Two Graves

by Douglas Preston

  The Nazis had been careful to safeguard their arsenal from any outside attack short of a tactical nuclear strike. However, in so doing, it was possible they had overlooked the possibility of an attack from within—an attack involving both high explosives… and Mother Nature. They were not, Pendergast thought with a faint smile, very good geologists.

  Grabbing one of the canisters of black powder, he pierced it with his knife and poured the contents over the crates and boxes and powder kegs that made up the ammo dump. He emptied another canister over the weaponry, and then another, until the entire upper surface of the magazine was coated with a thick dusting of gunpowder. Then, taking two more cans, he slipped one under his arm while using the other to make a trail of powder away from the arsenal, out the open door of the cage and along the floor, headed back in the direction from which he’d come. Discarding the empty can, he opened the second and last, and continued the gunpowder trail, out of the domed area and down the narrow stone passageway.

  The last of the gunpowder ran out and Pendergast put the can aside. Taking out his flashlight, he played it back along the narrow black trail he’d just made. It was approximately sixty feet long. He paused a minute, drew in a deep breath. Then, kneeling, he removed the lighter, held it to the end of the line of black powder, and flicked it on.

  Immediately there was a spark, a puff of flame, and—with an angry hiss—the trail of powder began to burn, dissolving into a low cloud of smoke as it flared its way back toward the weapons cache. Pendergast turned and ran back down the branching passageways of the sub-basement.

  He had just made it to the boat and was getting into it when a tremendous, earsplitting roar sounded behind him. This was followed by a second, and then a third, as a chain reaction of explosions began setting off more and more of the castle’s cache of arms. Even at this distance, the force of the initial blast knocked him sprawling into the bottom of the boat; ears ringing, he got up, shoved off, started the engine, jammed it into full throttle, and headed out the escape tunnel at top speed, passing dangerously close to the stone walls as he followed the twistings and turnings of the passageway. Now the explosions were coming so fast they were no longer discrete blasts, but rather one constant fusillade of noise and fury, as the Nazi arsenal exploded with ever-increasing violence, the blasts moving deeper and deeper inside the fissure beneath the castle. The force of the explosions was shaking the very walls around him, and now stones, dirt, and nogging from the ancient ceiling were falling, collapsing with immense force into the water behind him, setting up a thunderous surge of water that pushed his boat forward.

  He roared out of the mouth of the tunnel and into the open lake just as the entranceway collapsed into rubble behind him. Not stopping, not even slowing to look back, he goosed the throttle wide open and tore across the water in the direction of the town of Nova Godói. Not until he was halfway across the lake did he throttle down and glance back for a view of the castle.

  The rumblings had ceased. The fortress remained standing, dark and silent, with only a thin trail of smoke coming from where the tunnel met the shore. He waited, the seconds ticking by, but still nothing happened. The exploding dump had evidently not been powerful enough to fracture the rock, to pierce down to the magma chamber underneath the cinder cone.

  Still he waited. And then a shiver passed over the surface of the water. A low rumble reached his ears, almost below the audible range, a vibration he felt more in his bones than his ears. The surface of the lake shivered again, tiny wavelets kicked up, the rumble growing louder. Now the water was dancing crazily and he saw, along the very bottom of the massive wall encircling the fortress, a crack of red. Slowly it enlarged, moving horizontally, with small flares and puffs of steam, like the lid of some gigantic pressure cooker bulging up and about to explode.

  A bright flash, and another. This was no man-made blast: it was too vast, too loud, and it came from too deep within the earth. The thunderclap struck him a moment later, almost bowling him over the side of the boat. Several vast and spectacular sprays of lava erupted into the night air, like giant fountains, with a screaming roar of releasing gas and steam. The bellowing explosions of thunder rolled across the lake like a physical force, shivering the surface of the water. As he stared, entire sections of the fortress—towers, ramparts, walls—seemed to come apart at the seams and rise, slowly, amid roiling clouds of fire and smoke separating into mushroom clouds.

  He could make out tiny figures—some in uniform, others in lab coats, still others in coveralls—scrambling like ants down to the lake, diving in and piling into boats along the shore. Several other figures, their clothes aflame, like human firebombs, rose out of the eruption of rock, lava, and fire, trailing smoke.

  As he watched, unable to tear his eyes from the sight, an additional huge staccato series of explosions shuddered the island with ugly cauliflowers of red and yellow. The fortress was now rent asunder, turning night into ghastly day. The blasts reached Pendergast a moment later, one after another, punches of overpressure pushing him violently back, skidding his boat across the now violently agitated surface of the lake. This led to one monumental explosion whose gout of fire and destruction engulfed the top half of the island, a vast storm of rocks, lava, and smoke that rose as the explosion accelerated, a raging upward column of destruction. And then there was a second, even greater explosion, one so deep and muffled it seemed to stir the mountains themselves. But this one wasn’t an explosion; rather it was an implosion: and Pendergast saw the fractured, broken remains of the castle begin to collapse in on themselves—slowly at first, and then more and more quickly, until the vast ancient façade crumbled in with an unearthly shriek. Pendergast saw tongues of living lava shooting out from the rent maw of the island, streaking upward in fiery tracers before falling back down to the lake, dropping all around him like bombs, sizzling and popping as they hit the water.

  He revved up the engine again, heading toward shore.

  And then—with a final, convulsive blast that seemed to shake the earth to its very core—the entire island tore itself apart, hurtling house-size chunks of rock and blocks of dressed stone thousands of feet into the air with incredible violence, destroying many of the boats of the would-be evacuees, the detritus arcing through the night sky and falling as far away as the town of Nova Godói, starting fires in the surrounding forest and causing such a devastating rain of ruin that Pendergast found himself dodging a firing gallery of falling rocks as he tore through the water at top speed in an attempt to save his own life.

  84

  PENDERGAST PULLED THE LAUNCH ALONGSIDE A WHARF, leapt out, and ran along the quay. Several members of the Twins Brigade were there, guarding the docks, staring at the final destruction of the island. The chaos from the final, dreadful explosion was settling down now, and in the lambent light of the erupting island he could see that half a dozen boats of various sizes had escaped the final conflagration and were coming across the lake toward the town. As he watched, one of the boats—a small, sleek craft—approached the quay at high speed. It held what appeared to be scientists or technicians in lab coats. The boat roared up against the quay, slamming into the stone, and the occupants scrambled onto land. They were glassy-eyed and stunned, several with hair and eyebrows scorched, filthy with soot, coughing and choking. They staggered up the quay toward the town, saying nothing. The Twins Brigade watched them pass but did not stop them. Instead they focused their weapons on a second arriving boat, containing half a dozen men in Nazi dress. They had also suffered from the effects of the explosion, their faces blackened, uniforms singed. A few appeared to be injured.

  As the boat approached the quay, the brigade took positions and began firing. For a minute, scattered, sporadic fire was returned by the Nazis in the boat; but the firefight was over almost before it had started. The Nazis threw down their weapons, raised their hands in surrender as the boat idled up to the quay. A detachment of twins led them away under guard.

  Pendergast looked ba
ck over the lake, its black surface now a fiery reflection of the island, a gaping cone of boiling lava, only a few broken ramparts of the fortress remaining at the edges. A small skiff could be seen streaking over the water, approaching the quay at an oblique angle, keeping as much as possible out of the light of the flickering flames. Pendergast looked at it more closely. In it was a single man, seated in the stern, one hand on the tiller of the outboard. He was tall, powerfully built, with a thick shock of white hair that seemed to glow in the burning reflection of the ruined tower.

  Fischer.

  Pendergast drew his weapon and ran down the quay in the direction of the approaching skiff. But even as he did so, Fischer caught sight of him and gunned the motor, slewing sharply away from the quay, heading past it in the direction of the beach and the forest beyond. Pendergast fired once and missed; Fischer drew his own gun and returned fire, but from the moving boat the shot went wide. Pendergast stopped and took careful aim, this time punching a round into the outboard motor, which began to cough and sputter, billows of ugly black smoke rising into the ash-filled air. Fischer tried to turn the boat back away from shore, toward the center of the lake, but Pendergast fired a third time. Fischer staggered, grabbed his chest, and with a cry went over the gunwale of the boat into the water.

  The burning boat drifted on while Pendergast ran past the end of the quay, to the pebbled beach opposite where Fischer’s body had fallen into the water. Reaching the formation of three large, separated rocks rising from the water just beyond the quay, he leapt up on the closest, scanning the dark water for any sign of Fischer.

  A shot rang out; Pendergast felt a sharp burning sensation, like a fiery slash of a knife, graze his left arm just below the knife wound in his shoulder. He fell back onto the slippery rock, barely managing to retain hold of his weapon, cursing himself for his lack of caution. When he was able to take cover and reconnoiter, he realized that Fischer must have himself taken cover behind one of the other three rocks: the one farthest into the lake.

  Fischer’s bullet had barely grazed Pendergast’s arm, but nevertheless he could feel the warm blood began to trickle down toward his elbow.

  Fischer’s voice came from behind the rock. “It seems I’ve underestimated you,” he said. “You’ve managed to make rather a mess of things. What do you plan to do now?”

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  “One of us is going to die: but it won’t be me. I am armed and uninjured. That little tumble over the side of the boat was an act, as perhaps you’ve guessed.”

  “You killed my wife. You must die.”

  “She belonged to us, never to you. She was our creation. Part of our great project.”

  “Your project is dead. Your labs, your base of operations, destroyed. Even your experimental subjects have turned against you.”

  “Perhaps. But nothing will kill our dream—the dream of perfecting the human race. It is the greatest—the ultimate—scientific pursuit. If you think this is the end, you are sadly deluded.”

  “I greatly fear that you are the deluded one, mein Oberstgruppenführer,” came a voice from behind Pendergast. He turned to see Alban approaching them from the direction of the forest. He was dripping wet, his shirt stained with blood, and one side of his once-handsome face had been dreadfully burned, pink and charred most horribly, the dermis fused in some places, in others the musculature and even bone showing. He held a P38 in one hand.

  Alban leapt nimbly onto the third rock and stood there, outlined by the fiery island. Though he was burnt and wounded, he nevertheless moved with the same gazelle-like grace that Pendergast had noted so often before.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Herr Fischer,” he said. “I wanted to report that things have not gone exactly as you had planned.” He nodded in the direction of the burning hulk of an island. “As you’ve probably noticed.”

  He tossed the pistol from hand to hand as he spoke and gave a strange chuckle. A fey mood seemed to be upon him. “Why don’t you both come out from under those rocks you’re hiding behind, stand up and face each other like men. The endgame will be an honorable one—correct, Herr Fischer?”

  Fischer was the first to respond. Without speaking, he climbed up and stood on the rock. Pendergast, after a moment, did likewise. The three men, bathed in the infernal orange glow, faced each other.

  Fischer spoke to Alban, his voice bitter. “I blame you even more than your father for this. You failed me, Alban. Utterly. After all I did for you, generations of genetic grooming and perfection, after fifteen years of the most exacting and careful upbringing—this is how you perform.”

  He spat into the water.

  “And how did I fail, Herr Fischer?” His voice had a strange, new note in it.

  “You failed the final test of your manhood. You had many chances to kill this man, your father, and did not. Because of that, the flower of our youth, the seed that was to sow the Fourth Reich, is scattered. I should shoot you down like a dog.” Fischer’s weapon briefly strayed toward Alban.

  “Wait, mein Oberstgruppenführer. I can still kill my father. I’ll do it right now. Watch me. Allow me to shoot him—and restore myself to your good graces.” Alban raised his gun, aiming it at Pendergast.

  For a long, freezing moment, the three men stood, points of a triangle, each on one of the three rocks jutting up out of the lake. Alban’s gun was pointed at Pendergast. Pendergast moved his own firearm from Fischer and aimed it at his son.

  For agonizing minutes Alban stood there, the two with their weapons pointed at each other, bathed in the hellish glow and thunder of the eruption on the island, the sound of sporadic gunfire in the town.

  “Well?” Fischer said at last. “What are you waiting for? It’s as I suspected—you don’t have the guts to shoot.”

  “You think not?” Alban asked. Suddenly—quick as a striking snake—he swung his weapon around at Fischer and pulled the trigger. The round struck the man in the gut. He gasped, clutched his belly, and fell to his knees, dropping the gun.

  “You’re the failure,” Alban said. “Your master plan was flawed—flawed fundamentally. You should never have allowed the defectives to live. I see that now. Having recourse to an organ bank was too high a price to pay for the filial bond you were never able to completely breed out. You failed, mein Oberstgruppenführer—and long ago, you taught me what the price of failure must be.”

  He aimed the gun again and shot Fischer a second time, square in the forehead. The back of Fischer’s head detached from his body, dissolving in a mist of blood, bone, and brain matter; soundlessly, he fell backward, his body slipping off the rock and disappearing below the surface of the lake.

  Pendergast saw that the slide of the P38 had locked back—his son’s magazine was empty.

  Alban, too, noticed this. “It would appear I’m out of ammunition,” he said, snugging the weapon into his waistband. “It seems I won’t be killing you, after all.” Although it must have cost him dreadful pain, he nevertheless smiled crookedly. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be going.”

  Pendergast stared, only now managing to wrap his mind around what had just happened. He wondered how his son—despite the terrible burns, the wounds, the loss of everything—maintained his arrogant composure, his cocksure attitude.

  “No words of farewell, Father, to your son?”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Pendergast said slowly, maintaining his weapon on Alban. “You’re a murderer. Of the worst kind.”

  Alban nodded. “True. And I’ve killed more people than even you could imagine.”

  Pendergast aimed his weapon. “And now it is you who must die for your crimes.”

  “Is that so?” Alban issued a small laugh. “We shall see. I know you’ve figured out my unique temporal sense. Isn’t that right?”

  “The Copenhagen Window,” Pendergast replied.

  “Precisely. It’s derived from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which you are no doubt aware?”


  Pendergast nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “The interpretation is the notion that the future is nothing more than an expanding set of probabilities, time lines of possibility, that continuously collapse into one reality as observations or measurements are made. It’s the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics taught in universities.”

  “It would appear,” Pendergast said, “that your mind has somehow become able to leverage this—to reach into the near future and see those branching possibilities.”

  Alban smiled. “Brilliant! You see, most humans have only a fleeting sense of the immediate future, perhaps a few seconds at most. You can see a car ahead slow at a stop sign, and you intuitively sense the probability that it will stop—or else continue on. Or you might know what someone is going to say moments before they say it. Our scientists recognized the usefulness of this trait over half a century ago, and set out to enhance it through breeding and genetic manipulation. I am the final product.” There was evident pride in Alban’s tone. “My sense of the branching probabilistic time lines is much more developed than in others. I can sense up to fifteen seconds into the future, and my mind can see the dozens of branching possibilities—as if through a window—and pick out the most likely one. It may not seem like much—but what a difference it makes! In a way, my brain can tune in to the wave function ψ itself. But it is not the same as predicting the future. Because, of course, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, there is no fixed future. And as you have so astutely realized, my ability can be stymied by sudden, illogical, or unpredictable behavior.”

  His smile, made gruesome by the dreadful burns, widened. “But even without making use of my special future sense, Father, I know one thing beyond any shadow of a doubt: you can’t kill me. I’m going to walk away now. Into the forest. To stop me, you will have to shoot me dead—and that you won’t do. And so, auf Wiedersehen.”