Trail of the Twisted Cros Page 10
“Mavis, attend to Monckton… Lynfa, call the constabulary!”
Expertly, Mavis moved Slayton—Monckton, as he was still known to everyone at the Colliers—from the floor to the table top, clearing away bits of glass and blood. She found a towel and made him a pillow, then began tearing strips of cloth to make a tourniquet for his gushing shoulder.
Slayton’s eyes were watery, his speech slurred and incomprehensible. The blood loss was enormous.
“Lynfa,” Mavis screamed, “the doctor, too. He’ll be needing a transfusion. Call an ambulance!”
Jack, meanwhile, was clattering down the back stairs to the garden, hoping to hold Thatcher for the police. But Thatcher was nowhere to be seen. He had disappeared, bleeding, into the night.
Chapter Twelve
DANBURY, Connecticut, 16 September
A smirking Johnny Lee Rogers walked down the short corridor, from the seclusion area where he was restricted, to another corridor, this one private, leading to the warden’s office. Waiting for him there was Hamilton Winship.
“Sit down, scumbag,” Winship said. Somehow, the derisive word lost its power when Hamilton Winship used it.
“Thank you, sir, whoever you are, but I prefer to stand.”
“Right, scumbag.”
Rogers’ perpetually grinning demeanor changed.
“Look, you inferior old crock, you called this meeting. Now, what’s on your mind? Did you come all the way from Washington to call me names?” he asked.
“So you know I’m from Washington?”
Rogers laughed out loud at him.
“What’s the deal you’re going to offer me, old man?”
Winship sucked in his breath.
“The deal is, young man, that a plane is at the ready to take your filthy carcass out of this country. You want Algeria, you’ve got it.
“Inside the plane is a million dollars in gold. It’s all there.” Winship waited for him to react. “Well?”
“You caved in quite easily, really. But you had no choice, did you?” Rogers asked.
Winship looked down to his shoes and shook his head.
“No, you win. Now would you just get out?”
“I’m just not sure,” Rogers said. “I’d love to see those other surprises we’ve got lined up all go off. You remember the big bang at Love-bridge? That was nothing.”
Winship stepped toward the prisoner, raised his hand, and slapped him smartly across the face. Rogers wailed, as if he were some small forest animal.
“You filthy beast. You feed off hatred and misery. You have no idea what evil was released under the system you revere. You represent the most abhorrent philosophy in the history of the world, and you stand there and smirk. You are scum.”
Rogers was truly surprised by Winship’s anger. He had an almost penitent expression. Then the double doors to an adjoining room opened up, and he saw the flash of a television camera’s lights. Immediately, his visage changed, back to the ebullient, self-satisfied Führer, Johnny Lee Rogers.
He was marched into the other room, where the assembled press was waiting. Television lights hit him from every angle. His smile was never wider. This was his triumph, his release from prison despite his conviction. He could not be denied. He was above it all.
Standing behind one of the cameras, he saw Ben Slayton, his arm in a sling. Manacled to Slayton’s good left arm was Leo Thatcher, leader of the British White Guards and mastermind of the plot to release Rogers.
The cameras zoomed in close to catch the draining of every last ounce of confidence in Rogers’ face, the casting of a coward in a few seconds of mouth and eye movements. Suddenly, the swaggering Rogers was a bundle of tears and nervous twitches. He looked into each camera lens in turn and cried, “I was a captive of these Nazis… they made me do it all…”
He slumped to the floor and the cameras ground away, recording the writhing, humiliated, horrified Johnny Lee Rogers.
“Smile pretty for your fans,” Slayton told him, bending low to whisper to him. “Everybody wants to see a brave little Führer.”
Hamilton Winship appeared at center stage and told the assembled press that they had better sit down to hear what he promised would be a “whale of a tale” about an assassination plot against Richard Nixon, a Nazi-backed sabotage carried out against the Lovebridge mine, and an international terrorist conspiracy to thwart criminal justice in the United States.
Winship indeed gave the press a whale of a story.
Chapter Thirteen
WASHINGTON, D.C., 17 September
“Thatcher was not the most difficult man to track, even through sheep-grazing country at night,” Slayton said. “He was bleeding like a stuck pig, after all.”
“I can tell you he was rather difficult to get back here into the States for prosecution,” Winship said. “Bloody difficult.”
The two men sat in Winship’s office, both of them looking out his window to the White House.
“Another wrap, Ben. And a job well done.”
Slayton couldn’t match Winship’s satisfaction.
“There will be another Johnny Lee Rogers sooner or later,” he said. “Maybe not as brash, but just as dangerous.”
“You think so?”
“It’s too appealing a role. Look how long Rogers managed to carry it out. And he could have carried on a lot longer, if he hadn’t been hung up on the conviction.
“Even so, he could have been sprung. We had to get to the power behind Rogers, the power that was using him for its own purposes, before we could stop that power from carrying out unacceptable risks to our population.”
“The White Guards,” Winship said. “What did they want with Rogers?”
“A toe-hold in the U.S., a personality from the U.S.—an American media creation who could galvanize their forces in Britain. The Nazis figured that in Britain there was a real chance to emerge as an important power. A great industrial nation skidding into little more than a client state of the U.S., a skilled population increasingly resentful of black and Asian immigrants.
“Once Rogers could get on his feet in the U.S. as a legitimate politician, free of the spectacle of the swastikas and the brown-shirts, which he was working toward, the world was his. He would have gained significant electoral strength, here in this country.
“That concept could be imported to Britain. And that was the understanding between Rogers and Thatcher. Keeping Rogers out of prison became the problem—keeping him free, even if he were only a martyr in exile.
“The Führer cannot exist for long as a humbled man behind bars.”
“How soon will a Fourth Reich show its head again, do you suppose?” Winship asked.
“Someone is undoubtedly planning it now,” Slayton said. “The dream of total, undeniable evil is our curse.”
“And how long do we last against it?”
“As long as it takes.”
A NEW BREED OF NAZIS
with a charismatic latter-day Hitler at their head
hatch a daring transatlantic plot
to bend the nation to their iron will.
Their target is a strategic coal mine in the
American heartland—
their ultimate bargaining chip,
an ex-U.S. President living in New York.
Warning: It can happen here…today!
AMERICA’S TROUBLE MAN
races against the terror machine
with a fleet of fast, cold cars
and a will stronger than steel,
fighting for his country—
his own way.
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