I’m starting to understand how you felt, Carroll, she thought. Alone, yet pursued by some dark, malevolent force.
The elevator arrived with a cheerful ding. Kate clenched her jaw and figured it had been heard as far as the dance floor, so she quickly stepped into the elevator, closed the gate, and pressed a button.
As the elevator went up, she fell back into the cushioned seat. Her legs were too weak to stand. She noticed a folded newspaper and picked it up, her hands shaking. She was completely unsurprised by what she saw.
It was a copy of the Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the Nazi party. On the front page a wrathful Goebbels was speaking to a feverish crowd. In the corner was the date: August 1939. She dropped it like a poisonous snake and frantically rubbed her hands on the seat cushion, trying to get off the invisible filth.
The elevator came to a stop with a jolt.
Kate jumped to her feet and opened the elaborate elevator gate. Just as she was about to get out, she stopped, paralyzed as if hit by lightning.
In front of her, staring with glassy eyes, stood Isaac Feldman.
XL
Time seemed to stand still. Feldman looked at Kate curiously, wondering how the hell she’d gotten there. Kate, for her part, looked back hopelessly. Her game was up. Any moment now he would shout out, and a slew of security guards would be at his side. She remembered how brutally Moore had treated Senka, causing a pang of terror.
Feldman looked deplorable. He had only a few tufts of hair remaining, and the rest of his scalp was red and scabby as if he’d contracted ringworm. Hunched over, he was now shakier than ever, using an umbrella as a cane. His eyes were dull, and Kate noticed what appeared to be a cataract in one of them. His skin was wrinkled and dry as if the business tycoon had aged fifty years in the matter of a few hours. He was trembling like a leaf about to fall from a tree.
“Hi, Isaac,” she murmured. “Listen to me, please. I beg of you. Let me explain.”
“Do you know where my grandpa is?” His voice was as parched as an old newspaper. “I want to see my grandpa.”
“Isaac, what are you talking about?”
“My grandpa. I want to see my grandpa right now,” pouted the old man as a string of thick, foul-smelling spittle dribbled from his mouth.
The colossus known as Feldman, the business tiger who’d made people tremble, had lost his mind, reduced to an elderly man with dementia shuffling through the hallways of the Valkyrie. The ship had destroyed the only passenger still alive from the original 1939 voyage. His body was still alive but not his mind. With a shiver she wondered if Feldman’s consciousness had become a black hole hiding in some remote part of his brain.
Kate approached him and held his arm. Carefully, she walked with him toward a chair and helped him take a seat. Feldman smelled strongly of urine.
“Have a seat, Isaac,” she said in a soothing voice, watching behind her the whole time. If a guard were to appear, everything would be lost. “Let’s make a deal. I’m going to search for your grandfather. We’ll come back for you in a little bit, but you can’t move from here or make any noise in the meantime. OK?”
Feldman did nothing but continue staring off into the infinity of space. His jaw hung open as if he were in a permanent catatonic state. Kate looked at him sympathetically and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. The last time she’d seen him he’d been acting so curtly with her, which had made Moore treat her like a terrorist. But he was no longer himself. Everything that had made him Feldman was now gone. Unsteady remnants were all that was left, a Feldman who no longer recognized her voice.
When she was certain he would not move, she set off down the hall again.
Feldman stayed in his seat, trapped in the heavy netting of a deep dream from which he was unable to awake. He was burnt out like a lightbulb after a power surge.
The Gneisenau Room was deserted. The stations that should have been occupied by the research team were empty, and all of the monitors had been shut off. Above the table the small projector Cherenkov had used during the opening presentation was still there. Kate felt like that had been a million years ago even though it had been only four days.
Four days.
A cold sweat slid down her back. If it had already been four days since departure, then that meant the Valkyrie would be approaching the same place where its passengers had disappeared more than seventy years ago. An appointment with destiny, once again.
Time was running out.
In a corner of the room sat piles of folders with documents and temperature readouts that no longer meant anything to anyone.
The scene was one of desolation and absolute emptiness—the remains of a shipwreck forgotten by its own passengers.
Someone had knocked over papers, and the ground was layered with wrinkled pages covered in mathematical calculations. Dried blood stained many of the pages, like disfigured flower petals. Kate put her hand up to her nose, relieved to find that she was still not bleeding. For now.
She pushed past several reports and studies on electromagnetism that nobody would ever read again until she found a set of pages stapled together that was labeled “Attention Kate Kilroy.” Although there didn’t seem to be anything useful in the forty to fifty pages, she would have to try to find clues, but this was no place to do it.
She exited the room and went to the great gallery. Its name was far too grandiloquent for what it really was, but Kate supposed that the place was probably quite impressive to a passenger in the 1930s. It was a long, wide corridor with high, ornate ceilings that were dotted with stained glass depicting Germanic gods contemplatively frowning down at the wood floors below. Along the sides were spots for small shops where KDF had planned to put bars, jewelry shops, cafés, and several other types of businesses for the first- and second-class passengers to enjoy. Kate paused beneath one of the stained-glass pieces. Above her, a bearded and muscular Germanic pagan deity looked like he’d just eaten a meal that was too spicy. Kate approached one of the empty shop fronts. She found it was locked with all of its lights off, as were all of the others.
This was her first time in this part of the ship. Dust and plastic covered the floor, and wires still remained from the restoration efforts. It didn’t seem like anyone had been there since the ship had embarked on this journey. Although the commercial walkway was much smaller than ones found on modern cruise ships, the Valkyrie had still been ahead of its time for the 1930s by implementing such a commercial center.
Kate turned a door handle, and the door swung open noiselessly. She walked through the shadows until she came to a corner where a stream of dim afternoon light filtered through a porthole. On the other side the fog had become denser, and it clung to the Valkyrie even more closely. The rain continued to whip violently across the ship, and the wind howled like a distressed soul.
She fervently leafed through the file. Just as she’d been promised, the list of passengers and crew was there. One of the pages had the name Schweizer underlined, the owner of the straw hat she’d found. Kate found it almost funny that she had been so scared of that, in light of all that had happened since. As she had expected, there was no blueprint of the ship or any clue as to where Senka might be found.
“Typical, Robert,” she whispered angrily, tossing half the pages to the floor in frustration.
Then, she looked down at the last two pages in her hand. It was a copy of the Valkyrie’s logbook, the one Captain Harper—if he still even answered to that name—had consulted on the bridge. She noticed that Anne Medine had copied only the pages from the last two days. Her eyes jumped down to the final passage that had been made in the angular handwriting of Captain Kuss, the German who had led the original voyage in 1939. In the bottom right-hand corner, there was a small, dark stain, like someone had spilled a drop of ink on the page and tried to wipe it off with a finger.
20.47 GMT: 53 degrees 94' 17" north and 28 degrees 47' 09" west. Slight wind blowing NNW with strong gusts of wind inters
persed. Ten-foot-high waves. Fog bank unchanged since the last changing of the guard. Direction and speed constant. Next to the boilers, a strange vibration has been detected. Oberfeldwebel Dittmar found no apparent irregularities. During the following inspection, five stowaways were discovered in the lower deck in boiler room number two. The captain left the bridge to attend a Gala dinner. Official duties were delegated to head of security Otto Dittmar. Changing of the guard performed without incident.
After that, the rest of the logbook was blank until the Pass of Ballaster had discovered the Valkyrie at four thirty that morning, empty and adrift.
Kate reread the passage many times. Stowaways on board the Valkyrie. This was the first she’d heard of this. Feldman had never said a word about it, and it wasn’t in the file Robert had started. It made complete sense, considering how the logbook had been buried in naval archives up until a year ago, hidden beneath a stack of administrative documents from that era. But if Feldman knew about it, why had he not said anything?
Then, it came to her. Feldman must have been one of those stowaways.
Everything he’d done stemmed from there, hoping to discover what had happened to that family. His family.
He wanted to find the root of his origins. The anomalies, Cherenkov’s research, Wolf und Klee—none of it made a difference to Feldman.
Approaching footsteps scared Kate out of her thoughts, and she scurried under a table like a rat. The steps stopped right in front of the entrance. Kate gleaned a dark, shapeless shadow outlined against the windowpane. Distressed, she looked around, but there was nothing she could use to defend herself and no way out.
She watched as the doorknob turned, and the frosted pane of glass embedded in the door rattled.
The air in Kate’s lungs felt as if it were being sucked out.
Harvey Carter, the American physicist, stood in the doorway. A ray of light from above bathed his face in a dull shine. Before he had worn a whimsical raccoon pin, but now he wore a gleaming swastika, red as blood.
XLI
Carter stumbled into the darkness of the shop, muttering something under his breath that Kate couldn’t make out. Although she couldn’t see him clearly, she imagined that his shirtfront was covered in blood and he had that far-off zombie look. He was now one of them.
Without taking her eyes off Carter, Kate groped blindly around on the floor. Her fingers scratched over pieces of plastic and dust bunnies that had accumulated under the table. Then, her hands closed over a hard cardboard tube likely left behind by one of the decorators.
Kate gripped it tightly. Six feet in length, it was like a bat, and she waited patiently as Carter got closer to her. As he passed by her, she popped out from beneath the table and let out a shriek of fury, holding the makeshift weapon above her head. With all of her might, she struck Carter with the tube. The physicist screamed in shock, turned around, and instinctively raised his hands. Kate stepped back and raised up the tube again, but she bumped against the wall, which gave Carter enough time to jump back and put the table between the two of them.
“Kate, for the love of God,” he bellowed. “Have you gone crazy? It’s me, Carter.”
Kate stood motionless upon hearing his voice. He recognized her. He spoke to her in English, not German. Her relief was so intense that she dropped the tube and felt on the verge of tears.
“Carter. Is it really you?”
“Of course,” he assured her, rubbing his back. “Or at least what’s left of me after you hit me.”
The scientist limped toward the porthole and stood beneath the fading light. Kate could see he hadn’t shaved for several days and he was wearing a simple white shirt. Huge dark bags drooped beneath his bloodshot eyes. But otherwise he seemed very much the same. He had no sign of blood on his nose or his clothes. What he really looked like was someone suffering a terrible hangover.
“Do you recognize me?” he said after a few moments, sounding skeptical. “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re Carter, the physicist. You work for the University of Georgia. You’re a vegetarian, and two days ago at dinner you told me you hate baseball and that you prefer football,” Kate reeled off. She felt comforted by saying everything out loud. It was like reciting an incantation that was able to break past the cloak of darkness surrounding them.
Carter nodded in satisfaction. He groped around in his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and took a long drag before coughing out a large cloud.
“You’re Kate Kilroy,” he said in turn as he rubbed his throat in pain. “You’re the reporter from that English newspaper. You hate peas, and you were wearing a beautiful blue dress two nights ago. You’re also the only person on board who does not seem to have lost her mind.”
Overwhelmed by a rush of relief, Kate hugged the scientist, to which Carter responded with a couple of awkward pats on her back.
Pulling back from the embrace, Kate pointed at the swastika pin gleaming wickedly on Carter’s shirt. “What’s that about?”
Confused, Carter looked down at his chest and passed his hand over the pin, frowning. “I can’t remember very well. My memory has been all muddled up the last few hours. My head feels like someone jammed a ton of cotton into my ears. The lack of sleep is killing me.”
“Lack of sleep?”
“That’s the only way of avoiding what’s happening,” Carter said, sitting down and ripping off the pin. “Either way, I think I probably fell asleep for a little while during the last twenty-four hours. I don’t recall putting on these clothes. I have no idea where I picked up the stupid little pin.”
“You haven’t slept for how long?”
“Seventy-two hours, more or less,” the physicist answered, passing a hand over his stubble. “In the laboratory we detected a surge in the electromagnetic field that was interfering with the alpha waves, which in turn—” He stopped himself and made a dismissive motion. “Bah! That doesn’t matter anymore. To put it bluntly, the human brain is no more than an electric field. My theory is that these conditions have been enough to interfere with human brain functions. I told Cherenkov, but the bastard wouldn’t listen to me. He was far too obsessed with being able to empirically demonstrate the existence of his Singularity. Now the idiot has found what he was looking for.”
“But what do dreams have to do with all this?”
“I can’t explain it,” Carter said, the extreme fatigue weighing down on his words. “It wouldn’t even be simple to explain it under normal conditions.”
“How did you find me?”
“The floor is covered in dust. You left a trail even a blind man could follow. I passed through the doors to the great gallery and noticed that they were open, and so I came looking to see who was here. I’m looking for Feldman. He’s the only one who can help us out of this insanity.”
“Feldman’s no longer able to stop anything,” Kate replied bitterly, relaying what she’d been through the past few days.
Carter listened attentively. When she got to the part about Senka’s arrest, he shook his head.
“I can’t believe that woman would be a neo-Nazi. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“I agree. That’s why I’m looking for her. Something tells me she’s the only one able to stop this ship.”
“Seriously? How do you know?”
Kate didn’t want to tell Carter about Robert. She didn’t care if he thought her to be a lunatic, but she desperately needed his help, and if she brought up phantom lovers, he would think she was completely off her rocker. “I just know. Trust me, Carter, I beg of you. I need your help.”
Carter sighed and raised his arms up.
“I suppose I have no other choice. You’re the only person on board that isn’t bat-shit crazy and still remains aware of the fact that we aren’t a part of some fucking Nazi parliament.”
“Will you help me look for Senka, then?” Kate felt hope burgeoning inside.
“I can do you one better.” The physi
cist gave a wry smile. “I know where she is this very moment.”
XLII
Richard Moore was confused. Confused and angry. Sitting on a stool in one of the ship’s bars—the only one fully stocked—he was looking at himself in the bar mirror with severe irritation. A thirty-year-old bottle of Talisker whiskey stood before him. The bottle was already half-empty, and Moore felt more than a little tipsy. He was drunk and enraged.
Everything had happened so fast. He did not know when this simple job had transformed into an endless nightmare.
Or when he’d lost control of the situation.
Moore was a worldly man. Approaching forty, he had the hardened body of a football player with muscles like pistons and without an ounce of fat. He’d joined the Black Rats, the infamous British army brigade, when he was only eighteen, and he’d quickly climbed the ranks. Year after year he strengthened his reputation as a hard-nosed, irritable soldier who held a fierce reverence for the hierarchy of power. Moore was happy with the military discipline imposed by Her Majesty’s army. He’d found a home there that an alcoholic father and an ex-prostitute mother hadn’t been able to offer.
If it had been up to him, he never would have left the Black Rats. That was his home. But one hot day in the summer of 2005, everything went to hell twelve miles outside of Kandahar.
It was a routine checkpoint on a dusty road near a handful of smelly villages made of adobe and donkey shit. Their mission was to perform random checks to fish out Taliban sympathizers. Moore was there with five men under his command, all behind two heavy machine guns and sweating nonstop. The wind made things worse as it swept down from the mountains carrying dust and sand. All that, on top of a full day in the sun wearing a Kevlar helmet, had given Moore a severe headache. It could have happened to anyone.
The Last Passenger Page 24
