Astronomy (3 page)
Authors: Richard Wadholm
She dug the toe of her shoe into a square-edged scuffmark in the concrete. Something six feet across and heavy enough to scratch concrete had been dragged two, three feet and then vanished. Something heavy as lead.
She looked around to find a parade formation of these straight-edged scuff marks. Each one traveled a couple feet and then abruptly stopped.
“Naval Intelligence calls these sites ‘ghost ships.’ Whatever this
Das Unternehmen
is, we think we’re seeing the staging areas of it in these warehouses. We just don’t know what we’re looking at.”
“Have you ever staked anybody in one of these ghost ships to see what happens?”
“A couple of times, yeah. When we put someone in here, they disappear along with everything else. Conrad Hartmann was supposed to show us where this stuff was going.”
“When did this concrete and lead disappear?”
Shrieve seemed a little bemused. “How about last night.”
She looked at him. “Somebody moved two hundred tons of concrete and lead overnight?”
“Hey. You got any ideas, don’t keep them to yourself.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. Yeah, she had an idea. Suddenly the old warehouse had taken on a chill.
“I saw something once,” she said. She had seen it in Berlin, but she didn’t tell him that. “Find a light switch. Make this place completely dark.”
“And then what?”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to say. She hoped she was wrong.
Shrieve found a master light switch by the stairs. For one moment, the room was completely black. She let out a sigh of relief. She’d always been prey to an overactive imagination. Maybe she hadn’t really seen what she thought she had. Maybe whatever she’d seen in Berlin had all been the product of terror and malnutrition.
Then a glimmer of phosphorescence appeared in the center of the wall. Retinal fatigue? She blinked her eyes. The glimmer became a light. It took on form. The radiance etched itself across the wall, and then cut back to form an angle, three meters down to the floor of the warehouse.
The light grew bright enough she could see Charley Shrieve in the middle of the room. His eyes narrowed to a disbelieving squint, his mouth puckered like he was eating an aspirin.
The diagram was huge. It engulfed the empty room like a tidal wave of light. Even as she watched, the floor was divided all around her into an articulated mural, the color of a radium watch dial—only, one slash at a time, as if the wall were being systematically shredded to reveal an ocean of green lava.
“What is this?” He stared around himself as green lights ate up the floor. “What am I looking at?”
Susan’s heart sank. “It’s some sort of interdimensional transportation system,” she managed. “The man who showed it to me called it an ‘Angle Web.’ ”
The lines spread up through the floor like arrows of frost across a window pane. Was it her imagination, or did the darkness to either side carry a certain depth that went beyond the floor?
“ ‘Angle Web.’ One of your
Zentralbund
extractions show you this?”
In fact, the man who showed her the Angle Web had not asked for extraction. And why should he? With the Angle Web, he wouldn’t need her help to get to Paraguay. He didn’t need her help to get anywhere.
“I need a cigarette,” she whispered. Charley Shrieve was there with a smoke. She tried to light it herself. But something was wrong with her goddamn Ronson; the flame wouldn’t stop shaking.
Shrieve’s lighter worked just fine. “I need to know how this Angle Web works,” he said.
“Christ, I don’t know,” she said. “I saw somebody do this magic trick. He drew this diagram, he disappeared.”
“Who was he?”
“A mass murderer.” She had to clear her throat to say it louder. “He had a code name, ‘Galileo.’ ”
“Is this Galileo available to us? Can he tell us what’s going on?”
Susan saw herself trembling at the precipice. She could play dumb and be packing her bags for New York this very evening. She could be a wise guy and be back in the war with her next breath.
“I know just enough to make myself a target,” she said.
“Is it this Galileo you’re worried about?”
Susan laughed. It should be so simple. “What are you going to tell me? That you can protect me?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
Shrieve took a deep drag on his own cigarette. Sudden light bloomed beneath his eyes. Even with the shadows dancing demoniacally upward, his eyes held a certain sadness that she had seen in other case officers she’d known.
Charley Shrieve had let people slip out of reach, hadn’t he? Terrible things had happened to those people; Charley had never forgiven himself. But that didn’t matter. If it came down to it, he would let her go as quickly as the others.
It was all the warning she needed.
“I can’t help you,” she said.
Charley looked down at the floor. Maybe he was relieved.
She smelled cigar smoke. She looked up to see Walter Foley at the top of the stair. “The hell is that?” Foley spread his hand against the great, articulated expanse of green light.
“It’s called an Angle Web,” Shrieve called back to him. “I’ll tell you about it after Miss Gilbert is gone.”
“Ensign Gilbert is gone, eh? Did you tell her we need her?”
“Miss Gilbert is a civilian,” Shrieve turned back to face him. “She has a life to get back to.”
“Did you tell her that her country needs her?”
“Give it a rest, Walt.”
Charley Shrieve led her back up to the landing, right past Walter Foley. Foley glanced up at her just once. She’d seen warmer expressions on the back of bank notes. Shrieve thanked her for coming down to look at their artifact. He asked her if she had another flight to Washington, D.C. He promised to get her one if she didn’t. He asked her, please, contact them if anything relevant came to mind.
In this pantomime of kindly partings, Susan said she would.
Walter Foley couldn’t bring himself to lose so graciously. He sighed. “Well,” meaning, well, he had a million things to do, none of which involved Susan Gilbert any longer.
Dale Bogen hadn’t heard the particulars, but he knew she’d let them down. He wouldn’t look at her. But then, he had missed the war, hadn’t he? All except for the stories—the fun parts.
Bogen had been shipping out just as the Russians and the Americans were showing each other dance steps on the streets of Torgau. Missed it by weeks, he had, and boy was he disappointed.
To hell with them all anyway. She started for the outside.
A shape filled the doorway.
Susan saw nothing at first but a pair of crimson eyes gleaming just beyond the room light. She caught a whiff of something she hadn’t smelled since Berlin—
rotten meat
.
She froze for just an instant as a wave of nauseating fear washed over her. Then her Walther PP was in her hands and she was firing where lungs and spleen and guts would be, if only the shape were human.
Right over her head roared the big thunder of an Army Colt. Shrieve was at her back. He went through his seven rounds with the steady metronome that panic will bring to a mindless task—
crack, crack, crack.
He was still shaking his .45, squeezing it, after the slide pulled back and the empty clip clattered to the floor. But the thing in the doorway was clutching at its chest by then, staggering back from the light.
She followed it out to the landing, firing as she went. It emitted a weird ululation and disappeared over the rail. She looked over in time to see something very large scuttle away into the shadows.
She knew she had wounded it. The creature dragged itself as it slipped down the street, but it never slowed down. It was traveling at full speed as it melted into the darkness.
Shrieve slapped a clip into his Colt. “You all right?”
“I hit it.” She was patting her coat pocket for another clip. “I know I hit it.” She could hardly talk, her teeth were clenched so tight.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You hit it. Come on back inside.”
The two soldiers were leaning back against the glass window overlooking the warehouse. Their guns were in their hands. Their faces were perfectly white.
Dale Bogen stood rooted to the floor. “What in the holy fuck was
that
?” His eyes were big as twelve-gauge slugs.
Only Major Foley maintained some semblance of composure. “Seems we just had our first messenger from
Das Unternehmen
,” he said.
She figured Foley was wrong, because Foley was usually wrong about such things. She didn’t care. She had this aching sensation in her cheeks. She realized she was grinning, fiercely.
“Did you see the look on its face? It came up here for something and we surprised it.” She’d hurt one of them. Big, stinking, flesh-eating bastards—she’d cut his ass down to size. Five months too late to save the kids in that sewer, but never too late for payback. Payback was always good.
“Somebody screwed up,” Shrieve said. “Somebody left something of theirs behind—”
“—and sent the Fuller Brush Man there to tidy up.” She nodded over at the seated figure of Hartmann. “Anybody been through his pockets yet?”
Walter Foley looked at the two soldiers. They looked at each other. One of them cleared his throat uneasily. “We leave the gremlin work to you Watermark people. No offense, Sir.”
“That, uhm, that creature came up to retrieve something,” she said. “Maybe an address.” She nodded back over her shoulder toward the glowing insignia in the dark. “Maybe an address through there. If Hartmann knew enough about the Angle Web to drive truckloads of mercury through it, he’d have stuff like that written down.”
Sure enough. Lower left coat pocket, she found a slip of paper, a napkin actually. A little cocktail napkin. On the front was a cartoon of a cloud, puffing out its cheeks to blow a set of five-pointed stars around the sky. The logo tickled Susan’s memory; she’d just seen it this very night. It took her a moment before she remembered where.
It was the logo of that burned-out
biergarten
at the corner, the Four Winds Bar.
“What do you make of that?” Shrieve asked.
“Maybe he left something for us? Who knows?” Susan’s interest lay with the script on the back of the napkin. “If he did leave something for us, maybe this is where he left it.”
She noticed the circle left by someone’s sweaty glass. She touched it—the circle was still damp.
“Not bad for a place that’s been closed since forever,” Charley said.
Major Foley was blowing blue smoke into the dull light from the door. “I tell you what,” he offered. “We’ll track this business down, we’ll send a little note to—where was it?—Stony Brook, New York?”
She looked back at Shrieve,
You
’
d better do something about this guy
. Shrieve smiled and stepped between them. He whispered something in Walter Foley’s ear. He might have been reminding him that Susan, after all, was a civilian, and could deck his ass with impunity.
Just like that, she was in.
Susan didn’t even realize it at first. But Walter Foley knew. He smiled at her, the way he always did when he’d talked her into something really stupid and dangerous.
She entertained the idea of leaving him with that silly grin on his face. She could be just as happy getting his postcard in Stony Brook, New York, sure.
But that thing in the doorway, that had been the angel of her better nature. She had made promises to people who mattered a lot more than Walter Foley. The worst thing was, those people weren’t even around to know if she kept them or not.
Walter Foley must have seen this conversation going on in her head; his smile just got bigger and more evil. Susan thought back a moment, when was the last time she’d seen that heart-sinking leer? Oh, yes. She remembered.
He’d smiled that way at her the night she agreed to go to Berlin.
Chapter Two
I
T HAD BEEN WALTER FOLEY WHO TOLD HER
Berlin would be the best career move an ambitious young OSS agent could make.
He had received a request for extraction. Some SS major who called himself “Galileo” wanted to buy his way out of Berlin with information on a new weapons program.
Galileo had sent along photographic collateral—truckloads of German dead were being collected off the streets and hauled down into the sewers. Something was being done with them. They were being reused somehow, but for what? Fuel? Food? How desperate could people be?
Whatever it was, Galileo was supposed to be in charge of the program. He wouldn’t say what they were doing with hundreds of dead German soldiers. He wouldn’t say why he wanted out of the program he was supposed to be running. The message said he wanted passage to the American lines. General Eisenhower could ask him the rest in person.
Susan had just brought back Carl Leder, the head of Zentralbund’s Sparrow Group. A couple of people had brought in the low-level stuff—research assistants and grave robbers, folks like that. But the Sparrow Group had been translating certain ancient texts into modern German. Rumors of dark treaties between the Nazis and demons swirled through Leder’s head. Carl Leder had made Susan a superstar.
When it came time to send someone into Berlin to meet this Galileo, she was the only real nominee. There was some talk because she was a woman and the Russians were just outside of town. But Susan had the closest thing to a track record that Operation Watermark could point to.
Just to make all of her male handlers feel better, Watermark teamed her up with a U.S. Army Ranger—a sniper with fifteen kills, a snake-eater from the Rangers’ School at Fort Benning, Georgia. People spoke in hushed tones about this guy. His name was Roger Valholmen, but he had a nickname that he liked to pass around—Maxwell House.
Susan liked that—a sniper with a sense of humor. Maybe, she thought, this was a good omen.
Walter Foley dropped them just outside Berlin, along the banks of the Havel River. A rubber boat got them past the Russians. That part of the plan worked fine. It was after they got into the city that things started to go wrong.
Galileo, wherever the hell he was, had promised to be waiting with guards and an armored personnel carrier. Susan searched their landing area and came up blank: no guards, no personnel carrier, no Galileo.
The drop zone had been quiet when the operation was planned. In the twenty-two hours since, it had turned into the front line. They were taking mortar fire even before they rolled up their parachutes.
Middle of all this, Susan’s bodyguard announced rather breathlessly, “I’ve got to go.” He pointed at the only row of buildings within running distance. “Those look decent,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
She looked at him. “What?”
“You want to come with me?”
This row of buildings looked fairly intact, considering they hung out over a bomb crater the size of the New York Polo Grounds.
“You’re going to leave me here?”
Max held out his hands, he had to go. Now.
“Wait,” she said, somewhere between panic and exasperation. “Look—” How to say this like a lady? “
You
’
re
the guy. You’re the one who just
stands
there. I mean, can’t you just find a wall?” Susan couldn’t believe this—her bodyguard was going to get himself killed taking a leak, and she would end up entertaining half the Russian army.
Max was real sorry. He knew how this must seem. But he worried about people watching.
“I hope,” she said coolly, “you don’t mean me.”
He shook his head, oh no. He glanced toward what was left of the Berlin skyline. He was worried about Russian artillery spotters. “You remember you went over behind that wall, all the rocket fire in this sector stopped till you were finished? Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”
“That’s crazy,” she said, sincerely hoping it was.
“Be fair,”
he pleaded. “
You
got to go. Now I do.” Susan made a mental note for her next parachute drop: Leave the coffee thermos at home. If her bodyguard needed entertaining, she’d tell him dirty stories.
“I’ll be a minute,” he promised her. “I’ll be a second.” He was bouncing up and down by this time.
“You’re supposed to be my bodyguard!” she cried.
“What are you worried about? Obviously, they like you.”
Did she detect a note of jealousy?
“Give me the Thompson,” she said.
“Don’t worry about the Thompson. I’ll be right back.”
Of course, Susan never saw him again.
A rocket barrage scoured the street just as he stepped inside the nearest doorway. Oddly, the building he was in remained untouched. Max—
Mr. House
—simply failed to reappear.
She started after him, got maybe twenty yards before a couple of snipers forced her into the doorway of a bombed-out dance academy.
By the time a couple of
Volksstürm
soldiers came up from the sewers to see who was wandering around up there, she had already been nicked twice—once by gunfire, once by shrapnel from a Russian rocket.
Her bodyguard was a fond memory.
At least Foley was right about the German army. Her two escorts were a couple of kids, and scared stupid.
They hustled her down a storm drain just as another artillery barrage zeroed in on them, apologizing for the smell of the sewer as if it were somehow their fault.
But that was about as good as the news got. The bad news? This Galileo, who was supposed to be pacing the floors awaiting rescue, was nowhere to be found. She was afraid that he’d discovered another way out, and she had risked her life for nothing. But no, the two
Volksstürm
kids who had brought her underground assured her that she was here to meet their boss, Stürmbannführer Malmagden. They didn’t know this Malmagden as Galileo, but he was something of a hero to them. They just naturally assumed that anybody parachuting into Berlin would be here to meet him. They assured her that Stürmbannführer Malmagden had not fled Berlin. He was tending to some secret project away to the south in the Franconian Wald, but he fully intended to return.
And as for the nonexistent Gestapo . . .
* * *
She didn’t realize who he was at first, this spectacled gentleman with the valise. She had spent a week in a tiny cell off the main sewer. It was boring and gut-wrenchingly putrid, but she hadn’t been bothered by anyone. She had sort of forgotten about the Gestapo. She thought maybe they had forgotten about her.
The owlish gentleman introduced himself as Alexander Schoenberg as he awaited admission to her cell. She looked to her young captors—Hope and Crosby, she’d come to call them—for some explanation as to who he was. They seemed frightened and embarrassed. They wouldn’t look at her.
That’s when she knew.
She’d survived four covert operations in the past two years. One or two trips were a lifetime for most OSS agents. Maybe she’d grown cocky? Maybe she’d simply used up her luck.
“I am here to find out who you are,” Herr Schoenberg said. “Who you are, what your mission to Berlin is, and so forth.”
“You look like an accountant,” she said. Christ, she thought, I’m going to be tortured by a CPA.
Schoenberg set his little medical valise on the floor between them. He opened it carefully. Susan shrank back a bit.
Just, please, no knives,
she prayed to whoever listened to American agents in trouble. Came the reply in her head—
knives as opposed to what?
She had no answer for that.
Schoenberg withdrew a ream of paperwork. Susan risked a quick glance into the briefcase. Nothing down there but more files. She was so relieved she found herself laughing.
Schoenberg frowned at her, What? And then he realized how her thoughts had gone.
“No,” he said, a little embarrassed. “All the, eh, special investigators have already left Berlin. It was thought safer for their families.”
“Who are you?”
“Financial Crimes. Black market, war profiteering, things of that nature.”
Susan must have been staring in fascination. “You really are a CPA.”
Schoenberg seemed offended at her light regard. “I can break legs,” he said. “They sent me to a special school, you know. Beginning and Applied Leg Breaking. Hurrah.”
Maybe so. Maybe this guy had been Torquemada in the good times. Whatever, the war was over and his heart wasn’t in it. He lit a pair of cigarettes and handed one across to her, just like Paul Henreid had done for Bette Davis. Susan hesitated just a moment. She seemed to remember a lot of really awful stories started out this way.
Schoenberg sighed, embarrassed. “Just take the cigarette,” he said. A Russian rocket landed somewhere nearby. A roar filled the tunnel, thicker than the stench of churned-up sewage.
“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered. “We shall all die down here anyway.”
He no doubt wanted to sound fatalistic and European, but his voice cracked. Susan noticed the cigarette waver in the darkness.
He asked if she had come for Stürmbannführer Malmagden. Malmagden, she decided, had to be her boy Galileo. He was the name on every Nazi’s lips. Susan said no, she was here to map out a route for Eisenhower’s victory ride through Berlin.
“You know,” he said, “Herr Malmagden is already in trouble for embezzlement in connection with a certain project he is in charge of. Whether you cooperate or not, his neck is already in the noose.”
She still didn’t know what this Malmagden was working on with all these dead soldiers. Was there a lot of free cash floating around his project? Especially now?
“That strikes me as a little unlikely,” she said. She was getting over her initial wave of terror. She could afford to think beyond her immediate survival.
Schoenberg had not examined Herr Malmagden’s file closely, but he assured her that his superiors knew all about him.
“How’s he doing this?” she asked him. “He’s taking it out of the country in gold bullion? Gem-quality stones?”
“As you might imagine, gold has become a very valuable commodity in Europe. Stürmbannführer Malmagden entered the market rather late . . .” Schoenberg flipped through his documents a moment. He frowned. “It appears his ill-gotten gain remains in Reichsmarks.” He pressed his lips together in an expression of dissatisfaction. That seemed somewhat unlikely, even to him. “Still, it’s possible he has some plan to convert them; he simply hasn’t done it yet.”
“It seems odd to me that you’re here because he’s supposed to be stealing money from his research project,” she said. “I’m here because he’s supposed to be defecting.”
Schoenberg stared at her. “You are?”
Susan was starting to get a bad feeling about this whole adventure. “Herr Malmagden seems like a busy man,” she said.
A moan came up from the far end of the sewer. A dull trudging of hundreds of feet. Schoenberg did his best to ignore the sound. He pretended to study Malmagden’s financial records, looking for his gold certificates.
She asked him, “Is that Malmagden’s research project?”
Schoenberg wagged his finger at her:
Who is the interrogator here?
He piled his reports back into his valise and promised to be back tomorrow. “It seems we have an anomaly here,” he admitted. “I will study the matter, and we will talk further. Hurrah.”
The two
Volksstürm
soldiers looked wide-eyed as Schoenberg departed for the night. They asked her if she were all right, if Schoenberg had hurt her.
“He’s an accountant,” she said.
“We were supposed to watch out for you,” the tall one wailed in anguish. “Sturmbannführer Malmagden will be furious with us when he returns from the south.”
“Don’t worry about it. He’s an accountant.”
The shorter one nodded solemnly. “You don’t want to talk about it.” He understood.
Schoenberg was back the next day with more cigarettes. Hope and Crosby opened her cell door and stood back while he arranged his paperwork for the day’s interview. They gave her a sorrowful look and then left her on her own. As guardian angels, these guys were washouts.
A rocket volley hit the tunnel about fifty yards from her cell. The sound was ear-shattering. The dust from the collapsed section nearly choked them. As it subsided, the darkness was filled with a lowing sound to make her skin crawl.
Susan tried out a new word she had heard during the night. She nodded toward the dark. “Is Malmagden going to unleash the
Totenstürm
?” she asked.
He looked at her sharply. “Where did you hear that word?”
Hope and Crosby had donated it to her. They had been hauling out her latrine bucket when a looping cry came up from some distant darkness. Their faces got so white they glowed in the dim light.
“
Totenstürm
,” Hope had said (or maybe it was Crosby). Crosby (or Hope) gave him a bad look and nodded toward Susan, as if to remind his compatriot they were still in the presence of the enemy.
She remembered all those dead soldiers being collected off the streets of Berlin.
She gave the two of them an even stare. “
Totenstürm
,” she said. “Army of the Dead?”
Each blamed the other for saying too much. They got into a shoving match, which escalated till it involved the contents of her latrine bucket. People were edgy down here, no question.
Herr Schoenberg sighed a sigh of futility. “The
Totenstürm
will not be unleashed,” he told her. “They are uncontrollable by anyone but Sturmbannführer Malmagden. And Herr Malmagden . . .” Schoenberg stared at the ceiling as another impact made the lights dance about. He looked terribly young and terribly frightened. “Herr Malmagden is beyond the reach of the Russian army now.”
“What happened to Malmagden?” she asked.
“An accident happened last night,” he said. “I know only a little. There was a research station at Faulkenberg Reservoir. Herr Malmagden was visiting—that’s where he has been the past three days. Apparently the entire lake is gone, hurrah! Stürmbannführer Kriene, the project director at Faulkenberg Reservoir, was found on the shore of the Saare River. I am told he is all but unrecognizable. Herr Malmagden . . .” Schoenberg seemed unsure how to finish.