Pandora's Curse - v4 (59 page)

“He already told me. In fact, he’s trying to talk me into accepting a job there. Special science advisor to the president or something.” Mercer wasn’t sure if he’d accept, but he was honored.

“If it’s any consolation,” Barnes added, “Bryce wasn’t too pleased when I had him recruit you.”

“I’ll deal with Charlie at another time,” Mercer said. “We’re here to discuss what to do about each other.”

“And to handle the final disposition of the remaining Pandora box and an icon belonging to a Russian priest. They represent the last link to an unprecedented discovery. As a scientist, you must know the Pandora fragments could contain untold knowledge about our universe and its creation.”

Barnes tried to press his point with a hard stare, but Mercer remained unfazed. “I doubt you believe in science for science’s sake, Mr. Barnes.”

“Where are the fragments?” Barnes leaned across the table in another effort to gain some psychological leverage. “When Ira Lasko was debriefed in the hospital he said he didn’t know.”

“He lied.” Because of the prior arrangements, the old Nazi hunters had brought their small television and VCR into the dining room. Mercer slid the cassette into the tape slot and waited while Frau Goetz pressed the correct buttons to bring up the picture. “This footage was taken yesterday.”

The image on the screen was bouncy and the audio was filled with a deep thrumming rattle. The watchers quickly realized that the video had been taken aboard a speeding helicopter. The chopper’s side door was closed so the camera panned down through the scratchy window. A thousand feet below, the cold north Atlantic surged with its unending rhythm. They were high enough that the whitecaps looked like bits of string. The frame jumped and suddenly Mercer was shown sitting on the bench seat in the rear of the cargo chopper.

“Who took this?” Barnes asked sharply.

“Ira wanted to be with us but couldn’t get out of the hospital. Father Anatoly Vatutin ran the camera,” Mercer answered before the video image of himself bent forward to strip a tarp off a box sitting next to the door. A golden reflection filled the dim interior of the chopper. Resting on the only remaining Pandora box was another glittering relic, the last of Rasputin’s icons.

Jacob Eisenstadt grunted when he saw the box. Although he’d already been warned what was on the tape, his eyes were wet, doubtlessly thinking about what the box represented — the origin of that gold and all those who’d died filling it.

Barnes sucked in a quick breath. He glanced at Mercer, trying to understand what was happening behind his gray eyes. Mercer gave a triumphant smile that told Barnes everything. “You didn’t.”

The tape made Mercer’s answer unnecessary. Father Vatutin set aside the camera to open the cargo door and then refocused on Mercer as he kicked the heavy icon out the door. The camera image followed the antique as it pinwheeled toward the sea, swallowed by distance before it was swallowed by the water. Barnes went pale with impotant rage. Next, the tape showed Mercer bracing his legs against the seat supports and levering his back against the two-hundred-pound Pandora box.

Vatutin had tightened his focus on the swastika adorning the side of the Pandora box, tracking it as Mercer pushed it to the door. Pausing with the box on the edge of oblivion, Mercer addressed the camera, shouting over the wind and the rotor’s steady beat.

“The problem with any scientific discovery is that, once something is known, it can’t be unlearned. We can’t forget how to make a nuclear bomb or poison gas, nor can we prevent the propagation of that knowledge. To use a cliché, once the genie’s out of the bottle, it can’t be put back. Well, this is one genie that I’m not going to let escape. The military applications of Pandora radiation far outweigh any potential scientific use. A Russian madman realized that a hundred years ago and hid the truth until a German madman nearly succeeded in unleashing Pandora’s destructive potential one again. Now it’s my turn to end this once and for all.”

“What gives you the right?” Barnes shouted at Mercer.

“No one gave it to me.” Mercer’s voice was steel. “Thanks to what you’ve put me through in the past weeks, I’ve earned it.”

Everyone’s focus returned to the television as the chopper banked over, aiding Mercer’s final effort to heave the Pandora box into the rolling swells far from where anyone would find it. Again Father Vatutin, one of the two remaining members of the Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist, videotaped the object of his lifelong quest until it was gone. From the helicopter’s altitude, the splash appeared puny, an anticlimactic end to such a malignant artifact. The screen turned to electronic snow as the drama came to an end.

Eisenstadt reached over to shut off the television. “Thank you, Dr. Mercer, for showing me that. And thank you for including me in your decision to destroy the last of the gold I had been searching for. Once Anatoly Vatutin explained that it was his group in Russia feeding Theodor and me information about the shipment and told me what the Nazis had used it for, there was no other alternative. The financial loss to living Jews is painful but unavoidable.”

Mercer acknowledged the compliment but continued to study Barnes, sensing the machinations already churning in his head. “If you’re thinking that you can return to the site where the rotor-stat went down and retrieve the rest of the boxes, forget it. I can’t stop you from recovering them, but I know every top scientist you would use to analyze the meteorite fragments, including the people at Sandia and Livermore labs. The instant I find anyone is working on Pandora, I’m going to bury you.”

“Is that the price of your silence?” Barnes knew the threat wasn’t an idle one.

Nodding slowly, Mercer was too emotionally drained to summon outrage at the DCI’s intrinsic duplicity. He’d expected no less.

“And what about the others? What will their cooperation cost?”

Jacob Eisenstadt pointed a gnarled finger like an Old Testament prophet. “You must know that receiving our cooperation does not mean you also get our approval.” His voice thundered. “However, if Kohl’s entire board of directors is replaced and the company agrees to pay double what the Jewish reconciliation commission is asking for, Theodor and I will let this matter drop.”

Barnes rocked back from the verbal broadside but answered quickly. “The German government has been cooperative so far. The
Njoerd
has been impounded and those crewmen loyal to Rath will be prosecuted. The innocent sailors, members of Geo-Research from before Kohl bought the company, are being released after signing secrecy agreements. In order to keep this as quiet as possible, I see no reason why they won’t compel Kohl to agree to your request.”

Though he’d received the answer he wanted, the old Nazi hunter didn’t look happy. Mercer doubted he’d ever be truly at peace.

“Is that it?” Barnes prompted into the silence.

“Not quite.” Mercer pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Hilda Brandt wants enough money to start her own restaurant in Hamburg. Once he’s recovered from his injuries, Erwin Puhl wants a permanent staff job at McMurdo Station in Antarctica to continue his weather research. Father Vatutin is asking for the funding to rebuild a particular church in St. Petersburg. Marty Bishop disappeared as soon as the
Sea Empress
put in to Reykjavik. His fight’s with his father, not you, so I doubt he’ll make any demands.”

“What about you, Dr. Klein? What do you want?”

She gave Mercer a significant look. “I’m all set, thanks.”

They spent a further twenty minutes hammering out details, Barnes capitulating on each and every point. After Barnes left the Institute, Anika invited Mercer out for a drink, asking him to give her a moment to say good-bye to her grandfather. He was left waiting for fifteen minutes.

“Ready,” she announced when she came out of the dining room, a large bag over her shoulder.

Outside, the afternoon light made her hair glisten like polished anthracite. She walked with an infectious bounce that Mercer wished he could keep up with. He was thinking that maybe he shouldn’t have abandoned the cane given to him in Iceland.

“Seemed like a long time to say good-bye. We’re only going to a bar, aren’t we?”

She gave him a mocking look. “You’re not very bright, are you?

“Not usually, no.”

“I have to be back to work in a week and I won’t have any vacations for a while.”

“Rededicating yourself to medicine?”

“I’ve learned that playing at danger isn’t the same as actually experiencing it. There will be no more rock-climbing expeditions. I’m returning to the hospital and kissing my boss’s backside until my lips go numb. I’ve had all the excitement I want.”

“My sentiments exactly. But what’s that got to do with getting a drink?”

Anika stopped them on the street. He stood a head taller than her, but the force of her personality made the physical difference all but disappear. There was a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “I’m in the mood for wine, and a certain American geologist I know promised me a couple of days in the Loire Valley. I was saying good-bye to my grandfather because you’re taking me to France.”

“I am?” Mercer was both stunned and delighted. He had already booked an evening flight back to the States.

“You are.” She started walking again, taking his hand and turning away so he couldn’t see the flush rushing up her throat. “Do you remember how I told you I get drunk on a single glass of wine? I have to warn you that, when I’m tipsy, I usually get aroused too.”

Mercer’s heart tripped and suddenly his aches didn’t bother him so much. When he found his voice, he stammered, “I consider myself warned.”

They went off to restore each other’s spirit so that at least this one episode wouldn’t haunt their dreams. And after their first night together in a quaint guest house perfumed by vineyards, they knew it wouldn’t.

I’ve tried to blend a great deal of history into this story and have taken some license to make it work, but maybe not as much as you’d think. Project Iceworm was a real operation, but their Camp Century was built in 1960 about 150 miles from Thule on Greenland’s west coast. The story Erwin Puhl tells about Hitler’s operation on Rugen Island is true. The real U-1062 was a cargo sub that was sunk in the Atlantic after delivering a load of torpedoes to Indonesia for the Nazi’s
Monsun
boats, their secret Indian Ocean Wolf Pack.

As for Rasputin and the truth behind the Tunguska explosion? The mystic had been exiled from St. Petersburg at the time I place him near the explosion site. Many eyewitnesses did report that a portion of the object that slammed into the Russian taiga continued on in a northwesterly direction. Leonid Kulik was the first scientist to study the area and he did die as a prisoner of war. To date, science has yet to come up with a full explanation of that mysterious cataclysm because no physical debris has ever been found. So who’s to say what it was? Comet? Asteroid? Space-ship? Or the final misery to spill from Pandora’s box?

Pandora’s Curse
wouldn’t have been possible without the help of many people. First is Bob Diforio — agent, friend, and constant motivator. For research, I need to thank Thorsteinn Jonsson at the Svartsengi geothermal generating station and Magnea Gudmundsdottir at the Blue Lagoon Spa in Iceland as well as all those I met during my days in Greenland. Another thanks goes to Dr. Dennis Grusenmeyer; to Kim Haimann for help negotiating Munich’s suburbs; and to Angelo and Remo Pizzagalli for sharing their stories of excavating one of the P-38 Lightnings from the “Lost Squadron” that crashed in Greenland in 1942.

At NAL, my special thanks goes to Doug Grad, my editor. Like a jeweler who can turn a lump of stone into a gem, Doug never fails to expertly polish a rough manuscript into a finished book.

The Medusa Stone
Charon’s Landing
Vulcan’s Forge