INSIDE TEUFELSBERG, THE news stared at Stag from headlines of the day’s Berliner Zeitung:
Employee of high-end building found dead atop Quadriga.
Attack of the Vikings?
Numbly Stag picked up the abandoned paper left in the coffee room outside the SCIF and read about Einhar Kronbauer’s gruesome death. To others, it seemed like a sick joke. To Stag, it bore all the trademarks of a Tarnhelm hit.
Kronbauer must have been taken from his workplace. Escaping detection from the cameras of the Dresdenhof and the Pariserplatz, he’d been tied to one of the Quadriga horses and murdered. His back was cut open, and while still alive, his attackers had pulled out his lungs to lie like angel wings, paralleling the wings of the chariot driver behind him, the figure of Eirene, the goddess of peace.
Parallels aside, it was not hard to see the Tarnhelm footprint. Pulling the lungs out and laying them on the victim’s back like wings was a Viking mode of death.
It was called the Blood Eagle.
He shoved the newspaper aside and resisted the impulse to beat his fists against the concrete wall till they bled.