Sniper's Honor Page 29

  “Yay for the man from Texas!” she shouted.

  He said, “Say, weren’t you G.I. Jane?”

  “I just pulled the trigger and hid.”

  “That’s how wars are won. Sorry, didn’t kill the dog. Maybe next time. Got all your stuff? We ain’t coming back.”

  “Got it all.” She had remembered her bag, all her phones, even the carefully wrapped plate.

  “Good. Let’s see what we bagged.”

  Interlude in Tel Aviv VI

  “There are better killers in the world today,” said the director. “The best that science, government, and unlimited budgets can devise. Why would anyone go to so much trouble to manufacture this old garbage?”

  “Indeed, there are more efficient chemical and biological weapons,” responded Gershon. “Nerve agents, anthrax, sarin, Ebola, all sorts of vapors, dusts, unguents, and gizmos for murder. Moreover, the methods of deploying the Zyklon are awkward and prone to difficulty. It works best in a locked chamber disguised as a shower room. That is, in controlled circumstances. It is heavy for its effect, difficult to transport, and lacking, outside the extermination camp, sophisticated dispersal technologies. It’s old-fashioned.

  “But that’s not a mistake, that’s the very point. I see this as what might be called a ‘tribute atrocity.’ That is to say, a sentimental act of murder, a gesture in which the murderer’s true motive is not merely to kill but, by killing, to pay homage to an earlier generation of murderers. In other words, someone wants to replicate and sacralize the Shoah and to inform the world with his method that the ancient Nazi genocidalists are still out there, waiting, watching. It has nothing to do with Allah, not really, and is uninterested in Islam, other than as a means to an end. No, this fellow kills in the name of Hitler, and to him, it doesn’t matter if he kills five, fifty, five hundred, or five thousand, though the more, the better.”

  The faces at the table stared at him. He had their attention. It was well past midnight, the lights of the black cube burned brightly, and in the conference room not only the director and several department heads stared at Gershon, but so did IDF representatives and an emissary from the prime minister. In the background of the room, a silent TV carried a newsfeed from CNN, and the screen bled blue light into the dim space.

  “How could they deliver it?” Cohen said. “I don’t think the shower-room trick will work twice on us.”

  “No, indeed. The ‘crystals’ are actually placed under pressure and become embedded in porous stone or wooden disks and locked in airtight containers for transport and deployment. Air releases the vapor; water releases it more quickly. The Nazis packed them in pellet form in sealed cans, opened them, and dropped them into water to release the gas. So, bulk would be a problem. To kill a lot of people, you need a lot of stuff. On the other hand, he has a lot of stuff. Given what we know about his manufacturing process, he could have churned out ten thousand pounds of the stuff. Consider a low-flying plane that crashes into Tel Aviv in the night without warning, loaded with the pellets, releasing their gas into the air when their fragile containers break open. The gas—without the odorant to tip us off to its presence, and being heavier than air—would drift at low level through the city air, smothering people in their beds. Thousands could die. That would be the mega-disaster. In smaller applications, a shopping mall might contain people and gas long enough for hundreds of deaths, a school, any building would do. It could be added to water supplies, its deadly vapors drifting this way and that off the breeze. It could be packed in rockets and fired from Gaza. Fifteen rockets and people come out after the all-clear, unaware they’re walking into a poison-gas cloud. Dozens, hundreds could die.

  “Then, too, when the dying is over and the investigation begins, think of the furor after it is discovered that the death gas was our old Nazi enemy Zyklon, the cyclone. The world press would go nuts, as they love to run pictures of Nazis, which are sure magazine and newspaper sellers. All the old footage is rerun. Someone digs out Triumph of the Will, and the parades are run over and over on the news channels. Everyone loves to hate the Nazis, bad boys of a hundred thousand silly plots. Why, it would be like National Nazi Month. It would be the best month the Third Reich has had in seventy years. That in itself would be a major victory for the author of this event.”

  “Which brings us to the point of this meeting, Gershon. Who is he? Who is Nordyne? How do we find him? How do we kill him? How much time have we got?”

  “Well,” said Gershon, “I’d be trying to answer those questions myself if I weren’t at this damned meeting.”

  * * *

  Where are you, mister? You must have left a trace, a clue. You have to be somebody. You’re not just a spirit of malevolence that seeped out of a grave, you’re corporeal, of flesh, and mind, and hair, and stench, and somewhere, somehow, you’ve left a trail. I will find it.

  All around was activity, but Gershon was calm. He was where he wanted to be. He was hunting.

  I cannot hunt you in your Swiss bank, you putz, because those institutions are notoriously secretive, and I cannot get to your accounts without the validating algorithms. It could be done but would take far too much valuable time. Running your little ploy out of Switzerland was a master stroke.

  So what have you left? Only the logo.

  Yes, the logo. Two stylized faces staring off, “facing the future.”

  He stared, he stared, he stared. Was there a significance in the image? What could something so simple, so banal, conceal? Just another corporate bromide; who would look twice at it? A trademark, amusing to eye but devoid of content, as designed. It had no signature, no house style or indication of what graphic artist had confabulated it. It seemed offhand, yet the artist had captured in those two light lines a true glint of human intelligence, individuality, and flesh. Maybe it was steganography, a method of encoding information in graphic presentations. In some cases, not here, microdots. But Gershon thought that somewhere in the images, or in the imagination that conceived and selected and refined the images, there was a code of sorts, perhaps unconscious.

  Besides: he had nothing else.

  So: Two faces, facing left. Two profiles. Shapes. Though they’re technically lines, they’re really shapes. Your imagination attaches them to a head and completes the image in the eye of you, beholding.

  He knew of a Darknet site called Imagechase.com, which hunted for selected images, just as other search engines found words, names, anything in the universe of print. He called it up, activated it, and fiddled and faddled, defining the original image from the Nordyne website, cutting it and then pasting it to the software screen “target” area of Imagechase. Maybe in the posture, in the alignment, there was something, and Imagechase could hunt it down. It might lead to something that had inspired the actual artist in his studio, wherever he was.

  He pressed SEARCH.

  A magic animated disk appeared, the universal symbol that the elves inside were at work. The seconds dragged by. But then the screen changed and produced a chain of mini-images, each of which could be full-screened by a click.

  Mostly the click wasn’t necessary. It was a selection of left-facing profiles, many banal, many of no use whatsoever. Easter Island seemed to predominate, those odd busts from time unimaginable, two stories tall, as viewed in profile, endless fodder for speculation and photography. It seemed unlikely, however, that Easter Islanders were behind Nordyne GmbH.

  American presidential editorial cartoons, on the theme of the president posing for a sculpture, were the second most common, the joke always being the sculptor’s idealization or contra, truth-telling, about the stentorian great man posing before him in the required profile. Hand in breast of jacket strictly optional.

  Then an odd run of middle-tier European talent expressing itself in hagiographical portraits of powerful nobles. It seemed that the pose was favored by those with a strong sense of self-importance, while others preferred to face the instrument of record straight on.

  And final
ly . . .

  What have we here?

  He clicked.

  The image jumped out at him. Two strong faces, lean of jaw, forceful of nose, taut cheeks over bed-knob bones, foreheads caparisoned in helmets or hats, and the future they so dutifully faced made possible by the three words immediately before them, Garanten Deutscher Wehrkraft, or “Guarantors of German military strength.”

  It struck him how similar the two stylized faces in the logo were to this piece of Nazi poster kitsch. Gershon quickly diverted to another software program called Abonsoft Image Compare, which let him run more exact comparisons between the poster and the logo and enabled a fast pixel-to-pixel comparison. He loaded the two images and zoomed in on the lines of profile, bold in the logo, less strident in the poster, isolated them, aligned them, and clicked. Abonsoft found that the profiles of each were almost an exact match in pitch of forehead, angle of nose, cast of mouth, shape of chin. Whoever had designed the logo must have known about, studied, perhaps even idolized the image from the poster, which was ascribed to an artist called only “Mjölnir.”

  Mjölnir was quickly revealed by Dr. Google to be Hans Schweitzer, house artist of the Ministry of Propaganda, pet of Dr. Goebbels, the Nazi Norman Rockwell. The Internet quickly revealed the scope of his work. It seemed that he was a specialist in heroic profiles staring off to the left, as all manner of SS men, SA men, and Waffen-SS Soldats were captured in that pose, even a couple of rather horsey German women, though once in a while he’d turn them to face the other direction. He was also responsible for the poster for a Nazi movie called Der ewige Jude, with an image of the eternal jew as a kind of Fu Manchu facing the world in sinister yellow skin behind two squinting, malicious eyes and an enormous massif of nose.

  Gershon felt a little sick, as did most people when they saw this shit laid out before them.

  But he continued, becoming an expert in two minutes on Hans Schweitzer, who, after the glory days of the war, settled back into obscurity as a commercial illustrator and didn’t die until 1980. But it was all right. Justice was served. He was made to pay a fine.

  So: who would allow himself to be influenced by Hans Schweitzer?

  Who found the imagery so powerful and raw that he’d commissioned its replication seventy years after the last real Nazi was gunned down in the rubble of Berlin by Red Shock Army troops?

  Begin with family. He went to an Institute database, found nothing, then sent an e-mail to a friend at the Holocaust Research Center and in very few minutes heard back.

  Gershon, I don’t approve of holding a son guilty for a father’s deeds. It’s even more questionable here, as Schweitzer was really only guilty of what can be called Artcrime. Yes, he specialized in the world’s most hateful imagery, and prospered from it, and enabled the killers in some extralegal philosophic sense, but he himself did nothing except draw.

  You assure me this is necessary for some national defense issue. Then I will dutifully comply and tell you that Schweitzer had a son with some graphic talent who worked in advertising for many years. The son’s son has the same talent and now is a senior partner in a graphics firm in Berlin called Imagetorrent. The man’s name is Lukas Schweitzer, and it saddens me to report that he did in fact change his name back to Schweitzer to capitalize on his grandfather’s “fame.” It seems to have worked. Do what you will with this information, but remember, these people are guilty only of translating into imagery the sick fantasies of the truly evil. What does the world become if you are guilty of “drawing bad things” and can be punished for it?

  Gershon had no plan to punish Lukas Schweitzer for his grandfather’s intellectual crimes, but he did plan to do some actual spying.

  That didn’t take much effort, as the firewalls around Imagetorrent’s internal affairs were quite fragile, easily penetrated, and it took only a few minutes to crank into the e-mail of Lukas Schweitzer and call up its “trash” file, where that which had been erased lay in perpetuity, and pore through it until he came on a file of e-mails labeled “Nordyne.”

  It was a back-and-forth between artist and patron.

  Artist: I’m sorry you are disappointed in the submission. I find myself reluctant to pursue your ideas any further. Yes, I profit by my family associations, call me a hypocrite, but it is still a painful area for me.

  Patron: Bourgeois sniveling. You have accepted a generous payment. You have agreed to follow my ideas. Your opinions of them are not interesting to me. Use your talent as I have directed and as I demand, or there will be ruinous legal problems for you and your firm. I want the same purity of line that marked the great Mjölnir’s work; that talent is in your veins. Embrace who you really are.

  Artist: Let me know if this works for you. I have tried to eliminate any supremacist content and utilize only the core of my grandfather’s imagery. You don’t WANT associations with him, do you? You can’t. You just want some essence of his “spirit,” right? I hope so.

  Patron: At last. Yes, it is acceptable, and the final fee will be paid, with a bonus. All these e-mails must be destroyed, incidentally. But you knew that.

  The patron’s e-mail address was Anton1@Toryavesky.net. It didn’t take long for Gershon to learn that Toryavesky was the holding company at the center of a certain Russian oligarch’s empire. That man was Vassily Strelnikov, about to become the new minister of trade of Russia.

  CHAPTER 50

  The Carpathians

  Yaremche

  LATE JULY 1944

  Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon.

  To him we belong, to him return.

  Having spoken directly to Allah by means of a dua, as such direct declarations were called, Salid came out of his religious trance. It was still the same, only it was five seconds later.

  The senior group leader SS lay on his side on the narrow width of the bridge, in a gigantic puddle of blood that soaked his clothes and gleamed in the dull light of the occluded sun; some of it slid through the slats and drained down to the swirling waters below. There was so much blood you could smell it. The corpse’s eyes were open, as was his mouth. Blood ran from his nose and welled into his mouth from his throat but had not overspilled its boundaries yet.

  Where could the shot have come from?

  It had to have come from a long, long way out, so far out that its noise largely dissipated before it so tragically arrived.

  Salid blinked, hoping for the arrival of a clarification. Men looked at him in stupefied horror, waiting for orders. He himself wished someone were there to give crisp, concise, well-thought-out orders. But in the absence of Dr. Groedl, he was the senior officer.

  He could think only of himself.

  The man I was sent to protect is dead despite my best efforts. I will be blamed. I am, after all, the outsider, the one who does not belong. My greatest sponsor was Dr. Groedl, and now he is gone, the sniper has escaped, I have shamed my father, my grandfather, my cousin the Mufti, my family, my faith, my destiny. The Germans will shoot me for gross incompetence.

  Allah, send me wisdom, I pray to Thee help your son Salid at his hour of maximum terror among the infidels, to whom he is nothing really but a nigger of no account who, given responsibility, has failed it utterly.

  “Sir, what—”

  It was Ackov.

  Salid tried to think.

  What? What? What?

  The dogs.

  “The dogs will find her. Nothing has changed. She is up there, somewhere above the burned-out line. No, no, the bullet hit him frontally. The shot had to come from there!” He pointed to a much farther flank of pine-carpeted mountain a full thousand yards distant.“Where’s the field telephone?”

  Ackov waved over a man, who had a box containing the Model 33 field phone and the long cord. The field telephone, in its hard-shell Bakelite container, was the primary communications device of German ground forces, as it was far less fragile than the radio, far less temperamental, and wire could be laid quickly to put units at a great distance in contact. Its batter
ies were more reliable, it wasn’t as heavy, and it never blew a tube. Salid opened it, took out the phone, and turned the little crank to send a signal to the other end.

  “Graufeldt here.” Graufeldt was a steady lance corporal, one of the few ethnic Germans in Police Battalion.

  “Did you hear the shot?”

  “Yes sir. It wasn’t from our area.”

  “The dogs, Graufeldt.”

  “Sir, I’ve already released the dog teams, and they’re headed in the direction of the shot. They will pick up any scent. Since the shot was so far away, I directed the men to dump their machine pistols and packs and proceed under armament of pistols. I thought they’d have to move quickly and stamina would be the determining factor and—”

  “Yes, yes, good. How much wire have you got?”

  “Two spools. Another half kilometer. Should I move with them?”

  “Yes, stay as close as you can.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Keep me informed. I will be moving soon and beyond the reach of the field phones. You will communicate by flare pistol if you catch her, and you will proceed along the high path to the choke point. If nothing else, your presence will drive her into the parachutists.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good man, Graufeldt.”

  “Sir, how did—”

  “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters now is only that we apprehend the woman.”

  “Yes sir. End transmit here, as I move to new position.”

  Now Salid was thinking more clearly. He handed the phone back.

  “Sir, should we mount up for the trip to the Gap?”

  “Not yet, Ackov. Have the men roust all the villagers and lock them in the church.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Then have a crew use the Flammenwerfer to burn all the buildings. I want the place razed. I want there to be no record of the place where Senior Group Leader Groedl was murdered. There will be no monuments here.”

  “Yes sir. And the church, sir? With the villagers.”