“I’ll take that as a compliment. I’m half British. On my mom’s side. Born in London, raised outside of Chicago. Libertyville. They have dentists there.”
“Where do the Cubs play?”
“Wrigley Field.”
“Where do you go for drinks after the game?”
“I don’t know. Murphy’s? They card at Cubby Bear. At least they did when I was there.”
Michael relented. He hadn’t spent much time in Chicago, but he had been to a game or two and as far as he remembered it, she was right. They did card at Cubby Bear. “Okay, suppose I bite. You’re a spy and he’s a spy. But I’m not him. What do you want with me?”
“Pay attention,” Kate said. “This is where things get interesting.”
* * *
Several thousand miles away, across the Sea of Japan, a sleek black phone rang. A powerfully built Japanese man studied the caller display. His name was Hayakawa and he knew the call was not a good sign. Calls from China were never good news and as such, they could not be ignored. Hayakawa picked up the receiver.
“Hayakawa,” he said gruffly.
The person on the other end of the line took a moment to respond. When he opened his mouth Hayakawa knew it was Chen.
“We had an unwelcome visitor today.”
Hayakawa had expected as much. Already what had started as a pet project had gotten out of hand. He stretched out his five-foot-six frame and stared out the floor to ceiling window of the towering glass building. It was raining in Tokyo, the pedestrians lost in a sea of umbrellas on the street below. Bad tidings often accompanied the rain in Hayakawa’s experience, bad tidings and a whole lot of water. Hayakawa fingered a stray strand of his longish black hair, putting it back into place behind his ear.
“Who?” he asked.
“A man. A Western man. I think it was him.”
“Where is he now?”
“I do not know.”
“Can you find him?”
“I will try.”
There was a long moment of dead air.
“Hayakawa-san, please be patient. I will find him.”
Hayakawa eyed his reflection in the window, straightening the jacket of his impeccably tailored suit. As he had suspected, the news was bad, worse in fact than he would have thought. But that was only part of the problem. The other part, he could hear in Chen’s voice. The man was losing confidence. He was becoming a liability Hayakawa could not afford.
“Thank you,” Hayakawa said. “We will discuss this more thoroughly at another time.”
Hayakawa terminated the connection without another word. He then entered a second number he knew from memory. He let it ring once, then sat the phone back down in the cradle and waited. He only hoped that he had not already waited too long.
* * *
Michael watched with interest as Kate pulled an iPhone out of her pocket and jacked it into an Ethernet port that hung loosely from one of the floor joists above. Her Glock was safely re-holstered and she made no attempt to gather the Browning off the dirt floor. Michael couldn’t tell if she was trying to foster trust in him, or if she knew the gun wasn’t loaded. It didn’t matter. He had come this far. He was going to listen to what she had to say.
“The head monk let your dad use the space down here. This Ethernet port is hardwired into the T4 that runs the internet café across the street. In this part of the world, it makes this connection as close to anonymous as you can get.” Kate hunched down on the floor and pulled out her pistol. “As you probably figured out, the backpacker thing is a cover.”
Removing the clip from her Glock, she emptied the bullets into her lap. She reached for the final bullet to fall and held it between her fingers. It was a 9mm hollow point. Standard issue. Or at least it seemed to be until Kate proceeded to unscrew its base revealing a tiny USB plug. Michael watched with interest as she plugged it into a second port on what was obviously a highly modified iPhone. A photo of a daisy came up on the iPhone’s screen.
“Pretty flower,” Michael said.
“You have no idea,” Kate said, tapping the screen. After a few seconds, the image of the daisy began to resolve itself into the finer lines of a blueprint. “Your dad and I were here in China looking for a very specific piece of machinery. A piece of machinery dating all the way back to the Second World War.”
“I’m listening.”
“There’s more to this than just your dad’s whereabouts. If we can find your father, I hope to God he’ll lead us to this.”
Kate turned the iPhone’s glossy screen to Michael. The image on the screen could be described simply enough. It was an airplane. A bat winged airplane that looked more like a modern stealth bomber than a Messerschmitt, but an airplane nonetheless. It had a wingspan of twenty meters which Michael calculated would be about sixty-five feet. What looked like jet engines were integrated into both the leading edge of the wings and vertically mounted under them, the cockpit forming a low bulb where the two wings met. The blueprint was monochromatic, and there was only the single page, no section, no schematics, but just in case there was any doubt as to who built it, each wing was adorned by a single Nazi swastika.
“You’ve heard of the Horten 2-29?”
“German plane, right? Didn’t National Geographic run some kind of documentary on it?”
“The Horten 2-29 was a Nazi stealth bomber. It never went into production, but the folks over at Northrop Grumman were recently able to build a mock up of it from a surviving prototype.”
“Okay. Pretty plane, but who cares?”
“This is the Horten 21. Big brother to the 2-29.”
“Again. Not following.”
“Hitler’s people were supposed to have built as many as fourteen working Horten 21s sometime during the last years of World War II. Like the 2-29, the 21 was an experimental stealth jet. Unlike the 2-29, it was designed to be capable of speeds in excess of Mach 1 and perfect vertical takeoff and landing. They wanted to use it to drop the bomb on New York.”
“The bomb?”
“Yeah. The atomic bomb.”
“Brutal.”
“True, but that’s not what makes it interesting. The Nazis were having a hell of a time with their jet engine design. To get around this problem and still generate the thrust for vertical takeoff, the Horten 21 was equipped with two propulsion systems. Both a conventional auxiliary and a primary system that was entirely unique.”
“So it was a Nazi hybrid?”
“Basically.”
“Let me guess, they ran it off breakfast cereal. Soy milk and Franken Berry.”
“Close. Cold fusion.”
“Cold what?”
“Fusion. The Nazis were said to have pioneered a working cold fusion reactor to power their plane. Something that to this day hasn’t been done in the lab, let alone in an airplane.”
“Do you really want me to believe that this thing is from World War II and no advances have been made since then?”
“Believe it, don’t believe it, I’m just laying it out. The Nazis were somehow able to engineer a cold fusion reactor. They figured out a way to fuse hydrogen atoms at near room temperature releasing an enormous amount of energy. The basics are that a very cool gas was introduced into a very hot reactor and the super heated gas was shot out a nozzle creating lift. How they were able to create a reliable working fusion reactor we have no idea. Nobody anywhere has been able to do anything similar since. And not for lack of trying.”
“So what are you saying? The Nazis were smarter than everyone else?”
“Look. The way my people explained it to me is that a part of science, maybe not the biggest part, but a part, is luck. Who knows? Maybe the Germans got lucky. What we do know is that they incorporated the cold fusion reactor into their aircraft. The record shows two full-size, fully functional Horten 21 bombers were shipped from Nazi occupied Königsberg to their Japanese allies in Tokyo in the spring of 1945. Our guess is that they wanted the Japanese to take the war to the Pacific Coast. Knock out Los Angeles. But at that point the Japanese war effort was already on shaky ground. For whatever reason, probably because Tokyo was about to be bombed back to the Stone Age, the decision was made to hide the Horten 21 somewhere in occupied China. Long story short, your father and I have been working together for the last two years trying to find it. I’m sure the fact that he’s gone missing is connected to our work, Michael. I’m breaking every rule in the book in telling you this because I think we can help each other. You knew your father and I knew what he was looking for. Together we might stand a chance.”