EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum (9 page)

5

Saturday, 9 May (3:41 p.m. EST – Washington)

Daniel closed the file he’d been reading for the past two hours and slapped it down on the coffee table. He sat on the couch, put his hands on his head, and massaged his temples with his fingers. What was he expected to do? Thackett had made it clear: nobody knew what was happening. In the meantime, he and Sylvia would work on the problem, guided by the grandmaster of all Omnis, Horace. But he and Sylvia would have to come up with their own, unbiased conclusions without knowing how Horace came to his. It wasn’t clear that Horace had a logical path to his conclusions, whatever they were. Daniel suspected the man was working on a gut feeling.

He unwrapped a granola bar, took a bite, and chased it with a sip of water. Something bothered him: if Horace was who Thackett said he was – the country’s greatest intelligence resource – then the old man’s identity had been compromised. He wondered now if he and Sylvia would have to be eliminated once they’d served their purpose.
Through his many years of classified research, he’d often crossed cases of preventive assassinations. So it was a possibility. Or did they trust him and Sylvia? After all, they’d eventually need someone to replace Horace.

Daniel sighed and shook his head. What was he going to do, quit?

The new project had elements that made it different from all the others, including a facet he’d not before experienced: time pressure. It was as if there was a race to solve some big puzzle.

He choked down the rest of his snack, picked up the file, and got back to Operation Tabarin.

He’d concluded that the Brits and Americans had initiated their respective operations as a response to something, and their response had to be related to the war effort. The Americans had initiated their mission after the war ended, so to whatever it was that they were responding had persisted after the war.

Up to this point, he hadn’t turned up anything more than background information. However, he did find a clue in a Royal Navy logbook from a reconnaissance vessel that had been deployed in the southern sea before the war had begun. The British ship had followed a German vessel, called the
Schwabenland,
to Antarctica. No details were given about the reason for their suspicion of this vessel, nor anything they’d discovered about it.

Daniel submitted a requisition for top-secret documents and emailed it to the appropriate CIA address. He’d have all the available information about the
Schwabenland
in the morning.

He twitched. The urgency of the assignment had his mind tumbling with adrenaline. What he needed was a nap. Instead, he turned on the electric teapot on the windowsill. He hoped some tea would sooth his nerves and ready him for the long hours ahead.

6

Saturday, 9 May (7:58 p.m. CST – Chicago)

Lenny Butrolsky leaned his throbbing right shoulder on the wall of the balcony of his 19
th
floor hotel room. The even pressure spread the pain around so that it wasn’t all in one place.

The sweet Chicago night air was poisoned intermittently by cigarette smoke that wafted up from a lower balcony. The enormous red moon dominated the cloudless sky above the Great Lake despite the lights of the city. The glittering ripples in the water made him think about better times, and the uncertain future.

He dialed the number on his secure mobile phone. A man answered after one ring.

“It’s done,” Lenny said, referring to his latest target, Kelly Hatley.

“We know,” the man responded. “The funds will be deposited within 24 hours along with the first installment for your next job.”

“Instructions coming by the same method?” Lenny asked.

“Yes,” the man replied and hung up.

Lenny put the phone in his pocket and looked out over the water. Hatley had been taken out with a simple injection into her I-V. He felt hollow inside when he thought about her – she was in her late twenties, at most. Although, he thought, by virtue of her choice of employer she was no angel. He grinned and nodded as he took a deep breath. He could say the same for himself. But his actions damned him much more than anything the woman had done.

The Hatley job had been easy. He preferred it that way, as would anyone in his profession, but he’d become more aware of risks now that he was considering retirement. Maybe he’d just do a few more jobs. It seemed he could get all the work he wanted. He suspected his handler got orders directly from the former CIA Director, Terrance Gould, who’d been desperately trying to dispose of Red Wraith personnel since his untimely removal four months ago.

Lenny was uniquely suited for such a cleanup operation. He’d been intimately involved in the project – he knew the major players, what they did, and what they looked like. It was fortunate for Gould that many of the most threatening people had already been eliminated – either by Lenny, or killed in the explosion at the Red Box. But there were others.

His phone buzzed. It was a text message indicating that a new email awaited him in a secure account. They never actually
sent
emails – it was too risky. Instead, they wrote drafts and saved them so that someone else could log in and read them. Afterwards, they were deleted. He navigated to the email account and read.

His next target was a Dr. Martha Epstein. Lenny immediately made the connection to her Red Box alias,
Dr. Smith
. She was a psychologist who had interacted with every patient as they entered the program. She knew what happened there, and could make connections to others, including Gould.

He read on and swore under his breath. He had to go to Flint, Michigan. The woman didn’t have the common sense to get out of the area, and now he’d have to return to the place where he’d already carried out multiple hits. Even though it would be difficult to link him to any of those jobs, it was downright risky.

So far, all of his targets had been Red Box personnel.
Was someone else eliminating people from the Long Island facility?
he wondered. He knew the man who had held the security post there, a position equivalent to his at the Red Box. That man had been well connected in upper government circles, whereas Lenny had been linked directly to the project head, Heinrich Bergmann. He bet that the other man was conducting cleanup operations of his own. Perhaps they’d cross paths.

The jobs would get increasingly more risky, and Lenny thought about upping his fee. But he’d wait on that until he had enough in the bank to quit the business. Besides, it was the former CIA Director who had arranged for his escape from the hospital. That was risky. Perhaps he owed the man some work.

7

Saturday, 9 May (10:45 p.m. CST – Memphis, Tennessee)

Will ate a late dinner of Memphis-style ribs in the hotel restaurant and then went up to his room. No matter how nice they were, hotel rooms could be some of the loneliest places on earth. Like most things, it depended on one’s state of mind.

He stepped through a sliding glass door onto the room’s seventh floor balcony and looked out over the Mississippi River as a barge drifted under a bridge. He leaned against the railing and admired the stars shimmering in the night sky. They were brilliant despite the large red moon and lights of the city. Each star represented the possibility of a different world, but it was the blackness between them that gave him a sense of the infinite, the eternal, and, for some unknown reason, hope.

His phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the screen: it was Denise.

“I miss you,” she said before saying hello.

His chest tightened.

“I should have gone with you,” she said.

Will wanted her with him, but it would have been selfish. “It’s only temporary,” he assured her. Even though that was true, he wasn’t certain where he’d go next. Maybe he’d be in even deeper cover and be out of contact with her completely.

Her voice changed to a professional tone as she filled him in on the status of his civil case, and then on their hunt for Red Box personnel. What she told him next made his mind reel.

“Kelly Hatley passed away,” she said.

He was speechless. The young dental assistant was sadistic and she deserved what she got, but it was also saddening. He felt cheated: he’d wanted her to survive so that she’d be confronted with her crimes and sent to prison.

“When?”

“Last night. She was overmedicated. She was murdered.”

So it had started. He imagined a food chain with the government at the top hunting down all Red Wraith
personnel. The upper-echelon Red Wraith figures were second in the chain, taking out the lower-ranked personnel
before the FBI caught up with them and offered deals for their testimonies.

Where did he fit into the food chain?
he wondered.
And what about Denise and Jonathan?

“You and Jonathan better watch your backs,” he warned. “You’re prominent in the investigation. You’re dealing with ruthless people.”

She assured him that they’d be okay, and they ended the call a minute later, leaving him in a numbing silence.

To take his mind off of it, he reached for the television remote, but then reconsidered. It was time to practice.

He leaned back on the bed and put his arms at his sides. He closed his eyes and brought memories of agony to the front of his mind, concentrating on the pain of the dental treatments in the Red Box … Kelly Hatley driving a sharp instrument under his left upper molar and into his jawbone … the dentist cracking a wisdom tooth with a curved pliers … the white hot pain surging through his entire jaw and leaching into his head and neck … and then he was out …

He looked down on his body from above. His face seemed relaxed. Only slivers of white were visible in his mostly-closed eyes. He moved about the room and
touched
things. He grabbed the remote, turned on the TV, and then turned it off again. He went into the bathroom, picked up a glass, and filled it at the faucet. As he brought it back into the room, he stopped at a mirror and looked in wonder. In the mirror were the reflections of both his body, flat on the bed, and the glass of water suspended in space. He stared at the image for a few seconds, trying to decide whether it was real, and then moved along to the bed and put the glass on the nightstand.

After a few more minutes of moving around the room, and out and over the balcony, he returned to his body and opened his eyes. He sat up, grabbed the glass with his hand, and took a drink. He put it back on the nightstand and watched as the disturbance on the water’s surface dampened to smoothness. He lived in two worlds: one constrained to the physics of matter and time, and the other bounded by neither. The latter caused him great angst. There was a purpose for it, for
him
. He had no idea what it was but, as the Israeli said, it was something that transcended the geopolitical. It was deeper.

His eyes were tired, and he’d need sleep if he were going to get an early start on the six-hour drive to Baton Rouge. He was returning to his past, but his purpose resided somewhere in the unknown future.

1

Sunday, 10 May (4:01 a.m. EST – Antarctic Circle)

Captain McHenry walked around the sonar consul to another control station. He was on minimum sleep and maximum caffeine. His eyes burned as he squinted into a video monitor that lit up the face of the man testing the equipment. “Ready, Stuart?” McHenry asked.

“Going through some preliminary checks, sir,” Stuart replied, focused on the controls. He pushed a button and the computer screen flashed white. The display then faded to a view of a load-lock bay containing a small submarine.

“The
Little Dakota
easy to operate?” McHenry asked.

“The right joystick steers, and the left directs the camera,” Stuart replied. “The depth, speed, and lighting are controlled by the keyboard. Not too complicated.”

“We’ll be in position soon,” McHenry said and then walked to the navigation station where a team of four monitored computer stations. A large screen displayed a map with a blue line that represented the
North Dakota’s
past and projected course. Seeing their current location on a map had often amazed him. He’d been in so many strange places over the years: beneath the North Pole, the bottom of foreign harbors, and, now, inside the Antarctic Circle. But it had never felt like actually being there. It was like reading a book: his physical environment was unchanging, but his imagination filled in the gaps and gave him a sense of what was outside.

They were about 150 nautical miles southwest of Dronning Maud Land, in the Weddell Sea, near the Brunt Ice Shelf. Why anyone would expend so much effort to build a structure in such a place he couldn’t fathom.

“We’re in position,” a navigator said.

McHenry made his way to sonar. “Finley, you getting the signal?”

“Had it locked in an hour ago,” Finley replied.

“Stuart, ready the launch,” McHenry said.

“
Little Dakota’s
ready,” Stuart replied.

“Go,” McHenry ordered.

Stuart actuated the load-lock fill valve.

Other sailors jostled for position behind McHenry to get a line of sight to the video feed.

The load-lock bay flooded with seawater and quickly rose above the submersible. A few seconds later, the bay doors opened, and the clamps holding the
Little Dakota
in place disengaged. The mini-sub was free to roam.

“How much line do we have?” McHenry asked Stuart, referring to the umbilical cord providing remote control communications to the sub.

“About 2,500 meters of fiber-optic cable. But we have to be careful to avoid slack,” Stuart explained. “The crosscurrents will snap the line.”

The
Little Dakota
had two built-in emergency protocols. One made it blow its ballast tanks and go to the surface if its tether was severed. The other
filled
the ballasts and made it sink to its destruction. The latter option was selected for this operation.

It was a quiet vehicle, even more so than its parent, which made him feel better than he had during the noisy operation of the previous day. Returning to the same area after just 24 hours, however, made his stomach burn.

After a few minutes, Stuart reported, “
LD
is at 1400 feet, but still no visible on the sphere.”

“We’re coming at it from above,” McHenry said. “Make sure we don’t land on top of it.”

He tried to suppress a thought that loomed in the back of his mind: was it possible that the thing was rigged – booby-trapped for an inquisitive cat like an American fast-attack sub? He’d brought up the idea hours earlier with Diggs, but they’d both dismissed the notion. First, it would be an exceedingly elaborate trap just to kill one sub. Second, it would mean war for whomever had set it. Still, the thought lingered.

“Stopping at depth, 1,480 meters,” Stuart said. “It should be close by. Going to circle around and look.”

Stuart tipped the camera downward with left joystick and circled the sub slowly with the right. About halfway around the circle, gasps and expletives spewed from the crew. “Recording,” Stuart said.

The smooth, white sphere had no markings of any kind – no seams, rivets, paint, scratches – nothing.

“Get closer,” McHenry said. “Don’t hit it.” He was more concerned with the noise it would make than with damaging it.

Stuart guided the
Little Dakota
closer until the screen filled with the white color of the object. “Fifteen meters away, sir,” Stuart said. “Probably shouldn’t risk getting closer. The current compensators might not be able to keeps us stable.”

McHenry nodded, not averting his eyes from the screen. The surface was featureless. “Go all the way around.”

Stuart piloted the sub along the equator of the sphere. The surface was bright white, at least in the lights of the mini-sub, but not shiny. It seemed like it had a texture similar to that of unglazed ceramic – like that on the backside of a bathroom tile.

“Let’s look underneath, at the stem,” McHenry said.

The sub backed off a few meters and then descended until the joint between the stem and bottom of the sphere came into view. The camera panned back and forth. The cylindrical stem connected to the sphere via a smooth joint – as if the whole thing, sphere and stem, were cut from one enormous piece of material.

“Move down the stem,” McHenry instructed. It was smooth like the sphere, but he hoped there was a marking of some kind – a serial number or a company name – giving away its maker.

Stuart lowered the sub along the stem, panning the camera back and forth along the way. It revealed nothing but a smooth, white surface, but its radius increased gradually with depth. The
Little Dakota
stopped.

“We’re at maximum depth,” Stuart informed.

“Damn,” McHenry cursed. “Where are we?”

“Twenty-three hundred meters on the tether,” Stuart replied. “We started at 240 meters, so the absolute depth of
Little Dakota
is currently 2,540 meters.”

“Christ, that thing goes on for another 1,500 meters,” McHenry said. They needed a longer tether. “Bring it up, and let’s get the hell outta Dodge.” It was time to communicate the information back to Naval Command.

McHenry was acutely aware of the risks they’d been taking, and how easy it was to get used to such behavior. His father, a machinist, had often claimed the he’d been able to keep all of his fingers by sustaining a healthy fear of the powerful machines that he used every day. It was prudent to have a similar outlook as a sub captain.

But that self-preserving awareness was slipping away. The mystery at the bottom of the sea was taking over.