Warren Murphy: Failing Marks

"Tell them not to bother," he repeated flatly. "But he has killed many of our men."

"Not our men," Kluge snapped. "They were not from the village. They are therefore not my responsibility."

"Nonetheless," Herman persisted, "they were sympathetic to our cause."

Kluge laughed bitterly. "Our cause, " he mocked. "Thanks to our old friend Nils Schatz, we no longer have a cause. We have a pursuer. And he is getting closer." Kluge shook his head. "No. I fear now all we can do is await the inevitable. Please go." He sounded defeated.

Without another word, the aide gathered up his paperwork from the large oaken conference table. Dress shoes clicking a loud complaint on the highly buffed stone floor, the young man left the room. The big door echoed shut.

Alone, Kluge felt his shoulders sag as if drained of life.

The old portals in the ancient stone outer wall of the conference room had been filled with expensive paned windows. Around the edges were panes of beautiful stained glass depicting various struggles from different periods of German history.

Kluge's tired, roaming eyes ignored these. He had no great desire this day to dwell on the great Teutonic past. That was precisely what had brought them all to this dismal state.

Instead, his gaze moved to the clear glass at the middle of the nearest window. He stared out the slightly frosted panes at the nearby peaks of the Andes.

The air was thinner here in the mountains of Argentina, but his body seemed to have gotten used to it over the years.

It was a shame he had to leave. This had been his home for much of his life. The home of IV, the community of renegade Nazis that Adolf Kluge led.

An ultrasecret organization founded by the ragged losers of the Second World War, IV was to represent a rebirth of the fascist dream-the Fourth Reich, a Teutonic dynasty spanning generations.

That had been the ideal at its founding, and in his early, idealistic days as IV's third leader, it had always been the ultimate plan of Adolf Kluge. However, Kluge was nothing if not pragmatic. As he grew older, he realized that it would be impossible in the modern world to achieve the original goal of the secret Nazi organization.

With the abandonment of his youthful dreams and the approach of middle age, his concerns became more realistic. IV had a great deal of wealth at its disposal, riches looted from some of the finest families in Europe. During his tenure, Kluge began an aggressive covert campaign to involve IV in the financial markets of the world.

At nearly every turn, he met with rousing success. Kluge, it turned out, was a financial wizard. When it came to investments, he had the Midas touch. In the years of his stewardship, IV's business portfolio burgeoned. The money he made was used to meet the expenses of the village in which the founders of the organization-now retired or deceased-had come to live.

The building in which Kluge sat was an ancient structure, possibly Aztec, that had been constructed on a mountain peak that neighbored the IV village. A stone bridge connected the office stronghold with the main village. It was in this great old building that Kluge had made the first tentative steps toward the ruination of IV.

Of course, it had been accidental. When the downward spiral had started several months ago, Adolf Kluge had no idea where it would lead.

Back then, one of the many corporations in which IV had a financial interest was a technological giant, a German company called Platt-Deutsche. The company's subsidiary in the United States, Platt-Deutsche America, had developed a system that was able to create a link to the human brain with a computer via an electric signal. While refining the system, the company had run across a pair of agents in the employ of the U.S. government. One of these men was the legendary Reigning Master of Sinanju. According to the old men of the village, the Master of Sinanju was truly responsible for the death of Hitler. It was said that when the fuhrer learned that the wily Korean was on his way to Berlin to dispatch him, the German leader had taken his own life. The Master of Sinanju was said to possess remarkable physical powers. Kluge had foolishly approved a plan to use the computer program of Platt-Deutsche to download the abilities of the Master of Sinanju and his protege.

The scheme had backfired completely. Sinanju had triumphed, and IV's operatives in America had been killed. It was only sheer luck that Kluge had been able to sever all connections with Platt-Deutsche before the neo-Nazi group could be uncovered.

In the days that followed, Kluge was certain that the men from Sinanju would eventually show up on his doorstep. But as time went on, he realized that he and IV had stumbled into a bit of good luck; either Sinanju wasn't interested in him or didn't realize the extent of the Nazi organization's holdings.

Whatever the reason, he was left alone. In spite of the loss of a major company, IV had survived. Adolf Kluge had breathed a sigh of relief. But this relief proved to be short-lived.

All hope of anonymity for IV had been lost three months before. That was when the world as Kluge knew it ended and the entire delicately stacked structure of the decades-old organization had collapsed around his ears like a house of cards in a hurricane. One of the old founders of the village had left Argentina with the impatient hope of creating the vaunted Fourth Reich in his own lifetime. In a campaign that had played out before the entire world, the bitter old Nazi had created a modern reprise of World War II, complete with bombs dropping on London and the surprising takeover of Paris. Nils Schatz had financed all of this with stolen IV funds.

The Master of Sinanju had again arrived on the scene, and again he and his heir vanquished IV. This time, however, they knew. In the months following the events in London and Paris, a definite pattern of violence had begun erupting in neo-Nazi groups throughout Germany. Always the description of the attackers was the same-an old Asian and a slender white man with thick wrists.

The Master of Sinanju and his protege. Lately, in the reports he was getting, the old Korean was seen less and less. Adolf Kluge was not certain why this was. It could be that the Reigning Master-who looked quite old and frail-had finally succumbed to age.

He could be sick. He could even be dead.

What really mattered to Adolf Kluge was that the young Master of Sinanju was still alive. And he was coming for Kluge.

Kluge glanced away from the distant mountain peaks, drawing his gaze across the sparkling crystalline pattern of ice on the transparent window panes.

As he continued to reflect on his dire future, he found that his eyes had refocused on one of the stained-glass panes in the surrounding edge of the window.

He recognized the image out of Germanic legend. Ironically, like the pictures of the murder victims on the table before him, a body lay sprawled on the ground. Bits of red, blue, yellow and green glass-polished to a great luster-depicted an outdoor scene.

There was a river running near the body. The brilliant sunlight that eased across the Andes illuminated the strip of painted water, causing it to sparkle hypnotically. The effect as one stared at it was almost that of real running water. A vibrant testament to an artistic genius.

There was a small streak of red running down the stream.

Funny. Kluge had never noticed that before.

He saw now the slit of a knife wound in the back of the body. A smile of blood. According to myth, Siegfried, the great Nibelungen king, had been stabbed from behind by the mercenary Hagan.

More legends.

It was the legend of Sinanju that had brought Kluge to this sorry state. Would that that legend had not been true.

Kluge slapped his hands atop the table in impotent rage. He got to his feet, shoving the paperwork roughly to the floor.