As she raised a hand to shade her eyes, Avery saw a pair of men in black combat fatigues, faces hidden behind matching balaclavas, step forward to relieve Tam and Sievers of their weapons. The latter pair were roughly put in a prone position and thoroughly searched for additional weapons before having their wrists zip-tied together. Stone and Avery must have seemed less of a threat because the two men ignored them. The figure standing in the doorway, however, did not.
The man Avery knew only as Thom Martiel stepped out onto the porch, approached her and extended an open hand. Avery resisted the urge to spit in it, and instead slid the backpack off her shoulder and dropped it on the ground at his feet.
If the gesture of defiance irritated Martiel, he did not show it. Instead, he knelt and unzipped the backpack, then took his prize out, cradling it in both hands. A satisfied smile lit up his face.
“Let me guess,” Stone said. “You’re pissed off about what happened in New Jersey with Mystic. There’s a simple explanation, really. You’re batshit crazy, and we had to stop you.”
“Swear jar,” Tam muttered.
“We beat you there,” Stone continued. “And Avery solved the mystery of the Brazen Head all on her own. You’re no genius. You’re a fraud. No wonder you needed somebody else to figure it all out. You’re hopeless.”
“In hindsight,” Martiel said, rising to his full height again, “I probably should have assigned a higher priority to acquiring this. If I made a mistake, it was in thinking that it would be an irresistible mystery for you, Gavin, but it seems to have worked out nonetheless.” He continued to regard Avery with what might have passed for admiration. “Your protégé evidently possesses a sense of wonder that you have lost.”
“How did you find me?” Avery asked. She was curious since she had been careful to avoid detection, but mostly she just wanted to prove, if only to herself, that she was as fearless as Tam and Stone.
“Actually, we didn’t,” replied one of the men still hiding in the shadows. His next words told Avery that he was probably the same man who had tried to kill them outside the Nostradamus museum. “I waited for you to come to the hospital, but you never did. Instead, your friends showed up. I followed them instead.”
“Once we realized they were heading to Scotland,” Martiel said, “it wasn’t too difficult to figure out that Miss Halsey had solved the mystery of the Brazen Head. All that remained was following them here.”
“My hat’s off to you gents,” Sievers said, raising his head and peering in the direction of the voice. “I never once suspected we’d picked up a tail. One professional to another, that was a job well done. Let me guess, ARD-10, right?”
The silence seemed answer enough.
“Thought so,” he went on. “Are you running this on the side, or does this go all the way to the top of the Swiss government?”
Martiel laughed. “The Swiss government is utterly beholden to the bankers. There are many brave patriots like Lieutenant Colonel LeMans in every nation who share my vision of a world where those chains are cast off forever.
“To answer your earlier question,” he went on, “I did know exactly what the Brazen Head was for. Rudolph Hess kept extensive notes regarding his experiments with it which I found in the course of my research. Actually, that is how Peter and I became acquainted. He managed to acquire Hess’s diaries, which were smuggled out of Spandau prison. Our mutual interest in Hess brought us together.
“Hess figured out the Brazen Head’s function as vapor delivery system and knew he would need to visit the well in Scotland to recharge it. It would have saved a lot of trouble if he had recorded a copy of the map or named the precise destination, but c’est la vie.”
“Why am I not surprised that you’re right there with the Nazi connection?” Stone muttered.
Martiel glanced over at him. “My interest was purely academic at first. Like you, Gavin, I’m fascinated by human behavior. Why do we do the things we do? Hess’ decision to leave Germany and fly into enemy territory has always intrigued me, and when I started looking into the mystery, I began to realize that the conventional thinking falls short of explaining the behavior of this remarkable man.”
Tam, still face down, let out a snort of derision.
Martiel ignored her. “My research, as well as my acquaintance with Peter, opened my eyes to the reality of the world we live in, a world controlled by greedy usurers. Everything I’ve told you is the absolute truth, Gavin. The bankers—the money lenders—own everything and everyone. We are all enslaved, and the chain that holds us captive is this credit-based monetary system.
“Hess was remarkable. The only one of Hitler’s inner circle to survive into our lifetime. The only witness to what really happened. He knew that what Hitler really wanted was to break the stranglehold of the Rothschilds’ global banking monopoly.”
“The Rothschilds?” Avery shook her head in disbelief. “Next you’ll tell me it’s all a Zionist conspiracy. You’ve been spending too much time online.”
“Just because it’s paranoid doesn’t mean it’s not true,” Martiel replied. “And you’re not wrong. The banks control the world, and the secret order that controls the banks has a distinctively Semitic composition.
“Hess realized what was happening. That was the message he planned to deliver directly to the royal family, once his primary mission to refill the Brazen Head from the well was complete. Churchill was a Rothschild stooge, but the royals—they were as eager to throw off the chains of the bankers as Hitler. This was the secret that Hess kept for forty years. And it’s why he could not be allowed to leave Spandau Prison alive. In 1987, there was a movement afoot to commute his sentence in order to spend his last remaining days with his family, but the secret order couldn’t take the chance that he would tell the world the truth, so they engineered his suicide to hide the truth.”
“Speaking of Nazis, where is your buddy, Pete?” Stone asked. “I thought he’d want to be here, at the tip of the spear.”
“Peter is making our final travel arrangements. He’s so much better at managing the logistical details. Which reminds me...” He took out a phone, tapped out a quick text message, and then put it away.
“Travel arrangements? Where you headed now? Going to take the battle straight to Illuminati Headquarters at the Denver airport?”
Martiel smiled. “You’re closer than you realize. But I think I’ll save that for a surprise.”
“Oh, come on,” Stone pressed. “What are you afraid of? That I’ll beat you again? Oh, maybe you are. That would explain why you need the performance enhancers.”
Martiel, not looking the least bit embarrassed, turned the Brazen Head so that the robotic visage was looking up at him. “In that respect, I am no different than those who went before me. Albert of Cologne. Leonardo da Vinci. Even Hess. When a man of true genius awakens the full potential of his brain, what do you call him if not a god?”
Sievers let out a derisive chuckle. “Buddy, sounds like you already started hitting the vapors.”
Martiel, however, cocked his head sideways as if listening to something. A moment later, Avery heard it, too; the distinctive roar of a jet engine and the rhythmic thump-thump of rotor blades beating the air.
“Our transportation has arrived,” Martiel said. “All your questions will be answered in due course.” He turned back to Stone. “You’ll be coming with me, Gavin. And you, Miss Halsey. There’s so much I want to tell you. Things were rushed in New Jersey, and I apologize for that. It was never my intention for this to be an adversarial relationship.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Stone said, shaking his head. “You want to beat me so bad I can smell it coming off you. Your self-esteem must be in the toilet.”
“It would be satisfying to prove my intellectual superiority,” Martiel admitted. “But ours should have been a friendly rivalry. Two chess grandmasters, sharpening each other through competition in order to realize our full potential. Imagine what we could accomplish with our combined genius, unlocked by the Brazen Head? And I’m not discounting your contribution, Miss Halsey. You’re much more clever than I think even Gavin realizes.”
“Cut the crap,” Stone said. “You’re only bringing her along as leverage.” He then quickly added. “And you’re wrong. I do realize how smart she is.”
“Thanks,” Avery said, grinning a little in spite of the situation. “I think. And it’s Doctor Halsey, actually.”
Martiel shrugged. “I believe that when you understand what I am trying to accomplish, you will freely choose the path of cooperation.”
“What about Tam and Billy? Are you going to kill them?”
Martiel glanced down at the two trussed-up figures. “Once the three of us are safely on our way, they will be released unharmed. I’m not the villain you think I am.”
The beat of the rotor blades grew louder, making further conversation at anything below a shout impossible. Avery spotted the lights of the aircraft, coming in from the north—probably from Glasgow—and followed its approach. Just a few minutes later, it passed overhead, so close that she could feel the wind of its passage, and then circled around to touch down about a hundred yards away, not far from the trail she had followed earlier.
Martiel faced Stone and, cupping his hands around his mouth to amplify his voice, shouted, “Let’s go.”
Stone did not immediately move, but instead glanced down at Tam who was looking back at him intently.
Tam’s strong voice cut through the noise. “Look out for each other.”
Stone nodded then turned to Avery. He held out his hand, and she took it, and then together they followed Martiel toward the idling helicopter.
When the din of turbines and rotor blades finally began to subside, diminishing away to nothing as the departing aircraft headed north with its two unwilling passengers, Tam finally raised her head and peered into the surrounding darkness.
Their captors—Swiss Army Special Forces if Sievers had judged correctly—had remained concealed in shadow, all except for the two men who had ventured out to search and restrain the two of them, but based on the number of flashlights, she knew there were at least six of them.
Six against two was bad enough, but six armed men against her and Sievers, with no weapons and their hands tied behind their backs?
“Lieutenant Colonel LeMans,” she said. “Did I get that right?”
“Oberstleutnant,” corrected an irritated voice from the shadows. “He should not have told you that.”
“That was you that hit my people in Provence, wasn’t it?”
“It was necessary. Nothing personal, you understand.”
Oh, it’s personal, Tam thought.
“One professional to another,” Sievers said. “You were never going to cut us loose, were you?”
One of the lights was extinguished, and then from that spot, a masked figure stepped forward into the zone of illumination. As he did, he allowed his Heckler & Koch MP5S with its attached MagLite tactical flashlight, to hang from its sling across his chest, and took Tam’s Makarov from his belt. The compact pistol looked like a toy in his gloved hands. He covered the top of the pistol with his left hand and drew back the slide halfway, visually checking to see if there was a round in the chamber. There was, of course; Tam always kept the weapon chambered and ready to fire.
“One professional to another,” LeMans said, as he released the slide on the pistol, letting the buffer spring shove the assembly forward with an audible rasp and click. He knelt beside Sievers. “What do you think?”