by Matt Killeen
“Lots of caring and compassion, and motherly attention, just what you needed,” he sneered. “Everything that fools the stupid natives and hoodwinked her team down the years.”
“Give me the samples,” she snapped.
“I don’t have the samples, stupid girl. My stepdaughter has the live virus.”
“No.” Sarah was shaking now. “She said . . . she said . . .”
“What did she say? Exactly what did she say?”
Sarah thought back. Had she actually stated that her father had the virus? What was it she had said?
Not my samples—
My father won’t give them to the British.
Don’t worry! It’s all over now.
“She doesn’t lie, you see,” Bofinger continued. “She implies things, and you think she’s said something. But she hasn’t. It’s a rare gift.”
Sarah felt she was sitting on a block of ice, and her very presence was making it melt under her. “The Bateke in the cage, that was you—”
“That was one of her staff, and when she found out she was delighted. It saved the whole project.”
“She said . . .” Sarah said, tailing off.
I swear that when we left the village I had no idea. I sent Klodt to . . . put him out of his misery as soon as I possibly could.
It was an appalling thing that they did, but by the time I knew it was already too late.
Everything began to dissolve around Sarah.
“They said she was an angel . . .” Sarah whined.
“She long since persuaded them that the things she did were necessary, even a blessing . . . Fools. This was her team, her minions, her followers. Provoking me, making me bitter and angry . . . see, he’s mad, that one, she’d say. He’s the evil one.”
“She asked us to get her to England . . .” Sarah tried again, holding on to a belief turning liquid in her hands.
“And so she would. She spotted you two, not quite what you seemed, took a guess, and bull’s-eye!” He clicked his fingers. “She was so miserable when France fell, that they’d collapsed before she could enact her revenge, for what they did to Germany, for causing the poverty and the smallpox outbreak, for what they did to her, and her mother. But Britain and the United States . . . she can still punish them. They’re all ready for her to infect.”
People do horrific things for money. Or revenge.
I think we’ll see that the French got off lightly
“She fought Hasse every step of the way,” Sarah insisted, shaking her head. She was already sliding away to the edge of the precipice, the ground sucking away like water through a plughole.
“Did she? She didn’t want to end up back in Germany, but she certainly took advantage of his arrival. Oh, little girl, take me to England and freedom!” he mocked.
“Where would she have kept samples?” Sarah said, trying to make it sound defiant.
“She’s been holding it in her hands the whole time. Didn’t you notice how she fiddles with it, protects it, keeps it at body temperature? That necklace is hollow.”
Sarah looked round at the other lifeboat. She couldn’t make out any of the individual passengers now.
“And the White Devil?” Sarah said quietly. She looked at her fingers that had touched Lisbeth’s cheeks, at the creamy, oily residue of her makeup that was still present, even after being in the water.
He handed it to Sarah, who stared into the demonic glass eyes, seeing herself there. The helmet was oily and left a cream residue on her hands.
It’s not my father, I promise you that.
Sarah fell into a pit that stretched away into the fetid darkness.
She didn’t need his answer. Lisbeth was the White Devil.
* * *
Without the cathedral of belief that she had built around Lisbeth, in praise of those apparently loving arms, Sarah could see everything the way it was. Lisbeth had tried to stop Bofinger’s stories only because his prejudice, his disgust, betrayed them both. She had no use for politics when her hatred was so pure. Politics . . . just causes trouble, doesn’t it? she had said. She was upset about them reusing the needles, about the shooting of the villager, because it got in the way of the science, the research, of her mission. Her revenge. Her two graves.
But that would take someone who was very driven, who could murder hundreds of natives to get what they wanted and not worry about it.
Lisbeth was that person. The grown-up making the hard decisions, and the children dying because they had to.
And Sarah had helped her.
The other ship disappeared behind their destination as they drew up to its side, but it was already too far away for her to do anything about Lisbeth. The gray hull threw everything into shadow, and the air grew colder.
“Welcome to HMS Godalming,” called a voice as the scramble nets were lowered. Sarah sat in the bow and watched the others clamber aboard. She was too exhausted, too disgusted, and too defeated to move. She was the last passenger to leave and only then with the help of the crew.
“There’s my little channel swimmer! Did you find your mummy?” one sailor chirped as he pulled Sarah over the rail.
“I need to speak to your captain,” Sarah answered in English.
He was a little surprised that she understood him but continued genially. “Yep, all in good time, Frow-line. First we’ll sort you some dry clothes and—”
“Now, I need to see him right now,” she interrupted.
The sailor grinned and turned to his crewmate. “Here, got a live one. This little Kraut sounds like a duchess, and she’s got an attitude to match.”
“I’ve information vital to the war effort.”
The sailors began to laugh and turned away to help the lifeboat’s crew aboard.
Along the deck Bofinger stood watching her, with something approaching pity. It was all Sarah could do not to take out the Beretta and shoot him. All she had left was loathing and rage, but she didn’t have the energy to use either.
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE BRITISH SANK the Ittenbach. It was too small to be useful. Sarah watched, refusing to go below until it was done. The guns of both ships pounded away, putting holes in the hull with a puff of black smoke and sparks, until they hit the fuel tanks. There was a very small whomp, and a ball of orange fire before a pall of smoke hid the tear in the keel. Almost imperceptibly the vessel listed and very, very slowly began to disappear under the waves.
Sarah’s ship, HMS Godalming, was already underway before a far-off crash of bubbles signaled the Ittenbach’s final dive and Sarah’s handiwork—her crime—was hidden forever.
The warship, a “Shoreham-class sloop” according to a chatty sailor greeting the new passengers, put distance between them and the coast. The landscape of the South Atlantic drifted past in all its writhing, graceful restlessness. The motion was, for Sarah, just about bearable, if she stayed on deck where the wind refreshed and chilled her warm brow. The destroyer, which an officer had called HMS Virulent, romped to-and-fro, like an excitable dog, circling its slower human.
Aboard that destroyer was a monster. A beast who would now travel to a country of almost fifty million people in order to make fifty million corpses, if she could. Sarah wanted that to be why she was so angry, why her impotent rage tore away at her insides with dirty claws. But that would have been a comforting lie. Sarah wanted Lisbeth stopped, destroyed, because Lisbeth had tricked her into caring, into loving. Her gullibility and culpability just made the loathing stronger.
Worse still was the very real possibility that Lisbeth thought that Sarah was part of what she did. That Sarah would eventually approve of her mass murders, in return for her comforting arms.
She had to be ended, one way or another.
Sarah tried again with a young sublieutenant who promised to bring the information to the captain’s attentio
n, but Sarah could see another comforting lie when it was told. He was more concerned by how wet she was, and she was quickly bundled below by a petty officer who had been ordered not to take no for an answer.
She considered telling them her mother was on the destroyer, but the message would likely be the same. Wait until we dock. Everyone was far too busy until then.
Finally, in oversized trousers, a sweater, and sea boots that fell off if she tried to walk in them, Sarah sat against a sweating bulkhead on the seaman’s messdeck, which was crowded with the Ittenbach’s passengers. Having allowed them to give her bitter cocoa and something they called a corned-beef sandwich, whose bland, lardy stodginess was oddly satisfying, she couldn’t push the fatigue away anymore. She rested her head on her cork life jacket, and even though her brain continued to cycle through its reverie of failure and self-loathing, her body shut down.
* * *
So deeply was she sleeping that she didn’t hear the explosion, the tearing of metal and the rush of water. It was the alarm bell that brought her to, a shrieking, painful ringing, so intense it could not be ignored. As she opened her eyes the floor tipped and she started to slide on the moist planking.
She sat up and dug her heels down, just enough to fight the gradient and struggle into her life jacket. She blinked to clear the sleep from her eyes. The room was dark, lit only by a faint green light, making it hard to see through the swinging hammocks and moving shadows. Disoriented and too confused to be truly frightened yet, she noticed that part of the alarm seemed to consist of an unsettling screaming sound.
The floor steepened with a lurch and the noise of groaning steel. The room’s shapes heaved to one side and some kept falling. Sarah slipped farther down the slope, but her borrowed boots were good and gave her enough friction, even as she was hit by a series of heavy, loose objects, to bring herself to a stop. Something rushed past, shrieking as it went. Sarah watched the refugee hit the water that roiled under her feet and disappear into the green froth. The only lights that still burned in the room were now deep under its surface.
The screaming was not part of the alarm. It came from everywhere. From everyone.
Sarah was awake now.
She rolled onto all fours, so her back was to the rising flood, and she crawled up the steepening deck, one hand, one foot at a time, using the pipework, struts, and rivets of the bulkhead.
It’s just a tree. It’s just a tree. Climb it.
She concentrated on the upward movement, trying not to think of the next phase of her escape. There were more cries behind her as the sound of water became the noise of a rushing river.
Don’t look.
She glanced behind her to see the water level bubbling up to her heels. Arms and howling faces thrashed about in it as crates and canvas swirled around them.
She reached the top, and, clinging to the pipework on the bulkhead in front of her, she shuffled to her feet. The closed door to the messdeck was two and a half meters away to her right. The wall in between was so smooth and the deck now so steep that the only way to reach it was to jump.
Sarah closed her eyes. A few months ago this would have posed no problem for her, but she felt the weakness of her limbs, the illness having sapped her strength. Worst of all was the sense of failure, of utter uselessness and inadequacy that clung to her like weights hung on a horse.
She looked down into the water. Someone was floating facedown in the foam, and a woman clung to them like a raft.
Do this, or die here. Commit to the move.
There was no run-up. She couldn’t even manage a proper swing from her perch. All the power came from her legs and required her boots to keep their purchase on the moist and tilted deck.
Sarah flew.
Her arm wrapped around the handwheel of the watertight hatch. Her body weight dragged her down the slope until her elbow caught and held. The pain in that joint was almost unbearable, especially when Sarah swung her other arm to hold onto it. She gritted her teeth and hung on. Just a tree. Just a tree. You’ve done this before.
One seaboot slid away into the rising water.
She was holding the door, feet dangling against the tipping deck.
Breathe.
She pulled her booted leg up and under her to make a right angle with the deck planks, putting all her weight into the textured sole. It held. She turned the handwheel in a series of jerking motions, too afraid to let go of it for more than a second as she fed it through her hands.
With a thunk the door opened, causing Sarah to lose her footing entirely. Clinging on to the handwheel, she swung away from the floor with the hatch to dangle over the water below.
Hand by hand, she dragged herself back to the edge of the door and threw an arm around it, her bare toes finding a batten to use as a foothold. She pushed on it, and it held.
Then as she straddled the door, it began to swing back, and she rode the steel hatch to the doorframe. The frame smacked into her head and shoulder like someone had swung a bat at her, but she used the moment to grab the edge. She finally scrambled into the corridor beyond, where red lights lit a ladder running upward.
She looked back at the messdeck, where the water was rising fast. There were several people alive in the water and clambering on the spinning debris, but the tilt in the deck meant they had no chance of reaching the hatch. If she had a rope—
A hand grabbed her shoulder and dragged her away. The sailor leaned into the room and pulled the door closed, spinning the wheel to seal it.
“There are people in there,” Sarah gasped in English.
“And more up here who need time to get to the boats,” he said firmly, mounting the ladder.
Sarah could still hear the screaming from inside.
THIRTY-NINE
“WHAT HAPPENED?” SARAH demanded as they climbed.
“Torpedo, right in the guts. We’re practically broken in two. Move it now,” he said with more urgency.
They finally emerged into the open air.
A bright white star was dropping from the night sky, bathing everything with an eerie, pale-green glow.
It was as if a giant child had bent his toy in two. Below Sarah at the bottom of the sloping deck, the sea bubbled and frothed, claiming the center of the ship and everything inside it. The stern emerged on the other side of the water, cracked and bleeding black oil, spouting steam and smoke from every hatch and vent. Everything stank of gasoline and burning wood.
Above Sarah, on the rising peak of the bow, swarmed the crew of Godalming, desperately working on the lifeboats. With every degree of list, the job grew more difficult and their anxiety became more apparent. The civilians were getting in the way in their panic, and a sublieutenant was yelling orders at them in a language they didn’t understand.
Virulent steamed away in the distance, and in her wake, vast plumes of water shot into the sky. The noise of the explosions rumbled in a few seconds later.
Ba-boom. Ba-boom.
Sarah gripped the rail and began the climb up to the boats when she noticed a figure hunched next to a ventilation cowl. It looked at her as she stopped.
“Ironic, isn’t it, girl? You being on a British ship and then being sunk by a German U-boat,” Bofinger cackled.
“That’s not irony,” Sarah sneered. “At best, it’s tragic coincidence.”
“Really? A spy being undone by anything as underhanded as a submarine, after being deceived by those she sought to deceive?”
The ship groaned and the deck tilted again. The hatches of the stern spat sparks into the night, and the vents emitted a red, dancing glow. The section heaved and the whole ship shuddered.
One of the lifeboats, just pried from its chocks, swung wildly from the davits and tore free from its manila-rope falls. It hit the deck on its way down, ripping the rail to shreds and crushing several sailors like snails underfoot. The wooden boat,
dead men, tackle, cables, and rail clattered down the side of the hull and hit the water.
The star shell hit the water, and the glow faded.
Bofinger sighed. “But I don’t blame you for not stopping her . . . I lived with her for thirty years, and I couldn’t stop her.”
“She didn’t stand a chance having you as a father.”
“I didn’t make her the devil—the British and French did that. You know she won’t stop if she gets to Britain, don’t you? She’ll travel to every city, every slum, and they’re all going to die.”
Sarah did not lack for imagination. She watched it happen in her mind’s eye. She knew the poor would catch the disease and spread it quickly and that no one would care until it was too late. Just as the mission had cut a murderous swath through Central Africa and hardly anyone had noticed.
But Bofinger would have happily helped Hasse exterminate the Slavs, a distinction that Sarah couldn’t accept, or fathom.
The stern of Godalming caught fire. It spread to the leaking oil like spilled milk across a tiled floor. It danced across the waves. There were more shouts, cries, and now screams from above them.
“You need to go down with this ship,” Sarah whispered. “I’m not going to kill you, but you don’t get to live.”
The coldness of the thought process chilled Sarah to her core. Like she had walked into the snow barefoot. Not that she wanted him dead, but that she didn’t care either way. She had no compassion left to spend.
“How about I take my chances in the water? Looks like that’s what everyone is going to be doing anyway.”
There was a life jacket at his feet. He hadn’t tried to put it on.
Sarah bent down and picked it up. He didn’t complain as she heaved it over the rail into the darkness. She watched it vanish.