The Madagaskar Plan (57 page)

Parked outside the entrance stood a driverless Mercedes Geländewagen. Burton peeked inside. It had room for six passengers, and in the rear was an empty cradle.

The lights were the only sign that the building wasn’t derelict. They reached the main door. Burton flicked off the Beretta’s safety catch. He wished he had the familiar grip of his Browning: it was his juju as much as a weapon. Silently he opened the door with his boot. They were in a vestibule, a space that operated like an air lock to keep the chilled environment of the interior from the outside. There was an office where staff members and visitors signed in—unmanned—and the obligatory portrait of Himmler. In front was a pair of double doors.

Madeleine pushed against them. They parted a few inches, then jammed. She tried again but didn’t have the strength. Burton shouldered the wood, heaving harder, till the doors opened wide enough for him to slip through.

“What can you see?” asked Madeleine.

He was in a long white corridor, the ventilation system hammering. His breath condensed. Blocking the entrance was a harvest of dead bodies. Doctors, nurses, and guards—splayed and folded over each other, all clawing their throats.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

THE COLD ANTISEPTIC air, so familiar from her previous stay, bored into her nostrils. Madeleine felt thick with dread and an eviscerating sense of loss. She hugged her belly. The lights pulsed as though the power was being diverted elsewhere.

Burton knelt by the bodies. “They’ve been dead awhile,” he said, lifting a doctor’s arm; it juddered in his grip.

“They were gassed,” she replied.

“How do you know?”

Madeleine pointed behind him. On the floor lay two gas masks, like severed heads. She picked them up.

“One each,” said Burton, “as if we’re expected.” He dropped the doctor’s arm; it remained rigid, a half salute to the Führer. “We should go, while there’s still a chance.”

“We’ve come too far.”

“This place is a tomb.”

She refused to submit to her fear. “They were tiny bundles of skin, Burton, pink and perfect. Gulping for life. They’re you and me.”

“Where were they taken?”

“I don’t know. I never saw them again.”

They moved down the corridor, checking every room they passed, their boots squeaking on the linoleum floor. On this level it was mostly offices or cupboards stacked with filing cabinets; one door opened on a dispensary. They came across more bodies: nurses, medics, orderlies who had dropped where they stood, their faces contorted and spumed with saliva. Madeleine and Burton carried their masks at their sides. Apart from one moment when Burton thought he smelled a waft of chlorine, they didn’t put them on. The air had a synthetic aftertaste. They searched the rest of the ground floor, a memory coming to Madeleine of when she worked as a maid in London. One weekend her employers had been away, and she had sneaked through the house, a mausoleum of a place, gliding from room to room, looking for something she couldn’t name. Years later, she attended a party there with her husband. If the family remembered her, they made no show of it.

On the walls were signs and arrows indicating various parts of the complex, but everything was written in numbers and acronyms. Madeleine had little sense of the layout of the hospital from before: she had either been confined to bed or drugged and wheeled about the endless corridors, conscious of nothing more than the ceiling lights repeating above her.

They reached the central staircase and paused. The building was completely silent, apart from the air conditioners. Madeleine’s dress hadn’t dried out from the rain, and a chill penetrated her.

“Gas sinks,” said Burton. “We go up first.”

More corridors, more rooms, arranged in a quadrangle, and the first indication that they were in a hospital. They discovered rows of empty beds and an operating theater. Madeleine didn’t find the ward where she had given birth or the yellow-walled room where she was imprisoned afterward while the doctor with the scorpion smile ran endless tests. There was no pediatrics wing or any sign where the twins might have been taken. No trace of Abner, either. The place felt mothballed.

“Perhaps … perhaps I got it wrong,” she said when they had completed their circuit of the floor. Her voice reverberated loudly, making Burton gesture at her to be quiet. His fingers were white around his pistol.

“I was sick with grief,” she continued in a whisper. “Didn’t know what was going on … what if it was another hospital?”

Burton stepped to the window and looked over the compound. In the distance were the sparsely scattered lights of the Sofia Reservation. “There’s a lot more of the place yet.”

They returned to the ground floor. Burton paused on the steps, put on his gas mask, then followed them down. Madeleine tugged on hers; her breathing became fuggy and labored. They descended two flights before they reached the basement. The lights were more feeble down here, the corridor gloomy as a bunker. The passageway ran for several hundred feet, with doors on either side at regular intervals. Halfway along it, another body lay twisted on the floor.

“It must lead to one of the outbuildings,” said Burton, his voice muffled through the mask.

They each took a side of the corridor, checking the doors. They were all fastened shut. The
click-click
of twisted door knobs echoed along the passage. Madeleine convinced herself that they wouldn’t have shut her babies away; this had to be a storage area, the doors hiding nothing more than stacks of paperwork. Burton moved faster than she did. She wanted to tell him to slow down, to be certain each door couldn’t be opened. She pushed against the wood after she found it locked, then placed her ear to it, listening for the cry of children. All she heard was deep silence. The eyeholes of her gas mask were steaming up.

She became aware that Burton had frozen.

He was standing by an open door; she watched him go inside. Moments later he stepped back warily as if he’d disturbed a dangerous animal. A greenish light spilled from the room, patterning the corridor.

Madeleine ran over, her breath dense and moist through her respirator. “What have you found?” The lock on the door was broken.

He spoke slowly, his tongue thick, barring her with his stump. “Don’t go in there.”

She hesitated, then brushed past him.

*   *   *

There were no windows, no natural light, only the throb of electricity, more muted and nauseating than ever. A jade green tinged with something bilious rippled across the ceiling. Madeleine couldn’t determine its source. Then she saw two specimen tanks full of cloudy liquid catching the overhead lights. She was in a small ward that held no more than twenty beds, gathered in pairs. The significance of the detail hit her at once. Half the beds were occupied.

She heard the mechanical wheeze of Burton’s breath through his gas mask, close behind. “You don’t need to see this,” he said. “Go outside and I’ll check.”

Madeleine crept deeper into the ward, glancing at the beds and ignoring them at the same time, until she stopped short. On the mattress below her were two girls—identical twins—about the same age as Alice. They were naked, clutching each other, their limbs entwined. Golden hair splayed over the sheets. She grazed her fingers against the nearest foot: the skin was icy.

“Poor babies,” she said.

Burton’s hand was on her shoulder. “The gas would have been instant.”

For the first time, Madeleine saw that the ward was longer than she’d realized and divided by a pair of green curtains. They were closed, but at some point someone had rushed through them, leaving the join twisted and hanging loose. She slipped between them into a space that held six cribs. The slatted wooden sides of the cribs were too high to see into; she would have to peer into them, like staring down a well, to discover the contents. The green light continued to ripple above.

Madeleine’s heart banged up toward her throat, thumping in her ears. Her insides were meltwater.

She checked the cribs one at a time.

They were all empty.

She felt such relief that a shout of air, almost a laugh, erupted from her respirator. Relief became uncertainty. Madeleine had a sensation of vertigo that threatened to make her black out. Hanging from each of the cribs was a set of medical notes: two columns of figures and observations comparing Specimen A with B. Above them was a date. One had caught her eye.

Madeleine stepped closer to read it properly, and tore off her gas mask.

Born: 7 February 1953

The day she had been flown from Antzu to Mandritsara.

She snatched up the paper and read her own details:

Mother: Austro-German/British, aged 37 yrs

Health category: B

Blood group …

She plunged her hand into the crib. There was the tiniest double dip in the mattress. As soon as her fingers made contact with it, the shape wrinkled and vanished.

“Where are they?” she demanded. Tears drummed behind her eyes, plopping onto the mattress. “Where did they take them?”
They, them:
her babies still didn’t have names.

Burton reached out for her. She shoved him away.

“What did they do to them?”

She was screaming, screaming like she had done that night in the maternity ward.

Burton fought to hold her, to calm her. His face was hidden behind his mask: black, alien, threatening. She wouldn’t be silenced by him. She roared louder, the accumulation of shock and exhaustion and everything she had endured in the past months breaking out. Chunks of her heart were missing.

“Please, Maddie…” begged Burton.

He covered her mouth and she bit hard, enjoying the hot, salty squirt of blood on her tongue. She snarled and beat him—a vixen—and only when it was too late did she become aware of the sound.

*   *   *

Burton ripped off his gas mask, gulping in sterile air. The hysteria that had overcome Madeleine faltered as she realized she’d given them away. She stared and blinked as if she’d been shaken awake.

From the corridor came the rush of boots.

Burton flung the curtains wide and aimed his Beretta at the entrance, blood trickling down his wrist where he’d been bitten. Nausea and failure rampaged through him. He was dismal in the certainty that the children he would never see or hold had already passed through the hospital’s crematorium.

Now one thought dominated: they needed to get out of this place; he’d drag Madeleine if he had to.

The door opened.

“I’ve been looking for you.” Abner stumbled into the room, cheeks glowing. “I found them.”

Madeleine flew past Burton. “My babies?”

“I think so.” He glanced around the ward with revulsion. “Twins; tiny young things.”

“Are they alive?”

He hurried from the room, Madeleine at his side. Burton chased after them.

They sprinted to the end of the corridor, through a set of swing doors, and into an identical passage. Halfway along was a staircase. Abner raced up to ground level, leading them to another door. It was ajar, yellow light pouring from the interior.

“They’re in here,” he said eagerly.

Madeleine pushed past him, Burton following. The air was warm, sharp with tartaric acid. He just had time to register gas masks scattered across a table, a pile of spent canisters.

Something hard cracked Burton’s skull.

He staggered, vision wheeling, and felt a metal ring press against his temple. The pistol was cocked. Half-conscious, Burton recognized the distinctive click at once, as familiar as the greeting of an old friend. It was the sound of the pistol he knew best.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Governor’s Palace, Tana

21 April, 02:20

“THANK YOU FOR coming at such a late hour.”

Nightingale’s eyes darted around the room. His hair was matted, his previously smooth chin blue. A cloud of fresh aftershave and day-old sweat hung around him. “Where’s Governor Globocnik?” he asked.

Hochburg had taken over Globus’s study and was sitting in his chair. His desk was hidden beneath a welter of dispatches that Hochburg had been signing for the past hour. Beneath his signature he added,
per pro der Reichsführer-SS.
The room outside was lively with ringing phones and voices, the sustained rattle of typewriters. Hochburg had vetted every man for his loyalty to the SS, not Globus. Sitting in the corner behind him was Feuerstein, a plate of cake crumbs in his lap. He was transfixed by the photographs on the wall: Globocnik and the Führer; Globocnik and Himmler; Globocnik and Heydrich; Globocnik and a myriad of other party faces. The scenes were a mixture of the official and informal: dinners, shooting parties, the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. “A gallery of lions,” Hochburg had called it, “the complacent and crooks.”

He invited Nightingale to sit. “Globus has fled to the Sofia Dam. I am going there presently—to arrest him. First I wanted to speak to you.” He poured them both coffee from a freshly brewed pot; the air was pungent with it. “Would you like some cake, too?” Earlier he’d gone to the kitchens and found a gâteau speared with birthday candles in the shape of Ostmark. He cut the envoy a slice.

Nightingale ignored it. “I heard your broadcast, Oberstgruppenführer, but it’s too late.”

“Meaning?”

“I did caution you about further outrages. My duty is to keep Washington informed. They know about the synagogue being burned, and the mass transportations. I’ve seen the trains from my own window.”

He listed other grievances until Hochburg held up his palm. “I’m wresting back the situation.”

“My government has already decided. President Taft was coming under too much pressure from the American Jewish Committee. He’s dispatching the USS
Yorktown
.”

“
Yorktown
?”

“An aircraft carrier, sixty wings. Plus support vessels.”

Hochburg absorbed this information. The American carrier would be a minnow against the fleet at Diego, he thought. The danger arose from their proximity. Mistakes could be made—an aircraft accidentally shot down, a torpedo fired without orders—and with mistakes events could escalate beyond reason.