Free Three Tales From the World of Cotton Malone by Steve Berry

encouragement. It was the price the wealthy paid for the privilege of profiting from the Reich. Bormann ruled that fund, and many believed that he diverted much of those assets into foreign accounts. They were right. Gamero’s file cabinets contained records of those transfers.”
    â€œA bit stupid, wasn’t it? Keeping records.”
    Schüb smiled. “Such was their fallacy. Nazis loved to write things down. Like that memo you hold. It records the transfer of much wealth at a time when it would have been far better to say nothing.”
    He could not argue with that.
    â€œGamero was the son of a German immigrant. His father, along with countless others, filtered into Chile after the war. Some had relatives in the area, descendants of the original German émigrés who came, with the encouragement of the government, into central Chile during the 19th century. Gamero’s father had been a high-level diplomat in the foreign service, blessed with living abroad during the war, capable afterward of denying, with impunity, any involvement with war crimes.”
    â€œWho are you?” he asked, truly wanting to know.
    Schüb stared at the fire, still sitting slouched in the chair. “I am a man who bears a heavy burden. I think you can understand that, can’t you?”
    â€œI came here to right a personal wrong. I don’t care about your problems.”
    â€œI wish mine were as simple as yours.”
    Silence passed between them.
    â€œMy brother is dead,” Schüb said. “I killed him myself a little while ago.”
    â€œWhy am I still alive?”
    â€œI want to show you something.”

    He followed Schüb across the grass, back into the woods, and onto a wide path. After ten minutes of walking, during which his host said nothing, he spied the citadel, the long ponderous edifice clinging to the mount of a sharply rising slope, its gray walls splashed with a sodium vapor glow.
    They found a paved lane and followed the incline up to the main entrance. A solitary guard stood outside the wall, armed with a rifle.
    â€œMy brother’s castle,” Schüb said. “My guard.”
    â€œWhere do you live?”
    â€œNot here.”
    He surveyed the burg and its assortment of buildings, the walls dotted with mullion, dormer, and oriel windows. They walked into an inner courtyard. Several cars sat idle. Some of the windows above glowed with light, but most loomed dark and silent.
    A lighted entrance seemed the way in. They started across the cobbles, passing the dark cars.
    Inside was opulent, German, and medieval. Exactly what he would have expected.
    â€œMy brother clung to his heritage.”
    Schüb led them upstairs to a sleeping chamber. Wyatt noticed the enormous bed with bulbous Jacobean legs. Above its head hung a massive oil painting that depicted the archangel Michael with his sword directing anxious wayfarers toward heaven.
    Then he noticed the panel. On the far side, in an alcove.
    A slab of stone, hinged open.
    They walked over and stepped inside. Stone stairs lined with a red carpet runner wound down in a tight circle. They slowly descended and finished standing on a polished gray slate floor, staring at a Nazi uniform. The dry air was clearly climate-controlled and humidified. The coarse stone walls, plastered and also painted gray, bore evidencefrom when they were hacked out of the bedrock. The chamber cut a twisting path, one room dissolving into another. There were flags, banners, even a replica of some SS altar. Countless figurines, a toy soldier set laid out on a colorful map of early-20th-century Europe, helmets, swords, daggers, caps, uniforms, windbreakers, pistols, rifles, gorgets, bandoliers, rings, jewelry, gauntlets, photographs, and a respectable number of paintings signed by Hitler himself.
    â€œThere are about three thousand items in all,” Schüb said. “A lifetime of effort. Perhaps the greatest collection of Nazism