The Traveler (14 page)

“The part of Antarctica we're going to isn't cold at all, Henri.” Jack didn't turn around as he left the shattered shell of the Broken Cactus.

“What in the hell does that mean?” Henri asked Virginia as she moved to the door with Jenks.

“It's not where we are going, Colonel Farbeaux, it's
when
we are going.”

“What?” he persisted.

Virginia laughed out loud and so did Jenks. Sarah, Ryan, and Mendenhall were curious as to why this was funny to the two of them.

“Colonel, the reason Mrs. Hamilton sent you to Israel was to get Anya and the information she uncovered back to the director safely.”

“And that information is?” Henri asked, not liking the way the assistant director unfolded her arms with a sneaky smile and then faced him.

“For the simple reason Anya was able to uncover a trail, a trail that may lead us to Carl.”

Virginia left the diner and as she did Anya Korvesky also left, a void of confusion in their wake.

“Does she mean—” Sarah started to ask but Henri cut her off and then put forth the more logical explanation.

“It means you people are absolutely, unequivocally insane.”

 

4

EVENT GROUP COMPLEX, NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA

The conference room on level seven was silent as the members of the specialized team faced one another. For Sarah, Charlie, and Virginia, they had to smile as each and every person at the table who had not been a part of the Event Group before today sat in total shock and a disturbing silence after being hit with the secrets of the entire world laid out before their eyes. The biggest void came from Master Chief Jenks, who sat looking at the polished tabletop. Even Anya, who had guessed at the duties of Carl's decidedly strange agency, was stunned at the few artifact vaults they had been shown. As for the young man, Morales, he was still smiling at what he had seen. The only person who had not been given the grand tour of the complex was, of course, Colonel Henri Farbeaux. Niles just wasn't ready for that and might never be. Farbeaux had been in the complex before but had never seen the vault levels and on Jack's advice would keep it that way. He was escorted into the conference room by Jason Ryan. While Henri went to a seat by the table, Ryan turned on someone they could not see and gestured animatedly. Frustrated, he shot one more barrage of anger at whomever he was speaking to, then closed the conference room door and angrily sat next to Mendenhall.

“Do we have a problem, Commander?” Niles asked as all eyes turned and saw Alice Hamilton walking through the door. The eighty-nine-year-old was dressed in a light blue pantsuit and was carrying an armload of files and paperwork as if she had never retired.

“Mr. Ryan, is there a problem?” Niles repeated.

Alice took her normal place beside Niles and then placed her work on the table and smiled at each of the newcomers. For Anya it was like looking at the wife of George Washington, for as much as Carl had spoken about the famous Mrs. Hamilton and her brilliant boss, the deceased Garrison Lee. Anya had to admit that there was an air of royalty about the woman and as they made eye contact she could see why Sarah was of the opinion that Alice and Anya would soon become great friends.

“Oh, Mr. Ryan is a little put out with Clarisse Carpenter and her people.”

Niles looked from Jason to Alice, who had adjusted her seating and was pouring a glass of water from the carafe. “Clarisse? You mean of the logistics department?” Niles asked.

At the end of the table Ryan made a face, scrunching up the horrid tattoo used as cover to break Morales out of prison.

“It seems our logistics department placed the wrong tattoo on Jason here and he's a little put out by it.” Alice couldn't help herself as she grinned while trying to cover her mouth with the water glass. She failed miserably.

“Well, are you going to keep us in suspense?” Jack asked, guessing at the predicament Jason was now facing.

Ryan remained silent as he kicked Mendenhall under the table for snickering.

“It seems they used the wrong ink on Jason's prosthetic tattoo.”

All eyes went to Ryan, who lowered his head in embarrassment. The tattoo was the most brutal any of them had ever seen. The animal claw actually covered the entirety of his right-side facial features.

“How long?” Niles asked sadly, but inside he was glad that this situation broke up the seriousness of the meeting.

“Five weeks. It won't wear off for five weeks!” Ryan said as he challenged the smiling faces around the table.

“The lady-killer of the high desert—how will you survive?” Will asked in a seriously concerned tone.

Ryan started to say something but Jack stopped them.

“Thank you, Mr. Ryan. I will have a talk with logistics and have some precautions taken for future reference.”

“Wonderful,” Ryan said as he again gave Will a murderous look.

“I would love to know what our new personnel thought of our artifact and vault level, but I'm afraid we must get down to business. Mr. Morales still has to meet his department heads and has to settle in with Europa. He has quite an amount of work to get done and as always we have very little time to do it in.” Compton nodded at Alice.

“Europa, visual aide 17890, please,” Alice said, and then looked flustered when Europa did not respond. “Europa, visual aide please,” Alice asked again.

On the large 105-inch monitor that sat in the middle of fifty-two smaller ones, the screen came to life and showed an old black-and-white picture. It showed a man in a white lab coat next to a small girl who could not be more than fifteen. It was obviously a young woman from a concentration camp. The two were standing in front of a hundred or so similarly dressed technicians. With the exception of the small, hellishly thin girl, they were all smiling. The date scrawled on the bottom of the photo was 1943.

Niles Compton looked at Anya and nodded just as he had done with Alice.

“Lars Thomsen. German scientist of some renown only for his work in the early twenties with one Albert Einstein. In 1939 Professor Thomsen dropped out of the scientific world for all intents and purposes to dedicate his life to the acquisition of quantum technology.”

Everyone heard the exhale of breath from Master Chief Jenks, but he remained quiet after voicing his opinion of quantum theories.

“I understand your doubts, Master Chief, an educated engineer such as yourself always wants facts, hard design, not theory. But be patient with me and I will bring you to believe in the quantum sciences. I was just like you when I started digging after the death of”—she paused, looking embarrassed, but continued—“after the war.”

“Who is the girl?” Charlie Ellenshaw asked.

“We'll get to that, Charlie,” Niles said as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “But for now let's concentrate on our findings. We don't have a lot of time before I have to start filling in the other departments on what we will be”—he quickly corrected himself—“hope to be attempting.”

Ellenshaw nodded in understanding.

“The Israeli government in the late forties and fifties started a program to interview any Holocaust survivor they could debrief. Most in the vein of hunting down and finding war criminals, but there was other reasoning behind the interviews. Technology was one of those. So”—Anya, without really noticing, stood and started pacing, and all eyes followed the former Mossad agent as she walked—“in the process of debriefing the surviving slave labor force from sites such as Peenemünde, the V-1 rocket facility, Israeli intelligence came up with a name that kept recurring and for the life of them they didn't know why. That place was Dortmund, Germany. It was familiar to some of our people for the simple fact that we were aware of Operation Chastise.”

“Excuse me?” Sarah asked, knowing that operational name sounded vaguely familiar.

“The Royal Air Force raids into Germany during the war to eliminate certain projects from the Nazi books by taking out their hydroelectric power generating systems, thus ending any hard-water experiments for their atomic weapons research programs,” Jack answered for Anya.

“The famous bouncing bombs? The Dam Busters?” Charlie asked, proud that he recalled such a thing.

“The same,” Anya said as she nodded at Jack in thanks. “Dortmund, or in particular the dam that served the region, was called the Möhne. The dam was struck by a bouncing bomb on the night of May 16, 1943, essentially knocking out power to over a thousand towns and villages. Through research we have discovered that the RAF might have been taking out far more than just their hard-water research.”

“For instance?” Mendenhall asked.

Anya smiled and nodded at the eagerness. “We'll get to that part, Captain. Now, to the debriefing of all prisoners of war who served German science. While a first-year agent I was assigned the maddening job of refiling these old cases and mothballing, as you Americans say, any file that wasn't relevant to the search for war criminals, as that function had officially ceased to exist for the Mossad after 1984. During this time I came across one interview that was hushed up and secreted away. It was from, of all people, a thirteen-year-old boy who served with his sister at an unknown bunker complex in Dortmund. I was able to uncover his testimony from the official Israeli debriefing conducted in Jerusalem in 1946, and the contents of that testimony led me to investigate the Dortmund area for any war activity that may have been noticed. I did this in the hopes of impressing certain people on my thoroughness. I found nothing. Then it was eventually filed away and I forgot all about the debriefing until the recent war. I brought it up to my uncle, who swept it under the rug and told me that there was nothing to the file and to forget about it. The fact that it was being hushed up by the most powerful man in the Mossad gave me at the very least some doubts about my uncle's motives. I brought this fact up to Alice and Sarah and they conferred with Dr. Pollock. They wanted more information as it did have something to do with quantum theory as stated in the main file on this concentration camp survivor. So then on the advice of Dr. Compton and Virginia, I started delving into construction records for the German Army—still nothing. Then I went back to the file on this young prisoner. It seems he described the final night of activity in Dortmund as the night he lost his only living relative. He also described a very famous personage attending this event, whatever it was. By his description it could have been none other than Heinrich Himmler himself.”

“What does that mean?” Charlie inquired.

“It means that whatever this project was, why Himmler? Why was he in Dortmund?”

“Maybe like the colonel said, the hard water. I'm sure Himmler would have been interested in that.” Charlie made a good point.

“That wasn't it. Europa, slide 17895, please,” Anya said, facing the large screen. “Europa?” she repeated.

“Europa, slide number 17895, please,” Xavier Morales asked as everyone looked his way.

“Yes, Dr. Morales,” Europa finally said in her Marylyn Monroe voice. Again everyone exchanged looks.

“Admiration is one thing, but Europa is pushing it a little,” Will said, whispering to Ryan.

On the screen the picture changed and another appeared. This one showed Thomsen during the construction of his bunker system.

“The main clue as to the system and who built it. This is Thomsen himself standing with a construction president, Alexis Knudsen.”

“You know where this bunker complex was built?” Alice asked, admiring the newest member of the Event Group for her investigative technique. Alice could see why Carl had fallen for the young Gypsy woman.

“Through the gentleman's surviving family, yes. Unbelievably the plans were still in his office in Dortmund.”

“Which leads us to the conclusion that this project was undertaken without the knowledge of the German engineers who usually built these facilities, like the one at Peenemünde, and who were not allowed in on this one project. Why? Because we assume it was Himmler's and Himmler's alone. Thus he hired an outside construction firm to build his series of bunkers.”

“That aspect of the investigation was conducted by Dr. Compton and Virginia, who did very well. So, we have an underground bunker complex built by Himmler for this man Thomsen. He hires a construction firm that has no ties with the Nazis or even the German Wehrmacht. That is what we in the intelligence community would call secretive.” Anya paused and looked at Niles.

“People, let's get down to it. We suspect that through this Thomsen's ties with Albert Einstein and his connection with quantum theories, that Himmler and his own private mad scientist were attempting time travel. I know it's very thin, but it's a chance.”

“Hogwash!” Master Chief Jenks said, not caring if Virginia shot him a warning look. “To me old Albert's as entertaining a theorist as they come, and he did a bang-up job with the relativity thing, but time travel was something that he said would always be theory. It can be done, but never would be because there is no way to travel through time and space with the electrical technology we currently possess. That simple, folks.”

“And that is where we were short. We had no proof at all of what Himmler and Thomsen were working on. Until I actually found this child who was a part of the experiments.”

“You found him alive?” Sarah asked, amazed at the long odds the kid had to survive to make it to old age.

“Yes, in Tel Aviv … before he vanished.”

“What did he say?”

“He was afraid to discuss it, but he was old and sick by that time so he told me a story that shocked me, and from that sent us”—she gestured around the conference room at everyone—“down this path. He witnessed his sister, who was used in all of these experiments, actually leave this existence and arrive in another and return.”