Father Night (40 page)

*   *   *

“W
E LOST
General Tarasov,” Paull said in Jack’s ear. “He vanished into the wild blue yonder.”

“What about Reggie Herr?”

“Gone to ground.”

Jack stared out the plane’s Perspex window at the jet-black nothingness of night. There was no sense of forward motion, let alone speed. Something was swimming around in his head, some connection between twins and the name of Ax’s new legend, von Verschuer.

“Dennis, do me a favor. Look in Wikipedia for a Werner von Verschuer.”

“Hold on.… Okay, the site’s up. Typing now.… Hmmm.”

“What is it?”

“Well, there’s no Werner, but there’s an entry for … Good God. A Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was a leading scientist best known for his research in genetics with a particular interest in twins.”

Jack felt his head about to explode with possible scenarios. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Christ, yes, and I hope you’re sitting down.”

“Go on.”

“In 1937, at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, one Josef Mengele became von Verschuer’s assistant.”

That was it! Jack thought. Now he knew, but before he said anything he needed one more bit of confirming evidence. “Dennis, what does it say about von Verschuer?”

“Quite a bit. He was married, he had a daughter named Margarethe, who became Mengele’s mistress.”

And there it was in all its dreadful detail. “Mengele worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, or, in German, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre, und Eugenik. In other words, KWIfA, the notation you found in General Tarasov’s Three-thirteen file.”

He heard Paull’s swiftly indrawn breath. “What are you saying?”

“I think it’s possible that Josef Mengele may have secretly gotten his mistress pregnant. I think it’s possible that Margarethe von Verschuer had a son. I think it’s possible that Werner von Verschuer isn’t another legend, I think it’s Ax’s real name.”

“Ax is Joseph Mengele’s son?”

“Do you get the sick joke, Dennis? Where better to hide out than among the Norns, a cadre of ex-Nazis cleared by the OSS? They created the Werner Ax legend for him. Beautiful, right? In a sense, he didn’t even exist—officially, surely not. His father would have seen to that.”

“So the sets of twins are his—what?—experiments?”

“I’m very much afraid so, Dennis. I’m willing to bet that Acacia is made up of these twins.”

“Goddamn.”

“It looks as if we’ve had a continuation of the Nazis’ most infamous and horrifying experiment on human beings bubbling under our noses for decades.”

T
WENTY-FOUR

N
ONA KNEW
she ought to be paying attention to the phone conversation Dennis Paull was having with Jack McClure, especially when he said, “So the sets of twins are his—what?—experiments?” And then, a moment later, “Goddamn,” but she could not get the image of Alan laid out on the coroner’s slab out of her mind.

Perhaps she didn’t want to. It was still difficult to get her head around the fact that her friend and mentor was dead. It seemed so ironic—she was the one on the streets. If anyone was to die, surely it should have been her. And yet here she was, sitting in the office of the secretary of homeland security while Alan was a million miles away, lost to her forever. Why was it, she thought, that you never truly appreciated how much someone meant to you until they were gone? Was that a common human trait? If so, it was one she’d rather not be burdened with. Unbidden, her mind reached back to past incidents, moments she and Alan had shared, intimate pieces of the past that now, abruptly, had lost their luster, going slightly out of focus, as if her memories of him were already slipping beyond her grasp. It was this thought that finally brought tears to her eyes, and she bent over, face in her hands, as if she needed to hide away from the world.

“Nona,” Paull said, through with his call, “are you okay?”

“Don’t talk to me.”

She could hear him come around from behind his desk, watched him approach through eyes clouded with tears. “Why did you rope Alan into this mess? You got him killed.”

“I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”

Wiping her eyes, she stood up. “Is there any other?”

“Nona, I am truly sorry for your loss. Alan was a great asset—”

“That’s not all he was!” she cried.

“Sorry.” Paull raised his hands. “That came out wrong. Of course he was more than an asset, much more. But the fact remains that he wanted this assignment, I didn’t twist his arm.”

“With your power you didn’t have to twist his arm.”

Paull shook his head. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? We can talk about—”

“I have nothing more to talk about with you,” she said, turning on her heel and stalking out of the office.

*   *   *

“F
RANKIE, WHAT
d’you think of your sister now? I just crashed my career.” Nona came and sat beside her brother. “I just screamed at the secretary of homeland security, can you beat that? I’ll probably be blackballed off Metro and any other law enforcement organization in the country.” She shrugged as she took his limp hand in hers. He looked just the same as he had for years, the machines sucking air in and out of his body, keeping him alive—just barely. “Oh, fuck it, Frankie. Just fuck it.” She stared at his placid face, trying to remember the funny, happy, brave person he once was, but there seemed no relation to the hunk of meat lying in the bed beside her. “Damnit, Frankie, why don’t you come back to me? What are you waiting for?”

As she did from time to time, when his near-death state became too much for her to bear, she went through his zip bag she kept under his bed. There was nothing of real value in it, so she wasn’t worried about it being stolen. But each and every item inside was invaluable to her because they were all mementos of her brother’s life. As she took out each piece and handled it, his life returned to the real world, anchored by these bits of flotsam and jetsam that he had collected over the years.

There was an admission ticket from Disney World, a rabbit’s-foot key chain, so old the fur had been worn away, a couple of faded color photos of Frankie and Nona as kids, in summer shorts, their arms around each other, squinting into the sun, some dyed feathers and a yellow and blue polka-dot bikini bottom from a particularly raucous Mardi Gras. A song mix Nona had made for him before he shipped out to the Horn of Africa in 2002. She held the label up, reflecting on the string of songs she had selected, concluding with Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way.”

She slipped the CD out of its plastic case and into the portable player she had brought, clicked on the Play button. While Mick Jagger sang “Start Me Up,” she looked over the small carved wood elephant charm Frankie had picked up in a bazaar in some unnamed African country, a couple of machine gun bullet casings strung onto a beaded-metal chain, his ring of keys to a car and apartment she had finally sold, and several coins from different African nations. There was also the SSD card she had sent him, filled with e-mails, photos of her, friends he’d asked to see, and a couple of MP3s of songs he’d requested, Prince’s “Do It All Night” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”

She had never looked at the material on the SSD card, feeling that it might be too painful, but now, with Alan’s death, her desperation to feel closer to Frankie had reached an intolerable level. Her hand trembled, feeling the SSD card on the tops of her finger. It was so small, so light, and yet brimming with the last moments of the life that had flowed back and forth between her and her brother.

Her vision blurred, she inserted the tiny card into her mobile, wiped away her tears as she waited for the information to appear on the screen.

Dear NaNa …
the first e-mail began. NaNa was what Frankie had called her when he was little; for whatever reason, he could not pronounce Nona, and between them the nickname had stuck. She read the e-mails, back and forth, first him, then her response, on and on. Slowly, inexorably, his life in the Horn of Africa resurrected itself. And yet, as she reread the correspondence, she was struck by the spaces that should have been filled up but weren’t. She knew that there were things he couldn’t tell her while over there, but for the first time she wondered what it was he had really been up to.

She looked up, her gaze falling on his placid face. Frankie, who was no longer Frankie. Her heart broke all over again, but this time she didn’t think she would ever be able to piece it back together.

After a time, she returned to the files on the SSD card. She played “Do It All Night” and “What’s Going On.” Both of the songs reduced her to tears, head down, forearms on knees, like the lost little girl she once had been.

But her head came up when the last note of “What’s Going On” faded out and the first bars of Prince’s “Darling Nikki” came on.
That’s interesting,
she thought.
I never sent him this track
. Then she remembered Frankie’s lifelong girlfriend, Nikki. What was her last name? Harris, that’s right. Hadn’t Nikki Harris broken up with him while he was still in the Horn? Hadn’t he told her it had happened right after he’d sent her a proposal e-mail because he couldn’t get a call through? Or was it before he had a chance to send it?

This idea sent her poring through the rest of the files on the SSD card. She found nothing pertaining to Nikki, but she did find an odd file, or at least part of one. It was an e-mail addressed to her, but never finished, and, therefore never sent. In many of its expressions it seemed rushed.

NaNa, the weirdness here continues unabated 2 b honest I don’t know how much more I can stomach. I want to come home but I don’t want to be branded a coward or think of myself that way. I will if I come home now, and yet there’s something in the pit of my stomach that tells me this is all wrong, no matter what Lt. Bishop says.…

Abruptly unable to draw breath, Nona stopped right there. Her hands were shaking so hard she had to rest them on her knees, but then her knees began to shake. Her mouth was dry and she poured herself a glass of ice water from the plastic pitcher on the movable bedside table. She had insisted one be there every day in case Frankie woke up, even though there was no chance he would ever wake up. Its presence made her feel a sense of hope where none existed.

She drank convulsively, almost choking on the first gulp. Her head was pounding in time to the hammering of her heart. She forced herself to continue reading.

We’re about to ship out, don’t know where but its not where the Marines we came with r going, that’s for damn sure. I caught a peek at the plane taking us. Its not military, not even American. MimicAir. Sounds like a joke, right? Except nothing heres a joke. Took a look on the net & found MimicAir is a subsid of Mirage AirTransport, who the fuckre they? Did some digging in Bishops work orders—ill be fucked for sure if anyone finds out—& found a company Cakra Holdings being billed should ck it. Bishop coming finish later

And that was it, the end of the e-mail that Frankie hadn’t finished, hadn’t sent, and had been lying at the bottom of his bag for years, waiting to be found.

Bishop,
she thought murderously.
Fucking Bishop.

A sound caused her to look up.

“Secretary Paull.”

Paull stood on the threshold to the room.

“What are you doing here?”

“May I come in?”

“Of course.”

He came across the room to stand by the bed. Frankie lay still, inert between them.

“I regret what I said before.”

He waved her words away. “I can only imagine how upset you are.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“Any change?”

She was surprised. “I wasn’t aware you knew about him.”

Paull studied Frankie’s face. “He was a good soldier.”

“He was.”

“A brave man.” He cleared his throat. “I was worried about you.”

She caught the note in his voice. “You mean you were worried about Bishop.”

He smiled. “What you might do to him, more to the point.”

Nona let out a deep breath she had been holding. “Now I have more reason than ever to want to wring Bishop’s neck.”

Paull’s eyes lit up. “Tell me.”

*   *   *

R
EEDER WAS
not a man to suffer fools. He was both a thinker and a doer—that odd duck, so valuable to those who understood the full scope of his talents. He had been many things in his thirty years: a carpenter, an architect, a teacher, a killer. He was entirely self-taught, haunting both libraries and the Internet, studying when he might have been sleeping. In fact, sleep was as foreign to him as Mandarin was to the average American. He had come to Reggie’s attention through a series of multiple killings Reggie was following, along with the police and the FBI. Eleven women in West Texas, then another eleven three years later on Long Island. All dark-haired, Hispanic, or dusky-hued. All prostitutes. Neither the police nor the FBI had as much as a single clue. This dual outbreak was what sparked Reggie’s attention; he was both admiring and envious. He found Reeder where law enforcement could not. He went to Werner, wanting to bring Reeder into the fold. At first Werner was reluctant, and Reggie knew why.

“He won’t be like the first one,” Reggie said, forestalling Werner’s objection. “We won’t have another Incident.”

“That first one almost did Acacia in,” Werner said darkly. “It was a miscalculation to insert a control twin into the mix. I sincerely regret that. It might have gotten all the way up the line to Three-thirteen and me. It could have been the end of everything.”

“Could have, yes,” Herr agreed. “It’s a good thing I ordered Bishop to put a stop to it, and he did. There was minimum danger, and this time, none at all.” He grinned. “You should see this guy. Fucking killing machine.”

“Really?”

Werner was intrigued, as Herr knew he would be. Killing machines were his business, his only business.

“All right. Let’s see this prodigy in action.”