Jedediah put the leather suitcase into the trunk of our rental car. He climbed into the passenger seat and I drove off. He asked, “Where are you headed?”
“Into the country.” I glanced at the car’s GPS for directions to the road that I’d chosen the previous night while studying a map. I wanted a road that was lightly traveled, where I could pick out someone who might be following us.
We drove through the city and onto a road that led out of town. I looked in my rearview mirror for cars that were following us but didn’t see anything. This was our point of greatest vulnerability. They had to suspect that we could switch the flag with a fake once out of their sight. But they knew we had the real one in the car as we left the lab. I drove below the speed of the traffic so everyone passed us. After we’d driven ten miles to where there was only an occasional intersection or country house, I noticed a black seven series BMW a half-mile behind us. I continued on another ten miles and all the other cars passed. But the BMW stayed back.
“They’re on us,” I said. Jedediah turned and looked back.
“The Beemer?”
“Yeah.”
My cell phone rang and I pulled it out of my pocket and looked at the number. “Yeah?”
It was Alex. “You know you’re being followed, right?”
“Yeah. Black BMW.”
“There’s a second car about a mile behind him. You want me to get our German friends to intervene?”
“Where are you?”
“In a helicopter a couple of miles behind you, with Florian.”
“If you guys jump in they’ll know we aren’t what we appear to be. Let me take care of this.”
Florian who was also on the line responded, “I don’t know if that’s so smart.”
“Hold on,” I said as I looked in my rearview mirror and saw that the BMW had accelerated. “Shit.” He was closing in on us at over a hundred miles per hour. I put the phone on the seat, still connected to Alex and Florian. I said to Jedediah, “Here they come.”
He glanced back. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing, until they get here.” I looked ahead and there was no traffic in either direction. The terrain was perfect for an ambush. Grass and trees on both sides, no houses or buildings. No witnesses. The BMW flew up toward us and grew larger and larger in the rearview mirror. By this time, I could see two faces in the two front seats, but I couldn’t tell if there was anybody in the back. They closed on us fast, then pulled over into the other lane, to go around us. “Here they come.” I changed nothing, driving as I would if it were just another car passing us. “See if you can tell how many men are in that car.”
The BMW was on top of us. He swung into the oncoming lane to pass. Jedediah called out, “Four men in the car.” Just as he said that, the BMW braked hard and swerved over to hit us. I anticipated his move and slammed on my brakes and swerved to the right. The BMW kept slowing and cutting me off, which forced me over onto the shoulder. Before I knew it, I was across the shoulder and on the grass. The BMW kept coming, driving me completely off the road. The brakes pulsed as the anti-lock brakes fought our speed in the slippery grass. But it wasn’t enough and it wasn’t quick enough. I steered hard left to avoid one tree, but smashed into another head on. Our airbags fired out and punched us in the face as our car came to an immediate stop. As the airbag deflated, I asked Jedediah, “You okay?”
“Yeah. You?”
I reached for the door handle and my handgun. “Get your weapon and get out! You see one guy with a gun, you start firing. Go right at them! Don’t let them out of their car. They won’t expect it. No hesitation! Go!”
We jumped out of the car, put our guns up and ran at the BMW. They had just come to a stop as they had much more speed than we did and didn’t have a tree to help. They were a good thirty yards ahead of us. We ran up from behind them as they got out of their doors. The first man I saw got out of the rear door on the right side. He was carrying a handgun in his right hand. That was enough for me. I aimed and fired and hit him in the head. He dropped straight down onto the ground. The others had now heard the gunshot and hurried to get out and turn toward us in a firing position. But we had the advantage. The man in the right passenger door jumped out in a crouch and tried to run away from the car so he could turn toward us. Jedediah saw him and fired three shots. The man went down in a heap. We ran to the left side of the BMW and the third man got out of the left rear door. He had a submachine gun and aimed it toward us to fire. Jedediah and I fired at the same time, both hitting him in the chest. He was knocked back, but not harmed. He was wearing a vest.
“Vest. Close on him! Aim for his legs!” We continued to fire, hitting him in the groin and legs. He cried out in pain as Jedediah shot him in the head from fifteen feet away. The only one left was the driver. He got out with his arms up. Jedediah shot him in the chest and the man collapsed next to the car.
I said, “Get their weapons, clear out our trunk, and put them in it.” Jedediah went to the driver, checked to see if he was alive. He was.
Jedediah shot him again. He took his weapon out of his hand, and pressed the lever to release the trunk. The trunk popped open. As he collected the weapons and checked the BMW I retrieved the flag and my cell phone from our rental. I put the suitcase in the rear seat of the BMW and looked at their weapons. “They had a lot of ammo. It’s all over the trunk. They were loaded for bear.”
“Anything else in the car?”
“No, we got the keys.”
Just then, I looked over Jedediah’s shoulder as a black Mercedes S class slowed and looked at us. I looked back at the car, unable to see who was in it. They could see us standing there with guns in our hands, and bodies around us. They sped away. Jedediah dragged the four dead men to our car and threw two of them into the trunk, and the other two into the back seat. My phone rang. They must have hung up and called me to make it ring.
“Yeah.”
“Shit, Kyle! What are you doing? Are you okay?” Alex sounded frantic. “Yeah. We were driving along here through the grass and noticed a car in front of us that was stopped. I quit paying attention unfortunately, and I hit a tree. When we got up there, it looks like there are four guys that have been shot by somebody. We’re going to have to go, so you might want to send some people out here to clean this up.”
Florian interrupted. “You shot four of them?”
“Somebody did.”
“We’ll have to talk about this. This is not how this was supposed to go.”
“Whenever you like. But we’ve got to get out of here. That other car may be coming back.”
I hung up my phone, and said to Jedediah, “Let’s go. You drive.”
“Where to?” He said as he raced around and climbed into the driver’s seat of the BMW 750i.
“The airport.”
Jedediah floored the BMW. The wheels spun as we went from the grass back to the pavement and back toward the city on the two-lane highway. There was no sign of the Mercedes, but a couple of other cars went by. Before long we were a good distance away from the scene and Jedediah slowed down to normal highway speeds. After a few minutes, Jedediah asked, “Why the airport?”
“I’m going to rent another car. I don’t think I’ll tell Hertz that their car is piled against a tree for a while yet. I think I’ll go to Avis or whatever else is out there. Then we’ll drive around to this car and transfer their weapons—now ours—to my trunk, and take the BMW key with us. It will be all nicely locked and left in long-term parking like somebody’s gone on a flight. Then I’ll drive you around and you can rent another car. That way we’ll have two. We need to keep making random decisions so nobody knows where we are.”
Jedediah nodded. “Except the BKA knew where we were. They were following us with a helicopter.”
I looked at him driving, and thought about what had just happened. “I may need to ditch my phone . . . You handled yourself well back there. You know how to shoot.”
“I wasn’t in the army for nothing.”
“There are a lot of army guys who don’t know how to shoot.”
“Not in the Rangers.”
“You were in the Rangers? I didn’t know that.”
“Whatever file you have on me is incomplete. I guarantee it. There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”
“Like what?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I thought to myself that I needed to go through his file again. I didn’t like not knowing things. I thought again about the men in the forest. “You didn’t have to shoot that guy in the head.”
Jedediah glanced at me. “The one who just tried to kill us?”
“Yeah. That one. The one who was wounded. The one who had no chance of doing us any further harm.”
“Really? No chance? Like making a phone call or living through that and telling someone about us?”
“Telling who what? That we took the BMW? That was pretty damned obvious. That what? We had the flag? They already knew that. He was no threat to us.”
“He’s one of them. He’s bad.”
“We’re not executioners.”
Jedediah grunted. “If you came face to face with Satan himself, wouldn’t you shoot him in the freaking head, even if he was unarmed?”
“Never thought about it.”
“Some people are just like that. They are Satan. They need to be destroyed. And if you can’t do it, don’t worry about it. I can.”
I looked up and saw the large Lufthansa hangar at the Munich Airport. “You see the sign for the rental cars?”
“Yeah.”
“Drop me off, then go to long-term parking. I’ll come pick you up and we’ll transfer the guns. Then I’ll take you back to the rental counter.”
Jedediah nodded and pulled up to the rental agency site. I climbed out and he headed for the long-term parking. “Give me your cell.” He did. I broke his and mine open, took out the SIM cards, and smashed the various pieces and dropped them down the storm drain. “Follow me at all costs. Do not lose me. We’re going to drive a long way. Nothing close. Just somewhere where they won’t think to look at all. We’re going to go rent an apartment. I got a feeling that they know all the hotels around here. We’ve got to find something a lot less predictable.”
“What’re you thinking?”
“Austria.”
With Jedediah right behind me in his rental car I drove through Salzburg for forty minutes. It was a beautiful city surrounded by mountains. The idyllic setting conflicted with my heightened state of alertness that caused my hands to sweat on the steering wheel. When I thought about the four men intent on stealing the flag and taking us out with it, I started wondering what the hell I was doing. Michelle wouldn’t need to learn about that little event.
I had started this whole thing with a burning anger toward neo-Nazism, any strain of the virus out there. And now I was starting to come face to face with it. But this fight was bigger than me. I couldn’t take on all of international Nazism by myself, but that was the corner I’d backed myself into. Even though I had help within the Bundeskriminalamt, I was starting to wonder if I could trust them. They had been started by Nazis. And Alex was with them, which made me reluctant to rely on her. I couldn’t tell her everything I was thinking because she wouldn’t know not to tell them about it.
As we pulled away for the third time from the center of Salzburg I noticed an apartment building about four stories tall that had a sign in the window on the ground floor. It was in German; I assumed it said there were apartments available. We stopped at the next block and parked our cars. I told Jedediah to wait at a local café and watch the cars and me while I walked back to the apartment building. I walked into the ground floor and into a narrow hallway to a door that had a sign on it. I knocked on the door and walked in. It was a cramped and cluttered office with a man in his sixties sitting behind the desk. He greeted me in German and I responded, “Do you speak English?”
He nodded and said, “A little.”
“Do you have any apartments, any flats, for rent?”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know maybe a month?”
He frowned and threw up his hands. “A month? Why a month? Why not six months? We like one-year leases. Do a one-year lease.”
“I don’t need to. I’m just here for a month.”
“You’re American. Why are you here?”
“I’m writing a book about the Sound—”
“Ach. The world has too many books about it. Go do something else.”
“No. I have a whole different angle on it.”
He looked at me in disgust. “One month. How much can you pay?”
“How much is the rent?”
“Fifteen hundred euros.”
I looked shocked. “That’s ridiculous. I will give you a thousand.”
“Twelve hundred.”
“Eleven hundred.”
“Paid in advance, cash.”
“Two bedrooms?”
“No. Three.”
“Good enough.” I reached into my pocket, took out my wallet, and handed him eleven hundred euros.
He looked at me with suspicion. “Most people don’t have that kind of cash. And you’re a writer? Writers don’t have money. Why do you have so much cash?”
“Because I expected to rent a place for a month, and I thought they’d give me a discount if I paid in cash in advance. This is my rent money. I’ve been carrying it with me until I found the right place.”
“You’ve been to other places?”
“A few.”
He took the money. “Here’s the key.” He tossed me two keys on a ring. “Third floor. No elevator. 315.”
I nodded, took the keys and walked out of the office. I walked up the stairs to apartment 315 and opened it up. It was actually quite nice and fairly large. The building was built in the sixties and suffered from the ignominy of 1960s architecture, but was airy with clean windows and had three bedrooms and a small kitchen. I forgot to ask if it was furnished; it wasn’t. He hadn’t seen Jedediah, so if anybody came asking for two men, one of whom was built like a weight lifter, he wouldn’t have seen him. Nor did he have our names. Just cash, which was all he was interested in.
I got Jedediah and brought him up to the apartment. We went out and bought a couple of pillows and some blankets. We took the blankets to the cars and wrapped our newly captured firearms in them and brought them up to the apartment with the leather suitcase. We put the suitcase in the back corner of one of the bedrooms and checked the weapons. We left them loaded. I went back to the suitcase and carefully removed the flag. I put it into a backpack to take with us.
“Let’s go get some dinner.”
“Wiener schnitzel.”
“You got it. And tonight, I don’t think there’s a prayer that they’re going to find us here. But in any case, we’re going to have a watch scheduled.”
Jedediah smiled. “Two on, two off.”
“Exactly. And no sitting at all. Ever. Not even any leaning. Your only contact with anything is your feet on the floor. Then tomorrow we’ll get up at the crack of dawn and head back to the lab. Tomorrow we find out if this is the real Blood Flag.”
“It is,” he said.
I nodded. “I think so too. And when that’s confirmed, this is going to get real interesting.”
The dinner and evening passed without problem. The Wiener schnitzel was excellent and the beer was perfect. We had no communication with anybody. Our cell phones were gone, and I wasn’t going to replace them until we got back to Munich. No one had any idea where we were or how to contact us. Exactly how I wanted it.
We got up at 4:00 a.m., grabbed the backpack, put our weapons in the empty suitcase, and headed to our cars. We found a café that was open early and grabbed some Americano coffee and headed to Munich. We arrived in the heart of the city by six thirty. We parked our cars away from each other in spots near the city center. We found an open restaurant and ordered some eggs. We sat quietly until our third cup of coffee.
Jedediah asked, “So, what’s the plan?”
“They said they’d know this morning. I’m sure the answer is going to be yes, let’s assume so. We’ve seen what they’ll do when they think it may be real. Imagine how the stakes will go when they know it is. They’re going to try and get it. So we have to make it real clear that it’s literally not possible. Our only safety is in them not being able to get the flag.”
“And?”
“And last night when I went out during your watch, I went to the internet café across the street. I was looking at banks in Munich. I don’t want a German bank, and I don’t want a Swiss bank. But surprisingly, there is a Scottish bank in the heart of Munich that has safe deposit boxes. We’ll have a signature card on file with your signature and mine. Either one of us can get in. But even if Eidhalt were to get the key from us, he’d never get the box open because he can’t match the signature card. And we’re not going to tell them where it is anyway. They can go ransack wherever they want.
“We’ll put the flag in there, put the case in one of the cars, and then go to the lab. I’ll also get us a couple of new prepaid cell phones. If we want to call somebody we will, but nobody is going to call us.”
Jedediah surveyed the city street for any signs of interest. He looked back at me. “You think these guys are able to eavesdrop on cell phones?”
“Sure. It’s not hard. Just illegal. And I don’t know who they’re working with. If you can explain to me how they knew where we were driving yesterday, I’ll have some comfort in what their limitations are. Right now I’d rather over-estimate than underestimate.”
“Fair enough.”
As soon as the bank opened I signed an agreement for one of the largest boxes. Jedediah and I went into the carrel and transferred the flag from the backpack to the steel box. We put it back on the lower section of the column and with the banker’s back turned, slid it into the wall. The banker turned back around, pulled out his key, and with my key and his we locked the box. I put my key in my pocket, and we walked out. I told Jedediah to put the backpack back in the trunk of his car and meet me in front of the lab. I walked straight to the lab. Eidhalt was already there. Along with two other men I’d not seen before.
He said good morning to me in German with a smile on his face, but as before, although he smiled with his mouth, his eyes remained cold. I returned the greeting in my best German, which was bad, and asked if the lab was open. He said it was and asked where Jedediah was. I said he was coming and I’d wait for him on the sidewalk. He said he would too. We stood there silently for a moment, then Eidhalt said, “Where are you staying?”
“At a place.”
“What place?”
“In Berlin. Here he comes,” I said as Jedediah quickly walked around the corner and saw us standing there waiting for him. He slowed slightly and walked up to us. He had a hard look on his face, which was appropriate given that he was staring into the eyes of the man that almost certainly had sent others to try and kill us.
Eidhalt asked, “Did you have any trouble getting back to your place yesterday?”
I shook my head. “No, no problem.”
He smiled again slightly. “Let’s go find out what the results are.” He turned and all of us followed him into the waiting area. He asked the receptionist to summon the head of the laboratory, who came out about fifteen minutes later.
The head of the lab had a stoic look on his face that revealed nothing about what the results might be. He invited us into the lab and we went straight into the conference room where we had taken the samples from the flag the day before. We all fit in again, and the technicians who had drawn the samples came in. But the room was set up differently. No flag, but a computer with a projector attached by cable was pointing toward a screen. The head of the lab sat where the computer was, and the rest of us filled in around the table. He dimmed the lights, and projected the computer onto the screen. “Let me explain what it is we have done.” He went through the procedures of the DNA testing in great detail. Far more detail than I had ever seen, even in a courtroom. He clearly knew what he was doing. But his face was completely blank. He wasn’t projecting any hint of whether there was a match or not. Whatever the answer was, he was letting us know that he had done his homework, and that their testing had been done properly and within scientific standards. Because of all the preliminaries, I found myself becoming more concerned than calmed.
Finally, he projected some images on the screen of a type that I had seen before. They were the actual DNA test results themselves. It was mostly white with blotches of dark in something of a pattern. They were microscopic slides of the DNA itself. When he brought parallel images up the similarities were obvious even to me. In some respects it was like a fingerprint. It had a physical similarity, where one gene or a piece of a gene looked like another. It was like columns of numbers. Where one four looks like another four and a seven looks like another seven. They’re not just random shapes. The director of the lab paused on one slide. “This is the most significant slide I will show you. As you can see, the result on the left is the DNA that we were able to extract from the flag. On the right is the DNA of one of the skulls you gave us. Although it is perhaps not completely obvious, they are a perfect match. There is no doubt it is his blood on the flag.”
The room went into a stunned silence. We had all theorized that there might be a match, but probably internally each of us had reserved a lot of space for the possibility that the match would be ambiguous, or the DNA that they could extract would be incomplete, or they wouldn’t be able to extract anything that would give us complete confirmation. We were all wrong.
“No doubt?” I asked.
The lab director shook his head. “None. Other than the general rule that it is possible to have very very similar DNA in two people out of a billion. But based on how you represented this DNA was collected and the probability that that person in fact bled onto this flag, I would say the identification is absolute.”
I stole a glance at Jedediah. He was clearly impressed. He tried to control his expression. We had the Blood Flag. The most important remnant of Nazism in the world. And people had already shown themselves ready to kill to get it.
Eidhalt looked at me from across the table. “Where is the flag now? Perhaps you should give it to me for safekeeping for our . . . ” he looked around the room, “meeting.”
I looked into his eyes and could see the mischief. “I assume I’m still invited. I’ll bring it. It’s in a safe place. But if you don’t want me to come to the meeting, just let me know. Jedediah and I will just return to the United States now.”
Eidhalt looked at the lab directors and others and said, “Thank you for your work. We have your pay with us, plus an additional amount for putting us at the front of the line and your quick work. You have done excellent work.” They could tell they were being dismissed and quietly left the room.
They left the presentation up on the screen.
Eidhalt looked at me. “Would you be willing to sell it to me, for the cause?”
I could feel something coming. “I have no intention of selling it.”
“You did.”
I frowned. “Really. When might that have been?”
“In Tennessee.” He pulled an iPhone out of his pocket, touched an icon on the screen, turned it sideways, and showed it to me. It was a video of me asking Schuller how much the Blood Flag would be worth. I wasn’t surprised that Schuller had videotaped our conversation. What surprised me is that he was connected to the head of the German neo-Nazi movement.
“So what?”
“So you wanted to sell it.”
“I wanted to know what it was worth. If you know the value of something, you know how much you need to protect it. And it’s actually worth millions.”
He smiled.
I stood, and Jedediah stood next to me. I lowered my voice. “But since you’ve taken to spying on me and sending men to try and kill us, I really don’t see any point in going forward with you. You’re just another lying piece of shit who is not ever going to be a leader of any meaningful organization. I think I’ll take that role on myself.” I paused, “We don’t need you. And whatever you start, we’ll bury you, because we have the flag, and you never will. I can even leave without the flag if I want to, then I can come back and get it whenever I feel like it. You’d never even know I was here.”
Jedediah stared at the two men next to Eidhalt who were twitching agitatedly.
“So have a good meeting. Let’s go, Jedediah.”
We walked out the conference room door, and slammed it behind us. We walked out the glass door to the lobby, and Eidhalt followed right behind us. “Wait!”
We turned around and he was alone. “What?”
“I have not handled this well. I am inherently suspicious. I’ve known about Mr. Thom for a long time. I’ve watched the Southern Volk. It’s you I didn’t know. And I didn’t trust you. I’m still not sure I completely trust you. You don’t fit the usual mold. So when I started inquiring about you, I learned a lot of information that was out there, but that I had not been aware of, okay? And then I talked to my friend in Tennessee, who had recently met you. I thought that was an odd coincidence. Then I inquired of my friend inside the Southern Volk. He too was suspicious of you, and sent me a video of you at one of their recent meetings. Nicely done.
“But now you have the flag, and we’ve proved it. And I want you to bring it to the meeting. This is the most important meeting in the history of Nazism since the destruction of Germany in 1945. We’re going to change things. And the Blutfahne is just what we need to do that. I still want you to be a part of this.”
Jedediah said in a near whisper, “You got a video of one of our meetings? From who?”
“A friend,” Eidhalt said smiling, clearly pleased at the ugly surprise he had just sprung.
“Who?” Jedediah demanded.
“No need to say,” he said.
“Yes, there is, or we’re not going forward. Who?”
“Dirty White Boy.”
I stole a look at Jedediah who was making mental notes.
I said to Eidhalt, “How do I know you’re not just luring us into a trap to be killed? Like earlier.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. The German authorities monitor everything I do. The last thing I want to do is give them an excuse to put me in prison. This is the beginning of the rise of the Nazi movement worldwide. I’m not going to jeopardize that by being stupid.”
I didn’t believe a word of it. “We’ll see. The meeting is still on as scheduled, right?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“And where are we to go?” I asked.
He indicated to go outside, so we stepped outside the glass door onto the sidewalk. He looked around. “I need to give you a new number.” He looked at Jedediah who nodded. He wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it to Jedediah.
“Call it at one o’clock in the afternoon, day after tomorrow. You’ll be given instructions. But one thing that might not have been clear, is this may be more than just a few hours. I have quite a surprise in store. You’ll be amazed.”
“Where?”
“You’ll be told. Stay near Munich, call, and I’ll tell you what the plan is. Everything is in place. It’s going to be the biggest event in Nazism since 1945.”