The Black Sun (26 page)

“Not

really.

I

have

my

contacts.

People

I

trust

for

this

sort

222 james twining

of job. They’re reliable and discreet and keep themselves to themselves. Besides, they’re the last people on earth anyone would imagine I was involved with.”

“You mean the Sons of American Liberty?” Foster asked with a smile.

“How do you know that?” Lasche was at once amazed and angry. Amazed that they knew, angry because it meant that they’d been watching him. That they hadn’t trusted him.

“Cassius does not take chances. Just because he asked you to get him an Enigma machine, doesn’t mean he didn’t care how you did it. As soon as he was certain that your man Blondi—was that his name?” Lasche nodded dumbly. “As soon as he was certain that your man Blondi had taken delivery of this”—Foster patted the wooden box protectively— “and was on his way home, he asked me to go and . . . meet with your people.”

The hesitation, the slight edge that Lasche detected in Foster’s voice, hinted at some sinister implication to this seemingly innocent remark. Though he feared he already knew the answer, Lasche couldn’t resist putting the question: “
Meet
with them? What do you mean?”

“I mean that I locked them all in a booby-trapped room and tipped off the Feds so that they’d be the ones to set it off.” Foster seemed to smile at the memory. “They’ll be too busy blaming each other to ever figure out what really happened.”

“All of them?” Lasche gasped, feeling his chest tightening, his breathing becoming ragged. “Why?”

“Loose ends.” Foster reached into his pocket and pulled out a silenced 9mm pistol.

“Cassius won’t stand for loose ends. Which brings us to you . . .”

Lasche locked eyes with Foster, saw his cold and unblinking gaze, the gun pointed at his chest.

“I assume there’s no possibility of a reprieve?” His voice remained calm and businesslike. He had been around long enough to know that neither tears nor tantrums would have any effect. “No amount of money that would convince you to put down your gun

and

walk

out

of

here?”

the black sun 223

Foster gave a half smile. “Then I’d be the dead man and not you.”

“I see.”

A pause.

“But my employer did have one offer to make you.”

“Which is?” Lasche’s voice was fired by a faint glimmer of hope.

“You get to choose.”

“Choose?” He frowned in confusion. “Choose what?”

Foster jerked his head at the room full of weapons behind him. “How you die.”

Lasche gave a rueful shake of his head. He had been foolish to expect anything else from Cassius. Even so, it was a concession. A concession that Lasche valued because it gave him some element of control in his passing. Ridiculous as it may have seemed, he really did appreciate the gesture.

“Tell him . . . tell him thank you.”

Lasche reversed his wheelchair out from behind his desk and slowly rolled past the display cabinets along the left-hand wall, appraising their contents. Foster followed him, his gun still drawn, the sound of his footsteps like the steady, inexorable beat of the drum as the tumbrel rolled toward the steps of the guillotine.

Lasche’s eyes skipped from item to item, weighing the merits of each against the other. A Kukri knife presented itself as the first possible candidate. It had belonged to a Gurkha in the British Army who had died in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The hooked slash of its blade was covered, for legend has it that a Kukri can never be unsheathed without drawing blood.

Then there was the polished elegance of the pistol used by Alexander Pushkin in a duel fought on the banks of the Black River in 1837. The poet had entered into the duel to defend his wife’s honor against the unwanted advances of a dashing officer. Mortally wounded, he died a few days later, plunging the whole of Russia into mourning. Another possibility was the Winchester M1873—the rifle that “won the West” with its fearsome accuracy and reliability. Lasche’s two examples were especially rare, modern 224 james twining

ballistics having confirmed them as two of the eight 73s used by Native Americans at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

But he kept going, past these and many more like them, until his wheelchair hummed to a halt in front of the suit of samurai armor. At its feet, carefully mounted on their stand, were two swords. In the end, he knew now, these had been the only possible choice.

“A samurai wore two swords,” Lasche said softly. He could sense that Foster was standing behind him, although he did not look around. “The
katana
and the
wakizashi
.”

He pointed first at the long sword, then the shorter one mounted above it. “They were a symbol of prestige and pride, and along with the Sacred Mirror and the Comma-Shaped Beads, are said to be one of three sacred treasures of Japan.”

“They’re old?” Foster sounded uninterested.

“Edo period—about 1795. So old, yes, but not as old as the armor.”

“And that’s what you want?” Foster had stepped forward so that he was alongside Lasche, his voice skeptical.

Lasche nodded.

“Okay.” Foster bent toward the display, then looked up to see which of the swords Lasche wanted.

“Have you heard of Bushido?” asked Lasche.

“No.” There was irritation in Foster’s voice now, as if he wanted to get it over with. Lasche took no notice.

“Bushido is the way of the warrior, the code by which the samurai ruled their lives. It teaches that, to save face, a samurai may commit seppuku, a form of ritualized suicide.”

“You want to do it to yourself?” Foster looked worried, as if this fell outside the remit that he had been given. “You sure?”

“Absolutely. You will be
kaishakunin
, my officer of death. You’ll need both swords.”

Shrugging, Foster took both swords from their ebony stand and followed Lasche back over to the other side of the room where he had stopped, just in front of the large cannon.

“Traditionally,

I

would

be

wearing

a

white

kimono

and

in

the black sun 225

front of me would be a tray bearing a piece of
washi
paper, ink, a cup of sake, and a
tanto
knife, although the
wakizashi
will suffice. I would drink the sake in two gulps—

any more or less would not show the correct balance of contemplation and determination—and then compose a fitting poem in the
waka
style. Finally, I would take the sword”—he took the shorter sword from Foster and unsheathed it, throwing its black lacquered scabbard to the floor—“and place it against my belly, here.” He pulled his shirt out of his trousers and exposed his soft, sagging stomach on the left-hand side, pressing the tip of the blade against it. “Then, when I was ready, I would push it in and slice across from left to right.”

Foster had already discarded the scabbard from the longer sword and was feeling its weight in his hand, tapping his foot impatiently as he stood behind him.

“Then you,” Lasche continued, “as my
kaishakunin
, would step in and take off my head. This was intended to—”

Lasche never finished his sentence. With a flash of steel Foster decapitated him, the impact knocking his body out of the wheelchair so that he slumped forward onto the cannon, his head rolling across the floor.

“You

talk

too

much,

old

man,”

Foster

muttered.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

WEWELSBURG CASTLE, WESTPHALIA, GERMANY

January 9—3:23 a.m.

They’re here,” Tom shouted as he jumped down from the table between two of the skeletons and walked around the table behind them, flicking his light from one corpse to the next. The heads of a few had rolled onto the floor, but most were remarkably intact, peaked hats perched on white skulls, empty eye sockets seeming to follow Tom’s every movement like some grotesque Mardi Gras carnival float. “They’re all here,” he whispered to himself, not sure whether he should feel exhilarated or horrified by the discovery.

“Who?” Archie shouted from the floor above.

“The Order.” He noticed a small hole in the right temple of one of the skulls, saw the same wound in the others, then a gun on the floor next to one of the chairs. “Looks like they killed themselves in some sort of suicide pact.”

“I’m coming down,” Archie announced. A few seconds later, his large frame momentarily eclipsed the small circle of light from the crypt above before sliding down the rope and landing in the center of the table.

“Christ!” he exclaimed as his flashlight picked out the Nazi skeletons, the silver plaques behind their heads winking as the light caught them. “You weren’t joking.” He the black sun 227

sounded genuinely shocked. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but they’re an even creepier bunch dead than when they were alive. Gathered together for a last supper like the twelve apostles.”

“They must have lowered themselves in here, got someone else to replace the stones upstairs, then pulled the trigger.”

“And assured themselves of a much more pleasant death than they had ever allowed anyone else,” Archie said with feeling as he jumped down to the floor, shaking his head in disgust. “See anything else?”

“Not yet. Let’s take a look around, see what was so important about this place.”

“Wait for me—” Dominique had noiselessly lowered herself down the rope onto the table behind them, clutching a lantern.

“I thought you were meant to be watching our backs?” Tom admonished her.

“And let you two have all the fun?” She grinned, holding up her lantern so she could get a good look at the corpses. “Look at them. It’s almost like they’re waiting for us.”

“For us or someone else,” Tom agreed, realizing that he should have known better than to assume Dominique wouldn’t want to get stuck in alongside them. “Come on, let’s see what else is down here.”

She hopped off the table, and all three of them turned their attention to examining the chamber itself. It was about thirty feet across, and the walls were rounded as if they were in a large stone barrel. A brief survey confirmed that the only way in or out seemed to be the hole above them, for the walls were uninterrupted by any kind of opening. They reassembled near the middle of the room.

“Well, if there’s something down here, I can’t see it.” Archie shone his flashlight disconsolately around him.

“Agreed,” said Tom. “But there’s one place we haven’t looked.”

“The bodies,” Dominique whispered. “You mean the bodies, don’t you?”

Without

waiting

for

an

answer,

she

turned

toward

the

228 james twining

table and walked slowly around it, her forehead creased with concentration. The flickering light from the lantern threw rippling shadows across the skeletons’ faces, until they seemed almost alive, the occasional glint of a tooth or a shadow dancing across a vacant eye socket suggesting that they might be on the point of waking from their long slumber. Finally she came to a halt behind one of the chairs. “Let’s try this one first.”

“Why that one?” Tom asked. The skeleton looked no different from the others, although arguably slightly more grotesque, the lower jaw having fallen into its lap, with one eye socket covered by a frayed silk patch.

“Look at the table.”

Tom directed his light where she was pointing and saw that the table’s surface had been divided into twelve equal slices, one opposite each knight. And each slice had been inlaid with a different type of wood.

“Oak, walnut, birch . . .” She pointed each one out in turn, her lantern moving around the table like a spotlight. “Elm, cherry, teak, mahogany . . .” She paused when she came to the segment of table facing the chair she had stopped behind. “Amber.”

“It’s worth a try,” Archie agreed.

Her jaw set firm, Dominique gingerly unbuttoned the skeleton’s jacket, two of the silver buttons coming away in her hand where the thread had dissolved. Then, pulling the jacket to one side, she began checking the pockets, inside and out. There was nothing in any of them.

“What about around his neck?” Tom suggested. “He might have hung something there.”

Keeping her face as far away from the skeleton as possible, Dominique unbuttoned its shirt, the material clinging to the desiccated rib cage underneath where the flesh had rotted and then dried. But again, there was nothing. Just the empty void of the chest cavity and the remains of his heart where it had fallen through to the chair and dried like a large prune.

“No, nothing,” she said, sounding disappointed. “I must have got it wrong.”

the black sun 229

“I’m not so sure,” said Archie, peering down at the glittering array of medals pinned to the jacket Dominique had just unbuttoned. “He’s wearing a Knight’s Cross.”

He pulled on the remains of the red, white, and black striped ribbon and drew the medal out from under the uni-form’s collar.

“Does it have any markings on the back?” asked Tom.

Archie flipped the medal over. “Just like the others,” he confirmed with a nod.

“Dom, have you got the other two?”

She nodded and removed them from her coat pocket, placing them facedown on the table so that the markings were visible. Archie laid the one they’d just found alongside the other two.