God's Formula

by James Lepore

  “Conrad?” said John Tolkien, his voice gentle.

  “Is that the cave?” said Conrad.

  “Yes,” Fleming replied.

  They stared across the valley to the Bedeihlac Cave, with its long front porch that, with the grace of God, would serve as a landing strip for the single engine, prototype airplane, made entirely of wood, that would, in a few months, start coming off of the de Haviland assembly lines with the name Mosquito. Christ, Fleming had muttered to himself, when Jean Foret had said to him cryptically that afternoon, Mosquito coming.

  “There are prehistoric paintings there,” said Conrad. “My father told me about them. He said we would go there one day.”

  What to say? John Tolkien said to himself. The boy had lost everything, his father, his country, his friend Karl, his new friend Monique. And now he was being taken to a foreign land to have his brain picked clean. And then what? What would his life be like?

  “Mr. Fleming will take you there some day,” said the professor. “And, after you’re done in London, he’ll take you on holiday, perhaps to a tropical island, warm and sunny, where you can swim and be happy.” And forget.

  “I will what?” said Fleming, staring at his colleague as if he had grown a second head. “I say, professor…” But he did not finish his sentence. A flash of light appeared at the northern skyline. They turned that way and saw another flash, and then it seemed the entire horizon was on fire, the flames reaching a thousand feet into sky, illuminating the night with a green glow that spread as far east and west as it went up. They braced themselves against the howling hot wind that came next, causing their hair to stand on end and tears to stream from their eyes. When it passed, they looked north again.

  “My God,” said Tolkien. “The castle.”

  “And the mountain,” said Fleming. “They’re gone.”

  Chapter 34

  Princeton, June 23, 1940, 4:00 p.m.

  “Oxford transplanted,” said John Tolkien.

  “It’s the same with your ivy-draped universities everywhere,” Ian Fleming replied. “The professoriate seem to have a pretty cushy life wherever they set down.”

  “I daresay. Still. Nostalgic.”

  “How much longer do you think they’ll be?”

  “Hard to say.”

  They were sitting on the front porch of the compact, two-story, white clapboard house at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. They had a view of a small lawn with thick hedges separating it from the street. Bees buzzed above rhododendron in full flower under a blazing sun. All was bright green and gold and pink On a wicker table in front of them was a half-empty pitcher of lemonade and two empty glasses. The sound of a radio could be heard from somewhere inside the house.

  “Refill?” said Fleming.

  “No, thank you.”

  “All that for nothing.”

  “One hopes not.”

  “Maybe they can piece it together from what you remembered.”

  Tolkien shook his head. They had been over this at Bletchley House. The scientists had pursed their lips and shook their heads.

  “Gentleman,” said Albert Einstein.

  Both men rose.

  “You snuck up on us,” said Ian Fleming.

  “Please forgive me,” said Einstein.

  “Not very good form for master spies, I daresay,” said Fleming.

  “I often nap at this time of day,” said Einstein. “I hear the bees buzzing and the next thing I know, I’m asleep. Or waking up, I should say.”

  “How is the boy?” Tolkien asked.

  “Elsa’s feeding him cookies and lemonade in the kitchen. Shall we sit?”

  They sat facing each other, Tolkien and Fleming in shirtsleeves and bow ties, the famous physicist in a cardigan sweater and tieless shirt buttoned to the top.

  “The French have formally surrendered,” said Einstein. “It’s on the radio.”

  “Yes, late yesterday,” said Fleming.

  They sat looking at each other, all thinking thoughts of the long war ahead.

  “I’m afraid the boy won’t be any help,” said Einstein, breaking the silence. “He has no memory of any birthday poem, or any formula, nor of Hitler Youth, nor Karl Brauer.”

  “Are you sure?” Fleming asked.

  “I’m positive. I’ve known him since he was born. He could not fool me.”

  “What does he remember?” Tolkien asked.

  “His grade school classmates, his parents young and vibrant.”

  “Will any memory return?” Fleming asked.

  “What do the physicians say?”

  “They don’t know. Perhaps, with rest.”

  “What happened?”

  “He saw his friends clubbed to death.”

  “Inducing a seizure?”

  “Yes.”

  “He is not faking. The young Nazi with the eidetic memory is gone. Only the boy of seven remains.” Albert Einstein’s sleepy eyes flashed brightly for a second, but whether in anger or mirth or something else entirely, could not be told. “Permit me to ask,” he said, addressing John Tolkien, “I’ve read your reports.”

  “Yes, of course,” Tolkien replied.

  “You do know what you found?”

  Tolkien did not answer immediately. An expert runologist, he had his own ideas concerning the interpretation of the text and images he had seen in the caves under Foix Mountain and had conveyed them in a lengthy report to MI-6, which included detailed drawings he had done from memory, and as much as he could remember of what he had hastily read in the leatherbound, LeFer Vert, Diex de la Formule. “I do?” he said finally.

  “The cave,” said Einstein, “was filled with raw uranium ore, what the Romans called green iron. Tons of it. The liquid at the bottom, when applied directly, immediately distilled it to U-235. A drop on a chunk of ore became a small atomic bomb, and a distilled chunk dropped into that cave…well, I’m told Foix Rock is gone.”

  “So Walter Friedeman’s chemical enriching solution existed in nature,” said Tolkien.

  “Yes,” Einstein replied, “at the bottom of a cave in Foix, France. Probably for thousands of years.”

  “Now it’s gone,” said Fleming. “Or is it? Could there be other deposits?”

  “One hopes not,” said Einstein. “It killed the Cathars, you see, as well as their enemies.”

  Epilogue

  June 30, 1940, Oracabessa, Jamaica

  “What do you think of this place?” Ian Fleming asked.

  “What is it?” Conrad Friedeman said.

  “It used to be a donkey racecourse.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Donkeys with jockeys raced around the oval there. People ate box lunches and placed bets.”

  “It’s falling apart.”

  “Two plantation owners killed each other in a dual over a cheating accusation and that put a pall over the place.”

  Fleming and Conrad both wore white duck cloth shorts, polo shirts, and rubber sandals. The boy’s shorts, cut down to fit him, were held up by a sisal rope. He was nut brown, as was Fleming, from the long days they had spent roaming Jamaica’s north shore and swimming in the blue-green Caribbean under the tropical sun. Conrad’s Hitler Youth military haircut had grown into an unruly mop and was turning blond.

  “I met the owner last night,” said Fleming. “He’s offered to sell it to me. Shall I buy it?”

  “What about Yardley Chase?”

  “Oh, I’m just renting that.”

  “Are you renting Violet and Jacob too?”

  “In a manner of speaking. They come with the house.”

  “I heard you talking to Violet this morning.”

  “So you know I’m leaving?”

  Conrad put his hands in the pockets of his oversized shorts and kicked at a stone that had appeared at his feet.

  “Let’s walk down to the beach,” Fleming said.

  A path through tangled sea grape opened onto a small north-facing cove with a crescent-shaped w
hite sand beach. Low hills flanked the beach east and west. They paced the length of the strand, perhaps a hundred yards, and then turned back.

  “Violet tells me you are asking for books,” said Fleming.

  “Yes.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “No. I’m reading her Bible now, but I’ll be done soon.”

  “Does reading help your memory?”

  “No.”

  “Can you recite any bible verses?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember reading a book called The Hobbit?”

  “No.”

  “Any memory of the elvish language?”

  “What is that?”

  “A language spoken by elves in a fictional world, the world in The Hobbit.”

  “No.”

  “No small bits here and there?”

  “No. Did I know this language at one time?”

  “You memorized a large swath of it.”

  They turned again and were now making their second tour of the small beach.

  “Why are you leaving?” Conrad asked.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “But why?”

  “The war. I’m a naval officer.”

  Silence.

  “You will be in good hands with Violet and Jacob. They have taken to you, and I know you have taken to them.”

  “How will I get books?”

  “I’ll send some, and Violet can go into Kingston.”

  “Can I read The Hobbit?”

  “Yes, I’ll put it on the list.”

  “What is it you want me to remember?”

  Fleming knew that his questions concerning memory were tedious and frustrating to Conrad. And dangerous. One of the physicians who had examined the lad in London had warned: It could all come flooding back. He could break down.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sorry, Conrad,” Fleming said. “I’m trying too hard to help.”

  Conrad’s answer was to kick sand.

  “Colonel Harrington will check in on you from time to time,” said Fleming. “You know where he lives?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look,” said Conrad, shading his eyes, “it’s Jacob.”

  A skiff had rounded the spit of land to the east and was heading into shore.

  Fleming shaded his eyes as well. “He’s picking me up, taking me to a Royal Navy vessel off shore.”

  “From here? What about your bags? Your things?”

  “He brought them out this morning.”

  They stood still and watched. When the skiff was within ten meters of shore, Jacob, a slender black man in a straw hat, cut the outboard engine and let the small boat drift forward until its bow wedged in the beach.

  “Quick goodbyes are best,” said Fleming. “You’re a handsome lad. Keep that in mind when you start having trouble with women.” He extended his hand to the boy, who took it. They gripped firmly for a moment, then Fleming let go and hopped into the skiff. Jacob jumped out. He nodded to Conrad and pointed up to the hill to the east, where Violet, black and stout, was standing looking down at them with her arms folded across her ample chest. “Go back with Violet,” Jacob said.

  Then Jacob braced his feet in the wet sand, shoved the boat free and hopped in.

  Conrad turned and waved to Violet then turned back and watched the skiff head east on the calm, blue-green sea until it rounded the spit of land and was out of sight.

  “Suiliaid, mellon nin,” he said. “Dagro dan in yrch.”

  Then he turned and, hands in his pockets, headed up to meet Violet.

  About the Authors

  James LePore is an attorney who has practiced law for more than two decades. He is also an accomplished photographer. He lives in South Salem, NY with his wife, artist Karen Chandler. He is the author of five other novels, A World I Never Made, Blood of My Brother, Sons and Princes, Gods and Fathers, and The Fifth Man, as well as a collection of three short stories, Anyone Can Die. You can visit him at his website, www.JamesLeporeFiction.com.

  Carlos Davis writes and produces films, among them the Emmy nominated Rascals and Robbers with David Taylor and the cult favorite Drop Dead Fred with Tony Fingleton. He is producing O.T., a present-day version of Oliver Twist that he wrote in collaboration with the late great British comedian Rik Mayall. He and novelist James Lepore wrote No Dawn For Men, a finalist for the International Thriller Award. They are working on their third Tolkien-Fleming novel, The Bonekeepers. He lives in New York City.

  In 1938, Nazi Germany prepares to extend its reach far beyond its borders. The key to domination lies in a secret that would make their army not only unbeatable, but un-killable.

  MI-6, knowing that something potentially devastating is developing, recruits scholar and novelist John Ronald Reuel Tolkien to travel to Germany to find out what this might be, using the German popularity of his children’s novel The Hobbit as cover. Joining him there is MI-6 agent Ian Fleming, still years away from his own writing career but posing as a Reuters journalist. Together, Tolkien and Fleming will get to the heart of the secret – and they will face a fury greater than even their prodigious imaginations considered possible.

  Both an astounding work of suspense and a literary treasure trove to delight fans of either author, No Dawn for Men is a nonstop adventure.

  Professor Tolkien, from his seat in the back of the Eagle and Child pub, the Bird and Baby, as it was known around Oxford, watched as his old student, Arlen Cavanaugh, weaved his way, a Guinness stout aloft in each hand, to him. Tall and thin, his blond hair swept back to reveal twinkling blue eyes, pointy ears and a narrow face, his former student seemed to glide effortlessly around and through the knots of people standing, talking and drinking, in the crowded pub. Did his feet touch the floor? The professor remembered that Arlie had been a great athlete, swift and graceful on the rugby field where he seemed never to lose his balance, and the squash courts, where be bested all comers, smiling impishly and barely breaking a sweat the whole match. The word elvan came to Professor Tolkien’s mind, which surprised him since he was used to thinking of elves as smallish creatures.

  On the five-minute walk from Pembroke he had had a quick lesson in the improbable. Arlen, a poor student from a rich Midlands merchant family, had, after flunking out of Oxford, wangled an appointment to Sandhurst, where he lasted less than a month, and then managed somehow to land a job in Naval Intelligence, where he now worked directly under its director, a man named Hugh Sinclair, who Arlie referred to as Uncle Quex. SIS, MI-6. Quite.

  “Why the note under the rock?” the professor asked when Arlie was seated.

  “I was just having fun. You know me.”

  “That’s why you were sent down, Arlie.”

  “No doubt, sir.”

  “What’s your interest in Havamal?” The professor had pulled the note out of his pocket and spread it on the scarred wooden table.

  “We think Herr Hitler is interested in it as a code book.”

  “That’s absurd,” John Ronald replied. “It would be easily deciphered.”

  “Decoded, actually.”

  The professor, now forty-six and with World War One between him and his youth, rarely recalled his undergraduate days with anything but pain. Two of his best friends lay buried in the Somme Valley. He smiled now though, thinking of the brashness of the TCBS’ers, as he and his small coterie of public school classmates called themselves, not unlike the brashness of Mr. Cavanaugh.

  “So you’re lecturing me now,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to turn his smile into a frown of mild indignation.

  “No, sir. Just correcting your usage. Codes are decoded, ciphers are deciphered.”

  “Is this what you’re learning at Bletchley House?”

  “Yes, sir. Among other things.”

  “Excellent. Learning something.”

  “We had the same thought,” Cavanaugh said, “about Havamal. The Germans have Enigma machines. They are well bey
ond code books.”

  “Should I still be worried about German aggression?”

  “Professor…Are you serious?”

  “I was rather hoping the headlines were accurate.”

  “There’s no chance of that. Hitler’s a madman.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “They have seen my strength for themselves, have watched me rise from the darkness of war, dripping with my enemies’ blood.”

  “My God, Arlie. You were listening.”

  Silence, and a disarming, boyish smile from Arlie; then, the smile short-lived, the young man’s face suddenly deadly serious: “He’s killing Jews by the thousands. He’s arming himself to the teeth. Uncle Quex says he’ll invade Poland next year.”

  “And what is it you need of me?” The quote from Beowulf had penetrated the professor’s defenses. He had learned about evil on the Somme and did not want to believe that its great dark shadow was again falling over the world. But of course it was. And here was a young man some might consider intellectually challenged to remind him, to jar him from his personal struggle with what was after all just a novel, a fiction, epic though he hoped it might be.

  “Do you know a Professor Franz Shroeder?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “Franz Shroeder? Yes. He taught one term at King Edward’s when I was there.”

  “He’s a top man in his field.”

  “Correct. Norse Mythology, of which Havamal is a core text.”

  “He’s retired I believe.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Or on a long sabbatical.”

  “You can get to the point, Arlie. Indeed, having heard Grendel’s words fall from your lips, I am eager to know what it is.”

  “You’re going to Berlin on Wednesday, to talk to a publisher, I believe. A German translation of The Hobbit.”

  “You believe?”

  “I know.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “You have a five-day visa.”

  “Correct.”