The Vengeance of the Tau (31 page)

“Yes. Thirsty.”

“I have orange juice inside. Squeezed from our own oranges here.”

“Thank you.”

The old woman waved a hand back toward the small house. The wind blew, and patches of her scalp appeared when her hair parted. It settled so that the patches remained bare. Her skin was creased and wrinkled. Her legs were little more than withered sticks beneath her dress. Her hands trembled slightly on the sides of her wheelchair.

“Do you approve?” she asked. “Of this place, I mean.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do. You have a scholar’s eyes. You couldn’t possibly have missed the fact that our community is composed solely of women and children. War veterans or war widows. Women who are beaten and frustrated and want to withdraw. We let them withdraw here, where their lives can still be worth something, where they are never forced to prove anything to anyone, where they can rebuild themselves. Some leave after a time.” She looked down at her trembling, liver-spotted hands. “Some never leave.”

A young woman came with a tray containing a pitcher full of pulp-rich fresh-squeezed orange juice, a pair of tall glasses, and napkins. She left without saying a single word. Melissa poured herself a glass and then poured one for the old woman, which she placed within easy reach of her.

“You saved my life,” Melissa said after gulping some of the delicious juice.

The old woman nodded. “Yes, from Brandt. Wily devil he was. Doesn’t surprise me at all. We’ve been watching him for some time. We’ve been watching all those who bear any connection to the White Death.”

The now-empty glass nearly dropped from Melissa’s hand at the old woman’s mention of the deadly contents of the crates from Ephesus.

“You discovered it was missing,” she continued. “You discovered what I have feared would come to pass for forty-five years now, since we tried to bury it from the world forever.”

Melissa felt a chill slide up her spine, thinking back to the mummified remains of the three Jews inside the cavern. “My God, the first time the White Death was removed, you were part of it!”

The old woman did not bother to deny it. “So many years ago,” she said softly. “So much has changed since, and yet so little.” Her eyes sharpened, and she continued before Melissa could start up again. “I founded this place, you know. I founded it because I needed it for myself. I could never have children of my own.” A veil of sadness swept over her face. “The Nazis at Auschwitz took care of that. Auschwitz was where it all began for me. For others it started in different places, but the pain was always the same.”

“Who?” Melissa asked in exasperation.
“What?”

“This is a tale I do not wish to tell twice. We must wait.”

“Wait for—”

“The wait is over,” the old woman said, casting her gaze beyond Melissa’s shoulder. “He is here.”

Melissa turned around, and the sight sent a joyous shock wave pounding against her. She couldn’t believe her eyes no matter how much she wanted to.

Blaine McCracken had stepped into the clearing.

As Blaine’s eyes met Melissa’s, he froze in his tracks. The next instant she was out of the chair, running his way. She leapt into his arms and hugged him with all her strength.

“The hotel, all the killings,” she muttered.

“I know,” he tried to soothe.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.” She eased herself to arm’s length, still holding tight to him. “God, that sounds ridiculous.”

“Not to me.”

She dropped her arms away now. “The journal! I’ve got to tell you what I found in that journal!”

“The White Death …”

“You know,” she said, dumbfounded. “How could you know?”

“Same destination. Different route.”

And the last of that route had been traveled with the woman who had rescued him outside the old toymaker’s house. They had journeyed through the night—two planes, several cars, and even a bus—to reach here. The second plane had landed on a military airfield in Israel, and twenty minutes into the drive that followed he recognized the Golan Heights. The woman had told him the name of the kibbutz and nothing more when they approached it. Whatever else Blaine needed to know about Nineteen, he had learned from the flower-encased M-60 tank placed two hundred yards inside the gates. The symbolism was striking: where war had once reigned, a new life and world had bloomed over it.

“Come here, both of you,” the old woman called in as loud a voice as she could manage. “Since you are both present, the tale can be told.”

“She had me brought here,” Melissa explained.

“Me, too, it would seem. Saved my life, maybe.”

“No maybe in my case.”

They turned toward the old woman and, almost in unison, said, “Why?”

“Sit,” she told them after they had made their way back to the table. Then, as Blaine took the chair between her and Melissa, “You know what this place is?”

“That tank near the front makes things pretty clear in my mind.”

“It was one of the tanks used in the battle to take the Golan Heights. We had it restored, and then the children designed the monument it now has become. It was they who insisted that we leave it fully armed and functional. Every week when Friday brings the Sabbath, a different one of them starts it up at sundown. To make sure we remember …”

“And what do you remember about World War II, about a certain secret chamber in Ephesus, Turkey?”

The old woman looked at Blaine closely. “Plenty. And you need to hear it all. Everything.”

Melissa had retaken her seat. McCracken pulled his further away from the table so he could squeeze his legs beneath it.

“We have little time,” the old woman started. “Perhaps none at all.”

“Because of the White Death,” McCracken followed.

“Yes.”

“She was involved with the first shipment of crates that was removed from the chamber,” Melissa elaborated, eyeing the old woman.

“And now the time has come to finish something that should have been done with forty-five years ago. That task falls upon you.”

“Us,” McCracken echoed.

“I brought you here to aid you in this quest. To help you save the world from them.”

“From who?”

“The Tau.”

“We will begin the day they were born,” the old woman continued after introducing herself as Tovah. “A late winter day in 1942 at a Catholic boys’ school in France, a school where three Jewish boys were being sheltered from the Nazis.”

“Tessen,” Blaine muttered, speaking while his eyes shifted between Tovah and Melissa. “A Nazi who may have saved my life in the hotel. He was at the school that day, a member of the firing squad.”

The old woman flinched and shuddered. “Then you know what happened.”

“Three boys were shot, and then the priest.”

“The three Jewish boys.”

“Yes.”

“Edelstein, Sherman, and Grouche,” the old woman added as if she were calling the roll.

“How could you know?”

“Because my brother was one of them, except he didn’t die.”

“What?”
Melissa raised.

“Another boy took his place. A friend he had made who had helped shelter him from the very beginning.” Tovah’s voice trailed off. “A friend who was dying of cancer. It was a pact they had made long before. The friend asked only that my brother take care of his family, make sure they were watched over when the cursed war was over. And my brother did as he was asked. To this day he continues to do just that.”

“Your brother’s still
alive
?”

Tovah nodded almost imperceptibly. “We found each other again after the war. I had survived Auschwitz. After the school was closed down, he became a youthful member of the French Resistance. The experience served him well in later years with the Haganah and the Irgun.”

“The founding of Israel …”

“He was one of its best soldiers. No one served this country better.” The old woman’s eyes filled with tears. Her lips trembled. “And he will serve it again, once he recovers.”

“Recovers?” asked Melissa.

“They tried to assassinate him three days ago. My brother is Arnold Rothstein.”

Chapter 29

“
HE HELPED BUILD
this place,” the old woman continued, as Blaine and Melissa exchanged shocked glances. “And he has helped maintain it, providing us with a brand-new irrigation system for our fields six months ago.”

“And what about fifty-one years ago?”

“If you know of that last day at the school, you must know of the priest’s final words.”

“A curse aimed at his killers, if not unleashed by holy powers, then by unholy ones.”

“My brother was standing in the back of the assembly. He could barely hear the words, but he never forgot them. When we found each other after the war, they were among the first things he told me. I looked in his eyes and knew he was not the boy, even the person I had known. He had become a killer.”

She looked at Blaine knowingly, and Blaine looked back, meeting her stare.

“He was a survivor,” McCracken added, “just like you.”

“And both of us burned for vengeance in our hearts. We were filled with a hate so vast, even the joy of finding each other again could not overcome it. My brother swore he could not rest until the men in that firing squad and their leader were brought to justice. We met others in those first months. All of them had similar stories to tell. They had been forced to watch their children killed, their wives raped—my God, just thinking of it now brings the old vile taste back.”

“It never goes away,” Blaine told her. “It’s too strong.”

“You understand.”

“I’ve been there, Tovah.”

“Which is why God brought you into this. While the plans of men are fraught with the random, His are not.”

“And what about the plans of the others you and your brother met up with after the war?”

“You draw ahead of me.”

“The direction’s clear.”

The old woman shrugged. Melissa poured her a fresh glass of orange juice and set it down where she could easily grasp it.

“The lives of so many had been ruined,” she continued. “How could they go on? How could any of us go on? Where could we find the strength? We were afraid to love, so we lived on hate. There would come a day, we promised ourselves, there would come a day …”

“When did it come, Tovah?”

“When a Jew who had survived by betraying his faith and accepting the Nazi cross reached one of our members. Guilt was eating him away, just as hate was doing likewise to us. He worked for Hitler’s board of science. He worked on the White Death.”

Melissa and Blaine looked at each other, then back at Tovah.

“He told us what it was, what it could do and had done. At Altaloon.” She glanced at Melissa. “He gave us a map that pointed the way to a secret underground chamber where it had been stored. The way in was clearly laid out. If you could have seen how jubilant we were! Imagine! We had the means to gain the vengeance we so desperately sought. My brother and I summoned the others to a meeting, just those who had seemed as driven and as fanatical as we were. There were twenty-nine in all, but after we had announced our plans the number dwindled to nineteen.”

“The name you gave to this kibbutz,” Melissa realized.

“The symbolism is important to me. Nineteen is one more than the Hebrew number representing luck. We took this as a good omen, prophetic even. Ours was a holy mission. We convinced ourselves that God had blessed our actions.”

Tovah pulled up her sleeve and held her wrist out. The numbers stitched into her arm at Auschwitz had shrunk together with the withering of her skin. Less clear, they remained just as chilling, just as meaningful.

“I carried a second tattoo in addition to this one, on my right shoulder, until I had it removed. There were nineteen of us and we took that as our symbol.” She stopped long enough to stretch her left hand across to where the tattoo had been. “The Tau … We all carried its mark on our flesh and its imprint on our souls. We divided ourselves into teams to begin the holy task before us. One team went to Ephesus to retrieve a supply of the White Death for us to begin our work. Another, led by my brother, went about tracking down potential targets. A third, led by me, began to recruit others, others like ourselves whose lives had been destroyed by the Nazis. Our selection process was discreet. Out of every hundred we considered, only five or six were actually chosen. An indoctrination process followed, along with training, of course. But we still needed a strategy, a plan of attack. The White Death gave us power, yet we had to make that power work for us.” She paused to catch her breath. “The priest’s last words were ingrained in all our hearts and minds by then. What if we stayed true to them? What if we made it seem that our work was the fulfillment of his curse?”

“Word would spread,” Blaine picked up. “The resettled Nazis you couldn’t get to, and you couldn’t get to them all, would have their lives turned upside down by fear. What lives you couldn’t take, then, you’d disrupt, perhaps irrevocably.”

“They would live forever in fear of potential violent death,” the old woman acknowledged. “They would live forever under the threat of some unworldly monster coming to call on them in the dead of night.”

“Which left behind the footprint of an unidentifiable creature that tore its victims to shreds.”

The glass of orange juice slipped from Tovah’s grasp. She managed to regain control of it before it smashed, but the pulpy contents splashed her. She seemed not to notice.

“How could you know that?” she demanded fitfully.

“Two sources actually. From that Nazi named Tessen who seemed desperately afraid that the monsters had come back to finish their job. And from someone I know back in the U.S. who’s investigating the Tau’s rebirth.”

“Someone like you?”

Blaine shrugged. “Pretty much, yeah,” he said, not sure of how to explain Johnny Wareagle to someone who had never seen the big Indian operate. “They made the mistake of killing a friend of his. He doesn’t take kindly to that.”

The old woman’s bony hands clenched into fists. “None of us do. My brother lies near death, because he dispatched a team to your country to ferret them out.”