by Layton Green
“I did,” she said slowly.
“What if he invented some kind of conductor of electromagnetic energy, just like the pyramids but more sophisticated and on a much smaller scale? And then found a way to connect it to the human body? Maybe he didn’t even know what the effects would be for sure until he made it. I dunno, I admit I’m reaching.”
“I’ll keep an open mind,” she said quietly, more disturbed by his speculation than she cared to admit. She had a knee-jerk aversion to pyramid theories, though she had to admit her research into the knowledge lost at Alexandria had made her rethink her opinion of science and progress in the ancient world. “But you have to remember I’m a scientist, Cal. I deal with facts and have very little patience for conspiracy theories or wishful thinking.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to dream a little to reach the facts.”
“Maybe you do. But you can also lose the thread and get lost in the labyrinth.”
Cal blew out a breath. “All this talk about weird energy, this device everyone’s chasing, and those ink drawings some crackpot in London thinks are connected to some other place . . . this is getting heavy.”
Andie didn’t respond, lost in her own uncomfortable thoughts about how her mother, Dr. Corwin, and her own visions might relate to all of this.
Cal fiddled with his empty coffee cup. “I’m sure we’ve both got a million more questions. But someone’s trying to kill us and we need to keep moving. For now, I agree that following the Star Phone might be our best bet to finding the answers we both want. So you think the catacombs is the next step?”
“I do.”
“When do you plan to explore them?”
A grim smile lifted the corners of her lips. “How about tonight?”
“Surely it’s after hours. And didn’t you say they were closed for repairs?”
“Didn’t you say you wanted your life back?”
He settled back in the booth, lips compressed, eyeing her for a long moment. “Mercuri,” he said finally, “I think I like your style.”
Leipzig
1933
On the curb outside his apartment, Ettore stomped his feet to stay warm as he waited to meet Stefan for the first time since the horrific night in Copenhagen.
No one had pursued them into the library that night, and Stefan had walked right out the side door once the sun rose, pistol in hand and a grim, satisfied twist to his lips. A car with two armed guards had retrieved them, and Stefan had said very little on the drive to Ettore’s hotel, deep in thought and writing furiously in a notepad. Ettore was set to depart Copenhagen the next day, and Stefan promised to contact him in Leipzig before the end of the week.
True to his word, the day after Ettore returned to Germany, Stefan had sent a man in a belted coat and top hat to hand-deliver a note to Ettore while he was on his way to work. The note informed him—did not request—that Stefan would meet him at 7 a.m. that Saturday outside Ettore’s apartment.
Ettore tried to concentrate on polishing his particle theory as he chipped away at various projects with Werner Heisenberg. But thinking of the impending meeting with Stefan had caused Ettore to lose focus. His hope was that the chaos of that awful night would keep the German occupied until Ettore returned to Rome.
While fascinated by aspects of the Leap Year Society, Ettore was traumatized by the violence he had witnessed and the terror of running for his life. He wanted no part of such a dangerous lifestyle. In fact, he had come to the decision never to attend another meeting of the Leap Year Society. All morning, he had tried to work up the courage to tell Stefan.
On the other hand, that ancient glass ball he had seen in the mansion had sparked Ettore’s imagination and given him an idea he was excited about. He had no doubt there was something hidden down there between the quarks and neutrinos, layers on layers on layers, a cosmic onion that Ettore suspected science had only begun to unpeel. Yet the thought that technology might not progress fast enough for Ettore to uncover better answers in his lifetime depressed him thoroughly. He had to know why the quantum world worked as it did, why the numbers aligned with such symmetry and perfection.
Recently, someone had invented a microscope capable of much greater magnification than previously available. Still, Ettore doubted an amplification device would be invented for many generations to come that could reach the world of atoms, not to mention the subatomic realms beneath them.
But what if there was another way to probe the nature of reality? After all, one did not necessarily have to see a thing to experience it.
What if, he thought, one could harness the quantum fluctuations that occurred on an ongoing basis within one’s own mind?
Ettore revered the work of Nikola Tesla and had studied it closely. What if one could somehow connect the body’s own mysterious energy field to those places in between, or even to another dimension?
Inspired by the strange gray world mirrored inside the bauble, an idea had started to form in Ettore’s mind: a synthesis of his own particle theories, Tesla’s research, and Ettore’s belief that something mysterious and unseen lurked at the edges of human experience.
Expecting to take a long walk with Stefan, as was their custom in Leipzig, Ettore was surprised when a black Mercedes pulled to the curb. When Ettore opened the door and stepped into the back, he found Stefan awaiting him in an unusually somber state. The bottoms of the German’s eyelids were dark and pendulous as if from lack of sleep, dirt crusted his nails, and his light-blond hair was not as neatly trimmed as usual.
“Good day, Ettore.”
“Yes, good day. Is that . . . is that blood on your coat?”
Stefan absently flicked at a splotch of barely dried crimson on his right sleeve. With a shrug, he said, “And how is the institute upon your return?”
“The same as before. Good. And the Society . . . has it survived?”
“The blow they struck was a nasty one, but now that the cancer is uprooted, we will rebuild stronger than ever. Thank you for the concern, but do not worry. That war has only begun.”
“And what of the other?” Ettore said, with a glance at the Waffen-SS emblem on his friend’s shoulder.
“That, too, I’m afraid.”
“Will they come after me?”
“They would never destroy a mind such as yours. And we have people in place to dissuade any . . . counter-recruitment . . . attempts.”
“What does that mean? You’re watching me?” When Ettore didn’t receive an answer, he swallowed and said, “Where are we going?”
Stefan turned to look out the window as if the weight of the world were on his shoulders. “There is something I wish for you to see.”
“Which is?”
“Things have progressed further and faster in my country than I believed possible. It is imperative that we act with clarity, and with great alacrity.”
“Can you not speak plainly?”
After a moment, Stefan said, “Do you know what a concentration camp is, Ettore?”
“Is it not a place of detention during conflict?”
The German passed a hand through his hair and spoke very softly. “Whatever you think you know about the capacity of human beings to visit evil on one another, I assure you, you know nothing at all.”
Whatever Stefan meant by that cryptic remark, Ettore had the feeling he had been speaking not just to him but to the world in general. When the German failed to elaborate, Ettore repeated his earlier question. “Can you please tell me where we’re going?”
“We are driving,” Stefan said, “to a town called Dachau.”
The trip took much of the day. In the late afternoon they pulled into a pretty little Bavarian town with cobblestone streets winding up to a well-preserved castle atop a hill. Ettore quite enjoyed the scenery and interrupted Stefan’s brooding to tell him as much.
“Yes, it’s very beautiful,” Stefan replied. “A picture-perfect Heimat.”
Ettore knew the German word meant “homeland,” a term su
bverted by the Third Reich’s nationalist propaganda. “There is a concentration camp here? In this picturesque place?”
“All too often, the deepest darkness is paired with great beauty, just as a thin line separates love from hate, chaos from order. It’s as if human beings and nature, maybe the universe itself, cannot exist without polar extremes, and the closer we come to one, the stronger grows the potential for the other.”
The driver skirted the town and took a smaller road to the east. After driving through the forest for several miles, the trees broke to reveal a piece of cleared land housing a cluster of low uniform buildings that resembled barracks. An electrified barbed-wire fence surrounded the complex. Watchtowers and guards ringed the perimeter. After a pair of unsmiling armed men in brown uniforms interrogated Stefan, they let him enter, and the Mercedes passed beneath a fanciful curved sign erected over the entrance.
ARBEIT MACHT FREI, the sign read.
Work will set you free.
Stefan gave directions to the driver, then lowered the windows as they drove slowly through the camp. A sharp chemical disinfectant undercut the fresh air. Guards observed every inch of the property, and all around them, prisoners performed a variety of menial tasks: digging a ditch just behind the fence line, cleaning latrines, carrying crates in and out of buildings. The bunkhouses had a flimsy appearance, out of character for the Germans, which made Ettore think they were built for animals, or for someone they did not expect to house for very long. As he stared at the forlorn faces of the prisoners, the gaunt cheeks and shaved heads and hollow eyes that would not lift to meet his own, a sense of foreboding overcame Ettore, and he had the strange feeling the souls of these men had already begun to depart from their bodies. He could almost see the sad pale halo of their essence dissipating into the wintry air.
“This is all I can show you,” Stefan said, raising the windows as they completed the circuit. “It was risky for me to bring you at all. But I wanted you to see for yourself, no matter the lies that will be told in the newspaper. I’m afraid this is only the beginning.”
“The beginning of what? Why would they lie? Is this not a prison like any other, if perhaps a bit grimmer?”
Stefan stared out the window for some time before speaking. “Just after our return from Copenhagen, I met with a man named Heinrich Himmler.” At the mention of this name, Stefan gave a visible shudder, which surprised Ettore. He had seen nothing, not even an assassination attempt and a nighttime flight through Copenhagen while pursued by armed gunmen, that had rattled the daring German.
“There are factions within the Nazis even more extreme than the others,” Stefan said. “Men who do not see other men as human beings. A great darkness is coming, Ettore. Worse than you or anyone can possibly imagine. If my superiors have their way—and I do not see who will stop them—men, women, and children will be slaughtered like sheep at these places, and worse.”
“What is worse than death?” Ettore muttered, lowering his eyes at the thought of such barbarism.
“Death is a welcome relief to those undergoing great suffering. I am speaking of torture, mass starvation, sterilization, medical experiments on children—”
“Children?”
“A man is whispering in Himmler’s ear, a devil who committed horrific atrocities during the war. Injecting prisoners with neurotoxins, slaughtering women and babies with bayonets, burning entire villages alive. I have met this man myself. He recounted a tale to Himmler, right in front of me, of a campaign on the Eastern Front, where he made the decision, in order to alleviate the filthy state of his troops and raise their morale, to carve up their female prisoners and boil their fat to make soap.”
Ettore felt as if he might be sick. “Good God,” he whispered.
“I myself . . . I myself saw a gypsy child gassed to death by these men in an underground facility. As an experiment for future ‘exterminations,’ as they called it. While I speak the truth, I admit I am telling you this to shock you. You need to be shocked. Unimaginable horrors are coming, and we damn ourselves if we do nothing and let them happen. I had a feeling, after the night of your initiation in Copenhagen, that your resolve to aid the Society might have wavered.”
The abrupt change in topic caught Ettore off guard. Now he understood the true purpose of the visit to Dachau. It was as if Stefan had read Ettore’s mind and taken steps to reclaim him.
“You’re our great hope, Ettore. We must develop a weapon with sufficient power to combat the coming evil.”
“I thought you wished for me to help you find the Fold?”
“We believe that, yes, once it is properly understood, the Fold could be the key to all things—including a superweapon. By all means, include it in your research if it helps. But the truth remains that we know almost nothing about it.” His face twisted. “And our spineless former compatriots have hoarded what knowledge they have.”
“A weapon . . . What would you do with it?”
“Let me worry about that.”
“But I wouldn’t even know where to begin!”
“Do you not? You’re aware, I’m sure, of the concept of a nuclear chain reaction?”
“The concept, yes, of course—”
“And that the American president has publicly stated that it might be possible to create a bomb the size of an orange that can destroy an entire town with one stroke?”
“These are speculative ideas.”
“Tell me, Ettore, of your own speculations. What do you think science can do with the energy contained in the atom?”
Ettore pressed his lips together and looked away. Already, labs had induced nuclear transformations by bombarding atoms with accelerated protons. He and Werner had discussed the world-changing possibilities of harnessing such awesome power.
But a weapon of mass destruction?
It was a vile thought, and Ettore wanted no part of that madness.
“I know you’re set to return to Rome,” Stefan said. “We have people there as well. I’ll be in close communication and ensure you have the resources you need.”
Somehow, though spoken without inflection, Stefan’s words seemed to Ettore more like a threat than an offer of assistance. “But I don’t understand how I can—”
“You’ll find a way, I’m sure. We just need a blueprint. An idea we can use. You possess one of the most brilliant minds in the entire world, Ettore. Perhaps the most brilliant. On my end, I’ll work to wrest what knowledge of the Fold we can from the others.”
Ettore wanted to tell Stefan right then and there that he never wanted to hear the name of the Leap Year Society again. But he hadn’t the nerve. He would wait until he was back in his own country, safe and secure, and then pass Stefan a letter.
Stefan squeezed a gloved fist at his side. “As it has always been, the race to acquire technology is the true war. Yet the stakes are far higher than in the past. Unimaginably so. This is a war, Ettore, that must be won at all costs.”
The next day, when Ettore walked into work, still disturbed by the conversation with Stefan, he noticed a pall of gloom hanging over the hallowed halls of the physics institute. No one seemed to want to meet his gaze. Werner gave him an abrupt greeting and walked off in the other direction. Had Ettore done something wrong? He had a sudden, terrible thought—what if someone had discovered his personal relationship with a member of the Waffen-SS?
As soon as Ettore reached his cubicle and read the headline of the journal article that someone had placed on his desk, a message loud and clear, he understood at once the situation was far worse than someone learning of his meetings with Stefan.
It was worse than anything Ettore could have dreamed.
He took the journal article in both hands, read the entire thing without taking a seat or moving an inch, and then sank into his chair, his hands trembling so badly he dropped the article on the floor.
The discovery of Paul Dirac’s positron, the name given to the negative-energy sea of antimatter predicted by the Brit’s
wild theories, had just been confirmed by independent sources. In contradiction to all conceivable logic, it appeared that every time a particle of matter was created in nature, its existence was accompanied by an equivalent particle with opposite quantum characteristics—an antiparticle. Bizarrely, in all but a rare few cases—less than one in a billion—the twin particles annihilated each other at the moment of their creation, transforming mass into pure energy.
The import of this discovery was as yet uncertain. Yet one thing was very clear indeed: Dirac’s particle theory was in direct contradiction to Ettore’s. The beautiful infinite tower that Ettore had trumpeted to the world—the most important achievement of his life—was as dead as the concept of a flat Earth.
Ettore had staked everything on his theory. He had publicly mocked Dirac, and his peers had jeered right along with him. Yet now it was Ettore who had become a laughingstock, a disgrace, a pariah in the scientific community.
His career, and maybe even his life, was finished.
22
Another taxi dropped Andie outside the entrance to the Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, this time under the watchful eye of a yellow moon so vivid it bulged out of the darkness as if tearing through the fabric of space. Both she and Cal carried backpacks with their few possessions inside. Andie could not deny her relief at having Cal by her side as she took in the remnants of the old necropolis slumbering atop the hill, ancient and brooding, a far more permanent fixture than the flesh of the human beings interred beneath the stone courtyard.
Not knowing what to expect, she was unsurprised when a husky young man in a khaki uniform exited the guard shack as they approached, holding a rifle and standing just inside the iron fence. Earlier in the day, she had seen no sign of video surveillance. That boded well for the planned excursion—if they could manage to get inside.