Von Seeckt closed his eyes and said nothing.
Duncan decided on another approach. “Who was Domeka?”
The eyelids flashed up. For the first time since she’d met the old man, Duncan saw fear in those pale blue eyes. Even faced with death from the cancer eating his insides, von Seeckt had never shown fear.
“Domeka.” Duncan repeated the name.
“Ahhhh… ” Von Seeckt let out a moan.
Duncan walked over to the cart and picked up another needle. She inserted it into the IV line as von Seeckt dully watched her.
“I will kill you right now if you don’t tell me the truth.”
The old man’s face was slack, his eyes unfocused. “Kill me, then.”
The threat went out of Duncan’s voice for the moment. “You told Turcotte that you wanted absolution for your work on the Manhattan Project. You told him you had lived in fear all your life and you wanted to do something good. Something right. You told him what Oppenheimer said when the Trinity bomb… the first manmade atomic bomb… detonated in 1945. Did you mean any of that, or was that just lies like everything else you have said?”
“I told truth.” Von Seeckt seemed to be coming back to the room, to his reality.
“Some truth, but not all of it. Tell me all of it. The war… the war against the aliens and their minions… we’re going to lose it if we don’t know the truth. You’re human, you have that at least. Tell me!”
“Human?” The left side of von Seeckt’s face twitched. “You know nothing about what human is.”
“Then tell me!”
“Domeka.” Von Seeckt now spoke the name with awe. “Where did you hear the name?”
“Tell me where and what you’ve heard of him.” Duncan relaxed her thumb over the plunger.
“Heard of him?” Von Seeckt winced as he sat up a little. “Heard of him? I think Domeka was a name he had very early. Very early. It is Latin, you know. It means ‘leader.’ So maybe he was a Roman? But he predates Rome. Oh yes. He is old. I don’t know what his real name is. His names are legion. Even during my life he went by many names, so which name I first heard, I could not tell you.” Duncan pulled the needle out of the IV feed.
“Ah, where to begin?” Von Seeckt was lost in thought for a few moments. When he began speaking again, the change in subject matter startled and scared Duncan.
“Hitler was a failure,” von Seeckt finally said. “Historians have traced his life. It is known. So how did such a failure end up almost ruling the world? He was gassed in the First World War… the War to End All Wars, it was called. He had an undistinguished military record. Certainly there were many, many thousands of veterans who had shown more courage, more leadership than Hitler during that war.
“After the war he lived off his deceased mother’s savings. He went to Vienna to become an artist but was refused entry into the Academy of Fine Arts. He tried next to get into the School of Architecture and was again refused.
“What did he do then? He was an angry young man. Bitter at his treatment. So he went to the library.” Von Seeckt started to laugh, which immediately turned into a spasm of coughing.
Duncan waited the old man out. At the first mention of Hitler her skin had gone cold. She feared what von Seeckt was going to say, but she knew she had to hear it… no one had ever claimed the truth would be good.
“Do you know what was in the Hofberg Library in Vienna?” Von Seeckt didn’t wait for an answer. “Oh, there were books. Yes. Many books. Many books on the occult. On strange histories. Things we know now are true about our past but were looked at then as being like a cuckoo clock. Crazy.” Von Seeckt whirled a bony finger around his head.
“But there was something else in the library. An ancient spear. Said to be the Spear of Longinus.” Von Seeckt paused. “Do you know what that is?”
Duncan sat down on a stool to collect herself. “Longinus was supposed to be the legionnaire who stabbed Christ on the cross.”
“‘Supposed to be’?” Von Seeckt laughed, and this time there was no cough. He seemed to be gaining strength with each passing minute. “I agree, I agree. I do not know if Longinus was real. But there was a spear in the library there, and it was claimed to be Longinus’s. The Spear of Destiny. And a tool of destiny it turned out to be, as it shaped Hitler’s destiny regardless of its origins or its real purpose.
“Hitler was obsessed with the Spear and the legends that surrounded it. He would stand in front of the case holding it for hours on end, staring at it. He himself later claimed that seeing the spear was the one event that changed the course of his life. Of course, he was lying.”
“What do you mean?”
Von Seeckt snorted. “You think simply seeing an old spear could change a person like that? No, there was more to it than that. The Nazis didn’t appear out of nothing. The stage had to be set. There was a man in Vienna during those days. A man named List.” Von Seeckt suddenly stopped speaking.
Duncan waited, then the pieces came together. “List was Domeka?”
Von Seeckt graced her with the ghost of a smile. “I believe so. The name he used for this phase of his life was Guido von List. He first came to notice as a member of Austrian Alp Society, which used the ‘heil’ greeting, which had roots in early German paganism. List claimed to be a channel, a man with a connection to an ancient group of German shamans called the Armanen. The emblem of List’s group was the swastika. And their written language was one of runes.”
“Jesus,” Duncan muttered.
“You can find these facts in many history books,” von Seeckt said. “They are not secret anymore. But until the Airlia came to light, it was thought an odd historical footnote, and it has been too soon for stodgy historians in their ivory towers to catch up to recent events. To reevaluate all this information, which is now much more important than anyone gave it credence.
“List even wrote a book about runes in 1908. He extensively quoted a Roman historian, Tacitus, who lived in the first century A.D., yet didn’t attribute the material to a source document in his bibliography. How could he do that?”
Duncan felt overwhelmed. “Was Tacitus also Domeka?”
“Perhaps. List was interested in many objects of the occult. The Spear, certainly. But also the Holy Grail. The Ark of the Covenant. Someone who was close to Hitler in those early days in Vienna said that Hitler told him that List conducted strange rituals and that Hitler himself was the subject of one of them. A rite of purification. Purification of the race, of the blood. That was when Hitler really changed.”
“What did List do to him?”
Von Seeckt ignored her. “Do you know how Nabinger found me here? Found us? He got my SS dagger from an Egyptian… a Watcher… at the Great Pyramid. On one side was my name. On the other the word ‘Thule.’
“Thule was the cover name in the 1930s for the secret societies of the occult in Germany. For List’s followers. For Hitler’s. The Society of Thule brought Hitler to power. There was even an expose book written about it in 1933, called Bevor Hitler Kam… Before Hitler Came. Of course, the author was assassinated, and all copies of the book seized and destroyed by the SS.
“The Society of Thule believed in Atlantis… ah, they were not so foolish now that we know what we know about the Airlia base there, eh? They believed that the original inhabitants of Atlantis looked very much like the statues on the island of Rapa Nui… Easter Island. Ever more remarkable, is this not?”
“How did they have this knowledge?”
“After the war such ramblings were considered the ravings of crackpots. But these crackpots brought Hitler into power. Thule’s inner circle was dedicated to communicating with a nonhuman, more powerful intelligence.”
“The Airlia?” Duncan felt as if her head were spinning. “A guardian computer? Was there one in Germany? How many guardians are there?”