The Lance

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

It was a pleasant evening. The windows of the safe house were cracked open. A cool night breeze brought the pungent scent of burning leaves from somewhere. Nick tried to relax on the couch. A ceiling fan turned above. Selena sat across from him in a wingback chair.

"We have a lot to talk about," Harker said. "Stephanie broke the encryption on Arslanian's drive."

"I figured out most of it," Stephanie said. "Arslanian was researching the Holocaust. He visited Germany two weeks before he was killed and found documents written by Himmler. They were stashed away in one of the old Stasi archives in what used to be East Germany. He scanned them and that's what's on his drive."

"Stasi?" Lamont said.

"The East German Secret Police," Harker tapped her pen. "Kind of like the Nazi Gestapo."

Stephanie said, "Himmler knew Germany would lose the war. Sometime in 1943 he prepared a plan for afterwards. He wanted to establish the Fourth Reich right here in the US. The plan is code named 'Parsifal'. It details money transfers, land purchases, deep cover agents in the US and South America and political action plans for subverting our electoral process and taking over the government."

"What's the part you haven't figured out?" asked Lamont.

"It's a separate piece in itself, written in runes. It's several pages."

"Runes?" Selena came alive. "Nordic runes, the old Norse language?"

Stephanie nodded.

"Can you bring them up on screen?" Selena asked.

"Sure." Stephanie tapped on her keyboard. "Here's the first page."

Selena got up and went over to the monitor.

"This is Elder Futhark," Selena said.

"Excuse me?"

"Elder Futhark. That's what you call this variant. Although it might be using the Nazi variation. They made up their own meanings for some of the symbols, like the SS lightning bolts. That's a double Sig rune. The SS used runes everywhere, on birth certificates, graves, military markings — everywhere." She squinted at the screen.

"You can read it?" Harker tapped her pen.

"Yes. Elder Futhark is an Indo-European language, Germanic. I had to study it during my Master's program."

"What does it say?"

"It says, 'Aufruf vom Alten'. It's a direct translation from modern German."

"What does that mean?"

"Invocation of the Old One. What's the next page. Steph?"

Selena studied the writing, let out a breath. "Whoa. This says, 'By the blood of the Spear, call the Old One. With the Sacred Blade, prepare the circle with the blood of the sacrifice'."

Ronnie and Nick looked at each other. "Okay, who's the 'Old One'," Ronnie said.

"Someone you don't want to meet," said Selena. "A demon, or even Satan himself. I think we've got some kind of magical ritual here, something Himmler and Heydrich cooked up."

"You think they wrote a ritual to evoke a demon? Are you serious?"

"I have to read the rest of it. How many more pages, Steph?"

"Another twenty-five. There are twenty-seven altogether."

Selena nodded her head. "That fits. Twenty-seven is three times nine. Nine and three are magical numbers in the old Germanic culture, used in rituals and spells. Give me an hour and I think I can translate it all."

It took her an hour and a half.

"I knew the Nazis and Himmler were into the occult, but this is something else." She seemed uneasy and stopped. Everyone waited for her to go on.

"There was a strong occultist movement in Germany. These pages are a black magic rite. Himmler created a special SS Bureau to study the occult. He sent teams all over the world looking for secrets of magical power. The Nazis even used mystical power symbols to call on supernatural forces."

"Power symbols?" Nick finished his whiskey.

"The swastika is a good example. It's thousands of years old. The Nazi swastika turns counter-clockwise. As a symbol it can represent the dark side, the left hand path, the path of darkness away from the sun."

"The dark side? Like Darth Vader?" Ronnie shook his head. "When you look at what the Nazis did, it must have worked."

"The ritual on these pages is about using the Vienna Lance as a magical power object to ensure victory. According to this, it requires a blood sacrifice. Human sacrifice."

"A magical object requiring human sacrifice?" Lamont looked at Selena in astonishment. "I thought the Lance was supposed to be something good, something associated with Christ."

"That seems to depend on who possesses it and what they intend to do with it. That Lance was carried by the commanders of armies that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. People like Charlemagne and Barbarossa and Frederick the Great. There's been a lot of blood spilled under the shadow of that spear. That's a lot of psychic energy. Blood sacrifice, if you like."

"You believe in that stuff?" Lamont asked.

"It doesn't matter if I believe in it. It's clear Himmler and Heydrich thought the Lance was magical."

"If people think something is imbued with mystical power, they'll act like it is," Nick said. "It doesn't mean anything more than that."

"Are you sure about that?" Selena said. "What about all those stories of miraculous events associated with the relics of Saints or the like? Or the healing miracles that happen at places like Lourdes? Or that man down in Brazil who does operations with a rusty penknife while spirits help him out? And what about those dreams you have, the ones that foreshadow the future?"

"That's different."

"How is it different?"

"Well, you can't pick up a dream. It's not an object."

"Yes, but it's still mystical somehow. How can you know things that haven't happened yet?"

"I don't know that. I just get images of things that later turn out to be connected to something in my life."

Harker tapped her pen on a glass.

"This is all very interesting, but it doesn't get us any closer to finding out who's behind the Jerusalem bombing, or why Arslanian was killed."

"We should be able to figure it out," Nick said. "At least some of it. The documents and the diary say there's a Nazi plan for after the war, 'Parsifal'. Arslanian found out about it and they killed him. The plan must be active and someone is following it. Dysart mentioned Parsifal, so we know he's involved."

Harker set her pen down. "Yes, but he's taking orders from someone else."

"Dysart and whoever 'commands' him knew about the Lance." Nick looked at the others. "The Lance was hidden in 1945. The only people who could have known that were the Nazis in Himmler's secret Council. Maybe the Council kept going after the war and Dysart is one of them. If he is, someone in the Council could command him."

"You think a secret SS Order is still in business?" Harker picked up her pen.

"It would explain a lot. If they are, we'd better find out what the hell they're planning."