Now he listened for anything that would point to infidelity. Words and phrases like ‘soon’, ‘where do we meet?’, ‘away’, ‘I miss you too’ swam through his conjured precognition, but his hearing pleasantly disappointed his expectations. Not one of those horrid things was said while she spoke, although she had begun to have her conversations a bit more under her breath than before. Heinz hated secrets. As a military man he knew secrets could be deadly, and so they were in relationships too. He stood nearer to the door to find out what she was discussing, but what he heard perplexed him.
“And when can we do the test?” she asked, standing as close to the open window of the hotel room as she could. Her index finger was tapping lightly against her chin as she spoke, a gesture Heinz had learned through the years, meant that Greta was dead serious — even obsessed.
“I can’t. I have to be at the agency on Tuesday, but I’ll see if I can make the trip while I am in the city,” she said softly, her big dark eyes staring ahead of her. Heinz perked up and sharpened his hearing for what was to come, but he would not get any more information from the call.
“I…I have to go, if you don’t mind,” she said suddenly, anxious to end the call, “I have another call coming through. Thank you. I’ll talk to you soon, alright? Goodbye. Bye.”
She pressed the button with uncharacteristically shaking hands. Her husband could not determine the reason for her haste, or her tremors, for that matter. From behind the slit of the bathroom door, which was slightly ajar, he watched her behavior. It bordered very mildly on panic and it frightened him. He had never seen her like this — off kilter, even so slightly.
“Yes,” she feigned her firmness for the next caller. He watched her face change into the mask she wore most of the time and it fascinated him how even her hands had no stopped shaking. Suddenly, at the change of topic and person on the phone, Greta went from a frail, anxious woman with rushed words to the smart, independent leader she was known as — but then…
“That is an inconvenience, Markus. I don’t tolerate unnecessary obstacles, as you know,” she snapped at someone on the other side of the line.
Heinz-Karl watched in unprecedented horror how his wife disappeared under the skin of the new face she pulled. Already caught off-guard by her aberrant fragility a few minutes before where she had been positively groveling, he was now taken aback a hundred fold more by the new side of Greta he had never seen before. Not in over two decades had he ever seen her eyes fall to shadow, her lips pursed in frustration and her elegant fingers turn to clutching talons around the phone as she sneered through her clenched teeth, “Get to him before he leaves Germany. And get the camera, Markus, or else you will be the one with the dogs at your heel.”
Heinz caught his breath. What was she talking about? More yet, who was she talking about and why did this person vex Greta so? He stood frozen in amazement as she flung her phone on the bed.
“Ready, love?” she called to him in her usual way, completely docile in tone.
“Uh, ja!” he jumped on his side of the door and put on his usual charade as well, prancing out in his evening wear with his well-known proud strut and impeccably combed hair.
They left the hotel room to leave for the fundraiser downstairs they were invited to attend. As Heinz clicked the door shut, he wondered as to the identity of the man Greta was after. And then he wondered what was on the man’s camera.
Chapter 9 — Mueller’s Siege
The crisp air breathed a sigh of foreboding across the pointy tops of the tall grass and caused a sinister rustling amongst the branches of the surrounding trees. It hissed like an approaching serpent, bending the grassy shafts under the continuous gusts to form coppery yellow waves on an ocean of mountainous landscape. The hills and valleys rose and dipped like stormy waves while the wind rippled over the weeds, but other than this there was virtually no movement at all in the woodland country near Nohra. Herr Mueller and his sons sat down for dinner. It had been days since they chased off the intruders on his land, men who hunted another unarmed man shamelessly on his ground — a dishonorable act in his point of view. And Herr Mueller was a man of honor.
He did not use his land for farming, as it was purchased for by his grandfather in the mid-1900’s and as his father had raised him — no, Herr Mueller was an engineer of note, although he had never walked the halls of any institution or university for it. He possessed the natural skills for forging, constructing and planning extensive layouts of machinery and factories in general. This is where he found his purpose as a young man, close to his childhood home no less. It was convenient and Mueller knew he could utilize his land to give him the necessary privacy needed to pursue his hobbies of building, crafting and testing whatever amusing contraptions he would come up with.
In truth the man’s wheels never stopped turning, his head always swarmed with interesting theories and great ideas that he had just not had the time to test. His late teenage years and his twenties were spent working for the Nazis in the local factory where they produced mainly artillery, mines and grenades. Later they even assembled Panzers and other vehicles of war in the vast concrete basement of the factory, but the location of the structure was never plotted on any course, and never mentioned in any documentation. Herr Mueller soon made an impression as a designer of alternative weapons and furnace interiors which optimized the use of heating materials to produce more heat with less fuel.
After the Second World War was ended by a sudden collapse in the Nazi regime and its affiliate secret organizations, most of the high ranking officers who commanded the secret factory disappeared to escape prosecution. Electing to return later to the place only they knew of, they evaded the Allied Forces’ intelligence agencies successfully to hide their treasures, their knowledge and blue prints in the former factory that was now no more than some pallid decrepit ruin somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It was rumored that even some very valuable artifacts of questionable origin were stashed there too and Mueller figured it was this very hoard the Captain and his dogs were after. He had no time to effectively get to the bottom of it all from the stranger he and his sons had rescued from the hit team, because the man direly needed proper professional medical help and they could not waste any time before getting him to the hospital in Weimar.
Through the years, with the speculation of friends, the opinions of conspiracy theorists he had met at family gatherings in the 60’s and 70’s, and some rumors drifting through the mazes of local word of mouth, he had learned of the theory that the Prague Palace treasures had been moved to the very factory where he used to work at. With the mass red tape and post-War bureaucratic nightmares Germany had to deal with in the 1950’s, the borders of the land Herr Mueller had inherited from his father became a matter of speculation too.
It was not clear if the factory was in fact on his smallholding or just on the other side of the border with the next farm, which coincidentally belonged to one of the Nazi’s affiliates, the Black Sun Order. He never bothered to clarify this until now, since the factory and the land it was built upon had never been disputed until the new threat of mercenaries arose seemingly from nowhere. He hardly thought he would run into them on his land, let alone under the circumstances that he found Sam Cleave.