The Vengeance of the Tau

Chapter 22

“Very well, then. Let us move on to the subject you have all been waiting for.”

Introductory remarks complete, the mechanically synthesized voice prepared to get to the business at hand. Across the world, men and women waited with receivers clutched to their ears for the final instructions that would forever change the face of civilization. Thanks to sophisticated translating equipment at the speaker’s source, each heard the words in their own native language.

In Vienna, and Moscow, and Stockholm.

In London, and Dublin, and Prague.

In Tokyo, and Seoul, and New York.

In Los Angeles, and São Paulo, and Montreal.

In Cairo, and Tel Aviv, and Johannesburg.

Just to name a few. The time had come.

“Our successes of the past seven days have set the stage for the achievement of a destiny so long in coming,” the voice continued. “The world begs for what we have to offer it on a scale grand enough to rid it at last of squalor and rot. We are justified in the task we are about to undertake. Our mission is a holy one. You are the messengers of a new order, dispensing wrath to those for whom civilization has exhausted all other options. Because of our work, evil will cease to be, and we will maintain our vigil without pause to make sure it never returns.”

A brief staticlike sound filled the many lines as the network was rerouted once again to make tracing the caller’s origin impossible.

“You all know what your roles are. You all know what you must do. In four days’ time, distribution will take place in our western sector. Distribution will follow one day later in our eastern sector. Then, one week from today, at your specified times, your work will begin in your designated areas. I estimate it will take two weeks before saturation is achieved in the primary sites, and we will then move on to the secondary ones.”

The voice stopped this time for no reason at all. Nothing filled the line in its place, not even static.

“A glorious dawn is about to break, the dawn of a new world purified of evil. Today, the evil grows and festers unchecked, affecting everything and everyone, while the world stands passively by, accepting. We will not accept. We will stand and face it, as is our destiny. The tens of millions we destroy will stretch perhaps into the hundreds of millions before we are through. Let the number grow to whatever it must. Our goal is clear, our resolve immutable. The world cries out for us, begs for the tonic only we can supply. Survival — that is what this is about.”

Static replaced the voice again, as the network automatically rerouted itself one final time.

“Go now and brief your teams on the timetable I have placed before you. There is no turning back. Say good-bye to the world you have regarded with revulsion and disgust. The new world begins in seven days’ time.

“Our world,” the voice finished, and the connection was broken.

“Well, lookee what we got here….”

The bartender, a half-foot over six, leaned across the bar toward Johnny Wareagle.

“What can I get for ya, Crazy Horse?” he asked, and the few inhabitants of Cooter Brown’s, a bar on South Carrollton Avenue in the center of New Orleans, didn’t bother to smother their laughter. According to Sal Belamo, this was the virtual second home of Jersey Joe Watts, the man who had been with Heydan Larroux just minutes before the attack she had managed to escape.

Johnny’s expression remained unchanged. His eyes slid to a corner where a man was feeding change into a compact disc jukebox. Against the far wall the bar’s oyster shucker had stopped slicing and was simply holding his knife.

“I have come for Jack Watts,” Wareagle told the bartender.

The man grinned, and buried a chuckle. “Never mixed one of them before. How’s about a beer? Indian lager.”

Johnny heard more laughter, this time from behind him. “I wish to speak to Jack Watts. I have been told he comes here. Often.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He was here yesterday. And the day before.” Wareagle’s eyes roamed behind the counter. “His name is in the book where you keep track of bets.”

The bartender leaned farther across the counter. His right hand disappeared beneath it.

“I lost plenty of ancestors to you injuns. Don’t see much of your kind in these parts and don’t miss ’em none neither.”

Johnny saw the ax handle the instant it crossed the bar and snapped his right hand out against the bartender’s to keep it from going any farther. At the same time, he heard the chair scratching backward against the floor behind him and whipped his knife out with his left hand. A quick glance that way was all that he needed to spot the pistol rising in the hand of one of Cooter Brown’s patrons. The knife whirled out of Johnny’s fingers and sliced into and through the man’s wrist. The tip of the blade emerged on the other side. The gunman’s hand jerked upward. A harmless shot rang out, the sound of it swallowed by his screaming. The rest of the patrons were still. They had guns; Johnny could feel that much. But no one else had any intention of drawing one.

“You fucking broke my arm, you crazy fucking In—”

“Not yet,” Wareagle told the bartender, holding the arm straight out with no slack.

The bartender was heaving for breath, his face scarlet. “You want Jersey Jack, fine. Just let me go.”

“After you have spoken.”

“Jesus, it hurts….”

“Tell me where he is.”

“Rooming house on Ferrett Street. Twenty-seven, I think, or seventy-two. Yeah, seventy-two. Second floor, room five.”

Wareagle let the bartender’s arm drop. Numbed, it collapsed to his side. He slipped backward against the mirrored wall of liquor bottles.

“Hope he plugs your red ass full of lead. You hear me, you son of a bitch?”

Johnny did, but kept walking. The man his blade had found was whimpering now, seated on the floor and gazing in shock at his wrist.

“You can keep the knife,” Johnny told him.

Ferrett Street was located in what the residents of New Orleans commonly refer to as “Slumville.” Johnny walked to it from Cooter Brown’s and felt uncomfortable every step of the way. This kind of work was far more up Blaine McCracken’s alley than his. The presence of so many strangers unnerved him. He knew that he attracted their stares, but could do nothing but move on past them as quickly as possible. Venturing out on such a pursuit would have ordinarily been impossible for him; even responding to Joe Rainwater’s call had been difficult. But now Joe Rainwater was dead, and the discomforting knowledge that his killers were still out there was worse than any unease he would feel on their trail.

The rooming house Jersey Jack Watts was holed up in on Ferrett Street in Slumville was as shabby and decrepit as the neighborhood’s name indicated. The sign advertising ROOMS was missing the top of the second “O” and the bottom half of the “S.” Several of the windows had boards in place of glass panes. Several more were shattered or missing and hadn’t been replaced with anything.

The lobby consisted of a single chair and couch. Johnny Wareagle walked right past a trio of black men sitting there drinking wine out of plastic cups. He mounted the stairs quickly to the second floor and moved to room five.

“Nobody fucking home,” a tired, angry voice greeted his knock.

Wareagle rapped again.

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“I have come from Heydan Larroux.”

Johnny heard the soft click and threw his body down. An instant later a huge chunk of the door’s upper part was blown into splinters. They showered over Johnny as he shoved his body into what remained of the door and tore it clear off its hinges.

“Shit!” he heard a voice wail as he drove the door inward.

Impact smashed Watts up against the wall. His breath left him in a rush. His shotgun was pinned against his body. The air smelled of gunsmoke and ruined wood.

“Jesus, no!” Watts gasped. “Please, no! …”

“I need to find Heydan Larroux,” Wareagle said simply. He tossed the ruined door aside and held Watts pinned against the wall with a single hand.

Watts’s eyes sharpened at last, drinking in the sight of the huge Indian before him. The shotgun slipped out of his grasp and dropped to the floor.

“Who are you? Jesus, what are you?”

“You were the last one with Larroux before they came.”

“She dead, man. They all dead.”

“She got out.”

“Fuck me, she did. I heard what went down in that house. I run away first ’cause somebody mighta figured was me that done it, and then ’cause I figured whatever really done it might wanna pay me a visit.”

“She’s alive.”

“No way, man. Nothin’ go through what happened at the big house and live to tell.” He looked the big Indian over again. “ ’Cept maybe you.”

A pair of men appeared in Jersey Jack’s doorway. Wareagle turned enough for them to see his eyes. They rushed off, one muttering, “Fuck, let’s call the cops.”

“You worked for her,” Wareagle said, his eyes back on Watts.

Jersey Jack shrugged. The wounds Larroux had inflicted on him with the cat-o’-nine-tails still had him grinding his teeth when he moved, but, shit, he’d deserved it.

“Bitch always treated me straight.”

“You owe her.”

“How you know that?”

“I do. You can pay her back.”

“How’s that?”

“Let me help her.”

Jersey Jack tried to look the Indian in the eye. “Whatever showed up at the big house still after her?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And you can stop them?”

“I don’t know.”

“If anyone can, it’s you.”

“Where is she?”

“Only one place she could go to hide, place some of us call hell.”

Johnny didn’t seem surprised.

“Man, you don’t know much, do ya? I’m talking about the bayou. Lady got a place down there. Been there myself. She in trouble, that’s where she’d go.”

“She’s in trouble,” said Wareagle.

The Old One held the stones before her out to Heydan Larroux.

“Take one, my child.”

Larroux did so reluctantly. She held it in her hand but did not let it drop in the bowl of water. The afternoon air beyond her bayou hideaway was ripe with the sound of frogs and birds.

After the Old One’s last admonitions, she had redistributed her guards around the bayou hideaway that rose on stilts over the muck and ooze. Some of the guards were perched within trees. Others used the mud itself for camouflage. Still more spent their shifts in steel-hulled rowboats in the black waters. A few hid themselves within the thick, rank foliage. No electronic signals, no sophisticated security devices. Just men who knew the bayou and could smell a stranger a mile away.

“The stone, my child,” the Old One uttered in her ancient voice.

“Are they near?” Heydan asked.

Plop …

As always, the blind hag gazed down into the water as if she could see the ripples made by the stone. “They have learned where you are.”

Larroux accepted another stone.

“Should I leave?”

Plop …

“You are safer here than anywhere else. Your chances of surviving are greater because …”

“Because why?”

“It is difficult … to see. Another stone. Quickly!”

“A warrior comes,” the Old One resumed, after Heydan had let it fall into the water.

“You mentioned him before.”

“This is not the one I recognize.” The Old One’s dead eyes gazed across at her. “He comes our way even now. He will be joined eventually by the first warrior I saw; but not here, not now.”

Heydan Larroux got her fourth stone ready to fall.

“Who is he?”

Plop …

The Old One brought her face close enough to the water to drink. “I see a bird of prey dressed for war. An eagle, I think it is an eagle!”

Her head snapped upward with a start. She was breathing in rapid heaves.

“Another stone,” she instructed. “Now!”

Heydan took the second-to-the-last and let it drop.

“Others come,” the Old One said into the bowl.

“The enemy …”

“No. But not allies, either.”

“Who?”

“The last stone. Quickly, before the vision fades.”

Plop …

The Old One’s head was bowed low once more. “So hazy … They, too, are warriors. They come in number. But they … wait.”

“Wait?”

The Old One raised her head. “I can see no more.”

“You must!”

“The vision is gone.” Her dead eyes fixed themselves on Larroux. “But you will see for yourself soon, my child. That time is coming.”

To underscore his fervent support for Israel, Arnold Rothstein was in the habit of making frequent public appearances throughout the country. Because of his stature, the government insisted on supplying him security in the form of agents from Shin Bet and Mossad for all public gatherings. The billionaire agreed, on the condition that the majority of them not be obtrusive. Today’s appearance in Jerusalem was no exception. Minutes before his arrival, a dozen agents had blended into the crowd.

Uniformed security personnel, meanwhile, allowed a wheelchair-bound veteran of one of Israel’s more recent wars to be pushed up to the front of the line. The man was missing both legs. It would make for good shots on television, a perfect backdrop when the American networks picked up the feed.

Because of their disguises, none of the security personnel, uniformed or otherwise, noticed that the cripple and the man pushing his wheelchair were twins.

Israel’s greatest benefactor arrived right on schedule and stepped out of his car to a symphony of cheers and applause. He was waving and shaking hands with the first wave of supporters when the agents nearest the crowd’s front noticed the empty wheelchair.

Witnesses nearby would later say that the commotion actually started before the explosion, as bodies seemed to lunge and leap through the air. The blast was shattering, the fireball swallowed almost immediately by a gray-black wave of smoke that coughed blood in all directions. The screams were the only sounds that remained when the echoes of the blast dissipated. The only sights were mangled, twisted bodies. When the screams died down, the sound of sirens replaced them and continued for the rest of the afternoon, seemingly without end.

Chapter 23

Germany maintains no official archive of World War II. The closest thing to it is called the Document Center, which had been administered by the Americans until reunification. Located in Berlin, the center is a five-story building resembling a library. Melissa and her father had attended the ceremony when it was turned over to German control, because one of Benson Hazelhurst’s oldest friends had been named administrator.

She did not call ahead that Friday morning to announce her intentions. Instead she simply showed up at the Document Center and asked to see the chief administrator, Wolfgang Bertlemass. The guard at the front desk held the receiver against his shoulder while he informed Melissa that Bertlemass was sending his secretary down to escort her up.

“Melissa, you’re more lovely man I remembered,” he greeted moments later inside his office, stepping out from behind his desk. Bertlemass was even heavier than he had been at the ceremony. His vest strained to reach the top of his pants. He seemed barely able to move.

Melissa accepted his hug and light kiss. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“You are here no doubt on some adventurous research project for your father.”

“Sit down, please, Herr Bertlemass.”

“Wolfgang.” His eyes grew uncertain. “Your tone of voice, Melissa, tells me you have bad news.”

“The worst. My father … is dead.”

Bertlemass’s bulbous frame sank into his chair, mouth agape in shock. “What? I had not heard, did not know. Please forgive me. How did it happen? Where? Why wasn’t I informed?”

“You are the first to be informed.”

“I … don’t understand.”

“He died in the midst of his greatest discovery, Herr Bertlemass. But that discovery unearthed the promise of more death unless action is taken.”

“What are you saying?”

“No more than I have to. I’m asking you to trust me.”

“For your father I would do anything. You need keep no secrets from me.”

“What I do, I do for your own good.”

Wolfgang Bertlemass wiped the tears from his eyes. “I am so sorry, Melissa….”

“You must help me.”

“Of course. Anything.”

“With no questions.”

Bertlemass’s nod came without hesitation. “Whatever you choose to tell me will be sufficient.”

Melissa pulled Gunthar Brandt’s journal from the shoulder bag she had purchased at the airport. “I found this in the excavation where my father died. It tells of a battle from near the Second World War’s end but it is vague and much has been lost to the years. I need to learn everything about that battle. I need the holes filled in.”

Wolfgang Bertlemass struggled to rise once again. “Come with me.”

“We used to call these the stacks,” he explained as they stepped off the elevator onto the fifth floor. “Now they are called the official archives of the war. Everything that was ever written or known of those years is here. And almost all of it has been transferred into our computer banks.”

Around her everywhere, Melissa saw traditional library shelving packed with material of all shapes and sizes. There were maps, battle plans, discourses, first-hand accounts of various engagements, and accumulated interviews with tens of thousands of men and women. In essence, much of the Third Reich’s legacy was contained here, what it had done and failed to do. Melissa was overwhelmed.

“As I said, we are computerized,” Bertlemass said, and led her into one of the private cubicles. “It is really a simple matter. All the material you seek is cross-filed under a variety of headings.”

He struggled into a chair but had to sit back from the keyboard, since his legs wouldn’t squeeze under the table.

“Now,” he said as the terminal whirled to life, “where should we start?”

“The battle in question was named in the journal.”

“As good a place as any. What was it?”

“Altaloon,” Melissa told him.

“Location?”

“Austrian plains.”

Bertlemass called up the proper menu and activated the search procedure.

“It always takes a few seconds,” he explained, and returned his gaze to the screen, just as the monitor beeped. “Oh,” he said.

Over his shoulder, Melissa could see the results of the computer’s search: NO REFERENCE FOUND.

“Not a problem,” the administrator told her. “Many battles may have been named in private journals, but relatively few of those were ever recorded for posterity. We need another reference.”

“What about the registration of the German company that participated in the battle?”

“Splendid. Our cross-referencing of all engagements is virtually complete. What was the registration?”

Melissa read it to him and Bertlemass typed it into the console. Again he waited with Melissa pressed over him until the response came seconds later: NO REFERENCE FOUND.

“Strange,” the administrator said.

“What’s it mean?”

“That this company never existed.”

“No,” Melissa insisted. “That’s impossible. I’ve got the evidence right here.”

“Show me.”

Melissa produced her notes and Bertlemass’s fingers worked the keyboard again, producing the same results.

“There is no record of such a company anywhere in our archives.”

“I’m telling you it existed! It had to!”

Bertlemass was looking back at her. “Mistakes, omissions, are unlikely but possible. There is nothing to worry about. The journal’s author, you said you knew his name.”

“Yes. Gunthar Brandt.”

“Spell it.”

Melissa obliged. “And I have his rank and serial number as well.”

“That should speed things along….”

Bertlemass typed Gunthar Brandt’s serial number into the machine as Melissa recited it. The computer whirled into action.

“No,” she said in response to the results seconds later. “No….” NO REFERENCE FOUND.

“Very strange indeed,” Bertlemass said, clearly exasperated.

“What’s it mean?”

“That the man who wrote this journal never existed either.”

“There’s got to be something more we can do,” Melissa said.

The fat man shrugged. “We must face the fact that this journal can only be the result of fabrication, fiction instead of fact.”

“No. I showed you my notes. I told you what I was feeling as I read it. It happened, I’m telling you, it happened!”

“The participating company doesn’t exist. The man who wrote it doesn’t exist.”

“A ruse perpetrated by those behind the battle,” Melissa insisted. “They were testing something that made it possible for them to kill a force more than ten times their size that had infinitely superior weapons. I showed you the reference. They only lost four men. Four men on one side, two thousand on the other! …

“The White Death,” she finished after a pause that seemed longer than it was.

“Also no reference found.”

“Which is hardly surprising.”

Bertlemass sighed impatiently. “Melissa, I am a student of the Great War. I can tell you quite assuredly that I have never come across any mention of such an occurrence, or of a weapon that made it possible. And I ask you, if the Nazis possessed this … White Death … why didn’t they employ it again? Whatever it is, clearly it could have won them the war.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do: it never existed. Gunthar Brandt, the soldier, never existed.”

That gave her another idea, a recollection that had slipped her mind until now. “His hometown was mentioned in the journal. On the front inside page underneath his name…. Arnsberg!” she remembered without consulting her notes.

“That will not help us find the reference we need.”

“Maybe not to the battle, but what about the man?”

“Melissa, I—”

“Please, Herr Bertlemass, for my father.”

The fat man shrugged. “I will see what I can do.”

Bertlemass was able to get the head of the local district post office in Arnsberg on the phone twenty minutes later. The conversation was brief. He made a few notes and hung up, returning his gaze to Melissa.

“Apparently there are two families named Brandt living in Arnsberg.”

“I told you!”

“Brandt is a popular name, Melissa,” Bertlemass cautioned her. “You should not get your hopes up.”

“How long a drive is it?”

“Several hours, between six and eight anyway. If you leave tomorrow morning—”

“I must leave now!”

“Then let me call you a driver.”

“No. There isn’t time. Just a car, Herr Bertlemass. If you could just get me a car.”

“This is that important to you?”

“It may be what my father died for,” she said truthfully.

Bertlemass nodded and extracted a set of keys from his pocket. “Then you will take mine.”

“Any minute now,” Tessen told Blaine again.

“It’s been hours.”

“Gaining access to the one we seek must go through channels.”

“Channels, I gather, you’re no longer accustomed to.”

Tessen shrugged. “The diehards in our movement continue to hope for revival. Most of us merely wish to survive undetected.”

“Which might be a problem if the latest possessor of those crates has you on their list, just as the original possessor did.”

“Precisely why we have sought you out, Mr. McCracken, as I have already explained.”

Tessen continued to maintain his vigil by the phone at this small inn located in the German countryside. McCracken paced about nervously, his thoughts locked on Melissa. He and Tessen had reached the Archaeological Museum in the center of Izmir to find that she had already departed. Against Tessen’s strident objections, Blaine then insisted on returning to the Büyük Efes, where he found that they had missed her once again. His contact, the Büyük Efes assistant manager, had helped her in every manner he could before setting her on her way again. She had not told him of her destination, however, nor had he asked. To have done so might have placed both their lives in jeopardy.

Before they had even left Turkey, the old Nazi had begun the process of tracking down someone who could tell them what was in the missing crates the Third Reich had stored in Ephesus along with the rest of the supplies. He made phone calls every thirty minutes or so. One number led to another number, each contact to the next. They were waiting at this inn now for final instructions as to how to proceed. According to Tessen, his former comrades were being remarkably cooperative. There was strong reason for hope.

Blaine had tried to reach only one person since arriving at the inn. Sal Belamo had responded finally after thirty minutes.

“Where you been, boss?”

“I was about to ask you the same question, Sal.”

“Putting a package together for the big fella. Some real goodies, you ask me. On their way to New Orleans as we speak.”

“New Orleans? What in hell for?”

“Long story.”

“I may need you, Sal.”

“Big fella might need me more.”

And Belamo proceeded to relate to Blaine the crux of what Johnny was involved in, and the crux was all it took.

“All of them torn apart,” McCracken repeated, his mind numb.

“That’s the way he described it to me, boss. Big fella ain’t one to exaggerate, either.” Sal paused. “They killed his friend, the injun police officer who called him in. Big fella didn’t sound happy.”

“How many?”

“I found a dozen already, all in the last week. Same M.O. Pretty weird shit, you ask me…. Hey, boss, you there?”

McCracken remained silent. His mind was swimming wildly. All over the world, evil was being exorcised. Justice was being extracted upon those who had managed to exist beyond it by a force even more ruthless and deadly than those it sought to destroy. But this force was not new. It had made its mark years before, as detailed by Tessen. Now it was back. While McCracken followed the trail of the pilfered crates, Johnny was following the trail of those who were surely making use once again of their contents.

“Did Johnny say anything about strange footprints?” Blaine asked finally.

“How the fuck you know that?”

“Because it’s happened before.”

“Huh?”

“He and I are after the same thing, Sal.”

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me….”

“No. Different lines, different tracks, but it’s the same thing. He calls in, I want to know about it.”

“Where can I reach you?”

McCracken gave Belamo the number of the inn. But he hadn’t called over the succeeding hours. And neither had any of Tessen’s contacts.

“You were that certain I would help you?” Blaine continued, while their vigil before the phone continued.

“I was certain of nothing until our initial conversation. I knew — we knew — only that the chamber had been compromised. The fact that crates were what emerged from it instead of demons was meaningless. The threat was, in any case, the same as that we faced after World War II.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

Tessen’s expression was grim. “Whoever controls what was removed from that chamber, Mr. McCracken, has the power to do far more than extract vengeance. If my fears prove justified, the scope of that power is potentially unlimited.”

“That’s what the Arab said. That’s what drew me over here in the first place. That kind of power in anyone’s hands, no matter whose, is unacceptable, Tessen.”

The phone rang.

“The man is many miles from here in Mönchengladbach,” Tessen said when the brief conversation was over. “We have been granted access to him.”

“Who is this man?”

“A member of Hitler’s personal staff, some sort of liaison with the board of science. Apparently he was part of the team responsible for storing away our greatest munitions when it became obvious that the war was lost.”

“While others salted away the billions of dollars necessary to found a Fourth Reich.”

“A false rumor,” Tessen insisted. “What moderate sums there were have now been squandered by those who believed another Reich was possible. They spent it toward the formation of groups all over the world that would someday join together as the first line. But the groups fizzled. No sooner would one start up than another would die. The world had changed, has changed. Most of the old guard failed to see that.”

“Not you.”

Tessen shrugged. “I am merely a soldier. I see the battlefield for what it is. Come, we have a long ride ahead of us, many hours. We are expected just after nightfall.”

The elected head of the kibbutz known as Nineteen brought the news to the old woman herself. Tovah stiffened in her wheelchair behind the wrought-iron table at her approach. She looked down before the leader had a chance to speak.

“It is bad news.”

“Rothstein,” Tovah muttered.

“An attempted assassination occurred earlier today.”

Tovah looked up with a glimmer of hope. “Attempted …”

“It was an explosion. Apparently two security men saved him from the brunt of the blast. But, er …”

“Speak!”

“He was critically wounded. He is in surgery now. The prognosis is not good, even if he survives.”

The old woman’s parched lips squeezed together determinedly. “I warned him. The fool, he didn’t take it seriously. He didn’t realize …”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear what you said.”

Tovah’s hands clenched the sides of her wheelchair. She shoved herself backward from the table. The quickness of the action made the leader of Nineteen lurch away.

“No matter,” the old woman spoke clearly now. “Assemble the women in the cafeteria. I will address them in thirty minutes.” And then, under her breath, too softly for the leader to hear, “The time has come to go to war again.”

Chapter 24

Johnny Wareagle observed the house in the bayou from a distance of three hundred yards through the binoculars that Sal Belamo had included in his supplies. The rest of the supplies he’d picked up in New Orleans were either worn, pocketed, or slung from his back and shoulders. There was Kevlar body armor, a 9mm pistol, an Uzi, and a British Sterling SMG. There was a killing knife and two of the throwing variety.

“Hey,” Belamo had said, “the only thing I left out was a bow and arrow.”

The British Sterling SMG was fitted with explosive bullets called Splats that Johnny had worked with once before.

“Got a friend who makes ’em up special,” Belamo had explained then. “Puts a glass capsule inside each with a mixture of ground glass and picric acid. Mixing the acid with the ground glass makes it less sensitive and allows it to be fired from a gun. When the bullet distorts on its way out of the barrel, the glass capsule breaks, which allows the acid to mix with lead, forming lead picric. Big boom when it hits its target. I call ’em Splats since that’s what happens to whatever they hit. Only problem is the Sterling’s your best bet to fire them.”

Johnny had uttered a lengthy sigh upon hearing that.

“I know how you feel ’bout the Sterling, big fella, but Splats’ll blow up in an M-16’s barrel on account of the muzzle velocity. You’ll get to love the Sterling, though. Trust me.”

Johnny was holding it in hand now. He had parked a considerable distance back on the road, geared up under cover of woods, and trudged his way through the muck and ooze forming the shore of the bayou’s water. He stood now within the shadowy cover of the mangroves and cypress trees with mud covering his boots up to his ankles. The feeling was nothing new to Johnny; he had lived it for the better part of five years in a place his memory called the hellfire. But here the jungle breathed with life, the night birds and bullfrogs haunting the sultry air with their peculiar chants. In the fetid stink of the hellfire there had been no sound and the silence had been agonizing, the silence of death itself. A branch on his right shuffled, and Wareagle gazed up to see a curious tree boa descending to inspect this new visitor to its world. Johnny smiled at it and the boa stopped, lapping at the air with its tongue.

A slight breeze disturbed the currents in the black pool beyond, pushing a shape through the night. Johnny waded out farther into the muck and made out a boat snailing along the murky waters. He moved in up to his knees and peered into the skiff as it slid by. Empty. A guard must have once been posted in it, but he was in it no more. Johnny retreated back into the cover of sweeping vines and branches and glided about the edge of the bayou.

He came upon the first body hidden in a hollow tree. Its positioning told him the man had squeezed himself in and had been killed at his post. A single bullet hole lay in the center of his forehead. His dead eyes seemed to be gazing up at it. Not the mark of the killers of Joe Rainwater, which could only mean …

Someone else was here! Besides the force he sought, besides Heydan Larroux’s guards….

Perplexed, Johnny slid back out into the swamp. The soft bottom retreated beneath his step. Tangled weeds stroked his ankles, occasionally twisting themselves into a determined hold. A cottonmouth snake slithered past, ignoring him. He listened for the hiss of an alligator or the telltale thump its swinging tail made when it swiped against the water.

He found another pair of bodies hidden in the bushes they had used for camouflage. Again there were bullet wounds in the heads, the rear this time. The shots had been fired from in close, the killers obviously very sure of themselves.

Not Joe Rainwater’s killers, though. This was the trademark of an entirely different, though very proficient, style. Whoever the killers were, it was clear to Johnny now that they had slain all of the Larroux woman’s guards systematically, one or two at a time. The bodies in the bushes had been dead for at least thirty minutes, plenty of time for the killers to close in on the house and finish their work — if, in fact, that was what had brought them here.

To better investigate, Johnny risked moving across a narrow peninsula affording little cover to bring him closer to the woman’s hiding place. He raised his binoculars and inspected the house for signs of intrusion or violence. The door was intact. The walkway leading to the small porch was unmarred.

He checked the windows. Also intact. The lights were on but the blinds were drawn. Johnny continued his patient scan. A shadow passed before one of the blinds. Thirty seconds later, it returned. A guard inside was making regular checks of the windows. The defensive perimeter erected had been primitive; the dead guards had not been in communication with each other or with those inside the house.

But those inside the house were still breathing. The mystery force that had isolated them had not made its move yet. Why? The apparent contradiction mystified Wareagle. He could not find the logic in what had occurred here.

The night breeze picked up. Gooseflesh prickled Johnny’s flesh. He felt the presence of the spirits. They had never made themselves more known to him, had never been more insistent.

Something was coming, its movements dark, sleek, and one with the night. He waded back into the thick snarl of the shallow swamp waters to return to firmer land to await its arrival.

Melissa reached the town of Arnsberg in Bertlemass’s Mercedes an hour before nightfall. At the first address for a “Brandt,” the family had never heard of a Gunthar; at the second, the man who answered the door told her he had an uncle by that name. Melissa asked him if the uncle had fought in World War II. The man said he had indeed, after which he had taught science at a nearby high school. This Gunthar Brandt, he explained, had spent the last three months in a rest home operated by the Catholic church another hour away in Remscheid after suffering a stroke.

She felt certain this was the Gunthar Brandt who had written the journal. Still, she had to realistically consider what condition the stroke might have left him in. He would be seventy-two now, hardly old age by modern standards. That gave her as much hope as anything.

Night had fallen by the time she reached Remscheid, an industrial town not far from Düsseldorf; provincial, Melissa thought as she drove through it toward the nursing home. The nursing home was located amidst a residential neighborhood on Hansastrasse. It was made up of two interconnected buildings, and Melissa followed the signs toward the visitor parking lot. From there she walked down a small stone stairway to a second driveway that led to the lobby. The huge glass double doors slid open automatically as she approached them, and she moved toward a reception booth formed by a long counter on the left.

The receptionist accepted her announcement that she was here to see Gunthar Brandt matter-of-factly.

“Oh,” she said, after checking the log.

“Is something wrong?” Melissa wondered.

“You have not been here before?”

“No.”

The receptionist seemed to be considering whether she should say more. “Ward Three,” she directed. “Third floor. I will tell a floor nurse to expect you.”

Melissa took the elevator to the third floor and stepped out into a large, open area. Before her, patients lingered in wheelchairs or walked about aimlessly. Some stood leaning against the wall. Others gazed vacantly out one of the large windows. Obviously this was the chronic-care ward, which did not bode well for her chances of obtaining any information from Brandt.

“You are here to see Herr Brandt?”

Melissa turned toward the speaker and found herself facing a kindly bull of a woman in a white uniform.

“I am Herr Brandt’s night Altenpfleger.”

“The word — I’m sorry, but my German is lacking.”

“Nurse for the elderly, that’s all.” Her expression sombered. “The receptionist informed me you have not been to see Herr Brandt before.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, then.”

Melissa’s heart sank.

“You must be a long-lost niece or distant cousin of Herr Brandt’s. You should have called ahead. We would have spared you the trouble.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let me show you.”

The nurse led Melissa to the last room down an L-shaped corridor.

“Fortunately,” she explained, “we’ve been able to keep him in one of the private rooms. It’s quite smaller than the ambulatory apartments on the first floor, but I’m afraid he doesn’t notice.”

The door to the room was open. Melissa entered ahead of the nurse and froze.

The man in the bed lay in a state of virtual catatonia. The music of a radio by his beside droned on.

“He can eat. He can hear. We’re almost certain he can see,” the nurse explained. “But he’s lost the ability to comprehend and communicate. I’m afraid he’s completely lost.”

“Can I have a few minutes alone with him?”

“Of course.” The big nurse started toward the door, then swung back. “I am sorry.”

“Thank you.”

And she was gone.

Melissa moved to Gunthar Brandt’s bedside. Her hope for an easy solution to the mystery of the missing crates fizzled and died.

“Mr. Brandt, can you hear me?”

No response.

“Mr. Brandt, can you hear me?”

His eyes didn’t so much as flicker in her direction.

“Mr. Brandt, I need your help. If you can hear me, blink your eyes twice.”

They didn’t even blink once.

“Please try. I know you can try. I’ve come a very long way, and I think many, many lives may be at stake.”

When Gunthar Brandt continued to just lie there, Melissa pulled the journal that he had penned almost a half century before from her shoulder bag. She held it forward in front of his glazed eyes.

“Do you know what this is? You wrote it. You described a battle you were a part of, a battle that for all practical purposes never happened. No record of it exists. Also, there is no record of your service or of your company’s existence. It’s all been wiped out, Mr. Brandt, and I think the lost contents of this journal are the reason why. Am I right? Please tell me.”

His breathing remained steady and even. Melissa waited a few moments, pressed him again, and then gave up. It was useless. The man’s mind was a sieve. He was lost to the world. Melissa turned away from him.

“Close the door,” a voice whispered, and Melissa nearly jumped.

“What?” Her eyes fell back on the bed.

The eyes of Gunthar Brandt flashed alive and looked in her direction. “Close the door, Fräulein, and hurry.”

McCracken and Tessen waited in the car while their sanctioned access was confirmed within the large house on the Bokelberg. A residential area located fifteen minutes from downtown Mönchengladbach, the Bokelberg is actually a hill with several off-streets featuring mansions both large and small. The farther up the hill, the larger and more separated the residences become. Several of these, called Villen, had tall fences circling the property. The fence of the one they were parked in front of on Schwogenstrasse was rimmed with brick stretching ten feet up from the ground.

“I don’t know the man’s name,” Tessen said. “I’m not sure anyone does anymore.”

McCracken looked his way.

“I have heard that he had refused to share any of his secrets with anyone else. He believes to this day that this is the only thing keeping him alive.” Tessen stopped and then started again. “He has not been out of this house for fifteen years. The men you see around the grounds, he thinks, are his guards here to ensure his safety. Actually, they are his keepers.”

“Your movement seems to have maintained plenty of resources, Tessen.”

The Nazi shrugged. “Greatly depleted, I assure you. Most of our membership consists of the young, frustrated poor and unemployed — hardly people of means. Our funding these days comes from gifts to the party from abroad — America, most prominently.” He smirked. “I think those in your country believe even more strongly in the dogma than we do. The fools … None of them saw what it could do, what it did do in the war. They think hate is all they need. They think that is all we ever had.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“For a time, perhaps, but not any longer.” Tessen’s eyes sought out Blaine’s, in search of compassion, maybe, or understanding at the very least. “I don’t think I was ever the same after that day in the schoolyard. I was just a boy myself at the time. What was the point? What were we proving? We drove others to hate as we hated, and that is what ultimately destroyed us. That is why there can be no more wars, no mythical rise from our own ashes. No Phoenix for this movement, McCracken, eh? We must be content to live our lives as we are.”

Blaine turned to scrutinize the mansion beyond the gate. “So you wall up the man with the keys to your vast weapons storehouse in the name of peace, is that it?”

“The others are realizing slowly. Still more will come to their senses before long. They are old, frightened men, nothing more.”

“A minute ago you were speaking of the frustrated young now making up the bulk of your movement. What would they do if they got their hands on what this old man can give them?”

Tessen’s expression hardened. “The rest of us must ensure that never comes to pass. You have more influence in this regard than you realize. The chance that the curse might be unleashed again to complete its work was too much for the older members to bear. You became their greatest hope. They looked at your involvement as a godsend. They would have sacrificed anything to bring you to help us, to save themselves. Anything.”

A pair of imposing-looking men gave them the okay to pass through the gate. Tessen drove on and parked the car along the circular drive fronting the mansion. Another Nazi was waiting just outside the front door.

“Was the old man told we were coming?” Tessen asked before entering.

“We informed him,” the man replied. “Whether he heard us or not is anyone’s guess.”

Tessen signaled Blaine to enter ahead of him and closed the door behind them. McCracken froze. Around him everywhere were toys. Toys of all shapes and sizes. Dolls sat on a large mantel that ran the length of the foyer wall and they dangled from the ceiling like a town meeting of marionettes. The floor was littered with elegant shoebox-sized reproductions of classic trucks and cars. And there were games, dozens of games — none of which McCracken had ever seen before. Their boards were laid out on tables throughout the hall, complete with pieces, as if all were in the process of being played.

A guard posted at the foot of an ornate spiral staircase looked right past McCracken at Tessen.

“He’s upstairs in his workshop,” the guard said.

Tessen and Blaine chose their steps carefully to avoid the many scattered toys, and slid past the guard. The stairs were thankfully free of the clutter, so they climbed side by side. At the top Tessen seemed unsure of which way to go. A soft humming emanated from the right, and that was the direction they turned in. As they advanced closer, the humming took on a more raspy, choppy tone. Tessen entered the room that it was coming from through a set of open double doors. Blaine was just behind him.

“Professor … Professor?” Tessen called.

McCracken entered the room and froze once more. Again toys dominated the scene, but these toys were of a far different nature from the ones downstairs. They were exclusively devoted to war. Blaine could see a hunched figure toiling away with a paintbrush behind a workbench and realized that each and every toy in this house must have been made by this man over the years since World War II ended.

As he worked, the old man kept up his continuous, tuneless humming. Shelves lining every wall in the room were filled with toy soldiers of varying sizes, some miniature and some the size of small dolls. Many clutched at wounds that had been torn open and painted red. In several instances doll-sized figures were shown confronting each other, bayonets or knives rammed through plastic guts with gasps of agony frozen forever on their painted faces.

“Professor,” Tessen called again.

“Almost finished,” the old man said, still hunched over his work. He started to hum again, but stopped suddenly as if he had lost his place.

His workshop was a massive room lit with the tones of twilight, except for the old man’s work area, which featured daylight-bright bulbs. McCracken continued to examine the room and noted that the vast bulk of its floor displays were battlefields, totally re-created in miniature and set atop tables. Somehow the old man had successfully captured the intensity and pain of war itself in these tiny stages. Tank treads were upraised over figures that were appropriately crushed and bloodied. Other figurines were shown shredded and torn by heavy-caliber machine-gun fire. Blaine could almost hear the sounds of machinery and men, of screams and orders. Each diligently re-created battle atop the various tabletops was different, and the old man had meticulously re-created the terrain as well. Where water was supposed to flow, the coloring looked real enough to drink.

Fascinated, McCracken ambled carefully about, treating the models with the same delicacy as expensive china. He moved toward several large tables arranged near the room’s shelves on the far left side, their models covered by thin olive-colored sheets. Blaine reached a hand out toward one and felt Tessen grasp his shoulder.

“He would not want his work in progress glimpsed,” Tessen advised softly. “And we do not want to upset him.”

McCracken nodded his understanding and pulled his hand away.

“Professor,” Tessen called one more time.

“That’s got it!” the old man said, beaming.

He popped off his drafting stool with the bounciness of a child, a figure in his hand. He brought it to a battle scene being constructed atop a table to his right, lowered it lovingly into place, and stepped back to inspect his handiwork.

“Finished!” Then he looked up. “Polish hills, September 7, 1941,” he said to his visitors. “I’m afraid it’s not for sale. None of my work is for sale.”

“We know,” Tessen said.

The old man gazed around him. He was still wearing his thick-lensed work spectacles.

“Someday I will have the whole war in this room. Every major battle, every important engagement. I can’t decide whether to organize them by year or geography. France there,” he said, pointing. “Austria here. Poland not far from where you are standing.” His eyes fell admiringly on McCracken and he continued, “Could I use you as a model? I need an American. Are you available?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you’re willing to help me.”

“Something for your son, perhaps. Or is it a daughter?”

“Just me. And not a toy, information.”

“So boring,” the old man said, and started rearranging the figures on the model beneath him atop the re-created Polish hills. The smell of glue and paint intensified the longer they stayed in the room.

Blaine came a little closer. “Do your models include a certain chamber in Ephesus, Professor?”

The old man froze. His shoulders stiffened. He let the figure he was holding in his hand drop down randomly onto the model and turned. He looked at Tessen and then back toward Blaine.

“They let you in,” he said softly. “They must know why you’re here.”

“They know,” said Tessen.

“They are getting clever, I must admit, sending outsiders in to learn what they have been unable to. And an American yet.” The old man came forward and shooed them forward as if they were unwanted pets. “Sorry you’ve wasted your time. Go now. There’s the door. Close it behind you, if you don’t mind.”

“I know where the chamber is, Professor,” McCracken told him. “I’ve been inside it.”

The old man stopped in his tracks. “Impossible …”

“Is it?” And Blaine proceeded to provide a detailed description of the layout as he and Melissa had seen it. He elaborated on the placement of specific crates, canisters, containers, and drums. By the time he was finished, the old man had sunk stiffly into a leather armchair atop pieces of cut, discarded plastic.

“How did you find it?” he asked.

“Quite by accident. An archaeologist was looking for something else entirely.”

“The traps …”

“Bypassed.” And then Blaine realized. “They were installed by you….”

The old man gazed up at him with a mixture of admiration and fear. “Who are you? What are you?”

“Someone who can share secrets you wish to keep,” Blaine said, recalling something Tessen had said back in the car. “Someone who can eliminate the need for these men to keep you alive.”

“No! You can’t!”

“Only if you help me.”

“Anything!”

McCracken crouched to face him. “Something was missing from the chamber, Professor. Something was hauled out.”

“Someone else knows of the chamber, then?” the old man raised in shock.

“Through maps left by the first party to come upon the find. It doesn’t matter. The latest to enter won’t be coming back. They have what they need.”

“Have what?”

“Crates, Professor. Crates that had been located just about in the center of the chamber between—”

“Stop!” The old man nearly jumped out of his chair and pushed McCracken out of his way. “I don’t believe you!”

He was pacing nervously amidst his brilliant battle reproductions, gazing down at them as if to soothe himself.

“I’m not lying, Professor,” Blaine said, close to the old man again. “Someone hauled them out, and they’re going to use what’s inside. In fact, I think they have already used it, just as it was used by Jews to gain revenge on certain Nazis at the end of the war.”

“A trick! That’s what this is, a trick!”

“People are dying horribly. Mutilated, ripped apart. Well-guarded men, men with armies protecting them. Whatever is in those crates is responsible, isn’t it? That’s what’s making it possible.”

“All the crates …”

“Every last one.”

“My God …”

“Talk to us, Professor.”

The old man walked dazedly toward what looked like a closet. Blaine and Tessen fell in behind him tentatively. The door came open with a squeak of disuse, and the old man turned toward them.

“It is better if I show you. You’ll be the first to see this model.” He flipped on the closet’s light. “The battle of Altaloon.”

Chapter 25

The Israeli commando team assembled by Arnold Rothstein had arrived in the bayou just after the fall of night. Finding and dispatching the guards surrounding the house had not been a challenge for them. A far greater one would be to prepare for what would eventually be coming in their wake.

Locating the Larroux woman had proven surprisingly easy, thanks to the intelligence supplied by Rothstein himself. His logic in undertaking the pursuit was sound as always: he knew that the enemy would never leave one of its intended victims alive. That it would be returning for another go was not in question; the only issue was when.

The commandos settled back to wait.

They let themselves believe briefly that the time had come when their lookout spotted the large figure on the narrow stretch of land closest to Larroux’s house. The commandos had not been expecting this. Another party had entered the scenario. He would have to be dispatched; no other option was viable.

“Wait,” one of them said before the kill team moved out. He pressed the night-vision binoculars tighter over his eyes. “I know him.”

“An Indian,” another noted, after at last locking the large figure into focus.

“The Yom Kippur War,” the first resumed. “I fought by his side. He was part of the team the Americans secretly dropped in.” The commando lowered his binoculars. “He saved my life.”

“What could he be doing here?” the leader wondered.

“The same thing we are, perhaps.”

“He could not know.”

“You didn’t work with him,” the grizzled veteran said to the younger man.

“What are you suggesting?”

“Any attempts to kill him, successful or not, will cost us several of our number.”

The leader was looking through his own binoculars. “He’s gone.”

“I lost him, too.”

“Damn …”

The grizzled veteran, a bear of a man, smiled. The leader turned his way once more.

“So what do we do?”

“Bring him into our fold. Let me handle it.”

The force that had killed Joe Rainwater was approaching the area!

Johnny had spent the better part of his life preparing for battle, but this was a new feeling to him. Never had weapons felt so useless. Never had he felt so weak when measured against the potential of his opponents. He stood with his back against the widest of the cypress trees. Another tree boa, or perhaps the same one as before, ventured down and stuck its face into the air, as if to act as his sentry.

A sound like wind rustling through the low brush and mangroves reached him. The tree boa retreated back to its lair. Wareagle twisted away from the tree, Splat-loaded Sterling SMG aimed dead ahead, Uzi to the right. A pair of black-clad figures appeared from the thick tangle of vines behind him, weaponless with their hands in the air.

“Please don’t shoot,” the larger of the two said. “We have you surrounded.”

Johnny Wareagle stood there looking at him, the moment frozen in time.

“Wareagle,” the large figure said as it approached him.

“I know you,” Johnny followed, relaxing slightly.

“October of ’73. In the Negev.”

“And now we meet here….”

“Different times. Different enemies. Little changes.”

Johnny lowered his guns. “Until now.”

“We must hurry,” Wareagle said to the commando leader minutes later, before they were even introduced. “I feel them approaching.”

The leader looked at the big burly man who had recognized Johnny. The man nodded.

“You have any idea what you’re dealing with here?” the leader asked him in a hushed voice.

“I am dealing with what killed my friend. I am dealing with some force that has ravaged untold numbers of people on its route here.”

“Then you know pretty much the same thing we do. Since you were one of the Americans who helped us in 1973, I’m going to assume you’ve still got a G-5 security clearance. We’re here on the orders of a rather powerful man who’s had dealings with this force before. Apparently it’s making what you Americans would call a comeback. He sent us here to pick up its trail and follow it to its source.”

Wareagle gazed around him. He had no idea how many the commando team was in number, but six of them were huddled in the small muddy grove on the shore of the bayou now. He had seen their kind before; he had lived with their kind. If they weren’t the best Israel had to offer, they were very close.

“Something from the past,” Johnny muttered. “I should have felt that….”

“How far away are they?” the burly man asked him.

“Those who advise me seem … confused. They are here, yet not here.”

“We don’t need riddles right now,” the leader snapped, sliding away to find a clear view of the house.

“You will let the woman die,” Johnny said in what had started out as a question.

“We wait for what comes for her to show itself and then we move. Her life is of no concern to us.”

“She might be able to tell you something about what you face.”

The leader turned and looked at him again. “We’ve already been told everything we need to know.” He reached into a small pack hooked on his belt and came out with a pair of goggles like none Johnny had ever seen before. “Put these on. You’re going to need them.”

Gunthar Brandt had propped himself up in bed by the time Melissa made it back to his bedside. She had still not replied after the shock of hearing him speak, and now she struggled to steady her breathing.

“You never had a stroke,” she said finally.

“Oh, but I did, Fräulein. I merely hid the truth of my rapid recovery from them. I needed to be at peace. I needed to be isolated.”

“Because of Altaloon …”

“It has haunted me ever since that day of the battle.” Brandt shivered. “And now you return and stick that blasted journal in my face. I destroyed it, threw it away! …” He stopped. “They must have been watching. Of course! They could have no trace. I should have burned it, assuming they would have let me.” His eyes flashed with fresh alertness. “Where did you find it?”

“In an underground chamber full of stockpiled German weapons from the war. Near a collection of crates that were lifted out.” She paused briefly. “Crates containing what you called the White Death.”

Brandt’s mouth dropped. “That … can’t be.”

“It is, believe me. I almost died because of it. Several others already have.”

“Several?” Brandt tried to smirk and failed. “I watched thousands die, Fräulein, and that day destroyed the rest of my life.”

“What happened?” she asked softly, afraid in that instant of what the rest of the story of Altaloon might bring.

“You read my journal: a hundred and fifty men took on a regiment of nearly two thousand and wiped them out, massacred them.”

“I mean how? How could it have happened?”

“Simple, Fräulein: they couldn’t see.”

“The White Death,” the toymaker muttered to McCracken and Tessen, his sketchily drawn explanation complete. “That’s what they called it.”

The table containing the reconstructed model of the battle of Altaloon was the only content of the closet. It was wedged in the small space, lit by only a single dangling light bulb. There was scarcely enough room for the three of them to line up beside it. The bulb swung slightly above them, as if caught by a nonexistent breeze, the miniature panorama alive beneath it.

A hundred or so German troops were spread out on three papier-mâché hillsides that looked down into a large valley of green finished wood. The scene had been frozen well into the battle, perhaps even as it neared its end. The Germans had what looked like tight black goggles painted over their eyes. In the valley beneath them, plastic troops in red-smeared Allied uniforms lay in dying heaps. Some had discarded their weapons and seemed to be in the midst of searching for somewhere to hide. The carnage, even in the reconstruction, was horrifying. The old man was obviously a brilliant artist, able to re-create even agonizing pain on the faces of the tiny figures frozen near death. Not just pain, but confusion and terror as well.

“Blinded,” Tessen said, echoing the toymaker’s explanation, his gaze at the magnificent reproduction mirroring Blaine’s. “They never had a chance.”

“That was the idea, don’t you see?” the old man followed. “I had nothing to do with the weapon’s development, mind you. I was merely its caretaker once it was clear that the war was lost and we needed to salvage what we could. But I can tell you this: of all the weapons I stored in that underground chamber, this was the one I considered the most deadly and most effective.”

The toymaker’s eyes fell lovingly on the creation beneath him. He held out his arms the way a father might to a sleeping baby.

“Behold perfection. My greatest work, reconstructed with the help of a man from the board of science who traveled with the company pictured in the hillsides. Alas, it was the board of science’s greatest accomplishment as well, the ultimate battlefield weapon. If discovered earlier and produced in sufficient quantities, it could — would — have changed the course of the war. But by the time of Altaloon, our production and transport capabilities had already been severely reduced. Then, before more of the White Death could be turned out, the plant producing it was destroyed by an Allied bombing run. We hoarded what had been salvaged. But instead of using up our precious reserves on a few more battles that wouldn’t change the outcome of the war, we decided it would be better to save what we had for future generations to analyze and reproduce.”

“It was delivered by air,” McCracken theorized, looking over the old man’s model as if expecting to see bombers dangling from the ceiling.

“Low-altitude drop. Our best pilots were used to lower the margin for error. Without any danger of antiaircraft fire, it was a simple matter.”

“A gas, then.”

“No, an aerosol containing an advanced neurotoxin. Do you know what a binary agent is?” the old man asked McCracken.

“A compound that must interact with another element in order to be activated.”

“In a nutshell, yes. And the neurotoxin that formed the White Death was actually quite harmless until it came into contact with hyaluronic acid.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Blaine. “This hyaluronic acid can be found in the eye.”

“Precisely. Once the aerosol and the acid joined, the neurotoxin was activated, passing through the cornea and paralyzing the rods and cones of the retina in a matter of seconds.”

“Permanently blinding all victims,” McCracken added.

“It was brilliant, perfect,” the toymaker said. “When the canisters containing the aerosol ruptured over Altaloon, a fine mist was sprayed outward and down, the effect that of an open umbrella trapping everything beneath it as it dropped.” His gaze fell fondly once again on his model. “It was to have been just the beginning. The White Death was to be utilized as an equalizer on the battlefield as well as off, and what an equalizer it could have been! Imagine the possibilities! What parts of the world we didn’t overrun, we could have held hostage. Civilization would have cowered before us.”

“That sickens me,” Tessen scoffed.

“Are you not one of us?” the old man shot back.

“One of what? I am a soldier, a warrior. I fight with honor and dignity. I could not kill that which was unable to fight back.”

“Now, perhaps, but what about then, when we were all gripped with the fervor of the times? It was our destiny. Nothing else mattered. Nothing!” The old man again turned his gaze lovingly on the model before him. “And here it is, frozen in time for all to behold, frozen as an example of what someday will be a—” He stopped suddenly, face suddenly pained and unsure. “But it’s gone,” he said sadly, as he turned toward McCracken. “You say it’s gone.”

“How was it stored?” Blaine asked him. “In the crates, I mean.”

“In small tanks. From them the aerosol could be easily channeled into virtually any explosive. Missiles, rockets, grenades — why limit ourselves?”

It all made sense, McCracken reflected to himself. The Jews who were behind the killings of vengeance in the war’s wake, as well as whatever force had pulled the rest of the crates from the secret chamber more recently, had discovered a way to release the White Death within a confined area. It wouldn’t be hard. The explosive shell would have to be composed of some material that vaporized upon detonation so that no trace would be left. Then, since the microdroplets would dissipate rapidly into the air, no evidence of what had really transpired would remain. To the authorities first on the scene, even as quickly as minutes later, it would seem as though men armed and able to defend themselves had been slain by something that was impervious to their weapons.

Because they couldn’t see what they were firing at.

The wild, random shooting that struck nothing … The fact that none of the victims had tried to run … The way that access through impenetrable lines of defense had been gained … This was what Johnny Wareagle was up against halfway around the world.

An invincible army … Blaine felt chilled by the prospects.

“How many crates were stored in the underground chamber?” he asked the old man, almost reluctantly.

“The exact number escapes me now. In the area of a hundred, I think.”

“How many tanks in each?”

“It varied with the size of the tanks. Between eight and twelve. A few more in some cases.”

“But more could be produced.”

“Not easily. All traces of the original formula were lost before we could retrieve them. All attempts to re-create the White Death since have failed.”

Blaine swung intensely toward Tessen. “Which implies someone’s been trying, doesn’t it?”

“And failing,” Tessen reminded. “Leave it there.”

“I can’t, Tessen, not by a long shot. Don’t you get it? Whoever’s got the White Death has known about its presence in that chamber for a long time. So why pick now to bring it up? Answer: because they’ve figured out a way to reproduce the formula.”

“Of course!” The toymaker beamed. “Our plan exactly. Massive quantities to do the job, to perform the true task the White Death was created for.”

“What task?” Blaine and Tessen asked almost together.

“To unleash it on entire cities of our enemy, of course.” The old man’s gaze turned distant, yet bright. “Imagine the model of a city captured in the grip of the White Death. The fires, the looting, the desperation. All order gone. No possible way to return it. I would have pictures, even videos now!” His eyes rotated feverishly between Tessen and McCracken. “I will have to obtain them. It shouldn’t be hard, shouldn’t be—”

His words were cut off when gunfire erupted outside on the grounds enclosing the house. The screams were hideous, the cries desperate.

“Mein Gott,” muttered the old man.

“They’re here,” McCracken said.

Chapter 26

“Blinded,” was all Melissa could say after Gunthar Brandt had finished the story of the battle of Altaloon that his journal had started. “But not you.”

“No. We had been issued protective goggles. We donned them just before the White Death was dropped.”

“Yes!” she remembered. “I read in your journal that you were ordered to put something on. But that section was too badly damaged to make sense of. What happened afterwards?”

“Our company was broken up. We were all reassigned, mostly to the front lines where the kill rates were the highest. The reason was obvious: they didn’t want us to survive the war. I got lucky.” He chuckled humorlessly. “Or maybe I didn’t.”

“And when the war was over?”

“The few of us that were left kept our mouths shut, but I for one never got over Altaloon. I never will.”

“Then the White Death was never used again.”

“Why don’t you tell me? I mean, that is why you’re here, isn’t it? If the crates are gone, it means that someone must have the intention of unleashing it once more.” Brandt sat up farther in his bed. “Now it’s my turn to ask the questions, Fräulein. Who are you working with?”

“No one. I told you.”

“How did you find me?”

“I told you that, too.”

“And no one else knows you’re here?”

“Only the administrator of the Document Center in Berlin.”

“Leave me, Fräulein,” Brandt said coldly. “Leave me and never come back. Altaloon has chased me all my life. I do not wish for it to finally catch up.”

“Good-bye,” Melissa said, and turned.

“I’m … sorry,” Gunthar Brandt’s voice called after her.

Before she had reached the door, it crashed open and the big nurse, Brandt’s Altenpfleger, lunged in, holding a pistol in her hand aimed straight at Melissa.

“No!” Melissa shrieked.

The pistol spit once, twice. Melissa felt her breath freeze up. She gasped and would have screamed had not the nurse clamped a hand tight over her mouth.

“Look!” the nurse ordered.

Melissa turned to see blood seeping from a pair of bullet holes in Gunthar Brandt’s face.

“Under the sheet!” the nurse directed. “His right hand! Quickly!”

Melissa moved to the bed and lifted up the sheet on that side. A silenced pistol was still gripped in Brandt’s hand.

“He would have killed you,” the nurse said.

“Why? Who are you?”

“Later.”

“But—”

“There could be others. We leave now.”

Melissa stood there suspended between actions, between thoughts. The nurse grabbed her arm and yanked.

“I said now!”

And together they plunged into the corridor. The big nurse held her pistol hidden by her side the whole time that she and Melissa advanced down the hallway. Her other arm rested distressingly against Melissa’s back, and Melissa couldn’t tell whether she was being taken hostage or rescued. The confused succession of events had numbed her, and, having no choice, she simply went along.

She could feel the big nurse’s tension through the course of the walk to the third-floor elevator.

There could be others.

The nurse was taking her own words seriously. Melissa followed the woman’s eyes as they darted across those of everyone they passed, half expecting her gun to begin spitting fire again any moment.

Gunthar Brandt had had a gun, was seconds away from killing her, when the nurse had burst in. What did it all mean? As incomprehensible as things already were, they had gotten worse.

After an interminable descent in the elevator, the nurse led her outside into the cool early-evening air. Melissa felt the woman decrease the pressure against her back. The nurse guided her toward a car parked in the staff area, an old Volkswagen. Melissa resisted briefly.

“You must come with me,” the nurse told her. “It is your only chance to live.”

“Who are you?”

“Get in.”

“Who are—”

“Do as I say!”

Melissa climbed into the passenger seat, and the woman slammed the door behind her. She then got behind the wheel and started the engine.

“Now tell me who you are,” Melissa demanded.

“We will drive through the night to an airfield and a plane,” the nurse said instead of responding. “By midmorning it will all be clear.”

“You knew I would be coming here,” Melissa assumed. “You knew I’d be coming to Brandt.”

The nurse pulled the car onto the road from the rest home, eyes maintaining a vigil in the rearview mirror.

“No,” she corrected.

“Then what … Wait a minute! You were watching Brandt! That’s it, isn’t it?”

The woman stripped off a wig to reveal hair of an entirely different color and texture. She smoothed it as best she could while she kept driving.

“I took the place of the real nurse only today. The time had come.”

“Time had come for what?”

“Mobilization. Brandt’s name was on a list of those who could be valuable to us….”

“Us,” Melissa repeated.

“He was a link, one of the few left. We knew there was a chance that someone would be coming to see him, though not to talk.”

And then Melissa realized. “You thought I came to kill him.”

“And we thought you’d then lead us to those you represented. Listening to your conversation with Brandt told me otherwise. I knew Brandt would have to kill you to protect the secrets he had held for so long. But, based on your questions, I also knew you could help us in ways you could not possibly be aware of.”

“And just who is us?”

“When we get there,” was all the woman would say.

“Get where?”

“Israel. A place known as Nineteen….”

The panic in Tessen’s eyes, Blaine knew, mirrored his own. They had only seconds, a minute at most, before they would be under siege to the killers now on the grounds. Killers who never lost a single member of their number to whatever counterattacks their victims were able to mount.

The screams beyond dissipated as quickly as they had come. Somewhere downstairs glass shattered. The White Death had entered the house. McCracken’s eyes had wandered to a model of an especially grisly battle scene where Nazi soldiers were launching a chemical warfare attack, protecting themselves with—

“Gas masks!” Blaine blared over the screams mixing with futile gunfire on the first floor. He recalled the toymaker’s insistence on the accuracy of his work. “You have them, Professor, you must!”

“Of course! In the closet!”

“What closet?”

The old man led Blaine to it. McCracken grasped his elbow to make him go faster and threw back the double doors for him. The neatly arranged shelves and hooks featured a wide assortment of weapons and equipment. In addition, there were five fully clothed mannequins in different Nazi uniforms. One of the mannequins wore a gas mask. Another had a similar mask clipped to his belt.

Blaine reached inside and tore the one off the plastic face it concealed. Tessen reached for the other. Downstairs, the gunfire had stopped. Tessen was already tightening his mask over his face. McCracken started to follow suit.

“What about me?” the old man wondered.

“Hide in the closet and keep your eyes closed.”

“They’re my masks! This is all mine!”

“And we’re your best chance of keeping it,” Blaine said, and started to reach inside the closet for the rifles.

“They’re not loaded,” the old man told him.

“Where are the bullets?”

“I … have none.”

Tessen and McCracken exchanged glances, Tessen through the plastic lenses covering his eyes. The two of them drew their pistols.

“They won’t be expecting a fight,” Blaine said hopefully, pulling his mask over his head.

“If they know you’re here, they will.”

The door to the workshop fragmented inward. A small grenadelike thing fluttered through the air and shattered on impact with the floor.

Ssssssssssssss …

It sounded like a snake to Blaine. The deadly droplets of the White Death were filling the room. Screaming, the old man staggered toward the closet with one arm covering his closed eyes. He banged into a pair of display tables en route, and their fragile contents tumbled to the floor. A third table nearest the closet pitched over entirely on impact. McCracken spun toward the door, Tessen hanging back.

The first of two figures whirled into the room, as the hissing wound down and the White Death filled the air. Blaine instantly noticed the shiny black steel extremities that they had for hands. Some sort of razor-sharp prostheses, he realized. So that’s how they had pulled it off, not just now but forty-five years ago as well….

Tessen opened fire an instant ahead of McCracken.

“Head shots!” Blaine screamed his way as the Nazi’s first three shots plunked into the bulletproof vests that the invaders wore.

Blaine had no sooner shouted the words than he got off a trio of bullets into the lagging figure’s face. The third bullet snapped his head back, and then he went limp. Tessen’s misjudgment had cost him the luxury of space and surprise; the killer was almost upon him when he at last put a bullet dead center in his forehead.

Blaine and the Nazi met halfway across the floor and slid toward the doorway. McCracken reached it first. The house beyond had grown deadly quiet. How many more of them might there be in the house? Whatever the number, they would have heard the gunshots and might be approaching even now.

“Scream!” Blaine said loudly through his gas mask back to Tessen.

“What?”

“You heard me. Scream. Like they were killing us now.” His eyes fell on one of the corpses, at the deadly black weapons that had been pulled over their hands. “Scream!”

Tessen lifted his mask up to expose his mouth and screamed. Blaine followed, joining him. When they finished, a deathly quiet returned to the house. The overpowering scent of gunpowder had made its way to the second floor. McCracken peered outside into the hallway.

“Empty,” he whispered.

“Not for long,” Tessen warned. “They’ll be coming.”

“I think if we—”

“Not ‘we,’ McCracken. I don’t matter anymore. It is only you.” He pointed to the opposite end of the hallway. “You can get out through that window. Climb down and escape while their forces are still concentrated in the front.”

“While you …”

“Hold them off for as long as I can.”

“Might not be long enough, Tessen.”

“You will make it long enough. Once you are over the wall, you will be safe.”

“Unless they see me.”

“The mask will still protect you. Go! Now! Before it is too late!”

Blaine handed his gun to Tessen. “Thank you,” he said, and started off.

“It is I who must thank you, for what you are doing for us. Get out. Hurry. Stop them. Destroy them.”

McCracken charged off. He had to swing right at the end of the corridor to find the window that held his route of escape. He had it up and was halfway outside when the horrible screams reached him from well back down the hall, real screams this time.

Tessen …

From the window, Blaine dropped onto a branch and then climbed down the tree adjacent to the window as quickly as he could. He hit the ground running. Footsteps thumped behind him, closing the gap. He didn’t bother looking back. A pair, a trio perhaps, of the killers were giving pursuit, and more were sure to join them.

Blaine could see the brick wall enclosing the grounds just ahead. Ten feet high and nearly impossible to scale, unless he could grasp one of the vines wrapped upon it and pull himself up. He hit the wall climbing, razor-sharp death about to swipe at his heels. He grasped a vine and propelled himself upward, not stopping when he reached the top. He let himself tumble over and dropped onto a thick bush that cushioned his drop, but tore off his gas mask in the process. Impact on the ground was soft enough to let him have his feet back instantly.

McCracken was dazed, though, and the utter blackness of the night added to his disorientation. He could hear the pursuers behind him scaling the wall. More dark figures poured out from the mansion’s gate and charged toward him like a storm in the night.

A car was speeding down Schwogenstrasse. McCracken bolted into the street directly into the spill of its headlights. He intended to make the vehicle stop so that he might commandeer it. The car skidded to a halt just in front of him.

“Get in!” a woman’s voice ordered through the driver’s window, rear door thrown open.

Blaine stood there for a long moment.

“For God’s sake, do as I say. Now!”

McCracken lunged into the back seat, struggling to get the door closed as the car tore away.

Chapter 27

“I understand now,” said Wareagle after the Israeli commando leader had completed his explanation of what they were facing.

He tightened the strap of the goggles that had been handed to him behind his head. They had been fitted with infrared lenses, but donning them had reduced even further a view that was already restricted thanks to the black bayou night. He was alone now in the shielded clearing with the leader and the burly man named Joseph. The others had silently retaken their positions, eight commandos in all.

“And these will protect us?” he asked.

“They should,” the leader told him. “They haven’t been tested.”

Johnny’s mind strayed briefly to Joe Rainwater. He had died horribly, unable to even see his killers, much less fight them. The dishonor of it sickened him. The soul and spirit of his warrior friend had been done a terrible disservice. Johnny tightened his grip on the Splat-loaded Sterling SMG.

“You don’t know who those in possession of this weapon are,” he said, feeling his own warrior blood heating up against his flesh.

“Only that this is a return engagement for them. We knock out what we can here and hope for clues that lead us back to the nest.”

Wareagle tensed suddenly, the spirits alive in his ears. The night had turned rancid, ranker than even the hellfire’s. He moved forward until he was dangerously close to being visible.

“What are you doing?” the leader barked, as the man named Joseph started after Wareagle.

Johnny stood there motionless, his spine arched and whole body rigid. Joseph touched his shoulder and pulled his hand away instantly, a feeling like heat and an electric shock surging through it.

“What is it?” the Israeli asked.

“Pull your men back,” Wareagle told the leader.

“What?”

“Get your men out of here, Commander, get them out now!”

Inside the house Heydan Larroux sat in a chair facing a window with drawn blinds. Beyond them the night sounds spoke to her, and she tried to listen for their message. She heard the Old One ruffling stones through her aged hands, the sound curiously like that of a shooter at a craps table. The thought had her almost smiling until the familiar sound of a stone hitting water came, louder and flatter than normal.

She swung round to see the Old One’s hands empty and her wrinkled face wet with the splash that had resulted. Her hands were trembling.

“They have come,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” the commando leader demanded, storming toward Johnny.

“Act before it is too late!”

“My men would have signaled, I tell you. We’re prepared. If I pull them out now …”

The leader stopped when a soft splash split the other sounds of the night. A few seconds passed, then a single gunshot rang out.

“My God,” Joseph muttered.

“How?” the leader wondered, as he tried in vain to make his men respond to his contact signal.

“The water,” Wareagle had just finished saying when a black figure that was one with the night sprang out of the thick ooze and underbrush rimming the shore of the bayou. There was a dull flash of metal, and the commando leader gasped.

Johnny recorded the action in slow motion within his mind’s eye. But even that was barely sufficient to show him that the killer’s hands weren’t wielding the weapon; they were the weapon. The killer had driven them straight through the Israeli leader’s torso. Johnny saw them emerge through the man’s back like spikes as his ears recorded the tearing, wrenching sounds. The leader started to fall.

Johnny fired his rifle.

The Splat bullet struck the dark killer squarely in the chest and blew him backward into the water. A shower of gore sprayed in all directions. Johnny spun in time to see Joseph firing a burst into a second figure as a third took the big Israeli from behind with its hands closing on his throat. Before Wareagle could aim, the dark hands had torn Joseph’s head clean off. A fountain of blood shot upward, and Joseph’s body spasmed horribly before crumpling. Johnny fired a Splat into the killer’s head, and it ruptured with a fiery poof.

Whatever they were, they could be killed….

Wareagle took some comfort in that, although not a lot. He leaned over and checked the headless body of the second figure he had shot. It was a man, all right, everywhere except …

Johnny checked his hands. They weren’t hands at all, but molded gloves formed of steel that was honed razor-sharp all the way down the fingers. The method of Joe Rainwater’s and all the other deaths was clear to him now. The victims had been blinded first and then killed in awful fashion up close, unable to see and thus unable to defend themselves. The killers were out to achieve more than effectiveness. There was a ritual element to this, almost like the fanaticism of a cult. Johnny’s eyes shifted quickly to the house. The sounds he had heard prior to the appearance of these now-dead killers confirmed that there were more of them out there. They would now be heading toward the woman they had come for.

Wareagle waded into the muck of the swamp. His feet again sunk into the soft bottom, and the dense undergrowth tried in vain to hold him. He was waist-deep when the bottom firmed out. The water glistened instead of oozed. Johnny pushed himself in and began swimming the last stretch to the house that rose out of the bayou.

At the sound of the explosions, Heydan Larroux lunged from her chair and moved for the front room, where a pair of guards stood as her final line of defense. She knew already that all the other men she had posted were dead. The explosions she had just heard might have been a last-ditch effort by the few that had managed to take action.

“He is out there,” the Old One rasped from her unyielding perch over the water bowl.

“I haven’t got time for—”

“The warrior!” the Old One continued. “He is out there!”

Heydan was already into the living room, and the words barely reached her. Her last two guards held their machine guns at the ready, poised before either window. Heydan moved to the one that provided the clearest view of the walkway leading out from the shore, the only way to reach the house from land. In her hand was a detonator. Not hesitating at all, she pressed it.

Instantly a pair of blasts sounded, and the walkway collapsed into the swamp, sinking slowly. She discarded the detonator and pulled a 9mm Beretta pistol from the belt of her jeans. Whoever was out there would have to approach by water now. And it was deep this far out, ten feet where the house’s supports had been planted.

Heydan left her two guards at their vigil and returned to the first floor’s back room. She closed and locked the door behind her. An attack from beyond via the rear was much less likely, given the logistics of the house’s construction. The windows were seven feet above the water here, instead of four in the front, an impossible lunge for anyone. As for the upstairs, well, that seemed an unlikely route of entry at best.

Heydan Larroux steadied herself by one window and then shifted to the other. The Old One remained in the floor’s center, seeing without eyes. The longest two minutes of Heydan’s life had passed when a blast rang out in the front room. She heard her men yelling at each other, followed by the distinctive clacking of automatic-rifle fire. They continued shouting as they fired, but their words were indecipherable to her.

“My God,” Heydan muttered, staring at the door before her. “My God …”

Her men were shrieking now, ear-piercing screams that grabbed her gut and twisted. The pistol trembled in her hand. Heavy footsteps thumped toward the door leading into the back room. Heydan backpedaled and tried to steady her pistol.

Something cold grasped her arm.

“The warrior is coming,” the Old One said, suddenly by her side.

“What?”

The Old One looked at the door as if she could see through it. “No. He is here.”

The Old One moved away from Heydan just before an explosion sounded that blew the door inward. Something crashed into Larroux and flung her backward. Impact against the wall stole all of her wind and a measure of her consciousness. She was pinned down by something as black and heavy as the night, as death itself.

Johnny Wareagle had made the night his ally in swimming his way through the bayou’s black water toward the house. The water would not give him up to his enemies, because it, too, was part of nature. Existing in harmony with its heavy currents made for the best camouflage of all.

He swam like a great fish just below the surface, stealing only what little air he needed to make his way forward in the night. He was a hundred yards from Heydan Larroux’s bayou house when the explosion disturbed the smooth flow of the thick water. The ripple effect disrupted his stroke, and his head cleared the surface to see the last of the smoldering walkway disappearing into the bayou.

The woman inside the house was better than he had thought. Johnny turned that way and stopped dead in the water.

A trio of the blackened figures were climbing up from the black water directly under the house. Ropes dangled down from its front to the water’s surface, affixed to pylons that must have been shot into place by the same kind of pistollike device that Johnny had used plenty of times himself.

The need for subtlety was finished. Wareagle pulled himself through the currents in quick bursts of incredible power. He had covered more than half the distance when he saw the figures reach the door. They jammed something on its center and it blew inward, half-torn from its hinges.

The water hid the screams that followed from Johnny’s ears, but he heard them clearly enough in his mind and imagined that they were Joe Rainwater’s. He shot through the final stretch of water without slowing for air. The killers had left their ropes dangling, and he grasped one to pull himself upward.

Special goggles donned, Wareagle threw himself over the threshold and brought his Sterling SMG upward. One of the black figures was laying another explosive charge against an inner door when Johnny pulled the trigger. The Splat blew out his midsection and rocketed him against the door just as his charge detonated. Airborne, he crashed through the door’s remnants and into a woman who seemed to be poised to make a defense.

Another pair of black figures spun away from the blown door toward Johnny. One had a dark, egg-shaped object clutched in his hand. In the instant it took him to aim the Sterling, Wareagle realized that the blindness-inducing aerosol would be released as soon as the egg-shaped housing shattered. He fired his next bullet at the figure wielding it.

The Splat lifted the figure into the air and slammed him against the wall, his blood spewing in all directions. The egg-shaped housing shattered with a poof! within the outer room.

The third and final figure turned away from the blown door and lunged at Wareagle. Johnny got his barrel righted and went for the trigger.

Clang!

The thud of something smashing down hard on the rifle’s barrel weakened his grasp. In the next instant what felt like a vise grasped the weapon and tore it away. Johnny wavered, and before he could fully recover his balance, the figure had rammed the rifle’s butt under his chin. Johnny staggered backward through what remained of the door into the inner room.

One woman lay dazed on the floor, partially pinned by the first of the figures Wareagle had killed. A second woman, ancient, sat cross-legged in a corner, undaunted by what was happening.

The dark figure stormed forward and lashed at Johnny with one of its black steel hands. Johnny lurched from the hand’s path, and the steel sliced through his Kevlar vest and nipped at his flesh. The burst of pain made his back arch. He saw the next strike surging toward him like a spear. He twisted sideways and blocked it downward, but the move left him open for the figure’s second hand, which sliced upward.

Johnny turned again, and the blow scratched against the left lens of his protective goggles. He backpedaled and faced off against his adversary, thinking that Joe Rainwater had not been granted such a chance. The black figure lashed at him with his right hand and followed up quickly with a swipe from his left. Johnny deflected both blows, then ducked under a sweeping side-mounted double strike and dropped into a roll. He snapped quickly to his feet, shaking the wall he came to rest against. Above him something that had been hanging there dropped onto a nearby dresser. Wareagle stole a glance at it.

It was a cat-o’-nine-tails.

Johnny grasped the ancient whiplike weapon and sent it swirling outward, just as the figure spun into another attack. Enough of the cat’s tails raked across his face to draw blood and a gasp. Wareagle swung his weapon in again and the figure, on the defensive now, blocked it with one of his steel hands.

He tried to grab it with the other, which opened up his midsection for Johnny’s feet. A kick landed squarely in his groin, and he bent into an agonized hunch. Johnny drew the cat back and around, the tails catching his assailant in the right shoulder and spinning him into the wall.

The dark figure retaliated by surging forward again, Johnny’s throat his target. Johnny let him think he had it and whipped the cat-o’-nine-tails out with a snap at the last possible instant. Air surged by Wareagle’s throat as the cat tore down across the figure’s face.

And eyes.

The man’s scream was bloodcurdling. It was barely a breath in length, but a breath was too long. His hands whipped down from his ravaged eyes. By then, though, Johnny had come in fast and to the side, the cat whistling through the air ahead of him. The tails swirled together and sliced into the black figure’s exposed throat. Wareagle felt warm blood splatter him, as the figure’s breathless scream gave way to a wet gurgle. The figure collapsed, writhing and twitching. Johnny backed away, and his eyes fell on the old woman who had remained seated calmly through it all.

“I was waiting for you, warrior,” she told him, her mouth squeezed between thick layers of wrinkled flesh. “What are you called?”

“Wareagle,” Johnny replied, breathing hard.

“Yes,” the Old One said, showing a glimpse of a smile. “Yes.”

Across the room, Heydan Larroux moaned and stirred.

“My lady,” from the Old One.

Johnny lifted the corpse off the woman he sought. She was still groggy, but had recovered her senses in time to hear the Indian-looking figure call himself “Wareagle,” and recalled the Old One’s vision of a bird of prey painted with the colors of battle.

An eagle.

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered, accepting the giant’s help in getting to her feet.

Johnny then crouched alongside the figure he had killed with the cat-o’-nine-tails. After removing the goggles the Israelis had given him, he pulled the corpse’s strange-looking headpiece off and regarded the face curiously. He knew the face of a killer when he saw one; death could not take that look away.

Wareagle’s eyes scanned the man’s upper body where the cat had shredded his body armor and shirt. There was a mark on his left shoulder, partially covered by blood that Johnny wiped away.

The mark was a tattoo, a swirly line stretched across the top of a slanted one.

It was the Greek letter tau.

“His boot,” the old woman said from the corner, pointing. Wareagle realized that she was blind. “What you seek can be found in his right boot, warrior.”

Johnny crouched down next to it and ran his hand along the boot. He squeezed the thick heel and felt it move a little. A harder pull snapped it off and revealed a secret compartment containing a state-of-the-art pager complete with miniature LED screen. Johnny switched it on. The screen remained blank.

“Nothing,” he told the old woman.

“Its secrets remain within.”

“Told and gone.”

“No, warrior. Not for one who knows the box’s ways.”

Johnny almost handed it out toward her. “You?”

He watched the old blind woman smile. “No. Another we will meet soon.”

“Where?”

“Where we are going, warrior.”

“There could be more of them,” Johnny Wareagle told her, as he slid the sleek pager into his pocket. “We’d better be fast.”

The old woman turned Heydan Larroux’s way. “Tell him of the boat, child.”

Heydan couldn’t take her eyes off the giant Indian. “There’s a raised platform built onto the underside of this house. A boat is stored upon it. Not much, just a small outboard …”

“It will do,” said Johnny.

“You will make it do, warrior,” the blind woman said quite assuredly.

Heydan instructed Wareagle to pull up the throw carpet from the center of the floor. When he did so, a small hatchway was revealed. He yanked it open, and the black water of the bayou glistened beneath him. He could see the rigging holding the boat to the platform. A hand crank resting just to his right would lower it onto the water ten feet below.

It took a full minute of turning before the outboard’s bottom kissed the surface. The boat wobbled under Wareagle’s bulk when he dropped down into it. Steadying himself as best he could, he stood up and raised his hands toward the hatchway.

“Let me help you,” he said to Heydan.

She slid her feet over the edge and felt a pair of powerful hands lock on to her ankles and accept her weight. Then she watched as the warrior named Wareagle lowered the Old One into the swaying boat as well.

“The engine,” Heydan said, shifting toward it.

Wareagle had a guide pole already in hand. “We won’t be using it.”

“We’re miles from anywhere,” she protested. “Without the engine, it’ll take us hours, even—” She stopped when a feeling of incredible stupidity swept over her. “I’m sorry. If we use the engine, of course, they’ll know where we are.”

“They already know where we are,” Wareagle told her. “I want to hear them if they come.”

Johnny pushed off with the guide pole and eased the boat out from beneath the house and whatever security it provided. A sea of still, black glass, blistered by the overgrowth from the shore and draped by the overhanging foliage, welcomed them. Johnny’s motions were smooth, and the boat rode the currents easily, his rhythm broken only when his guide pole lodged in the soft bottom.

Heydan was transfixed by the subtle power of his motions. She tried to speak several times but didn’t until the big Indian’s eyes at last met hers.

“You came down here for me.”

“Because I knew they would be returning.” Wareagle paused. “Because they must be stopped.”

“Who are they?”

“I do not know.”

“Yes, you do, warrior,” the Old One said suddenly. “Back in the house you saw something that told you.”

“On the arm of one of the killers,” Johnny acknowledged. “A letter.”

“What letter?”

“Tau, from the Greek alphabet.”

The Old One squeezed her face up tight in consternation. “These men represent a cause, the true scope of which is not yet clear to me. But there are many, many more of them. And what they seek stretches far beyond these dark waters. That much, warrior, is clear.”

Wareagle stiffened his grip on the guide pole. “And what of our route to them?”

“Where we head now is the right direction, warrior. Partly over land. Known by few. My home long ago.” She turned her dead eyes on Johnny. “The first stop in a journey that will reveal to you the answers you seek.”