Colony Of Evil

“Two days prior to the attack, the consulate received a note, postmarked Bogotá. It took nine days to be delivered. No one in the postal service can explain exactly why.”

Another nod to Kurtzman, and the happy-couple photo was replaced by a plain sheet of paper. Roughly centered on it was a typed message: “See now, how ugly are the Jews who suck our blood.”

“That’s it?” Bolan asked. “I’d imagine the Israeli consulate gets bags of poison-pen notes every day.”

“You’d win that bet,” Brognola said. “I checked it out. Apparently they average fifteen pounds of hate mail daily, double that around well-known religious holidays.”

“So what sets this apart? The timing or the ‘ugly’ reference?”

“The postmark, actually,” Brognola replied. “But that’s hindsight. Stay with me for a minute, here.”

A nod, another change of photos. Now the carcass of a tour bus filled the screen. Fire damage showed around the frames of shattered windows. Bolan picked out bullet holes along the one side he could see. The bus’s logo, what was left of it, read Tourismo Grand de Sonora.

“This went down about an hour after the Park Avenue attack,” Brognola said. “A busload of Israeli tourists traveling around Sonora, as I’m sure you gathered from the sign. They were en route to Hermosillo, from some kind of mission, when a group of masked men stopped the bus and started shooting. Passersby, they left alone.”

“They wanted witnesses,” Bolan observed.

“Apparently.”

“Survivors on the bus?”

“Not one.”

“You’re linking this to acid on Park Avenue, because…?”

“Of this,” Brognola said, and Kurtzman keyed the next slide. Once again, it showed a common piece of stationery with a one-line message: “Jews suck the lifeblood of nations.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t see it, either,” Brognola replied, “but the Mossad and FBI agree that both notes were prepared on the same manual typewriter. It’s a vintage German model, specifically an Erika Naumann Model 6, last manufactured between 1938 and early 1945.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I wish. It just gets worse.”

This time the picture changed without a signal from Brognola. On the screen, a body sprawled in blood and sunshine, with pastel storefronts and palm trees in the background. Bolan couldn’t see the dead man’s face.

Small favors.

“Ira Margulies,” Brognola said. “One of the top fifteen or twenty richest people in Miami Beach. He was a force to reckon with in banking, real estate, what have you—until Friday morning, when a shooter took him down.”

“Where was the note?” asked Bolan.

“Tucked under his left elbow, away from the blood flow,” Brognola said.

And as he spoke, another note filled up the hanging screen. It read, “The Jews are not the people who are blamed for nothing.”

Bolan frowned and asked, “Why does that sound familiar?”

Price fielded that one, telling him, “It’s similar, but not identical, to a note left at one of Jack the Ripper’s London crime scenes back in 1888. The original note misspelled ‘Jews,’ and a couple of other words are slightly different. For plagiarism, it’s a sloppy job.”

“You said, from 1888?”

She nodded, adding, “But it’s quoted in every book and article written about the Ripper since then. How many hundreds are there, all over the world? We think it stuck in someone’s mind. They’re playing games.”

“Same typewriter?”

“Affirmative,” Brognola said.

“But only one note sent by mail,” Bolan observed.

“We think,” Brognola said, “that they were leery of a drop-off at the consulate.”

“One source for all three notes,” Bolan confirmed. “One mind behind the crimes.”

It was the big Fed’s turn to nod. “And on the rare occasions when he mails a note—”

“It comes from Bogotá,” Bolan finished the thought.

“Or somewhere in Colombia, at least. We think the author’s tied in to a Nazi clique established in the country during 1948 or ’49. Are you familiar with a place known as Colonia Victoria?”

“Victory Colony?” Bolan translated with his meager Spanish. “It’s not ringing any bells.”

“No reason why it should, really,” Brognola said. “It gets some bad publicity every ten years or so, but mostly it’s a hush-hush operation. The Colombians don’t like to talk about it, with their public image in the crapper as it is. The German immigrants and their descendants in the colony, well, it’s in their best interest if they don’t get too much ink or TV time.”

“How so?” Bolan asked.

“The colony was founded by war criminals, for starters,” Brognola replied. He slid a dossier across to Bolan, an inch-thick manila folder with a CD-ROM on top. “You’ll find the major players there. Or what we know of them, at least. Nutshell, they’ve got substantial acreage in coca and they deal with the Aznar cartel. Some say they use native slave labor, harvesting the crop, refining it. The local police take their bribes and look the other way.”

“So, Nazi narcotraffickers?”

“Tip of the iceberg,” Brognola said. “Through the years, there’ve been reports that the resident führer—one Hans Dietrich, formerly an SS captain under Eichmann—runs some kind of cult. We’ve had reports of child-molesting and polygamy, you name it. As I said, the local cops are deaf and blind. On one or two occasions, when investigators made the trip from Bogotá, they claimed the place checked out okay. Whatever that means, when you think about the status quo down there.”

“Somebody’s getting greased,” Bolan suggested.

“Six or seven ways from Sunday,” Brognola agreed. “Bribes are a given. On the flip side, the Israelis and a few left-wing reporters have tried sneaking in, over the years. Most of them disappear without a trace. One, as I understand it, wound up eaten by a jaguar or a crocodile, something like that.”

Old Nazis raising new ones in the jungle. And an antique German typewriter.

“It’s thin,” Bolan said, “if that postmark’s all you’ve got.”

“Did I say that?” Brognola’s grin was just this side of sly.

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“When Margulies got hit, down in Miami Beach, somebody got the shooter’s license tag. Of course, it was a rental car.”

“Dead end,” Bolan said.