Pandora's curse m-4

by Jack Du Brul

  “Do you work for your government, Dr. Mercer?”

  “No, ma’am. As I said on the phone, I’m part of a scientific expedition going to Greenland. I was doing research for the trip when I came across the story of a crashed airplane and how your son was part of the search. Because it happened near where we’re going, I thought I would speak with him about conditions there.”

  “Greenland’s east coast is a mystery to most people. There are only a few native settlements, and the Danes heavily subsidize them. Where Stefansson went to look for that plane is an area that even the native Inuits don’t bother with. You are wise to want to talk with someone who has actually been there.”

  Mercer said nothing.

  “It was the middle of August 1953, I don’t remember the exact date, when my husband received a phone call from the American military at Keflavik Air Force Base. They told him about a plane crash and how they needed guides who knew Greenland to help them in their search. Stefan had just returned from another failed attempt to climb Everest and was in no condition to attempt something that strenuous. However, our son, who was twenty at the time and every bit the Arctic expert as his father, agreed to go. Your government was offering unheard-of wages.

  “Stefansson was gone for two weeks. As you probably know from the article you read, they never found the plane and they searched by dogsled, on foot, and by airplane.”

  “Did they happen to go to a place called Camp Decade?”

  She looked at him sharply. “You have heard of it?”

  “Part of my mission is to reopen the base,” Mercer said, somehow knowing this news wouldn’t please her.

  “You know what the base was supposed to be, yes?”

  “It was an experiment to create a town under the ice. To see if such a place could be habitable.”

  She shook her head as though he’d given her the wrong answer. “Why would your government want to know if such a thing was possible? Have you ever asked yourself that question?”

  Mercer hadn’t, which was unusual. “Do you know why?”

  “No. But I want to show you something.” She made no move to show him anything. She sat very still, her mind elsewhere, probably with her dead son. Finally she spoke. “Camp Decade was off-limits to the searchers. They weren’t even supposed to know it was there, though they did fly over it once. Stefansson told me he asked about it and was informed by the military pilot that he hadn’t seen anything.”

  “That was the height of the Cold War.” Mercer felt a need to explain his nation’s paranoia. “My government thought that everything should be classified top secret. To look back now, so much of what they did seems comical.”

  Mrs. Rosmunder winced. Mercer wasn’t sure what he’d said to cause such a reaction. She reached into her handbag and withdrew a leather wallet. From inside, she pulled out two black-and-white photographs. She handed one to him. It showed a handsome young man in a thick roll-necked sweater, his blond hair falling around his head in heavy rings. He was smiling at the camera with the easy confidence of youth.

  “That is Stefansson about two months before he left for Greenland,” Elisebet Rosmunder informed him, taking back the picture and staring at it before handing over the other.

  This shot showed a skeletal figure lying on a bed with sheets drawn up to the neck so all Mercer could see was an enormous head. Bony shoulder blades created sharp ridges in the covers. Whatever was wasting the person rendered its face sexless. Its eyes were sunken, and it had hollowed cheeks and just a few stray hairs covering its skull. Dark splotches marred its skin. Mercer was reminded of pictures of Holocaust victims.

  Mrs. Rosmunder held out her hand to take the photo back from Mercer. This time she didn’t even glance at it before replacing it in her wallet. Mercer waited quietly for an explanation.

  “That was Stefansson six months after returning. He died a couple of days after a nurse took that picture. I never wanted to be reminded what happened to him, but I am grateful that she gave it to me anyway.” Her eyes were filled with tears while her voice had tightened. “Doctors told me it was cancer, a very aggressive cancer that he must have had for quite some time but only showed itself in those final months.”

  “You don’t believe what you were told?” Mercer’s voice was as gentle as possible.

  “It was certainly cancer,” she replied. “But I never believed that he’d had it before going to look for that plane.”

  She spoke with absolute conviction, yet Mercer couldn’t help but think she’d fooled herself into believing that something other than cruel fate had stolen her son from her. Newspapers were full of stories about healthy people dying of cancer without having symptoms until the very end. It was the most feared disease for that and many other reasons.

  Elisebet Rosmunder turned so she faced him on the bench, taking his hand into her bird-like fingers. “Dr. Mercer, you don’t have to believe me. I have long ago given up trying to convince people that there is something on Greenland that killed Stefansson. My government never looked into it, your military never looked into it, and I would never allow my husband to go over there and search for himself. I am certain that my son was exposed to some toxin or some radiation, and that is what gave him accelerated cancer. I also believe it has to do with Camp Decade.” She forestalled the question on Mercer’s lips by squeezing his hand. “I have no proof. There is no reason for me to think this. And as far as I know, no Americans stationed there suffered the way Stefansson did. I just wanted you to know the suspicions of an old woman who lost her son in the same area you are now going to. In good conscience I could not let you or your team go without warning you.”

  She turned back and tossed another handful of crumbs to the ducks.

  Mercer knew she had nothing more to say. He stood. “Thank you for sharing this with me, Mrs. Rosmunder. You’ve given me something to think about.”

  When she looked up at him, her smile was wan. “You are years older than Stefansson when he died, but you remind me a great deal of him. Not your looks. Well, you’re as handsome as he was, but I’m talking about your spirit. You both have the same confidence in your abilities.” Mercer made a small gesture of denial. “It is true. Yet all the confidence in the world couldn’t save my son. But maybe the truth could have. I wanted you to know the truth or as much of it as I know.”

  Mercer took her hand. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  As he turned to go, she stopped him with one more comment. “Dr. Mercer, three months after the plane crash and failed search, Camp Decade was abandoned. Your military didn’t dismantle it and cart it away. They deserted it on Greenland for the ice and snow to bury. No reason was ever given. I think it is a mistake for you to reopen it.”

  Mercer could understand now why he’d detected fear in her voice when they spoke on the phone. More disturbed than he wanted to admit, he left Elisebet Rosmunder with her memories and her ducks. As he walked toward the hotel, he felt a creeping suspicion, a sense of unease that he’d felt all too often. There was something to her story, even if she couldn’t provide any proof.

  Given the times, Mercer had little doubt the U.S. government might have carried out some sort of experiment at Camp Decade. With its isolation, it would have been the perfect place to test chemical or biological weapons. While the camp was powered by a small reactor, he discounted nuclear testing or an accident because even a small atomic detonation registered on seismographs. He also thought that if something did get away from them, the area around Camp Decade would have been rendered safe by time and the elements; otherwise the Surveyor’s Society would not have received permission from the military to reopen it.

  Mercer checked his watch. The Njoerd was leaving in an hour, which left him just enough time for two stops if he hurried. One stop was a liquor store. Despite Geo-Research’s prohibition against alcohol at the Greenland base, he’d bought a bottle of brandy at the airport duty free, and if he was going to spend three weeks with them, he’d need at least one more. The
second stop was a matter of suspicion, Mrs. Rosmunder’s and his own. Mercer had built his career on risk and didn’t mind taking chances as long as he had time to manipulate the odds first. Such was his concern that he headed to the second location before finding booze, a move that would have stunned Harry White or anyone else who knew him.

  HAMBURG, GERMANY

  It was with an unnatural stillness that Klaus Raeder sat in the conference room. His breathing barely made an impression against his suit coat, and his eyes blinked at long, regular intervals. When the phone next to his elbow chimed, his hand made a graceful gesture to pick it up, almost as if he’d paused between rings. In fact, he’d remained motionless for more than an hour.

  “Yes, Kara?”

  “The board members are here, Herr Raeder. Shall I show them in?”

  “Please.” Raeder pressed a button on the console built into the blond wood conference table, and the heavy drapes over the large picture windows swept closed, obscuring the view of the Alster River far below.

  His secretary opened the door and stood aside for the six members of the board whom Raeder had called in this afternoon. He ignored them as they took their seats. “Kara, has Gunther Rath returned yet?”

  “He got back from Paris about an hour ago.”

  “Tell him I want to see him after we are finished here.”

  “Yes, sir,” the secretary replied.

  She closed the door behind her, and Raeder turned his head to regard his guests. At the far end of the table sat Konrad Ebelhardt, the seventy-year-old chairman of the board. Next to him was Anna Kohl, the daughter and only living relative of the company’s founder, Volker Kohl, whose portrait stared down from behind Ebelhardt’s back. The others were of little consequence to Raeder. Certainly they were wealthy and powerful, but they took all of their cues from Konrad and Anna.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Good afternoon, Anna.”

  “How are you, Klaus?” the elderly Anna Kohl asked. “How are Eva and the children?”

  “She’s taken them to the lodge in Bavaria for the summer.” There was a twinge of loneliness in his voice. “The boys have been looking forward to it.”

  “Will you be joining them?” she persisted.

  “I’m planning on a weekend visit in a week or so.” He poured water from a carafe and took a long sip to discourage her from asking any more personal questions.

  Raeder folded his hands in front of him, waiting while Anna asked the others about their lives. He wasn’t deluded by her interest. Anna Kohl was as tough as any of the men at the table with the possible exception of Raeder himself. She couldn’t care less about the board members. The spinster had nothing in the world except the company that bore her name.

  “I saw the quarterly projections,” Konrad Ebelhardt said to end the idle chatter. He was broadly built with a heavy stomach and a blocky head. He spoke with the deliberation of a Prussian officer. “With our capital reserves as low as they are, I don’t like that we are so dependent on getting the Eurofighter’s avionics contract. If that deal falls through, we will be in a vulnerable position.”

  “The announcement for who will be supplying the next-generation computers for the Eurofighter is still a month away, but we have been assured that Kohl’s electronics arm will be building them,” Raeder stated in such a way that Ebelhardt knew not to ask anything further. The board members wouldn’t want to know what their president had done to secure the multibillionmark contract.

  “Does that mean we can forget about the French attempt to underbid us?” asked Reinhardt Wurmbach, Kohl AG’s chief legal counsel.

  “Their bid is thirty percent higher than ours,” Raeder said. “I’m going to increase our own bid price to cut that gap to ten percent. We’ll still get the contract and squeeze another two hundred million marks from NATO.”

  “Do we have Herr Rath and his trip to Paris to thank for this information?”

  Raeder allowed a tight smile, knowing it was expected of him. “My special-projects director was instrumental in learning the amount of the French bid.”

  “Nothing too illegal, I hope.” The lawyer tried to make light of industrial espionage.

  The president of Kohl AG said nothing. In his devotion to the company’s fiscal strength, very little was beyond his scope, and he would not make jokes about his business practices. An uncomfortable silence stretched for ten seconds. Wurmbach stripped off his glasses to avoid Raeder’s stare but he could not hide his bitterness toward the man financial magazines called Uberkind. Superboy.

  When Kohl’s previous president announced his retirement eighteen months ago, Reinhardt Wurmbach had worked tirelessly to become his replacement. It was to be his reward for twenty-seven years of loyalty. And yet Anna and Konrad had passed him over in favor of Raeder, an outsider who had amassed a personal fortune buying up marginal companies in the former East Germany and making them profitable in record time. The sting of reporting to this handsome forty-year-old interloper was something Wurmbach had not come to grips with. And yet he couldn’t fault the growth Kohl, one of the fifty largest companies in Europe, had enjoyed in Raeder’s brief tenure.

  “You all know why I wanted to see you today,” Raeder said to cut the silence. The six members present represented the core of the board and sixty percent of the company’s stock. Collectively, they were Kohl AG. “You are all aware that we are the largest company in Germany yet to cooperate with the reconciliation commission seeking financial compensation for Holocaust survivors and their families. You also know that pressure to turn over documentation for the company’s wartime activities is mounting.

  “By stalling for as long as we have, public opinion, which had been ambivalent, has shifted away from our company and our products. Our secrecy has had the unintended effect of severely damaging our reputation. Despite a fifty-percent increase in advertising and marketing, sales are down in nearly every division and most strongly in our heavy-construction business. No one is willing to use us until we are out from under the shadow of our legacy.”

  “Not cooperating with the reconciliation commission was your idea,” Wurmbach said and others nodded. “Our losses are your fault.”

  The outburst had no effect on Raeder. “And it is a decision I stand by. I would not expose Kohl to billions of marks’ worth of lawsuits until I was satisfied that I knew everything the company did before and during the war. For that, I needed the time to study the old records.”

  “It’s inevitable we will have to pay something,” Wurmbach stated. “Before the war, Kohl was just a small ironworks company with less than a hundred employees. Our expansion was due entirely to military and government contracts from the Nazi regime. We profited from the bloodshed just like Seimens, I.G. Farben, Volkswagen, and all the others.”

  “And after the war we were a collection of bombed-out factories and ruined equipment,” Raeder replied evenly. “What profits we gained during the war were effectively nullified. Despite evidence to the contrary, many believe that we are the same company now as we were before the war and must be held accountable. I needed to know the full amount of our culpability and thus our liability. Putting a few hundred million marks into the collective pot is a lot different than facing an endless number of individual lawsuits worth billions.” He looked down the table at Ebelhardt and Anna Kohl. “It is my risk-management skills that attracted you to me in the first place. You knew a day of reckoning was coming and you hired me to protect you.”

  Anna didn’t deny it. “The question is, can you?”

  “Yes.” Raeder saw Anna slump in relief. “For the past twelve months I’ve determined our strategy for minimizing the amount of money we will have to pay. I’ve estimated that a payout of two hundred million marks won’t interfere with our long-term growth while satisfying the commission that we are cooperating.”

  A wave of murmurs and sighs washed across the table.

  “I arrived at that number after a lot of exhaustive research,” Raeder cut throug
h the dissenting voices. “It’s the very minimum we can get away with.”

  “Have you prepared documents that we can give them that will lead them to this figure?” asked Konrad Ebelhardt.

  “Everything’s ready now. I’ve had Gunther Rath and his staff gather one hundred thousand pages of correspondence, shipping orders, and the like. It’s all original material, carefully edited so that the commission will determine that we should be responsible for paying roughly a quarter billion marks in reparations.”

  “You just said two hundred million.”

  “We’ll negotiate down to that number after they have made their findings public. They would be suspicious if we didn’t.”

  “How much of our wartime activity are we keeping from them?” Anna asked.

  “Very little, actually. Kohl certainly did profit from the use of slave labor at a few factories, but the practice was not as widespread as in many other companies. If it weren’t for one project in particular, I would have felt comfortable disclosing everything to the commission.” Raeder noticed the quick glance between Konrad and Anna. He could even read her lips as she mouthed a single word. Pandora.

  He paused, waiting to see if Konrad would dismiss the rest of the board. He wasn’t surprised that the chairman did.

  “Gentlemen,” Ebelhardt said, looking around the table, “could you please excuse us for a few minutes? Anna and I need to speak with Klaus alone.”

  Wurmbach shot Raeder a deadly look as he led the three others toward the door. When they were gone, Anna was the first to speak.

  “My father intentionally shielded me from the Pandora Project, Klaus, and I ask you to show me the same courtesy. Please don’t mention specifics in my presence.”

  “I can’t believe Volker left any records even remotely connected to Pandora.” Ebelhardt’s face was red with ill-disguised fury. “The damned fool.”

  “Konrad! He was my father.”