Herbert had expected an army of skinheads and brownshirts— shaved heads and tattoos, or crisply pressed pseudo-Nazi uniforms with armbands. There was a smattering of punks in pockets of ten here and half a dozen there. But most of the men and the few women he saw were dressed in casual designer clothes with fashionable if slightly conservative hairstyles. They were laughing and at ease, looking very much like young stockbrokers or attorneys who had come to Hanover for a convention. The scene was frightening in its ordinariness. This could be Herbert’s beloved hometown.
With his trained eye, Herbert divided the tapestry into manageable fragments and then swallowed each image whole, rather than examining individuals. Later, if need be, he could pick out important details from memory.
As he inched by, Herbert also listened through the open window. He wasn’t fluent in German, but he picked up enough to understand. These people were talking about politicians, computers, and cooking, for Chrissakes. It wasn’t the way he’d imagined it would be, young men singing old German drinking songs. No wonder the authorities kept their distance from Chaos Days. If they cracked down here, they might have to lock up some of the nation’s leading doctors, attorneys, stockbrokers, journalists, diplomats, or God knows who else. And God help them all if these people were ever motivated to move against the government. They weren’t strong enough or united enough yet. But if they were, German rule could quickly unravel and be rewoven into a tapestry which the world would have every reason to fear.
His bowels tightened. Part of him screamed inside, They have no right, the young bastards. But another part of him knew that they had every right. Ironically, the defeat of Hitler had given them the right to say or do a great deal, as long as there was no racial or religious incitement or public denial of the Holocaust.
Toward the end of the street, there was a registration table with a half-dozen men and women behind it. The crowd waiting at the table was swelling, no one pushing, no one complaining, nothing to disrupt die general air of fellowship. Herbert slowed and watched as the organizers took money and passed out itineraries and sold black-andred bumper stickers and lapel pins.
They’ve got a goddamn cottage industry going here, Herbert thought, amazed. All of it subtle, venomous, and legal. That was the problem, of course. Unlike the skinheads, who were considered low-caste neo-Nazis and spurned by people like these, the men and the few women here were smart enough to stay within the law. And when there was enough of them to field candidates and vote, Herbert had every confidence that they would change the law. Just as they’d done in March of 1933, when the Enabling Act gave Hitler dictatorial authority over the nation.
One of the hosts, a tall young man with sandy blond hair, stood stiffly behind the table. He shook the hand of each newcomer. He seemed less comfortable with the few grubbier skinheads than he did with the clean-cut men.
Even among the vermin there are castes, Herbert noted. He was intrigued as one of the scruffier new arrivals followed the handshake by throwing his arm in a traditional Nazi salute. It was an isolated, nostalgic gesture. The other men seemed uncomfortable with it. It was as though a drunk had come to the cash bar at a social function. They tolerated the salute but did not acknowledge it. Obviously there were schisms in the new Reich just as there had been in the old. Rifts which could be manipulated by outside forces.
Cars were piling up behind Herbert. Releasing the hand brake, he pressed his palm hard on the gas pedal and ripped down the street. He was angry: angry at these slick monsters, heirs to war and genocide, and angry at the system which allowed them to exist.
As Herbert rounded the corner, he saw that the side streets were closed for parking. He was glad there was no one here with a baton to direct traffic. That would have been too much, like a goddamn country fair.
Turning down one of the streets, he found a place to park. Then he pressed a button beside the radio. The left back door opened and the well in which the wheelchair sat slid to that side. The entire bucket emerged from the car and deposited the wheelchair on the ground. Herbert reached back and pulled it over. He also resolved to make a deal with these people to get cars like this into the U.S. They really made life a whole lot simpler.
Sliding into the wheelchair, he snuggled himself in like a top-gupner. Then he pressed a button in the car door to retract the bucket. When it was back inside, he shut the car door and began rolling down the street, toward the Beer- Hall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Thursday, 3:28 P.M., Toulouse, France
Dominique could feel victory. It had weight, it had presence, and it was near. Very near.
He felt it more strongly now that his New York attorney had phoned to say the NYPD and the FBI had taken the bait.
They had arrested the Pure Nation team which Dominique had underwritten for these many, many months. Gurney and his people would bear their arrest and trial like true Nazis: proudly and unafraid. At the same time, they would send the FBI to arms caches and literature and would hand over the man who had raped the lesbians in Chicago. And the FBI would crow about its victories.
Its victories. Dominique grinned. Their scavenger hunt.
A hunt which would eat up time and personnel and lead the crack law officers in the wrong direction.
It was astonishing to Dominique how easy it had been to dupe the FBI. They had sent an infiltrator. They always did. He was let in with other members. But because the agency infiltrator, John Wooley, was in his late twenties with no prior organization membership, two Pure Nation members had gone to California to visit the “mother” to whom he was writing. Although the FBI had rented a home for her and provided her with a cover, she made two or three calls a day from pay phones inside the local grocery store. Hidden video camera coverage of the phone numbers showed that the calls were made to the Phoenix bureau of the FBI. Pure Nation leader Ric Myers suspected that Mrs.
Wooley was probably a veteran agent herself. The Pure Nationals let Wooley remain in the group so they could feed the FBI false information.
At this same time, Dominique had been looking for American neo-Nazis to carry out his work. Jean-Michel had found Pure Nation, and Wooley’s presence fit in perfectly with Dominique’s plans.
Mrs. Wooley and her “son” will be dealt with in time, Dominque reflected. In just a few weeks, when the United States was thrown into chaos, the Wooleys would become the first victims. The elderly woman would be raped and blinded in her rented home, and the infiltrator would be castrated and left alive, a deterrent to other would-be heroes.
Dominique stood looking through the one-way mirror in a conference room which adjoined his office, a room which looked down into his underground factory. Below him, in a facility which had been used to manufacture armor and weapons during the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade, workers were assembling video-game cartridges and pressing CD-ROM games. In a separate area, toward the well-insulated river side of the cellar, technicians were downloading samples of the games to outlets the world over. Consumers would be able to order the game in any format.
Most of the games he manufactured at Demain were mainstream entertainment. The graphics, sound, and gameplay were of such a high caliber that since 1980, when he made his first game, A Knight to Remember, Demain had become one of the most successful software companies in the world.
The other games, however, were much, much closer to Dominique’s heart. And they were the real future of his organization. Indeed, they were one of the keys to the future of the world.
My world, he thought. A world he would rule from the shadows.
Stripsy the Gypsy was the first of his important new games. It had been released nine months before and it was about a Gypsy woman of low morals. The object of gameplay was to beat information from villagers, locate the slut, then find articles of clothing she had scattered around the countryside. Demain had sold ten thousand copies worldwide. All of those sales came through mail order, from a Mexican address where authorities had been bribed and wouldn’t touch his operation regardless of what kind of games he sold. It had been posted on the web and advertised in white supremacist magazines.
Stripsy the Gypsy was followed by the Ghetto Blasters, set in World War II Warsaw; Cripple Creek, a place to which the handicapped had to be led and drowned; Reorientation, a graphics game in which Asian faces had to be made Occidental; and Fruit Shoot, in which players were required to gun down gay men as they marched in a parade.