Final judgment, p.11
Final Judgment, page 11
“Are you certain?” Eli asked.
“I am, sir. I was wounded. It took me some time to bind my wound, and then I lost consciousness in the trenches surrounding the bunker. We took heavy losses there, fighting Nitzche’s men. When I came to, I was surrounded by the dead.”
“I am so sorry, my boy,” Berwald said. His voice was thick with emotion.
“It wasn’t only our people,” Kurz said. “It was also the HN fighters. In the trenches we encountered a government assassin named Cooper. Matthew Cooper, he said his name was.”
“An assassin?”
“I don’t know what else you would call him,” Kurz said. “He was like the grim reaper. He killed so many. I have never seen anything like it. We were separated from him, and Nitzche’s men attacked in force. We managed to eliminate many, but most of the team was killed there.”
“What of Aaron?”
“Aaron survived the trench assault,” Kurz said. “I found his body in the bunker. He was shot. The authorities were beginning to arrive. I had to escape the way I had come or risk being taken into custody. I regret that I couldn’t bring Aaron’s body with me, sir, nor look to the proper disposition of the rest of our team.”
“No, no, you did the right thing,” Berwald said. “Where are you now?”
“A motel in Kansas, sir. My leg…the wound is bad, sir. It may become infected. If I seek medical treatment, I may be arrested. It is a gunshot wound and will be reported.”
“Do as you think best,” Berwald said. “Perhaps you can tell them it was some sort of accident.”
“I will try, sir,”
“This assassin, this Matthew Cooper,” Berwald said. “Which government agency was he with?”
“He said the Justice Department, sir.”
“Justice? Are you certain?”
“Yes, sir. I remember precisely, because I thought it odd, too.”
“Very well. Godspeed, Avi.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Berwald hung up.
“I am concerned, Claire,” he said.
“About what?” the woman asked.
“Avi’s story sounds like, well, just that,” he said. “A story. I’m concerned that Aaron’s commandos weren’t ready. They may have been physically prepared. Certainly they had the equipment. But they were untested in battle. We sent them straight into it. I’m concerned that emotionally, there was no way they could have coped. We sent them to their deaths.”
He examined the carved head of his cane, which resembled a winged lion. The cane had been a gift from Aaron, made with his own hands. “What am I to do?” he asked. “I don’t know if I can live with this guilt.”
He stood with difficulty, leaning on his cane, and went to the window. Outside, the streets of Williamsburg, Virginia, were as busy as ever. From the top floor of Lantern’s office building, the people below looked small, like children.
Like his son.
Eli Berwald wept.
Claire went to him then, holding him, her dark hair falling over his shoulder. “It is my fault,” Berwald told her. He clung to the younger woman. “It is all my fault. My son has died because I couldn’t save him, Claire.”
“Aaron made his own decisions,” she said, looking up into his face. “You could no more stop him than he could force you to do what you didn’t truly wish to do. You are both so stubborn.”
“Were,” Berwald said, crying quietly. “Were.”
“Come. Sit. I’ll make coffee.” She guided him to the sofa in his office and left him to his thoughts for the moment.
When he had come to the United States, it had all seemed so clear. America was the land of his freedom. When the American soldiers liberated Schlechterwald, he had looked on them as conquering heroes, practically gods among men. He knew how very close he and every survivor of the death camp had come to joining the facility’s many victims. Nitzche, so young then, so brutal, so eager to kill, would gladly have executed them all, if only he’d had the time to do so. The Nazi’s escape from the hands of the Allies had taken priority over revenge…and spite.
Spite. That’s what it would have been. Revenge implied a wrong, but the prisoners of Schlechterwald hadn’t wronged Klaus Nitzche or the evil regime that had imprisoned Germany’s Jews. And not just the Jews, but anyone Hitler saw as undesirable, any man, woman or child who could be sold to the Germany citizens as a common enemy. It was a brilliant strategy, really. It was brilliant in its simplicity. It was brilliant in its savagery.
Eli still remembered the look on his mother’s face when she and his father had been separated from their son. “Orientation,” the Nazi guards had called it. It had been some weeks before his fellow prisoners could bring themselves to explain to Eli what that word meant. At Schlechterwald, “Orientation” was the gas chamber. It meant a man, a woman or a child had been deemed so much useless garbage.
Garbage was disposed of.
Eli had vowed that no member of his family, no friend, no loved one, would ever again die at the hands of the hateful. He had built Lantern to achieve that goal. And he had succeeded! Or so he had thought, back then, when Aaron was alive. Then, when anything mattered.
Lantern could lobby the rich and powerful on behalf of Israel. Lantern could achieve results where lesser pressure groups failed. Lantern even funded several investigatory groups, whose task it was to hunt the escaped scions of the Nazi regime.
In the early years, there had been much of that. There were still many, then, who remembered the horrors of Hitler’s war, of his atrocities, of his camps. Support for the cause of bringing these fugitives to justice was almost automatic. Men and women who grew up seeing pictures of the camps and their aftermath in newspapers and on television wouldn’t shirk from the responsibility, even the pleasure, of taking final revenge on Hitler’s monstrous children.
Time passed. Lantern grew more powerful, yes, but at a price. Its workings became complex. Its lobbying became an intricate web of favors owed and favors given. It was now fully political. Lantern and its people, particularly its younger firebrands enamored of the idea of staging protests and even vigilante “raids” on enemy interests, were a force to be reckoned with, but every day, Eli Berwald felt his organization leaving its roots further behind.
Worse, around the world, anti-Semitism was on the rise. He had watched in dismay as Israel became further alienated from her allies. He had watched in fear as she had become the target of ever more hostile saber-rattling from her enemies.
War was coming.
He was convinced of it. War would come again, and the Jewish people would once again be forced to fight for their lives. Few were alive today to remember things like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or the camps themselves. The need to be armed, the need to be willing to fight back in the face of an enemy who wished to exterminate you, was a disconnected idea to most “modern” people, Jew and Gentile alike.
He was torn when Aaron came to him with his new ideas. Eli Berwald Sr. owned guns, yes. But he had nothing resembling the stockpiled armory, including even illegal automatic weapons, that Aaron proposed they amass.
The survival goods were for the most part things Eli hadn’t considered, for he had grown accustomed to the luxury, the plenty, that living in the United States afforded him. The thought that it could all be swept away was an unsettling one, but nothing he couldn’t comprehend. He had agreed readily to Aaron’s plans to stockpile food, medical supplies, tools and other emergency goods.
He had resisted the weapons. It wasn’t because he didn’t feel they had a place. As things grew worse in the world, the idea of having arms on hand with which to defend his people became increasingly appealing. No, he had resisted because he knew what Aaron planned to do with them. Forming “commando” teams, militarizing the members of Lantern, training them to fight and to kill… Aaron was building a vigilante group, one that would make good on the many rumors already circulating about Lantern. It hadn’t taken long for Aaron’s leadership to permanently change their reputation. The organization was said to be hotheaded, with a penchant for vandalism and other acts in which they took to the streets to make justice for themselves.
That worried Eli Berwald.
He feared for his son and for what was coming, feared that such a commando group might one day be needed. He feared living in a world where that was so.
Now Aaron was dead. In death, he had proved that his own vision for the future had been terribly, lethally correct.
The courts had held Nitzche…and lost him. The evil Nazi commanded a private army on American soil. How could any individual man or woman stand against such a force? It would require an army of one’s own. The commando force Aaron had been so passionate about building… Understanding this truth, Eli Berwald wept, both for his son’s death and for the fact that he had argued with the young man so much about these matters.
Aaron had been right, and he had died proving it.
Berwald leaned heavily on his cane, going to the painting on the wall behind his desk. He slid it aside, dialed the electronic combination and opened the built-in wall safe. Inside, there were valuables and some documents. Most of the space, however, was devoted to automatic weapons: MP-5 submachine guns, purchased from improperly disposed government stock; Glock pistols issued to many government agents.
Washington, D.C., and its environs provided a wealth of ill-gotten plunder if one only knew where to look and whom to ask.
Claire returned, finally. She carried a tray with cups and accoutrements for Berwald’s afternoon coffee.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He looked at her bleakly. “I’m thinking dark thoughts about the war and Aaron’s death.” He closed the safe and replaced the painting. “I am thinking that I won’t make the same mistakes twice.” Carefully, he sat behind his desk.
Claire poured the coffee. Without prompting, she added cream and sugar to Berwald’s, just as he liked it.
“You aren’t telling me everything.”
“I’m not,” Berwald admitted. He looked at her. So young. So beautiful. “Do you know how long I have been creeping around the halls of power? How long I have lived a stone’s throw from the seat of American government?”
“Many years,” Claire said.
“Many years,” Berwald repeated. “When you spend your time in Washington, talking to politicians, learning their strengths and weaknesses, you build a portfolio.”
“Of contacts?” Claire asked.
“Of secrets,” Berwald said. “This is a land of secrets. Secrets are power. Secrets point to power. And the man with the most secrets isn’t the man most vulnerable, as one might think.” He sipped his coffee. “If he has come by his secrets honestly, the man with the most of them has the most power.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” Claire said.
He regarded her for a moment. She had taken the news of Aaron’s death surprisingly well. Avi had sent word ahead before placing the call to Lantern’s offices from a location he deemed safe. Claire had shed tears for Aaron Berwald, yes, but then she had put them aside. She wouldn’t let them hinder her. Eli admired that.
Now, more than ever, he needed that strength.
“It has long been said, here in Washington,” Berwald said, ignoring the irrelevant fact that Alexandria wasn’t, in fact, D.C., “that there is one man in this city you don’t cross.”
“The President?”
“Let me tell you something about the President,” Berwald said. “I have lived through the times of many leaders of the United States. Every one of them had in common the fact that he was more concerned about the consequences for him and his administration, politically and socially, than he was for truth or falsehood. A President is a curious creature, my dear. He wants to do right. He means very well. But it is my theory that no single human being can hold all the tasks, the work, the responsibilities of that position, within his brain.”
“What do you mean?” Claire asked.
“I mean that a President is a creature of impossibilities,” Berwald said. “Why do you think they all turn gray so fast? The office of the presidency ages a man because he is called on to do the impossible. He must live the lives of ten men, make decisions of twenty, accomplish his jobs in half the time it should take, and improve on the performance of his predecessor. No human could do all of that, and all the while, he takes the credit or the blame for a hundred different things over which he has little direct control.”
Berwald managed to chuckle despite the ache in his soul. “No, my dear Claire. Not the President. Someone much, much more powerful.”
“Who in Washington is more powerful than the President?”
“He is rumored to decide the fate of many,” Berwald said. “A man who dictates life and death. A man who sits in an office on the Potomac and commands others. Those others, it is said, will go anywhere in the world, kill whoever must be killed, and disappear again as if they never were.”
“You have been watching too much television again,” Claire said. She disapproved of the late-night programming Berwald indulged in, which she characterized as “conspiracy theories.”
“It does sound fanciful, doesn’t it? But for years I have heard it whispered. It is said that elements within our government command a vast network of resources. Men with special abilities. I know, I know. It is like something out of a spy movie. But consider, for example, the hijacking not so long ago. You remember all the fuss about pirates off the coast of Somalia?”
“I remember,” Claire said. “There was the cruise ship whose crew and passengers were taken hostage.”
“And sometimes, when that happens, you hear of elaborate military operations to correct the problem. Like the men who shot those pirates from the rolling deck of a smaller boat. They freed a ship captain who was ready to sacrifice his life for his crew. Think, Claire. How often do you hear something like that? Now compare that to how often you hear nothing at all. No story. No military tale. The problem simply…goes away. Why do you think that is?”
“I wouldn’t have any notion,” Claire said.
“The problem goes away,” Berwald insisted, “because men who are specially trained in violence go to areas of the globe, or to places within our own country, and they quietly and discreetly kill everyone involved. How does one address a scenario like that? You have a boatful of pirates. You, let us say, board a Navy vessel, and you are trying to conceive of a plan in which you can free hostages aboard the ship without endangering their lives. A voice you have never heard calls you on your radio phone and tells you that the problem will go away. All you have to do is stay out of it. You are told to ask no questions. You are told that ‘specialists’ are on the case. And when it is all over and you are told that the problem is solved, you find dead bodies. Dead bodies killed in countless ways, all of them very efficient.”
“What proof have you?” Claire pressed.
“There is no proof,” Berwald said. “There has never been any, not that we can find. Imagine that. A powerful organization like Lantern, unable to pin down a single man who wields such power. It could be said such a man commands a private team of assassins. Such a man would have the ear of those in power, especially the President. Picture the job of the President as I have described it to you. So impossible. So fraught with pressure. Now you are told that for especially egregious problems, you may call on this man, this voice, and he will dispatch other men who will make your problem disappear. Because this man and the men he orders don’t exist, you can’t be held accountable. To the President, what could be more important? What could be more valuable than the ability to make problems vanish without consequence? Remember that it is consequence all presidents fear. The man who offers you solutions without consequence would become the most important individual in your universe. He would have power that trumps power. What would you do for such a man? What influence would you exert? What gratitude would you show him? It is unconscionable that any man should have such power. All of us in Washington whisper of it, but no one knows for certain. Never before have I spoken freely of it. Do not repeat to anyone what I have told you.”
“Who?” Claire asks. “Who is it?”
“I have heard his name many times,” Berwald said. “He is supposed to be a highly placed bureaucrat of the Justice Department. No one, especially the President, will admit that he is anything else. But so many politicians have said to me, ‘There is one man in Washington I won’t cross. That man is a Hal Brognola. “He is with the Justice Department, the same department that Avi says employs the assassin who abandoned my Aaron.”
“Abandoned? You cannot think that.”
