Two Graves (62 page)

P
ENDERGAST PULLED THE LAUNCH ALONGSIDE A WHARF,
leapt out, and ran along the quay. Several members of the Twins Brigade were there, guarding the docks, staring at the final destruction of the island. The chaos from the final, dreadful explosion was settling down now, and in the lambent light of the erupting island he could see that half a dozen boats of various sizes had escaped the final conflagration and were coming across the lake toward the town. As he watched, one of the boats—a small, sleek craft—approached the quay at high speed. It held what appeared to be scientists or technicians in lab coats. The boat roared up against the quay, slamming into the stone, and the occupants scrambled onto land. They were glassy-eyed and stunned, several with hair and eyebrows scorched, filthy with soot, coughing and choking. They staggered up the quay toward the town, saying nothing. The Twins Brigade watched them pass but did not stop them. Instead they focused their weapons on a second arriving boat, containing half a dozen men in Nazi dress. They had also suffered from the effects of the explosion, their faces blackened, uniforms singed. A few appeared to be injured.

As the boat approached the quay, the brigade took positions and began firing. For a minute, scattered, sporadic fire was returned by the Nazis in the boat; but the firefight was over almost before it had started. The Nazis threw down their weapons, raised their hands in surrender as the boat idled up to the quay. A detachment of twins led them away under guard.

Pendergast looked back over the lake, its black surface now a fiery reflection of the island, a gaping cone of boiling lava, only a
few broken ramparts of the fortress remaining at the edges. A small skiff could be seen streaking over the water, approaching the quay at an oblique angle, keeping as much as possible out of the light of the flickering flames. Pendergast looked at it more closely. In it was a single man, seated in the stern, one hand on the tiller of the outboard. He was tall, powerfully built, with a thick shock of white hair that seemed to glow in the burning reflection of the ruined tower.

Fischer.

Pendergast drew his weapon and ran down the quay in the direction of the approaching skiff. But even as he did so, Fischer caught sight of him and gunned the motor, slewing sharply away from the quay, heading past it in the direction of the beach and the forest beyond. Pendergast fired once and missed; Fischer drew his own gun and returned fire, but from the moving boat the shot went wide. Pendergast stopped and took careful aim, this time punching a round into the outboard motor, which began to cough and sputter, billows of ugly black smoke rising into the ash-filled air. Fischer tried to turn the boat back away from shore, toward the center of the lake, but Pendergast fired a third time. Fischer staggered, grabbed his chest, and with a cry went over the gunwale of the boat into the water.

The burning boat drifted on while Pendergast ran past the end of the quay, to the pebbled beach opposite where Fischer’s body had fallen into the water. Reaching the formation of three large, separated rocks rising from the water just beyond the quay, he leapt up on the closest, scanning the dark water for any sign of Fischer.

A shot rang out; Pendergast felt a sharp burning sensation, like a fiery slash of a knife, graze his left arm just below the knife wound in his shoulder. He fell back onto the slippery rock, barely managing to retain hold of his weapon, cursing himself for his lack of caution. When he was able to take cover and reconnoiter, he realized that Fischer must have himself taken cover behind one of the other three rocks: the one farthest into the lake.

Fischer’s bullet had barely grazed Pendergast’s arm, but nevertheless he could feel the warm blood began to trickle down toward his elbow.

Fischer’s voice came from behind the rock. “It seems I’ve underestimated you,” he said. “You’ve managed to make rather a mess of things. What do you plan to do now?”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“One of us is going to die: but it won’t be me. I am armed and uninjured. That little tumble over the side of the boat was an act, as perhaps you’ve guessed.”

“You killed my wife. You must die.”

“She belonged to us, never to you. She was
our
creation. Part of our great project.”

“Your project is dead. Your labs, your base of operations, destroyed. Even your experimental subjects have turned against you.”

“Perhaps. But nothing will kill our dream—the dream of perfecting the human race. It is the greatest—the ultimate—scientific pursuit. If you think this is the end, you are sadly deluded.”

“I greatly fear that
you
are the deluded one,
mein Oberstgruppenführer
,” came a voice from behind Pendergast. He turned to see Alban approaching them from the direction of the forest. He was dripping wet, his shirt stained with blood, and one side of his once-handsome face had been dreadfully burned, pink and charred most horribly, the dermis fused in some places, in others the musculature and even bone showing. He held a P38 in one hand.

Alban leapt nimbly onto the third rock and stood there, outlined by the fiery island. Though he was burnt and wounded, he nevertheless moved with the same gazelle-like grace that Pendergast had noted so often before.

“I’ve been looking for you, Herr Fischer,” he said. “I wanted to report that things have not gone exactly as you had planned.” He nodded in the direction of the burning hulk of an island. “As you’ve probably noticed.”

He tossed the pistol from hand to hand as he spoke and gave a strange chuckle. A fey mood seemed to be upon him. “Why don’t you both come out from under those rocks you’re hiding behind, stand up and face each other like men. The endgame will be an honorable one—correct, Herr Fischer?”

Fischer was the first to respond. Without speaking, he climbed up and stood on the rock. Pendergast, after a moment, did likewise. The three men, bathed in the infernal orange glow, faced each other.

Fischer spoke to Alban, his voice bitter. “I blame you even more than your father for this. You failed me, Alban. Utterly. After all I did for you, generations of genetic grooming and perfection, after fifteen years of the most exacting and careful upbringing—
this
is how you perform.”

He spat into the water.

“And how
did
I fail, Herr Fischer?” His voice had a strange, new note in it.

“You failed the final test of your manhood. You had many chances to kill this man, your father, and did not. Because of that, the flower of our youth, the seed that was to sow the Fourth Reich, is scattered. I should shoot you down like a dog.” Fischer’s weapon briefly strayed toward Alban.

“Wait,
mein Oberstgruppenführer
. I can still kill my father. I’ll do it right now. Watch me. Allow me to shoot him—and restore myself to your good graces.” Alban raised his gun, aiming it at Pendergast.

For a long, freezing moment, the three men stood, points of a triangle, each on one of the three rocks jutting up out of the lake. Alban’s gun was pointed at Pendergast. Pendergast moved his own firearm from Fischer and aimed it at his son.

For agonizing minutes Alban stood there, the two with their weapons pointed at each other, bathed in the hellish glow and thunder of the eruption on the island, the sound of sporadic gunfire in the town.

“Well?” Fischer said at last. “What are you waiting for? It’s as I suspected—you don’t have the guts to shoot.”

“You think not?” Alban asked. Suddenly—quick as a striking snake—he swung his weapon around at Fischer and pulled the trigger. The round struck the man in the gut. He gasped, clutched his belly, and fell to his knees, dropping the gun.

“
You’re
the failure,” Alban said. “Your master plan was flawed—flawed fundamentally. You should never have allowed the defectives
to live. I see that now. Having recourse to an organ bank was too high a price to pay for the filial bond you were never able to completely breed out.
You
failed,
mein Oberstgruppenführer
—and long ago, you taught me what the price of failure must be.”

He aimed the gun again and shot Fischer a second time, square in the forehead. The back of Fischer’s head detached from his body, dissolving in a mist of blood, bone, and brain matter; soundlessly, he fell backward, his body slipping off the rock and disappearing below the surface of the lake.

Pendergast saw that the slide of the P38 had locked back—his son’s magazine was empty.

Alban, too, noticed this. “It would appear I’m out of ammunition,” he said, snugging the weapon into his waistband. “It seems I won’t be killing you, after all.” Although it must have cost him dreadful pain, he nevertheless smiled crookedly. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be going.”

Pendergast stared, only now managing to wrap his mind around what had just happened. He wondered how his son—despite the terrible burns, the wounds, the loss of everything—maintained his arrogant composure, his cocksure attitude.

“No words of farewell, Father, to your son?”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Pendergast said slowly, maintaining his weapon on Alban. “You’re a murderer. Of the worst kind.”

Alban nodded. “True. And I’ve killed more people than even you could imagine.”

Pendergast aimed his weapon. “And now it is
you
who must die for your crimes.”

“Is that so?” Alban issued a small laugh. “We shall see. I know you’ve figured out my unique temporal sense. Isn’t that right?”

“The Copenhagen Window,” Pendergast replied.

“Precisely. It’s derived from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which you are no doubt aware?”

Pendergast nodded almost imperceptibly.

“The interpretation is the notion that the future is nothing more than an expanding set of probabilities, time lines of possibility, that
continuously collapse into one reality as observations or measurements are made. It’s the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics taught in universities.”

“It would appear,” Pendergast said, “that your mind has somehow become able to leverage this—to reach into the near future and see those branching possibilities.”

Alban smiled. “Brilliant! You see, most humans have only a fleeting sense of the immediate future, perhaps a few seconds at most. You can see a car ahead slow at a stop sign, and you intuitively sense the probability that it will stop—or else continue on. Or you might know what someone is going to say moments before they say it. Our scientists recognized the usefulness of this trait over half a century ago, and set out to enhance it through breeding and genetic manipulation. I am the final product.” There was evident pride in Alban’s tone. “My sense of the branching probabilistic time lines is much more developed than in others. I can sense up to fifteen seconds into the future, and my mind can see the dozens of branching possibilities—as if through a window—and pick out the most likely one. It may not seem like much—but what a difference it makes! In a way, my brain can tune in to the wave function ψ itself. But it is not the same as
predicting
the future. Because, of course, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, there is no fixed future. And as you have so astutely realized, my ability can be stymied by sudden, illogical, or unpredictable behavior.”

His smile, made gruesome by the dreadful burns, widened. “But even without making use of my special future sense, Father, I know one thing beyond any shadow of a doubt:
you can’t kill me
. I’m going to walk away now. Into the forest. To stop me, you will have to shoot me dead—and that you won’t do. And so,
auf Wiedersehen
.”

“Don’t be a fool, Alban. I
will
kill you.”

The youth spread his hands. “I am waiting.”

A long silence ensued, and then Alban went on, almost jauntily. “With
Der Bund
gone, I’m free. I’m only fifteen—I have a long and productive life ahead of me. The world, as they say, is now my
oyster—and I promise you it’ll be a more interesting place with me loose in it.”

And with that he leapt nimbly from the rock into the shallow water.

Pendergast followed him with his gun, blood dripping slowly from the fingers of his left hand, as Alban waded onto the beach and strolled up it. Pendergast remained unmoving, gun still aimed at his son, as Alban continued, in no apparent hurry, to the grassy verge of the shore, climbed the shallow embankment, and strolled into a field of grass, finally melting into the black and unbroken wall of trees at the forest’s edge. Only then did Pendergast—ever so slowly—lower his weapon with a trembling hand.

I
T WAS CHRISTMAS EVE AT MOUNT MERCY HOSPITAL. A
small Douglas fir, freshly cut, stood in the waiting area near the guards’ station, plastic trimmings attached to its branches by discreet rubber bands. Deep within the hospital, a recording of carols was faintly audible. Otherwise, the vast and rambling mansion was cloaked in a nostalgic silence, its resident murderers, poisoners, rapists, arsonists, vivisectors, and social deviants caught up in reveries of Christmases past: of presents received, and—rather more commonly—of presents inflicted.