SecondWorld

by Jeremy Robinson

  Miller sat back in the seat and looked at Adler. She was focused on the road, emotions held at bay for the moment, which was a gift not many people possessed. They’d both be a mess when the adrenaline wore off, but the woman had a dormant fighter at her core. “Turn right.”

  She did.

  “Know how to get to the highway from here?” The question triggered Miller’s memory. He’d asked Arwen the same question back in Miami. This time he got a nod. Miller watched Adler drive. She had the same blond hair, blue eyes, and determination as Arwen, though her face was more angular, more—

  Adler noted his attention and glanced at him. “What?”

  He cleared his throat and brushed the broken glass from his leg. “How much cash do you have on you?”

  The question caught her off guard for a moment. “Uh, I— Nine hundred dollars.”

  She saw the look of surprise on Miller’s face, and she added, “I thought if people at Interpol were a part of the attacks, then maybe other agencies were, too, and I could be tracked through my cards. I went to three ATMs.”

  A fighter and smart, Miller thought. “Good thinking. When we reach Ninety-five, head north into Pennsylvania. We’ll get a room there.”

  Miller leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

  “What are you doing?” Adler asked, sounding incredulous. “Taking a nap?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About making a phone call.” Miller opened his eyes and removed the president’s iPhone from his pocket. A single number had been preprogrammed into the phone. He selected it and tapped the Call button.

  24

  The phone rang only once before Bensson answered. “You should be sleeping.”

  “No longer an option,” Miller replied.

  “What happened?” Bensson asked, getting straight to the point.

  Miller gave him the short version of the story. “Special Ops squad took a shot at me. They missed.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Miller thought about the question. He was far from okay. But his heart still pumped, which was more than could be said for Brodeur. “A little banged up, but they dropped Brodeur.”

  “Brodeur?”

  “The FBI agent assigned to me.”

  “Do you want someone else?”

  “I’m fine,” Miller said. He’d trusted Brodeur, but didn’t want to risk involving another stranger.

  “Where are you?”

  “Would prefer to keep that to myself.”

  “These phones can’t be tapped.”

  As much as Miller trusted the president, he couldn’t take the chance that the person who designed this phone wasn’t a closet Nazi. There was no way to know, for sure, if their conversation was being listened to. He doubted it. But better safe than sorry. At least until he’d slept. “When I need you to know, you’ll know.”

  Miller wasn’t sure how Bensson would handle being denied by a subordinate, but the man remained composed.

  “Fair enough,” Bensson said.

  “I might be a little late to that meeting,” Miller said. “In fact, it might be better if we made it a conference call.”

  “You’d be safer here,” Bensson said.

  “Coming to you will put me back on the radar,” Miller replied. “I’d rather be under it.”

  “Listen,” Bensson said. “When you need something—anything—let me know and I’ll make it happen. If they’re already gunning for you, they know you’re a threat.” There was a pause before Bensson spoke again. “And I’m sorry about that. I can’t help but think my visit in the hospital painted a target on your head.”

  Miller agreed, but didn’t say so. The man didn’t need more weight added to his already hefty burden. But he could help ease Miller’s burden. “Actually, there is something you can do.”

  “Name it.”

  “Arwen.”

  “The girl from Miami.”

  “If they’re gunning for me, they might try to use her.”

  “I’ll assign a security detail to her.”

  “You’ll assign more than a detail,” Miller said. “The men who came for me were good, well armed, and weren’t afraid to pull the trigger. If they come for her, the D.C. police and FBI won’t be able to—”

  “Secret Service,” Bensson said. “She’ll have the same level of protection as me.”

  Miller nodded and said, “That will work. Just make sure they look like Jay-Z’s security.”

  After a chuckle, Bensson said, “Will do.”

  “I’m going to chase down a lead,” Miller said. “I’ll be in touch in the morning, but I’m hoping to—”

  “A lead?”

  Miller could hear the eagerness in the president’s voice. The FBI, CIA, and Homeland were most likely clueless, or being derailed from the inside. Bensson would be desperate for some nugget of good news. But he’d have to wait. Miller was in the habit of keeping his cards close during an investigation. It kept him from being distracted. Plus, he had no idea what Adler had in her bag or if it was worthwhile. “If it turns out to be big, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “I knew you were the right man for the job,” Bensson said.

  “Thought I was the only man for the job,” Miller said, half-smiling.

  “You’re both,” the president said. “Godspeed, Miller.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.” Miller hung up, pocketed the phone, and stared out the tiny windshield of Adler’s Mini Cooper. Night had fallen as they’d crossed into Pennsylvania. For a moment he just watched the reflective mile markers pass by, his anger slowly drifting away like steam.

  He glanced over at Adler and found her wide eyes on him.

  “That was the president?” she asked.

  “The one and only,” Miller said. “We go to the same church.”

  Her eyes widened a bit more, which seemed impossible.

  The look of shock on Adler’s face made her look like some kind of circus clown. Miller grinned, revealing the joke. His smile turned into a laugh, and Adler joined in. They laughed for nearly a minute, expunging the tension of nearly being killed. Miller watched her laugh. She was a stranger to him and nationality marked her as a potential enemy. But he felt glad to have her there.

  Of course, that might change after he got a look at what was in her purse. Remembering the purse sapped the remaining humor from him and he turned back to the road. A Best Western sign appeared in the distance.

  “Take the next exit,” he said.

  Adler’s smile disappeared when she heard the serious tone in Miller’s voice again. She put on the blinker and eased onto the off-ramp. Ten minutes later, they were checked into the Best Western, having paid in cash and used fake names.

  The room was typical—two twin beds, a desk, two uncomfortable chairs, a large poster of a Western scene hung over each bed and screwed to the wall as though someone might actually steal them. The bathroom was small, but clean.

  Adler opened the window.

  “Better keep that closed.”

  “Smells in here.”

  She was right. The room reeked of cheap cleaning supplies. “You’ll get used to it,” he said as he stepped around her and closed the window.

  “Why?”

  “So we’re not overheard.”

  A quick flash of fear appeared on Adler’s face. She didn’t know him any better than he did her. He realized this and said, “We need to talk.”

  Miller took a seat at the small round table and motioned to the other chair.

  “About what?” Adler said, sitting down across from him.

  Miller really wanted to take a shower. He’d never felt so dirty before and was sure the stench rising from his body would soon overpower the room’s chemical odor. But the sooner he put his mind to work on what Adler was hiding, the better. “About what’s in your purse and why your boss tried to kill you over it.”

  Adler sat still for a moment. Then her shoulders sagged. She lif
ted the large purse onto the table, opened it, and pulled out a small leather-bound book. “It’s my grandmother’s journal.”

  Miller fought against the sigh of frustration building in his chest. What could a grandmother’s journal have to do with the attacks? And then she laid it out in the simplest terms possible.

  “She was a mathematician and professor at the University of Königsberg. She was … brilliant.” Her face churned with ancestral guilt. “They couldn’t have done it without her.”

  25

  “Done what without her?” Miller asked.

  Adler studied the table’s drab mustard yellow surface for a moment. “The attacks. The timing. The ratios of iron to oxygen. Particle accelerations. All the calculations required to pull off the extinction of the human race. These things were not her ideas, but the math that made them possible was, is, hers.”

  “Your grandmother was a Nazi?”

  “She was a German during the Third Reich. Many of the scientists that worked on projects for the Reich didn’t agree with what they were doing. There was no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” Miller said.

  “She would have been shot, and my mother with her.”

  “And yet here you are, risking your life to stop the same evil sixty-something years later. And if you die in the effort, your family’s bloodline will end with you anyway. Sure, you might not have been born, and that’s sad, but your grandmother handed over the keys to genocide to save her family? C’mon.”

  Adler’s head bowed back toward the table. “You’re right.”

  Miller took the book from Adler. The leather cover was worn and cracking. He opened it and found a name scrawled on the inside cover. “Elizabeth Adler. You were named for her?”

  “I was her jewel, she said.” Adler wiped a tear from her eye. “She was a good woman. A loving woman. She believed the SS men in charge of the project had died toward the end of the war. Some of the other scientists survived, but they became U.S. citizens.”

  Miller flipped through the diary. The first fifty pages were complex mathematical computations.

  “She replicated the math from memory,” Adler said. “And told my mother, and eventually me, that if red poison ever fell from the sky that we should get her diary to someone who could do something to stop it.”

  “And that someone was me.”

  “You weren’t my first choice, remember?”

  As she turned toward the window and looked at her reflection, he saw the bruising around her neck. He remembered.

  “So this explains what, how it’s done?”

  Adler shook her head. “In theory, yes, but the equations are just part of the puzzle. There were others working on real-world applications. They never told her about the rest of the project, only what she needed to know to work out the math. But after calculating how much oxidized iron it would take to remove the oxygen from the lower atmosphere, she recognized the project’s success could lead to a global mass extinction. She began duplicating her equations and keeping notes about everyone she knew to be involved and the small amount of information they revealed.”

  Miller flipped through the journal. The last one hundred pages were handwritten notes in German. “You’ve read this?”

  “Several times.”

  “Other than the equations, is there anything that might help us?”

  “Most of it is notes about her equations and what she believed the possible real-world applications of them could be, which may not be relevant because the world has already experienced the real-world applications. I’m not sure if the book will be of any use to anyone who can’t understand the math.”

  “Which is both of us, I’m guessing?”

  She nodded. “I took years of advanced math in the hopes that I could understand my grandmother’s work. It’s still like looking at hieroglyphics to me.”

  Miller flipped through the pages and stopped at a list of names beneath the word Laternenträger. “What’s this?”

  Adler leaned forward, looking at the open page. “Laternenträger. She called it Project Lantern Bearer, but that was just one of many names given to each individual aspect of the final project. The names are a list of everyone she believed was involved.”

  Miller read through the list of names.

  — Admiral Rhein - Kriegsmarine

  — SS Obergruppenführer Emil Mazuw

  — Dr. Kurt Debus - Parameter und Messung, Hochspannungs-Stromversorgung, Mathematik

  — Dr. Hans Coler - Physiker, Spezialisierung Strom und Magnetismus

  — Professor Dr. Walther Gerlach - Spinpolarisation, Magnetismus Schwerkraft

  — Dr. Hermann Oberth - Raumfahrt Theoretiker, Raketeningenieur

  — Dr. Aldric Huber - Antrieb Spezialist und Assistent von Braun

  — Dr. Wernher von Braun - Rakete Wissenschaftler, Ingenieur

  “Wernher von Braun?” Miller said. The name sounded familiar.

  “You know who he is?”

  Miller looked at her. “Do you?”

  “Only what it says there. That he was a rocket scientist and engineer.”

  Miller shook his head. “I guess that’s why you’re a liaison instead of an investigator?”

  She bristled. “Hey, I didn’t know if any of this was real until a few days ago. I loved my grandmother, but she wasn’t lucid before she died. I wasn’t— I wasn’t sure it was—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Miller had the phone out and worked his fingers across the touch screen.

  “You think this is worth taking to the president?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he said, not looking up from the phone.

  “Why not?”

  “First, the math may reveal the scope and potential danger of the attacks, but like you said, we’ve already had a taste of Grandma’s secret recipe. Second, the president won’t understand a lick of this either and will have to turn it over to NASA or DARPA. If he does that, there’s a good chance we’ll tip off the bad guys and give them time to erase the trail.”

  “What trail?”

  Miller turned the iPhone around. A Web site was displayed showing a dapper-looking man in a gray suit leaning on a desk in front of an American flag. Next to the photo was the name: Dr. Wernher von Braun.

  Adler took the phone and read through the text. Her expression became more shocked with each line. “Operation Paperclip.” Adler was familiar with the then-secret program that brought the best and brightest Nazi scientists to the United States and made them naturalized citizens. Many of the great scientific achievements of modern America had come from those German minds, including the atom bomb. But she hadn’t realized how much freedom those scientists had been given. “Mein Gott, they made him director of the Marshall Space Flight Center?”

  “Wouldn’t have made it to the moon without him. Says he died in ’75.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  “Other than track down and interrogate his children? Find out if Aldric Huber is still alive.”

  “Aldric Huber?”

  Miller spun the journal around and pointed to the name near the bottom of the list. “My German is rusty, but I’m pretty sure this says he was von Braun’s assistant.”

  “Ja.”

  Miller began dialing a number on the phone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Someone I trust.”

  After reaching the automated switchboard, Miller punched in the extension number. The line picked up a moment later. “You’ve reached the office of Executive Assistant Director Fred Murdock. Leave your name, number, and time and date of your call and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” The message beeped. “Fred, it’s Lincoln. Sorry I haven’t been in touch yet. But something fell in my lap and it can’t be ignored. I need you to get me everything you can on a guy named Aldric Huber. Born in Germany. May be a naturalized U.S. citizen. If he’s still alive he’d be old. Eighties. Maybe nineties. Keep it under the radar. Do the search yourself and delete
it when you’re done. Call me back at…” Miller quickly found the phone number under the Settings tab and read it into the phone.

  When he hung up, Miller realized his instincts now controlled his actions. He was on the case. And that meant he’d follow this thing to the end, whatever that might be. Which meant he’d be breaking a promise.

  He dialed 411 and got the name and number of the flower shop inside the George Washington University Hospital. After being connected he arranged to have a pack of chocolate puddings and a bouquet of flowers delivered to Arwen’s room. When asked about the note for the flowers, he said, “Arwen, I’m taking the ring to Mount Doom. Love, Frodo.”

  The woman on the other end of the line got a laugh out of that, but Miller knew Arwen would understand the message. His quest had begun. He hung up the phone and turned to Adler, who waited with raised eyebrows.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now,” Miller said, “I’m taking a shower.” He opened the Safari Web browser on the phone and handed it to her. “Find out what you can about the other names on the list. If anything stands out, make a note. After that, read and reread your grandmother’s journal. Flag anything that sounds like it doesn’t involve Project Lantern Bearer. If Fred calls, come get me.”

  She looked surprised. “In the shower.”

  Miller gave a sarcastic nod. “That’s where I’ll be.”

  He stood and walked to the bathroom, wondering if it was even possible that a dead German scientist turned U.S. patriot and his assistant could help track down a modern Nazi cabal who’d shown they were fully capable of wiping out the human race. The truth was, he doubted it. He was grasping at straws. But the journal of a German mathematician had provided a few bread crumbs to follow.