There were few actual photographs from those early years, unlike the preponderance from the latter half of the century, when cameras became affordable enough that everyone could own one and the development of negatives became an automated industry, stripping the artistry from the craft. Those early pictures, though, they weren’t haphazardly snapped with the mindset of deleting those that didn’t make the cut; they were composed, still-lifes captured by an artist on a photographic tapestry. Brooks almost felt as though he could see into the subjects themselves, rather than merely observing them from afar.
He stood before a picture of five men in suits and ties and leaned across the glass display case filled with masks cast from faces of obvious Tibetan or Nepalese origin to better see it. The men posed in a line beside a very formal British officer wearing a helmet with a cock’s comb crest and several shorter dignitaries in silk robes and strange hats that reminded him of an ostrich’s rump.
“That was our second night in Gangtok, if memory serves, and our first formal meeting with the political officer from the British Mission and the local regent. Thapa was his name, although I recall none of the names of those in his entourage.”
Brooks didn’t immediately recognize Brandt, who seemed to have not grown into himself yet. He stood off to the side as though called into the picture as an afterthought. Not like the others, who did their very best to look more important than the dignitaries receiving them. He’d come to recognize König by his rugged features and physique and Eberhardt by his scarecrow-frame. Metzger was shorter and stockier and his eyebrows were so thick and dark they drew the eye away from his bulbous nose. Wolff had eyes so blue they appeared almost white, a birthmark near his hairline, and a cocky air about him, as though he kept a secret to which none of the others were privy. Brooks chalked it up to the arrogance of an artist who fancied himself to be on a different level than his peers, in much the same way an academic could often appear arrogant when surrounded by company he considered inferior.
“We thought all we would have to do is smile and hand out gifts and we would be on the road to Lhasa in no time. To think there was a time when the British held the keys to all kingdoms. It’s a wonder we aren’t still there trying to hack through their myriad layers of bureaucracy. I suppose the end of the empire was one of the few redeeming outcomes of the war.”
The picture beside it featured the same men in their uniforms with hobnail boots and bouffant trousers, as though they were about to goosestep right down the dirt road crowded with much shorter peasants. Brandt grinned around the pipe clenched between his teeth. Beside him, the others posed in ways meant to appear very serious; however, the overall impression was one of boys attempting to put on airs before the picture was taken. Eberhardt and Metzger stood close, as they always did, while König appeared both with the group and apart from it, a faraway look in his eyes. Wolff stood tall and proud, his chin held high.
Brooks was about to move on to the next picture when something caught his eye. He scoured the photograph until he saw what had drawn his attention. A piece of metal poked from the breast pocket of Wolff’s jacket, its head shaped like a T-square with pincers. They were calipers, the kind early anthropologists used. Why the expedition’s photographer had them was a matter of speculation, though.
The next picture was of the five men on the windswept Tibetan plateau in heavy winter garb. Behind them, strings of prayer flags flew from a cairn of rocks stacked so tall it was a miracle they didn’t fall. König wore a game bag from which the feathered tails of birds protruded. His rifle was the only clean thing about him. Eberhardt wore a fur-rimmed hat pulled so low over his forehead that only his nose and chin were visible. Metzger was hunched against the frigid breeze, one eye closed. Brandt wore a wool hat with an enormous pack on his back from which three bound poles projected. Wolff towered over him, against his chest a large brown sack that sagged over his arms like grain or cement powder.
Those were the only pictures commemorating the König Expedition into Tibet. The remainder of the photographs featured Brandt, no longer accompanied by men accustomed to laughter and adventure. They were either uniformed men subordinate to him or emaciated prisoners being subjected to the tools of his trade.
Brooks had always known that this part of the story would have to be addressed. Brandt had marched off into the Himalayas as a wide-eyed scientist and returned a man obsessed, one who devoted himself not only to the Nazi party, but to its beliefs. The expression on his face was more than that of a man taking advantage of the times to further his research as he claimed, it was the expression of a true convert. It was his eyes that gave him away. Whatever Brandt said in an attempt to diminish his role in the atrocities or to justify his actions as the inescapable realities of a country held captive by the prejudices of its chancellor, his eyes gave lie to his words. The more Brooks thought about them, the more he firmly believed that whatever happened to Brandt’s party in Tibet, he’d returned a changed man driven by forces outside of his understanding or control.
Brooks forced himself to look at the gaunt faces of people who’d been wrenched from their lives, treated like cattle, abused as slaves, and then subjected to horrors beyond his imagination when he spoke.
“How anyone can deny the Holocaust happened with proof like this is beyond me.”
“It’s not so much about denial as repression. In the aftermath of the war, mine became a country ashamed of itself, not for its actions, but for the actions it allowed to be taken in its name.”
“How were you not arrested and tried?”
“Be careful reading history backwards, my boy. In retrospect, mine were crimes of opportunity. At the time, they were not crimes at all. Would you prosecute the scientists who inject mice with carcinogens or kill rabbits with cosmetics?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Oh, but it is. In the proper context.”
“There is no context capable of justifying mass murder.”
“Like I said, I’ve taken full responsibility for the decisions I made at the time, even knowing I was taking advantage of a bad situation.”
Brooks stared at the photographs of a much younger Brandt. His bearing was erect and his chin held high in such a way that he appeared to be looking down his nose at those around him, almost like Wolff had in the previous pictures. His cap sat high and proud on his head. No matter how Brooks looked at them, he couldn’t see Brandt as a victim.
“Why did you do it?”
Brooks couldn’t bring himself to look at Brandt, who rolled down the aisle behind him. The electric hum of the chair abruptly ceased and the room became preternaturally quiet, save for the buzz of the overhead lights.
Brandt said nothing for the longest time, while Brooks stared at the photograph of a much younger version of the man outside of a building into which railroad tracks converged from seemingly every direction at once.
“The world was a different place back then. The political climate—”
“Enough!” Brooks shouted, his voice echoing through the sublevel.
He turned to Brandt in the ensuing silence and stared at the diminished man, curled in upon himself in his wheelchair, the aura of death hanging over him.
“Stop trying to tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me the truth, no matter how ugly it is. There’s something I’m missing. Something I need to understand. What happened on your expedition that caused you to return home to do…”—he made a sweeping gesture toward the faces of the starving Jews—“…this? You’re asking me to lead an expedition into the very same place and for every answer you give me, I’m faced with a dozen more questions. There are too many inconsistencies in your story. Too many holes I can’t seem to fill.”
“What would you like to hear? That I became so focused on my research that I didn’t care about anything or anyone else?”
“That’s a start.”
“Or how I was dispatched on an expedition to find ancestors that sounded like they were r
ipped from a fairy tale, and not a very good one at that? I found the whole notion of the Aryan race patently ridiculous. How anyone could speak of it aloud with a straight face was beyond me. We were looking for the mythical survivors of a fictional land in order to prove we were superior to the rest of the world, all of whom looked exactly like us. We might as well have been hunting leprechauns for all we expected to find. We climbed into those mountains already trying to figure out how we would break the truth to Herr Himmler that his master race didn’t exist in such a way that didn’t get us all expelled from the party. Or worse. But do you know what happened next? The last thing any of us expected. We found exactly what we were looking for.”
Brandt looked past him toward the end of the room. Brooks followed his stare to the case containing the rotating mask.
“I entered Tibet a skeptic and returned a believer. And until you’ve experienced it for yourself, you have no idea the power of belief. It’s strong enough to override any compunctions. There is no greater ally to have on your side, no more formidable weapon. Maybe I didn’t fully subscribe to the Nazi propaganda. I’d be surprised if anyone did. I was raised to question everything and only believe what I could see with my own eyes. And I had seen the master race. I had seen not our mythical roots, but our very real future. I knew not how such mutations worked, for genetics was a field in its infancy. I knew heredity and that any aberration was a product of its breeding, so I set about learning everything I could about our species and its potential. I did things I will take with me to my grave and for which I know I will eventually be brought into account, and all because I believed as fervently then as I believe now. Humanity stands at an evolutionary crossroads. With the knowledge we’ve accumulated over the last seventy years and the technology at our disposal, we are finally in a position to take control of the destiny of our very species.”
“Maybe there are some things we were never meant to control.”
“You’re saying you wouldn’t open Pandora’s box?”
Brooks stared at the face slowly turning in its Plexiglas housing and wondered what price he placed on his own soul.
Thirty-three
Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin
Motuo County
Tibet Autonomous Region
People’s Republic of China
October 17th
Today
Brooks could only guess as to where they were and the river had risen so high that whatever game trails might once have existed on its banks were now several feet underwater. Picking their way through the shrubs and overgrowth was a maddening proposition, especially knowing there was only one way into and out of this valley and surely whatever stalked them knew as much, too. To make matters worse, right now they were heading in the wrong direction.
Julian was still on the other side. Swimming across the river wasn’t a realistic option any more than walking back into the teeth of their pursuit was. Their only choice was to continue deeper into the valley and hope to find a place narrow enough to either ford or toss a line across. If Julian could get them his rope, they could pull him through the water and to the opposite shore.
The rain still fell, although nowhere near as hard. They were spared the majority of it beneath the canopy; however, the sound of even the diminished downpour on the leaves made it impossible to hear anything approaching. The humidity wouldn’t allow their clothes to dry, either. It was reasonably warm and yet their teeth chattered and the fine hairs on their bodies stood on end. They were going to be in serious trouble when the sun went down if the rain didn’t cease. They couldn’t afford to change into dry clothes only to get them wet, too. They were damned one way or the other and their only hope for survival lay in getting out of this infernal valley and across the highest mountain range on the face of the earth.
Brooks tried not to think about what happened to Warren. It seemed positively unreal. One moment they were arguing over what to do with Zhang’s supplies and the next his blood was diffusing into the water around them. And whatever killed him had stood mere feet away on the other side of the waterfall, close enough that he could have reached through and touched it. He remembered how human-like its silhouette had been with a shiver.
Adrianne clung to his hand as though for dear life. He found the physical contact reassuring and drew strength from the gesture as they scoured the flooded forest for anything resembling a stricture narrow enough to cross.
Julian had an even harder time on the far side, where the sheer escarpment often bordered the river, forcing him to climb its slick surface, where venomous snakes had sought refuge from the rising water. And all the while they could feel that something else was still out there, its presence betrayed by the silence of birdsong and the absence of game.
Brooks battled through a thicket of durian and lychee trees and turned to see Julian across the river, gesturing toward something ahead of him. Another dozen feet and he saw why the grad student was so excited. Several tree trunks had piled up at a bend in the river, narrowing it by a third. The rushing water thumped against them with enough force to fill the air with a dense mist of spume, nearly concealing the rock formation against which the trunks were pinned. It was by far the best option they’d seen in the entire time they’d been walking and likely the best they would encounter, especially with the knowledge that time was now working against them. The clouds in the eastern sky were already beginning to darken, while to the west they were imbued with the faintest hint of red from the setting sun.
Brooks sloshed onto the floodplain, wading as deep as he dared without sacrificing the leverage provided by the trees still firmly rooted in the ground. Across from him, Julian was little more than a silhouette through the rain and mist as he eased along a collection of boulders that appeared to have once formed a great outcropping from the top of the cliff and onto the slick logs, his rope wound in his hand. He made it a single step away from the rocks before a stump rose from the depths and slammed into the trunks.
“Throw us the rope!” Adrianne called.
If Julian replied, they couldn’t hear him over the roaring river. He held out his arms, bent his knees, and inched away from the bank. The trunks rolled and sank beneath his weight as he advanced. He reached a point where he had no choice but to carefully lower himself to his hands and knees, and even then barely managed to keep himself above water. He paused and looked up at them, his eyes wide, his lips a grim line. He was maybe ten feet from the far side and rapidly running out of room to crawl. Smaller trunks slowly twisted out of the logjam in front of him and drifted away on the current, accelerating as they sank.
“Try throwing the rope!” Brooks shouted.
Julian nodded, raised the bundle from the water, and braced himself as well as he could. In one jerky motion, he hurled the rope, which unspooled in the air as it arced out over the water. It splashed into the river well shy of where Brooks clung to the branch of a durian, reaching for it.
Julian reeled it in and tried again. The rope flew farther, but still fell a good five feet short. Brooks might have been able to catch it if he dove. With as quickly as the water swept it away, if he missed he would be at its mercy. Even if he managed to grab it, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t just end up pulling Julian in with him.
A cluster of trees shook across the river, near where the largest boulder leaned against the sheer cliff.
Julian bellowed with the exertion of a third try, which didn’t even make it as far as his previous effort and cost him his balance. His entire left side dipped underwater and he clung to the log through sheer force of will. A section of the dam broke away and he scurried backward as fast as he could. He was nearly to the boulders when he was finally able to stand again.
“I have an idea!” he shouted.
He slid off his backpack, rummaged around inside until he found his ice tool, and shouldered it once more. He snapped the pick into place and stared at it for a long moment before looking up at them through the spume.
“I’m only going to get one shot at this! If I miss…” His words were swallowed by the raging river.
“What?” Adrianne yelled.
“If I miss, you guys are going to have to go on without me!”
Brooks watched Julian tie the end of his rope to the handle of the small pickax and recognized what he was doing. If his throw fell short like the previous ones, the pick could snag some debris rushing through the water or sink to the bottom and embed itself in the rocks, likely costing Julian his rope and his best means of scaling the cliff again.
“We’ll find another place to cross!” Brooks shouted. “It’s not worth the risk!”
Julian glanced back over his shoulder toward where the trees met with the fallen boulders. When he looked back, it was with determination on his face. He tied the free end of the rope to his climbing belt.
“I don’t have a choice!”
His shoulders rose as he took a deep breath. He flexed his legs and tested his balance.
“Jesus,” Brooks said. “He’s going to run for it.”
Adrianne looked at Brooks, then back at Julian. They both knew what he intended to do. Whether his ax cleared the river or not, he was going in and it was up to them to get him back out.
“Wait!” she shouted, but it was too late.
He took off at a sprint, his right arm reaching back with the ice tool, preparing to hurl it as far as he could.
The tool weighed roughly two pounds, twice the weight of a football and nowhere near as aerodynamically designed. Brooks figured he could make the throw himself, but didn’t know if he was confident enough to stake his life on it, especially with the additional six to eight pounds of rope attached to it. The river was maybe thirty-five feet wide and Julian was going to have to throw it at least twenty-five with the rope creating all sorts of downward drag. And while Brooks had no qualms about diving for the rope, the last thing he wanted to do was try to catch the ax. It was designed to pass through several inches of ice hardened by the arctic winds. Lord only knew what it would do to him.
Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Page 21