“And both of us burned for vengeance in our hearts. We were filled with a hate so vast, even the joy of finding each other again could not overcome it. My brother swore he could not rest until the men in that firing squad and their leader were brought to justice. We met others in those first months. All of them had similar stories to tell. They had been forced to watch their children killed, their wives raped — my God, just thinking of it now brings the old vile taste back.”
“It never goes away,” Blaine told her. “It’s too strong.”
“You understand.”
“I’ve been there, Tovah.”
“Which is why God brought you into this. While the plans of men are fraught with the random, His are not.”
“And what about the plans of the others you and your brother met up with after the war?”
“You draw ahead of me.”
“The direction’s clear.”
The old woman shrugged. Melissa poured her a fresh glass of orange juice and set it down where she could easily grasp it.
“The lives of so many had been ruined,” she continued. “How could they go on? How could any of us go on? Where could we find the strength? We were afraid to love, so we lived on hate. There would come a day, we promised ourselves, there would come a day …”
“When did it come, Tovah?”
“When a Jew who had survived by betraying his faith and accepting the Nazi cross reached one of our members. Guilt was eating him away, just as hate was doing likewise to us. He worked for Hitler’s board of science. He worked on the White Death.”
Melissa and Blaine looked at each other, then back at Tovah.
“He told us what it was, what it could do and had done. At Altaloon.” She glanced at Melissa. “He gave us a map that pointed the way to a secret underground chamber where it had been stored. The way in was clearly laid out. If you could have seen how jubilant we were! Imagine! We had the means to gain the vengeance we so desperately sought. My brother and I summoned the others to a meeting, just those who had seemed as driven and as fanatical as we were. There were twenty-nine in all, but after we had announced our plans the number dwindled to nineteen.”
“The name you gave to this kibbutz,” Melissa realized.
“The symbolism is important to me. Nineteen is one more than the Hebrew number representing luck. We took this as a good omen, prophetic even. Ours was a holy mission. We convinced ourselves that God had blessed our actions.”
Tovah pulled up her sleeve and held her wrist out. The numbers stitched into her arm at Auschwitz had shrunk together with the withering of her skin. Less clear, they remained just as chilling, just as meaningful.
“I carried a second tattoo in addition to this one, on my right shoulder, until I had it removed. There were nineteen of us and we took that as our symbol.” She stopped long enough to stretch her left hand across to where the tattoo had been. “The Tau … We all carried its mark on our flesh and its imprint on our souls. We divided ourselves into teams to begin the holy task before us. One team went to Ephesus to retrieve a supply of the White Death for us to begin our work. Another, led by my brother, went about tracking down potential targets. A third, led by me, began to recruit others, others like ourselves whose lives had been destroyed by the Nazis. Our selection process was discreet. Out of every hundred we considered, only five or six were actually chosen. An indoctrination process followed, along with training, of course. But we still needed a strategy, a plan of attack. The White Death gave us power, yet we had to make that power work for us.” She paused to catch her breath. “The priest’s last words were ingrained in all our hearts and minds by then. What if we stayed true to them? What if we made it seem that our work was the fulfillment of his curse?”
“Word would spread,” Blaine picked up. “The resettled Nazis you couldn’t get to, and you couldn’t get to them all, would have their lives turned upside down by fear. What lives you couldn’t take, then, you’d disrupt, perhaps irrevocably.”
“They would live forever in fear of potential violent death,” the old woman acknowledged. “They would live forever under the threat of some unworldly monster coming to call on them in the dead of night.”
“Which left behind the footprint of an unidentifiable creature that tore its victims to shreds.”
The glass of orange juice slipped from Tovah’s grasp. She managed to regain control of it before it smashed, but the pulpy contents splashed her. She seemed not to notice.
“How could you know that?” she demanded fitfully.
“Two sources actually. From that Nazi named Tessen who seemed desperately afraid that the monsters had come back to finish their job. And from someone I know back in the U.S. who’s investigating the Tau’s rebirth.”
“Someone like you?”
Blaine shrugged. “Pretty much, yeah,” he said, not sure of how to explain Johnny Wareagle to someone who had never seen the big Indian operate. “They made the mistake of killing a friend of his. He doesn’t take kindly to that.”
The old woman’s bony hands clenched into fists. “None of us do. My brother lies near death, because he dispatched a team to your country to ferret them out.”
“And this team?”
“Contact has been lost with it. I expected as much. I warned him to take this threat seriously. He wouldn’t listen.” Her voice trailed off. “Just as he didn’t want to listen all those years ago….”
“About what?”
Tovah’s face became almost pleading. “You’ve got to understand that ours was, in truth, a holy mission. We were doing something that God Himself would have approved of.”
“But something made you stop, didn’t it? When the Tau came here to fight the battle of the founding of Israel, they didn’t bring the White Death along.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Thanks to you?”
She smiled slightly between trembling lips. “You are very perceptive, Mr. McCracken. Even my brother wouldn’t believe me at first, but the White Death brought with it too much power, the power of life and death itself. We started to believe ourselves invincible. We started to believe we were above the mission we were performing.” She took a deep breath. “Mistakes were made, terrible mistakes. Innocent people died senselessly, horribly. The White Death did not discriminate between good and evil, and eventually neither did we. We were driven. We were obsessed.”
“And eventually you went back to Ephesus and sealed the entrance to the storage chamber.”
She nodded. “Or so we thought. The original nineteen of us had miraculously survived through the entire duration of our mission. We drew marbles out of a box for the task of destroying the White Death and sealing the remnants in the tomb forever.”
Melissa and Blaine looked at each other. “The corpses!” she said before he had a chance to.
Tovah sighed. “When they never returned, we knew something had gone wrong.”
“Something big,” McCracken told her. “They were murdered.”
The old woman’s mouth dropped, the surprise on her face replaced quickly by resignation.
“There must have been a fourth person down there with them,” Blaine continued. “They got the entrance sealed all right, but the White Death was never destroyed.”
Tovah raked a withered hand across the iron tabletop. “I suppose I have always known it would come back. I always feared that someday someone else would revive what we had sought to hide from the world forever. I felt it. I read newspapers from all over the world every day, waiting, keeping my vigil.” She paused. “The items first began to appear not even a week ago. They had come back, bringing with them the same thirst for vengeance.
“The vengeance of the Tau,” Tovah said, almost too hushed to hear.