My Immortal: The Vampires of Berlin Read online

  MY IMMORTAL

  THE VAMPIRES OF BERLIN

  BY LEE RUDNICKI

  Published by

  Broken Ocean Entertainment

  11901 Santa Monica Blvd., #521

  Los Angeles, CA 90025

  All of the characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any and all references to any government, school, military units, intelligence agency or law enforcement personnel are purely fictional and for entertainment purposes only.

  ISBN 978-1-4507-3191-1

  © 2010 Lee Rudnicki

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition – July 2010

  For my friends and family

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lee Rudnicki is an entertainment attorney, motion picture producer and writer in Los Angeles, California. For more information, please visit http://www.drumlaw80.com

  MY IMMORTAL – PRODUCTION TEAM 2010

  Creative Consultants – Chris Nalls and Rumiko Ono

  Graphic Design (book) – Dennis Mancini

  Music (As the Blood Flows) – Trip Device

  Graphic Design (web) – Leo Guzman

  Editor – Kaleigh Woods

  Photography – Lee Rudnicki

  Special Thanks – Chris Rudnicki, John Rudnicki, Ko Mori, Maria Kabanova, Maureen Rudnicki, Scott Gorden and Uta Arning

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the last.”

  - D.H. Lawrence

  Fantasia of the Unconscious (1930)

  Hi there. Welcome to My Immortal: The Vampires of Berlin. As you will soon find out, villains and heroes come out of the most unlikely places in this story. In fact, two of the heroes are in the Wehrmacht. Yes, that German army.

  The difficulty in using two German soldiers during World War II as protagonists, of course, is that doing so potentially raises all sorts of moral and political issues.

  Please know that as I write this, I am profoundly aware that there is nothing in the world I can tell my German and Russian friends—or anyone else for that matter—about World War II that has not already been said in thousands of well-written articles and history books.

  Along those lines, My Immortal is not a history book — it is a supernatural adventure tale that is set during the Battle of Berlin. Conceptually, the setting is very similar to being on the Titanic after the ship hits the iceberg. There are no underlying political statements or moral judgments to be gleaned from these pages and there is no disrespect intended towards any government, country, person, religion, school or entity that is depicted or not depicted in this book.

  The sole and exclusive exception to the foregoing rule is the Nazis. For the record, I have nothing good to say about the murderous bastards and My Immortal does not glorify their crimes in any way. The Nazis do, however, make the perfect villains for a supernatural adventure tale; that is the role they are called upon to play here.

  The acknowledgements are at the end, but I would like to use this opportunity to thank my wife Rumiko for her patience and understanding during the many hours that it took to write this novel. Domo Arigato, Rumi. I love you.

  Now, without further adieu ...

  MY IMMORTAL

  THE VAMPIRES OF BERLIN

  PROLOGUE

  In April 1945, the Second World War was coming to a bloody end for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

  As the Red Army encircled Berlin, the Nazis broadcasted a curious radio message. They threatened that if the Russian forces were not immediately withdrawn from German soil, a secret weapon “more powerful than the sun itself” would be unleashed upon them. The message ended with an ominous warning: there will be no survivors.

  Allied intelligence intercepted this message and concluded that the Nazis had a nuclear bomb. They also believed that Hitler was about to use this weapon against the Soviet 8th Guards Army, which was positioned in and around Berlin.

  President Roosevelt notified the Kremlin of this analysis, but Stalin elected to continue the assault on the German capital. Meanwhile, his generals quietly braced for the possibility of casualties on an unimaginable scale.

  On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler ordered the weapon, code-named Tristan, to be utilized against the Soviet Red Army. It is not known why these efforts failed, but shortly after giving the order, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide.

  Over the last sixty years, there has been a great deal of speculation about the miracle weapon that had Adolf Hitler so convinced he was about to win the war.

  To date, every American president since Truman has precluded any legislative or judicial inquiry into Operation Tristan on the grounds of national security.

  PART I

  SEVEN YEARS FROM NOW

  1

  Berlin, Germany

  As the sun broke through the clouds, a young mother knelt down next to a baby carriage. She pointed to the sky to show her child the sunlit cross that appeared each day on the steel bulb on the television tower. Berliners called the mysterious optical effect “the Pope’s revenge,” a tribute to the communists’ failed attempt to purge Christianity from their lands; futile efforts that included the application of various chemicals to the silver tower to try to eliminate the cross. The city had seen some very difficult days, but God had apparently not forgotten about Berlin.

  Professor Gerhard L. Richter III emerged from Berlin Cathedral behind a group of giggling Italian tourists and squinted in the sunlight. Professor Richter looked every bit the part of a mad scientist—wild hair, thick glasses and an old mismatched plaid suit that didn’t quite fit. An untrimmed gray beard bristled from his face, which matched the hair that sprung from his ears. A handwritten price tag hung from the sleeve of his jacket.

  Richter’s investigation had begun two weeks prior, at a small overgrown airstrip in the Czech countryside. After examining the rusted hulk of what had once been a Nazi transport plane, he ventured into Prague, where he carefully retraced the soldier’s footsteps. The Czech Secret Service had not been amused by his attempts to access Heydrich’s secret room in Prague Castle. He didn’t get in, but they couldn’t hide it forever. He would see to that.

  After Prague, the professor took the train north to Berlin, where he again walked the same path as the two men had done so many years ago. The culmination of his journey was Berlin Cathedral, where they had found the young girl, once upon a time. The crypts were exactly as they had been described in the dossier, but the entrance to the tunnel that led to the Neptune had long since been bricked over, as he knew it would be.

  Professor Richter relished the thought of seeing the faces of those university morons who labeled his writing as the work of a delusional conspiracy theorist. Those idiots and the governments they supported were about to be unveiled as fraudulent puppets.

  Of course, it had been difficult for him to verify all of the information in the dossier, due to the passage of time or the fact that evidence had been destroyed or covered up after the war. But the game had changed; he finally had all of the proof that he needed. He was about to rewrite the history books, whether the governments that suppressed the information for the last seventy years liked it or not.

  Professor Richter glanced at his watch and donned his hat. As he walked across the Lustgarten with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, he smiled at a beautiful woman who was talking on a cellphone.

  Richter didn’t realize it, but the woman had been following him for over two hours—she was reporting his every move to
someone who was stationed thousands of miles away.

  2

  Ft. Meade, Maryland

  Zig was nervous. He had been at the National Security Agency for six weeks. So far, it wasn’t what he expected.

  In hindsight, it had been unrealistic for him to go into the intelligence field with the expectations of driving a bulletproof black Audi on covert missions around Europe. Instead of a life that resembled a Jason Bourne film, Zig’s German studies degree and NSA job application brought him long hours pouring over email intercepts and computer bulletin boards for signs of extremist activity in Germany. He was using his language skills and doing something good for his country, which was nice, but he simply didn’t think that he was very good at it.

  Zig promised himself that if he made it through the day without getting arrested, he would find a new career. Depending on how things went, he thought he might be available for that new career before lunch.

  You see, Zig screwed up on that fine Wednesday morning over his daily cup of orange tea. Long story short, he stretched the accepted interpretation of international law and NSA electronic surveillance directives when his short attention span got the best of him. He didn’t think it was a big deal to snoop through the laptop as Professor Richter surfed the net in a Berlin café. Zig’s flawed rationale was that he wasn’t really stealing anything; he just wanted to know what book was next.

  He had always been a huge fan. He tracked down every book and article the professor had ever written and had even bought Pyramids and Aliens twice—first in hardcover and then again when the paperback came out with a blue cover. He also had copies of The Bermuda Triangle UFO Conspiracy, The Secret History of KGB Astral Projection and Tales of Man.

  The other member of the Richter fan club was his best friend Julia, who just finished her first year at the CIA. They met back in college, in the West Chester University marching band, and they had stayed in touch ever since.

  As fate would have it, Julia was in Berlin visiting her mother’s family that week. When he read her email and learned that Professor Richter was going to announce his next book at Humboldt University, he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t be there, of course, but he was dying to know what book was next in the series, so he could beat her to the punch when he got that inevitable gloating phone call from Berlin.

  No harm no foul, Zig thought as he broke through the firewall. He chuckled as he scanned the documents folder and found what he thought was the outline for Richter’s next book. There was only one problem—it wasn’t the outline for the next book. Zig knew that he was in trouble the second he saw the cover page.

  TOP SECRET

  FOR THE PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY

  The first thing he did was to call Julia. Unfortunately, he couldn’t fully explain the situation to her, nor would she believe him even if he could. He wasn’t sure what she could do to help him, if anything, but he begged her to track Richter down and keep an eye on him until he could talk to someone. Julia agreed because he was already on thin ice at work—she didn’t want him to get fired.

  Deep inside, Zig knew the dossier was like Pandora’s Box—once it was open, there was no going back. It might be sheer entertainment and fiction, like everything else the professor had written. But then again, it might be something else. He just hoped Julia could keep tabs on him in case the document turned out to be authentic.

  Then came the hard part. The door was open, so he knocked on the doorframe. Deputy CIA Director Christian Sheppard heard him, but he didn’t look up.

  So Zig knocked again. Louder.

  “I don’t have a meeting right now,” Sheppard grumbled. “Talk to Cabrini and schedule one.”

  Zig knocked again. And again and again.

  Finally, Sheppard got annoyed just enough to look up from his report on the Israeli subs in the Gulf of Oman. “What do you want? Better yet—who the hell are you?”

  Zig was nervous; his palms dripped with sweat. “Good morning, sir. I’m Michael Zigmund. I’m an analyst in the Germany group, downstairs. I need to talk to you. It’s kind of important.”

  Sheppard looked back down at his report. “Did you speak to your supervisor about this?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then go back and take it up the proper channels. If it’s important enough, I’ll see it.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  That simple declarative sentence got Sheppard to look up. In fact, Zig suddenly had his full and undivided attention. “Does this concern an immediate threat to the national security of the United States?”

  “Yessir,” Zig replied anxiously.

  “What is it?” Sheppard’s expression was deadly serious. He had one hand on a red phone.

  Zig gulped hard. “The incident in question happened in 1945. During the Battle of Berlin.”

  Sheppard stared at him in disbelief. “The Battle of Berlin? As in ... World War II?” he asked, just to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating.

  “Yes, sir. The Nazis called it Tristan. It was a supernatural weapon of some sort. Ring a bell?”

  Sheppard took off his glasses, brushed his dyed auburn hair back and sighed loudly. He was annoyed as hell. “No, that doesn’t ring a bell,” he grumbled. “In fact, the NSA and CIA both stopped worrying about witchcraft, ghosts, astrology, psychic submarine tracking and all of that other supernatural crap a long time ago. You’re wasting your time. More importantly, you’re wasting my time.”

  “Well, how about—”

  Sheppard cut him off. “Look, kid. I’ve never heard of Tristan. Whatever it was, it happened far too long ago to affect our mission in the here and now, which is to protect the United States of America. Put the Harry Potter books down and get back to work.”

  “With all due respect, sir, maybe you aren’t high enough up the chain of command to know about Operation Tristan,” Zig said rather innocently. “May I talk to the President?”

  “The president of what?” The conversation was growing tense and strange. He contemplated calling security.

  “The United States. He was just sworn in.”

  “I know who he is, asshole,” Sheppard shot back. The rogue analyst no longer seemed dangerous, just incredibly stupid with no social skills whatsoever. He wondered if someone put him up to it. Are we on Candid Camera? Punk’d?

  Zig held up the dossier. “Sir, can you please look at this? It’ll only take a minute.”

  Sheppard didn’t look at it. Point of fact, he would rather carve his eye out with a spoon than be badgered into doing something by an analyst. “Mr. Zigmund, how long have you worked here at the NSA?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Six whole weeks?”

  “Yep.”

  Suddenly, the stupid questions made sense. The guy was a newbie—a computer nerd run amok. Sheppard decided to screw with him. “Maybe you were absent that day, but you should have gotten the memo that we typically don’t grant first-year analysts an emergency meeting with the President to discuss World War II. And even if he had time to meet with you, there is nothing you can tell President Duarte about World War II that he doesn’t already know—I gave him The World at War DVD set for Christmas, which is narrated by Laurence Olivier. And let me tell you something else.”

  “Sir?”

  “That son-of-a-bitch was the best narrator in the history of human civilization—and probably a couple of other ones too. Including the chimps. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently.”

  Zig was stunned silly. The conversation wasn’t going as he had imagined. Technically, he was being openly mocked. Nevertheless, he pressed on. “Sir, this is really serious. I think I found something important.”

  “Fantastic. Now, go write a report about it. Use Times New Roman, double-space everything and use lots of goddamn commas—you can never have enough goddamn commas. But just don’t bother me again, I have work to do.”

  “But the President...”

  “Is that coffee?” Sheppard asked, pointing to the red c
eramic cup in Zig’s hand.

  “Orange tea, actually.”

  “Whatever. Drink your drink and get the fuck out.”

  “But-but-but ...”

  “Drink your drink and get the fuck out.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  Sheppard talked over him. “That’s what this bouncer used to say at the Chapeau Rouge in Prague. Today, I’m giving you the same advice that they dish out at the best bar on Earth when it’s time to go home. Drink your drink—”

  “I got it ... I got it ... thank you.”

  Sheppard pointed to the door.

  At least I tried, Zig thought as he walked out. His consolation prize from that debacle of a meeting was that he didn’t have time to confess to stealing the dossier from Richter’s computer. Which meant that he could keep his job for a few more weeks while he sent out resumes.

  Then, the strange and chaotic Wednesday took an unexpected left turn. Zig literally did a double take when he saw the stars in front of the elevator—they were on the shoulders of General John Hastings, the Director of the NSA. This is no coincidence, Zig thought. This is fate. God Bless America.

  His approach immediately caught the attention of the two Secret Service agents who were constantly at the general’s side, a precaution that former President Obama had implemented after the abduction and murder of two British intelligence officers in Brussels a few years ago.

  “General Hastings, can I please talk to you for a minute?” Zig asked.

  Hastings ignored him. He looked at his watch.

  Secret Service agent Michael Jones stepped in front of Zig and eyed his badge. “You don’t have the credentials to speak to the general without an invitation,” he said. “In fact, you’re not even supposed to be on this floor. Scram.”