The Sixth Seal полностью

Zahra took a sucker punch to the back of the head. It staggered her forward into Cork. Cork bounced Zahra back into her attacker. Zahra was half-caught by someone, colliding with him. Both went to the ground. This was where Zahra’s fight training meant little. She wasn’t a large human being. Zahra wasn’t Cork. If a man got her to the ground and successfully pinned her with his body weight, Zahra would be at a serious disadvantage.

So, she squirmed and thrashed, spinning and jabbing at the man’s face with her fingers. It worked, too. She caught him in the eye, causing him to reel back and protect his face.

Zahra rocked back, lifted her legs into the air, and locked her ankles around the back of him like a lover would — or someone trained in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. But instead of leaning in and kissing him or waiting for him to tap out, she lashed out with a punch, connecting with his exposed Adam’s apple. The lack of air in his system trumped his urge to keep fighting. He rolled to the side and into the fetal position, clutching his throat with both hands.

She stood and blinked away the last of the stars that the sucker punch had brought on. Someone clutched her shoulder. The intent was clear. The fingers were white, not black. Its owner wasn’t Cork.

Zahra latched onto one of them and wrenched it sideways with a quick wrist snap. The audible pop of the dislocating joint was sickening. She let go and let a haymaker fly. Gaston — Jacques — collapsed like Waterloo.

Cork held the last guy by his hair, swinging him around like a top. She let go, tossing him toward the same car Jacques had already dented. Zahra casually stuck out her foot, tripping the man up. He went headfirst into the passenger side door with a bang.

The last people standing sported entirely X chromosomes.

Zahra opened and closed her right hand, feeling the knuckles protest the effort. The back of her skull pulsed, but the only injury it had sustained was a tender knot and an annoying headache.

Cork’s already busted lip dribbled blood down her chin, and her left cheek was slightly swollen. Other than that, she looked okay.

“Thanks, Luv,” Cork said, breathing heavily.

Zahra bent over and put her hands on her knees, also catching her air. “You know… sometimes… I really hate you.”

Cork shrugged. “Only sometimes.”

The portly manager came back outside, yelling for his people to get back inside. The crowd that had gathered to watch Zahra and Cork dispatch the foursome of men was still present. Unfortunately, a few of them held out their phones. They had, no doubt, recorded the unpleasantries.

Dang.

“Come on, Cork. We’ve definitely overstayed our welcome.”

For nearly a century, the Krause family had been one of the more influential families in Germany. Their rise started with Dietrich Krause’s promotion to Generalfeldmarschall within Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, specifically its think tank, the Ahnenerbe. With the new position came a hefty pay raise, as well as pride and respect.

And thus, the Sixth Seal was born.

Many of General Krause’s innovations went on to benefit the Nazi war machine. As a result, money flooded into the Krause family bank account. Following the war and Dietrich’s disappearance, the government seized portions of the fortune, but only the parts Tobias Krause had allowed to be seized. He had discovered that getting into a bit of trouble was a great way to hide the much bigger trouble he truly wanted to engage in. Tobias had smartly known that any overt involvement in the war effort would lead to too many people knowing. To this day, he’d never been implicated, thanks, in part, to a handful of sympathizers who’d been covertly operating within the German government.

During the war, documents had been easily altered or even forged altogether. In the modern world, everything was done on computers. Those were easy to manipulate if one had the right people in the right places.

Once the Krause family investigation finished, Tobias promptly had those officials erased, one by one. No one would ever know how much the family had truly aided Himmler and the rest of the SS.

Tobias grinned. Heil Himmler. He’d been the real leader of the Nazi movement, not the showman Führer.

Now in his nineties, Tobias Krause was worth billions. He’d taken Dietrich’s advanced R&D and that of several other higher-ups within the Ahnenerbe and applied it to his own work. Krause Global was a scientific and engineering mogul. Everything they had designed and produced had been light years ahead of their competitors. Much of the more modern buildings in Stuttgart, and other prominent cities throughout Europe had been designed and built by Krause and his company.

But it wasn’t enough.