That ethnos is the one associated with Western European civilization. The control center is the Party of Humankind.
There is no better way — or, for that matter, any other way at all — if humanity is to survive. This, and only this, matters. This is important. This is worth the effort.
CHAPTER SIX
Thursday, July 10, 2042
“You. Not one of us?” Liese’s full name was Anneliese Meisinger, and her curt, shorthand speech still grated. Close up, she was not as perfect as Lessing had thought. Her features were slightly irregular, her skin the sort that freckles rather than tans, her mouth a little large, her eyes a gold-flecked hazel rather than the green they had appeared under the fluorescent lights of the boardroom. She seemed a little too elegant and mannered, too sophisticated, for Lessing’s taste.
“I’m a security man,” he answered. “I was hired by Indoco for their Lucknow plant.”
“You have a German name,” Mrs. Delacroix declared sweetly. The old lady had abandoned the cockpit of her private jet to its pilot, much to the latter ‘s relief, and she now occupied a seat beside Liese and opposite Lessing in the long fore-cabin.
“My ancestors came to America during Revolutionary War times.” He was not sure, actually, but that was what his father claimed.
“Lessing,” Mrs. Delacroix mused. “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was a great German dramatist and critic of the mid-eighteenth century.”
“Worked for the Duke of Brunswick… among others,” Liese interjected. It was as though she had to pay by the word to talk.
“Never mind,” the elderly French woman said brightly. “Gotthold Lessing is long dead. This one… Alan, is it not?… is alive. I am curious about Alan Lessing.”
Talking to Emma Delacroix was like handling fragile porcelain. Lessing had the impression that she would shatter if anyone disagreed with her.
“Not much to tell. Nowhere to go at home in Iowa… that’s one of the Midwestern states. Got out of school, one year of college, no jobs, joined the Army. Served awhile, then went into the army business for myself.” He grinned self-consciously. It was a longer speech than he usually made, but Mrs. Delacroix’ shrewd, black eyes and powdered-doll smile invited confidences. And Liese was listening.
“Not a member,” Liese put in dubiously. “Yet Mr. Müller seems to trust you.”
“Who?”
“Oh… Mr. Mulder. That’s his name now.”
“And he’s a Descendant?”
“Yes. Like Mrs. Delacroix.”
He was tired of the subject. The SS and the Nazi Party were as corpse-cold as — what was his name? — Gotthold Lessing. He looked out the window at the tiers of white cloud-castles. They had left Caracas behind and were now out over the Atlantic headed for Dakar.
Mrs. Delacroix caressed one of the SS diaries with all the reverence of a nun touching a hallowed Bible. The more recent of the diaries were legibly copied in modem German and English, but the earliest of the twenty-odd volumes were written in the archaic Suetterlin German script, which neither she nor Liese could read. They would have to be transcribed when they reached Pretoria, something Mulder hadn’t done while his family held them.
The dark-blue bindings and scuffed, leather spines exuded an aura of almost mystic devotion. Those who had penned these pages had loved their cause with a terrible fierceness. They had not given up, even under the persecution of the Nazi-hunts of the last century. Lessing felt something akin to religious awe, like the time he and Jameela had visited the cave-temples of Ellura. The gods carved there were still proud, still powerful, still splendid in their enigmatic majesty. They still spoke to humankind. Jameela, whose family belonged to the Shi’a— or Shi’i, which she insisted was the correct adjective — sect of Islam, had laughed at him.
Lessing had ceased to be a Lutheran when he was sixteen, when his mother’s bitter piety and his father’s Christmas lip-service finally had eaten away the last traces of his childhood beliefs. Later he had found little to tempt him among the dogmas of the Born-Agains, the Catholics, Jameela’s Islam, or any other of the world’s faiths. He was sometimes still affected by religious and quasi-religious experiences, however. The diaries piled on the red-plush airplane seat were just that; they overflowed with a power of their own, like the mana of the South Pacific islanders. They called, cried out, almost shouted: “Believe in us! Believe in our Führer! Believe in the National Socialist movement and in Germany and the glorious destiny of the Aryan Race!” He could almost hear the chanted Sieg Heils over the droning thunder of the jet.
He jerked awake so violently that Liese stared at him.
“Dakar by evening,” she said. “Then Pretoria. Return at once?”
He struggled to decipher her odd verbal shorthand. “Uh… yes. Back to Indoco.”
She crossed one silk-sheathed leg over the other, and her pearl-grey, Chinese-silk dress slithered away from her thigh. “Slay. Day or two. Show you around.”
Her expression was ambiguous. She might be making a pass at him, or she might be offering only ritual hospitality. He smiled and said nothing. He would cross that bridge after proper reconnaissance.
He awoke again from a muddled dream of thorn bushes, black faces, and stuttering automatic weapons: Angola. For an unnerving moment he thought it was real. Just above his head Liese announced, “Africa, Mr. Lessing. Landing at Dakar. Yoff Airport.”
It was real, as hot and wet as he remembered, and it smelled like India but with subtle differences. There were real black faces now, bony men in scruffy khaki uniforms, German SM-97 submachine guns slung ostentatiously over skinny shoulders. This was the New Empire of Guinea, founded forty years before by some army captain or other. The Guineans had taken over Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and a few other relics of European colonialism. Their up-and-coming enterprise was backed by French and Portuguese money — and Euro-mere officers to command Emperor Sayyid Abu-Bakr’s Black legions.
Mrs. Delacroix disembarked, taking Liese with her. The pilot dealt with the paper work while Lessing remained in the cabin. He took what precautions he could: locked the diaries in the aircraft’s safe, checked his 7.62-mm sidearm and his 9-mm machine pistol, and inspected the tarmac and distant buildings with binoculars. If any interested parties knew that the diaries were aboard, now was the time to strike. He could expect anything from a hijacking to a rocket grenade. He switched off the cabin lights and waited.
Fuel trucks rumbled out to the plane, several commercial craft landed and took off, and airport control officers came aboard and then disembarked, redolent of Mrs. Delacroix’s best French Pernod. The pilot, a sandy-haired, young Scotsman, bent over his charts to plot a course for Pretoria. Outside, lines of blue landing lights made geometric diagrams upon blackness, and the dank odors of Africa mingled with those of gasoline, asphalt, and hot metal.
A white light raced across the tarmac, became two lights, and resolved itself into an open car. Mrs. Delacroix and Liese? Not at that speed! And not with three huddled figures carrying blue-gleaming automatic weapons jammed into the front seat.
This could be it.
The pilot emerged at Lessing’s call, stared, ducked back into his cockpit, and returned with a Japanese GK-11 assault rifle, grenade launcher attachment, bayonet, scope, and all. He grinned at Lessing. “Backed up the old girl a few times before.”