The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

“I’m not liking this,” Tanisha said, rubbing her hands together as if to warm them. “Nazis doing things to us.”

  “Wait-wait-wait,” Laura said. “Let’s just take a step back. He was a physicist and his expertise was in rockets and he died years before you were even conceived.”

  “Then why is he inside of us?” she said, her lips quivering. “Why does his name come out when Sela holds our hands?”

  Lurid scenarios of Osterhagen secretly being Hitler and the nadaný being his clones played through Laura’s head—the kind of tale Rick would concoct, just for fun. Or maybe not for fun. She glanced at him and saw his eyes boring into her. What was he thinking?

  “I don’t know, Tanisha,” she said. “None of us do. But he’s not the only Maximilian Osterhagen that popped up.”

  “But the only one in Wikipedia.”

  Yeah, there was that.

  “That’s it?” Rick said. “Kind of thin. What else you got?”

  She scrolled through the list of hits. “Mostly Facebook pages and blogs.”

  “We’ll give them careful study,” Stahlman said. “Maybe there’s a connection between him and these maternity clinics. Right now, let’s get Anulka settled in her new digs.” He touched Mrs. Joyner on the arm. “I’ll be back in a minute and we’ll discuss where we go next with Sela.”

  Despite the lack of logic, Laura sensed a connection. A German rocket scientist and maternity clinics … it seemed so unlikely. A connection, any sort of connection, might not provide a lot of answers itself, but at least it would give her some direction.

  As Stahlman was leading Anulka, Marie, and Tanisha out, Mrs. Joyner looked at Rick.

  “Do you want Sela to read you?”

  Rick shook his head and kept his hands behind his back. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “You look like a nice man,” Sela said. “You’re the only one—”

  “Let’s drop it,” Rick said.

  “Done with my tablet?” Luis said, appearing at her shoulder.

  “Yeah. I’ll bring my own next time. Listen, we’ve discovered a few things.”

  She started giving him a quick rundown and had just reached the Osterhagen connection when a high-pitched scream split the air.

  Sela slammed against her mother and wrapped her arms around her waist.

  “My gloves! Gimme my gloves! I wanna go!” She had her face buried against her mother and was pushing her through the doorway. “I wanna go! I wanna go! I wanna go!”

  Rick stood frozen and silent, staring after her with a stricken look on his face. “She grabbed my hand. I told her not to but she grabbed it anyway.”

  Laura understood exactly what had happened. Rick’s life, the one he was living today, had been shaped by the horrors in Düsseldorf, and Sela had tapped into them.

  He looked so lost. She gripped his upper arm. “It’s okay, Rick. It’s okay.”

  5

  LANGE-TÜR BUNKER

  Urgent. Imperative we meet at the bunker. We have trouble. Be prepared to stay for a while.

  Maureen LaVelle hadn’t seen Benjamin Greve in years, but she doubted he’d changed. His cryptic message indicated he was still indulging his flair for drama. Normally she would have called him and said she didn’t have time for clandestine, subterranean meetings, and let’s get this over with now. But just above his signature on the email he’d inserted a symbol she hadn’t seen in over a decade.

  Synapse … speak the word only when absolutely necessary. Nothing relating to Synapse could be recorded anywhere now, on any medium—all the old papers had been burned. All Synapse matters had to be discussed face-to-face.

  He’d even sent a car to Frederick for her—a Lincoln Continental that had seen better days. Older, low-value cars had long been the rule around the bunker entrance. No shiny black Escalades allowed. She’d used the ride time for some leisure reading. Or in this case, rereading: Ghost Story by Peter Straub. She’d always been intrigued by its first line, its signature question: What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?

  She knew her answer: allowing herself to become involved in testing melis on pregnant women. Nothing bad had happened, no one had suffered because of it, but only through sheer dumb luck. Things could so easily have gone so wrong.

  Shadows had lengthened by the time the car pulled off the road and into the junkyard lot. It stopped by the We Buy Scrap Metal—All Kinds sign to the left of the battered Quonset hut that comprised one of the property’s two structures. The last rays of the late September sun filtered through the pines as she stepped out.

  The driver pulled her carry-on from the trunk and extended the handle for her. She glanced up at the security camera atop the curved edge of the roof, and at the others in the trees, to make sure they got a good look at her. Then she waited until a middle-aged man in grease-stained coveralls stepped out of the hut.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  With his scruffy beard he didn’t look like the typical DIA type who had manned the entrance back in the day when the bunker was the center of her universe. They were usually younger too.

  He and the other agent inside had seen her car on the security cameras, no doubt already scanned the license plate, and knew exactly who she was.

  “I’ll show you my ID inside.”

  He held the door for her and she signaled her driver that he was free to return the car to wherever it had originated. Then she rolled her carry-on toward the hut.

  Be prepared to stay for a while.

  She’d come prepared, but had no intention of staying here. Her back had been giving her problems and the bunker’s mattresses hadn’t been replaced in decades. No, she’d grab a room at one of the boardwalk hotels in Seaside. The season was over. She could have her pick.

  A similarly garbed and equally scruffy agent sat at a desk inside and gave her an appraising up-and-down. Maureen kept herself in shape and watched her weight, but for Christ sake she was old enough to be his mother.

  She didn’t recognize either of them, but anyone working the entrance back in the day would have either moved up or been shipped out by now. She opened her ID folder. The man at the desk scanned it and handed it back.

  “Agent Greve is expecting you,” said the first. “I’ll take you down.”

  “No need,” she said. “I used to work here.”

  This earned her a pair of strange looks: Work here? Nobody worked here. Not unexpected. They weren’t cleared to know what lay beyond the barrier at the far end of the bunker below.

  The first agent opened the doors to the elevator and she took it from there. As she descended the five stories to the corridor, she couldn’t help remembering her first trip here back in ’86. Blindfolded until she was enclosed in the Quonset hut, she’d had no idea she was in New Jersey. The cart ride down the corridor had seemed so long at the time, and then her introduction to the source of melis.

  Greve had been right. She wouldn’t have believed him if he’d simply told her. He had to show her. As he’d said, seeing proved believing; seeing was a game changer. Suddenly all her determination to walk away from the human trials had melted away like Icarus’s wings. Her high-and-mighty resolve had vanished and she’d plummeted back to Earth, to the new, mind-boggling reality that had been presented to her. No way was she going to miss out on being a part of that.

  The elevator stopped, the doors slid back, and a familiar musty smell of old concrete mixed with mold assailed her. She unplugged the charging cord on one of the golf carts and started rolling the half mile to the bunker-cum-laboratory hiding unsuspected fifty feet below a pine forest. The eight-foot ceiling seemed even lower than she remembered.

  She parked her cart outside the wall that marked the end of the corridor. Greve had given her a code for the keypad. She noticed the old one had been replaced and the new model had a slot to accommodate a swipe card as well. Just for the hell of it she tried her old code but the indicator light remained red. The new code turned it green, however, a
nd she waited for the doors to rumble aside as the lock buzzed.

  She entered the bunker and spotted Greve waiting for her at the far end of the central hallway. She doubted he’d been there long. The agents up top had surely given him a heads-up that she’d arrived and was on her way.

  “Welcome back,” he said with the grimace that passed for his smile.

  Still thin and pale, though he’d developed a stoop and a paunch. His hair had grayed and thinned, his face grown lined, but his rimless glasses remained the same. She was surprised he hadn’t retired—he had to be flirting with seventy or beyond by now. But maybe she shouldn’t be surprised; he didn’t seem the type to retire.

  She’d passed sixty herself and suspected that for him, like her, work offered a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Neither of them had married. She’d had off-and-on affairs through the years, but nothing serious. She didn’t know about Greve. Certainly he’d shown no interest in her, for which she would be eternally grateful. A man was supposed to warm your bed, not chill it.

  She was aware that some acquaintances and family members had remarked ad nauseam about how much she’d sacrificed in the pursuit of knowledge, so she’d quietly accepted the mantle of martyr to science or some other such bullcrap. But she knew the truth: She hadn’t sacrificed anything that mattered, at least not to her. Mainly because she’d never met anyone she deemed worthy of an extended outlay of her time. She knew how arrogant that sounded, but should the day come when she met someone whose presence was preferable to being alone, she might change her mind. With the passing years the probability of that day arriving had diminished toward null. So she’d have to be content with her own company. Which was fine. Other people were, for the most part … interruptions.

  As for Greve, she knew nothing of his private life. He seemed asexual. For all she knew, he longed for companionship, but that wasn’t going to happen. The man was a control freak and just plain toxic. Maureen was alone by her own choice. Greve, she was sure, was alone because of everyone else’s choice. And so he kept working. Besides, he probably knew too much about too many people for anyone to dare tell him he had to retire.

  Or maybe he kept working in the hope that he’d come across a project that would make up for the dismal failure of Synapse. All the time and resources, black and white, that had been squandered on the Modern Motherhood Clinics with nothing—absolutely nothing to show for it.

  Greve had tried to hide it when the clinics were shut down, but she knew he’d been bitterly disappointed. And she knew what a blow it had dealt his career. The people behind Synapse at the Pentagon and DIA had had such high expectations. They were going to be the ones to transform all the U.S. pawns into queens and take over the world’s intellectual and technological chessboard. So what if they’d bent the rules a little? Look what they’d accomplished.

  But when the pawns remained pawns, they’d slunk away, leaving Benjamin Greve twisting in the wind. Overnight he’d gone from fair-haired boy to schmuck.

  Welcome back, schmuck, she thought as she marched past the empty rooms that lined the hallway.

  For the first twenty or so years of the bunker’s existence, the twenty rooms had all been occupied as the place hummed with activity, with technicians actually living down here. Then the activity and population tapered off, only to resurge in the nineties.

  “Miss the place?” he said as she neared.

  Something different about him. He seemed wound up, almost excited. Greve rarely got excited about anything. What had happened to his post–Modern Motherhood bitterness?

  “Not really.” Seriously, who could feel nostalgia for the Lange-Tür bunker? “Where is everybody?”

  “We’ve been in a low-level holding pattern with a skeleton crew since you returned to Detrick.”

  “Low-level is right. Even your DIA people up top—”

  “Oh, they’re not DIA. They’re outside contractors.”

  That surprised her but it didn’t really matter. The reason for his summons, however …

  “I hope this is important.”

  “Oh, it is. Trust me.”

  That was just it—she didn’t trust him. Greve always seemed to have a private agenda.

  “Fine, but we could have met in the middle. Baltimore’s a lot closer for both of us.”

  That pseudo-smile again, but close up now she could see it looked a bit twitchy. He looked wired. “In a few moments you’ll understand why the bunker is much more appropriate.”

  Okay, he had her interest.

  He turned and led her toward the heavy steel door at the end of the hall with the small window made of very thick glass. The door to the rear chamber.

  “Not there,” she said.

  “Don’t you want to see it? Been a long time.”

  “I’ll pass. I can’t concentrate in there.”

  She didn’t know how anyone could concentrate in there.

  But the truth was, she found the rear-section situation too frustrating. Possibly the greatest discovery in human history and they couldn’t tell anybody about it. Even after all these years—strict silence.

  Of course, the number of suicides of current and past employees helped keep the secret.

  “No worry,” he said. “Oddly enough, the conference room is free.”

  Was he attempting sarcasm? With a skeleton crew manning the bunker, what else could it be?

  In the conference room they seated themselves on opposite sides of the long oval table where she’d suffered through many a boring meeting during her years here. The wastebaskets overflowed with sandwich and candy bar wrappers. A refrigerator hummed in a corner; a microwave oven sat on a cabinet next to it. The conference room had always doubled as a break room for the staff.

  “I’ll get right to it,” Greve said. “I got a call from NSA: One of the search strings I submitted for monitoring after we closed down MM has had some hits. ECHELON has registered a sudden uptick in phone calls mentioning Modern Motherhood Clinics, also web searches for MM, all coming from New York.”

  Maureen couldn’t believe this. Her fists tightened. “You’ve got to be kidding! I made a three-hour drive from Frederick for that? You could have told me on the phone.”

  His face remained impassive. “Also online searches for Doctor Osterhagen from the same IP address as the Modern Motherhood searches.”

  Maureen’s spine went rigid. Okay. That was different. That was … bizarre and unsettling.

  “How is that possible? They have no connection.”

  “Of course they do,” he said, his tone bordering on contempt. “How can you say that?”

  “You know they do,” she said, “and I know they do, and maybe half a dozen people in DoD know they do, but there’s no real-world connection. And besides, I thought you scrubbed the net of any mention of him.”

  “I did, except for what we want people to think. Like that Wikipedia entry.”

  She’d helped him write that fiction. They’d left it out there and tagged it to send out an alert should anyone access it.

  “This is the first time someone has searched Wikipedia for Maximilian Osterhagen?”

  “The very first. Which would be of only minor concern by itself. But when the query comes from the same address searching for Modern Motherhood Clinics, it’s potentially catastrophic.”

  Somehow someone had made the connection.

  “But how?”

  “Exactly what I wanted to know. And the answer is …” That excited look again. “The answer is astounding.”

  “Well, are you going to tell me or are we playing twenty questions?”

  “When I learned of the searches I had the code heads at DIA look into it. The queries originated from a company called H-N Research owned by a Clayton Stahlman. I had them crack their servers.”

  “And?”

  Come on!

  “This Stahlman fellow is gathering a group of melis children.”

  It took Maureen a second or two to process that.

/>   “Wait, what? That’s impossible. No one knows about melis but us.”

  “We didn’t follow the children long enough, Doctor LaVelle.”

  “Stop playing games. What on Earth are you talking about?”

  “If what this Stahlman and his team are documenting on their servers is true and not deluded ravings, the melis kids have developed what would be described in the popular press as ‘paranormal powers.’ I know you don’t believe in the paranormal, and neither do I, but how would you categorize telekinesis, levitation, and even teleportation?”

  A tingle of excitement gathered in the pit of Maureen’s belly and seeped outward, a wave of needles and pins. She fought it. She couldn’t allow herself to buy into this.

  But melis was involved, and melis was like nothing else in the world.

  “I would normally categorize it as Bullshit with a capital B, but … you say these are all melis kids? You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely. I cross-checked with our own records. Stahlman and his people don’t know about melis, but they somehow discovered the kids and, like any good researchers, they looked for a common denominator. Naturally they found the MM clinics.”

  Maureen was having difficulty wrapping her mind around all this. Telekinesis? Teleportation, for Christ sake?

  “But they never showed—”

  “Exactly. Because it appears their odd talents never manifested until they hit puberty.”

  “Then I guess you’re right,” she said. “We didn’t follow them long enough.”

  Greve shrugged. “It might not have made a difference if we had. We were following their grades, not their personal lives. And none of them has made a show of these talents. But we’re going to change all that. We’ll show the powers that be that all the time and money devoted to Synapse was not wasted. Synapse was not a wild-goose chase. We are going to present them with a whole gaggle of uniquely talented geese. This is our vindication, Maureen.”

  Your vindication, you mean.

  She’d always felt more of a need for redemption than vindication.

  But she wasn’t so sure she liked the sound of this. “How do we do that?”