The Eldridge Conspiracy

by Stephen Ames Berry

  “Resources?”

  “A contingency force—the special brigade out of Ft. Bragg.

  “The Black Brigade?” said Budd, shocked. “You’re using the Black Brigade in the U.S.? Whatever for?”

  “Why, for cleanup of course—if needed. If they go in, Kessler will be in charge.”

  “Cleanup? In what sense?”

  “In the usual sense. Kessler will be standing by to put out fires and to bail you out. I’ll send you a briefing packet today.”

  “And what about the Eldridge roster?”

  “Ah, the roster. I sometimes see that miserable thing in my sleep,” he said honestly. “Pity I can’t quite make out the names. Regardless of what happens on that island, we’ll still need it. We can’t finish off without it. They’re out there somewhere, breeding.” He shook his head. “Would’ve been nice if we could have completed this under the guise of research—had The Good Doctor do it for us.”

  Schmidla’s cover name, assigned by Whitsun many years ago, in place ever since, was The Good Doctor. Budd thought one of Whitsun’s subordinates back in Germany must have made up the title, the Admiral not being noted for his sense of humor, dark or otherwise.

  “Whitsun was supposed to obtain that roster. Not only did he fail, he let it get stolen out from under him. We invested a big pot of money in GDR just to get that information.”

  “SLIF?”

  Rourke nodded. “SLIF. The deal was, the contractors and their subs got to exploit the technology they developed, with just a pittance paid to Uncle, while we got the information we needed. Problem: the basic information is gone. And as Whitsun’s company is the prime contractor, he’ll do very well off of his own failure.” It wasn’t true, but no one would’ve believed the truth anyway.

  “One more thing, Billy. The Russians may become involved.” That, unfortunately, was true.

  “Why can’t they stay buried?”

  Rourke shrugged. “They smell money and power. It brings them out of their crypt. A while ago I pulled the rug out from under Whitsun, told him he couldn’t have any more Agency resources. That shook him up. His current security chief hasn’t been doing well by him recently. So, Whitsun started asking around. Someone—not me—gave him Anton Lokransky. They’ve been talking.”

  “Lokransky? That butcher? He now works for the Russian Mafia.”

  “Which means that he works for the Russian government. The two are virtually indistinguishable. Spesnatz in Afghanistan and Chechenitza were your turf, Billy. Is Lokransky the brilliant devil they say he is?”

  “Possibly the best special ops leader since Otto Skorzeny,” said Budd, naming the Nazi colonel whose daring raid had rescued Mussolini from Italian partisans. “Lokransky is brilliant, cold, viscous and sadistic. The Mujahedeen still have an outstanding offer of one hundred thousand dollars in gold for his head. His literal head. He did a lot of stuff to their women and children they’ll never forget. So, what do you want me to do, Harry?”

  “I need you on that island when this alleged final attempt occurs, which should be in a few days. If it succeeds, if Schmidla pulls it off, then all our fears are justified. You’re to signal Kessler. He’ll launch the assault. Everyone on the island is to be eliminated. If the Russians are there, so much the better. That island is to be completely sanitized.”

  “What about computer records, files, what naught?”

  “A recovery team will go in as soon as it’s over. Most of the project records are in a vault, deep inside the old fort. Action should be limited to small arms, so the records should be intact.”

  “Should?”

  Rourke shrugged. “Spesnatsky are light infantry.”

  “Let’s hope they remember that,” said Budd. “And if Schmidla fails?”

  “Then all’s well that ends well. You smile, express regrets and leave. If the Russians are indeed there, let’s hope they pack it in and go home. If not, there’s more than enough firepower on call to take them out.”

  Chapter 16

  “Welcome to this, one of a series of lectures for the general public in Early American History,” said Maria, standing at the podium in the large half-filled hall. “My name is Maria Nelson, and I’m a professor of history here at the university. I’ve been asked to speak about Robert Rich. Given that I teach an entire semester’s course in which Rich is a central figure, tonight we’ll just hit the high notes.

  “Who was Robert Rich? America would not be the nation it is today had it not been for this seventeenth century Englishman, much neglected by history. How many here – excluding history faculty—have ever heard of the second and twenty-third Earl of Warwick, Lord High Admiral Sir Robert Rich?” Only one hand out of several hundred was raised: that of a middle-aged man in the back. “You’re an unusual man, sir,” she said.

  Jim acknowledged with a nod and a faint smile.

  “No understanding of how we as a nation came to be is complete without some knowledge of Lord Rich,” she continued. “Rich is one of our Forgotten American Fathers—incidentally the title of the course I teach in early colonial history. In the hour allotted to me tonight, I hope to impart at least an appreciation of this remarkable man and his time—a time of war, a time of exploration and a time of opportunity for those like Rich who had the courage and vision to seize it.”

  “She’s brilliant,” said Angie, as they walked toward Harvard Square. “History bores me, but she breathed life into some obscure English earl. She reached out and touched me. Your daughter’s a very gifted teacher, Jim.”

  “You can thank Schmidla for that,” he said bitterly.

  “She’s your daughter—yours and Emma’s,” said Angie. “Sprung from your seed, not his. All he did was raise her for his purposes, a component of his work. He doesn’t love her, you do.”

  They’d stayed after the lecture, drinking white wine and nibbling cheese at the back of the hall as a small group of people – most friends and acquaintances—surrounded Maria, a bright chatty circle of admirers.

  Suddenly spotting Jim, she broke free and came over. “Maria Nelson,” she said, extending her hand. Jim stared at her for instant, dazed, then recovered, taking her hand. “Jim Beauchamp,” he said. “This is my friend, Angie Milano.”

  “That was the best lecture I’ve ever been too,” said Angie, honestly. As a teacher Maria had the rare gift of infectious enthusiasm.

  “Thank you,” said Maria. “So,” she asked Jim, “how come you’ve heard of Bobby Rich? Are you an English Civil War buff?”

  “There is such a thing?” said Angie.

  “Oh, yes. You should see the emails I get. Some people still want to lop Rich’s head off for taking the Royal Navy over to Cromwell. Others want the Republic of England restored.”

  “Bobby Rich was my umpteenth great-grandfather,” said Jim. Yours, too, he wanted to add. She got Emmy’s gray eyes, he thought, and my nose. If I hug her, she’ll push me away and they’ll throw me out. Do you remember your mother, he wanted to ask, your gifted, funny, passionate mother? No, of course not, you were so young when they killed her. “My mother’s family is descended from Rich and his first wife, Jane Faircamp.”

  “Daughter of Sir Thomas Faircamp,” said Maria. “Thomas and Bobby Rich’s grandfather, the infamous Richie Rich, sacked the monasteries under Henry VIII.”

  “Yeah, thick as thieves and the wealthiest families in England.”

  “How did that work out for you guys?” asked Maria.

  “Partied hearty until the South Sea Bubble burst,” said Jim. “The London gaming tables took the rest. Gramps was a telephone linesman.”

  To Jim, the conversation felt increasingly delusive, as though he and his daughter were puppets, each in their own way in thrall to Schmidla—Maria, Schmidla’s unwitting marionette, unaware of who or what she was, Jim playing his part for fear of shattering the frangible vessel of Maria that God willing, still held his Kaeko.

  “And what do you do?” Maria asked him.

  “Oh,
this and that.”

  “‘Oh, this and that,’” mimicked Angie.

  “What the hell did you want me to say, Milano? ‘Hi there! I’m your Dad?’”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “I couldn’t risk that.

  “So weird,” he continued as they walked toward the lights of Harvard Square. “Angie, Rich really was my tenth great-grandfather. And her eleventh. No way Kaeko... Maria... could know that. Yet she goes forth and researches him for years, makes him the basis of her dissertation, of her career. And brilliantly—she makes that old man live again. Care to calculate the odds of my lost daughter unearthing and making a career out of a long-forgotten forbearer she didn’t even know was hers?”

  “Synchronicity, Jimbo,” said Angie after a moment. “It happens to me too, a lot, but before I just thought it was a fluke. What if all Potentials are affected by synchronicity way out of proportion to the general population?”

  “Buy me a coffee, Milano, and tell me about it,” he said, suddenly feeling very tired.

  “Okay, so what’s your definition of synchronicity?” Jim asked a few minutes later as they sat sipping cappuccino in a coffee house. Despite the hour, the place was crowded, a mix of students and locals.

  “Actually, it’s acausal synchronicity – events that seem to be more than coincidence, but which must be, as they’ve no rational explanation, no apparent causality,” explained Angie, sprinkling more cinnamon onto the frothy steamed milk. “Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli wrote a book about it, back in the ‘50’s.”

  “It’ll surprise you to know that I’ve read it,” said Jim. “But only because someone left it on the New York-D.C. Amtrak I was riding. Coincidence?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Now, say you lived in New York and were taking that train to D.C. to find your long-lost twin brother, whose address you’d just gotten after years of searching. Yet at the same time, your brother was heading north on the opposite track, having just found your address, after years of searching.”

  “Synchronicity?” asked Jim, wondering if he should tell her about the white mustache the cappuccino had left on her lip. “Not yet,” she said. “Say the two trains collide.”

  “Death and destruction,” he said. “Scream of brakes and tortured metal. Moans of the dying amid the wreckage. Synchronicity?”

  “Not yet. And then you and your brother, your relationship still unknown to one another, surviving unscathed, pitch in to rescue a trapped conductor—a conductor who is the father that abandoned you two and your mother to years of hardship. Now that’s synchronicity!”

  “So leaving the worthless son of a bitch in the wreckage, do we go out for a beer?”

  Angie sighed. “No, dear. You may never know that one’s your brother and the other’s your father. Your knowledge of the event’s irrelevant—it’s the event itself that matters.”

  “If no one knows that it’s happened, then how can it have happened?”

  “Jimbo,” she said, “we’re getting into deeper waters.”

  “Knowledge a priori and a posteriori,” he said, sipping his drink. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it and all that, right? William James? He taught here.”

  “I apologize for my condescension,” she said humbly.

  “You called me ‘dear,’”

  “No I didn’t,” she said, shocked. “I never call anyone ‘dear.’”

  “And you’ve got a white mustache,” he added.

  The lecture hall was empty. Maria went outside, standing for a long time on the portico, staring out at deserted Brattle Street. The cold wind shook the old chestnut trees along the sidewalk, their branches throwing intricate, ever-changing shadows along the uneven, weathered bricks. Maria, her mind Elsewhere, seemed not to notice.

  “Gotcha!” cried Tooky, reading the email from his locator service. Picking up the phone, he dialed Jim’s number. “We have two current addresses,” he said when Jim answered.

  Chapter 17

  “We’re an accredited fifty-bed, private psychiatric hospital,” said Schmidla, leading Whitsun and Billy Budd into a three-story, red brick building. Passing a deserted reception desk, they turned down an empty, well-maintained corridor of gleaming marble. “We have a few regular patients, five at the moment, all private pays. They’re treated by psychiatrists from various Boston-area teaching hospitals, all of whom receive incentives to maintain their privileges here at Smalls. We try not to take in anyone who’ll be staying too long and who doesn’t need to be heavily medicated.”

  Budd noticed Dr. Richard S. Schmidla, MD, Director gilt-etched into the frosted glass panel of a door as passed. He’d seen no one else since entering the building, “Where’s the staff?” he asked.

  “There are two duty personnel on the ward, none down here. We haven’t needed much of a staff since our research wound down.”

  Wound down indeed, thought Budd. “Did you ever consider a career in politics, Dr. Schmidla?” he asked. “You have the gift.”

  “I was involved in a populist political movement many years ago, though I never stood for office. Happily. And now what we’re really about,” said Schmidla, pressing the call button. Entering the elevator, he keyed a sequence into the touchpad set at the base of the control. The door shut and the car descended, indicator lights marking its progress from L to B1.

  “Home,” said Schmidla as the door slid open, revealing a hallway of dressed granite blocks and brick floor. “This is Ft. Strong, Mr. Budd,” he said, “named for a fallen Union general. It occupies the western end of the island, mostly dug into the rock. You can’t really see it very well from the ocean. Its earthen roof and gun embrasures are almost totally overgrown.”

  “When was it built?” asked Budd as they turned the hall, pausing at a steel door.

  “About 1840,” said Schmidla. “One of a series of forts built from Maine down to Louisiana to protect you against those vile European powers. Most were designed by Sylvanus Thayer, an American Army engineer and the founder of the U.S. Military Academy. The War of 1812, during which the British burned the White House and raided at will along this coast, left Americans reeling, violated and vulnerable. So, they built their own Maginot Line and it saw about as much service. Of all the forts built during that period, though, only Sumter ever fired a shot in anger, but their existence served as a signal of American resolve to any potential invaders.”

  Wonderful, thought Budd. A Nazi war criminal is lecturing me on American history.

  Keying yet another touchpad, Schmidla led them through the door and down an antiseptic modern corridor done in white latex semi-gloss with recessed lighting. Very ordinary six-panel doors, also white and marked only by small black numbers, lined the corridor. “Let’s look in on our room of curiosities. It’s where we always first take our VIPs.”

  “Room of curiosities?” said Budd. He wished Schmidla would stop smiling. He knew too much of the man’s history to ever see anything but a skull beneath the smile.

  “Curios, transdimensional knickknacks,” said Schmidla.

  “A mere hint of the powers we seek to unleash,” said Whitsun, trying his best.

  Unleash was probably an unfortunate choice, thought Budd.

  Turning a corner, the party stopped short.

  “That’s quite a door,” said Budd.

  A dull gray expanse of metal blocked the corridor. A green-lit keypad was set in the wall beside it, a camera high and to the right.

  “More a gate than a door,” said Schmidla, keying in a quick series of digits. With a faint whir, the great slab sank into the floor. The room beyond was small with just a simple wooden table in the middle, the few objects on it softly lit by low hanging lights.

  Budd walked to the table and stared down staring at two identical black objects. “So, what are these?”

  ‘These’ were equilateral triangles, about six inches on a side, two inches thick, made of a dark iridescent blue material. Budd thought he saw a faint rippling along their
surfaces. He blinked and whatever movement he’d seen was gone.

  “You noticed the shimmering?” said Schmidla.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  Schmidla shrugged. “Who knows? In the twenty-one years they’ve been here there’s been all sorts of speculation by some of the better minds. Terms like phase transition and perturbation theory are the current vogue. My colleague Dr. Bartlett, who worked with extensively with our project’s children, dubbed them Thing One and Thing Two. Certainly as good a name as any.”

  “Fascinating,” said Budd, reaching for nearest Thing.

  “Don’t touch,” said Whitsun, grabbing the CIA officer’s wrist. “You wouldn’t care for the results.”

  “That, Mr. Budd, is what we asked ourselves after we pried them out of the dead hands of one of our Potentials,” said Schmidla. “Why would she bring these back to us from Wherever? Not very impressive looking, are they? Like bookends, they’re a pair.” Taking something shiny and yellow from his pocket, he held it up. “Kruegerand,” he said, dropping it atop the nearest Thing.

  Without any apparent transition a duplicate of the coin appeared on the opposite Thing. Carefully avoiding touching the artifacts, Schmidla quickly removed both with his pen and handed them to Budd. “If you can detect a difference, tell me. You’ll be doing better than some very good numanists and metallurgists.”

  “How large an object can it duplicate?”

  Schmidla shrugged. “I had my car pushed atop one, out in the field near my house, with the other Thing a hundred meters away. I now have two identical cars with identical contents, right down to the Mahler in each CD player. My niece drives the duplicate to Boston. Thinks her silly old uncle ordered two cars.”

  “People don’t fare as well, though, do they, Richard?” prompted Whitsun.