Eagle ascending, p.23
Eagle Ascending, page 23
With his attention focused on his corrupt captain, Krueger failed to notice Tessa Brandt pull open the left-side passenger door. Armed with a baseball bat, she pulled the shocked guard next to Grimm from his seat and flung him to the asphalt. A swift strike to his shoulders reduced him to a simpering pile. Grimm saw the sudden opening and barreled out of the car, with Krueger fast behind him. The driver was too stunned to offer pursuit.
Brandt used her pocket knife to slice open the plastic cords that bound Krueger and Grimm’s hands. Then, with her bat raised high, Brandt led them back toward the rental car, where Mac Hassler waited with his gun raised. The arc light above lit up the miserable architecture of his face.
“Hold it right there!” he yelled into the night sky, as raindrops began to fall.
“You can’t stop us,” Krueger said, inching toward the car.
“You think I’m too scared to shoot you?” Hassler asked. He chuckled, as if trying to mask his rising dread.
Krueger shook his head and took another step forward. Thunder chuckled in the sky. “No,” Krueger answered. He put a hand on the busted hood. “I think you’re too good to shoot us. You may be a lousy cop, but you sure aren’t a murderer.”
Krueger opened the side door and let Brandt and Grimm into the car, leaving Hassler standing in the rain with his mouth agape. Krueger was right; the old captain had the heart of a fool, but not that of a senseless killer. Thus, he did not stop their escape.
In spite of the collision, Krueger found that the rental was still drivable. And as he pulled away he left Hassler all alone, feeling the rainwater sodden his jacket, hearing the wail of the police sirens pierce the air, sensing the confused glares of passersby.
“What are you doin’?” bellowed the driver of Hassler’s Escalade, who’d finally rediscovered his composure. He watched in dismay as Krueger drove the rental toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
Summoning the last vestiges of his courage, Mac Hassler returned to the car and found that the engine was still running despite the crash. Relieved, he ordered his driver to follow. Hassler didn’t know what his next step would be, but he hoped that it would, at last, be a good one.
WITH HEADLIGHTS SLICING the blackness like a blade, Krueger’s car approached the outer fences of the Gemini campus. Krueger gripped the wheel with a rage kindling in his heart. His weariness still hung over him, wrapping him in an unwelcome blanket, but he was beyond feelings of fatigue and of pain. He wanted answers now. His mind would not let him rest until the conspiracy has been laid bare.
And Sam O’Brian had to be rescued.
“You wanna tell me what happened back there?” Krueger asked Brandt. “This car was empty when we passed the hotel with Hassler. I was worried about you.”
Brandt smiled and kissed the wound on Krueger’s forehead. “I did alright by myself, don’t you think?” she asked playfully. “Soon after you headed into the hotel, I saw that Escalade turn into the alley. I tried calling you like you asked, but you didn’t pick up.”
“We were being deprived of our phones at that precise moment,” Grimm said.
“I feared as much,” Brandt continued, “so I snuck down there to take a peek. That driver… he looked like a drug addict.”
“He probably was,” Krueger said. “The guys that jumped us all looked the same: sallow, thin, and a little high too. These Neo-Nazis have guns and they have numbers, but nothing else we should be worried about.”
“They have the True Cross,” Grimm cautioned.
“Not for much longer!” Brandt said with an iron-like voice.
The trio sped past a sign warning them that they were now on private property. Beyond, the storm clouds were turning the Pacific into a thunderous boil.
“This place is going to be crawling with guards,” Grimm warned. “And killing them will only make our plight all the worse.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Krueger insisted, turning on the windshield wipers. The scene before him became a streaky smear. “I figure we sneak in, find Sam and Dubchek, and then confront Dennilson.”
Krueger carefully drove the car onto the promontory of rock. The surf below was white and churning. The outer fencing of the campus winked in the headlights.
“This is it,” Brandt whispered.
But as they drew nearer, Krueger saw the guard box. It was empty. And the main gate was hanging open, the check-point clear.
“Something isn’t right,” Grimm whispered as the card slowed to a crawl.
“I don’t care anymore,” Krueger replied, his voice a slow rasp. He killed the car’s engine and searched the guard post, finding nothing that could serve as a weapon. I should have grabbed a gun from one of Hassler’s thugs, Krueger thought.
Unarmed, Krueger returned to the car and drove toward the silent, brooding tower before him. The windows were dark, the street empty.
“I’ll get us as close to the entrance as possible,” Krueger said. “Once we are in, we head to the subbasement.”
Krueger left the smashed rental parked next to the wide, gleaming atrium. Holding Brandt’s baseball bat, he led his two friends through the rain and into the vast, darkened entrance.
Brandt retrieved her cell phone and used the greenish light to guide their way forward. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to see that the place was bereft of life. The main security desk was unmanned, the polished floors bare.
“I don’t get it,” Krueger said. “Where is Dennilson? Why would he leave his fortress unguarded?” Without answers, the trio edged forward.
The light from Brandt’s phone caught a dark spot on the floor. Another, larger spot came into view further down the hall. Krueger crouched low and touched the dark marks.
It was blood. Fresh blood.
Krueger spun and ordered Brandt to play the feeble light across the walls. Still they found nothing. “Damn it all to Hell,” Krueger hissed, turning haphazardly in all directions. He was desperate for another clue. Stumbling like a drunk, something struck him on his shoulders. He turned and saw a pair of brogues dangling in the dark air, like the footwear of ghosts.
Tired, confused, standing on the brink of utter emotional collapse, Krueger could not comprehend what he was seeing. He looked up, squinting, Brandt’s light providing little illumination.
“Hey Krueger!” someone yelled from behind. Krueger turned to find Mac Hassler following him. He had a flashlight in his hand and two wounded men following him.
“They followed us!” Grimm said, bracing himself for another beating. But Hassler stopped when he saw that the atrium was empty and dark. The concern on his face revealed that this was not part of his plan.
Hassler caught sight of the dangling shoes and played his flashlight over the grisly scene. The shoes were attached to two legs, the legs of Curt Dennilson, who was hanging by his neck from a rope tied to the uppermost balcony in the atrium, one-hundred feet above.
Dr. Barnaby Grimm turned and vomited into the darkness.
“What in God’s name have you done?” Hassler tried to shout. But the shock was too great, and his voice sounded like a plaintive squeak.
A gunshot, loud and terrible, answered Hassler’s question. Krueger spun, straining to find the origin of the shot. He was so busy looking that he failed to notice his captain, Mac Hassler, falling to the ground, a red stain blossoming on the back of his sport coat like a crimson flower.
Tessa Brandt screamed and fell into Krueger arms. There was nowhere else to hide.
Suddenly, the lights of the campus turned on, flooding the murder scene with a buttery glow that revealed the extent of the carnage. Dennilson had been beaten before being hung; his face was a battlefield of wounds.
With the layout of the atrium now clear to see, Krueger pointed to the elevators and led his friends forward. But rank upon rank of black-shirted men suddenly came pouring forth from a dozen doors. They surrounded the glass entrance way.
“Who the Hell are you?” Krueger demanded, shielding Grimm and Brandt with his baseball bat held aloft.
“We are the future,” someone replied, and Krueger looked at the serried, armed ranks at the front of the building. From amongst them emerged Preston Gates, wearing a smile as black as his trench coat.
-18-
THE TEMPEST OUTSIDE GREW WORSE, and so, too, did the mood of the mob.
With a frenzied yell, dozens of armed men surrounded Krueger and his friends. Some, he noticed, wore Nazi iconography on their uniforms, and more than a dozen wore swastikas. Enraged, Krueger swung his bat once, striking the hip of an aging biker, but it was not enough to scare away the crowd. Sustained by the strength of their leader, Preston Gates, they overcame Krueger’s attacks and disarmed him.
“Search them!” Gates barked, and he discovered that he enjoyed giving orders with his newfound power. The way the minions before him leapt into action upon hearing his voice, the way they fought to curry favor with their new Fuhrer, gave him a feeling that no drug, drink, or woman ever had before.
A youth, with both the complexion and attitude of an Appalachian dope addict, licked his lips as he pawed over Brandt, winking at her as he squeezed her crotch. But Brandt could tell that this grimy adolescent was not experienced with women, and a swift hard kick between his legs was enough to send him away yelping. His friends, each wearing lank hair and pallid skin, laughed.
“Enough!” Gates said. “Bring them here.” Gone were his yellowing t-shirt and cringing smile—the smile of a lackey. He was now donning a black shirt and tie, a Sam Browne belt affixed around his gut, and a pair of jodhpurs tucked into polished boots.
Gates’ men hustled Krueger to the middle of the atrium, and he was forced to stand beneath Dennilson’s hanging body. Mac Hassler was slouched on the floor, the blood from his fatal gunshot seeping onto the cream tile.
The sound of sudden commotion filtered from the elevator banks, and Krueger turned to see Sam O’Brian and Colin Dubchek being manhandled by a squad of neo-Nazis. He knew they’d both been beaten, but Krueger could not help feeling elated as they approached. Sure, they were captured, scared, and almost out of luck. But at least they were alive.
“It was you!” O’Brian screamed at Gates as he saw the bodies of both Dennilson and Hassler. Gates smirked. The pimples on his cheeks seemed to glow a brighter shade of red.
Shaking his head, Krueger turned to his old friend. “So you’ve been hanging around with some real charmers since I left, partner?” he asked. “Who is this joker?”
O’Brian and Dubchek were brought to a stop next to Krueger’s group. At long last, they were all together, albeit with their enemies circling like sharks around them.
“This is Dennilson’s crony,” O’Brian spat. “Preston Gates. Well-credentialed but ill-educated. Guess he’s trying to take over his boss’s fascist operation.”
“Dennilson!” Gates cried, before erupting in laughter so utterly without mirth that Brandt felt her skin crawl into chilled gooseflesh. Gates tugged at his black shirt as he did so, as if confirming to himself that he was still clad in the raiment of a dictator. “This wasn’t Dennilson’s work! He didn’t have the vision. I alone shall lead the revolution.”
O’Brian eyeballed the crowds of angry men who had swarmed the atrium. “Revolution? So you mean to overthrow the government with these dummies? Good luck!”
The guard standing nearest to O’Brian, a man who had the haircut of an ex-marine but the belly of a man who’d forgotten his training, kicked him in his gut. But O’Brian refused to give him the satisfaction of a whimper.
“These are patriots!” Gates declared, drawing closer to his prisoners. He was flanked on either side by large, well-armed sentries. “Well-bred heroes of the Aryan people! From Idaho, from Montana, from the parts of California that have not yet been surrendered to the hordes of lesser races. These fine men are the shock troops of the Revolution, which begins tonight!”
“You don’t believe this shit, do you?” O’Brian asked.
In response, Gates flashed a smile of vulpine triumph, and O’Brian got his terrible answer. “Dennilson didn’t give a damn about the future of our species,” Gates said. “He only cared about hoarding art and hoarding wealth, nothing more. It was me who arranged the purchase of the Volcker-Blum facility. It was me who acquired General Krueger’s body. And it was me who completed his search for the True Cross. Dennilson wanted it for his art collection! Ha! Only I understood its power.”
“The power to resurrect the dead?” Krueger demanded, but his question only won a swift snarl from his captor.
“You’ll see,” Gates replied darkly.
“So Mr. Dennilson was your cat’s paw?” Grimm asked. He found Gates looking at him with molten anger contorting the features of his face. Grimm paused, wondering why he, above the other four prisoners, would prompt such a display a hatred.
“Don’t you dare look at me, scum!” Gates said, smashing his fist into Grimm’s jaw. The academic fell to his knees as a ribbon of red dribbled from his nose. “Get that nigger up off my floor,” Gates cried, drawing out the syllables of that vile slur and savoring them with savage delight.
Grimm rose to his feet, a chill blaze kindling in his heart as he heard the word; a silent fury at being dismissed with such a hateful term. He'd heard it before, of course, from irredeemable, ill-bred racists and degenerates drowning in booze and self-pity. But Grimm’s unshakeable self-belief had given him the strength to ignore them.
Hearing that word spoken, however, by a man of such uncommon intelligence, a man who should have seen in Grimm a peer amid a world of mediocrity, proved to him that no matter how he excelled, there would forever be parts of the rarified world shut off from him.
“Dennilson,” Gates continued, “thought this was just another of his expensive capers, a chance to find a priceless artifact and squirrel it away in his collection. He didn’t know about the attacks General Krueger made on my orders, the signal to start our just war against the Semitic oppressors and the other inferior races. All he was worried about was keeping his common thievery hidden!”
Gates placed a gloved hand on Dennilson’s shoe and swung the body from the rope, an act which Dubchek found strangely revolting. “If secrecy was so important,” Dubchek asked, “why did you name those shell companies after the twins of Gemini? It was a big clue.”
“Insurance!” Gates replied, before suffering a fit of giggles. “In case I failed to obtain the Cross, or worse, was denied its powers of resurrection! I needed to have someone ready to take the fall. So I left you a few breadcrumbs to follow. Naming his shell companies after the twins of Gemini? That was me. Registering their websites to a shadowy man with the same initials as Dennilson? Me too. I even put the proof of Dennilson’s mother’s notorious past online, taking care to make sure it looked like I wanted it hidden. It all pointed to that capitalist, Jew-loving swine!”
The crowd around Gates began to mutter curses. One of them even threw a shoe at Dennilson’s bruised face.
“But I should not have feared. Our new Aryan Empire has been blessed with Holy sanction! God has gifted us the True Cross, and with it the power to forge a new chapter in human history!”
“If Dennilson was so important to your plans,” Kruger asked, “why did you kill him?”
“Because he has served his purpose,” Gates announced matter-of-factly. “Our weapon has been tested successfully in New York and Portland. We have no more need for secrecy in this war.”
Using words like war and revolution, Krueger realized that Gates sounded more and more like the zealots he had faced in the Middle East. The comparison did not cheer him. “So that’s what this was all about?” he demanded. “You racist kooks think the Cross is going to win you the war you’re about to start?”
“It wasn’t us that started this war!” Gates replied, jabbing his finger his Krueger’s chest. “It was the Mexican hordes who came here with their Third World diseases. It was the Jews who are destroying the American Dream with their control over our banks and our media. All we want to do is defend ourselves against these assaults!”
Krueger turned his sullen gaze to the floor. Like Grimm, he’d heard such racist garbage before, but it had always come from the mouths of the unemployed or unemployable, the degenerates who refused to see that they themselves were the authors of their own suffering.
But now he saw that devious, cunning minds like Gates traded in race hate too.
“So, why’d you do it, Gates?” Krueger screamed, realizing how desperate he sounded to his captor. “What turned you into this monster?”
Gates smiled and shook his head, enjoying the torment that was disfiguring the cop’s already ugly face. “That doesn’t concern you,” he said at last, before turning to a lanky skinhead in sunglasses, who Krueger guessed was a captain of some sort. “Have these enemies of the Aryan people taken to the main hall. I want them to see the future of our mighty and measureless empire right before their execution.”
CURT DENNILSON’S AUDITORIUM was a spacious, well-furnished room on the ground floor of the Gemini campus. He’d used it to flirt with the world’s media, announce new product launches, and showcase the technologies of the twenty-first century.
But Preston Gates had turned it into a stage from which he would drag the world back to the miseries of the twentieth.
Before black drapes, Gates had erected a dais, flanked on either side by ugly icons. Confederate battle flags, Celtic and Sun crosses, and perched eagles holding fasces all stood erect, confirming the ideology that drove Gates and his men. On the dais, there stood a great oak table, all inlaid wood and intricate carving. The table was crowned with a series of big computers, which burped and chittered as the prisoners were led inside.
The scene was a combination of old and new, of science and faith, and as such, the perfect alter for Gates’ new quasi-religion.
Krueger and his four friends were led to the dais and forced to kneel. Looking out into the auditorium, he saw ranks of soldiers, perhaps as many as two hundred, all whey-faced and hungry for violence. Krueger wondered what hatreds, ancient and modern, had driven these men from their homes and into the embrace of a pudgy, dime-store Hitler. Had lost jobs and lost wives put them on a road to fascism, or was it something more elemental: a simple anger toward those who looked different?
