Astronomy (2 page)

Chapter One

S
USAN GILBERT REALIZED SHE COULD BACK OUT
if she wanted. No one would say a word.

The war in Europe had been over three months now. She was already a civilian in the eyes of God and man and U.S. Naval Intelligence. She had a teaching position lined up—Contemporary American Literature at the University of New York at Stony Brook.

And then there was the matter of her last mission to Berlin. One nice thing about being imprisoned in a sewer and nearly eaten alive, you could be a little choosy about your next assignment. People understood.

A couple of spooks from Naval Intelligence were trying to be convivial as they drove her to this warehouse down by the old submarine pens. She was as polite as a girl can be with two guys she’s going to ditch the moment they look away.

The quiet one in the Plymouth’s passenger seat must have been aware of what she was thinking, yet he never bothered to talk her out of it. He simply promised her something “interesting” if she hung on.

Susan didn’t need to ask what “something interesting” meant. Just looking at these two Watermark spooks, she could guess this was gremlin work.

The nonchalant kid behind the wheel had endeared himself to her the moment he’d picked her up at her apartment. “You must be the one who sends me all those secret memos,” he drawled.

She could feel a migraine out there with her name on it. “Excuse me?”

“You know—
Watermark Clearance-Level Emerald, Eyes Only
?” Ah yes. Emerald eyes. Bogen, you card.

The other one, the sad-eyed one, simply smiled tolerantly. They looked like they had a great Mutt-and-Jeff routine going. Too bad she was going to miss it.

The kid at the wheel—Bogen would be his name—spotted a deserted
biergarten
, “The Four Winds.” This was some sort of landmark. His hands got rigid on the steering wheel. He cast a sidelong glance down the street. “Hold tight back there.”

The sudden right turn brought them just behind the gutted bar, up a small alley and into the shadow of an old warehouse. A U.S. Army Jeep loomed, and the kid hit the brakes, nearly spilling her into the front seat as they stopped.

He glanced back at her through the rearview mirror. “You still with us?” The quiet one just rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. Maybe he sighed.

A pair of military police were blocking the light in a second-floor doorway. She saw their weapons come out at the sight of the car.

“Oh great,” she said to herself, “ ‘something interesting.’ ” The two MPs looked interested. They looked absolutely wide-eyed with interest.

Bogen went up to clear things with them. Susan took in every darkened door and alleyway entrance. “I’ve never really done this sort of thing,” she said. “Don’t you guys need somebody a little more experienced in counterintelligence?” She guessed from the MPs that this was some sort of crime scene. Three years of tradecraft told her that hanging around crime scenes was a great way to get famous.

“No choice,” The quiet man apologized. “Regular Naval Intelligence wouldn’t know what they were looking at.”

“I thought Watermark
was
Naval Intelligence.” She pulled her collar up around her face and her hat forward. She felt about as inconspicuous as Ginger Rogers.

Bogen flashed his hand torch down at them, twice: Come on up.

The quiet man smiled at her. “If we wanted anyone else, they’d be here. Just use your experience; see what you can find.” Almost as an afterthought, he stuck out his hand. “Charley Shrieve.” He smiled. “Hi.”

His tone betrayed a hint of curry. She wondered where Charley Shrieve had spent the war. She liked his face. He had these little cheek muscles that guys get when they’re down to around ten-percent body fat.

She introduced herself. “Susan Gilbert,” she said.

One of the MPs stopped her at the second-floor landing.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. This is a restricted area.”

At least he was polite. At this point in the war, she was easy to please.

“It’s all right, Shaw,” came a growl from the darkness. “She’s with us.”

Susan smelled cigar smoke at the door. “Commander Foley,” she said out loud.

A roundish man in a business suit stood back for her. He had been here awhile. A layer of blue haze congealed among the ceiling lights over his head.

“Ensign Gilbert,” he said. She could guess he was smiling by the way his cigar tilted up against his silhouette. “You’re a hard person to get hold of.”

“I’m a civilian,” she said. She figured it couldn’t hurt to remind him.

Walter Foley came into the light, his hands clamped together behind his back in the manner of the great ship-bound naval officers he always talked about. Foley had never spent much time on a ship himself, but he did seem to prize the cut of a sea-going officer—the way they rolled with the deck, the way they stuck their heads forward like pit bulls.

Indeed, Foley’s rolling stance of authority had improved since she’d seen him last. She wondered if he’d been practicing in a mirror. That would be like him.

Foley squinted at her, up and down. His cigar rolled to one side. “How you doing these days, Ensign Gilbert?”

“Great,” she said. “I’m a civilian. Maybe you’ve heard.”

Of course, that wasn’t what he meant. Like everyone else she knew, he meant,
How you doing since Berlin?

Her OSS friends had let Berlin drop long ago. But Walter Foley had been her case officer. He didn’t let anything drop. Her mental health had become his ongoing concern.

Susan had been surprised by all the attention when she got back from Berlin, not altogether unflattered. But something proprietary lurked at the bottom of all his sympathy and encouragement. Walter Foley worried for her state of mind the way Joe Lewis’s corner man worried for his cuts. She could see him now, gearing up that jovial Pat O’Brien routine—How’s my Hot Shot? How’s my girl? His girl. That grinding sound back of her jaw—that would be her teeth, yes?

She would have told him to back the hell off if Charley Shrieve hadn’t stepped between them.

“Night’s getting long,” Charley said. “Maybe we want to save the photo album stuff for another time?” He made one of those embarrassed nods like men do. Susan could almost hear him whispering:
Christ, Walt. Give the kid a break.

And then, to her: “You ready to meet my guy Hartmann?” She could tell by Charley’s face that she wasn’t going to like this.

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

He led her back to a little room overlooking an empty warehouse. The room looked like some sort of shipping clerk’s office. She could see train schedules for 1940 on the wall.

The center of the room was filled with a dinner scene, served up for a man with torpid eyes, greasy blonde hair, and the thick skin of a hard drinker. An old desk had been righted and covered with fine linen. A table setting of paper-thin Dresden china was laid before him. Susan picked up an ornately scrolled sterling-silver fork. She had not seen such expensive tableware since her undergraduate days at Boston College.

Of course, the scene was rendered perfect by the dollop of quicksilver filling the tea cup, brimming at the edge of the dinner plate, forming a silver drool down the rigid man’s lips, a silver puddle around his buttocks.

She realized the man was full of mercury, to the point that his guts had burst under the weight of it.

She became aware of a certain silence. She looked up to see every man in the room watching her. She started to go,
“What?”
But she knew what was up. They were waiting for her to catch a case of the vapors.

Very deliberately, she picked up the elegant ivory dinner candle in front of the plate. “I like the candle,” she offered. “Lends a nice romantic air, don’t you think?” She looked around the room for validation.

The two soldiers scowled at each other. Perhaps they wondered how a pretty young lady of breeding and refinement could be so callous? Susan had been in this business awhile now; she was used to these little moments of masculine discomfort.

Bogen and Shrieve looked relieved. If this was a classic Watermark operation, they would be worried about anybody who couldn’t hold their water at a time like this.

“I suppose I should make a formal introduction,” Shrieve said. “Everybody, Herr Hartmann. Herr Hartmann,” he extended a hand to all, “everybody.”

“This is your informant?” she asked.

Shrieve looked away. His cheek muscle twitched in the candlelight. “Things never got that formal between us,” he said. “He told me he had a line on six tons of mercury.”

“Looks like he found it,” Susan said quietly.

“It was going to some place called ‘Site Y.’ He was supposed to slip my boy Bogen here on board his truck; maybe we’d get a look at this Site Y at long last.”

That still didn’t answer the question most central to her mind: “What’s my part in this?” she asked.

“We brought you here as sort of a technical advisor,” Shrieve said. “We wanted someone who could tell us whether this Conrad Hartmann was giving us the straight dope on a few things.”

“Use your experience,”
he’d said. She should have known. Her experience the last six months had been with Operation Watermark, verifying the outlandish stories of Nazi war criminals trying to escape the Russian army.

“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” she said. She didn’t know but maybe she should be insulted. “I know you gentlemen have a lot to do here. If I can just get a ride back to my apartment, I’ll be out of your way.”

She wasn’t going to get mad. She promised herself that. There was a plane leaving for Washington at midnight. She figured she could just make it.

Walter Foley stepped forward. “As long as we’ve got you here . . .” He smiled amiably. “You ever hear about this Site Y during your travels in the East? It may be connected with a program called
‘Das Unternehmen.’
Any of your Watermark subjects ever mention an
Unternehmen
?”

Susan found her gaze drifting toward the door. Any minute now she’d make her break. Just let one of these guys get in her way.

“Jog my memory,” she said. “Tell me what the hell’s going on.”

Meaningful looks were zipping back and forth between Walter Foley and her quiet friend with the cheek muscles. They were discussing her, she realized. They had reached some crucial point in the conversation; they were deciding between themselves whether to bring her in the rest of the way or put her back on a plane for Stony Brook, New York.

Susan found this vastly amusing—here, these three spooks from one of the more disreputable branches of Naval Intelligence practically kidnap her at gunpoint off a transport plane bound for home. Only they aren’t sure whether they trust her enough to hear their whole story.

“Excuse us,” Foley said. He pulled Charley Shrieve off into the far corner of the room.

“Sure,” she said. She caught Charley Shrieve looking back at her, as if checking her temperature. Susan just smiled. “Take your time.”

She found herself flipping her hair in irritation.
Just keep your mouth shut
, she told herself.
Smile sweetly and you
’
ll be out of here.
Whatever they cooked up for her, she figured they could call her up at Stony Brook to let her in on their decision.

Foley and Charley Shrieve didn’t even notice she was leaving. It was the kid, Bogen, who caught her arm.

“You don’t want to go out there,” he told her.

“I’m just going out for a cigarette.” She was planning to walk to that abandoned
biergarten
on the corner and wait for any green uniform in a jeep to take her out of this.

“You never know who might be waiting.” He had this smile, somewhere between winsome and sly, and desperate.

“You never know who might be waiting,” she told him, and tugged her arm back.

“Hey, come on,” he said, and then, “All right. I’m sorry about the Emerald Eyes joke.”

“The what?”

For the record, Susan’s eyes were not green, but black-blue, and a bit crossed—just enough to give her this air of dreamy surprise. She wasn’t sure why men were always mentioning her green eyes. She figured it was one of those burdens God gave red-haired girls to keep them humble.

“Ohh, that,” she said. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

But Bogen had done his job. Foley and Shrieve had finished deciding her future. They were ready to share their decision, and here she was just like she’d been waiting, breathlessly.

“We’d like you to look at one more thing,” Shrieve said.

“You’re sure you won’t compromise security?” She couldn’t help herself. She was mad.

Shrieve ducked his eyes. He had to stop himself from apologizing. “We’ve each got our job,” he said.

He led her out onto a landing on the far side of the entryway. From here, they overlooked a vast warehouse. Cracks seamed the bare concrete floor. In the corners, litter, patches of dirty ice.

(Susan frowned—
Ice?
But she let it go. Any sign of curiosity, she knew she was doomed.)

There was no handrail. Charley took her hand as they descended the stairs.

He seemed just the slightest bit uncertain about her. Maybe it was because he had no rank on her; maybe it was because they were close to the same age. Whatever, Shrieve was not so presumptuous as Walter Foley, which was bad—Susan could have said no to Walter Foley.

“We’ve seen this four times in the last two weeks,” he said. “A warehouse full of trucks and gasoline, or building materials, or winter bivouac, or, occasionally, things we can’t figure out. We keep an eye on the place a day or so, go back inside . . .” Shrieve held up his hand, indicating the emptiness. “Everything’s vanished.”

“What was in here?”

“Two hundred tons of lead and concrete. And, if you believe my guy Hartmann—six tons of mercury.”

Susan looked a little closer at her escort. Shrieve was worried; she could see it in his eyes. She wondered what, besides girls, could worry a guy like Charley Shrieve.

“You think they’re building some sort of, uhm, Gadget?” No one ever used the word
bomb
.

“Analysis is not my department,” he said. A good, stiff brush-off—she could appreciate that.