EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum (31 page)

2

Wednesday, 3 June (5:44 p.m. CST – Chicago)

Denise tugged at her hair, strands of which tangled in the hinge of her glasses. Rain blew against her office window and it was as dark as midnight outside despite the early hour. Her search for the personnel and Syncorp satellite companies on the list Will had sent was fruitless after a couple of days of work. The home addresses given for the personnel either didn’t exist, or led to commercial locations such as malls and movie theaters. The company profiles seemed to be legit, unless their covers were just well managed.

She walked into Jonathan’s office. He was on the phone and motioned for her to have a seat.

She sat down and watched through the large windows as the rain tore through the trees in the courtyard below. Jonathan ended the conversation that, from what she’d overheard, had to do with data encryption and recovery.

“Any luck?” he asked as he walked over to her. By the look in his eye she could tell he already knew better.

She shook her head. “I can’t verify anything, and I’m two-thirds through both lists.”

“Nothing at all?”

She shook her head.

Jonathan’s face became serious to the point where she thought he looked worried. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, and seemed to shake away his expression. “The companies – any of them close to us?”

“There’s one here, in Chicago, and another in Waukesha, Wisconsin,” Denise replied.

“What’s the one in Chicago?”

“A biotech company – nutrition enhancements,” she replied. “Not sure what that means.”

“Sounds nondescript enough to fit the profile of a Syncorp affiliate,” Jonathan said. “Make a visit and see what they’re doing.”

“Just walk in?” Denise asked.

“Be creative,” Jonathan said, grinning. “You’ve done this before.”

Denise recalled the time she’d conned her way into a forensic testing facility in southern Illinois while investigating Will’s case. That adventure had ended with the facility in flames, a car chase and, most disturbingly, two dead people. Compared to that, she figured, this should be a piece of cake.

“I’ll start planning,” she said.

“Get it done tomorrow,” Jonathan instructed. “We need to evaluate this information as soon as possible.”

Denise again sensed something in Jonathan’s voice. “Something wrong?”

“I hope not,” he said.

She walked back to her office and pulled up the webpage for Nutrition Enhancements, Inc. Maybe they had some job openings.

3

Wednesday, 3 June (6:55 p.m. EST – Antarctica)

After dinner, Daniel and Sylvia went back to the library with the translators. Horace stayed on the
North Dakota
to rest.

Daniel continued his work on the notebooks. The more he read, the more he despised Mengele. He was supposed to be able to emotionally detach himself, but it was impossible. The man was a brutal sociopath who had been given the opportunity to exercise all of his heinous whims. It was a shame that the Israelis hadn’t caught up with him.

He finished with Mengele’s first notebook, which started in December of 1943 and ended in November 1944. At the time, the Nazis had to know the war was lost, but there was no such indication in Mengele’s notes, even in the streams of consciousness that were now beginning to read as the babblings of a madman. The second notebook logged events of the same nature as the first: gruesome, drawn-out torture treatments, strange observations construed as telekinetic events, and ideas for new horrific experiments.

After a few hours, the translators left for a break and, on Daniel’s request, to check on Horace. He caught Sylvia’s gaze.

“I want to go to the vault,” she said. “I need to look at the disc.”

“You find something?”

She shook her head. “There’s a mark on the print that’s too faint to read,” she said. “I just want to verify it. That’s all.”

As they navigated through the hallways and staircases, the underlying darkness overshadowed the bright lights. Even the crew bustling about, working on things and taking pictures, didn’t temper the feeling of being watched. It was nonsensical, but it was hard to separate the place from what had happened there. Were the tortured souls still running about? He brushed it off. He’d debunked quite a few ghost stories in his early years as an Omni.

He tried to imagine what it had been like for the prisoners that had been brought to the place. They’d been delivered by submarine to the bottom of the world to have the most horrible things happen to them. They were being brought to hell.

They went through a door, and Daniel led the way through the first room and into the vault. He opened a cabinet on the right, revealing the large object wrapped in a blanket.

Sylvia reached in and uncovered the stone. With her finger, careful not to touch the surface, she traced the circular pattern on the third ring in from the outside. She tilted her head and looked closely at a symbol. “The print missed a subtle feature,” she said. “Good thing we came.” She pulled out a small, digital camera from her pocket and took a few shots.

They rewrapped the disk and closed the cabinet doors.

Sylvia turned to go out, but Daniel’s attention was drawn to the bank of file drawers that filled the entire wall opposite the vault door. There were 49 of them – an array of 7 by 7. He grabbed the handle of one near the center and rolled it out. It was about six feet long, and packed solid with files. He didn’t even bother to pull out a file; they didn’t have time to read anything more than what they had, and he didn’t want to disturb the organization for those who would come later and research the place in detail. It would take years, and he only had days.

He closed the drawer and opened others, just to see if they all were packed just as densely. Opened, closed. Opened, closed. After about 20 repetitions, he opened one from the middle right of the array that he knew was mostly empty from the moment he pulled it. All it contained was a cubic metal box, about 10 inches on a side. He pulled it out – it wasn’t very heavy – and walked it out of the vault and set it on a desk in the adjacent room.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s locked,” he replied. He examined it for a label but found nothing. “Damn,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’ll ask the captain to get one of his guys to open it. Let’s get back to work.”

She remained still, staring at the box.

“What?” he asked. He read fear in her expression.

“I don’t know,” she replied. Her eyes darted around, looking at the walls, and then the ceiling. She crossed her arms tightly into her midsection and bent over. She took her right palm and pressed it tightly against the center of her chest, near her sternum.

“You okay?” he asked, touching her shoulder with his right hand.

She flinched violently. She stood erect and backed out of the room and into the hall. Daniel followed.

“Sylvia, what’s wrong?”

“Let’s just go.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to keep up with her as she hurried down the corridor.

After a minute, she slowed but was breathing heavily. He didn’t say anything, but just walked with her. By the time they got to the library she was back to normal

When they walked in, Horace was already back and working. “Exploring the area?” he asked.

“We went to the vault room,” Daniel replied, and then told Horace about the locked box. He asked one of the translators to go ask McHenry to have it opened.

“What happened to you back there?” Daniel asked Sylvia, her face still pale.

“I don’t know,” she replied, shaking her head. “I was overcome with the need to run – to get the hell out of there. It was a dark feeling, Daniel, like fright and depression. My chest hurt, and I still feel like throwing up.”

Daniel had felt something as well, but for him it wasn’t as strong. Perhaps it was from knowing what had happened so many years ago – from the files it was clear that many hundreds people had been tortured to death.

When Sylvia seemed settled, they got back to work. Daniel continued reading Mengele’s third notebook. Most of the pages were covered with dense writing mixed with hand-drawn sketches and graphs. He finished a page explaining a new torture method that would tap into the nerves of a subject’s lower back. He flipped to the next page that, to his surprise, was mostly blank.

In the middle of the page dated June 2
nd
, 1945 was written a phrase that Daniel was able to translate himself:
Der Führer ist heute angekommen.
He got light-headed for few seconds, and rubbed his eyes. He took a deep breath and read it again, slowly. There was no other interpretation.

The Führer has arrived today.

4

Thursday, 4 June (1:38 p.m. CST – Chicago)

Denise walked into Jonathan’s office with a cup of coffee and sat down at the large table.

Jonathan hung up his desk phone, and walked over. He gave her a strange look.

“What?” she asked, confused.

“What’s that smell?”

“I smell?” she asked, sniffing her sleeve, and then her hair. “No wonder the people at Moose Beard Coffee were giving me odd looks.”

“What is it?”

“Cheese,” Denise replied. “The suspected evil Syncorp partner I visited makes concentrated cheese products. I now know more about cheese than I ever wanted to.”

“A front for something else?”

“I don’t think so,” Denise replied. “I posed as a job candidate and the owner took me on a tour of the entire facility. No place to hide anything.”

“I have people checking out a few other places. Now I want you to focus your efforts on finding the Syncorp personnel on the list,” Jonathan said. “I have a fundraiser tonight. Let’s meet after that, say ten?”

Such late meetings weren’t unusual. Jonathan would often work past 2:00 a.m. But this time she saw something different in his eyes. He was worried about something.

“Ten o’clock it is,” she said and went to her office. She went to work on Will’s list of Syncorp employees and, after two hours, confirmed nothing – not a single name.
Something was wrong.

5

Thursday, 4 June (8:41 p.m. EST – Antarctica)

Daniel ate dinner while Horace and Sylvia discussed the day’s findings with Captain McHenry.

“Certainly you aren’t suggesting that Hitler was alive at the time,” McHenry said.

“After seeing this place, would that really be such a surprise?” Horace asked.

Daniel could tell by Horace’s tone that he wasn’t completely serious. McHenry seemed to catch on.

“I suppose not,” McHenry replied, and chuckled. “Have you made headway on anything else?”

After they finished giving their updates, McHenry spoke. “Now I have an update for you. We’ve discovered a porthole to the surface. It was used by the Nazis to extend an antenna. If we hadn’t discovered it, tomorrow we’d have to take the
North Dakota
out to the lake and extend an antenna of our own.”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to communicate,” Daniel said.

“We’re not supposed to transmit,” McHenry corrected, “but we can receive.” He paused a few seconds and continued. “We put an antenna up the hole and got a message from the carrier group. Chinese Special Forces have moved closer – they’re within five miles.”

“How do they know what they’re looking for?” Daniel asked. “And where to look?”

“I don’t think they know exactly where to look,” McHenry said. “That’s our advantage, and we’ll keep radio silence as long as possible.”

“How long do we have?” Sylvia asked.

“If they don’t find us, then we have until we run out of food,” McHenry answered. “In that case, we have about three months.”

“What’s realistic?” Daniel asked. “How long will it take them to find us?”

“Ten days, tops,” McHenry replied. “That is, if the weather holds up. It’s getting pretty ugly out there right now.”

“And if they find us?” Sylvia asked.

“We’ll need to use force to secure the base. The President will have to decide whether or not to risk war.”

Daniel’s feet tingled. Sleep was going to be impossible. The time pressure made the conditions unfavorable for undistracted thought. “Did you open the box?”

“I have someone working on it right now,” McHenry replied. “It will be straightforward – we’ll just drill out the lock – once we’ve determined it’s not booby trapped. Do you think it’s important?”

“Important enough to put into the vault,” Horace said.

McHenry nodded.

They finished eating and McHenry went to the bay to check the progress on the box. Daniel filled his coffee mug and stood at the end of the table. “I’m going back to the library,” he said.

“I really need sleep,” Sylvia said, “but I don’t see any other way.”

Horace agreed.

Daniel was impressed by the old man’s resilience. “Horace, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“I had the impression when we’d first met that you had some insight regarding what is happening right now,” Daniel said. “Do you?”

After a few seconds of still silence, seemingly mulling over in his mind how to respond, Horace nodded slowly. “I’ve had suspicions since the end of the war,” he replied. “You see, I participated in Operation Tabarin
.
”

Daniel was stunned. Horace was indeed ancient. “But that was a
British
mission.”

“I have dual citizenship,” Horace replied. “I was OSS and SAS and, later, MI-6 and CIA.”

“How were you cleared to be an Omni?” Daniel asked, astonished.

“The ties between the US and UK run deeper than most people realize,” Horace answered.

“What happened in Tabarin?” Sylvia asked. “What did you learn?”

“Nothing,” Horace replied.

Daniel was confused. “You said all of this had
existential implications
. What did you mean?”

“I’d led a recon group to a location probably within 50 kilometers from here,” Horace explained. “We were looking for a Nazi SS task force.”

“Did you find them?” Sylvia asked.

“Yes,” Horace said. “At first we thought they’d frozen to death – but 12 soldiers don’t just freeze to death all in the same place. We searched their site and found a note explaining that they had poisoned themselves – committed suicide.”

“Why?” Daniel asked.

“They were frightened,” Horace said. “The note explained that the Nazis had found a way to bring back Hitler, and that he’d possess powers beyond imagination. They were aware of what Hitler had done in the extermination camps. They felt that, if he did return, they’d be responsible. They thought that Hitler might be the devil himself.”

“It’s preposterous,” Daniel said. “The SS wouldn’t fall for such idiocy.”

“I disagree,” Horace said. “The SS was a strange organization, deeply rooted in the occult.”

“What do you believe?” Sylvia asked Horace.

“When we returned from our mission with this information, we were quickly debriefed and ordered never to speak of it again,” Horace explained. “Of course, we talked about it amongst ourselves. But it wasn’t until 1960, when I met a former American submarine captain, drunk in a London pub, that I’d become suspicious to the point of paranoia. He was telling a story to some fellow drunks of how he’d been tasked with sinking a Nazi sub off the coast of Antarctica because it had been feared that Hitler was on the vessel. He’d said that that occurred in 1946, during Operation Highjump – the so-called American invasion of Antarctica.”

“You believed him?” Sylvia asked, her face showing both surprise and skepticism.

“No,” Horace said. “But I wish I had.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Now I remember some details of that conversation,” Horace replied. “He’d mentioned a secret tunnel, and an underwater object – a secret Nazi weapon. When I asked him questions, he clammed up. My impression at the time was that he was making up stories.”

“Too many correct details,” Daniel said. “Probably not a coincidence.”

“What’s happening now
does
have existential implications,” Horace said. “I believe that.”

“And now, with Mengele’s notes about the Fürher arriving … well, I suppose we have to consider every possibility,” Daniel said in disbelief of his own words.

McHenry rushed in. “Come with me,” he said, breathing heavily.

“What is it?” Daniel asked, his heart thumped hard in his chest. His first thoughts were that Chinese forces were knocking on their door.

McHenry waved for them to follow him. “We’ve opened the box.”