The Killing Scar Read online

  The red-haired man turned toward the kitchen, but the Professor was already at the icebox.

  "I don't know how he does that… You want some help organizing these? They're already bundled by date."

  "Actually, I was thinking I'd like to sort them by city. That way I can read through several days at a time, looking for patterns."

  The blond man came back into the room, three glasses of lemonade grouped in his hands. The others simultaneously swooped in to relieve him of two of them.

  "What? You didn't think I could handle all three glasses?"

  "Three tacklers, yes," replied not-Herb. "Three glasses, no. You were a football player, not a waiter."

  T.J. Gillis had been a very good football player, in fact, and now he was well on his way to becoming as famous in the world of geology. He had played on the same team as the red-headed chemical engineer Damien Pierrot and the man who masqueraded as Herb Young, the former quarterback, and flying ace in the Great War, Eric Reinhold. The reason why "Herb Young" was taking care of this ranch was that, as far as the world knew, Eric Reinhold was dead.

  T.J. (aka "Professor Death") and Damien were two of the handful of people who knew the truth: that after Eric survived being shot by gangsters, he had decided to use the anonymity provided by his highly-publicized "murder" to his advantage. Long ago, in the war, he had failed to prevent the massacre of a small village in France, a failure that still haunted him. Since then, he had become an expert pilot and served as an intelligence agent, fluent in a half-dozen languages and a master of disguise. Now he was embarking on a new career, tracking down men who used their strength for evil, and stopping them.

  His odd choice had already taken him to the jungles of South America and the steppes of Mongolia, in the company of Damien, T.J., their friend and former teammate Ted Kane, and Eric's petite and dangerous sister Kate. If he was to continue, however, he had to know where he was needed, hence the piles of newspapers Damien and T.J. routinely brought in from town.

  The three of them made short work of dividing the newspapers into stacks by title, then arranging them by date. T.J. grabbed the top San Francisco Morning Herald and plopped into a chair, fanning himself with the pages.

  "Okay, this part of the job I can handle. What are we looking for?"

  "First, we're looking to read the newspaper, not wave it around," Eric said. "Then we're just looking for the odd bit. People disappearing, unexplained deaths, weird happenings…"

  "You know," Damien put in. "The kind of stuff that used to happen in our apartment when we were at school."

  T.J.'s eyebrows went up. "I don't think they print that kind of stuff in the Times." He turned his attention to the print in front of him. "If they did, I'd subscribe."

  Hundreds of pages turned and several pints of lemonade later, Damien laid down his last periodical and sighed.

  "That does it for me. No invisible stranglers, no diplomats dropping dead, not even a revolution." He paused to fold the paper. "Nothing but the Japanese running amok in China, and there's not much we can do about that."

  Eric was staring at the newspaper spread out on a table in front of him, as though trying to force it to give up some mysterious secret by sheer willpower. He said nothing.

  T.J. raised a glass. "Okay, but think about all the things you've learned. You've spent so many years wasting your energy on chemistry, it's about time you branched out."

  Damien snorted. "Better than studying rocks. Rocks are everywhere. They don't take any effort. Chemistry, now, you have to go looking for answers. But I'll grant you, I now know more about current events than I do about carbon molecules."

  "'Current events…'" T.J. repeated, and he chuckled.

  "What's so funny?"

  "You said 'current' events. The only 'current' event I read about was some guy being struck by lightning."

  Damien leaned forward. "What did you say?"

  T.J. frowned. "Okay, I'll admit it wasn't funny to that guy, but--what are you doing?"

  Damien was shuffling through the stack of papers he had just finished, mumbling to himself. Even Eric looked up from his study to watch him.

  "I… just…saw…" Damien was muttering. "Here!" He tugged out one daily. "Right here. 'German farmer struck by lightning.' Where was your guy?"

  T.J.'s face went slack. "Germany. Funny that some German getting hit by lightning would make two papers in the States."

  "Find that article," Eric ordered. "Let's make sure it was the same person."

  A quick comparison showed that Gerhardt Hentel and Josef Lanz were not the same person. Nor were they from the same village, Gerhardt from Meyerberg and Josef being from Winterhafen.

  "Anybody remember either of these places?" Eric asked, but neither of his companions could place them. He got up and started to walk about the room in frustration. "I'm going to have get some atlases in here, that's for sure. In fact, I need a whole reference library." He flopped down in his seat. "Two men being hit by lighting in the same week? That's just not right. But I'd like to know how close they were to each other, before we get excited thinking it was worth looking into."

  "We can pick up an atlas in town and bring it by tomorrow," T.J. offered. Eric thanked him with a weak smile.

  They all jumped when somebody tried to knock the front door down.

  "Get the door!" Eric hissed. "I don't have my make-up on!"

  As odd as this might sound in other circumstances, T.J. and Damien understood him perfectly. As Eric faded into a back room, T.J. headed for the door.

  "Maybe it's an atlas salesman, and he can tell us where Meyerberg and Winterhafen are."

  He was half-right.

  Chapter Three

  A Change in Circumstances

  Although the man on the front stoop was not an atlas salesman, there were those who thought him large enough to be branded as his own country, or at least a medium-sized State. Los Angeles police detective sergeant Ted Kane tipped the scales at nearly 250 pounds, and was proud that since his playing days, none of it had run to fat. Hoods had been known to throw down their guns and surrender at the sight of him.

  "Well, look what the cat dragged in," Damien said as his friend lumbered in. "Eric, I hope you stocked another gallon of lemonade."

  Eric advanced to shake Ted's hand. He was one of the very few people living who dared to risk Ted's grip.

  "Don't worry, if we run out, we've got 500 acres of oranges in the back. I'm sure some of them are ripe." By now, however, T.J. had fetched another tall glass of lemonade--as well as one for himself. Eric gave Ted a chance to quench his thirst and mop his brow with his handkerchief. "So where have you been, old man? We haven't seen you in a week. Big case?"

  Ted found a clear space and set down a briefcase. "Actually, I've been travelling. I had to go back to Washington, D.C."

  "D.C?" T.J. repeated. "J. Edgar Hoover need help solving something?"

  "No," Ted replied, sipping his cold drink. "I went to see your father, Eric."

  Very few pronouncements had ever closed the mouth of the irrepressible T.J. Gillis. This was one of them.

  "My father?" Eric asked.

  "Yes. He called me, long distance, asked me to fly to D.C. He also asked me not to mention it to anyone. And he cleared my calendar with the chief."

  Eric's eyebrows went up. "He can do that?"

  Ted nodded. "Apparently. And it wasn't a social call, either. The word came down for me to get my flat feet to Washington, so that’s what I did." He glanced around at his friends, and sighed. "This is going to sound odd, but I need you all to promise that what I'm going to tell you doesn't go anywhere else."

  "I think we've all proven we can keep a secret," Damien said dryly, nodding toward Eric.

  "I know," Ted admitted. "In fact, Eric, your dad said that very thing. But he had to ask, and I have to ask you. And while the O'Donnells and Leslie Bryant Overton know you're still alive, even they can't know about this."

  "What about Kate?" Eric asked. r />
  "Kate can know. I'll tell her when I can. But since she's not here… How much do you know about what your father does?"

  "I know that he was officially a roving ambassador, kind of a presidential envoy, and unofficially he was a spy. But last I heard, he was planning to retire."

  "Uh-huh. After that mess in Quanyu, he did--to an extent. But--and this is the part you have to keep quiet about--not completely. It turns out your father was in Quanyu actually working for a bureau in the State Department that--kind of like you--doesn't officially exist. They gather intelligence from all over the world; usually they just disseminate to other agencies, but sometimes they act on it themselves."

  "And that's what my father did."

  Ted nodded. "Exactly. But now he doesn’t do that any more. He runs the place." He drained his glass. "So he wants me to do it instead."

  This time the only sound was T.J.'s low whistle.

  "So what are you going to do?" Damien asked at last.

  "I already did. I took the job. I handed in my resignation to the Department this morning."

  "So are you going to be running all over the world now?" T.J. demanded. "Hey, wait, are you an ambassador?"

  "No, I am not an ambassador." Ted looked Eric in the eye. "And you don't have to worry I'm quitting our little crusade, either. My cover story is that I'm resigning to go to work as a private detective, but my real job is to help you."

  "Me?"

  "Yeah, I guess some of you fellows were talking on the way back from Quanyu, somebody mentioned it was going to be hard for me to stay with the group because I had a real job, and your father has this government slush fund…"

  T.J. punched Damien in the shoulder to get his attention. "You and me gotta find some kind of secret, brother. I'm starting to feel left out."

  "So did my father really say that your job was to help me? My step-mother spent the whole trip back trying to argue me out of this."

  Ted shrugged. "Your father said that there were some things that even your step-mother doesn't have to know. I leave that to them." Looking around for somewhere to set down his glass, he spied the stacks of newspaper. "What's up with those?"

  Eric briefly explained his idea of looking for odd events that might need their attention, and how they had run across two strangely similar stories of men in rural Germany being struck by lightning.

  "But it's hard to know if they're related because none of us has ever heard of either of these little towns."

  "What were they called?" Ted asked. Eric named them, and Ted mused for a moment. "They're south of Berlin, about twenty kilometers apart."

  "How do you know that?" T.J. demanded.

  "I looked at a map once. I spent a little time in that part of the world a while back."

  While T.J. stared, Eric sat in thought. "We'd better call Kate," he decided. "And pack a bag. We're headed back to Germany."

  "Not so fast." Ted took up the briefcase and opened it. "You need to look at this first." He pulled out a large manila envelope, extracting a letter, and a file folder nearly an inch thick. "Here," he said, handing over the letter. He kept the folder, gripping it with such strength that neither of the others was brave enough to ask to see it.

  While Damien and T.J. exchanged quizzical looks, Eric read the letter. Slowly the color drained from his face. He looked up at last.

  "Is that--?" he asked, nodding toward the file folder. Ted nodded back. Eric made no move to take it, staring at it with the fatal fascination of a man watching a venomous serpent preparing to strike.

  Chapter Four

  The Dead Return

  At length Ted handed over the file, which Eric accepted automatically. Once it was placed in his hands, he seemed to come to himself again, scanning the pages quickly. The air grew heavy and still, but no one moved or spoke.

  With another last long look at the first page, Eric closed the file.

  "That was quick," T.J. noted.

  Eric's eyebrow twitched. "Not surprising. I wrote most of it." He indicated Damien and T.J. "Can they see it?"

  "I think your father expected they would," Ted answered. "They know everything else. But we have to hurry. This file was delivered to me by special courier, and I've only got it for twenty-four hours. Then he takes it right back to Washington. He's waiting at the Biltmore."

  "All right, then. Why don't you fellows look this over while I get myself a drink. And I don't mean lemonade."

  T.J.'s head jerked up. "You mean you've got booze in this place? How come you never said?"

  Eric grinned. "This house belongs to Aloysius O'Donnell. You think he wouldn't have something stashed here?" In short order, four glasses of illegal Scotch whiskey were awaiting their fate. Eric handed one to Ted, who accepted it gratefully, and they drank together. "Ahh. Damien, you boys might want to wait until you're done reading. You'll need it then."

  By now T.J. was crowded over Damien's shoulder. They rushed through the file in short order, giving it much less scrutiny than had Eric. Then, as if by prearranged signal, they each took a glass.

  "Is this fellow who we think it is?" Damien asked Eric.

  "Yeah."

  They drank. Then they all had another.

  "So this Aldus Skarzos fellow is the reason you disappeared for two years." T.J. had picked up the file again, staring at an uncompromising face in a grainy photograph. "And he's the one who massacred those villagers back in '18." He shook his head. "I don't remember him."

  Eric sighed as though trying to shed a weight that he had been carrying for almost fifteen years.

  "He wasn't one of the ones we talked to. He was in charge, but he was never on the front lines. The rest of the Huns were just there to protect him, keep the villagers from bothering him while he conducted his experiments. That's why he had them killed, so they couldn't talk. Until we came along, he couldn't care less about them."

  "Until we came along…" Damien echoed unhappily.

  "I don't think it made any difference, in the long run. He would've had them shot regardless. It wasn't that Skarzos had no mercy, he just didn't care. If it helped his work, he liked it; if it hindered him, he removed it. So long as they didn't get in his way, he couldn't be bothered to think about them. But in the end, I believe it would have been the same."

  "But you found him at last, right?" T.J. asked. "And you put the kibosh on him."

  "Yes." It was plain he did not want to say more.

  "So why did your dad send you his file?"

  "That," Ted responded, "was in the letter. You read the file, but not the letter. Mr. Reinhardt's department has been tracking a German weapons manufacturer who might be making guns the Germans aren't allowed to have under the Versailles agreement. He goes by the name of Dr. Scar."

  "Scar," Damien repeated. "Skarzos?"

  Ted shrugged. "Could be; they don't know. But Skarzos disappeared in 1920, after Eric found him, and Scar seems to have sprung up full-grown around 1921. Nobody can find a trace of him before that. Not only that, but Skarzos was supposedly working on high-intensity light experiments when Eric--put the kibosh on him. And now Scar is rumored to be doing the same thing."

  "When you say high-intensity light, are you talking about the stuff that Archimedes wrote about?" Damien demanded. "The big lenses they were going to us to sink the Roman fleet?" The others stared at him. "Hey, I took history classes, too."

  "Skarzos was working on a lot of things," Eric recalled.

  "Was Archimedes really going to sink Roman ships with heat rays?" asked T.J., who had plainly not taken history.

  "I doubt it," Damien answered. "But he tried. And Skarzos has had two thousand years to improve on his methods."

  "We don't sail in wooden ships any more," Ted pointed out. "Either he'd have to have a much stronger light…"

  "… or he isn't planning to use it on ships," Eric finished. "That's why these reports of people being hit by lightning are bothering me."

  "German engineers working on a weapon that can take
down a man without a trace and without laying a finger on him," T.J. mused. "Does that remind anyone of anything?"

  Eric sucked in his breath. "Oh, man. I hadn't thought of that. Ted, you'd better give that courier a message for my dad when he goes back. If the Germans are working this hard on weapons of assassination, that can only mean one thing. They're getting ready to go to war again."

  "Only this time they're gonna be a lot sneakier about it," T.J. said.

  "Not necessarily," Ted countered. "When we fought, we were all in the trenches. A weapon like this wouldn't do you a lot of good against men who were huddled down behind dirt walls. But the next war isn't going to fought that way. And something like this," he tapped the file for emphasis, "could be devastating to infantry troops. You don't have to burn them down, you just have blind them. And God help anybody who tried to take cover in a stand of trees."

  His friends took a few moments to contemplate his words. They had all served in the infantry in the Great War; they had gone over the top against machine guns and through barbed wire. What chance would a man have under those conditions if he couldn't see?

  "They'd have to move at night," Damien said.

  "Yeah, and when would they sleep? The enemy wouldn't have to worry about marching during the day."

  "Okay," Eric said, looking around at all the newspapers. "We've got our work cut out for us. But before we go rushing off to Europe again, I want to make sure we don't leave any undiscovered clues behind. Like the Professor said, it's odd that this kind of story would be reported twice here. I'm wondering if there's some other connection we're missing, some reason those papers thought this was worth reporting."

  It was Ted who found it, after half an hour of intensive study.

  "I think I've got something. There's a Professor Rosenstein making a tour over here about recent advances in physics. He's a friend of Professor Einstein's."

  "Does it say anything about him studying light waves, or high-energy power transmission, anything like that?" Eric asked.