Astronomy Read online

  Indeed, Foley’s rolling stance of authority had improved since she’d seen him last. She wondered if he’d been practicing in a mirror. That would be like him.

  Foley squinted at her, up and down. His cigar rolled to one side. “How you doing these days, Ensign Gilbert?”

  “Great,” she said. “I’m a civilian. Maybe you’ve heard.”

  Of course, that wasn’t what he meant. Like everyone else she knew, he meant, How you doing since Berlin?

  Her OSS friends had let Berlin drop long ago. But Walter Foley had been her case officer. He didn’t let anything drop. Her mental health had become his ongoing concern.

  Susan had been surprised by all the attention when she got back from Berlin, not altogether unflattered. But something proprietary lurked at the bottom of all his sympathy and encouragement. Walter Foley worried for her state of mind the way Joe Lewis’s corner man worried for his cuts. She could see him now, gearing up that jovial Pat O’Brien routine—How’s my Hot Shot? How’s my girl? His girl. That grinding sound back of her jaw—that would be her teeth, yes?

  She would have told him to back the hell off if Charley Shrieve hadn’t stepped between them.

  “Night’s getting long,” Charley said. “Maybe we want to save the photo album stuff for another time?” He made one of those embarrassed nods like men do. Susan could almost hear him whispering: Christ, Walt. Give the kid a break.

  And then, to her: “You ready to meet my guy Hartmann?” She could tell by Charley’s face that she wasn’t going to like this.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said.

  He led her back to a little room overlooking an empty warehouse. The room looked like some sort of shipping clerk’s office. She could see train schedules for 1940 on the wall.

  The center of the room was filled with a dinner scene, served up for a man with torpid eyes, greasy blonde hair, and the thick skin of a hard drinker. An old desk had been righted and covered with fine linen. A table setting of paper-thin Dresden china was laid before him. Susan picked up an ornately scrolled sterling-silver fork. She had not seen such expensive tableware since her undergraduate days at Boston College.

  Of course, the scene was rendered perfect by the dollop of quicksilver filling the tea cup, brimming at the edge of the dinner plate, forming a silver drool down the rigid man’s lips, a silver puddle around his buttocks.

  She realized the man was full of mercury, to the point that his guts had burst under the weight of it.

  She became aware of a certain silence. She looked up to see every man in the room watching her. She started to go, “What?” But she knew what was up. They were waiting for her to catch a case of the vapors.

  Very deliberately, she picked up the elegant ivory dinner candle in front of the plate. “I like the candle,” she offered. “Lends a nice romantic air, don’t you think?” She looked around the room for validation.

  The two soldiers scowled at each other. Perhaps they wondered how a pretty young lady of breeding and refinement could be so callous? Susan had been in this business awhile now; she was used to these little moments of masculine discomfort.

  Bogen and Shrieve looked relieved. If this was a classic Watermark operation, they would be worried about anybody who couldn’t hold their water at a time like this.

  “I suppose I should make a formal introduction,” Shrieve said. “Everybody, Herr Hartmann. Herr Hartmann,” he extended a hand to all, “everybody.”

  “This is your informant?” she asked.

  Shrieve looked away. His cheek muscle twitched in the candlelight. “Things never got that formal between us,” he said. “He told me he had a line on six tons of mercury.”

  “Looks like he found it,” Susan said quietly.

  “It was going to some place called ‘Site Y.’ He was supposed to slip my boy Bogen here on board his truck; maybe we’d get a look at this Site Y at long last.”

  That still didn’t answer the question most central to her mind: “What’s my part in this?” she asked.

  “We brought you here as sort of a technical advisor,” Shrieve said. “We wanted someone who could tell us whether this Conrad Hartmann was giving us the straight dope on a few things.”

  “Use your experience,” he’d said. She should have known. Her experience the last six months had been with Operation Watermark, verifying the outlandish stories of Nazi war criminals trying to escape the Russian army.

  “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” she said. She didn’t know but maybe she should be insulted. “I know you gentlemen have a lot to do here. If I can just get a ride back to my apartment, I’ll be out of your way.”

  She wasn’t going to get mad. She promised herself that. There was a plane leaving for Washington at midnight. She figured she could just make it.

  Walter Foley stepped forward. “As long as we’ve got you here . . .” He smiled amiably. “You ever hear about this Site Y during your travels in the East? It may be connected with a program called ‘Das Unternehmen.’ Any of your Watermark subjects ever mention an Unternehmen?”

  Susan found her gaze drifting toward the door. Any minute now she’d make her break. Just let one of these guys get in her way.

  “Jog my memory,” she said. “Tell me what the hell’s going on.”

  Meaningful looks were zipping back and forth between Walter Foley and her quiet friend with the cheek muscles. They were discussing her, she realized. They had reached some crucial point in the conversation; they were deciding between themselves whether to bring her in the rest of the way or put her back on a plane for Stony Brook, New York.

  Susan found this vastly amusing—here, these three spooks from one of the more disreputable branches of Naval Intelligence practically kidnap her at gunpoint off a transport plane bound for home. Only they aren’t sure whether they trust her enough to hear their whole story.

  “Excuse us,” Foley said. He pulled Charley Shrieve off into the far corner of the room.

  “Sure,” she said. She caught Charley Shrieve looking back at her, as if checking her temperature. Susan just smiled. “Take your time.”

  She found herself flipping her hair in irritation. Just keep your mouth shut, she told herself. Smile sweetly and you’ll be out of here. Whatever they cooked up for her, she figured they could call her up at Stony Brook to let her in on their decision.

  Foley and Charley Shrieve didn’t even notice she was leaving. It was the kid, Bogen, who caught her arm.

  “You don’t want to go out there,” he told her.

  “I’m just going out for a cigarette.” She was planning to walk to that abandoned biergarten on the corner and wait for any green uniform in a jeep to take her out of this.

  “You never know who might be waiting.” He had this smile, somewhere between winsome and sly, and desperate.

  “You never know who might be waiting,” she told him, and tugged her arm back.

  “Hey, come on,” he said, and then, “All right. I’m sorry about the Emerald Eyes joke.”

  “The what?”

  For the record, Susan’s eyes were not green, but black-blue, and a bit crossed—just enough to give her this air of dreamy surprise. She wasn’t sure why men were always mentioning her green eyes. She figured it was one of those burdens God gave red-haired girls to keep them humble.

  “Ohh, that,” she said. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

  But Bogen had done his job. Foley and Shrieve had finished deciding her future. They were ready to share their decision, and here she was just like she’d been waiting, breathlessly.

  “We’d like you to look at one more thing,” Shrieve said.

  “You’re sure you won’t compromise security?” She couldn’t help herself. She was mad.

  Shrieve ducked his eyes. He had to stop himself from apologizing. “We’ve each got our job,” he said.

  He led her out onto a landing on the far side of the entryway. From here, they overlooked a vast warehouse. Cracks seamed the bare concrete floo
r. In the corners, litter, patches of dirty ice.

  (Susan frowned—Ice? But she let it go. Any sign of curiosity, she knew she was doomed.)

  There was no handrail. Charley took her hand as they descended the stairs.

  He seemed just the slightest bit uncertain about her. Maybe it was because he had no rank on her; maybe it was because they were close to the same age. Whatever, Shrieve was not so presumptuous as Walter Foley, which was bad—Susan could have said no to Walter Foley.

  “We’ve seen this four times in the last two weeks,” he said. “A warehouse full of trucks and gasoline, or building materials, or winter bivouac, or, occasionally, things we can’t figure out. We keep an eye on the place a day or so, go back inside . . .” Shrieve held up his hand, indicating the emptiness. “Everything’s vanished.”

  “What was in here?”

  “Two hundred tons of lead and concrete. And, if you believe my guy Hartmann—six tons of mercury.”

  Susan looked a little closer at her escort. Shrieve was worried; she could see it in his eyes. She wondered what, besides girls, could worry a guy like Charley Shrieve.

  “You think they’re building some sort of, uhm, Gadget?” No one ever used the word bomb.

  “Analysis is not my department,” he said. A good, stiff brush-off—she could appreciate that.

  She dug the toe of her shoe into a square-edged scuffmark in the concrete. Something six feet across and heavy enough to scratch concrete had been dragged two, three feet and then vanished. Something heavy as lead.

  She looked around to find a parade formation of these straight-edged scuff marks. Each one traveled a couple feet and then abruptly stopped.

  “Naval Intelligence calls these sites ‘ghost ships.’ Whatever this Das Unternehmen is, we think we’re seeing the staging areas of it in these warehouses. We just don’t know what we’re looking at.”

  “Have you ever staked anybody in one of these ghost ships to see what happens?”

  “A couple of times, yeah. When we put someone in here, they disappear along with everything else. Conrad Hartmann was supposed to show us where this stuff was going.”

  “When did this concrete and lead disappear?”

  Shrieve seemed a little bemused. “How about last night.”

  She looked at him. “Somebody moved two hundred tons of concrete and lead overnight?”

  “Hey. You got any ideas, don’t keep them to yourself.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself. Yeah, she had an idea. Suddenly the old warehouse had taken on a chill.

  “I saw something once,” she said. She had seen it in Berlin, but she didn’t tell him that. “Find a light switch. Make this place completely dark.”

  “And then what?”

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to say. She hoped she was wrong.

  Shrieve found a master light switch by the stairs. For one moment, the room was completely black. She let out a sigh of relief. She’d always been prey to an overactive imagination. Maybe she hadn’t really seen what she thought she had. Maybe whatever she’d seen in Berlin had all been the product of terror and malnutrition.

  Then a glimmer of phosphorescence appeared in the center of the wall. Retinal fatigue? She blinked her eyes. The glimmer became a light. It took on form. The radiance etched itself across the wall, and then cut back to form an angle, three meters down to the floor of the warehouse.

  The light grew bright enough she could see Charley Shrieve in the middle of the room. His eyes narrowed to a disbelieving squint, his mouth puckered like he was eating an aspirin.

  The diagram was huge. It engulfed the empty room like a tidal wave of light. Even as she watched, the floor was divided all around her into an articulated mural, the color of a radium watch dial—only, one slash at a time, as if the wall were being systematically shredded to reveal an ocean of green lava.

  “What is this?” He stared around himself as green lights ate up the floor. “What am I looking at?”

  Susan’s heart sank. “It’s some sort of interdimensional transportation system,” she managed. “The man who showed it to me called it an ‘Angle Web.’ ”

  The lines spread up through the floor like arrows of frost across a window pane. Was it her imagination, or did the darkness to either side carry a certain depth that went beyond the floor?

  “ ‘Angle Web.’ One of your Zentralbund extractions show you this?”

  In fact, the man who showed her the Angle Web had not asked for extraction. And why should he? With the Angle Web, he wouldn’t need her help to get to Paraguay. He didn’t need her help to get anywhere.

  “I need a cigarette,” she whispered. Charley Shrieve was there with a smoke. She tried to light it herself. But something was wrong with her goddamn Ronson; the flame wouldn’t stop shaking.

  Shrieve’s lighter worked just fine. “I need to know how this Angle Web works,” he said.

  “Christ, I don’t know,” she said. “I saw somebody do this magic trick. He drew this diagram, he disappeared.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A mass murderer.” She had to clear her throat to say it louder. “He had a code name, ‘Galileo.’ ”

  “Is this Galileo available to us? Can he tell us what’s going on?”

  Susan saw herself trembling at the precipice. She could play dumb and be packing her bags for New York this very evening. She could be a wise guy and be back in the war with her next breath.

  “I know just enough to make myself a target,” she said.

  “Is it this Galileo you’re worried about?”

  Susan laughed. It should be so simple. “What are you going to tell me? That you can protect me?”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  Shrieve took a deep drag on his own cigarette. Sudden light bloomed beneath his eyes. Even with the shadows dancing demoniacally upward, his eyes held a certain sadness that she had seen in other case officers she’d known.

  Charley Shrieve had let people slip out of reach, hadn’t he? Terrible things had happened to those people; Charley had never forgiven himself. But that didn’t matter. If it came down to it, he would let her go as quickly as the others.

  It was all the warning she needed.

  “I can’t help you,” she said.

  Charley looked down at the floor. Maybe he was relieved.

  She smelled cigar smoke. She looked up to see Walter Foley at the top of the stair. “The hell is that?” Foley spread his hand against the great, articulated expanse of green light.

  “It’s called an Angle Web,” Shrieve called back to him. “I’ll tell you about it after Miss Gilbert is gone.”

  “Ensign Gilbert is gone, eh? Did you tell her we need her?”

  “Miss Gilbert is a civilian,” Shrieve turned back to face him. “She has a life to get back to.”

  “Did you tell her that her country needs her?”

  “Give it a rest, Walt.”

  Charley Shrieve led her back up to the landing, right past Walter Foley. Foley glanced up at her just once. She’d seen warmer expressions on the back of bank notes. Shrieve thanked her for coming down to look at their artifact. He asked her if she had another flight to Washington, D.C. He promised to get her one if she didn’t. He asked her, please, contact them if anything relevant came to mind.

  In this pantomime of kindly partings, Susan said she would.

  Walter Foley couldn’t bring himself to lose so graciously. He sighed. “Well,” meaning, well, he had a million things to do, none of which involved Susan Gilbert any longer.

  Dale Bogen hadn’t heard the particulars, but he knew she’d let them down. He wouldn’t look at her. But then, he had missed the war, hadn’t he? All except for the stories—the fun parts.

  Bogen had been shipping out just as the Russians and the Americans were showing each other dance steps on the streets of Torgau. Missed it by weeks, he had, and boy was he disappointed.

  To hell with them all anyway. She started for the outsid
e.

  A shape filled the doorway.

  Susan saw nothing at first but a pair of crimson eyes gleaming just beyond the room light. She caught a whiff of something she hadn’t smelled since Berlin—rotten meat.

  She froze for just an instant as a wave of nauseating fear washed over her. Then her Walther PP was in her hands and she was firing where lungs and spleen and guts would be, if only the shape were human.

  Right over her head roared the big thunder of an Army Colt. Shrieve was at her back. He went through his seven rounds with the steady metronome that panic will bring to a mindless task—crack, crack, crack. He was still shaking his .45, squeezing it, after the slide pulled back and the empty clip clattered to the floor. But the thing in the doorway was clutching at its chest by then, staggering back from the light.

  She followed it out to the landing, firing as she went. It emitted a weird ululation and disappeared over the rail. She looked over in time to see something very large scuttle away into the shadows.

  She knew she had wounded it. The creature dragged itself as it slipped down the street, but it never slowed down. It was traveling at full speed as it melted into the darkness.

  Shrieve slapped a clip into his Colt. “You all right?”

  “I hit it.” She was patting her coat pocket for another clip. “I know I hit it.” She could hardly talk, her teeth were clenched so tight.

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You hit it. Come on back inside.”

  The two soldiers were leaning back against the glass window overlooking the warehouse. Their guns were in their hands. Their faces were perfectly white.

  Dale Bogen stood rooted to the floor. “What in the holy fuck was that?” His eyes were big as twelve-gauge slugs.

  Only Major Foley maintained some semblance of composure. “Seems we just had our first messenger from Das Unternehmen,” he said.

  She figured Foley was wrong, because Foley was usually wrong about such things. She didn’t care. She had this aching sensation in her cheeks. She realized she was grinning, fiercely.