apocalypse watch | Page 4

for you, brilliant plans.”

The early sun was blinding, causing the old man crawling through the wild brush to blink repeatedly as he wiped his eyes with the back of his trembling right hand. He had reached the edge of the small promontory on top of the hill, the “high ground,” as they called it years ago-years burned into his memory. The grassy point overlooked an elegant country estate in the Loire Valley. A flagstone terrace was no more than three hundred meters below, with a brick path bordered by flowers leading to it. Gripped in the old man's left hand, the shoulder strap taut, was a powerful rifle, its sight calibrated for the precise distance. The weapon was ready to fire. Soon his target-a man older than himself-would appear in the telescopic crosshairs. The monster would be taking. his morning stroll to the terrace, dressed in his flowing morning robe' his reward his morning coffee laced with the finest brandy, a reward he would never reach on this particular morning. Instead, he would die, collapsing among the flowers, an appropriate irony: the death of consummate evil among surrounding beauty.

Jean-Pierre Jodelle, seventy-eight years of age and once a fierce provisional leader of the Resistance, had waited fifty years to fulfill a promise, a commitment, he had made to himself and to his God.

He had failed with the lawyers and in the sacrosanct court chambers; no, not failed, instead, been insulted by them, scorned by all of them, and told to take his contemptible fantasies to a cell in a lunatic asylum, where he belonged! The great General Monluc was a true hero of France, a close associate of le grand Charles Andre de Gaulle, that most illustrious of all soldier, statesmen who had kept in constant touch with

Monluc throughout the war over the underground radio frequencies despite the prospect of torture and a firing squad should Monluc be exposed.

It was all merde! Monluc was a turncoat, a coward, and a traitor!

He gave lip service to the arrogant De Gaulle, fed him insignificant intelligence, and lined his own pockets with Nazi gold and art objects worth millions. And then in the aftermath, le grand Charles, in euphoric adulation, had pronounced Monluc un bel amide guerre, a man to be honored. It was no less than a command for all France.

Merde! How little De Gaulle knew! Monluc had ordered the execution of Jodelle's wife and his first son, a child of five. A second son, an infant of six months, was spared, perhaps by the warped rationality of the Wehrmacht officer who said, “He's not a Jew, maybe someone will find him.”

Someone did. A fellow Resistance fighter, an actor from the Comedie Franqaise. He found the screaming baby amid the rubble of the shattered house on the outskirts of Barbizon, where he had come for a secret meeting the following morning. The actor had brought the child home to his wife, a celebrated actress whom the Germans adored their affection not returned, for her performances were dictated, not offered voluntarily. And when the war ended, Jodelle was a skeleton of his former self, physically unrecognizable and mentally beyond repair, and he knew it. Three years in a concentration camp, piling the bodies of gassed Jews, Gypsies, and “undesirables,” had reduced him to near idiocy, with neck tics, erratic, blinking, spasms of throated cries, and all that went with severe psychiatric damage. He never revealed himself to his surviving son or the “parents” who had reared him. Instead, wandering through the bowels of Paris and changing his name frequently, Jodelle observed from a distance as the child grew into manhood and became one of the most popular actors in France.

That distance, that unendurable pain, had been caused by Monluc the monster, who was now entering the circle of Jodelle's telescopic sight. Only seconds now, and his commitment to God would be fulfilled.

Suddenly there was a terrible crack in the air and Jodelle's back was on fire, causing him to drop the rifle. He spun around, stunned to see two men in shirtsleeves, one with a bullwhip, looking down at him.

“It would be a pleasure to kill you, you sick old idiot, but your disappearance would only lead to complications,” said the man with the whip.

“You have a wine soaked mouth that never stops chattering craziness. It's better that you go back to Paris and rejoin your army of drunken vagrants. Get out of here, or die!”

"How .. . ? How did you know .. .

“You're a mental case, Jodelle, or whatever name you're using this month,” said the guard beside the whip master.

“Youthink we haven't spotted you these last two days, breaking the foliage as you came to this very accessible place with your rifle? You were far better in the old days, I'm