Sniper's Honor(104)
“Then, too, when the dying is over and the investigation begins, think of the furor after it is discovered that the death gas was our old Nazi enemy Zyklon, the cyclone. The world press would go nuts, as they love to run pictures of Nazis, which are sure magazine and newspaper sellers. All the old footage is rerun. Someone digs out Triumph of the Will, and the parades are run over and over on the news channels. Everyone loves to hate the Nazis, bad boys of a hundred thousand silly plots. Why, it would be like National Nazi Month. It would be the best month the Third Reich has had in seventy years. That in itself would be a major victory for the author of this event.”
“Which brings us to the point of this meeting, Gershon. Who is he? Who is Nordyne? How do we find him? How do we kill him? How much time have we got?”
“Well,” said Gershon, “I’d be trying to answer those questions myself if I weren’t at this damned meeting.”
* * *
Where are you, mister? You must have left a trace, a clue. You have to be somebody. You’re not just a spirit of malevolence that seeped out of a grave, you’re corporeal, of flesh, and mind, and hair, and stench, and somewhere, somehow, you’ve left a trail. I will find it.
All around was activity, but Gershon was calm. He was where he wanted to be. He was hunting.
I cannot hunt you in your Swiss bank, you putz, because those institutions are notoriously secretive, and I cannot get to your accounts without the validating algorithms. It could be done but would take far too much valuable time. Running your little ploy out of Switzerland was a master stroke.
So what have you left? Only the logo.
Yes, the logo. Two stylized faces staring off, “facing the future.”
He stared, he stared, he stared. Was there a significance in the image? What could something so simple, so banal, conceal? Just another corporate bromide; who would look twice at it? A trademark, amusing to eye but devoid of content, as designed. It had no signature, no house style or indication of what graphic artist had confabulated it. It seemed offhand, yet the artist had captured in those two light lines a true glint of human intelligence, individuality, and flesh. Maybe it was steganography, a method of encoding information in graphic presentations. In some cases, not here, microdots. But Gershon thought that somewhere in the images, or in the imagination that conceived and selected and refined the images, there was a code of sorts, perhaps unconscious.
Besides: he had nothing else.
So: Two faces, facing left. Two profiles. Shapes. Though they’re technically lines, they’re really shapes. Your imagination attaches them to a head and completes the image in the eye of you, beholding.
He knew of a Darknet site called Imagechase.com, which hunted for selected images, just as other search engines found words, names, anything in the universe of print. He called it up, activated it, and fiddled and faddled, defining the original image from the Nordyne website, cutting it and then pasting it to the software screen “target” area of Imagechase. Maybe in the posture, in the alignment, there was something, and Imagechase could hunt it down. It might lead to something that had inspired the actual artist in his studio, wherever he was.
He pressed SEARCH.
A magic animated disk appeared, the universal symbol that the elves inside were at work. The seconds dragged by. But then the screen changed and produced a chain of mini-images, each of which could be full-screened by a click.
Mostly the click wasn’t necessary. It was a selection of left-facing profiles, many banal, many of no use whatsoever. Easter Island seemed to predominate, those odd busts from time unimaginable, two stories tall, as viewed in profile, endless fodder for speculation and photography. It seemed unlikely, however, that Easter Islanders were behind Nordyne GmbH.
American presidential editorial cartoons, on the theme of the president posing for a sculpture, were the second most common, the joke always being the sculptor’s idealization or contra, truth-telling, about the stentorian great man posing before him in the required profile. Hand in breast of jacket strictly optional.
Then an odd run of middle-tier European talent expressing itself in hagiographical portraits of powerful nobles. It seemed that the pose was favored by those with a strong sense of self-importance, while others preferred to face the instrument of record straight on.
And finally . . .
What have we here?
He clicked.
The image jumped out at him. Two strong faces, lean of jaw, forceful of nose, taut cheeks over bed-knob bones, foreheads caparisoned in helmets or hats, and the future they so dutifully faced made possible by the three words immediately before them, Garanten Deutscher Wehrkraft, or “Guarantors of German military strength.”