EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum (14 page)

1

Friday, 15 May (7:21 a.m. EST – Washington)

Daniel stared through his office window and shivered. The treetops swayed in a swirling wind infused with a freezing mist.

He was the first to arrive, just beating the brunt of the incoming weather. Sylvia’s schedule was about a half hour behind his, which suited him. It gave him time to start his day without distraction. He recalled with nostalgia when his entire day use to be like that.

It had been a week since their first meeting in Room 713, and he was sure that Thackett was disappointed in their progress. He
had
to be – a carrier group had already entered Antarctic waters and a large-scale, geopolitical event was on the verge of exploding. The Omnis had, to this point, contributed nothing.

His left eye twitched as he sat on the edge of the couch and rested his elbows on his knees. He massaged his temples. By the look of her chewed fingernails, which he’d noticed the previous night, he could tell the pressure had been getting to Sylvia as well.

Despite the anxiety, seeing things unfold in real time was exciting. He was privy to the real motivations for the large-scale naval actions, whereas the general public was fed plausible misinformation. Snippets had been released through various news media: the Navy was conducting exercises, and the carrier group was heading to the southern seas to test new equipment. Of the billions of people on the planet, only a handful knew the truth, and Daniel was one of them – or at least he thought he was. He was cognizant of the possibility that even he wasn’t told the complete truth, but he had to place his trust somewhere.

As usual in his research, he was overwhelmed with the names of operations, people, and, in this case, naval vessels, all with filamentary connections between them. He reminded himself that they were only in the discovery stage, and things would become clear with time.

The carrier group securing the icy waters surrounding the beacon had provided some new information about the object, but they were mostly physical details that had, so far, not helped to determine why it was there, or how it got there.
When
it got there, however, was fascinating. If he hadn’t read the Captain’s log himself, he would’ve scoffed at the idea that Captain Cook had been involved. But it put a timestamp on it: the beacon had been there in the 1700’s at the very latest.

The timeline of events was so complex that, two days earlier, he’d requested a whiteboard and a large corkboard to pin photographs, just to keep things straight. As usual, everything was ready to go the next morning. They’d even included an assortment of pins for the corkboard and colored markers for the whiteboard.

The whiteboard was already covered with notes, Daniel’s in blue marker and Sylvia’s in red. At the top, in blue, was a timeline starting with
Cook and crew discover beacon (November 1773).
Next came the
Schwabenland Expedition (January 1939), U-Boat – Schwabenland Rendezvous (February 1939).
And then
Operation Tabarin (November 1943)
followed by
Operation Highjump (Southern summer, 1946).
Finally,
Operations Argus and Blackfish (November, 1958).
The names of the major players, mostly military personnel, were written close by, and he and Sylvia had been trying to identify links between them.

He stared at the spaghetti of red and blue lines and scribbled words, some of which were circled or underlined for emphasis. He then turned to the corkboard and examined the photos pinned to it. Black and white pictures of people were placed in two columns, one for those associated with Daniel’s investigation and another for Sylvia’s. They hadn’t yet made any connections between the columns.

Photos and schematics of the various Antarctic bases were organized according to their respective operations – but most were from Operation Tabarin. Some of the bases had been shockingly small – in some cases, just a single building and fewer than ten people. He thought those who’d occupied them must’ve been miserable dealing with the extreme conditions.

He inspected the images of the ships and equipment involved in the operations. Pictures of German and American submarines, British vessels, and various aircraft were grouped according to the dates the photos had been taken. Three photos of the
Schwabenland
were pinned in a vertical column, each showing the vessel from different perspectives. The British report described it as an 8000-ton floating airbase. It had two tall masts, which were actually antennae, and a catapult to launch its two seaplanes,
Boreas
and
Passat
. A claw-like crane was mounted on the rear deck to pluck the planes out of the water after returning from a flight. The
Schwabenland
had belonged to the German airline, Lufthansa, whose crews flew and maintained the planes.

He kept staring at the
Schwabenland
pictures. He walked closer to the board and examined each more closely. There was something …

The door beeped, far to his right.

Sylvia stepped in and inserted her wet umbrella into a clay pot next to the door. She nodded to Daniel, walked into her office area, and put her lunch in a small refrigerator. A few second later, she walked to his side of 713. An empty coffee cup dangled from her hand.

“May I?” she asked, and nodded in the direction of his coffee pot.

She looked disheveled, as if she’d been up all night. Her damp hair was the color of dark copper. “Certainly,” he said as he walked to the back of his office, retrieved the pot, and filled her cup. “You look tired.”

“Just what a girl wants to hear,” she said and shook her head. “Couldn’t sleep. My brain was in overdrive all night. When I finally managed to fade out, I dreamt of this stuff. I feel like we’re behind.”

“We are,” he said and walked out of his office and towards the furniture arrangement in the center of the huge room. Sylvia followed.

He sat in Horace’s chair, and she on the couch directly across from him.

“I think we have many pieces of the puzzle,” he explained, “but something big is still missing.”

“If this is so important, why aren’t all of the other Omnis working on it? Why aren’t they pooling together all of our resources?”

“Who’s says they aren’t?” Daniel replied.

“Why are you and I working together?” she asked.

Daniel shrugged. “Our projects have commonalities: Nazis, South America – the route to Antarctica was not direct from Germany or England,” he said. “It was a long trek through South America and some island hopping.”

She nodded. “The Nazi network I’d been researching spanned Argentina and included Deception Island.”

“As a part of Operation Tabarin, the Brits put an outpost on Deception Island to spy on the Germans,” he explained. “But why would the post-War network set up anything there? What interest could former Nazis have in getting to Antarctica? They’d be better off hiding in South America. Warmer, too.”

“There were rumors about ex-Nazis and Antarctica,” she explained. “One of my tasks was to find their origins and debunk them.”

“What kind of rumors?”

“That the Nazis were regrouping. Hitler was still alive and building the Fourth Reich in a secret base in Antarctica,” she said. “The best one was that they had come across extraterrestrial technology and were about to mount a new attack. There were even stories of strange aircraft sightings in newspapers.”

Daniel fell into deep thought for a few seconds. “How else can we account for the beacon being there for centuries, and being beyond their technology – maybe beyond our
current
technology?”

Sylvia raised an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting it had an extraterrestrial origin?”

He huffed and shook his head. “I’m saying we can’t take anything off the table. For now we have to keep all possibilities open, no matter how absurd they may be.”

She nodded.

He continued, “We can’t even identify the material the damned thing’s composed of – can’t even scratch it. And we certainly don’t know its purpose.” His legs muscles twitched like taught rubber bands and he had to stand. “I need to get back to work.”

Sylvia went back to her office and Daniel went to the corkboard to reexamine the photos. His attention was again drawn to a large snapshot of the
Schwabenland
. One of the water planes, the
Passat
, was perched on the catapult. Its two propellers – push and pull – were blurred, so it must have been getting ready to launch. He stared at it for a few minutes and then moved on.

His focus turned to the German U-boats that the Brits had tracked as part of Operation Tabarin. One was of U-530, taken in July of 1945 at the Argentine naval base at Mar del Plata. He wondered how the men on those vessels coped with the cramped conditions; they’d been but a malfunction or depth charge away from a horrible death.

The adjacent picture was of U-530’s young, smiling captain, Otto Wermuth. There were some strange facts regarding U-530. First, it had arrived with no torpedoes. Second, it had a skeleton crew – somewhere around twenty men – where its full contingent was 54. Third, the vessel’s documents were destroyed before landing in Argentina. Finally, there were large barrels of cigarettes on board; a strange detail that had drawn speculation that they’d been intended for delivery at a base of some sort.

As he’d done at least 100 times in the past week, he examined the pictures of Otto Wermuth. Some had been taken after his arrival at Mar del Plata, and others snapped before his final mission. It was easy to tell the difference: he didn’t smile in the later pictures.

He unpinned and took down two pictures of Wermuth to have a closer look. Both had been taken in the captain’s quarters of U-530. He focused on a leather file binder in one of the photos. It lay open on a desk and contained file folders stamped with standard Nazi emblems. He could see swastikas on everything, and SS symbols were stamped on a few, but there was one he couldn’t quite make out.

He went into his office and returned with a magnifying glass. The image was a little fuzzy, but clear enough. The hair on his neck bristled and the magnifying glass shook in his hand. The symbol was of a large bird of prey carrying an emblem that resembled a hash symbol with tails coming off from every other edge. It was like a swastika drawn with a tic-tac-toe board at its center rather than a cross.

He knew
exactly
what it was.

2

Friday, 15 May (8:54 p.m. EST – South Beach, Florida)

This is more like it
, Lenny thought, as he parked the rental car in a gravel parking lot in front of the restaurant. South Beach, or
SoBe,
as the locals called it, was exactly the type of place he wanted to live out the rest of his life. The heat made his aging and damaged body feel comfortable. He’d experienced too many cold winters in Chicago and Detroit, not to mention the long spans of time he’d spent in Eastern Europe.

Ivan Poliakov, M.D., Ph.D., was smarter than most of the others who had been involved in the Compressed Punishment program. The others hadn’t run far enough away, or run at all. Poliakov at least made it to a place better than Detroit, but he didn’t change his name. It was okay. It made Lenny’s job easy.

He got out of the car and took a deep breath of evening ocean air marinated with the scents of seafood and spices. He donned a Florida Marlins baseball cap he’d purchased at his hotel the day before, and adjusted his loose-fitting khakis. He slipped on a light leather jacket over his open-collared white shirt. He’d fit in perfectly with the rest of the upper-class clientele.

The doctor was celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary, which was earlier that week. Poliakov had been low on the target priority list, but he’d been moved to the top when Jonathan McDougal started looking for him. Lenny had known of McDougal long before the catastrophic breakdown of the Red Wraith project. The do-gooder lawyer was the one who had shot him. Lenny longed for the day when he’d find McDougal on his target list. Now the law professor’s DNA Foundation was tracking down everyone involved in program. He was certain McDougal intended to not only round up the run-of-the-mill employees, like Poliakov, but to use them to get the people at the top.

Lenny knew he wasn’t safe either, having blood on his hands, even though it was unlikely they’d get any solid evidence. Even the man who had ordered the hits, Heinrich Bergman, was dead. He wondered why McDougal wasn’t a priority target: they could end the problem with one hit.

Poliakov was one of a team of three doctors who knew enough to put many people away. The other two had been killed in the explosion that had exposed the Red Box. Eliminating Poliakov would allow many high-level Red Wraith personnel to sleep more easily – and that included the former CIA Director.

Lenny walked into the Blue Dolphin Bistro, a restaurant-bar that was crowded on Friday nights because of their seafood and margarita specials. He asked a young woman at the host station how long the wait was for a table for two. There wasn’t a second person, of course, but to dine alone in such a place would draw attention. Besides, he had no intention of being seated; he just needed an excuse to move about the place.

As he weaved his way through the crowd, he spotted Poliakov’s wife, Jillian. She was a stunning woman, tall with dark hair and green eyes. She wore a green sundress and a thin, white sweater. According to the file, she was in her early thirties, eight years younger than her husband.

A bearded man, about four inches taller than Jillian, walked onto the scene holding two glasses of red wine. He handed one to her.

Lenny took a seat at the bar, his back to Poliakov, and ordered a beer. He watched the doctor and his wife in a mirror mounted behind the racks of alcohol and below a TV showing a baseball game. He glanced back and forth from the TV to the mirror as he sipped.

Poliakov’s red beard was nearly as full as his own, and much thicker than it was the first time they’d met. Although Lenny had been beardless during their first encounter, he wondered whether the doctor would recognize him. He doubted it: when they’d met, Poliakov had just accidentally injected himself with some horrific chemical and was writhing in pain. How a person could accidentally inject his own thigh with a syringe of fluid, he’d never understand.

Even though Poliakov wouldn’t recognize him, Lenny had to be careful. Most places had cameras. After being shot and captured, his identity had been well-cataloged – pictures, fingerprints, and DNA. He couldn’t leave any evidence behind – and that included the beer bottle in his hand.

It was fitting that Poliakov would die by injection. The man had spent a good part of his so-called professional life administering various drugs and chemicals into the bloodstreams of hapless patients.
How many people had the man treated?
he wondered.
How many of those had died?

Lenny was no hypocrite. He, too, was a killer. But the man had it coming, as did the others. The woman he’d terminated in Detroit was no better. Nor was the young woman in the hospital in Chicago. She was a psychopath whose goal was to become the dentist of the damned – a torture artist of the worst sort. None of these people belonged in the world, and Lenny was doing a service to society.

That was the thing about operating in the civilian world: he was almost always given justifications for his hits. In the professional world, there were only orders. In that case, he thought of himself as an instrument, and all guilt could be transferred from him to the entity that had deployed him. He was innocent.

Dr. Poliakov stood from the table and excused himself.

Lenny watched in the mirror as the man passed behind him towards the restrooms. He pulled his hat low on his forehead, gulped the last of his beer, and slid the bottle into his jacket pocket. It was time.