“Hey down there, what’d you find?” It was Ira.
“What’s left of a German sailor and part of his set of golden luggage. Mind tossing me a rope?”
“Have you out in a second.”
Back on the surface, Mercer changed his wet parka and snow pants for the spare ones they’d brought for an emergency, and he told the others what he’d found. The idea of walking past the radioactive body had a chilling effect on them even after he explained that their exposure wouldn’t be too dangerous. Like him, they were all terrified by radiation.
It took a half hour to pile enough snow near the opening to seal the hole and erase their presence. With the Pandora box, as Mercer already thought of it, covered by the “space blankets,” the slush would freeze to concrete hardness in a few hours. Rath would need weeks and a lucky break to find them. Both of which, Mercer mused grimly, he would no doubt have.
They lowered each other one by one into the antechamber until only Mercer remained on the surface. He mounded snow around the hole, shrinking the aperture until it was barely large enough to admit him. He took one last look at the setting sun and allowed himself to fall into the ice, his landing cushioned by waiting arms below. Flashlights had already been snapped on, their beams vanishing into the bowels of the glacier.
“We ready?” he asked brightly, hoping to dispel their apprehension.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Marty said as he looked down the stygian air shaft.
“It drives me nuts when they use that line in the movies.” Mercer stopped and turned, his eyebrows raised in a mocking expression. “Marty, do you think any of us have a good feeling about walking through an oversize Nazi sewer pipe that leads to a radioactive chamber filled with God knows what?”
Together, they started the long descent into the unknown.
HEADQUARTERS OF KOHL AG, HAMBURG, GERMANY
Klaus Raeder waited a moment before answering Reinhardt Wurmbach’s question. He carefully unlaced his fingers and placed his hands palms down on the tabletop, fixing his stare as if pondering his response. “No,” he said at last.
“No, you won’t agree to pay the reconciliation commission two hundred and twenty-five-million-mark settlement, or no, you won’t counter with two hundred million like you promised before?”
“No to both,” Raeder replied, delighting in the veins that bulged like tumors on Wurmbach’s forehead. “Tell the lawyers that we’ll consider one hundred and seventy-five million.”
“Damn it, Raeder, what are you doing?” The lawyer did nothing to hide his anger. “We agreed at the last board meeting that we would pay out the two hundred and consider ourselves lucky. Why make this more difficult by prolonging the negotiations with the Jewish groups?”
“Because we have a fiduciary responsibility to pay as little as absolutely necessary,”
“What about our moral responsibility?” asked Reinhardt’s deputy counsel, Katrine Groener.
“Our shareholders don’t pay us for that,” Raeder answered, annoyed that the woman would ask such a ridiculous question. “Too bad if we offend some delicate sensibilities. This is a business decision.”
“Which is costing the company money,” Katrine persisted. “Our increased expenditures to marketing and advertisement have yet to stem the loss of customers. And in the past week we’ve seen NATO cast doubts over Kohl receiving the contract to build the computers for the Eurofighter unless we come to a quick resolution with the reconciliation commission.”
Raeder remained impassive, refusing to betray his anger over the possibility of losing the Eurofighter contract. That had come as a complete shock a week ago when a friend at NATO headquarters in Brussels had telephoned with the confidential decision. Now the deal was being openly discussed in capitals all over the Continent. The French especially were putting pressure on NATO to pull the contract from Kohl, a company they screamed had yet to make amends for its Nazi past. The irony was that the electronics firm in Toulouse that would fill the order if Kohl lost out had made a fortune selling radio gear to the wehrmacht right up until D day.
Katrine Groener waited for Raeder to respond, and when he didn’t, she continued. “Our warehouses are filling with products we have no buyers for as our market share diminishes. Kohl Heavy Construction has no new work lined up for the remainder of the year. And” — she sifted through some pages in front of her — “ah, here it is. While the corporation is hemorrhaging money, I’ve found we’ve spent roughly twenty million marks on a project with an accounting number I can’t find in any of our books: 1198-0.”
Wurmbach did a poor job hiding his astonishment that she knew about 1198-0. He wasn’t even sure what the code signified, only that it was being handled by Raeder’s pet fascist, Gunther Rath. “Katrine, that’s a special project still deemed too secret to put through normal channels. It, ah, has to do with, ah, a new steel-milling process,” he improvised lamely. “Forget you know about it.”
“Fine, whatever,” she said, looking from the sputtering Reinhardt to the glacially cool Raeder.
“Just to satisfy your curiosity,” Raeder said when he saw that the young attorney wasn’t impressed with Reinhardt’s pathetic explanation, “there will be no further expenditures on 1198-0. As to the Eurofighter contract, we’re not out of the running yet. Once we come to terms with the reconciliation commission, we’ll get that deal. If they won’t go for the one seventy-five, Reinhardt will give them two hundred million and they’ll leave us alone. It’s my decision to wait them out a little longer and save ourselves money we sorely need.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime we’ll be denounced by fringe groups and lambasted in the media for harboring Nazi secrets, but in a few weeks no one will remember any of this.” Raeder’s confidence wasn’t forced. He was as certain of his plan now as he was when it had been conceived. His intercom buzzed. “Yes, Kara?”
“Herr Raeder, I know you asked not to be disturbed, but Herr Rath is finally on the line from Greenland.”
“Thank you. Put him through.” He clamped his hand over the mouthpiece to address Wurmbach and Groener. “Excuse me please.” He didn’t speak again until the two lawyers had left his office. “Gunther, what the hell is going on out there? I’ve been getting panicked calls from Ernst Neuhaus at the Geo-Research office in Reykjavik. The plane with the Surveyor’s Society people and the other team is two days overdue. What happened to the evacuation?”
“The evac went as planned.” Rath’s voice was faint as the solar max stripped power from the radio he used to patch through to the Njoerd and then on to Hamburg. Raeder couldn’t be sure of the emotion in his special-projects director but it sounded like defiance. “They left right on time.”
“Where are they?” Raeder feared what he was about to hear.
“There was an accident on the flight back to Iceland. The plane was lost with all hands.”
The full horror telescoped in on Raeder so quickly he felt like he was going to be ill. He knew there had been no accident. Gunther Rath had killed those people, murdered them in cold blood. Oh, God, it isn’t supposed to be like this. Raeder and Rath had done many illegal things in their career together but nothing approaching murder. Yes, there had been that arson early on, but that was the only time. And since then their tactics had lost any trace of brutality. Industrial espionage and veiled threats were one thing, but this?