by James Barney
“My full name is Ophelia Josephine Chauvenet,” said the woman. “But everyone has called me Opal since the day I was born.” She spoke in a slightly wavering voice with a mild upstate New York accent.
Ana wasn’t sure what to ask next. Explain everything! was what she wanted to say. But she settled for something smaller in scope. “What were you doing in the church this morning?”
The woman let out a sigh. “It’s a long story. Should I start at the beginning?”
Ana, Califano, and Armstrong all answered in unison, “Yes!”
The woman laughed quietly and nodded her head. “Okay.” She paused for a moment to collect her thoughts, and then she began. “In June of 1947, when I was nineteen years old, I was asked by Bill Donovan to help him with an operation they were conducting to get certain scientists and engineers out of Germany and into the United States.”
“Wait. Bill Donovan? As in Wild Bill Donovan, the founder of OSS?” Ana was referring to the Office of Strategic Services, the immediate predecessor of the CIA.
“Yes,” said Opal. “He was a friend of my father’s. They grew up together in Buffalo and served in the same unit during the First World War.”
“And you’re referring to Project Paperclip?” Ana asked.
Opal nodded. “I was in college at that time, studying civil engineering. Bill felt I would bring a certain ‘woman’s touch,’ as he called it, to the operation. At that time, we were competing with the Russians for the top German talent, so there was a certain degree of enticing that had to be done to encourage the best scientists and engineers to come with us instead of them.”
Ana nodded that she understood. Sex appeal. The oldest trick in the book.
“I was assigned to Franz Holzberg, a physicist who had worked during the war on secret Nazi projects in the Wenceslas mine complex in Poland.”
Ana suddenly stopped pacing. “It was Die Glocke, wasn’t it? That’s what he was working on.”
Opal nodded. “Yes. That was our belief at the time. It’s why Bill Donovan was so interested in bringing him to the United States.”
“Wait,” said Califano, who was seated at his computer, across the room. “Die Glocke? You mean the antigravity stuff that the Nazis were supposedly working on at the end of the war?”
“Yes,” said Opal.
All around the room, there were slow nods of recognition. It made sense.
“And why were you assigned to Franz Holzberg?”
Opal flashed a lovely smile and subtly rolled one of her shoulders forward.
With that, Ana had her answer. Even in her eighties, Opal still had a certain indelible beauty. And at nineteen, she would have been a stunner in high heels.
“We knew Franz had a certain reputation, shall we say. He was thirty-six years old, married, with no children, and quite handsome for a physicist. And like a lot of men in those days, he liked the company of younger women.”
On the other side of the room, Califano was nodding along. He recalled the comment from Thelma Scott at the diner in Fire Creek about how Dr. Holzberg would often stop by the diner on Sundays. Allegedly because he liked the “pancakes.”
“So you were sent over to cozy up to him?” asked Ana. “Give him a little extra reason to come to the U.S.?”
Opal smiled. “You got it.”
“I guess it worked,” said Admiral Armstrong. “I mean, he did come to the U.S.”
“Actually, it worked a little too well.” Opal looked down with a wistful smile. “I fell madly in love with him. When he took up residence at Princeton in 1948, I dropped out of school and moved there myself.” She paused for a moment, as if trying to conjure up some long-lost emotion. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “We were having an affair.”
Which is why we couldn’t find any record of you at Princeton, Ana realized. “You were part of his small circle of friends, weren’t you? His group of acolytes.”
“Yes, I was. It was a very exciting time. Franz was working on things that just . . . blew people’s minds. Albert Einstein was involved, too, which was amazing. And then, of course, there was the material itself.”
Ana pulled up a chair and sat down close to Opal. “Yes, tell us about the material.”
“Well, let’s see . . . Franz brought the first stone with him from Germany. He said it was the only thing he managed to save from his lab in Wenceslas when Poland was liberated by the Allies.”
“What do you mean the first stone?” Ana asked. “How many were there?”
Bill McCreary suddenly spoke up. “Ana, she’s referring to two black stones. One about the size of a golf ball; the other about this big.” He held up his thumb and finger about an inch apart. “We’ve got both of them downstairs in our vault right now. The first one, which Holzberg brought with him from Germany, was the smaller of the two stones.”
“Remember,” Opal warned. “Don’t let them touch.”
McCreary nodded. “Don’t worry. We won’t.”
Ana was momentarily at a loss for words as she looked back and forth between Opal and McCreary. “Uh . . . how about a little more information here?” she pleaded.
McCreary spoke again. “The time-dilation incident behind the Hay-Adams. It was caused when Opal touched the two stones together. It was a very small dilation, as these things go. It faded just after I got there. The reason we couldn’t see her at the bottom of the escape shaft is that time dilation refracts light, just like water does. But unlike water, which creates a smooth interface between two media with different light transmission speeds, time dilation creates a steady gradient of transmission speeds, which causes objects to be completely obscured from view.”
“It’s one of the Qaset techniques,” said Opal.
Ana’s head was about to explode as she tried to process all this information at once.
Opal apparently sensed her frustration. “You see, when Franz came to the U.S. in 1948, he had a small black stone with him that had these very unusual properties. Most notably, it floated in air. He said the Nazis had recovered it from a church or mosque somewhere in Turkey. And his initial research at the Institute of Advanced Studies was focused entirely on that small stone. It was just he and Einstein working on it at first. Then, about three years later, the institute came into possession of a much larger stone with the same unusual properties.”
“The second stone,” McCreary added. “It was provided by British Intelligence. Recovered during the British invasion of Tunis in 1943. In 1951, the Brits sent a young physicist named Benjamin Fulcher to Princeton with the Tunis stone in order to collaborate with Einstein and Holzberg in trying to figure out its properties. It was a binational project and highly classified, as you can imagine. Einstein died in 1955, and after that, Fulcher and Holzberg continued the research without him.”
“But Franz never trusted Ben,” Opal added. “Something about him was very off-putting. I felt it, too. He had a real lust for glory that neither Franz nor Albert shared.”
“And how do you know about the Qaset techniques,” Ana asked.
“From Franz.” She paused when she saw the surprised looks around the room. “Franz told me everything back then. We were very, very close. He told me all about the book of Jasher and the Joshua Stone, and the many other things he’d learned working for the Nazis. He hated the Nazis and was itching to divulge their secrets.”
“Did he tell you about the lab in Thurmond, West Virginia?” asked Admiral Armstrong.
“Not at first. But eventually . . . yes.” Opal paused before continuing. “It was early spring in 1959 when he first announced that he’d be gone for at least six months, off to some secret lab. I cried my eyes out for days, until he eventually broke down and told me where he was going and what he’d be working on. He said he’d try to arrange a way for me to visit, but he never did. The last time I saw Franz was on May 4, 1959. When he left, he gave me a beautiful black-stone necklace.” Instinctively, she reached for the necklace, but it was gone. “It was to remember him
by, but also for safekeeping.”
“What do you mean, for safekeeping?” Ana asked.
“It was the small stone that he’d brought from Germany. The ‘first stone.’ He’d made it into a necklace for me. I think he was afraid Ben Fulcher might get hold of it.”
Ana looked amazed. “So he made the floating black stone into a necklace?”
“Yes,” said Opal with a sweet smile. “It was perfect. It was framed in silver and looked just like a chunk of uncut onyx. Sort of the au naturel style that was just coming into vogue at that time. And no one ever guessed its special significance.”
Unbelievable, Ana thought. She decided it was time to switch gears. “What can you tell us about Malachi?”
Opal’s eyes suddenly grew large. “Is he okay? Where is he?”
There were glances all around the table, and Ana eventually shook her head slowly. “I’m . . . sorry.” She sensed this was coming as bad news for Opal.
Opal lowered her head and brought both hands to her eyes. “Oh, it’s my fault,” she muttered beneath her hands.
“What is?” asked Ana gently.
“I got him into this mess. I should have put my foot down and said no.”
Ana gave Opal a few seconds to work through her emotions before asking, “Can you tell us about it?”
Opal finally lifted her head and regained her composure. “It was all Ben Fulcher’s idea.”
“What was?”
“To go down into the lab to rescue Franz and the stone.”
“When was this?” asked Ana.
Opal searched her recollection. “It was . . . 1971. October or November, when Ben first broached the idea.”
“And how, exactly, did this come about?”
Opal took a deep breath and looked all around the room. “First, I need to explain to you about MOSS. The Mother of Science Society.”
Across the croom, Califano slapped his forehead. “Mother of science,” he said. “Not ‘murder’ of science.” He snapped his fingers, angry at himself for the mistake.
Opal continued. “A few of us in Franz’s circle formed a group that we called the Mother of Science Society.”
“And the point of this society was what, exactly?” asked Ana.
Opal laughed. “There wasn’t any point at all, really. It was just an intellectual thing. Just a circle of people who got together occasionally to discuss whether there might be limits to what mankind should know, some sort of point of no return.”
Bill McCreary was nodding his head emphatically. She had just described his life for the past ten years.
“Ben Fulcher was part of it, too,” continued Opal. “At least, he played along at the time.”
“Which was when?”
“Late fifties—fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine. I left Princeton not long after that. Went back to New York and finished my degree. I eventually got a job designing bomb shelters for the U.S. government, which was a big deal in the sixties. Ten years later, I was living here in this area, in Arlington. My group had just finished construction on the bomb shelter complex beneath the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, in Washington, which I helped design. My career was going great. And then one day, from out of nowhere, Ben Fulcher showed up at my door.”
“With a plan to rescue Dr. Holzberg,” said Ana.
“Yes. A crazy plan. He explained the time-dilation issue to me. He said that he’d been monitoring the aftereffects in the surrounding areas and that, based on his calculations, the time was perfect to send someone down into the lab to rescue Franz and his team, and to retrieve the stone. We both agreed that the stone had to be protected from any further experimentation. Too dangerous. Too close to disturbing the intricate balance of the clockwork universe. The plan was to lock it away and keep it under the protection of our group, MOSS.”
“What happened?” asked Admiral Armstrong.
“Ben had a lot of calculations, none of which I really understood. But he seemed convinced that if someone went in and spent less than ten minutes in the lab, he would lose only five or six days of time, seven at the most. He also explained that, if we waited much longer, as time continued to speed up in the lab, the men inside would soon die of starvation. That’s why he said we had to act quickly.”
“Why not get the government involved?” Ana asked.
“Ben said that he’d tried. But the government had already washed its hands of the Thurmond lab and written off everyone as dead.”
Admiral Armstrong nodded his head. This was true. He’d seen the top-secret reports himself.
Opal continued. “Ben said most of the people at the institute who should have known about Thurmond wouldn’t even acknowledge its existence. Plus, there was a new administration in office—Nixon. And he had lots of other problems on his hands without having to worry about some carryover from the Eisenhower administration. According to Ben, if we didn’t do this thing ourselves, and soon, it wasn’t going to happen at all.”
“So the two of you hatched a plan to go into the lab yourselves,” said Ana.
Opal looked down and nodded. “I had access to top-secret topological maps of the area, and it didn’t take me long to find a way into the lab through an old coal mine.”
“Foster Number Two,” said Califano.
“That’s right,” said Opal.
“And what about Malachi?” Ana asked.
“His name is Daniel.” She paused and wiped away a tear. “We had all adopted silly code names—Ben’s idea. I was Eve. Ben was Elijah. And Daniel . . . Daniel was Malachi.”
“And Malachi—I mean, Daniel—he’s the one who actually went down into the lab. Is that right?”
Opal nodded. “He was the youngest and strongest. He insisted that he be the one to go in. I tried to talk him out of it. Too many risks. Too many unknowns. But he insisted.” She paused for a moment and sniffled. “I should have tried harder.”
“When did he go in?”
“March 14, 1972. The first moonless night in March. We had rehearsed for months, worked out every detail. Ben had told him what to expect in the lab and had walked through dozens of different possible scenarios. I was in charge of the rendezvous. We were to meet at the abandoned coal depot in Thurmond. Ben and I would be there in my car, flashing our lights to signal him. The key to everything was the time. According to Ben’s calculations, Daniel was to spend no more than ten minutes in the lab, no matter what. Ben even gave him a special watch to use.” She paused and slowly shook her head. “I found out later why he was so insistent about that watch.”
“Why was that?”
“Because Ben is a traitor. A selfish, lying, backstabbing traitor . . . and a murderer. He knew all along that Daniel wouldn’t be coming out in six days, or anything close to that.” Opal let out a bitter laugh. “He was working with the Soviets the entire time.”
“What?” exclaimed McCreary. “Benjamin Fulcher, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist?”
“Never proven,” said Opal without missing a beat. “But there’s no doubt in my mind that he was working with the Russians. In fact, why don’t you ask British Intelligence what they thought of him? You think it’s a coincidence that he left Cambridge in 1980, never to return to Britain? You don’t think Cambridge would have loved to keep a Nobel laureate on staff?”
McCreary glanced over at Califano, who was already typing furiously on the keyboard. “Hey!” he barked, realizing what Califano was probably up to. “Don’t hack into MI6, Michael.”
Califano immediately stopped what he was doing.
“We have a cooperative agreement with them.” McCreary turned to Goodwin: “Help him out, will you?” Goodwin quickly rose to his feet and joined Califano at the computer.
Two minutes later Califano announced, “She’s right. MI6 put Fulcher on their watch list back in 1976. There’s just a one-line entry that says ‘suspected ties to USSR.’ ”
Opal arched her eyebrows and nodded knowingly. “Like I said, he’s a traitor. And he d
eserves whatever fate awaits him . . . on earth and in hell.”
There was a long period of silence after that, which was finally broken when Califano asked, “How did you know Daniel was going to be at the church today?”
Before Opal could respond, Ana spoke up. “I think I know the answer to that. It was Tom Reynolds, wasn’t it?”
Opal nodded.
“I thought you looked familiar,” said Ana. “Then I remembered seeing you in a picture at Tom Reynolds’s house. It was you and his wife, Betty, and two other ladies standing together on a golf course.”
“We’re close friends,” said Opal. “Tom called me and said a young woman had stopped by to ask questions about Franz Holzberg and the book of Jasher. He described her as ‘beautiful and wicked smart.’ ” Opal gave Ana the once-over. “I presume that was you.”
Ana nodded and blushed.
“I had a hunch it was about Thurmond,” said Opal.
After another stretch of silence, Admiral Armstrong finally spoke up. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t know who Malachi—er, Daniel—was.” He was apparently the only one in the entire room who hadn’t already figured it out.
Opal closed her eyes. “Daniel was my son . . . with Franz. He went down into that lab because he wanted to see his father again. He was only twenty-one years old.”
“Ah,” said Armstrong, finally getting it. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Ana walked across the room and whispered something in Califano’s ear. Moments later, the Madaba map appeared on the large screen at the front of the room. Califano zoomed in on the detail of the building with the twelve circles.
“Opal, do you recognize this?” Ana asked.
Opal studied the picture for a moment and nodded. “Yes. That’s from the Madaba map. It marks the location where Joshua created a monument of twelve stones after crossing the Jordan River. At least, that’s what the Old Testament says.”
Ana suddenly got excited. Finally, we’re getting somewhere. “Have you ever seen a sketch or modified version of this with German writing on it? Like from an old notebook or something?”
Opal shrugged and shook her head. “No. Not that I can recall.”