The Project (11 page)

The briefcase was full of papers, mainly in German, although there were also some letters in English that appeared to be business transactions. There was also a small cardboard box containing business cards, with Mullins’s name on them, and at the very bottom of the case was a plain manila folder.

Luke opened it.

There were papers inside, the first having nothing on it except for a strange symbol:

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Beats me,” Tommy replied.

Inside were diagrams—plans for something, but Luke had no idea what. The titles and descriptions were in German. According to Tommy, it was technical vocabulary that he didn’t understand, but even stranger than that, they were all written
backward
. All the words and numbers were mirrored.

“Why would they do that?” Luke wondered.

“Ask Leonardo,” Tommy said.

There were about ten pages of plans, and Luke went through them one by one, studying them, holding them up to the mirror on the hotel wall and memorizing the diagrams and numbers.

He was on the last page when they heard voices in the corridor outside.

“Luke!” Tommy hissed.

Luke thrust the folder back into the briefcase, slammed the case shut, and shoved it underneath the bed where they’d found it.

There was a beep from the electronic lock on the door.

Luke pointed toward the adjoining room, 302, and they ran into it just as the door to 300 opened.

Guttural voices, speaking in German, filled the room behind them.

They waited until they heard the door to room 300 click shut before opening the door to the corridor as quietly as they could. They ducked out into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind them. Hearts pounding, they took off
down the hall, desperate to get out of there in case Mueller and his thugs noticed anything was different.

It was a huge relief when the elevator doors finally shut behind them.

“What were those plans?” Tommy asked.

“Dunno, bro,” Luke said. “But if you lock something in a briefcase and hide it under your bed, then it’s not exactly going to be instructions on how you like your morning coffee, is it?”

“No.” Tommy looked thoughtful as they exited into the lobby and walked calmly out onto the pedestrian mall.

Luke wondered if he’d remembered to relock the briefcase.

His heart was still racing as they left the front entrance of the hotel. How close had they come to getting caught? Everything in the street seemed extra bright and vivid; every detail burned into his brain with the rush of adrenaline that had not yet subsided.

An elderly woman was approaching the hotel through the mall, past the fountain with its six looping jets of water. She looked a little unsteady—from age, Luke guessed, or possibly the bulging bag of groceries she was carrying.

As she got to the fountain, a guy on a skateboard shot out from behind a crowd of people gathered farther up the mall and raced past, just in front of her. He didn’t collide with her—in fact, he missed her by about six feet—but it was close enough to startle her. Her foot slipped on a paving stone, wet with runoff from the fountain. She went down onto one knee, then sprawled over onto her side.
Groceries spilled out into the fountain area.

The skateboarder looked back but didn’t stop. Some of the crowd drinking beer outside a bar in the pedestrian mall glanced over, then looked away. Maybe they thought she was drunk. A homeless bag lady. Something like that.

“Come on,” Luke said, and ran over to where she lay on her side, clutching at her knee.

“I’m all right,” she said in short breaths. “I just slipped.”

She wasn’t all right, Luke thought, but that seemed like the wrong thing to say, so instead he said, “Happens all the time around here. The fountain makes the pathway slippery.”

Tommy and Luke each took an arm and helped her back to her feet. Her groceries had rolled in and around the fountain, so they ducked into the water spray, getting wet but collecting the stray items and packing them back into her bag.

“Thank you, boys,” she said with an odd expression when they finished. “You are very kind.”

She fumbled in her purse and brought out two ten-dollar bills.

“Not on your life,” Luke said firmly, and Tommy shook his head also.

Luke took her arm, and Tommy carried the grocery bag as they helped her into the hotel. She limped a little on her injured leg.

The bellboy looked up as they entered, wet and dripping, and came running over, recognizing the woman. The reception clerk also came out from behind the desk, and they both took over from there, assisting the woman toward the elevator, fussing over her.

Just before the door closed, she glanced back at Luke and Tommy and smiled.

“Tommy,” Luke said as they left the hotel, “that’s a bit odd, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Those hotel rooms don’t have kitchens.”

“Not the ones we saw,” Tommy agreed.

“So what was she doing with all those groceries?”

L
uke walked into the university’s College of Engineering building and found the reception counter unattended. There was a bell, though, and that eventually brought a gray-haired lady scurrying out from a back room. Her name tag said Laura Crisp.

“Hello, sonny, are you lost?” she asked, getting Luke’s back up instantly.

“No,” he said. “I need some advice on a project, and I was hoping to speak to one of your professors.”

It was Monday. Tommy and Luke had gone in different directions. Tommy had gone back to the public library to look into that strange symbol, and Luke had gone to see if he could find someone who would know what the plans were.

Mrs. Crisp looked doubtful. “They’re all very busy people,” she said. “I’m not sure they’d have time to help you with a school project.”

“I’d only need a couple of minutes,” Luke persisted.
“To see if they could help me identify a diagram.”

She had that expression people use when they really want to just say no but are trying to be polite.

“Which department?” she asked. “We have lots of departments.”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Any, I guess.”

“Why don’t you phone in and arrange an appointment,” she said, finding an easy way out. She scribbled a number on a piece of notepaper. “Go to our website”—she added the URL to the note—“and decide who you think might be the best person to speak to. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

Luke had the feeling that it would never happen, but he said “Thanks” and took the note.

He backed out through the doors into the corridor and headed for the entrance. The main doors opened just as he was nearing them, and a man with thick glasses, a beard, and an ill-fitting jacket entered.

On a hunch, Luke said, “Excuse me, sir, are you one of the professors or lecturers here?”

The man shook his head, which made his glasses slip down his nose, but he stopped. “Sorry, mate, I’m just a technician.” He pushed his glasses back into place and started to walk on.

“You’re an Aussie!” Luke said, recognizing the accent.

He stopped again and looked at Luke sideways. “Kiwi?”

“G’day, I’m Luke,” Luke said. “My dad works over in the agricultural college.”

“I’m Heath, g’day,” the man said with a quick grin. “I don’t hear that around here very much. Who were you looking for?”

Luke explained about the diagram, without telling him where he had seen it.

“So do you have a copy?” Heath asked.

Luke tapped his head. “In here.”

“You memorized the entire diagram?”

Luke just nodded.

Heath shrugged. “I’ll find you some paper. Draw it for me and I’ll show it to a few of the profs. See if anyone recognizes it. Come with me.”

He led the way into his office, which was a tiny room tucked at the end of a long corridor, beside the men’s bathroom. He unlocked the door with a swipe card and indicated that Luke should sit.

Heath’s desk was covered with notes, thick sheaves of paper, and three-dimensional models of strange things with boxes and balls all interconnecting by small tubes. A sign identified him as
HEATH THOMPSON, LABORATORY TECHNICIAN
.

Heath fished a few sheets of paper out of a box marked
RECYCLING
and made enough space on the desk for Luke to draw.

Luke sketched the first page of Mueller’s diagram as quickly as he could, the numbers and the long German words flowing easily from the cavernous storeroom of his memory. He put that page down and started on the second, while Heath rustled around in a filing cabinet, then made a phone call, his feet up on his desk.

Luke was just starting on the third page when Heath finished the call and idly picked up the first page of the
drawings. His feet slid off the desk with a crash, knocking over a wastepaper basket, which spilled paper and lunch wrappings across the floor. He didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed at the second sheet and studied it.

“Is this a joke?” he demanded, looking around the room as if searching for hidden cameras.

“No, sir,” Luke said in a voice that was not as steady as before.

“Who put you up to this?” Heath asked, snatching away the third page.

“Nobody, sir,” Luke mumbled, wondering what the hell was going on. “You said you might show this to—”

“Where did you get this diagram? Where did you see it?”

Luke thought about that for a second or two. He couldn’t exactly tell him that he had broken into a hotel room and opened a locked briefcase. He sat back upright in his chair, looking Heath directly in the eye. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “because it would get a friend of mine in trouble.”

“Your friend is already in much bigger trouble than he wants to be in,” Heath said a little more calmly. “I’m going to have to report this.”

“That’s fine,” Luke said, unsure who he was going to report it to. “What is the diagram of?”

“You know perfectly well,” Heath said. “Don’t you?”

It seemed he still half suspected that Luke was setting him up for some kind of elaborate practical joke.

“No, sir, I don’t,” Luke said. “What is it?”

Heath looked at Luke keenly, his eyes magnified so large behind his Coke-bottle glasses that his pupils looked like
marbles. “These are the plans for a rudimentary fission device.”

Luke shook his head. “Sorry, sir. A rudimentary
what
device?” Luke’s memory was freakish but fickle. Some things he could remember easily; some things he couldn’t remember at all. But what Heath said next he would remember—in full color, in minute detail—for the rest of his life.

Luke rang Tommy as soon as he got clear of the building, which was only after Heath took his name, address, and phone number and rang Luke’s father over at the agricultural college to verify who he was.

Tommy answered immediately. “Dude!” he said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you. You’re never going to believe what I’ve found out.”

That shut Luke up for a moment, because it was exactly what he had been going to say.

I
n the late summer of 1944, World War II was turning against Germany, with Russian forces closing in from the east, and British and American troops advancing through France
.

The Third Reich, the German empire that was supposed to last a thousand years, was being dismantled after little more than a decade, and curtains were soon to be drawn on one of the most violent and bloody episodes in human history
.

Heinrich Himmler, the much-feared head of the SS (Schutzstaffel), ordered one of his senior officers, Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann, to set up a secret and elite troop of volunteer forces to operate behind enemy lines. They were to be known as Werwölfe (Werewolves)
.

About five thousand troops were recruited, mainly from the SS and the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). Their tactics included sabotage, arson, and assassination, and by early 1945, about two hundred recruits were in training at the Hülchrath Castle near Erkelenz, Germany
.

Their symbol was the Wolfsangel (German for “wolf’s hook”)
.