The Art of the Devil by John Altman Read Free Book Online Page B

survivors after the landing: grim, dark, ranks thinned, faces aged: Bosford, Carlson, Vasquez, Guerra, Wilson, Mahoney, all old before their time.
    The landing had been only the beginning. Here was Francis Isherwood sixty hours later, in the dead of night, two klicks inland, sneaking up on a young Nazi standing guard over a makeshift supply depot. Isherwood grabbed a clump of hair with one hand, drawing his KA-BAR across the exposed throat with the other. A parabola of blood arced onto frozen grass. He dragged the body, with head barely connected, into a nearby hedgerow, and then pressed on without looking back.
    And here was Evy, drenched in sunlight three years later, brightly singing Doris Day from the passenger seat of the Studebaker: ‘My Dreams Are Getting Better All The Time.’
    Groaning, he rubbed at his temples. Duty called. He must finish the task of familiarizing himself with every agent, farmhand, security patrol and square foot on the farm. A survey of town, concentrating on centers of gossip – drugstores, lunch counters, bars – would acquaint him with any suspicious characters lurking about. But applying himself to the task at hand could keep him distracted for only so long … and he had passed those package stores, on the outskirts of town, beckoning …
    After the briefest fillip of hesitation he opened his eyes, pushed back from the rectory table, folded the newspaper beneath one arm, and went to face the day.
    Four miles away, over scrambled eggs and coffee, Richard Hart perused the same articles in the same newspaper.
    In Buenos Aires, Provisional President Lonardi had been overthrown by General Pedro Aramburu. In Russia, the Soviets were working on a bigger Bomb, with a payload equal to one million tons of TNT. Closer to home, the stock market recovery was sluggish. And in Germany rearming had begun – atrocity of atrocities! – which the newspaper’s editors downplayed. But of course they did. Eisenhower’s America, as the senator said, was weak and irresolute, determined to coddle and circumvent the enemy rather than engage them full-on.
    Had General Eisenhower only shown more backbone, thought Hart, they could have avoided this current geopolitical morass altogether. America could have beaten the Russians to Berlin. On April eleventh, 1945, following an advance of sixty miles in a single day, a spearhead of the US Ninth Army had reached the Elbe River, leaving only sixty miles more between themselves and the capital city of the Third Reich. But Eisenhower had hesitated, fearing that German armies might regroup to make a last stand in the Alpine mountains of southern Bavaria, where the impenetrable territory could extend the war indefinitely. And so, from that day forward, he had concentrated on preventing such a retreat, leaving the way open for the Russian advance and everything which had followed.
    Turning from international news to national, Hart scanned for an article, as he had every day since returning from Denver, concerning a body part discovered in Colorado’s South Platte River, or Chatfield or Cherry Creek Reservoirs. He found none. The story might not be big enough to make a national paper. Yet he kept looking anyway – from morbid curiosity, or from a lingering pang of guilt.
    Pushing the newspaper away, he finished his coffee and then stepped out onto the sidewalk, buttoning his dark coat against the chill. The rooming house had been chosen for its location: far enough from the center of town that he could avoid the worst of the crowds, but close enough that he could conveniently reach the bench before the Plaza Restaurant every day at noon.
    Even on its outskirts, Gettysburg harbored a noticeably larger population than its infrastructure could comfortably support: a side effect of the President’s sudden proximity. The faces crowding the sidewalk belonged to fox-like journalists or stern members of the Signals Corps, or to the