Anesthetist Dr. Dirk Schmid sat in his tasteful office in the medical wing of the Fairchild Private Hospital; he was not required in surgery for another hour. In this role, there was nothing that connected Schmid to his other life as Chief Executive of The New Aryan Order. On his large timber desk sat a framed photo of his family; the perfect Aryan family. His glamorous blond wife, Steffi, stood with two fair and healthy looking sons aged six and ten and his beautiful teen daughter, now fourteen.
Logging onto his computer, he went to his personal screen, put in his password and logged in externally to his home email. There were several emails including one from his brother; a press clipping about the uproar at Benjamin Hoefer’s last appearance at the Jewish Community Centre. He should never have survived in the first place. He thought about how his medical skills could have contributed towards the creation of Hitler’s Aryan master race…and still could.
He clicked on a document and put in another password to open a strategy paper, the Fountain of Life 2. The original Fountain of Life program or Lebensborn launched by the Nazi Party involved men of the SS mating with blue-eyed, blond Nordic girls with no Jewish ancestry. Of the ten thousand children that were born in World War II as part of a Nazi genetic engineering plan to build an Aryan master-race, just over three thousand were still alive, all now in their sixties. Schmid and the NAO were working with their German allies to get their DNA, sort out who had mated with purity and produced offspring that could still be eligible for the program.
Schmid looked at his family portrait again; Steffi was perfect on many levels and will be again when I find the next round of matches for her to mate with. Like all members of the NAO, it was her duty to reproduce—same as that of the other members who were good specimens. His eyes strayed to the image of his teenage daughter in the family portrait. Allie, just like her mother, and at fourteen, not long until she will be useful.
“How’s things in the nerd, I mean nerve center?” Nicholas Everett teased Henri’s two assistants as he strode through the lab.
“Keeping the organization going,” Jared said, and grinned.
“Thank God for you guys,” Nick said.
“Hey funny video Nick, has Mitch seen it yet?” Tom asked with a nod to his email inbox.
“Yeah and I’m sure I’ll pay for that later.” Nick grinned. He rapped on Henri’s door. “Can you spare me ten minutes, Henri?”
Henri looked up from his computer. “Nicholas! Good to see you. Yes, indeed…in fact you can save me for ten minutes. I’m preparing a paper to deliver to the executives next week and trying to put everything that might be too scientific in lay-terms. See, you’re glazing over already.”
Nick laughed. “Throw in some subliminal slides, like a photo of a plane or a Ducati, the latest Glock or adventure skiing. I hear that works.”
“Good idea. Shall I make one of my organic coffees?”
“Thought you’d never ask,” Nick said.
Henri called out to Jared and Tom who declined the offer of a coffee. “They’ll have no internal organs left by the time they’re thirty. All those high energy drinks. So how are you, Nicholas?”
Nick slid onto a stool and loosened his tie, as Henri made them both a coffee.
“Good.”
“And your mom and dad?” Henri asked.
“Still going around the country in their Winnebago, discovering America.”
Henri laughed. “Yes, Ann is keen to do that one day soon. I’m not so sure. I think I would rather fly to the location, experience it and fly back to base.”
“Yeah, I’m with you on that one. The folks are like two peas in a pod though. They ring up and put the phone on speaker then finish each other’s sentences for the length of the call.”
“How lovely. You’re very lucky, Nicholas.”
Nick shrugged. “I’m lucky they’re on the road and not giving me a hard time about getting a haircut and a girlfriend.” He accepted the coffee and sugar sachet with thanks.
“So you want to talk genetic testing?” Henri sat opposite him.
“Are you psychic or is Mitch checking up on me?”
“Neither. I ran into Adam in the hallway and he said you’d be on your way. How’s he settling in?”
“Got a place, got a woman, getting paid. Doing better than Mitch and me, I’d say,” Nick said. “So what did Adam tell you?”
“Not enough. What do you need to know?” Henri asked.
“We’ve got a case and we think Eli Hoefer who died close to two decades ago is not the biological father of Benjamin Hoefer.”
“The writer of the Holocaust memoir that’s attracting all the attention?” Henri asked.
“Precisely. So what would you need to prove a genetic connection? Love this coffee.”
“Yes, it’s a good blend; discovered it after years of taste testing. Any relatives alive?”
“At this stage, not that we know of. Benjamin’s mother died in Auschwitz, he is an only child and if there is a relative of Benjamin’s alive, it won’t be in the US, given he and his father immigrated here after the war,” Nick filled him in.
“Right. What we need to do DNA testing is a cheek swab, or blood. Obviously getting both from Benjamin Hoefer will be easy but from Eli … impossible,” Henri said. “If you can find a relative that you know for sure is related to Eli, not Benjamin, then this will work for the deceased alleged father, but a few relatives would be better.”
Nick nodded and sipped his coffee.
“This is where it gets tricky, Nicholas. Ideally, you want to find the parents of the deceased which is impossible because they are long dead, any known siblings of Eli Hoefer, or any children of Eli’s aside from Benjamin.”
“He only had one child, Benjamin. But now that you say that, perhaps there was a reason he didn’t continue to procreate,” Nick said.
“Mm, maybe. It is possible to attempt a DNA paternal relatedness test using DNA from a known niece or nephew, but we can’t guarantee conclusive results since aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews will share only about twenty-five per cent of Eli’s DNA.”
“What if Benjamin had his father’s hairbrush still. Could we use hair to test DNA?” Nick asked.
“Good question. Yes and no…we require at least five to six hairs but given Eli was aged, well gray hair does not usually provide a good hair specimen so there’s that challenge, but worth a try. You want the hair follicle, so it must be from the root, not a clipping,” Henri informed him.
“So even if it is an old sample, say a decade or so, it is still useable—the DNA doesn’t die so to speak?”
“It’s useable,” Henri said, “because you’ve got the resources of a lab that can do it. It’s not easy or cheap. Of course you could exhume the body … or was Eli cremated?”
Nick’s eyes widened with the possibility. “I don’t know. But there’s no way we would get approval to do that at this stage; no real grounds to do so. So if he was buried …”
“Then he could be exhumed and DNA tested against his son’s DNA.”
“But,” Nick said, “if he was cremated?”
Henri shook his head. “Then that would not be good news. The high heat of the cremation process destroys DNA. However, one part of the body that is weakened but still intact to some degree following cremation is a person's teeth. But, virtually all properly performed cremations will ultimately pulverize the teeth, so there is little chance of intact DNA.”
Nick nodded. “You’re not giving me a lot of joy here, Henri.”
“Sorry. Come down with an easier question next time.” He smiled.
“Loved the video from Nick,” Ellen teased Mitch.
“Yeah, hilarious,” Mitch agreed.
“Good moves. What’s the story with this car?” she asked as they headed to Mitch’s house for a change of shirt. “Why do you love it so much?”
Mitch looked away from the road and over at Ellen.
“I don’t, Nick just beats that up,” he said, and returned his eyes to the road.
“Yeah, he does, but you still love it.”
Mitch shrugged. “It’s the first thing I’ve ever owned.”
He felt Ellen staring at him.
“Really? But you own a house, even if it is rented out, you still own it.”
“But I bought this first. Actually I always wanted a BMW but when I test drove both, I liked the Audi better.” He ran his hand over the top of the steering wheel.
“But didn’t you own a car or motorbike when you were in the Air Force?”
“No, you didn’t really need to. You were always stationed somewhere and when you had an off-base pass, you’d usually taxi somewhere in a group because you were going to have a few beers anyway. You just didn’t need wheels.”
Ellen persisted. “But what about when you were a kid … didn’t you own a bike?”
“Nope,” Mitch fidgeted. “Are we meeting Benjamin at his hotel?”
“No, but nearby; a coffee shop around the corner. He requested we meet him there. Really, no bike?”
Mitch sighed. “No, I didn’t own a bike.”
“What kid doesn’t own a bike? A train set? A scooter? Even poor kids get hand-me downs or ‘find’ them.”
Mitch pulled at his tie, loosening it. He was getting into dangerous territory; territory he didn’t talk about, least of all with his team. He felt Ellen looking at him, waiting for an answer.
“You and Nick must have biked around when you were kids. You know, have wheels will travel,” Ellen persisted.
“Yeah, I had a bike sometimes, but Dad owned it. He owned everything.”
He saw Ellen turn and look straight ahead at the road, processing what he said.
He cleared his throat. “Sometimes he would give it to me, sometimes he would take it and lock it up, or get rid of it, just to remind me that everything we had was his or because of him.”
“I see,” she said.
“But Nick had a few bikes so it wasn’t a big deal. I’d just go to his place and we’d take off from there.”
“Did you get birthday and Christmas presents?” Ellen asked.
“Of course,” Mitch said. “I’m not Oliver the orphan.”
Ellen laughed. “So you got to keep those then?”
Mitch shook his head. “Only if Dad didn’t see or find them. We owned nothing. I remember one Christmas, Mom bought my brother Dylan and me the most fantastic train set. She worked part-time and saved up to buy it. You had to build it, you know, assemble the train and the whole city and landscape. We loved it. We spent about two weeks putting it together, painting the village and the landscape, the whole thing.”
“That’s cool.”
“It was,” Mitch agreed. “Then one night Dad came home drunk as usual, took a baseball bat to it and smashed it completely.”
Ellen gasped. “What did you do?”
Mitch looked at her. “Nothing.” He turned his eyes back to the road, indicated and turned off at the street entrance to his and Lyn’s residence. “A ten-year-old and a seven-year-old don’t take on a drunk man wielding a baseball bat. We cleaned it up and threw it in the bin the next morning like we were told.”
Ellen ran her hand along the window ledge of the car. “No wonder you love this car.” She sighed. “I had so much when I was a kid.”
Mitch grimaced, ready for the inevitable comparisons.
Ellen continued. “But I was adorable,” she teased.
Mitch laughed. He glanced at her, shook his head, surprised and pleased she had not gotten heavy. “Yes … I bet you were.”
Mitch’s phone rang and he answered it hands-free. “John, I’ve got Ellie with me, we’re on our way to talk to Benjamin Hoefer.”
“Right. I have clearance to give you that information you wanted. I suggest we talk and then you can brief Ellie and the lads. How long will you be?”
“An hour tops. Do I need to know before we talk with Benjamin?”
John thought for a moment. “What angle are you taking?”
Mitch nodded to Ellen.
“We’ll grill him some more on who he thinks is pulling these stunts,” Ellen answered, “we believe he knows but is frightened to say, and we’re going to cut to the chase and ask if he really thought Eli was his biological father and then ask for a genetic sample,” she said.
“Okay.” John thought again. “No, it can wait. I’ll see you in an hour.” He hung up.
Ellen turned to Mitch. “What was all that about?”
“I gave the case back to him, said it was a mission for the local police unless he told us the full story about who commissioned the investigation and why we’re on it.”
“Yeah, I did think it was an over-reaction, giving us this case,” Ellen agreed. “How did John take that?”
“He understood and said he’d get us clearance, which he has, but I suspect I’ll get a lecture later. I want to know who is behind this brief. It’s information that we should have had from the start.”
Mitch swung the Audi into his driveway and turned the car off. “Come in while I change. You can meet Lyn, she works from home.”
Ellen’s eyes widened in surprise. In the years she had worked with Mitch she had never met anyone from his inner sanctum except Henri and that was only because he worked at the FBI. She took her seat belt off and hurried to catch up with him before he changed his mind.