Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman Read Free Book Online Page B

fish, and is vilely corrosive to the mucuous membranes. Like a bethylid wasp who squirts venom at her enemy as she flees from a fight, it was only a distraction; but as the Ariosophist coughed and retched and rubbed his eyeswith the heels of his hands, I had time to grab my car keys from my desk and get out of the flat.
    I slammed the door behind me, and heard two gunshots no louder than the punch of a big stapler. I ran down the stairs, dodged a few post-nightclub drunks who stood smoking outside Happy Fried Chicken, and got into my car. It had rained through the night, and the street lamps glistened off the tarmac, grainy golden light spreading under my wheels like daffodil blood oozing up through the earth. A helicopter buzzed in the distance.
    Zroszak might just as well have been murdered by the Whig Party, I thought, as I careened down Camden Road on the way to Grublock’s penthouse near Battersea Bridge. As far as I knew, the Thule Society hadn’t operated for at least eighty years.
    It had been founded in 1914 by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, an occultist and adventurer. He took the name from Thule, the capital of Hyperborea, a lost utopia near the North Pole identified by the American congressman Ignatius L. Donnelly as the real location of Atlantis and the birthplace of the Aryan race. Sebottendorff held meetings in a hotel in Munich and even purchased a local newspaper. In 1919 two Thule Society members, Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer, were asked to establish a political front for the organisation, which they called the German Workers’ Party. Then in 1920 Adolf Hitler joined, and they changed the name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
    From then on, not much is known. Sebottendorff moved to Turkey, in flight from the agents of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and the Thule Society is usually assumed to have withered away like a moth’s cocoon. But one meets a surprising number of people in the internet Nazi memorabilia collecting community who believe that the Nazi Party was never anything but a front for Ariosophist sorcerors. (Meanwhile, others believe that Hitler was either a British secret agent or the boss of some sort of homosexualist mafia.)
    Indeed, Stuart insisted for a few months, until he lost interest, that the Thule Society was responsible for the September 11 attacks. You may already have heard that at the end of the Second World War the US military ran something called Operation Paperclip, shipping dozens of Nazi scientists to America to work on nuclear physics and rocketry. Actually, their true expertise, claims Stuart, was in antigravity, extraterrestrial life and necromancy, and many of them were hierarchs of the Thule Society. Somehow, these scientists made an alliance with their cousins at Yale University, the Skull and Bones Club, to which allegiance was owed by many of the most powerful men of the twentieth century, including Robert A. Lovett, architect of the CIA, and both Bush presidents. This ‘Brotherhood of Death’ saw the Third Reich as merely a practice run for the Fourth Reich, America’s New World Order, and their recent dirty tricks have included the demolition of the World Trade Center towers with remote-control plastic explosives and two holographic aeroplanes. Their eventual aim is to conquer the holy city of Agartha, hidden beneath the snows of Tibet, and use its supernatural powers to dominate the earth for eternity.
    Although it’s perfectly obvious to me that we’ve been told a lot of lies about September 11, I find Stuart’s account a bit implausible for reasons I won’t go into here. It’s funny, I suppose, that an organisation like the Thule Society, composed mostly of paranoid bores who talked about nothing but the gods of Atlantis and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even worse than my ‘internet friends’, should itself return as a ghost to haunt every modern conspiracy theory. All paranoids soon begin to imitate their enemies, and the Thule