Preston Child - Mystery of the Amber Room

“…was Adolf Hitler. I get it now,” Sam filled the blanks, acting very fascinated to beguile his captor. “Kalihasa gave Hitler the ability to turn individuals into, well, drones. This explains how the masses in Nazi Germany were basically of the same mind… the synchronized movement, and this obscenely instinctive, inhumane level of cruelty.”

Klaus smiled endearingly at Sam. “Obscenely instinctive…I like that.”

“I thought you might,” Sam sighed. “This is all positively fascinating, you know? But how did you learn about all this?”

“My father,” Kemper replied matter-of-factly. He struck Sam as a would-be celebrity with his pretend coyness. “Karl Kemper.”

‘Kemper was the name called out on Nina’s sound clip,’ Sam remembered . ‘He was responsible for the death of the Red Army soldier in the interrogation room. The puzzle is coming together now.’ He stared in the eyes of the small-framed monster before him. ‘I cannot wait to watch you choke,’ Sam thought as he paid the Black Sun commander all the attention he craved. ‘Can’t believe I am drinking with a genocidal fuckwit. How I would dance on your ashes, Nazi scum!' The notions that materialized inside Sam's psyche felt alien and detached from his own personality, and it alarmed him. The Kalihasa in his brain was at it again, feeding negativity and primal violence into his thoughts, but he had to admit that the terrible things he was thinking were not altogether exaggerated.

“Tell me, Klaus, what was the objective behind the assassinations in Berlin?” Sam extended the so-called ad hoc interview for a glass of good whiskey. “Fear? Public alarm? I always thought it was your way of just preparing the masses for the coming implementation of a new system of order and discipline. How close I was! Should have placed a bet.”

Kemper looked less starry on hearing the new route the investigative journalist was taking, but he had nothing to lose in exposing his reasons to a walking dead man.

“That is a very simple agenda, actually,” he replied. “With the German Chancellor at our mercy, we have leverage. The killings of high-profile citizens, mostly responsible for the country’s political and financial well-being, prove that we are aware and that we are not hesitant to enforce our threats, of course.”

“So you picked them based on their elite status?” Sam inquired simply.

“That too, Mr. Cleave. But each of our targets had a deeper investment in our world than mere money and power,” Kemper revealed, yet he did not appear too eager to share what exactly that investment had been. Only until Sam pretended to lose interest with a simple nod and started staring out the window at the moving terrain outside did Kemper feel compelled to tell him. “Each of those seemingly random targets was in fact Germans assisting our contemporary comrades of the Red Army in concealing the location and shrouding the existence of the Amber Room. Milla has been the single-most effective hindrance in the Black Sun's search for the original masterpiece. My father heard it first hand from Leopoldt — a Russian traitor — that the relic had been intercepted by the Red Army and had not gone down with the Wilhelm Gustloff , as legend dictates. Since then some Black Sun members, changing their opinions about world domination, have defected from our ranks. Can you believe that? Aryan descendants, powerful and intellectually superior, chose to break ranks with the Order. But the ultimate betrayal was helping the Soviet bastards keeping the Amber Room hidden, even funding the covert operation in 1986 to destroy six of the ten remaining slabs of amber containing Kalihasa!”

Sam perked up. “Wait, wait. What are you saying about 1986? Half of the Amber Room was destroyed?”

“Yes, thanks to our freshly deceased elite members of society who funded Milla for Operation Motherland , Chernobyl is now the tomb of half of the magnificent relic,” Kemper sneered, clenching his fists. “But this time we are going to kill them off — make them extinct along with their countrymen and anyone who questions us.”

“How?” Sam asked.

Kemper laughed, surprised that a sharp man like Sam Cleave did not realize what was really going on. “Why, we have you, Mr. Cleave. You are the Black Sun's new Hitler… with that special creature that is feeding on your brain.”

“Excuse me?” Sam gasped. “How do you believe am I going to serve your purpose?”

“Your mind has the ability to manipulate the masses, my friend. Like the Führer, you will be able to subjugate Milla and all other agencies like them — even governments. They will do the rest themselves,” Kemper grinned.

“What about my friends?” Sam asked, alarmed at the prospects ahead.

“It will not matter. By the time you have projected Kalihasa’s power over the world, the organism will have consumed most of your brain,” Kemper revealed as Sam stared at him in raw horror. “Either that or the abnormal increase in electrical activity will have fried your brain. Either way, you will go down in history as a hero of the Order.”

“Give them the fucking gold. Gold will soon be useless unless they can find a way to convert vanity and density into feasible survival paradigms,” Natasha sneered at her colleagues. Milla’s visitors were seated around the large table with the group of militant hackers that Purdue now found were the people behind Gabi’s mysterious air traffic control communication. It was Marko, one of Milla’s more quiet members, who circumvented the Copenhagen air control and told Purdue's pilots to divert to Berlin, but Purdue was not going to blow his cover of Detlef’s ‘Widower’ moniker to reveal who he really was — not yet.

“I have no idea what gold has to do with the plan,” Nina muttered to Purdue in the midst of the Russian quarrel.

“A large part of the amber sheets still in existence still has the gold inlays and framing in place, Dr. Gould,” Elena explained, leaving Nina feeling silly for bitching a bit too loudly about it.

“Da!” Misha chipped in. “That gold is worth a lot to the right people.”

“You a capitalist pig now?” Yuri asked. “Money is useless. Value only information, knowledge, and practical things. We give them the gold. Who cares? We need the gold to fool them into believing that Gabi's friends are not up to something.”

“Better still,” Elena suggested, “we use the gold carvings to house the isotope. All we need then is the accelerant and enough electricity to heat the pot.”

“Isotope? Are you a scientist, Elena?” Purdue charmed.

“Nuclear physicist, Class of 2014,” Natasha boasted about her soft-spoken friend with a smile.

“Damn!” Nina raved, impressed at the intelligence hidden in the beautiful woman. She looked at Purdue and nudged him. “This place is a sapiosexual’s Valhalla, hey?”

Purdue raised his eyebrows flirtatiously at Nina's accurate assumption. Suddenly the heated discussion between the Red Army hackers was interrupted by a loud crackle that had them all frozen in anticipation. Listening intently, they waited. Over the wall-mounted speakers of the broadcast center, the wail of an incoming signal announced something sinister.

“Guten Tag, meine Kameraden.”

“Oh God, it is Kemper again,” Natasha hissed.

Purdue felt sick to his stomach. The sound of the man’s voice provoked a dizzy spell in him, but he held his own for the sake of the group.

“We will be arriving in Chernobyl in two hours,” Kemper reported. “This is your first and only warning that we expect you to have the Amber Room excavated from its Sarcophagus by our ETA. Non-compliance will result in…” he chuckled to himself and elected to abandon formality, “…well, it will result in the death of the German Chancellor and Sam Cleave, after which we will release nerve gas in Moscow, London and Seoul simultaneously. David Purdue will be implicated by our vast network of political media representatives, so do not attempt to defy us. Zwei Stunden. Wiedersehen.”