It probably wasn’t the best plan, but it was the best one he could come up with at short notice. Sizing it up, he thought it stood a pretty good chance of success.
“Don’t move,” said somebody from behind him, and the plan’s chances nose-dived pretty badly.
The voice was female and accented in German, so Carter didn’t have to perform much of a deductive leap to say, “Dr. Giehl?”
“What are you doing with that machine?”
“That’s a little complicated,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he should raise his hands or not. “Are you pointing a gun at me?”
“Yes,” she said, and the lack of hesitation made him believe it. “Why have you opened the detector?”
“Like I said”—he raised his arms slowly as he spoke—“that’s complicated. Not really sure where to start with that.” He looked at the screws in the plastic lid, the screwdriver on the floor, thought of the camera in his pocket, and then he said. “Have you heard of the CIA, Doctor?”
She didn’t reply immediately, and that was fine because there was no CIA here, only the OSS, which in this world liked its name and never changed.
“Say that again.”
“CIA. Central Intelligence Agency.”
“Never heard of it. That’s who you’re with?”
“It’s a suboffice within the OSS. They deal with peripheral threats and practice deniability. I’m not ‘with’ them because nobody is, apart from some higher-ups and office staff, I guess.” Carter marveled at the high-quality, smooth-as-chocolate-mousse bullshit that was flowing out of his mouth. “I’m a detached agent, like all the agency’s field agents. I get hired for a job, and if it goes to hell it doesn’t matter, because I can’t prove I was ever hired by them.”
No reply. On the plus side, he hadn’t been shot yet, so that was good.
“‘Peripheral threats.’ What does that mean?”
It was a good question. The phrase had felt good when he had said it, and he knew vaguely what he was getting at when he had, so he trusted his subconscious to pull the rabbit out of the hat and let himself go to the Zen of bullshit.
“Partially defined threats compiled from disparate sources, ma’am. Nothing solid enough for a main intelligence or security agency to act upon, but worrying enough to spend a few bucks checking out.” He shrugged. Slowly. “I don’t cost much, really.” He half-believed it himself. He deserved a round of applause for all this.
“What sort of threat?”
Holy crap, thought Carter. She’s buying it. Thank you, lying Baby Jesus.
“Not sure. Domestic, I think. I was just told to look out for anything weird.”
“Weird.”
“Out of the ordinary. Y’know?”
“And what is so ‘weird’ about that piece of apparatus?”
“This thing? Nothing. But … Ma’am, may I move a little? I just want to show you this.” He didn’t wait for a reply, but slowly reached for the screwdriver before holding it up between his forefinger and thumb. “I found this on the floor.”
“A screwdriver? So what?”
“It’s German, ma’am. A specialized tool. I don’t think you can even buy these things in the U.S.” Before she could come up with any more arguments, he said, “If you’re asking me why finding it lying around when this place is usually pristine made me suspicious, I got to say again, I’m paid to be suspicious. So, I thought, what might it be used for? This machine is the only one that needs a tool like this to get into.” This was true. He’d examined the other machines previously. Even the German ones used standard screw heads. “I looked inside.” He cautiously looked over his shoulder, making sure his hands were held up. “Ma’am, there are six sticks of explosive in here. If you’d turned this thing on in the morning, there wouldn’t have been enough left of you to identify from dental records.” This wasn’t true—teeth were amazingly resilient and often made it through explosions—but it sounded good.
The doctor hadn’t been blowing smoke about being armed. She had some nasty little pistol in her hand that looked like the kind of thing Walther might make. She looked down at him over the sights, her shock evident.
“There’s a bomb?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How do I know you didn’t put it there?”
That was a good question, and it took him a moment to think of an answer. “Try and think back. When you came in here and saw me, did I look like somebody who’d just planted a bomb, or just found one?”
She pointed the gun at him for several more seconds, then lowered it. “Scheiße. A bomb. Scheiße.” She lowered but did not put away the pistol, and Carter saw he had been right about it. It was a Walther PK380, and being shot by it would have been no fun at all. “Show me.”
He scooted back a little and pointed into the open side of the detector. As she approached, she pointed at the base of the wall. “Sit there with your hands behind your head, fingers interlaced. If you make any sort of move I don’t like, I will shoot you.”
She hadn’t tried to take his gun, but if he went for it while sitting, it would be difficult to draw and certainly give her plenty of time to raise her own weapon and empty the Walther into him. Carter did as he was told. “Yes, ma’am.”
She crouched by the detector and looked inside. She looked more exasperated than shocked now. She said something harsh in German that sounded like she was spitting nails. She glanced over at Carter. “What were you intending to do?”
He was relieved to realize that cover story and truth were now in alignment. “I was going to close it up again and call in a bomb warning. Let the bomb squad deal with it.”
“Anonymously?”
“Well, yeah. Gets complicated if I call it in as myself. The whole deniability thing is going to bite me in the ass, isn’t it? I can’t really tell the cops why I was looking inside the machine because no one is going to corroborate it. I get thrown under the bus, and it’s game over for me. That’s not a good plan for me. Do it anonymously, and I get to stay out of it.”
Giehl thought it over for a moment. “No.”
“No?”
“You’re not going to call it in at all, anonymously or otherwise.”
“Ma’am? The bomb?” He nodded at the detector, as if there might be another bomb they were talking about.
“We’ll defuse it.”
Carter slowly unlatticed his fingers and looked at her as if she’d just suggested they forget the bomb and tango. “We’ll what? Wait. We’ll? Lady, I have no idea how to defuse a bomb.” It wasn’t entirely true. He did have a small idea how to, but he was pretty keen not to apply that idea in case it got him vaporized.
“You don’t have to. I know what I’m doing. The device is very simple.” She put the gun away and Carter saw she had a holster mounted on the back of her belt, hidden beneath the long jacket she wore over jeans.
“Have you got a conceal-carry license for that?” The States were much softer with concealed firearm laws here than on the other side of the Fold, but Carter knew they didn’t extend to foreign visitors.
“No,” she said as she reached into the machine. She shot him a sideways glance. “Are you going to report me?”
“Just keep your mind on what you’re doing.”
“I always do.” He could see from her expression and the tension in her forearm that she was applying pressure to something. Then her arm moved suddenly as whatever the something was came free. She didn’t hesitate, but extracted the device, now detached from its mounting, and tossed it onto the floor by her with a weighty clatter.
“Holy shit,” said Carter.
“It can’t explode. It has no power source. Also”—she held up a brass-colored cylinder about the dimensions of a pen—“I pulled the detonator.”
Carter was sitting with his hands by his side now that the threat of death by pistol-toting physicist seemed to have passed. “Where exactly is your doctorate from, Doc?”
She didn’t trouble to look at him as
she sat on the floor and picked up the device, treating it with about as much respect as a TV dinner. “I think I must have got it from the same place you got your guard qualifications.” She examined the trigger. “Crude, but practical. It would have taken the capacitor about ten or fifteen seconds to charge, then it would have fired the detonator. Any idiot could have built this.” She looked at him. “Carter, isn’t it?”
Carter wasn’t sure he was so happy about “Any idiot” and his name being so close together in the doctor’s speech, but he let it go. “Yeah. Look, I got to ask, what was so bad about my plan that you decided it was better to arm wrestle an IED than call it in to people who have the equipment and training?”
“IED?”
Oh, right, Carter reminded himself. IEDs weren’t called that now. They were just booby traps or improvised bombs or whatever. “Improvised explosive device.”
“That’s what they call them in the CAI?”
“CIA, and yeah. You haven’t answered my question.”
She got to her feet. “Because your bomb squad would have decided the safest thing to do would be a controlled explosion, and they would be right, too. They would destroy a unique device in the name of safety, and put this project back months while a replacement was built and calibrated. I was not prepared to let that happen.”
“Okay, so your gadget’s safe.” She flinched slightly at the description, which Carter enjoyed more than he should. “Can I call the cops now?”
Chapter 11
MASTERS OF DESTINY
Harrelson was not enjoying his morning. Arkham had the same crimes as everywhere else, but Miskatonic University loomed far greater in the life of the city than any of the seats of higher education of Providence, now lost in the mists of probability, and somehow the tone of crime seemed colored by the presence of MU. He had two homicides on his desk: a student who’d been found in the river having suffered an antemortem blow to the head, and a teaching assistant who’d been shot in a parking lot. If what Lovecraft had told him about the U was true, then it was like a weirdness magnet anyhow, but it just seemed to attract trouble. The kid in the river could still be an accident. The parking lot shooting might just be a snafu mugging. But …
But he’d gone through old case files soon after the unfolding, trying to get a feeling for a town that wasn’t his anymore, and what he’d found had freaked him out a little. Miskatonic U wasn’t just a weirdness magnet—it was a death trap. Students and faculty dropped like flies out of any sort of sensible proportion with a similarly sized institution anywhere else. Yet it was very Ivy League and had more endowed chairs than any other institution. The supersmart and the superrich came to Miskatonic University, and a statistically weird number of them would never leave. Yet still more came, and the cases of their predecessors ended up closed real quick. The boy in the river? On balance, Harrelson thought he was looking at an accident there, but he still wanted to ask around a little to make sure, pull some CCTV and so on, see if anything shook out to change his mind. In Providence, he’d have been given the slack to do that. Here, his captain had started out by calling it an accident before they knew anything at all, and now every time past Harrelson’s desk, it was, “Have you finished your report on that tragic accident yet?” Harrelson almost felt like keeping the case open just to piss off the captain, but he knew he wouldn’t. Miskatonic U’s gravity was crushing, and those who tried to resist it ended up places they didn’t want to be.
Like Innsmouth. Being assigned there was like a Fed being reassigned to Alaska. He’d heard scuttlebutt about how cops, some of them good cops, had been sent to Innsmouth PD because they couldn’t or wouldn’t toe the line in Arkham. It wasn’t the shittiest burg in the Unfolded—that was Dunwich—but it was the shittiest one with a police department. Most bailed for new pastures at the first opportunity. The ones who didn’t ended up worn down and washed out. Having seen the place, he wasn’t surprised. He’d also seen people on the street who looked familiar somehow. It had taken him a couple of days to figure out that he hadn’t seen them, he’d seen people who had the same kind of look. The Waites, back in the folded. Innsmouth had way, way too many people who had that weird Waites look about them—the men too stupid and the women way too smart and all of them with those eyes that just looked a little too big. Harrelson had drunk a half bottle of Jack that evening before he told himself that wasn’t the way he wanted to go.
So, he had two murders on his desk that were going to snap shut like mousetraps any second now whether they were resolved properly or not, and a guy from the DAPFG telling him German cops were great and there was a natural friendship between the countries. DAPFG stood for some nightmare in German—Deutsch-Amerikanische Polizei Freundschaft Gesellschaft, he thought the guy said, although he wasn’t clear on that and thought he’d maybe remembered one “schaft” too many.
“Harrelson’s a good Teutonic name,” the guy said, a detective from vice. “You’d fit right in.”
“I might,” admitted Harrelson, “if it was the Scottish-American Friendly Club. The name’s Scottish.”
The man laughed. “Whatever. Look, there are exchange trips, hands across the ocean, it’s a good thing to belong to.”
“I’ll pass,” said Harrelson. He was trying to will the vice cop to fuck off, but it didn’t seem to be working. “Sauerkraut gives me the shits.”
“Yeah, me, too,” he said with enough sincere sympathy that Harrelson now felt he knew more about the man’s medical history than he had ever or would ever want to know. “But beer, man! The beer! C’mon, give the club a try.”
“If it’ll get you to leave me alone so I can get on with my caseload, okay.”
“Cool!” The vice cop pulled a glossy printed circular from his inside pocket. Harrelson saw it wasn’t the only one in there. He gave it to Harrelson and went, finally, with a cheery nod, which made Harrelson wonder if vice was such a bad gig in this city. No vice cop should be that happy. He returned the nod and smile a little tightly, and dropped the circular unread in a desk drawer as soon as the cop turned his back.
His cell rang.
* * *
Lovecraft was unsympathetic. “Let me get this straight: you’re really working for the Gestapo, but now you have to pretend to be working for the CIA so you can work alongside the Abwehr? Is that right?” She snorted. “Jesus fucking Christ, Dan, how’d you manage that?”
“Just lucky, I guess.” He didn’t want to get into this right now, but he just couldn’t help but say, “And the man’s a Gestapo stooge, not actually one of your leather overcoat guys, and I only think the woman last night is maybe Abwehr.”
Lovecraft sighed. Her momentary anger had been the product of surprise more than anything else. “She’s the one you’re supposed to be watching? Well, I guess you can watch her from close up, now she thinks you’re some sort of fellow traveler.”
Carter narrowed his eyes at her. “What was I supposed to do? And, come on, ‘fellow traveler’? That’s not cool.”
“I didn’t say you were, just that she thinks you are, kinda. Oh, look. I’ve hurt your delicate feelings. It must be tough being a white, blue-eyed, blond guy in a world where the Nazis are a big thing.”
“Not that you’re bitter.”
“Not that I’m…” She stopped and the half smile left her lips. “I can’t even joke about this anymore. I can’t carry on being a good soldier if we ain’t going to fight some fucker to make things right.” She nodded at the safe. “Some guy came in yesterday asking after the Necronomicon. Said my uncle Alfred had clued him into it before he went missing, like, seven years ago.”
Carter wanted to eat some eggs and sink into a deep sleep all afternoon, but he forced himself to focus on what Lovecraft was saying. “And?”
“And”—she made a short pantomime of vague hopelessness—“I told him he was mistaken and we didn’t have it.”
“I thought you wanted to get rid of it?”
“I do. I did. I just ain’t so s
ure anymore. If we are ever going to stand any kind of chance of putting a crease back in the universe, we are going to need to know a shit ton more about how these things work than we do now.”
Carter glanced at the old black safe, lurking in the shadows behind the counter. “You said those books are dangerous.”
“They are. Freak-your-eyeballs-out-of-your-skull dangerous. Accidentally-summon-things-it’s-suicidal-to-even-name-never-mind-meet dangerous. Get-yourself-way-worse-than-killed dangerous. But, I don’t see we got a choice, Dan. We either roll over, accept all this, and pretend we’re cool with a world where Hitler died peacefully in bed surrounded by his loving relatives, or we take some risks to make sure he eats his gun in a bunker like he’s supposed to.”
“That means bringing back the Holocaust. The Cold War.”
“The Nazis offed way more than six million during this world’s version of Barbarossa. As far as anyone knows, they’re still exterminating in the East. Not much news comes out of what’s left of Russia. No matter what we do, a lot of people die. But there’s a difference. In the Folded, it’s all down to us. Here, we’re puppets, or pawns, or cattle for gods who only get worshipped out of fear. If humanity is going to hell, I’d prefer it if it was all our own fault.”
After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft) Page 11