This story began in August 2003. For more than a week, the criminal pages of almost all leading American newspapers were occupied by the more than mysterious death of Wilhelm Herder.
At the first examination, everything turned out as follows: shots were fired from the neighboring mansion, and the bullets, in an unknown, incomprehensible, incomprehensible way, passing through the walls, hit the head and chest of Mr. Herder.
And in fact, all the strange and completely inexplicable circumstances of the incident resembled a convoluted detective story. One non-poor and very influential American citizen, Wilhelm Herder, who at that moment turned ninety-two years old, was found dead on August 15, 2003 in the office of his own mansion located in a prestigious suburb of Boston.
The office was located in the central part of the building on the third floor, surrounded by other rooms and had no windows.
The light entered the room through the ceiling, which was completely made of special glass, transparent and very durable. Well, the old man had such quirks …
The cause of death of Mr. Herder was two bullet wounds - one in the head and the other in the heart. Each wound in itself was unequivocally incompatible with life and led to an instant death.
One of the mysteries immediately became bullets, which instantly made the experts fall into complete bewilderment. To begin with, they were interested in their composition: the bullets were made of electrum (an alloy of gold and silver). Why shoot a person with bullets with such a composition?
If they were pure silver, one would think that someone considered the old man a vampire and decided to take him to the grave in such an exotic (for our century, of course) way. Secondly, being soft in nature, they were deformed. Why use metal that can fail?
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But even this was not the main thing: according to the firm conviction of ballistics, they were fired from a non-standard rifle with a caliber of twelve millimeters. In principle, there was no barrel in the database capable of leaving the rifling found by the forensic experts on the bullets.
However, even more confusion was caused by the circumstances of death. At thirteen forty-five minutes, Wilhelm Herder entered his office. Mr. Herder's secretary, John Peters, was in the room in front of the office.
As, however, always. At fifteen o'clock sharp, the servant, Mrs Boyes, entered the study with the vitamin drink, which the elderly Mr. Herder was in the habit of taking at that time - and found the lifeless corpse of the owner lying next to the writing table.
The police were immediately called, who arrived quickly - eight minutes later, but the investigation came to a standstill from the very beginning: because from the very beginning it was completely unclear how the attacker (or attackers) managed to shoot Herder.
A shot through the windows was excluded because there were none. The glass roof was carefully examined, but no signs of damage could be found, and the very location of the mansion is such that it was possible to shoot through the roof only from a balloon, helicopter or other aircraft, which no one else observed nearby. A thorough search of the mansion from roof to basement did not lead to the discovery of the murder weapon.
Interrogation of Mr. Herder's secretary, John Peters, revealed that Peters was … a secret agent of one of the American intelligence services, which put him in charge of Mr. Herder.
Peters' track record was impeccable, and, again, the bullets that had killed Mr. Hurder could never have been fired from the secretary's nine-millimeter pistol.
Then, of course, they began to scrupulously study the video recordings of the security system. The best experts have confirmed the authenticity of these records, the absence of any editing, erasure of the records; all video cameras worked properly and without interruption.
However, not a single shot gave an answer - who and in what way managed to get into Mr. Herder's office. Because, according to the video recordings, no one entered the mansion, no one left it, the movements inside the mansion were exactly the same as on other days.
In addition, video footage confirmed that Herder's secretary, Peters, had not entered the owner's office. Moreover, the camera in the office captured the very moment when the bullets hit Mr. Herder, but there were no traces of either the weapon or the intruder on the film.
Then, which is quite natural, they decided to find out the point from which the shots were fired. The ballistics specialists, using the information available, established both the point and the direction. It was not difficult to do this: given the extremely insignificant content of gunpowder in the area around the two wounds, one could confidently assume that the shot was fired from a distance of three hundred, three hundred and fifty meters from the direction north of the victim.
Of course, in that direction there was first the wall of the study, then the adjoining room, and finally the outer wall of the house. Further empty space.
Naturally, no bullet marks were found in the walls. And what kind of bullets had to be such that they pierced several walls ?! Especially if they were made of soft metals? And, accordingly, what kind of weapon was it supposed to be ?!
Despite the obviously unpromising idea of looking in this direction, they nevertheless decided to carefully examine the place from which, according to the calculations of the ballistics, the shots were fired.
At three hundred and fifty meters north of Mr. Herder's mansion, calculated by ballistics, there was another mansion, which had been empty for a month - the owners were away.
A search warrant was obtained for an empty building, and it gave stunning results: in a room overlooking the Herder house, microscopic particles of gunpowder were found on furniture, furnishings and walls, identical in composition to those found on the bullets and in the near-wounded areas corpse.
It turned out to be complete nonsense: shots and soft bullets were fired from the neighboring mansion, passing through the walls in an unknown, incomprehensible, incomprehensible way, hitting the head and chest of Mr. Herder. Such an explanation looked completely unsatisfactory, moreover, completely ridiculous.
At that moment, the unexpected happened: the federal authorities intervened in the case and removed the local investigative team from the investigation.
However, freelance journalist Eugene Kane, who covered the event in the newspapers, decided to find out who, in fact, was Mr. Herder, and who needed to kill him. Here's what he learned.
Mr. Herder was not an American born. He arrived in the States in August 1945, and before arriving in the New World, his name was Baron Wilhelm von Herder. And his profession was extremely interesting - especially in light of the incomprehensible murder. Wilhelm von Herder was … a prominent gunsmith designer. Where? In the Third Reich.
In 1940, von Herder proposed to equip the Wehrmacht tanks with a cannon, called the A-1. The main difference of this cannon was that it sent shells through … the fourth dimension.
This was achieved thanks to a special system of rifling inside the barrel, twisting the projectile to an unstable state, in which a spontaneous transition to the fourth spatial dimension is possible.
On hearing this is perceived, of course, as pure fantasy. However, to understand how this works, you need to draw a simple analogy, and everything will become more than clear. If you draw a line on the ground, which, of course, will have only two dimensions - the bottom and the width, then such a two-dimensional line will in no way be able to protect against a projectile moving in three dimensions familiar to our world.
So no three-dimensional wall or even the thickest and most durable armor can protect against weapons firing from (or through) the fourth dimension.
The Herder cannon was designed, but tests showed that it was capable of withstanding no more than five shots, after which it burst the barrel. Therefore, Herder's idea had no mass application and was temporarily forgotten.
She was remembered in 1942, when the German special services decided to destroy the top leadership of the Soviet Union. German agents were aware of underground shelters located in secret sections of the Moscow metro. Reinforced with reinforced concrete, they were absolutely impenetrable for the most powerful German bombs.
And then the titled gunsmith von Herder was given the task of creating an aerial bomb capable of penetrating the fourth dimension, and thus unhindered by the concrete floors of bomb shelters.
Unlike a cannon projectile, the rate of fall of bombs is significantly lower, which, naturally, complicated the work of von Herder. It took him three years to create a prototype, called the B-4, which would deliver a nine-hundred-kilogram charge to a depth of fifty meters. But in 1945, Nazi Germany was no longer able to translate von Herder's ideas into practice. She was not up to it …
After the Allied victory, von Herder, along with other German specialists, was taken to the United States, where he was provided with the conditions for further research.
Because only a complete fool could not be interested in such developments. And Americans have never been stupid, especially in areas that promised profit or military superiority.
Von Herder met the expectations of the new owners. Many of his developments have found application in the armed forces. For example, the bombs that destroyed Saddam Hussein's deep hideout during the 2003 US-Iraq war were based on the writings of von Herder.
And then Saddam Hussein made a decision: von Herder must overtake retribution. Already underground, Hussein organized an operation to eliminate Herder.
The special squad tracked down the gunsmith and destroyed it with a special rifle. It was known that von Herder produced such rifles in single copies for the needs of the American special services.
Naturally, they were not disseminated, and, again, naturally, they could not be in the database of ballistics. That is why the usual, unsuspecting investigative team was removed from the case of the old man's murder.
So how did the rifle end up in the hands of the avengers? One of the special rifles ended up in Afghanistan, where it was planned by the hands of the mujahideen to eliminate the commander of a limited contingent of Soviet troops.
For some reason, the assassination attempt failed, and the rifle, in the end, after long "travels", fell into the hands of Hussein.
Hussein's special squad coped with the task perfectly: bullets penetrated into Herder's closed office through the fourth dimension and hit the target.
Naturally, this version is not supported by any evidence, although the restless Eugene Kane claimed that he had evidence.
Representatives of the FBI on public relations, answering numerous questions, how reliable is Eugene Kane's message about the use of a "rifle that shoots through the fourth dimension", which arose after the freelancer's article, replied that there would be no comments.
Which, no doubt, speaks not in favor of the FBIs. For when a journalist writes nonsense (slander, nonsense, invention, etc.), there are always comments. And when the truth is, the comments disappear …