Death of an Adept

With a smile, Graham invited Adam to be seated. Sinking into the chair opposite, he said, "I see you had no trouble finding the way. Thank you for coming."

"It is I who should be thanking you," Adam answered. "It was very generous of you to bear a hand in this inquiry."

A more sober look clouded Graham's lean face. "As it happens, this inquiry concerns me as much as it does you - though the evidence linking our interests dates back to a time before you were born. Your instincts in coming to me were entirely correct. I doubt if anyone else now alive could have made the connections necessary to link this man who now calls himself Evans with his own buried past."

This cryptic statement gave Adam a prickling sensation at the base of his skull, for John Graham was not prone to exaggeration.

"What, exactly, have you learned?" he asked.

"Enough to give me cause for grave concern," Graham replied. "To begin with, it isn't Taliere that's the pseudonym - it's Evans. The name Jasper Taliere occupies a curious place in the classified annals of military intelligence. And for the past fifty years, he's been on file as missing, presumed dead."

At the mention of military intelligence, Adam raised an eyebrow. Mentally performing a quick mathematical calculation, he said, "That would make him active during the Second World War. Am I to understand that he was some kind of spy?"

"Not a spy," Graham corrected. "A terrorist - though the term had not yet been coined in those days."

At Adam's look of inquiry, he continued. "As you well know, when Hitler came to power, the Nazi regime was not without its sympathizers here in this country. From the very outset of the war, there were some who actively collaborated with the enemy, seeing the threatened invasion of England as an opportunity to further their own schemes for aggrandizement.

"Jasper Taliere was hardly more than a boy at the time, but he was old enough to harbor a host of resentful ambitions. Spurred on by dreams of power, he was among those who took part in a well-orchestrated campaign to bring havoc to our cities - a campaign all the more terrible and effective because it was carried out with the aid of supernatural powers."

Adam was well aware of whispered tales concerning the existence of certain black lodges operating within the Third Reich, whose members had utilized their esoteric talents in support of their patron's designs for world conquest. Aware of a sudden chill creeping into his bones, he asked, "What, exactly, was Taliere doing?''

Graham's jaw hardened. "Committing very specialized acts of sabotage - some directed at destroying national monuments, others aimed at wiping out key individuals associated with the wartime government. To this day, I doubt we'll ever know the full extent of the damage that was done. But one thing I am sure of: By the time certain of my colleagues were able to bring the situation under control, these sabotage operations had cost the lives of hundreds - possibly even thousands."

As Adam shook his head in horrified wonderment, Graham went on.

"It started in the early days of the Blitz. When the air strikes first began, the devastation seemed as random as it was widespread. As the raids continued, however, it came to our attention that the number of direct hits on politically significant targets was disproportionately high. We thought at first that the Germans had perfected some kind of highly sophisticated internal guidance system for their bombs. Then one of my own special agents in the field managed to intercept information which enabled us to piece together the truth.

"Taliere and his fellow-collaborators were using the bombing raids as convenient camouflage under which to carry out a parallel campaign of attack. The damage they were wreaking was caused not by explosives, but by lightning. This lightning was no natural phenomenon, but an emanation from the realms of chaos. The giver of the lightning was none other than one of the storm gods of old."

Adam caught his breath. All at once, this was beginning to have an eerily familiar ring.

"How did they determine where the lightning was to strike?" he asked.

"By leaving a votive object at the site to draw down the lightning charge," Graham replied. "Those few we were able to recover and neutralize took the form of disk-shaped bronze medallions bearing a symbol that my people dubbed the lightning rune. It was not unlike the double-S sigrunen insignia adopted by the SS. Even at the time, it was suggested that this symbol might be part of a secret Pictish alphabet reserved for ceremonial use. But in those days, all that seemed certain was that the rune was intended to invoke the destructive power of Taranis, the ancient lightning god of pagan times."