The Antarctic Forgery

by Kevin Tumlinson

  He opened it reluctantly, unsure of what he’d find.

  Dan,

  You’re reading this, so that means I’m done. Dead, probably. Or maybe in a cell somewhere. Doesn’t matter. I’m out of the game, and you’re still standing. Congratulations.

  As I write this, I'm on a private jet for Jakarta. I know, cliché isn't it? My grandfather owned quite a bit of off-the-books real estate in Indonesia, including a luxury hotel. I think he was keeping it hidden from Uncle Richard, as an escape plan. In case he ever needed it. I inherited all of it when he died.

  It’s been about 48 hours since I left you at a warehouse, badly needing to pee. Which I find a little funny, I admit. But I gave you the case with the artifacts and the note. My last-ditch effort to find some solution to all of this.

  I don’t know if you’ve solved it. I don’t know anything, really, except that if anyone can do it, it’s you.

  I wanted to say something to you, and this is the only way. It's the only way because I'm not even sure of this myself. And I think you wouldn't believe me if I said it out loud.

  The truth is, I love you. I didn’t want to fall in love with you, but it happened. It’s been this way since Sri Lanka. Maybe a little before. I started off with a plan to seduce you, to use you, and somehow it became more real than that. Not something I wanted. It’s a liability.

  Just because I love you doesn’t mean I won’t do whatever it takes, of course. Even kill you, if I have to. Some things are bigger than love.

  I figure I’m off the board now. There’s no harm in letting you know the truth.

  That’s it. No mysteries or riddles to solve. No secret messages. If you’ve gotten this, it means I’m at least out of commission enough that I couldn’t send the code to delay it for another couple of months. Things must have gone very bad.

  So, I guess the final thing to say is, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that we couldn’t have met under more normal circumstances. I’m sorry that I couldn’t have been a more normal girl. I’m sorry that I could never have convinced you to join me. We would have been so good at this. We would have ruled the world.

  I’m not sorry for who I am, though. Don’t get any ideas.

  But I do love you. And I’m not sorry for that either.

  Goodbye, Dan.

  That was it. No signature. Just an abrupt ending. It fit. It was the kind of thing Gail would want. The best end to her story that she could imagine, if she were not to be crowned queen of the world.

  Kotler smiled, and then laughed, and then closed his email and rode the rest of the way in silence.

  “Do you have it?” the figure asked.

  Reggie had only one arm and one eye now, and his injuries were still fresh enough that every movement was painful. But he could take it. He’d get a prosthetic arm in a month. He was being treated as a burn victim after all the fires in California. A literal smoke screen. Good cover. A lucky break, in all this.

  He slid a tattered piece of cloth across the table. It was stained in blood and ash. Her blood, mostly. Gail McCarthy’s. Reggie missed her. He’d loved her, in a way. He’d served Van Burren and her grandfather with utter loyalty, and it had been easy to shift that to her. She was a queen. She’d been born to it.

  Now, this was all that was left of her.

  The figure took the cloth and unfolded it, revealing its contents. A medallion, about the size of Reggie’s palm. Gail’s talisman, given to her by her grandfather. Reggie had seen her play with it, stroking it with her fingertips. A schoolgirl fascination that had driven her to rule the world.

  The talisman acted funny in the light. It shimmered, in a way. Almost a reverse shimmer. The element that Gail had sacrificed literally everything for.

  “This is all that’s left of the stuff,” Reggie said. “No idea what happened to the rest.”

  “I suspect I know someone who can answer that,” the figure said.

  “Kotler,” Reggie nodded.

  They settled their business. The figure pushed a bag under the table, and Reggie took it by the handle. It was enough to pay for an advanced prosthetic arm and a long and rum-filled retirement. Reggie already had a place picked out, as far from Antarctica as he could get. Warm and covered in sand and tourists. It was another of Gail's off-the-books properties. She'd left it to him. He'd gotten a mystery email and everything. She'd taken care of him, in the end.

  He stood, the bag dangling at his side and the stump of his missing arm gesturing toward the figure. “If you’re smart, you’ll forget Dan Kotler. Find another way. Gail played cat and mouse with him because she had a shine for him, but it was a mistake. She was smarter than he was, I think. But she let him get to her. That’s what he does. He knows people, knows how to read them. And he knows how to use them. I’d steer clear.”

  “Noted,” the figure said.

  Reggie nodded and walked away.

  The figure remained, holding up the talisman, letting the light play through it, around it, over it. The thing disappeared, almost seamlessly. A magic coin trick with real magic.

  It would make a lovely treasure. But it wasn't quite what the figure wanted.

  Forget Dan Kotler?

  Never.

  This was all about Dan Kotler. Him, and everyone close to him. This trinket was just a lure. Finding the element would be a bonus. The rest was all about the past.

  Dan Kotler was fascinated, maybe even obsessed with history, but he was flat-out running from the past.

  And now the past was catching up to him.

  A Note at the End

  True confession: I have never been all that intrigued by Antarctica.

  There are a plethora of mysteries swarming around the continent, and those can sometimes pique my interest. Conspiracies abound, and I have certain theories about the place—ideas I'm sure I'll explore in future novels. But the frozen wasteland that is the continent of Antarctica is just about the last place on Earth I'd want to spend any time, fictional or otherwise.

  Still …

  When it came time to end the through-line story of Gail McCarthy and her vast smuggling empire, to round off her relationship with Dan Kotler and resolve all of this cat-and-mouse once and for all, Antarctica was the only place big enough for the two of them. It was the only landscape I could think of that would allow me to focus on just them, with very few interruptions.

  It was all I could do not to have them both trapped in an ice cave together, fighting to the death in a battle of sharp words and even sharper ice shards.

  Well, now I just want to rewrite the ending …

  Aside from its vast metaphorical advantages, there really are some cool historical mysteries surrounding Antarctica, and any given one of them might have made for a premise worthy of fictional exploration. I barely scratched the surface—things can go very deep.

  There have been numerous historic expeditions to the continent that I almost decided to include in this book and then thought better of it. Darwin, for example, once led an expedition there that helped him form some of his theories regarding evolution and species specialization. Sir James Clark Ross, Captain of the HMS Terror (a ship's name that is intriguing enough all on its own), led an expedition in which he became the first to realize that Antarctica was actually a continent and not just some frozen shelf of ice floating in the ocean. Sir Edmund Hillary, famous for being the first man to conquer Everest, decided he was bored with the frozen, airless peaks of the world's highest mountain and that he'd go freeze for a bit in the southern-most region of the planet.

  Kotler does the continent a great injustice by saying that it has no history of his own. It's a blind spot for him. Something that, in subtle ways, played into this story. Just as he'd never quite seen the full truth of Gail McCarthy, he tended to underestimate Antarctica as well.

  Symbolism for three points.

  So, the reality is, I could write stories about Antarctica for years, if the very idea didn't make me want to crawl into the warmest bed I could find and re
ad biographies for the rest of my life. I'll dip back into the well of Antarctica again someday, for sure ... but I wouldn't want to live there.

  The idea of a Nazi presence on the continent is a very real thing. Die Fuhrer, obsessed as he was with finding a way to overpower the Allies with something they never saw coming, sent expeditions to the continent on a regular basis. He even claimed part of it as German territory. His reasons for all of this are kind of unclear. We do know that he used the region for testing newly developed technology. It was the perfect landscape to try the most outrageous ideas, without fear of repercussion or (worse) embarrassment on the world stage.

  Some speculate, however, that he was also on the hunt for something more unusual there in the permanent ice and snow. Alien tech, ancient ruins, long-lost diseases—maybe something arcane or profane that would give him an edge and bring him the world, regardless of whatever horrors he unleashed upon it.

  Swell guy, Hitler.

  In a slightly more mundane take on Nazi activity on the continent, we do know for sure that Hitler was experimenting with stealth technology, which is part of the basis for the story you've just read. Whether that capability was to evolve from alien spacecraft or from some as yet undiscovered "element" is all up for fiction writers to decide. But the fact of it, at least, was that the Nazis did have this on their world-conquering bucket list.

  Another kernel of historical fact in this novel comes in the form of the Piri Reis map. The history of this, as far as I've presented it, is real. There does exist a map that allegedly predates the discovery of Antarctica, illustrating its features, sans all the snow.

  It's profound in its implications. It indicates ports, cities, an entire culture. It hints at interaction between the Antarcticians and the rest of the known world, at a time when most of that world still thought of it as flat. How mind-boggling is that?

  So, the Piri Reis map is real, as in it really exists. But, is it authentic?

  A lot of historians seem to think so. The map itself is verifiably authentic, at least in that we do know it was compiled by a real and well-respected mapmaker. It's a compilation of hundreds of other maps and charts, gathered and scrutinized and finally synthesized into one cohesive whole by Ottoman cartographer and future headless guy, Piri Reis.

  The good admiral served the Ottoman Empire faithfully, right up to his 90s, when he refused to assist in yet another campaign against the Portuguese and was beheaded for the "betrayal."

  History is full of nuggets like these. It keeps guys like me in business.

  There's a better than good chance that the Piri Reis map is a complete work of fiction. Or, at least, a work of speculation based on rumors of rumors taken from the brag of sailors who once thought they might sail off of the edge of the world. The sources Piri Reis relied on were more or less credible, but it wasn't like they had GPS and radar to guide them. An alarming amount of the time, they were just guessing about where they were. Mistakes were made. Sometimes new continents were discovered, and occasionally old continents got new names on a hastily drafted chart. Whaddya gonna do?

  Historical and cartographic inaccuracies aside, however, the Piri Reis map is still intriguing. Here we have a chart of a world we can no longer visit, that we might have considered a myth if Antarctica hadn't turned out to be a real place. It almost makes us want to pull on six pairs of long johns and go exploring the frozen South, pillaging through banks of snow and frozen tundra in search of lost history. We would surely meet an icy death. Just sayin'.

  I prefer to do this particular bit of exploration from my home office or a local Starbucks, warm and cozy with a cup of coffee at hand. I appreciate the efforts of hardened, worldly men, strapping the essentials of survival to their back and trudging through the ice until they found (surprise) more ice and snow. I can thrill to their adventures from the comfort of my plush office chair while wearing a cardigan to ward off the chill of the air conditioning on a too-low setting. I'm very ok with that.

  Still, I've experienced my share of rough treks through dense wilderness, ice-cold nights spent in sleeping bags, meals made from boiled beef jerky and some pine needles for vitamin C. I have spent nights making do, waiting for the morning sun so I could trek back to civilization, find some help, catch a ride. It's a far cry from sled dogs and having my blood literally freeze in my veins, but I can draw some loose parallels. I get why this kind of thing could be both horrible and somehow inviting all at once. I have tremendous respect for the people who do these things voluntarily, with no guarantee of recognition much less survival. God bless ‘em all.

  When it came time to embroil my very-me-like protagonist in this adventure, I needed something that carried the weight of the Piri Reis map but had the enigmatic appeal of a puzzle. So, the Antarctic Forgery became a thing. It presented a MacGuffin for our heroes and villains to strive after.

  The trouble was, I'm what's known as a "pantser" in the writing community. And because one of my writerly heroes, Dean Wesley Smith, has publicly disavowed that term, I will elaborate to say that I am a "discovery writer." An "improviser." I could put things in quotes all day, but the gist is that I write my books without anything resembling a plan or outline.

  I don’t know what the story will be until I write it. I “discover” it, just like you do—the story unfolds under my fingers, line-by-line, word-by-word. I’m reading it as it evolves.

  That's a horrifying prospect for some writers, I know. Dean and I aren't alone in our tightrope walk through literature, however. Stephen King is a confessed discovery writer. So are a lot of big-name authors with books on the New York Times list and front-facing paperbacks in Barnes & Noble. We're a hearty and sometimes directionless breed.

  But back to the trouble …

  Throughout the first few books in my Dan Kotler series, I introduced elements that were meant to be part of a greater mystery. These were mostly breadcrumbs, meant to tease Kotler and the reader alike. The artifacts Kotler was given by Gail were part of this. Three objects, seemingly random, with no obvious connection or clues. I literally picked three ideas out of the ether, with a loose theme to bind them. I didn't know where these clues would lead or how they would be used until the story revealed this truth to me.

  Which is a poetic way of saying that I found myself in a situation where I had to solve a mystery using three random objects, and I had no idea where that would lead.

  There was a thread, though. Something I had dropped into an earlier book without even thinking about it. A throw-away moment that, if I’d been traditionally published, would have been pulled from the book for not moving the story forward.

  In a scene from one of the earlier books, I had Dr. Dan Kotler sitting in Agent Roland Denzel's office, more or less lamenting that he was bored with the work Historic Crimes was doing. When asked about a map, Kotler responded that it was an obvious fake, and dismissed it as being out of his purview. The story moved on, and the map was relegated to the archives (where it would eventually be retrieved in a flurry of inappropriate activity from Kotler).

  Pretty arrogant on Kotler’s part. Which made it perfect.

  How poetic is it that Kotler had the key to the whole problem with Gail McCarthy, right in his hands, and dismissed it as not being interesting enough? Having that moment come back to smack Kotler in the face … that was too good. I had to do that.

  It really was a throwaway moment, but for some reason, I didn't throw it away. I used that scene to show a bit of Kotler's character. Specifically, I was showing some imperfection in my Superman (in the Nietzsche Übermensch sense, not in the DC Comics superhero sense). Kotler's kryptonite (... ok ... superhero after all) is his ego. But it's true, that moment would never have been left in if I'd been on a traditional track. A developmental editor would toss that faster than those little cardboard sleeves used for Hot Pockets (after consuming the questionable contents, of course).

  I'm not claiming any genius here, by the way. I improvised. I looked around and found th
e resources I needed, just like I'm always having my characters do. It makes something of a case for writing the way I do, but I'll go ahead and confess that I have a bit of envy for those guys who weave tight plots, outlining every scene so they have a perfect roadmap for their writing journey. The idea of doing that myself drives me to drink, but … respect.

  So, the map, the artifacts, a bit of enigmatic flim-flam—a plot is born.

  I mentioned the MacGuffin earlier, but the truth is the map only served that purpose for a limited time. Now I needed a real MacGuffin—the object of desire for the good guy and the bad guy (or gal) alike. Something that would be big enough and provide enough power to the possessor that it would drive rational, warm-blooded people into the icy wasteland of Antarctica.

  Enter the “element.”

  The element became a pivotal piece of this story, but it actually began as a reference to “red mercury.”

  My initial idea was to have Gail McCarthy clamoring for this substance that has long been reported as a hoax but had enough historical credibility and presented enough of a threat that it would be right up Dan Kotler and Agent Denzel's alley.

  Red mercury was supposedly an explosive substance of undisclosed and uncertain composition, which could be used to make nuclear bombs. But also rumored to create anti-gravity, invisibility, psychic powers, and possibly a lovely dessert topping.

  Basically, red mercury was in the same category as Big Foot and flying saucers, both of which may have been the result of clandestine government entities using red mercury.

  It was rumored that this magical, mythical result of mad science may have been developed by the Soviet Union … or maybe it was by the Americans to use against the Soviets. Or perhaps it was a joint operation between the Soviets and the Americans to solidify both as the dominant world powers …