The Apocalypse Watch (26 page)

“You know I don’t understand such talk—”

“Not
talk
, dear wife, but hard, solid research. We’re working in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, and at any moment an associate may wish to check the research in our computers.”

“So let them, dear husband.”

“You are an unscientific fool!
I
have the software, and I’ve spread a virus throughout the system.”

“You know, your bald head is far less attractive than your waves of full white hair, Rudi. And if I ever permit this much gray in my hair, I’ll forgive you if you seek a mistress.”

“You are also impossible, my adorable young wife.”

“
Ach
, so why do we go through this nonsense?”

“I’ve told you time and time again. The Brüderschaft, there is only the
Brüderschaft
!”

“Politics so bore me.”

“We’ll see each other in Stuttgart. By the way, I bought you the diamond necklace you saw at Tiffany’s.”

“You’re a
darling
! I shall be the envy of every woman in Munich!”

“Vaclabruck, my dear. Munich only on weekends.”

“
Boring!
”

Arnold Argossy, radio and television impresario of the hysteria-prone ultraconservative wing of American political thought, squeezed his enormous frame into the inadequate chair at the studio table. He put on his earphones and looked over at the tinted glass panel, beyond which were his producer and the various technicians who caused the familiar high-pitched, grating voice, so beloved of his constituency, to be heard across the land. The once-staggering number of his listeners had begun to fall off, insulted, perhaps, by his singularly vicious attacks on anything and everything he considered
liberal!
without his offering any coherent alternatives to the programs he attacked. The gradual decline in his ratings had done nothing to diminish his ego; instead, he held on to his decreasing audience by ever-increasing assaults on Libbo-Commies, Female-Fascists, Embryo-Killers, Homeless-Suckers, and assorted labels that eventually had to turn off even the vast “patient, stable majority” who began to question his diatribes.

The red light flashed,
ON AIR
.

“Hello, America, you true, red-blooded sons and daughters of giants who carved a nation out of a land of savages and made it sweet. It’s A.A. talking, and this afternoon I want to hear from
you
! The honest, hardworking people of this great land that’s been soiled and spoiled by the sex-ridden, religion-bashing, morality-blasting, sick sycophants who run our government while running away with your money. Hear the latest, my friends! There’s a
bill before Congress that would permit our taxes to pay for obligatory sex education, specifically targeting inner-city youths. Can you
believe
it?
Our
cold cash squandered away on a hot topic,
our
dollars to fund, at the least, a million condoms a day so the rootless offspring of the lazy and the indolent can fornicate at the drop of a—no, I can’t say it, for this is a family program. We spread the morality of our God; we do not pander to the base, savage hungers of Lucifer, the archangel of hell.… What is the solution to this promiscuous madness? It’s so obvious, I can hear you shouting the answer.
Sterilization
, my friends! Benign denial of procreation by
lust
, for lust is not married love. Lust is the nonselective appetite of animals, and no amount of so-called
sexual
education can cure it, it can only cause it to proliferate!… Now,
you
know and I know who we’re talking about, don’t we? Oh, yes? I can hear the liberal chorus shouting
racism
! But I ask you, my friends, is it racist to inaugurate programs that without the slightest doubt can benefit the very people who are being debased by their promiscuity? I think not. What do you think?”

“
Whippo!
” cried the first caller. “I got nuthin’ against nobody, but I betcha if we paid every black person on welfare twenty-five thousand bucks to go back to Africa and start his own tribe, they’d grab it in a shot. I even figured it out. It’d be cheaper, right?”

“We cannot condone migration through bribery, sir, it’s unconstitutional. But in a word,
yowsah!
Next, please.”

“I’m calling from New York City, A.A., lower West Side, and let me tell you, the Cuban-Spic cooking’s stinking up the whole apartment house, and I can’t read the signs on the stores no more. Can’t we get rid of Castro and send ’em back where they belong?”

“We also can’t condone ethnic slurs, sir, but disregarding the unfortunate epithet you attached to a nationality, you do have a point. Write your senators and congressmen and ask why we haven’t sent in a hit team to assassinate the Commie dictator. What else is left?”

“Double whippo, A.A.! The senators and congressmen, they gotta listen to us, don’t they?”

“They certainly do, my friend.”

“Great!… Who are they?”

“The post office has that information. Next caller for the Argossy Argonaut, please.”

“Good evening,
mein Herr
, I’m calling from Munich, Germany, where it is evening. We listen to you on the Religion of the World Broadcast, and we thank God they bring you to us. Also, we thank
you
for everything you’ve done for us!”

“Who the hell is this?” said Argossy, covering the microphone and looking over at the tinted glass panel.

“The RWB is a hell of a good market for us, Arnie,” answered the producer over the earphones. “We’re reaching into Europe on shortwave. Be nice, and listen to the guy, it’s his nickel and it’s a lot of nickels.”

“So how are things in Munich, my new friend?”

“Much better for hearing your voice, Herr Argossy.”

“That’s nice to know. I went to your fair city about a year ago and had the best sausage and sauerkraut I ever tasted. They mixed it all together with mashed potatoes and mustard. Terrific.”

“It is you who are terrific,
mein Herr
! You are obviously one of us, one of the new Germany.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean—”

“
Natürlich
, of course you do! We will build the new Reich, the Fourth Reich, and you will be our Minister of Propaganda. You will be far more effective than Goebbels ever was. You are far more persuasive!”

“Who the fuck
is
this?” roared Arnold Argossy.

“Cut the mikes and stop the tape!” yelled the producer. “
Christ
, how many stations did this go over live?”

“Two hundred and twelve,” replied an uninterested technician.

“Holy shit,” said the producer, falling into a chair.

In his still unfinished medical complex, Gerhardt Kroeger paced aimlessly, impetuously, in front of his wife, Greta, who sat in a chair in their quarters deep in the forests of Vaclabruck. “He’s still alive, that we know,” said the surgeon excitedly. “He’s passed the first crisis, and that’s a good sign for my procedure but not healthy for the cause.”

“Why so, Gerhardt?” asked the surgical nurse.

“Because we can’t find him!”

“So? He will die shortly, no?”

“Yes, of course, but if he has a cranial hemorrhage and dies among the enemy, their doctors will perform an autopsy. They will find my implant, and that we cannot permit!”

“There’s not much you can do about it, so why aggravate yourself?”

“Because he must be found.
I
must find him.”

“How?”

“There will come a time in his last days, his last hours, when he’ll have to make contact with me. His confusion will be such that he demands instructions,
demands
them.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I know. I don’t know the answer.” The telephone rang on the table beside the wife’s chair. She picked it up.

“Yes?… Yes, of course,
Herr Doktor
.” Greta placed her hand over the phone. “It’s Hans Traupman. He says it’s an emergency.”

“I would think so, he rarely calls.” Kroeger took the telephone from his wife. “This must be an emergency, Doctor. I can’t remember when you called me last.”

“General von Schnabe was arrested an hour ago in Munich.”

“Good heavens, what for?”

“Subversive activities, inciting to riot, crimes against the state, all the usual legal garbage our forebears refined in a far more conducive environment.”

“But
how
?”

“Apparently your Harry Latham-Lassiter was not the only infiltrator in our valley.”

“Inconceivable! Each and every one of our followers was put through the most rigorous examinations, even to the point of electronic brain scans that would reveal lying, doubts, the smallest hesitation. I myself devised the procedures; they’re foolproof.”

“Perhaps one of them had a change of heart after he or she left the valley. Regardless, von Schnabe was picked up by the police and identified in a lineup where the accuser could not be seen. According to what little we’ve learned, it may have been a woman, as there apparently were references to sexual abuse. A middle-level police officer was heard laughing about it with his colleagues in the Munich station.”

“I told the general constantly, warned him repeatedly, about his liaisons with female personnel. He always answered, ‘With all your learning, Kroeger, you don’t understand. A general connotes power, and power is the essence of sex. They
want
me.’ ”

“And he wasn’t even a general,” said Traupman over the phone. “Much less a
von
.”

“Really? I thought—”

“You thought what you were meant to think, Gerhardt,” interrupted the doctor from Nuremberg.
“Schnabe is a brilliant student of military operations, a devoted partisan of our cause—few among us could have found, created, and managed our valley—those were his enormous strengths. Actually, in medical terms, he was,
is
, a sociopath of the highest intelligence, the sort of person such movements as ours demand, especially in the initial stages. Afterward, of course, they are replaced. That was the error of the Third Reich; they believed their false titles, lived them out, and overrode the real generals, the Junkers who might have won the war with a properly timed invasion of England. We will not make those mistakes.”

“What do we do now,
Herr Doktor
?”

“We’ve arranged for Schnabe to be shot in his cell tonight. The assassin will use a silenced pistol. It’s not difficult; unemployment is high even among the criminal classes. It must be done before his interrogation begins, specifically the Amytals.”

“And Vaclabruck?”

“It’s yours to run for now. What concerns us, what concerns our leader in Bonn, is your computerized robot in Paris. When will he
die
, for God’s sake?”

“One day, three days at the outside, he can’t last more than that.”

“Good.”

“Excuse me, Herr Traupman, but it is all too possible that he will experience a virtual explosion in his occipital lobe.”

“Where your implant resides?”

“Yes.”

“We must find him before that happens. If they discover one robot, they’ll believe there are a thousand others!”

“I said as much to my wife.”

“Greta, of course. What does she suggest?”

“She agrees with me,” replied Kroeger as his wife stood up and shook her head violently. “I must fly to Paris and meet with our people. First with the Blitzkrieger; they’re missing something. Then with our plant at the American Embassy; we must refine what he knows about the Antinayous.
Finally, our man at the Deuxième Bureau. He vacillates.”

“Be careful with Moreau. He’s one of us in his stomach, but he’s a Frenchman. We really don’t know which side he’s on.”

D
rew Latham, now his brother Harry, waited in the shadows of the Trocadéro, behind the statue of King Henry the Innocent, his eyes peering through night-vision binoculars. Nearly a hundred yards across the vast concrete pavement were the equally dark spaces between the statues of Louis the Fourteenth and Napoleon the First. It was the rendezvous point of his last request to Karin de Vries that day. The delivery of selected confidential papers he needed from his “dead brother’s” office. It was almost eleven o’clock, the Paris night illuminated by a summer moon, a professional white hunter’s moon in the African veldt, and Drew Latham found comfort in that fact.