Chapter 14—Barron Revealed
Majestic now floated once more in the sky, high above the ruins of Alamut. But her business on the Rock was not quite finished.
Tyr Sorensen leaned against the fuselage of the second autogyro, watching the airship, waiting for the signal that the objective had been achieved. He did not have to wait long.
A teardrop of light appeared in the sky beneath the dirigible. A signal flare, launched from the open tail section, burned brightly as it fell to the earth. Even before it disappeared in the rocky landscape below, Sorensen went to work.
As he strode to the round hole cut into the ruins by the wave projector, he unslung a bulky satchel charge from his shoulder and deftly removed the safety pin, activating the time-delay fuse. He then promptly dropped his burden into the hole, spun on his heel and headed back to the aircraft.
A few seconds later, the explosive charge detonated, sending out a blast wave that instantly crushed the ceramic jars containing the secret collection of the library of Alamut. Thousands of priceless, irreplaceable documents, containing secrets of the ancient world that modern scholars didn’t even know had been forgotten, were vaporized in an instant.
Sorensen did not flinch as the mountain shuddered beneath his feet, nor did he feel even a glimmer of regret at the destruction of so much history. He understood his instructions perfectly. All traces of their presence here had to be erased. If the documents were retrieved, delivered to museums or sold on the black market, people would begin to ask questions, and the search for answers posed an unacceptable risk.
All the loose ends had to be tied up, lest the entire web unravel.
Not that it would make much difference. In a few weeks… or perhaps just a few days… it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if the whole world knew what had happened at Alamut.
But Sorensen had his orders all the same.
As he climbed into the autogyro’s cockpit, he leaned forward. “Ready?”
His passenger nodded an affirmative, and Sorensen started the engine.
Dodge’s mind staggered under the weight of the revelation. Walter Barron. Baron Otto Von Heissel. One and the same.
Can it be true?
Dodge only knew of Baron Von Heissel from Hurricane’s accounts of his adventures with Captain Falcon, following the Great War. Like everything else in those stories, Captain Falcon included, Dodge had always believed the baron to be a fictional creation, perhaps loosely based on real individuals and events, but magnified and exaggerated to create an exciting narrative. He had learned otherwise of course; he vividly recalled the moment when Hurricane had told him that all the stories were true, and he had even seen proof to that effect. Nevertheless, part of him refused to believe it, even when the man standing before him — a man who looked nothing like the villain he had described as grotesquely fat, with a shaved head, a thick Austrian accent, and mannerisms that were diabolical to the point of cliché—simply folded his arms across his chest and addressed the room.
“Mr. Hurley has identified me correctly. In another life, I was Baron Von Heissel. But I would urge you to remember that what you think you know about me from Mr. Dalton’s sensational fiction, is just that.”
“Yeah?” Hurley replied, still smoldering with barely contained rage. “And what about what I know from bitter experience?”
The man who was both Barron and a baron, did not flinch under the weight of Hurricane’s stare. “It was a different time. A time of war. A war that we would all like to forget.”
“Now see, that’s where my memory gets a little fuzzy, ‘cause as I recall, you built your little clockwork army after that war, and would have started a brand new one in its place if Captain Falcon hadn’t put a crimp in your plans.” Hurricane took an ominous step forward. “Maybe you’ve got these folks buffaloed with your snake oil pitch about wanting to put an end to war, but the way I see it, you’re a criminal who’s already been sentenced to death. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let you put your appointment with Lady Justice off for one more day.”
Dodge felt he should do something — say something — but he didn’t know whether to implore Hurricane to show some restraint, or encourage him to make good on his threat. If even half of what Dodge had written about the battle with Von Heissel was true, then he certainly deserved death a dozen times over.
That’s just it, though. Half of what I know about this man, I fabricated out of whole cloth.
Baron Otto Von Heissel had made two appearances in the syndicated Adventures of Captain Falcon. The first, entitled The Clockwork Brigade, had been based on one of Hurley’s manuscripts, and had presented the Prussian noble as a mad genius, leading an army of steam-powered automatons with which he intended to conquer Europe and restore the Habsburg Empire to its former glory. The war machines had not been especially sophisticated; they were little more than wind-up toys on a massive scale, but had they been employed in the Great War, they would have rendered trench warfare completely obsolete. The clockwork soldiers would have charged fearlessly across No Man’s Land to crush the enemy positions beneath tons of steel.
As Hurricane had told it, Von Heissel had been building his mechanical army in the closing hours of the war, and wasn’t about to let something like an armistice keep him from using it.
Von Heissel’s second appearance in the Adventures of Captain Falcon was much fresher in Dodge’s memory: a twelve-chapter serial titled Castle Perilous, in which the evil villain had turned an entire castle into a deathtrap for Falcon and friends. Dodge had penned the epic climax of the story only a few months earlier, but that story had been entirely his own creation. Everything Von Heissel had said and done — every evil scheme, every gleeful chortle — had been purely the product of his imagination.
The man standing in front of him looked nothing at all like the villain he had described in Castle Perilous. Nearly two decades had passed since the real Captain Falcon defeated Von Heissel’s clockwork army; who was to say that the man’s heart had not changed as much as his external appearance?
Hurricane Hurley, for one.
The big man’s hands curled into sledgehammer fists as he took another step forward. His face was grim and determined, and Dodge knew this was no mere show of bravado.
He felt Nora’s hand on his arm. “Do something,” she urged.
“Sergeant!” A new voice cut through ominous tension. “Stand down!”
Though he had retired from the army, and now wore a business suit instead of a uniform, General Frank Vaughn still remembered how to give an order. And even though he was retired as well, former Sergeant Major Brian “Hurricane” Hurley had not forgotten how to follow one. While he did not exactly snap to attention, Hurricane halted his advance, and turned to face Vaughn, who stood a few paces behind Von Heissel at the entrance doors.
“General, sir,” Hurricane filled the word with more contempt than Dodge would have thought possible for the typically genteel Hurley. “This man was tried in absentia by the Hague, and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.” He enunciated each word as if reading from a warrant.
“Sergeant…” Vaughn took a breath. “Hurricane, the President of the United States has signed an executive order granting asylum to the man formerly named Baron Otto Von Heissel.”
Dodge’s breath caught in his throat. “You knew?”