The Project

by Brian Falkner

  Luke sketched the first page of Mueller’s diagram as quickly as he could, the numbers and the long German words flowing easily from the cavernous storeroom of his memory. He put that page down and started on the second, while Heath rustled around in a filing cabinet, then made a phone call, his feet up on his desk.

  Luke was just starting on the third page when Heath finished the call and idly picked up the first page of the drawings. His feet slid off the desk with a crash, knocking over a wastepaper basket, which spilled paper and lunch wrappings across the floor. He didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed at the second sheet and studied it.

  “Is this a joke?” he demanded, looking around the room as if searching for hidden cameras.

  “No, sir,” Luke said in a voice that was not as steady as before.

  “Who put you up to this?” Heath asked, snatching away the third page.

  “Nobody, sir,” Luke mumbled, wondering what the hell was going on. “You said you might show this to—”

  “Where did you get this diagram? Where did you see it?”

  Luke thought about that for a second or two. He couldn’t exactly tell him that he had broken into a hotel room and opened a locked briefcase. He sat back upright in his chair, looking Heath directly in the eye. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “because it would get a friend of mine in trouble.”

  “Your friend is already in much bigger trouble than he wants to be in,” Heath said a little more calmly. “I’m going to have to report this.”

  “That’s fine,” Luke said, unsure who he was going to report it to. “What is the diagram of?”

  “You know perfectly well,” Heath said. “Don’t you?”

  It seemed he still half suspected that Luke was setting him up for some kind of elaborate practical joke.

  “No, sir, I don’t,” Luke said. “What is it?”

  Heath looked at Luke keenly, his eyes magnified so large behind his Coke-bottle glasses that his pupils looked like marbles. “These are the plans for a rudimentary fission device.”

  Luke shook his head. “Sorry, sir. A rudimentary what device?” Luke’s memory was freakish but fickle. Some things he could remember easily; some things he couldn’t remember at all. But what Heath said next he would remember—in full color, in minute detail—for the rest of his life.

  Luke rang Tommy as soon as he got clear of the building, which was only after Heath took his name, address, and phone number and rang Luke’s father over at the agricultural college to verify who he was.

  Tommy answered immediately. “Dude!” he said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you. You’re never going to believe what I’ve found out.”

  That shut Luke up for a moment, because it was exactly what he had been going to say.

  19. WEREWOLVES

  In the late summer of 1944, World War II was turning against Germany, with Russian forces closing in from the east, and British and American troops advancing through France.

  The Third Reich, the German empire that was supposed to last a thousand years, was being dismantled after little more than a decade, and curtains were soon to be drawn on one of the most violent and bloody episodes in human history.

  Heinrich Himmler, the much-feared head of the SS (Schutzstaffel), ordered one of his senior officers, Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann, to set up a secret and elite troop of volunteer forces to operate behind enemy lines. They were to be known as Werwölfe (Werewolves).

  About five thousand troops were recruited, mainly from the SS and the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). Their tactics included sabotage, arson, and assassination, and by early 1945, about two hundred recruits were in training at the Hülchrath Castle near Erkelenz, Germany.

  Their symbol was the Wolfsangel (German for “wolf’s hook”).

  As the war drew to a close, however, the objectives, and the training of the Werewolves, changed.

  They became a terrorist organization, trained to operate in secret after the war was over.

  A “National Redoubt” was planned—a heavily fortified and defended base in the Bavarian Alps, from where Hitler said that Nazi Germany would “strike back at one minute past twelve using the most efficient secret weapons yet invented.”

  A system of bunkers was built underneath a hill in Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden.

  The concrete- and brick-lined tunnels were sheathed with rubber to protect the occupants from the shock waves of aerial bombing. The entrances were covered by fortified machine-gun positions and anti-aircraft defenses.

  In the last few weeks of the war, however, it became clear that there would be no last great stand for Nazi Germany. Himmler dismantled the Werewolf organization, and on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler killed himself in a bunker in Berlin.

  Luke shut the book with a snap that echoed around the silent library and gave it back to Tommy.

  The book had been full of photos and biographies of the top people of Nazi Germany—people such as Himmler, Göring, and Speer. There were photos of Obersalzberg and their fancy holiday homes, and pictures of the bunkers. There was also a timeline of the events leading to the end of the war.

  It was amazing how much you could learn from a book, really.

  “Werewolves,” Luke said. “You reckon Mueller is a Werewolf?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  Luke was doubtful. “He’d have been just a kid when the war ended.”

  Tommy nodded. “Yeah, I thought about that. But the Werewolves were recruited from the Hitler Youth, or maybe he is the son of one of the Werewolves.”

  “But the book said they were disbanded.”

  “Maybe they weren’t,” Tommy said. “Maybe shutting down the Werewolf organization in 1945 was just a cover-up. Maybe they’ve been hiding out somewhere, waiting for Hitler’s ‘one minute past twelve.’ ”

  “Hiding for over sixty years, waiting for their chance to strike back,” Luke said. “That doesn’t figure. Why wait till now?”

  Tommy shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe they were waiting for something like a particular date or a certain world event. I don’t know.”

  “It has something to do with the book,” Luke said slowly. “Leonardo’s River. It all seems to hinge on that book.”

  “How could it?” Tommy asked. “That book was written almost a hundred years before World War Two!”

  “Dunno, bro,” Luke said, “but that book is the key. Mueller dropped everything to come here and search for that book.”

  “So what was your news?” Tommy asked.

  “These Werewolves,” Luke said with a dry mouth. “Mueller and his neo-Nazi terrorists. They’ve got a nuclear bomb.”

  20. JUST WALKING

  It was one thing to play at being detectives, but there was a point when it all got too much. Too serious.

  Luke and Tommy were way past that point.

  They typed a letter on one of the library computers, detailing everything they knew. The plans for the bomb. The symbol that connected Mullins with the Werewolf organization. The lot. Then they printed it on one of the library laser printers and bought a plain brown envelope from the bookshop in the pedestrian mall.

  On the front of the envelope they wrote “URGENT: SENIOR DETECTIVE.” That seemed like it would get to someone appropriate. They wrote the letters alternately in block capitals. Luke wrote the U, and Tommy wrote the R; then Luke wrote the G, and so on. They hoped it would confuse the police handwriting experts.

  Then Tommy pulled a baseball cap down over his eyes, strolled casually into the police station on Washington Street, and slipped the envelope onto the desk of the officer on duty.

  From here on, it was up to the authorities, and he was sure they would know what to do.

  Tommy headed home. He was going to spend the evening on the Internet, seeing if there was any more information to be found about Herr Mueller and his friends.

  Luke went for a walk.

  There seemed to be so many different facts swirling around in his head, like pieces o
f a jigsaw puzzle, but he just couldn’t make them all fit together so he could see the whole picture.

  When he needed to think, he walked. It always seemed to clear his head. Just strolling, looking at what was around him, letting his mind idle, instead of stamping on some mental accelerator, trying to force himself to come up with a solution to the problem.

  The plans in the briefcase had been mirrored. Leonardo sometimes wrote in mirror writing, too. Was that some kind of connection? What about Mueller’s company? He had made a fortune out of rare-earth magnets. Was that important?

  The Franklin Library had owned the book but had lost it. The Iowa University Library had the book, but their records had been destroyed in a fire. Could the fire have been deliberate? No, it was started by lightning. What about nice Claudia Smith? She seemed to get on well with Mullins/Mueller. A little too well, maybe? Was she involved somehow?

  Images floated through his mind. The Vitruvian Man. The unmade fourth bed in the hotel room. Werewolves. Atomic bombs. Leonardo hiding his laboratory so well it wasn’t found for five hundred years, and keeping his drawings secret so they wouldn’t be misused.

  Ms. Sheck. Missing. Was it possible that she was connected to this in some way?

  More images faded in and out: the photos from the history books, Heinrich Himmler (nerdy-looking), Hermann Göring (fat and pompous), Albert Speer (dignified), and the dank concrete tunnels of the underground Nazi bunkers. Photos of the destruction and death of countless millions of people in World War II. Images that he wished he could wash from his mind but that he knew would be with him forever, playing again and again on a permanent loop in his brain.

  He walked until the sun dropped below the tall buildings by the river, and the low golden twilight was replaced by deepening shadows. A snake slithered suddenly across his path on Dubuque Street, winding itself into some shrubs as he approached. Luke didn’t know who was more startled, him or the snake. There were no snakes in New Zealand.

  By the time he got back to his bike, his head was clear. He still didn’t know the answers, but he knew what he had to do. He wasn’t looking forward to it—he was dreading it, in fact—but he knew it had to be done.

  He had to read the book.

  The most boring book in the world.

  21. THE MOST BORING BOOK

  He finished dinner quickly, even though it was his favorite—macaroni and cheese—and he didn’t have seconds, which got his mother worried.

  “Are you feeling all right, Luke?” she asked as he rinsed his plate in the sink.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going to go and do some reading.”

  His father and mother exchanged glances across the dinner table.

  “Reading?” his mother said. “That’s a nice change. What are you going to read?”

  “The most boring book in the world,” Luke said.

  His mother sighed. “We talked to Mr. Kerr about this,” she said. “It’s not really the most boring book in the world.”

  “Oh, yes, it is,” Luke said, and headed up to his room.

  When his parents had settled in the living room—his mother reading a magazine and his father going over some lecture notes—Luke snuck back down and made himself a cup of coffee.

  He didn’t actually like coffee, and his mother disapproved of him drinking the stuff, so he did it quietly, using two teaspoons of instant coffee and sugar but leaving out the milk. Then he tiptoed around outside the house and retrieved the book from its dusty, ashy hiding place.

  He sat down at his desk to read, thinking that if he lay on his bed, it would be too comfortable. Too sleep-inducing. As another precaution, he set the alarm on his watch to go off every half hour.

  Then he slowly opened the old gray cloth cover of Leonardo’s River. Fastening his eyes securely on the first word, he began to read.

  It was a dark and gloomy afternoon. Not dark like the night, nor light like the day, but something in between like brass, which is not quite copper and not quite zinc. It was the kind of dark that seems to come in waves of gloom and despair. Big waves, small waves. Midsized waves. Waves in between midsized and big, and others in between midsized and small, all crashing together on the tortuous, tormented sea that was the sky, to create a darkness that was gloomy and despairing. Not as despairing as losing a loved one (unless that loved one was a distant relative, or perhaps a former lover for whom your ardor had cooled, and whom you had not seen for a long time, maybe a few years, or even a decade, but certainly longer than a few months. Enough time for the love to fade, because as love fades, so does the despair of losing that loved one fade in concert). Yes, the despairing darkness of the day was great, but not absolute. Enough to sap your enthusiasm and energy, but insufficient to thieve your will to live (unless you were already suffering from depression of the clinical kind, in which case the added weight of the dark and gloomy sky might be enough to tip you over the edge, but probably not, and in any case if you were already of that nature, you should be consulting a doctor who could prescribe a vigorous tonic, or perhaps a holiday in the country to lift you out of your moroseness).

  The darkness came from the clouds, which were heavy and sodden. Probably cumulus clouds, which are the puffy, cotton-wool type that seem gentle and often make shapes on warm summer days. They are the friendliest of clouds, except when angry, with rainwater just waiting to be unleashed on the earth, as were these clouds, so full of moisture, in fact, that they were entirely gray, with not a trace of the white cotton wool around the edges that is often seen when the day is not so full of rain.

  Cirrus clouds are another common cloud, but more distant and not so friendly, and in any case there were no cirrus clouds around, unless they were high in the sky, hidden from view by the wet darkness of the cumulus clouds below them.

  It was dark. It was gloomy. It was the afternoon. A dark and gloomy afternoon.

  Luke rested the book on his chest after the first page and rubbed his eyes for a moment.

  A whole page, and all the author had said was that it was cloudy. He shook his head in disbelief and turned the page.

  Despite the strong black coffee, he fell asleep in chapter two. And again in chapter five. Not to mention chapters six, seven, nine, and thirteen. But each time, the shrill beeping of his watch alarm roused him and he forced his eyes back to the page.

  It was a novel but an awful one. Benfer would start off by describing some really unimportant thing in intricate, page-after-page detail, and before he was even finished, he would get sidetracked into something completely irrelevant and then go off on another tangent. Given the choice between this and The Last of the Mohicans, he would have happily read the other book seven times over.

  In the end, it was chapter fourteen that finally got him. It was after midnight. Luke dozed off for the last time, and no amount of beeping from his watch was going to wake him up.

  When he awoke to the sound of his cell phone ringing, it was seven-thirty.

  He hadn’t finished the book, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had been on the verge of discovering something.

  Something tremendously important.

  22. THE VITRUVIAN MEN

  It was Tommy on the phone. “Get over here,” he said.

  “Why?” Luke asked sleepily.

  “I’ll meet you at the Burlington Street Bridge,” he said. “On my side of the river. I’ll explain when you get here. Hurry!”

  Luke dressed quickly, grabbed his backpack from the closet, and munched a breakfast bar on the way out the door.

  Hurry or no hurry, he still took the time to wrap the book in its protective plastic liner and stow it in the ash dump before unlocking his bike from the rack behind the house and heading for the bridge.

  It was busy with traffic at this time of the morning and blocked at one point by a pickup truck parked right on the walkway. Cleanup workers wearing plastic gloves and paper face masks were loading smelly gray sandbags onto the truck. Luke had to skirt around them to r
each Tommy on the other side.

  “What is it?” Luke asked.

  Tommy didn’t answer but took off along the riverside path. Luke followed, wondering what all the drama was about.

  The footpath was muddy in places and still smelled of the floodwaters.

  “Remember we thought it was strange that Mueller got here so fast?” Tommy asked.

  “Yeah,” Luke said, pedaling furiously to keep up with him.

  “Well, I found out that he lives in New York. So if that’s where he was when he heard about the book, then the only way he could have got here in time was to fly.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I checked on his company, the magnet manufacturers, and found out that they have a private jet, a Gulfstream G100.”

  He stopped talking but kept pedaling, looking at Luke, quite proud of himself, Luke thought, and rightly so. If only Luke had managed to stay awake last night, he might have made some discoveries of his own.

  “So I texted Ben Pickering. You don’t know him; he’s Nick’s older brother. He’s one of those plane-spotter nuts. He said there was a Gulfstream sitting outside a hangar at the airport. Flew in the night of the flood.”

  “Didn’t they shut down the airport?”

  “Nope, it never flooded, so they kept it open, according to Ben.”

  “I think we should call the police,” Luke said, slowing down.

  Tommy came to a halt in front of Luke. “And tell them what? We already told them about Mueller and the atomic bomb stuff. Have they done anything about that?”

  “I don’t know,” Luke said.

  “If we just tell them that Mueller has a plane at the airport—and we don’t even know yet if it is his plane—then they won’t do anything. We need some evidence.”

  Tommy seemed to be getting a little bit carried away with the whole spy thing. When he took off again, Luke followed reluctantly.