Safe House

niggers fromslaughtering them. Muscle beats brains in the short run, the way they figure it. Of course, the niggers won’t be able to run a government. . . . That’s when the true Aryans come in, the race warriors. With the weapons they’ve been hoarding, they’ll be able to carve out a few states as their own.”

“Your basic Helter Skelter scenario,” I said. “A Charlie Manson update.”

“Right. Not many of them acknowledge it, but he’s their visionary all right. Okay, next they’ll get foreign aid from wealthy countries who support their mission, especially the Arabs—after all, exterminating Jews should give them perfect credentials.” He waved a hand dismissively, anticipating me. “Yes, I know, the A-rabs are mud people too. But that’s just the first step in the master plan. After they ship all the niggers back to Africa—the ones they don’t just outright kill in the camps with the kikes—they’ll run the show here. The Day of the Rope will eliminate all the race-traitor whites. Next step is acquisition of nuclear weapons,” he said, face flat but his voice loaded with sneer, “and then it’s time for the A-rabs to pay the piper. Finally, there’ll be a natural link between all the North European tribes—the Aryans, right?—and the true Americans, their descendants. Not the Indians, of course . . .

“Lothar’s people are divided as to the next step. Some of them want to retain all the mud people in South America and Africa and Asia as slave labor. Some want to just kill them all—you know, nerve gas, poison the water supply, the ovens . . . the usual.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway, when they’re not hyping up some of those retarded skinheads into bashing cruising gays or mixed- race couples with baseball bats—or recruiting on military bases—they’re sitting around plotting how to make Oklahoma City look like a pipe bomb in a bus-station locker. And my boy Lothar is a real live member of an action cell.”

“Bombers?”

“Oh yes. Major bombers. Domino bombing—you know what that is?”

“No.”

“A couple of dozen targets. Virtually simultaneous targets. Congress. The FBI. Post offices. Communications centers. Airports. Train stations. The whole infrastructure. That’s Phase One.”

“And Phase Two?”

“The way they figure it, the military has to respond. National Guard first, but soon there’ll be warplanes in the air. And where are they going to respond to? Wherever there’s riots. Whoever starts the looting. And they know who that’s going to be. With the communications cut, it’s all going to be word of mouth. They don’t have the troops for guerrilla warfare, but they have the weapons. Lots of weapons. They’ve been stockpiling for years.”

“That plan is Swiss cheese,” I told him.

“It is,” he agreed. “But it’s going to be America that gets the holes punched in it.”

I felt a chill on the back of my neck. Probably the night air. I wondered if Pryce was feeling it too. I lit another nasty clove cigarette from the stub of the last one just in case he was thinking about zipping up his window.

“And Lothar’s yours?” I asked him.

“All mine,” he said. “But if he’s taken out of the play, it won’t work.”

“What won’t work?”

“ZOG likes to play dominoes too,” Pryce said, the muscle under his right eye jumping hard.

I worked it around in my head for a minute. And it didn’t add up. Not for what I needed. “You’re not telling me Lothar’s a government agent,” I said flatly.

“No. He’s not,” Pryce replied.

I passed up the invitation. “But he’s not gonna roll either,” I said, no trace of a question in my voice.

“Why do you say that?”

“Couple of reasons. If he rolls, the best he can hope for is immunity. And that means the Witness Protection Program. Okay for some guys, maybe. But he’s not gonna be able to do his Master Race crap there. And he’s not gonna get his son either. Even if you could find a bent judge to give him custody, the media would have you for breakfast.”

“He’s not going to get immunity,” Pryce said. “He’s not going to testify at all. When the bust goes down, he’s going to slip through the net. Go into the underground. The sole survivor. He’ll be a hero. And he’ll have his son with him.”

“He’s stupid enough to buy that?”

“He’s stupid all right, but it’s the truth. It’s already set up. He’ll leave the country. England first, then Germany. They’ll take him in, never fear.”

“And you’ll keep working him, right? He changes his mind, you’ve got the hammer over his head.”

“That’s right,” Pryce said, refrigerator-voiced.

“And he keeps his kid?”

“That’s the part I thought we were going to negotiate. That’s all you want, isn’t it? Believe me, there’s no way he’s going to bother his wife ever again. He’s going to vanish. New name, new face, the whole works.”

“They’re going to do plastic surgery on the boy too?”

“It’s been done,” he said calmly. “The pedophile rings have been doing it to kidnapped children for years. But I believe you already know about that . . . ?”

I ignored the opening. It hadn’t really been a question anyway, just bait. Any pro interrogator knows that trick—you make the subject think you approve of whatever he did, show some empathy, get him bragging about it . . . and you’ve got him locked. He probably knew about some of the things I’d done in the past, had me tapped as a vigilante. Maybe he thought I’d welcome the chance to unburden myself to a kindred spirit.

Or maybe it was his chance—to show off, the info-warrior flexing his muscles.

“How come you don’t just tell him not to show up for the divorce thing? That it’s a trap?” I asked, like I’d never heard him mention pedophiles.

“I don’t have complete . . . control,” Pryce said. “His son has always been part of the deal. I told him we might be able to . . . obtain the child at a later date, but he’s afraid his wife will just vanish. There’s more than one underground operating in America. His Nazi friends don’t have the resources to find one woman and one child in some safehouse. I don’t even know where the woman is now. Only your . . . friend knows that.”

“So it’s her you threaten?”

He shrugged, dismissing the accusation. “The only thing holding his wife close is legal jurisdiction,” he said. “She has to bring the divorce and the custody in New York, where they both live. She won’t run until that’s over with. But he doesn’t have everything I . . . need yet. Do you understand my dilemma?”

“What if you had another man in there?” I asked, flipping my trump card on the table. “Someone who could get you the information?”

“Forget it,” he said. “Believe me, you are quite well known to those people, Mr. Burke. They don’t have my sources, and they certainly don’t have the . . . extent of my information. You may have some . . . credentials that they would respect. But this isn’t some racist prison gang we’re talking about. If one of them you’ve . . . done business with recognized you, you’d be dead. Right then. And so would the man who brought you into the group.”

“I’ve never done business with—”

“Don’t insult me,” Pryce said softly. “You sold a bunch of original tapes of one of Hitler’s early speeches to some idiot Nazis a number of years ago, remember?”

“No.”

“That was a long time ago, before you became so . . . sophisticated in your operations,” he said, ignoring my denial like I’d never spoken. “It was very easy to trace. How do you think those morons felt when they learned what those original, authentic tapes really were? Oh, they were revolutionary speeches, all right. A call for armed resistance in support of the homeland. Only it was Menachem Begin, exhorting the Irgun to violence.”

I had to laugh. Couldn’t help it. Yiddish sounds like German if you don’t speak either language. I used to do a lot of stuff like that. Not for politics, for the easy score. Freaks are always easy. And they never go to the law.

“I doubt they’d see the humor,” Pryce said dryly. “There’s also the little matter of selling them a few crates of machine guns. Funny how the ATF showed up a few minutes after the money changed hands. And after you’d