“Keep moving back.”
“I’m getting a sense of a wide-open area. Grass. Beyond that are trees. No. Not trees. Columns. A row of columns. Pavement. It’s a building, or a house. A large house.” She sketched it quickly. An Italianate villa with a terrace overlooking the water. She went back over her drawing, adding arched windows, wide French doors, the feathery fronds of palm trees.
Dr. Bukovsky said, “Can you move back more?”
Tobie tried to focus on the surrounding houses, the street. But the farther she moved away from the boat, the more indistinct and disjointed the images became. She managed to draw a rough sketch of a bridge. But in the end, she shook her head in frustration and leaned back in her seat.
“The target,” she said, pushing her hair off her forehead with one splayed hand. “What was it?”
Wordlessly, Dr. Bukovsky held out the plain envelope.
Tobie ripped it open. On a single sheet of white paper, someone-Andrei?-had written, “The current position of the pathogen from U-114.”
“I guess that explains why the viewing I tried in Bremen didn’t work,” said Tobie, pausing on the sidewalk in front of the university building. The snow had stopped, but a bitter wind had kicked up, stinging her cheeks and making her eyes water. She turned up the collar of her jacket. “I was trying to RV an atom bomb that didn’t exist.”
Jax squinted over at the Tatar, who waited, unsmiling, next to a sleek silver Mercedes S-Class drawn up at the curb. They were booked on the next flight to Washington, D.C. “I suppose we can take this as some kind of proof that the pathogen does exist. Even if we don’t have a clue where it is.”
“You know it’s someplace that has palm trees and boats,” said Andrei, a smile tightening the skin beside his eyes. “That should narrow your search.”
Jax studied the Russian’s enigmatic face. “You’re being way too cooperative, Andrei. Why?”
“Can you think of a better way to find out if that pathogen has left Russia?”
“Are you telling me you believe in remote viewing?”
Andrei shook a cigarette from a nearly empty pack. “Why? Don’t you?”
When Jax didn’t answer, the Russian huffed a soft laugh. Resting the cigarette on his lower lip, he reached inside his jacket for a sheaf of papers folded into thirds. “Here. Some light reading to pass the time on your flight.”
Jax took the papers. “What’s this?”
Andrei struck his lighter, his eyes narrowing against the smoke. “You remember you asked about Martin Kline?”
“You found something on him?”
“Who told you he came to Russia?”
“Someone who was at Dachau.”
Andrei nodded to the papers in Jax’s hand. “Those are copies of some old World War II intel reports from the field, including a transcript from the debriefing of one of the Communists liberated from Dachau. According to his report, the Americans took Dr. Kline.”
“What makes you so sure your Dachau survivor was right, and mine was wrong?”
“Because this man wasn’t just repeating a rumor. He says he helped load Kline’s papers and medical samples on a truck. A U.S. Government truck.”
“He could have been mistaken,” said Tobie.
Andrei glanced over at her. “He might have been. Which is why I’ve also included a report from an agent we had at Fort Strong, where your government processed the high-value Germans it took to the States after the war.”
“Operation Paperclip,” said Jax, his fingers tightening around the papers.
Tobie looked from one man to the other, not understanding. “What’s Operation Paperclip?”
Miami, Florida: Friday 30 October 10:30 P.M. local time
The 110-foot Hargrave yacht Walker’s ex-wife had christened the Harlequin rocked gently against the private dock at the base of Walker’s Miami garden.
Lifting the aluminum case onto the master stateroom’s built-in desk, he eased it open. Nestled within the gray foam padding lay a fluorescent yellow steel tank, thirteen inches long, of the kind normally used as an emergency air supply by SCUBA divers. Within it waited six cubic feet of deadly air under 3,000 dpi.
Walker didn’t often smile, but he smiled now. There weren’t many men in history who could truly be said to have changed the world. But he was about to join their ranks.
He snapped the case shut and left it there, behind the locked door of the Harlequin’s stateroom.
63
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Friday 30 October
Early that morning, General Gerald Boyd took the train up to Boston to visit his daughter, Taylor, now in her second year at Harvard Law School. They had lunch, and a fudge sundae at Billings and Stover, then went for a walk along the Charles. They were sitting on a bench in Harvard Yard when he got a call from Colonel Lee.
“There’s a new development,” whispered Lee.
“Excuse me, honey,” Boyd told his daughter, smiling apologetically. “This’ll just take a minute.” Standing, he strolled away some fifteen feet and said to Lee, “Now what?”
“I thought you should know the Russians have sent the fingerprints of Rodriguez’s team to Division Thirteen. If they start looking into Rodriguez’s files and see-” The man’s voice cracked.
“Calm down, Colonel.” Boyd squinted up at the banks of heavy white clouds ripe with the promise of snow. Lee was rapidly becoming more of a liability than an asset. If Rodriguez would get his ass back to the States-
“We need to talk,” said Lee.
Boyd glanced over at Taylor. She was slim, like her mother, with fine light brown shoulder-length hair and a dimple that appeared in one cheek as she watched a squirrel grab an acorn and run. Whenever he thought of her, he still pictured the little kid in pigtails he used to take fishing. He had to keep reminding himself she was all grown up now. He said, “All right. I’m tied up the rest of the day, but I can meet you at the Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek Park at 0730 tomorrow morning.” If Rodriguez wasn’t back by then, Boyd would just have to take care of the Colonel himself.
“I’ll be there.”
Boyd slipped his phone away, then walked back toward Taylor, a smile on his face. “How’d you like to drive your old man to the train station?”
Kaliningrad, Russia: Friday 30 October
Jax barely managed to send Matt an urgent request to look into possible links between Kline and Paperclip, before the flight attendant’s warning voice crackled over the intercom and their plane pushed away from the gate.
“Operation Paperclip,” said October, watching him put away his phone. “Tell me about it.”
He glanced at the staid German businessman sitting in the aisle across from them, and kept his voice low. “Paperclip was the code name for a project dreamed up at the end of World War II by Allen Dulles.”
“Who was…?”
“Dulles? He was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence. Basically, the idea was to sneak Nazi scientists into the United States.”
“Why would the United States want to import Nazis?”
“Because we were already gearing up for a fight with our new rivals, the Russians.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Even before the war was over, both the Americans and the Russians had competing intel teams ready to fan out over the German countryside and grab any kind of scientific booty they could get their hands on. And the biggest prizes of all were the German scientists themselves. At first the U.S. government just took the guys they nabbed back to places like Fort Hunt in Virginia, with the idea of interrogating them and then sending them home. But the more they learned about German advances in everything from rocketry to aeronautics, the more they wanted to keep them.”
“Isn’t that, like, slave labor or something?”
“Sort of. But a lot of these guys had wives and kids in the parts of Germany taken over by the Russians. They struck a deaclass="underline" they’d work for the Americans if the U.S. government would get their families out of harm’s way.”