Hexie. Behind the bed were clippings about Professor Abraham Singer, while opposite were pages about the last victim, the tarot reader Crystal Vileda. Hyde had put those up earlier in the evening. It was interesting that the FBI had found prints incriminating the Englishman Matt Wells at Monsieur Hexie’s apartment.

There were books piled high on the floor, old books full of strange pictures. They showed demons and witches, priests and zombies, Norse gods and Jewish mystics. There were also a Washington, D.C., Yellow Pages and several local maps. In a box under the bed, the killer had collected numerous pairs of weapons-skewers, knives, pieces of piping. There were even chopsticks. They had proved unexpectedly effective.

But Marlon Hyde was tired and dispirited. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be, this wasn’t what all the training had been for. There was a greater purpose, one for which every sacrifice was justified. But could that really be right? Most human beings were worthless, that was indisputable. But what about family? Was it ever acceptable to take the lives of parents, of siblings, of children? As time passed, that had become harder to take. It had been emphasized that no one was innocent, that even the children of the enemy had to be wiped out, so there would be no future for their kind. But what of the children of the just? What of siblings who failed the test? Did they deserve to be discarded-no, that word was a lie. Why did they have to be executed by those closest to them?

Hyde remembered the scenes in the Antichurch-the hyena-headed celebrant and the cloaked figure with features of stone, the chanting of the naked faithful, the mist of blood from the victims’ opened throats. Those had been ecstatic occasions.

It had been a long time before the horror came, and the realization that the death of a brother had to be mourned; that blood would have blood, no matter what else had been taught; that nothing could ever justify the murder of a loved one.

Killing came easy. It always had done for Marlon Hyde. The hard thing had been to feign respect for human life; respect for the poor and needy; respect for the vulnerable. The tarot woman could have been a problem. The gross Loki, the pathetic Monsieur Hexie and the Jew professor hadn’t raised a qualm. In any event, neither did Crystal Vileda. Using chopsticks had added an incongruous element that helped, and the need to hurry had removed any lingering doubt. But now, what was left? The pull was still there, the urge to submit to the coffining. Hyde had been fighting it, but confusion sometimes prevailed. To make things worse, Matt Wells had stolen the glory for two of the murders.

It was getting harder and harder to keep up the facade. Marlon Hyde knew that time was running out. Soon the ultimate victims would have to be taken out.

Clem Simmons came into the diner with a scowl on his face. Given that it was four-thirty in the morning, I forgave him. He looked around before spotting me in the booth at the rear.

“This had better be good,” he said as he sat down opposite me. “Just coffee,” he told the dull-eyed waitress.

“Oh, it’s good,” I said, rebooting my laptop. I had downloaded the contents of Joe’s memory stick.

I spent the next ten minutes taking the detective through the findings. He scribbled notes, his brow furrowed. Finally, he raised a hand.

“Hold up, Matt. Where exactly is this going?”

“I haven’t reached the best bit yet,” I said, gulping coffee. “Look at this. Nikolaus Rothmann was an Obersturmfuhrer in the SS.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“Obersturmfuhrer or SS?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “I know what the SS was, you fool-the Nazis’ private army of madmen.”

“Right. Obersturmfuhrer is the equivalent of captain.”

“Shit, is that all? I thought you were going to say the guy was a general at least.”

“It doesn’t matter because the rank was largely honorary in this case. You see, Rothmann was a doctor. A specialist in neurosurgery.” I gave him a meaningful stare. “As in brain surgery.”

“Yeah, yeah, I watch ER like everybody else. Keep going before I keel over.”

“The point is, Rothmann spent two years at Auschwitz-working under none other than Josef Mengele.”

The detective scratched his head. “Mengele? Didn’t he escape after the war?”

“He eventually drowned in Brazil in the late seventies. In Auschwitz, they called him the Angel of Death. He carried out horrific experiments on people-on kids, as well, in particular twins. And our friend Rothmann helped him.”

Clem Simmons put down his pen. “What is it you’re saying here, Matt? That this Rothmann is in the States?”

“He might be, but he would be nearly a hundred. He had kids, though. It looks like the three of them were brought over here secretly after the war. There’s no mention of his wife.”

“All this because the old guy’s initials happen to be the same as a minor organization that might have Nazi connections? It’s a bit thin, man.”

“Is it, Clem? The man who runs that organization also seems to be involved with Woodbridge Holdings-”

“Who you think set up the camp in Maine where you were imprisoned.” The detective shook his head. “Like I say, it’s pretty fucking thin.”

“I told you, Clem, they messed with my head. My memory was screwed for days. It still isn’t functioning normally. And get this-Woodbridge is into pharmaceuticals and chemical research. I reckon they’re carrying on Rothmann’s work.”

“All right, Matt, all right. It’s not like you need pharmaceuticals to mess with people’s heads. But even if you’re right about all that, what has Woodbridge Holdings got to do with the killings in D.C.? Some of which you’re in the frame for, don’t forget.”

I’d seen a news flash saying that my prints had been at the scene of the Crystal Vileda murder.

“Only two of them,” I said, realizing how dumb that sounded. “You can’t seriously suspect me of the latest murder. You saw me outside Joe Greenbaum’s not long after it.”

He shrugged. “It’s not me you have to worry about, Matt. The Feds have taken that case, too.”

I caught his eye. “Who do you think is the killer?”

Clem frowned. “That’s what we’d all like to know.”

“No, I mean, what kind of person would commit the occult murders?”

The detective gave a hollow laugh. “A crazy person?”

“Really?” I countered. “A pretty organized crazy person. One capable of planning and executing four murders without leaving any traces-except mine, which are obviously a diversion. One who’s got a carefully planned agenda, as the diagrams show.”

“And one who’s violent as hell.”

“True. But has it crossed your mind that this could be the behavior of someone whose mind has been tampered with, like mine?”

The detective held my gaze. “Still doesn’t explain why he’s choosing occult targets.”

I slumped in my seat. “You’ve got me there. The only thing I can think of is that Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, was fascinated by the occult.”

Clem grunted. “You will definitely have to do better than that, Matt.”

“I’m working on it. By the way, what about the body in the river? The FBI is treating it as one of the series.”

“Yeah, they are, even though there were no drawings found on the vic. The guy was a farmer from Iowa whose twins went missing here last winter.”

“Twins?” I repeated.

“Yeah… So?”

“Jesus,” I said, hairs rising on my neck. “Twins could be the key.”

“You mean, the twin weapons?”

“Maybe, but not only that. Nikolaus Rothmann didn’t just experiment on twins with Mengele. He had twin children of his own.”

That made the detective’s jaw plummet.