The Vengeance of the Tau (22 page)

Tessen pulled at his collar as if to stretch it. Clearly things were not proceeding in the order he had planned. His eyes drifted to the rearview mirror again, as if expecting the twins to appear at any moment.

“The beginning,” he muttered.

“That would do just fine.”

“A Catholic boys’ school in France during World War II. I do not remember the name.”

“Get on with it.”

“Our division was assigned to ferret out the many Jews such places were known to be hiding,” he continued, his voice soft and almost mechanical. “Our commanding officer was named Erich Stimmel. He was a proud man who felt that such toilsome work was beneath him. If he could not exercise his abilities on the front, then—” Tessen took a deep breath. “We pulled our trucks through the school’s front gate. I remember the day well. It was raining, cold. I was shivering. The trucks stopped and we dispersed. The schoolboys were rounded up and placed in orderly lines, along with the teachers. The school’s headmaster, a priest, stood not far from Stimmel in the front.” Tessen’s voice became harder, colder. “Edelstein, Sherman, and Grouche. …” He called them as if off a roll. Then his voice went flat again. “Those were the names of the boys we had come for. A local baker who delivered the school’s bread had informed. We had not come to investigate. We had come simply to punish.”

“Punish,” Blaine repeated.

“The school would be closed, the three boys taken away and shipped elsewhere.”

“Yeah.”

“Let me finish, please. The priest would not turn the boys over. When their names were called, they did not come forward. Stimmel was enraged. He insisted that three other boys would be shot in their place if the Jews did not step out.”

McCracken could see the bulge in his collar as Tessen swallowed hard.

“When they finally showed themselves, Stimmel had them shot. He lined them up against a brick wall and assigned six men to the firing squad. I didn’t think he would really do it, not until the very last when he said ‘
Feuer!
’
We had made our point. There was no reason to …”

“But you did.”

“Yes.” Tessen sighed. “First the boys, and then the priest. Only with him the firing squad was reduced to five. One still stood there but did not pull his trigger.” His eyes sharpened and peered toward Blaine. “Me, Mr. McCracken.”

“That wasn’t all,” Tessen continued. “Before the priest was shot, Stimmel let him speak.” The Nazi’s words seemed to be coming harder here, an undercurrent of fear rimming each and every syllable. “He placed a curse on us. He swore that he and the boys would be avenged for what we had done to them. He swore that his wrath would live beyond the grave, that we would pay horribly for the acts we had committed. Stimmel just smiled at him and gave the order to fire again. He died glaring at Stimmel. The colonel spit on his corpse and turned his back.”

“A curse …”

“None of us paid it any heed. Only those nearest the wall could hear the words clearly anyway. By the time the war ended in shame, we had forgotten, all of us.”

“But something made you remember, didn’t it?”

Tessen nodded, and the car wavered slightly out of control. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and pulled down a narrow side street. He parked in front of the closed storage bay of some sort of small factory or plant.

“Stimmel was the first,” he replied. “It was two years after the war had ended. He was living in Vienna, also under a new identity. They found what was left of him in a hotel room. He had been torn apart. The other five members of the firing squad were killed in similar fashion. I was the lone survivor, and I have tried to tell myself it was because I refused to aim my bullets as ordered. I have tried to tell myself that the powers that the priest’s curse unleashed spared me because they knew. But I always feared they would still come for me another time.”

“Because Stimmel and the members of his firing squad weren’t the only ones to get what they had coming to them, were they?”

Tessen nodded. “There were dozens of others, all with new identities chiseled for them by those in the party who wished to prepare the way for our rebirth. Some were protected, guarded. It didn’t matter. Nothing could stop whatever force was unleashed that rainy day by the priest. And now, now …”

“Now what?”

Tessen’s face had turned ashen. “It has started again.”

“What?”

“All over the world, vengeance is being dispensed in the same way it was in the years following the war. I have always feared as much,” Tessen said, terror underscoring his voice. “And in more recent days I have expected it.”

“Why?”

“The dig site that the Hazelhurst team uncovered. We were too late to stop them from opening the doorway. With a path reopened to this world, whatever fulfilled the priest’s original curse was able to return.”

Tessen turned and stared at Blaine. McCracken’s eyes returned the look skeptically without wavering.

“Refusing to believe was common among my fellows all those years ago, Mr. McCracken. I suppose some of them refused right up until the curse reached them. You see, the stories you have heard about Hitler’s obsession with the supernatural are underrated. I have spoken with members of the teams that he dispatched all over the world. One of them spent the last eighteen months of the war searching for the entrance to hell. By the time I met him, a month before he died, he was a raving drunk. But he claimed they found it in the end, when it was too late to mount an effort to explore and excavate it properly.”

“Oh, they explored it all right,” Blaine muttered.

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind. What else did this man say?”

“They hid all traces of their work and made a detailed map of how to find the site, a copy of which led both you and Hazelhurst to it. But the damage had already been done. The original discoverers had opened the same doorway Hazelhurst did, Mr. McCracken, and something emerged from it to extract the justice the priest had called for in his curse.” The Nazi took a deep breath. “The fact that it’s happening again proves the curse was real. We are talking about doorways here, invitations. As soon as Hazelhurst’s team reopened the same doorway, the killings began again, because whatever had laid dormant for all these years was free to return to this world. Perhaps it was summoned to do another’s bidding. Perhaps it is merely fulfilling its original mandate. But it is back.” Tessen paused to search Blaine’s emotionless eyes. “You must believe me. You
must
!”

“You’re close to the truth, Tessen, closer than you can possibly know.”

The Nazi’s lips quivered with his fear. His whole face paled and began twitching. “You went down there,” he realized. “You
saw
!”

“I saw, all right, but not monsters or demons—a whole cache of Nazi war machine remnants, stored in a secret chamber for the next Reich to make use of.”

“No, it can’t—”

“And some of the remnants were missing, maybe hundreds of crates worth. …” Blaine detailed what he and Melissa had uncovered. Tessen’s eyes bulged when he reached the part about finding the remains of the three Jews.

“So,” Blaine concluded. “Let’s say whatever was in those missing crates allowed the Jews to exact revenge on Stimmel and dozens of others like him. Let’s say when their work was done, they decided to destroy the crates and seal the chamber forever. Only someone killed them before they could finish the job, someone who knew about another passageway.”

Tessen looked utterly befuddled. “Then this person …”

“Very likely had something to do with the removal of the rest of the crates in the much more recent past.”

“Who?
Who?
”

Blaine looked the old Nazi in the eyes. “Anyone with a desire to see this world rid of scum. Take your pick.”

Tessen stiffened. McCracken didn’t give him a chance to respond.

“Just tell me how you knew I was here, how you knew I was at the site.”

“I didn’t, not at first. I was reached when word filtered out of Turkey that one of Hazelhurst’s teams had at last unearthed what many of us had lived in fear of since the end of the war. If the doorway was opened again, then perhaps none of us would be safe. Perhaps the forces summoned by the original curse would return to finish the job they started forty-five years ago. We dispatched a team to seal the newly found entrance. That was supposed to be the team’s only mission, I swear it! Word that they had not reported in reached us at the same time we learned of your presence in Izmir. The reason for it seemed obvious.”

“The entrance is sealed again now.”

“I saw. Thanks to you and the woman.”

“Jesus,” Blaine muttered, chilled suddenly. “Turn this car around!”

“But—”

McCracken grabbed the old Nazi’s arm. “Listen to me, Tessen. Turn this car around. Back toward Bahribaba. The Archaeological Museum there.”

“I must—”

“Do it!”

Chapter 21

MELISSA DID HER BEST
to deflect questions about her father at the Archaeological Museum in Bahribaba, the name given to Izmir’s town center. Broaching the subject at all could only complicate matters further and cause her more hurt, so she simply smiled at the staff’s pleasantries while tearing herself up inside. Her father was still alive, as far as the museum was concerned. He was well known here, one of the facility’s largest benefactors. Favors were owed, and it was time to call at least one of them in.

She showed the tattered book to some of the research assistants, who frowned at the state of its decomposition.

“We can treat the ink to make it readable again,” one explained. “But the problem lies with the condition of the paper. It’s so brittle and parched, chances are the writing won’t fluoresce even when treated.”

“On the other hand,” another said, “we could have a go at this with the electron microscope. Take about a week if—”

“No,” Melissa said abruptly. “Today. It has to be today.”

The two men looked at each other and shrugged.

“Let’s have a go with the pages, then,” the first said.

“Process takes about an hour,” the second added.

And just that much later, Melissa found herself in a small closetlike cubicle with a single counter and chair. She was wearing special glasses that would allow her to see once the cubicle’s black light was turned on. The pages of the book had been treated with a fluid that interacted with what remained of the ink and its lingering impressions to make the words readable again.

“We’ll be right outside if you need anything,” one of the research assistants offered.

“Thank you.”

The door closed and Melissa locked it before sliding her chair beneath the counter and activating the black light attached to a swinging arm above her. She placed a pad of paper just to her right, so she could make notes on whatever she was able to decipher. Then she opened the book. There, on the inside cover page, the magic of technology revealed a name in bold, blue-tinted writing:

Gunthar Brandt.

Beneath the name was what must have been his home address. The street was indecipherable, but the hometown had fluoresced clearly: Arnsberg, Germany.

She slid the first page over so it was in direct line with the black light and began to read. The first six pages of Gunthar Brandt’s notebook yielded a bit of inconsequential information. The handwriting resembled chicken scratches, and the German dialect used was filled with slang. It seemed to Melissa that this was actually some sort of diary or journal, penned by someone of average intelligence, at best.

Worse yet, this journal seemed to be a continuation of another, so it picked up in the middle: April 1944; the precise date was indistinguishable. It opened with complaints about the weather and the horrible food. Brandt wrote that he spent many nights crying. But his company was headed for the valley of Altaloon in the Austrian plains, where they had been chosen to fight a monumental battle. The mood in the camp was somber. Rumors of the war already being lost were running rampant. Desertion rates were increasing. The diehards, the most strident, feared that another company would be chosen for the battle of Altaloon.

To gauge that much, Melissa had to read between the lines and piece together fragments of sentences. The feeling in the pages remained, even if the words were gone. She had read war journals before. Her stomach panged with disappointment, for, unfortunately, this seemed no different from any of them. Perhaps it had been discarded within the secret chamber on purpose and had nothing at all to do with the mysterious missing crates. Still, she read on, progress slowed by the black light’s inability to make a dramatic enough impact upon the book’s poor state of preservation.

The further she got into the diary, the worse the deterioration became. The black light was able to reveal less and less with each flip of the page. She began skimming what little she could decipher, eager to find anything that might help her decipher the secret of the underground cache at Ephesus.

More than halfway in, a pair of words at the top of the page capitalized in bold print like a tide grabbed her attention:

The Battle

Melissa leaned closer to the journal and began to read. The early pages in this section were in decent condition, and she found her eyes glued to them. What she couldn’t decipher, her mind filled in for her, and it read like a novel. Brandt’s prose was clumsy and his use of German slang continued to make some of it incomprehensible. But he was able to relate his own fears and anxieties brilliantly. His description of their camp, of the fervor and agitation in the final hours leading up to the battle, were mesmerizing. She came to the bottom of a page and stopped, men reread a line that was actually whole to make sure she had gotten it right:

We are marching to our deaths. Only a hundred and fifty in number, we must confront a force of two thousand. The logistics of the valley will help, but for how long? We are but an infantry unit. We have no artillery. Air support is questionable. We are lost. The war is lost. …

Melissa’s hands were trembling when she shifted to turn the page. The condition of the next several pages frustrated her anew. It was like coming to the end of a mystery and finding the pages missing. She grasped what she could, which wasn’t a whole lot.