The Eldridge Conspiracy

by Stephen Ames Berry

  The corridor had six metal doors, each with a small rectangle of thick, clear glass set at eye level, a large brass lock above the doorknob. A small sliding panel lay just below the window. Painted an institutional green, the doors bore no markings, but she knew at which one to stop. Not hesitating, knowing she’d never try again if she didn’t do it now, Maria peered into the room.

  He sat on a wooden chair beside the bed, reading a book by the light of a table lamp, a long-haired young man in his mid-twenties, dressed in a cotton sweater and bell-bottom jeans, decades out of style.

  She must have made some sound—he looked up. He had a bright, intelligent face, narrow and sharp-featured, with a very prominent nose and dark hair. He also had the saddest eyes she’d ever seen. “A woman,” he said, amazed. Rising he moved to the door. “They never send a woman.”

  Barely able to hear him through the thick door, Maria pushed open the slide. She’d been expecting... what? A monster? No, a monstrosity, some horrible perversion of nature. Instead, she’d found a guy who looked like a 70’s grad student. Yet there was something off about him, something that escaped her but left her uneasy.

  “Want to come in?” he asked. “Just another quiet evening at home.”

  “Who are you?” she asked

  “I’m...” His face clouded with confusion. “I’m some kind of idiot who can’t remember his own name.” He tried to laugh, but instead his face twisted and he turned away with a strangled sob. Shuffling to the bed, he threw himself down, burying his face in the pillow.

  Maria hated the door and the lock that kept her from reaching him.

  Suddenly he turned over and sat bolt upright. “Jack!” he shouted triumphantly. “I’m Jumpin’ Jack Goldman! Come in, pretty face,” he cried, “come in and jump with Jumpin’ Jack! It’s jumping time!” His eyes were wild, insane and his face glowed, a glow that grew brighter as Maria watched in horrified fascination.

  “No!” he shrieked, his features contorting in terror. “Not again! Stop! Let me end!” He drew himself into a fetal ball as the glow continued, spreading down his body, encasing him in a blinding white radiance that forced Maria to jerk her head away, shielding her eyes. Light pulsed through the small room and then faded.

  She opened her eyes. Jumpin’ Jack was gone.

  “He comes and he goes,” said a voice behind her.

  She whirled, heart pounding, reaching for the knife. “You!” she said to Musashi. “Don’t ever do that again!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Who was that poor demented man and where did he go?

  “That, as he told you, was Jack Goldman—Jumpin’ Jack,” said Musashi. “A second generation descendent of an ensign from the second Eldridge experiment. Jack’s one of Schmidla’s more spectacular failures. As you saw, he did boost Jack’s Potential so that he could jump Elsewhere—a little chemical accelerant from The Good Doctor’s stock—but he couldn’t get him to stop. Jack’s gone zero, looping until the end of time. A hellish immortality. He shows up each night about seven, looks confused and then picks up that book he just dropped and starts reading it. Always at the beginning.”

  Maria peered through the window, trying to discern the title.

  “It’s by Jean Paul Sartré,” said Musashi.

  “Not Being and Nothingness,” said Maria, recalling an empty space in Schmidla’s bookcase. It was surreal, it was horrible. She was scared and wanted to wake up.

  Musashi nodded. “A cruel prop provided by The Good Doctor. Says a lot about Schmidla, doesn’t it? Jack’s kept alive to show to visitors, a vivid demonstration of a potentiality not yet realized.”

  “What happened to the ‘born alone, die alone’ stuff?”

  “It’s still true, Kaeko. It’s just that after we’re born or after we die, someone tidies up. That’s me.”

  “My name’s Maria,” she said.

  “If it pleases you to think so.”

  “Who or what are you?” she asked as they walked back through the fort and into deserted hospital.

  “Just a guy,” said Musashi. “So, how’s my credibility?”

  “Better. At least as far as the project and Uncle Richard’s involvement.”

  “If that, why not the rest?”

  She shrugged. “Denial. I want to meet this Beauchamp,” she said after a moment.

  “Your father.”

  “Whatever. I want to meet him. Can you arrange it?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. He’s in the area.”

  “My car’s over by the bridge,” he said as they stepped out of the hospital. “I’ll walk you back to the house.”

  It was then that they heard the helicopter.

  “Lokransky,” said Musashi. “Inside!”

  Ducking back into the lobby, they stood watching through the doors.

  The big Sikorsky appeared seconds later, coming in low over the fort, ablaze with light. Swooping past, nose down, it circled and leveled off, landing near the house, engines roaring. Lokransky was out before it had quite touched down, dragging a woman after him. Handcuffed, face battered, she walked in front of him, her head held high. Two more Russians followed, a man between them, his hands also bound behind him. Schmidla and Whitsun came out to meet them.

  Captives and captors disappeared into the house.

  “Maria,” said Musashi urgently, taking her by the shoulders, “you must leave now. We’ll go together.”

  “No,” she said, shrugging off his hands.

  “You must! Things are going to quickly worsen.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until I find out who I am and if my uncle is the monster you say he is.”

  Musashi looked at her determined face, then back at the house. “They’ll be looking for you. Perhaps it had to come to this,” he said more to himself than to her. “Listen,” he continued urgently, “whatever happens, wherever you go, no matter who you are, try to remember that you’re a good and kindly person, daughter of gentle and loving parents. I’ll be back for you,” he said as he moved into the lobby. In a second he’d disappeared down the main corridor.

  Maria stepped outside and waited for them to find her.

  “I gather she didn’t give you the Eldridge roster?” said Whitsun, taking in Angie’s bruised and cut face as Lokransky brought her and O’Malley into the front parlor, hands secured behind them.

  “She didn’t have it,” said Lokransky. “She managed to kill one of my men, though.”

  “Quite the little spitfire, aren’t you?” said Schmidla.

  “You must be the infamous Doctor Schmidla,” said Angie, ignoring Whitsun.

  Smiling, Schmidla sketched a bow.

  “Still shrinking?” she asked.

  Schmidla stopped smiling.

  “Was Seaman Bissette your grandfather?” Whitsun asked O’Malley.

  “He was,” said O’Malley. There was an air of quiet resignation to him. He regarded Whitsun as though the Admiral were an uninteresting bit of flotsam.

  “He was in my division, back on the Missouri, before he transferred to subs. Good man.”

  “My grandfather said that you were a pompous and self-aggrandizing martinet, Admiral, and that whoever put you in charge of other human beings should have forced to serve under you,” said O’Malley. “Forever.” It wasn’t true, but it worked.

  Whitsun’s icy WASP reserve disappeared as the color rose to his cheeks. Lokransky stepped forward and punched O’Malley hard in the stomach. The engineer doubled over with a grunt of pain.

  Angie pulled away from her surprised guard, closed the distance to Lokransky and kicked him at the back of the knee. Cursing, the Russian staggered, going to the floor.

  “Stop!” ordered Whitsun as Angie’s guard raised the stock of his machine pistol. “Get them out of here. Put them in the hospital ward, next to Mr. Goldman’s room. See that they’re kept apart.”

  “She killed one of my men,” said Lokransky as the door closed behind. “You will pay his family, as we agreed.” />
  “Of course, Colonel,” said Whitsun.

  “Are all your women officers like that, Terry?” asked Schmidla with a slight smile.

  “I never allowed women officers in any of my commands. And I retired before they could force any on me.” Going to the side table, he poured himself a scotch, neat. “Warfare is for men.”

  “Had you been in Russia with us Terry, you’d have learned that the Russians certainly don’t believe that nonsense.” He turned to Lokransky, standing by the door. “Or am I wrong, Colonel?”

  “All of her children serve the Motherland,” said Lokransky, exchanging icy glares with the Schmidla.

  “You see, Terry?” said Schmidla, walking over to join Whitsun for a drink. “How could anyone defeat that? It’s like fighting the earth itself. We must have been mad.”

  Lokransky glared at Schmidla, silent and tight-lipped

  “You planned and executed a brilliant operation tonight, Colonel,” said Whitsun, trying to ease the tension. “My compliments, sir. Will you join us for a drink?”

  Lokransky bowed stiffly. “Thank you, Admiral. I would be pleased to drink with you, sir, but not,” he jerked his head toward Schmidla, “with that. With your permission, I’ll see to the prisoners and check the guard posts.”

  “Perhaps the Colonel would be so kind as to find my niece?” asked Schmidla. “She’ll be needed shortly. She’s not in her room.”

  Lokransky looked at Whitsun. The Admiral nodded. Turning on his heel, Lokransky left.

  Watching the Russian through the window, Schmidla raised his cognac glass. “To the New Europe. God help it. And so now we’ve got two useful Potentials and we need three.”

  “Actually, Richard, you may have three,” said Whitsun with a smug smile.

  “Oh, really?” said Schmidla. “How’s that?”

  “Rourke forwarded a summary of the fight in Jamaica Plain, at O’Malley’s house.”

  “Phil Martin’s Waterloo.”

  “Yes. One of Martin’s men was killed, rather gruesomely, in a way that could only have been done by someone who’s a very powerful Potential.”

  “A Potential?” asked Schmidla. He set down his glass, cognac forgotten.

  “Had to have been. And it couldn’t have been O’Malley, as he’d already been spirited away. From the reports of the witnesses—neighbors, peering out their windows—it had to have been Milano, saving Beauchamp, whose brains were about to be blown out.”

  “How do we know it wasn’t Beauchamp?”

  “Neither of his parents was in any of the ship invisibility experiments. It could only have been Milano.”

  “How extraordinary, if true,” said Schmidla. “Well, there is one way to find out.”

  “Use her as the third Potential in the experiment?”

  “Precisely.”

  “You didn’t tell them that O’Malley is also an illusionist?” said Nikolev to Lokransky as the two walked from Hull House.

  “No,” said Lokransky. “And I won’t. Only Moscow need know. Just be on your guard for anymore such tricks, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, wondering how you guarded against such tricks.

  In McLean, Virginia, CIA Director Harry Rourke dialed the private home number of the Secretary of Defense. The SecDef himself answered. “Sorry to bother you so late,” he said. “There’s a situation brewing in Boston that may require SpecOps intervention.” He listened to the protest on the other end. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with Naesmith,” he said, invoking the President’s National Security Advisor. “We’re to meet with her tomorrow—she’s probably calling you right now. I just wanted you to hear it from me rather than her. We’re sending the Second SpecOps battalion to Boston, as precaution. Yes, the Black Brigade. It’s Whitsun and Telemachus. Time to close them down. No, I don’t think they’ll be needed, but they’ll be there just in case. The Russians are poking around up there. If they see something they like coming out of Telemachus they may try to take it. Tell me, Joseph, have you ever heard of Colonel Anton Lokransky of the Spesnatz?”

  Lokransky was a sadist, a remorseless torturer and murderer, an adept in the black arts of death, fast or slow. He’d gone into Afghanistan a captain and returned three years later a lieutenant colonel. Afghanistan had been hell and he’d reveled in it, as he had in Chechnya. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to another human being in the pursuit of his mission—that he enjoyed doing it made it even better. “It’s not so important what work you do in life, Anton,” his grandfather had said, “so long as you enjoy it.” Anton enjoyed his work.

  Above all else, though, Anton Lokransky was a Russian officer and the son of Russian officers. He despised the decadent West for its cowardly Cold War triumph. He despised his own countrymen for their greed—the greed with which they were raping his Mother Russia. He despised his government for its weakness and corruption. Often, too, he despised himself for working for the men he did, justifying it as an expedient toward the birth of a new Russian Empire, one free of the crippling strictures of a failed ideology.

  In many ways Lokransky and the Russian Mafia were much alike: they were strong and ruthless and knew what they wanted, and what they wanted was more. After the Berlin Wall came down they’d both wanted money. Having money, they wanted Russia to be powerful again—something Anton Lokransky might just be able to help attain. And then when Russia was powerful again, they would want ever-greater things for her.

  The Kremlin had long known about Project Telemachus and GRD and Admiral Whitsun and all those secret sites out in the desert—known but never penetrated it, the agents they sent always disappeared. Only recently, through one of Schmidla’s corruptible European colleagues, had they learned of the second aspect of Telemachus and its wondrous promise. The old freighter now dropping anchor off the island had been their only hope—until Whitsun had hired the very man they’d picked to lead that operation. We may yet dance on your graves thought Lokransky, looking beyond the freighter towards the lights of Boston.

  Reloading his machine pistol, he resumed his walk along cliff tops, following the well-worn path toward Hull House and what promised to be a momentous day.

  Behind and below him, the incoming tide battered the bullet torn bodies of half a dozen harbor seals against the rocks.

  Chapter 21

  Jim and Dee had a somber lunch over soup and salad in a little place on Prince Street then went up to the rental condo he’d shared with Angie.

  “If you never love anyone, you can never be hurt,” said Dee, coming from the alley kitchen, bearing two steaming mugs of coffee.

  “I thought you didn’t read minds,” he said.

  “I don’t,” she said. “You’re emanating great dark waves of anguish. I’d have to be dead to not feel it.”

  “You’re an empath, too?”

  “If you feel it, I can feel it,” she sighed. “You know, I’m pretty much an agoraphobic. I try to wall myself off from people—their emotions wash through me like a polluted stream. Strong thoughts do too, the ones driven by strong emotions—love, hate, greed. Hate tops the rest. God, it’s so corrosive. Some dark days I all but pray cockroaches inherit the Earth.” Sipping her coffee, she looked out the window. It was a gray autumn day, rain clouds scudding in off the ocean.

  “She’s on that island, right over there,” he said following her gaze over the rooftops of the North End toward the harbor.

  “No one you can call on for help?”

  “Help? Like the government?”

  She nodded.

  “No. Our fine government’s in this up to its nostrils. All I seem to be doing is getting people I care about killed or captured.” The shootout at the Windermere was all over the TV and the newspapers, especially images of a parade of body bags. “I’m going over to that island and I’m not coming back without the three of them.”

  “Anyone else but me going with you?”

  Jim looked at her small determined face and laughed. “Have you ever fired a
gun?”

  “No. But I can learn. Besides, it never hurts to have a mind reader along.”

  “Really. So where do I have to be in thirty minutes?” he asked, trying to clear his mind of all but an image of an earless Vincent Van Gogh.

  “Anne’s Donuts on Bunker Hill Street in Charlestown,” she said at once. “Meeting with a criminal named Eddy Murphy. You saved Mr. Murphy’s life a few wars ago when you were his platoon leader. Later Mr. Murphy was employed by you to break into various places and steal information about...”

  “Thank you,” he said. “We can walk to Charlestown—there’s no place to park there anyway.”

  “And yes, I do have nice little tits.”

  “Now El Tee, let me see if I understand this,” said Eddy, tucking into his luncheon omelet. Jim watched the egg-laden fork paused halfway to Eddy’s mouth. “I’m just a simple working guy, you know?”

  “Right,” said Jim.

  Five years younger than Jim, Eddy Murphy, despite the beer and the red meat and the donuts, had somehow kept the weight off. Still, he’d never been small—six feet two, stocky—almost chunky—he had big hands, a broad face with green eyes and a mouth that smiled a lot without always meaning it. His income tax return listed his occupation as “Automobile Recycler.”

  “Okay, so you need some sharp guys to go with you on a trip, a little outing to someplace nearby, rescue a few friends from some bad men. Would these bad men be any I know?”

  “No,” said Jim, watching the food slip into Eddy’s mouth. “They’re not in the same line of work as you.”

  Eddy chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “I hear Tooky Azarian got shot over in JP, helping out an old friend,” he said, slabbing butter on his toast.

  “Tooky’s a nice guy,” said Jim.

  “Umm. Yeah, well, while he was nicely catching a bullet the guy he was with got away. Neighbors got a good look at him, though.” Eddy looked at Dee, sitting a few tables away, sipping her orange juice and watching them. “She read lips or something?”