The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

  “We bring them here. We investigate and delineate their powers, not some strangers.”

  “How do we convince them to—?”

  “Convince? We don’t need to convince anyone. It’s already in the works. There’ll be no refusal.”

  “What?”

  “They’re our children, Maureen. We’re their parents. They’ll do what we want them to do.”

  She stared at him. It had finally happened. Benjamin Greve had gone totally around the bend.

  6

  QUEENS

  Laura and Rick finally found a moment to themselves in a corner of the warehouse.

  “So, about that Mets game,” he said. “Is that for real?”

  “It is. But if things go like last night, it might not be such a cheery occasion.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, as you may or may not know, the beloved Metropolitans are scratching and clawing their way to a wild card spot in the playoffs.”

  “So I’ve heard. I also heard that they lost by a single run last night.”

  “Yes, further diminishing Marissa’s postseason hopes. She was close to tears when she went to bed.”

  “Those Mets … still breaking little hearts.”

  He seemed distracted. Laura had caught him with a thousand-mile stare now and then during the day. She thought she knew why.

  “Still rattled by Sela?”

  He sighed. “Who wouldn’t be? She grabbed my hand and screamed and ran to her mother. Am I that black inside?”

  “She wasn’t sensing you. She touched me and said ‘Marissa.’ She sensed the ikhar for Stahlman. It’s not who you are, it’s what makes you who you are, what shaped you.”

  “And she sensed Düsseldorf.”

  “Of course she did. You’re still traumatized by it. It changed your worldview, your whole life. It’s why you’re no longer in the CIA.”

  “Still …”

  “ ‘Still’ nothing. It shaped the present-day you, sure, but it’s not who you are.”

  Finally he looked at her. “You sound so sure. How can you be so sure when I can terrify a teenage girl with a simple touch.”

  “You don’t frighten Marissa.”

  “She’s not nadaný.”

  “But she’s a great judge of character and she adores you.”

  At last a smile. “Well, there’s that. And it’s mutual.”

  “She’s with her dad this weekend but the Mets play the Phillies Sunday night. You on?”

  “You bet.”

  She debated asking him to Sunday dinner but decided against. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

  “Busy day tomorrow,” she said. “Luis and I are going to be working with our invisible girl to see how she does it, and then Tanisha told me her mother remained friends with one of the nurses at the Bed-Stuy clinic. She’s arranging a little tête-à-tête with her tomorrow afternoon.”

  “And I’ve got a date with the CIA—I hope.”

  Laura hadn’t expected to hear that. “I thought they were denying your existence.”

  “They are. But you remember Nelson Fife, right?”

  “How can I forget?”

  He’d tried to kill them. She still remembered the hatred in his eyes when he’d looked at her.

  “Called his superior in the Company—well, former superior. Guy named Arnold Pickens.”

  “You can’t think the CIA has anything to do with the Modern Motherhood Clinics?”

  “The Company has its tentacles everywhere, but no, I don’t. I asked him for a simple favor: everything he can find out about Maximilian Osterhagen.”

  “Ah, now I see.”

  He was nodding. “Osterhagen’s name popped up three for three with the nadaný, and yet there’s virtually nothing about him on the net. We have his birth and death dates and a story about postwar work with von Braun and other scavenged German scientists, but when I looked up specific projects—supposedly he worked on the Saturn V—there’s no mention of him. Not a freaking word.”

  “Which means he might have been working on something else.”

  “’Zackly. Something someone wants to keep under wraps.”

  She frowned. A rocket scientist and prenatal clinics … how could they possibly be connected? And then she had a thought.

  “Wait … you just asked this Pickens and he agreed?”

  Rick gave her a crooked smile. “Made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  “You threatened him?”

  “Not physically. I met Pickens years ago; he’s known as a guy who never sticks his neck out, and the Fife fiasco has put him in a precarious position. He wants it all to blow over. I offered to make some noise if he didn’t listen to me. He put on a bluster show, but I’m not asking for much. With his clearance level, all he’s got to do is spell the name right when he enters the search string. Got a promise to meet late afternoon.”

  “So maybe by this time tomorrow, we’ll have some answers.”

  THEN

  NORMANDY BEACH,

  NEW JERSEY

  OCTOBER 12, 1995

  The house smelled of death.

  Or so Benjamin Greve thought as he stepped through the front door. Maybe not death. Maybe simply old-man, never-open-the-windows staleness. But he sensed death lurking in the corners, readying to make its move.

  Well, no secret that Maximilian Osterhagen was dying. His doctors said he didn’t have long—six, eight weeks at most—and mentioned transferring him to hospice care soon. Benjamin needed to talk to the good doctor before then.

  “Doctor Max?” he called. “It’s me, Agent Greve.”

  “I’m over here,” came the hoarse reply.

  Greve looked around. Where was “over here”? The living room walls were planked with tongue-and-groove knotty pine and hung with nondescript seashore paintings—by marginally talented local artists from the look of them. Double French doors on the far side of the room stood open. He followed the light to a jalousied porch that overlooked a gravel backyard abutting a bulkheaded lagoon that opened onto Barnegat Bay. Max had bought the two-bedroom ranch back in the fifties, probably for a song. Worth a tidy sum right now, what with waterfront property at a premium.

  The man himself sat in a wicker chair, basking in the autumn sun. His denuded scalp gleamed. The unruly, rarely combed thatch of white hair had fallen victim to the radiation treatments and multiple bouts of chemotherapy in the war against his widely metastatic lung cancer. Even his eyebrows were gone. Greve doubted a hair remained on the man’s body. Clear plastic tubing trailed from his nostrils to a small oxygen tank beside him.

  “Agent Greve,” Max said, his German accent still thick. “You’ve never visited before.”

  My, how he’d wasted away. The once full cheeks had hollowed, the bull neck withered to a wattle. His cancer was quite literally devouring him.

  “Well, it’s not a social call.”

  Max smiled. “I had no such illusions.”

  Greve indicated the matching wicker chair next to him. “May I?”

  “Of course. To what do I owe the honor?”

  Greve slid the chair closer. Once seated, he leaned in toward the dying man. The houses here along the lagoon sat cheek-by-jowl, and the porch jalousies, though closed, offered scant privacy.

  “I’ll get right to the point.”

  “Excellent. I haven’t a lot of time left.”

  “I know.”

  Greve was a bit surprised by the man’s blithe acceptance of his impending demise.

  “Which provides a perfect lead-in to the reason for my visit. As you know, the Lange-Tür Project has been a huge disappointment.”

  Max’s eyes widened. “It produced the Anomaly.”

  “Which has proven next to useless. All the physicists and engineers on the project agree that they have run into a wall that appears insurmountable.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear this. I had hoped that my years of effort, if not successful in my lifetime, would at least lay a foundation for future suc
cess.”

  Greve nodded. “The government had the same hope. Yet all the millions invested have yielded nothing of strategic value.”

  The Department of Defense would have pulled the plug years ago if not for the Anomaly. Nobody knew what to do with the fucking Anomaly.

  “My theories are valid,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Others agree with you, but I’m told we are missing a vital piece, an equation that might trigger a breakthrough.”

  Max shook his cue ball head. “Obviously we are missing something.”

  And now Greve came to the meat of the matter. “Doctor Osterhagen, is it possible you’ve held something back?”

  He stiffened in his chair. “What? Absolutely not. The Lange-Tür was to be my legacy, my guarantee of a place in history. Why would I hold anything back?”

  “Well, you were a member of the Nazi Party back in the day.”

  “Bah!” His hand gave a dismissive backhand wave. “I had no choice! If you didn’t join the party, you had zero chance of funding. You could propose the most brilliant innovations and all would be for naught if you weren’t a member. The funds you sought would go to a party hack instead.”

  “So you’re telling me you were a Nazi in name only?”

  “Of course! That master race nonsense—ridiculous!”

  “You wouldn’t happen to be holding back on the future possibility of a Fourth Reich, now, would you?”

  He stared at Greve. “Are you insane? Of course not!”

  “Then what are you hiding in your safe deposit box?”

  “My what?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “I have no such thing.”

  “Ah, but you do. In Provident Bank. You’ve had it for over thirty years.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “Really? In 1961 you traveled to your parents’ home in Düsseldorf after the death of your mother. You returned with personal belongings, some of which you immediately placed in a safe deposit box.”

  Whatever he’d hidden away had remained hidden for more than thirty years. The DIA could have used legal or extralegal means to get into the box, but wanted very much to avoid attracting any attention to Maximilian Osterhagen. If his Nazi Party affiliation ever came to light …

  Max’s jaw dropped as he gazed at the ceiling. “Gott im Himmel! I’d forgotten! You are right!” He looked at Greve and grabbed his hand. “My memory—it’s not so good these days. I must go there and empty it before I die. You will help me?”

  Greve stared, nonplussed for a heartbeat, then nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  He’d expected denials and resistance and had come prepared to counter both. But apparently the initial denial had been genuine—old Max’s age-and chemo-fogged mind truly had forgotten the safe deposit box. And now that he remembered, he wanted to empty it. Which told Greve that it most likely held nothing of strategic value.

  Still, he’d been assigned to get into that box, so …

  There followed a two-hour ordeal of transporting a frail, cancer-ridden, oxygen-dependent octogenarian to and from a local bank branch where he emptied his safe deposit box. The contents consisted of one large, square object wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, which Max held crushed against his chest all the way back home.

  If that’s a photo album, Greve thought when he first saw it, I will strangle him.

  When Greve finally deposited Max, panting and pale, in a fireside easy chair in his living room, the man looked all in.

  “Could you start the fire?” he said. “It’s gas so it’s no work. I’m freezing.”

  Greve felt uncomfortably warm in the closed-up house, but guessed the doctor’s wasted flesh offered little insulation. He found the on/off dial down by the grate and turned it to max. With a soft pop, bluish natural gas flames started licking the artificial logs.

  Without asking, he tugged the package from Max’s spotted hands.

  “No!” Max said, reaching for it, but Greve ignored him.

  “Heavier than it looks,” he said, heading for the kitchen. He used a steak knife to cut the strings and let the brown paper fall away. “All right, now let’s see what you’ve been hiding all these years.”

  A book—thick, with heavy black leather covers, maybe twelve by sixteen inches, bound by three iron hasps.

  “What the—?”

  This was no photo album. Too damn old. He opened it and flipped a few of the heavy pages. The typesetter had used some fancy, serif-loaded font that made no sense. Then he realized—

  “Oh, hell, it’s in German.”

  “Do you speak German?” Max said softly.

  “Not a word. What is this thing?”

  “An old book that I gather has been in my family for generations.”

  “You ‘gather’?”

  “I found it among my mother’s things when I was clearing out her house—our neighborhood escaped the Allied bombing raids. My maternal great-grandfather’s name is written inside the front cover.”

  Greve checked that and saw the date. “Eighteen thirty-nine?”

  “It’s a very old book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Unsavory things. I think the author was a madman. I read only a few pages here and there and that was quite enough. I didn’t want to expose the family to it so I brought it back and put it away until I could decide what to do with it.” He reached out his trembling hands. “May I? It’s been a long time.”

  Greve hesitated. He didn’t know whether to believe him. Not knowing a lick of German put him at a disadvantage here.

  “How do I know this wasn’t the inspiration for Lange-Tür?”

  “From 1839? You are silly.” He wiggled his fingers. “Gib es hier.”

  Max laid it unopened in his lap and rested his hands on the cover.

  “Would you be so kind as to pour me a glass of schnapps? I could use a pick-me-up, as you Americans say. Please join me.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Greve said. “Where—?”

  “I keep a bottle of kirschwasser in the refrigerator.”

  Greve found the bottle and poured two generous servings of the clear liquid. He’d heard of kirsch—cherry flavored, wasn’t it?—but had never tried it. He hoped for something palatable, but if things held to their current course, he figured he should be prepared for something that tasted like crap. This trip had proved a complete waste of time.

  He handed Max a glass and held up his own, saying, “What’s a German toast?”

  “We say Prost!”

  Max knocked back the whole glass in one long gulp. Greve wasn’t about to try that. He was raising his for a sip when he noticed Max’s empty lap.

  “Where’s the book?”

  Max stared at his glass. “Where it belongs.”

  Greve looked past him at the fireplace where the flames were licking at the black book. He dropped his glass and grabbed the tongs.

  “No!” cried Max, clutching his arm. “Leave it!”

  “Like hell!”

  “Let it burn!”

  Greve managed to maneuver it out of the flames and onto the hearth where it lay smoking but not burning. It hadn’t been in long enough to catch fire.

  He turned on Max. “What the hell are you up to?”

  “It’s a vile book! Evil! It should never have been written!”

  “Bullshit! You’re hiding something, and I’ll find out what.”

  “No, please, Agent Greve. Put it back in the fire. Nothing good can come of it.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  He hadn’t been all that interested in the book before, but that had changed. Something lay hidden in those pages, something relating to Lange-Tür. He was sure of it. The first thing to do was have it translated …

  NOW

  Friday

  1

  MANHATTAN

  “We could have taken my car,” Laura said as the chauffeured stretch limo inched along East 60th Street.

  Stahlman laughed. “No-no
-no. This is the only way to arrive at the Regency.”

  He’d called her at the crack of dawn and asked if she could get to the warehouse a little earlier than planned and to “dress up a little.” When she’d asked how much was “a little,” he’d said, “Appropriate for a power breakfast.”

  Whatever that meant.

  She’d found the gleaming limo waiting, liveried chauffeur and all. Stahlman wore gray slacks, a blue blazer, and an open-collared dress shirt. So easy for men to “dress up a little.”

  “We’re meeting Willard Beasley,” he said as they lounged in the spacious rear compartment. “He was a big shot in the Koch and Dinkins administrations, and then out of the limelight when Giuliani took over, but that doesn’t mean he’s out of politics. He’s still got some suck in the New York Democratic Party.”

  “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “I called him yesterday and asked him about the Modern Motherhood Clinic in Bed-Stuy. He vaguely remembered it from his Dinkins days. Told me if I’d spring for breakfast, he’d refresh his memory and tell me all he knows.”

  Okay. Breakfast for info—not a bad deal. But …

  “We need a limo to have breakfast with this guy?”

  “Beasley wanted breakfast at the Regency Bar and Grill. It’s the New York Power Breakfast. All the city’s movers and shakers show up to be seen and make deals—politicos, Wall Street honchos, publishing and theater people, Hollywood folks in town for whatever reason. Beasley’s getting old. With all his cronies retiring, his power base is slipping away. Probably hasn’t been seen in the Regency in a while.”

  “And we couldn’t arrive in my minivan?”

  Another laugh. “No. And I didn’t want to bother driving myself in the Maybach. Anyway, renting this limo for the day will probably cost less than breakfast for the three of us.”

  Laura filed that away as hyperbole. At least she hoped so.

  “Isn’t he curious as to why you’re interested?”

  “First thing he asked. I told him this was research. I said I’m looking for charitable ways to spend some money and free prenatal care in poor areas looks like a good path. I’m wondering if the Modern Motherhood model is still viable.” He cleared his throat. “I can’t very well tell him the real reason, can I.”