Maps of Hell mw-3 Page 35

  Peter Sebastian turned to face me. “Think about it, Matt. You’ve already said that you’ve been affected by the word that the Rothmanns used-notice that I’m not repeating it. And you were in captivity for less time than Karen.”

  “So what are you doing allowing her anywhere near the justice secretary, let alone the president.”

  Sebastian looked away. “It’s not my call. I’ve told the director and he’s passed on my suspicions to his counterparts in the other agencies. The problem is, the justice secretary thinks Karen is a hero and we all know how much politicians like to be seen with their heroes. Your woman’s also a foreign dignitary. The last thing anyone wants today is a diplomatic incident.”

  Rodney Owen leaned forward. “I still don’t get why you’re letting Matt here attend the service.”

  The FBI man looked to the front. “I’m rather hoping he’ll have a beneficial effect on Karen Oaten-maybe put her off trying anything.” He shook his head. “Not that I expect her to. She had her chance at the party and nothing happened… Despite your fears, Matt.”

  I was about to lay into him for his cynicism, but then I realized it was to my advantage-I desperately wanted to be with Karen, whatever happened.

  The car was stopped at the final checkpoint by the cathedral. We got out and I watched as a convoy of heavy limousines swept past. Large men with wires coming from their ears scanned the area and then opened the doors. I caught a glimpse of the president and his wife. They waved and smiled as they went into a side door. I looked up and around. Above the gargoyles and pinnacles, I saw numerous black-clad personnel toting guns. It only took one of those to be a renegade shooter…

  “Come on,” Sebastian said, heading toward the entrance the president had used. “It’s nearly showtime.”

  My throat was dry and my stomach performing somersaults. I couldn’t have had a worse feeling if Rothmann himself had been on the door.

  Karen Oaten sat down after the president and first lady had taken their seats at the front of the nave, three rows in front of the justice secretary and herself.

  “I’ll introduce you afterward,” the diminutive woman whispered, with a broad smile.

  Karen nodded and looked ahead. There were ranks of veterans in front of the high altar, many of them in wheelchairs, all wearing berets with badges on them. Each was accompanied by a family member and a young soldier with similar unit insignias. The veterans themselves looked bewildered, as if the ceremony was directed at younger selves they had long since left behind.

  There was a slight commotion in the row behind her and Karen looked round. To her surprise, she saw people moving along and Matt taking the seat directly behind her. He gave her a smile, which she didn’t return. She had assumed, after his behavior at FBI headquarters, that he had been taken somewhere to cool down. What on earth had he been doing? He had put her off something, though she couldn’t remember what it was. Fortunately she had regained her composure as soon as the justice secretary invited her to come to the minority veterans’ service, saying that her presence would send a message to criminals and terrorists that the kidnapping of a police officer, no matter where she was from, would be given the highest priority by the administration.

  And now, Karen thought, here was Matt again. She considered complaining to the justice secretary, but the ceremony was beginning. Besides, she would have to see Matt sooner or later to tell him that their life together was finished. She had other priorities for her son now. She knew a major event was about to change her life irreversibly. She was ready.

  I was only half listening to the readings and prayers as the service dragged on, so disturbing was the way Karen had looked at me. It wasn’t that she gave the impression of some horrific intent, or that she showed any signs of being a different person from the one I loved. But that was precisely the problem. She was the same woman; she just didn’t seem to care about me anymore. She had glanced at me as if I was of no greater significance to her than a dust mite. I began to lose confidence in myself. Maybe I was the one at fault. Maybe I had never really loved her and had never wanted a child with her…

  I clenched my fists and forced myself to concentrate on what was going on in the cathedral. From the pulpit, a minister in dark purple robes was preaching about the necessity of sacrifice in wartime and how gloriously members of the nation’s minorities had fulfilled that, particularly in the defining war against European fascism and Japanese militarism. I had a flash of the blonde woman who had been sacrificed by the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant at the camp. Had her death been justifiable in those terms? In any terms? Then the minister paused and I felt a tremor of anticipation that I couldn’t account for.

  “But the regimes you fought against so bravely,” continued the man at the pulpit, “despite what you were told, were not evil. For centuries they were the bulwarks of civilization against the barbarian. As long ago as the twelfth century, the Holy Roman Empire was defended by the great German Fredrick I.” The preacher stopped again and looked across the rows of listeners. I was sweating, my heart racing. I knew what was coming-I had seen it in dreams and visions that, deep down, my mind had suppressed and that my conscious will had resisted, until now. “Also known as Barbarossa,” the minister concluded.

  There were a few seconds of silence and then all hell broke its chains. There was a loud blast from the front of the cathedral, smoke and dust immediately obscuring the altar and its carved figures. Then automatic weapon fire started, shots coming from all directions. People dived to the floor between the pews but there wasn’t room for all to find cover and the screams of the wounded and dying filled the air. I rubbed my eyes, my mind clogged by disparate thoughts and images. Barbarossa-Rothmann had called that the default trigger and there were obviously plenty of people in the cathedral responding to it. Sweating, I tried to fight the coffining and keep myself under control. Looking ahead, I saw Karen. She was bending over the woman next to her, the justice secretary, and she was brandishing something. Getting up, I saw that it was a pen, but there was a vicious shaft like a small skewer projecting from it.

  “No!” I yelled, dashing the weapon from her hand.

  Karen turned to me, her eyes wide, and screamed a single word.

  I couldn’t make it out in the rattle of gunfire and the cries of thousands of people.

  She understood that and said it again.

  “Gerty?” I repeated, a dim recollection swimming to the surface of my mind.

  “Goethe!” Karen screamed back at me.

  Immediately I felt my knowing self fly from my body, as it had on the Isolde. I was aware that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born 1749, died 1832, was the greatest of German writers-the author of novels, poetry and plays, including the incomparable poetic drama Faust-and the universal genius of his countrymen. But I also knew that Goethe was my personal trigger, the word that activated the deepest level of conditioning that lurked beyond all conscious control.

  I watched as my body moved into action, completely indifferent to the bullets flying around-fire was now being returned by army and security personnel against Rothmann’s sleeper Nazis. My other self paid no attention to Karen, who was being held tightly by Owen and Sebastian, but pushed his way to the end of the pew. The central passage was crowded by people pushing toward the exits. There was a crush all round as veterans in wheelchairs jammed against current army personnel and guests. Groups of VIPs protected by their phalanxes of guards were unable to reach the cathedral doors.

  Then I saw my programmed self catch sight of the scrum of men in suits that had formed beyond the front row of pews. There was a glimpse of the president, his arm around his wife. His mouth was moving, but it was impossible to hear his words.

  And then the Matt Wells I didn’t know made his bid for glory in accordance with the perverted vision of the Rothmann twins and the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant. He smashed his fist into a female soldier’s face and grabbed her assault rifle. Switching to automatic fire, he pointed it a
t the group around the president and charged toward them, screaming like one of the Germanic warriors that had massacred the Roman Emperor Augustus’s legions nine years after the birth of Jesus Christ.

  The tumult rose to a crescendo.

  I was unable to stop my separate self rejoining the body that was intent on destroying the leader of the modern world.

  Everything ended in darkness as I tumbled into a deep well.

  Epilogue

  But after every darkness, until the sun finally consumes itself, there is light.

  Well wrapped up, Karen and I were walking across a snowy landscape, the breath billowing from our mouths like ghosts escaping from tombs. In the distance, the hills were covered with pine trees and it was only with difficulty that I could make out the electrified fences marking the boundaries of the FBI research center.

  “Not too cold for you?” I asked, squeezing her arm.

  She smiled. “Not too cold for your son, you mean.”

  I laughed. “He’s all right. He’s in a temperature-controlled swimming pool.”

  “Yes, well, he’ll be out of there in a month, so I hope you’re looking forward to disturbed nights.” She stopped walking and then shook her head. “Not that there’s been a shortage of those recently.”

  I led her down the path that led to the concrete block we’d been living in for the past three months. It was hardly surprising that the Justice Department had sent us to the facility in North Dakota. Neither of us remembered anything about what had happened latterly in the cathedral. It was calculated that there had been forty-six of the Rothmanns’ subjects involved apart from us, the majority in the armed forces and local police. One had been in the honor guard at the high altar and had detonated the bomb that blew him and many innocent people to pieces. Sixteen sleepers had been twins. The subjects had obviously been trained to fight to the death-only three of the forty-six survived, and one of those was in a coma. Neither of the other two said a word to their interrogators. Attempts were being made to reverse their conditioning in secret research centers.

  Karen and I had undergone weeks of treatment, too. Unlike the other survivors, we weren’t guilty of killing or injuring anyone. Rodney Owen and Peter Sebastian had managed to prevent Karen from stabbing the justice secretary, while I had been floored by a member of the Secret Service as I had tried to get at the president. Fortunately, the M16 I was wielding jammed, so I hadn’t been able to shoot anyone. The fact that we were foreign nationals probably helped. We had been visited by staff from the embassy and from the U.K., and given to understand that we would not face charges. But there was no immediate prospect of our release. There was a medical center on site and our son would be born there. Meanwhile, the drug and talking therapies continued, and we both woke up every night screaming.

  One hundred and sixty-three people had been killed at the cathedral and over four hundred injured, not counting the attackers. Although the president and first lady had escaped unscathed, the veterans’ secretary had been shot dead and a senior White House adviser confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The bomb planted in the floor in front of the altar had destroyed the stone from Mount Sinai, which no doubt had symbolic significance for the Rothmanns. The state of Israel quickly offered to provide a replacement.

  The North American National Revival claimed responsibility for the attack, crowing that the bloody disruption of what it called “the undeserved commemoration of minority subhumans” was backed by the majority of Americans. That was called into doubt when, because of public demand, thirty-six state legislatures immediately passed bills establishing annual services for minority veterans. The NANR also stated that the attack was aimed at destroying “the Jew and Negro controlled regime” that the recent financial collapse had already shown was failing America. The tainted logic of the Rothmann twins was easy enough to discern.

  The FBI quickly published documentation proving that the NANR was a Nazi front and two camps were found, one in Montana and the other in Texas. The Maine camp remained undiscovered despite helicopter searches, some of which I joined. Then one of the psychiatrists working with me-a strange guy called Ray Iselin-got interested in the settlement where the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant had flourished. Using nineteenth-century maps and documents, the location of the long-lost town of Jasper was pinpointed. The camp where I’d been tortured was under a mile away. I’d like to think that it was immediately shut down, but no doubt plenty of government bodies and private companies would have been interested in the research that had gone on there.

  “Matt?” Karen asked plaintively. “Do you think I’ll ever get my job back?”

  It was the first time she’d mentioned her career since we’d arrived at the facility. She’d been composed but withdrawn, engaged fully by our son’s imminent arrival. I had slightly more interest in the outside world, but I hadn’t been as deeply programmed as she had. I certainly wasn’t interested in writing books and columns, despite the offers that my agent kept sending me via the FBI.

  “Do you want it back?” I asked, kissing her cheek. “Work isn’t everything.”

  She looked at me solemnly. “Work makes you free.”

  I felt my abdomen clench. It was impossible to tell if she remembered that “Arbeit Macht Frei”-the German version of those words-had been above the gates of the Auschwitz death camp, among others. I wondered if she would ever be free of the coffining. I had no idea if I would ever get over mine-I hadn’t forgotten Rothmann’s boast, that subjects became his possessions. Even if the experts finally told us we were clean, would we ever be sure that we wouldn’t turn into Aryan killing machines at the utterance of some unsuspected trigger word?

  That wasn’t all. We had asked the scientists if there was any chance that the conditioning could have affected the child in Karen’s womb. They didn’t think so, but there wasn’t much research on the subject. Besides, Irma Rothmann was a brilliant neuroscientist. Who would bet against her having extended her father’s research into the unborn fetus? Not me.

  Peter Sebastian turned up once a week and filled us in on some things. Predictably, Gordy Lister had vanished-I was sure he would have linked up with Rothmann by now. Dana Maltravers was recovering physically, but she was in deep shit. The FBI is hard on their own who go bad, though her lawyers would no doubt argue that Irma Rothmann-literally the mother from hell, having grown up in Auschwitz-had brainwashed her from an early age. Clem Simmons and Gerard Pinker had both been discharged from the hospital. Apparently Clem was going to take his pension and do some private sleuthing. Versace had been given a commendation and a promotion. Much to Rodney Owen’s disgust, Pinker had recently won a contest as the most fashionable detective in the entire MPDC.

  Karen stopped about fifty yards away from the building we were forced to call home for the time being.

  “Matt,” she said softly, “are you going to be a good father to your son?”

  “Sure I am,” I said, smiling. “Rugby training every evening, two foreign languages before he goes to school, and no arguing with his mother.”

  She nudged me in the ribs, the first time that had happened for months. The smile faded from my lips. I wasn’t going to tell her, but on his last visit Sebastian had passed me an intercepted message from my ex-lover Sara Robbins, the Soul Collector.

  Matt, where are you? All that stuff in the press about the Washington murders and then…poof, you’re gone. Karen, too. It isn’t long now till you’ll be a father again, is it? I would swing by sometime, if I knew where you were. After all, we have unfinished business. All right, I accept the challenge. I’ll track you down. Don’t expect me to be in a good temper when I find you, though. SC

  There was a time when I’d have been scared shitless by a communication like that, but not anymore. Rothmann was still at large and it wouldn’t be long till he reconstituted the NANR and the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant. There would be other camps, other maps of hell, and he would soon find someone else to wear his si
ster’s gargoyle mask.

  It was obvious that I’d have to deal with Rothmann, just as I’d have to put an end to Sara. If there was one thing I had learned in the U.S., it was the benefit of nailing your enemies before they nailed you. Actually, it was something I had practiced on the rugby pitch often enough-get your retaliation in first. That was as good a principle as any, though I wasn’t planning on passing it on to my son till he was a lot older.

  I kissed Karen and we walked into the warmth.

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