The SS general indicated for his guest to sit in the single wooden-back chair in front of his desk. Langer's manacles clanked as he obeyed the unspoken order.
Langer cast a quick look around the stone-walled room, noting a single window set about five feet from the floor. Zeitsler smiled and spoke for the first time, his voice steady, the words measured and precise. He shook his finger schoolmasterishly. "I really wouldn't consider it if I were you. It's a sixty-foot drop to the ground, where you would land in a stone courtyard in which a machine gun and its crew are positioned. And if you somehow managed to free yourself from your chains and take me prisoner it would still serve no purpose. My guards have their orders and they wouldn't hesitate a heartbeat to shoot me down to stop you, Herr Longinus."
Langer froze at the name. "You have me mistaken, Herr Brigadeführer, my name is Langer, Carl Langer."
Zeitsler smiled and shook his head, opening a desk drawer. He removed the contents. Several photographs were visible from where Langer sat and some older documents looking like parchment, old, very old. His heart skipped a beat. He sat tense, fully alert, awaiting the next move with a definite feeling of foreboding pervading the atmosphere of the sterile office.
"You may relieve yourself of playing at charades. We know exactly who you are." He tapped the folder. "It's all in here, including the report of your stay at the sanctuary of Elder Dacort. Indeed, we know all about you. How long has it been since you were called by your true name, Casca Rufio Longinus? No matter." He waved a hand dismissing the unimportant thought. "We have been looking for you for some time now. We lost sight of you in the twenties when the world went to pieces following the depression. But when we received your name from the Geheime Staats Polizei they also sent along your paybook, which they found after you killed three of our men. With that a complete investigation was launched as a matter of routine. There is no Carl Langer. You took the name from a tombstone in Bayreuth and acquired your other papers after that. Indeed, we have been awaiting your arrival for some time. You would be flattered to know how many man-hours and how much money have been spent on seeing that you could join us. Indeed, you have arrived at a most opportune time." He checked his watch. "In a few minutes all your questions will be answered. In the meantime you will remain in this room until someone comes for you. You are our guest and food will be brought. But please, no tricks. We know all about—how should we say it?—your condition." He laughed softly. "And as you know, there are worse things than dying." He left closing the door behind him, but Langer knew he was being watched. The general's words echoed in his mind, worse things than dying . . . Sweat broke out on his forehead.
Did the SS general know? And if so, to what purpose was he brought here? What could the SS want with him? Questions, too many of them.
No longer thinking of himself as Carl Langer, Casca Longinus rose from his seat and looked over the papers on the desk. He knew the general had left them out in the open for that purpose. The story, the truth, was there. Not everything, but enough. They did know.
There was nothing to be used in the room as a weapon. Even the flagpole would be of little use against the machine guns and hundreds of men here who would just overpower him. And as the general said, there were worse things than dying. He sat back down to wait.
Langer felt familiar with the stone walls of the medieval castle. He passed stone-faced guards standing rigidly at their posts with faces pale in the glow of the bare light bulbs, spaced every ten or so feet throughout the halls of the castle. Unsmiling, serious faces that stood in pale deathlike contrast to the black of their dress SS uniforms, each armed with a Schmeisser machine pistol slung from the shoulders by the straps ready for instant use, as was evidenced by the fact that the cocking levers were drawn full back ready to instant firing. They knew they were chosen, the elite. Ready to die for the Führer, God and the Reich.
His escort had the same vacuous expressions, the dead eyes, that would only come alive when they were witnessing the pain of another. They halted at the end of one corridor before massive, ancient wooden doors carved with the mystic runic symbols of the ancient Nordics, a stylized oak tree wrapped about with the twining tendrils of the great serpent. Standing in front of the Laers he felt a sense of foreboding that there was something evil behind the doors.
The guards escorting stopped, the one on the right raised a massive brass knocker in the shape of a Viking's head and let it drop once. The sharpness of the heavy brass head striking sounded once, heavily. The two guards then placed themselves one on each side of the door facing back down the hallways they had come from. Not a word had been spoken in the time since they had taken him from his rooms, and it appeared there would be none now.
With no sound the well-oiled hinges worked smoothly, holding the massive weight of the single door that swung to the inside. From the darkened interior came but one short command: Enter.
The door swung silently shut behind him, leaving him and the voice in a small anteroom lit only by the flickering glow of two oil braziers giving off a lightly pungent, scented aroma. The voice belonged to a man dressed in monk's habit resembling those the Franciscan monks wore, dark rough cloth. A hood covered the face so the features were indistinguishable in the gloom. A rope for a belt tied the waist loosely. The figure motioned for Langer to follow, leading him to a dark curtain of wine silk embossed with the symbols of the fish and cross.
The curtains parted. . . .
Langer's heart stopped for a moment with his throat constricting. ... A line of oil braziers identical to those in the anteroom lined the aisle and the walls of the long narrow room, illuminating the fifty or so kneeling figures all dressed identically to the monk next to him, their backs turned, facing the end of the room.
All attention from the kneeling monks was focused at the end of the hall, where superimposed over a life-size wooden cross was . . . THE SPEAR . . . Mine, it's back again, am I forever to be haunted by not only the Jew but that damned thing, too?
One kneeling figure at the front detached itself from the line of worshipers, rose and walked down the aisle to face him. The face was hidden in the shadows, but there was a familiarity to the walk, the body english of the approaching monk.
A hand raised itself and moved the hood back to show the face. Round plain features with steel-rimmed glasses. Heinrich Himmler, Reichführer SS, spoke to his guest. "Welcome, Longinus, welcome to the Brother of the Lamb. It has been a long time since you were our guest. But as you see, we survived as you do, and whither thou goest so go we."
Taking Casca by the arm, he led him from the chamber through a side door and down a narrow hall to his personal chambers. Once inside he removed the cassock; underneath was the more famil