by J. Bryan
Dr. Wichtmann saluted the man with his palm out and conversed with him in German. Then Wichtmann turned toward Juliana. “This is Group Leader Kranzler, the man in charge of the base. He wishes to inspect the results of your test,” Wichtmann explained.
Kranzler looked down at her, and then he and the two S.S. men stepped back from the window. Less than a minute later, the laboratory door opened, and Kranzler marched inside, right toward Juliana. The two men who accompanied him followed very slowly, as if they were afraid to go near her like everyone else. Kranzler’s eyes bored into her as he approached, and he did not look scared at all. He looked like he meant to crush her in one of his large fists.
He stopped to look her over, then looked at the goats. The first one had stopped panicking and gone into a kind of shock. The second lay on its side, groaning and vomiting as it died. The third lay completely still, its head just a lumpy, dark puddle on the cage floor.
Kranzler surveyed them carefully, then spoke to Juliana in German.
“Gruppenführer Kranzler would like to know why the second one dies more slowly, when its wounds extend all over its body. The third goat died before the infection fully spread,” one of the younger S.S. men translated. Both of them remained near the door, ready to run away.
Juliana shrugged. “I guess I concentrated it. Like a cannonball.” She pressed her hands together, in case that made anything clearer.
Kranzler listened to the translation, then muttered in German. The other S.S. men laughed, followed quickly by the scientists above.
“What did he say?” Juliana asked the translator.
“He says, the Reich no longer needs an army. We can simply place you alone on the battlefield.”
“I would not recommend it,” Juliana told him. Kranzler himself laughed when he heard the translation, and everyone hurried to join in. Then he spoke to her at length.
“The Gruppenführer wishes to convey his great joy at having such a valued guest as you,” the translator said. “He asks whether your accommodations have been pleasant, or whether you lack for anything.”
Juliana could have said that she didn’t want to kill any more animals, but she didn’t think her opinion would matter much. She realized that this man held the true power here, and he was trying to decide how he might use her. The thought made her more than a little uneasy. His face was like iron...despite what his assistant said, he did not look like a man feeling great joy, or deeply concerned about her comfort.
“Tell him my accommodations are fine, thank you,” Juliana said, eager to escape Kranzler’s powerful, penetrating gaze.
Kranzler touched the brim of his hat, then crisply turned and walked away, followed by his two assistants, who quickly closed the door behind them.
“This test is concluded,” Dr. Wichtmann announced when the S.S. men had left the lab. “We will study the results and design more for you tomorrow. Leave now and return to your room.”
* * *
Juliana scrubbed and scrubbed herself in one of the four sinks in the bath area on her hall, but she couldn’t quite erase the taint of red from her hands. The animals’ dying shrieks kept echoing inside her skull, tormenting her. She didn’t know if she’d ever felt so horrible or hated herself so much.
She wanted to simply curl up on her bed and speak to no one, but she learned that every evening during the week, the girls had to meet in the community room for “culture hour,” to be led by Alise, since she was their hall fuehrer.
Alise sat on the deep, comfortable couch in the girls’ community room, flanked by Roza, the Polish girl with the large braids, and Vilja, the Swedish girl so ghostly-pale she seemed on the verge of fading out of existence. The three of them had also made chocolate cookies and an apple-cider punch in the community room’s small kitchen corner, and these now sat on the card table in the middle of the room.
The three blond girls formed a kind of clique, from which Juliana’s roommate Mia seemed excluded. Evelina, the short, dark Slavic girl, was all but ignored by the group. She sat in a chair in the corner, while Juliana and Mia sat in rocking chairs next to each other. Juliana thought it was silly to have cliques based on hair color, but that almost seemed to be the idea. In that case, Juliana and her long black locks properly belonged with Evelina instead of Mia.
“First, some good news,” Alise announced. “We will no longer be herded into the mess hall with everyone else. Instead, we subjects will have a private dining room on our own level! They’ll send the food down by dumbwaiter, and we’ll just send our dishes back up.”
“It’s because of her, isn’t it?” Roza looked at Juliana, with a smile that wasn’t particularly friendly. “They’re scared of her. They don’t want to get contaminated.”
“Roza, let’s try something original and be nice to the new girl,” Alise said, touching Roza’s arm. The look in Roza’s eyes immediately softened, and she turned to gaze lovingly at Alise.
“If you want,” Roza breathed.
“Good. Now, Juliana, since you’re new, allow me to explain cultural hour, my favorite hour of the day,” Alise told her. “It is my job to instruct you in German language and history, so we can all speak and understand each other better. We also study proper female arts, such as sewing...” She indicated the sewing machines. “Or we read from the great German writers, or listen to true German music.”
“That sounds fun,” Juliana said. She didn’t mind learning history, and she liked the idea of learning a new language, especially if there were cookies involved.
“I knew you would like it!” Alise said. “You should begin by learning your German numbers. Do you know any yet?”
Juliana shook her head.
“It’s easy.” Alise held up one finger at a time as she said, “Eins, zwei, drei...”
“Eins, zwei, drei...” Juliana repeated, as did all the other girls in the room except for Evelina. The small Slavic girl just watched them with a distant frown.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ward, his assistants Avery and Buchanan, and Tommy hitched a ride on a military plane hauling crates of supplies bound for U.S. Army installations in Schweinfurt, Germany. From there, they rode north in a helicopter, toward the research center in the Harz mountains.
“There it is.” Ward pointed down through the window. “What do you say, Tommy?”
Tommy looked, and Ward could have laughed as his face fell. The old base didn’t look like much—a few sunken concrete pillboxes and rattling ventilation wells in a weedy yard enclosed by a high brick wall and rusty coils of wire.
“What are we doing out here?” Tommy asked.
“Just what I told you, testing and training.”
“At the town dump?” Tommy asked.
“It doesn’t look interesting at all, does it?” Ward asked. “Certainly not worth a second look if you happen to notice it by airplane or satellite. Just old World War II ruins surrounded by chainlink, with signs warning about hazardous conditions inside, just in case any hikers or campers stumble their way up here. We’re in the middle of a national park, so nobody lives nearby.”
The helicopter dropped them down inside the brick wall, onto a helipad painted to blend with the dirt and weeds around it. Ward instructed the pilot to refuel immediately, and then he led Tommy away from the helicopter and toward one of the old concrete buildings.
Inside, the floor was cracked and full of dead weeds and scattered trash. A small, sleek structure of black steel, obviously much more recent, stood in the center of the room, with a pair of sunken double doors like an elevator. Ward stepped up to the circular lens beside it and let the security system scan his retina. There was loud thunk, and then the steel doors slid apart.
“After you.” Ward nodded at Tommy.
Tommy stepped forward. Inside the doors, a long escalator, activated by their arrival, flowed silently down a steep tunnel made of old concrete reinforced with bright steel ribs. Bars of fluorescent lights hung at evenly spaced intervals all the way down.
“What’s down there?” Tommy asked him.
“Your future,” Ward replied.
Tommy lifted his overstuffed duffel bag and stepped onto the escalator. It took them down, down, down...
“What is this place?” Tommy asked.
“A research base. Originally built by the Nazis before World War II, for the Yggdrasil Project...which, as far as we can tell, was about finding and breeding humans with ‘supernormal’ abilities, to create a race of super-soldiers.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do?” Tommy asked him.
“We’re not interested in breeding projects, only national defense,” Ward said. “This base fell into Soviet hands after the war, and they did God knows what with it until the 1980s, when they realized they were losing Germany, cleared the place out, and sealed it up. The modern German government has no use for it—they were going to demolish it, but now it’s under lease to the U.S. government. My agency, specifically.”
They reached the bottom of the escalator and stepped into a wide corridor with gleaming white tiles on the floor and walls. When Ward had first scouted the location, the walls had been either concrete or raw rock from the natural cave system. It had looked like an underground bunker, but with the new walls, floors, and lighting, it now felt more like a proper research center.
“How big is this place?” Tommy asked, clearly impressed.
“Several levels deep,” Ward said. “It had everything we could wish for—dormitories, huge reinforced laboratory bays, an independent supply of mountain spring water, ventilation, hydroelectric power from a couple of nearby waterfalls. German engineering. You have to hand it to the Nazis, they really knew what they were doing sometimes.”
Tommy snorted laughter and smirked.
“Here’s our observation deck.” Black double doors opened automatically at Ward’s approach. They entered a wide, dimly lit corridor lined with clear windows, which looked down into high-ceilinged concrete laboratories, some of them just bare bones with just fluorescent lights and huge steel sinks, others jammed with chemical testing or medical equipment. One had an MRI machine. The workday had ended, so the observation deck and the labs below were deserted.
A digital workstation sat in front of each window, allowing observers to monitor the lab from above. A long table with more workstations ran along the center of the corridor. Little square flags hung here and there, depicting the “union” of fifty white stars on a blue field from an American flag. As an agency with no official existence, ASTRIA had no official insignia or seal, either, but it had used the starry blue as its unofficial symbol since the 1950’s.
“This looks really familiar to me,” Tommy said. “Like I’ve been here before.”
“That’s because you made the right choice,” Ward said. “You belong here. This is where we’ll use the latest technology to unravel just how your power works, and how it can best be applied to national defense. It’s quiet now, so let’s go to your new room.”
Ward led him through more tunnels, toward the dormitory area for test subjects. Along the way, they passed a pair of security officers in black uniforms ribbed with light body armor. Their uniforms were blank, with no insignia, badges, or other designs to indicate what organization employed these men. Like all the security staff at the base, they were not soldiers, but specialists from Hale Security Group, a Virginia-based multinational that provided operatives under contract to the Defense and State Departments, the CIA, and other sensitive agencies, and they did similar work for an assortment of other national governments, including the UK and Saudi Arabia. These men were former Special Forces or intelligence agents from across the Western world, highly trained killers who knew how to keep a secret.
Because they were mercenaries and not soldiers, they did not salute Ward, but simply nodded their heads in recognition.
Ward opened the double doors to the short dormitory hall for male test subjects. Tommy gaped as he stepped into the first room, the largest on the hall.
“This seems familiar, too,” Tommy said. “It’s weird. You ever get the hairs on the back of your neck standing up?”
Ward had felt that same cold tingle of recognition before—when he’d first toured the facility when scouting locations for a research center. He’d known immediately that this was the place he wanted.
“It can happen,” Ward said. “You’ll see we’ve modernized, got you a flat screen TV with satellite feed. Climate control panel. At the end of the hall, you’ll find the common room and the bathrooms. You’ve got the place to yourself for now.”
Tommy sank slowly onto the bed, looking dazed.
“The scientists might come here to meet you,” Ward told him. “If not, you can go to the mess hall for dinner.” Ward gave him directions through the underground complex.
“Are you leaving?” Tommy asked.
“I’ll have to jump back to America to deal with a certain situation,” Ward said. “But I’ll be returning soon. Very soon, if things go well. Are you all right here?”
Tommy nodded, but made no move to unpack his duffel bag. The kid seemed out of it, but he had tonight to rest.
Ward left the dormitory hall, followed by Buchanan and Avery.
“You think he’ll work out?” Avery asked.
Ward ignored the question. “Buchanan, didn’t we see transactions between Barrett Capital and Hale Security Group?”
“A few, sir. It looked like standard private-sector work, risk assessment for investments in India and East Asia.”
“Of course, it looked like nothing interesting. Hale isn’t run by idiots. But didn’t those transactions begin around the time Seth Barrett disappeared?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“Tell me, Buchanan, if you were some rich guy, and you wanted to hide yourself...or hide your son...from the United States government, would Hale be a good company to hire?”
“Of course, sir,” Buchanan replied.
“Those rats!” Avery said.
Ward considered it. He’d automatically seen Hale as part of “his” team because he’d staffed up the research center with their security officers. He’d had Buchanan check into the payments from the Barretts, of course, but the story had sounded normal at the time. It hadn’t occurred to him that his own security people could be hiding the targets for whom he was searching.
Ward slowly smiled. Hale had a multimillion-dollar contract with his agency, ASTRIA. He had plenty of influence with them, and he could even threaten to have their security clearance revoked if they didn’t play ball. That would cost them most of their revenue, destroying the company. Their piddling payments from Barrett Capital were nothing compared to their government contracts.
Also, Ward felt like he had the current Hale CEO, Edward Cordell, in his pocket. He’d shaken hands with the man on many occasions, and so he knew all about Eddie’s twenty-two-year-old mistress and the Manhattan apartment he rented for her. He also knew that Eddie hid things from his wife by keeping the apartment on a Hale corporate account, lightly embezzling from the company to protect his secret. Ward would have almost no trouble getting him to cooperate and tell him where to find Seth Barrett and Jenny Morton.
There was only one remaining obstacle, and it was time to square that away.
* * *
Senator Junius Mayfield woke in his hospital bed on the fifth floor of a private hospital in Maryland to find a ghostly apparition staring in through his window. His heartbeat kicked up until he realized it was just a barn owl perched in the tree limb outside, its dark eyes and ghost-white face turned toward Junius, watching him. The owl’s stare was unsettling, and he would have liked to yell at it and chase it off, but he couldn’t even get out of bed.
“Go on, fly on, leave me be,” Junius said, but it sounded like “Ooh ah, faya, lemma buh.” His voice came out as a whisper, barely audible above the beeping of his heart monitor.
The owl, clearly not intimidated, stayed where it was, staring into his window.
The left half of Junius’ body was frozen solid, and the right half moved as slowly as a stiff old mule in the dead of winter. His staff had done their best to keep the full extent of the stroke damage from the news media and the public, but his prolonged absence from the Senate floor spoke volumes about his true condition. Already, his enemies back in Tennessee were pushing for a special election to replace him.
Junius thought about calling in the nurse and getting her to close the blinds so the owl couldn’t stare at him, but it seemed like a pathetic request. Instead, he clawed his right hand toward the side of the bed, thinking he would find the TV remote and discover what kind of programming the Golf Channel offered at three in the morning. Probably the women’s tour, he thought.
His hand couldn’t find the remote, so he turned his head, and then he saw the three men in his room, all of them wearing dark suits and lab coats, but they weren’t any doctors he knew. The one in the lead was the oldest, his sandy-red hair going gray and cropped close. One of the two younger men held Junius’ remote, smirking at him. Without it, Junius couldn’t summon help.
Junius didn’t recognize any of them. He flipped through his mental catalog of enemies, trying to figure out just who would bother having him killed when he was already down for the count. He couldn’t think of anyone. Junius had the sort of enemies who relished the chance to give a speech at his funeral, where they could damn him with faint praise. On reflection, Junius wasn’t sure he deserved much more than faint praise, anyway.
“Senator Mayfield,” the oldest man said. “I’m General Ward Kilpatrick. I’m looking for your niece’s son.”
Junius tried to snarl at them, but he had very little control over his face. So it was about that. Junius had hoped he would die before the Seth ordeal raised its head again. I told Iris not to marry into that Barrett family, he thought. Told her they were trouble.
Junius had known the first Jonathan Seth Barrett briefly, a lifetime ago. The man had a heart like black smoke, and in his prime, they said he could charm the horns off the devil. Barrett had started out as a small-town banker and landowner, but managed to work himself up into a minor player on Wall Street and a titan of Southern industry. Fortunately for the world, the South wasn’t all that industrious, or Jonathan Seth Barrett could have been the next J.P. Morgan. Instead, Barrett had eventually shriveled up and faded away, going crazy inside his big house with all his money.
