NORMANDY BEACH,
NEW JERSEY
OCTOBER 12, 1995
The house smelled of death.
Or so Benjamin Greve thought as he stepped through the front door. Maybe not death. Maybe simply old-man, never-open-the-windows staleness. But he sensed death lurking in the corners, readying to make its move.
Well, no secret that Maximilian Osterhagen was dying. His doctors said he didn’t have long—six, eight weeks at most—and mentioned transferring him to hospice care soon. Benjamin needed to talk to the good doctor before then.
“Doctor Max?” he called. “It’s me, Agent Greve.”
“I’m over here,” came the hoarse reply.
Greve looked around. Where was “over here”? The living room walls were planked with tongue-and-groove knotty pine and hung with nondescript seashore paintings—by marginally talented local artists from the look of them. Double French doors on the far side of the room stood open. He followed the light to a jalousied porch that overlooked a gravel backyard abutting a bulkheaded lagoon that opened onto Barnegat Bay. Max had bought the two-bedroom ranch back in the fifties, probably for a song. Worth a tidy sum right now, what with waterfront property at a premium.
The man himself sat in a wicker chair, basking in the autumn sun. His denuded scalp gleamed. The unruly, rarely combed thatch of white hair had fallen victim to the radiation treatments and multiple bouts of chemotherapy in the war against his widely metastatic lung cancer. Even his eyebrows were gone. Greve doubted a hair remained on the man’s body. Clear plastic tubing trailed from his nostrils to a small oxygen tank beside him.
“Agent Greve,” Max said, his German accent still thick. “You’ve never visited before.”
My, how he’d wasted away. The once full cheeks had hollowed, the bull neck withered to a wattle. His cancer was quite literally devouring him.
“Well, it’s not a social call.”
Max smiled. “I had no such illusions.”
Greve indicated the matching wicker chair next to him. “May I?”
“Of course. To what do I owe the honor?”
Greve slid the chair closer. Once seated, he leaned in toward the dying man. The houses here along the lagoon sat cheek-by-jowl, and the porch jalousies, though closed, offered scant privacy.
“I’ll get right to the point.”
“Excellent. I haven’t a lot of time left.”
“I know.”
Greve was a bit surprised by the man’s blithe acceptance of his impending demise.
“Which provides a perfect lead-in to the reason for my visit. As you know, the Lange-Tür Project has been a huge disappointment.”
Max’s eyes widened. “It produced the Anomaly.”
“Which has proven next to useless. All the physicists and engineers on the project agree that they have run into a wall that appears insurmountable.”
“I’m so sorry to hear this. I had hoped that my years of effort, if not successful in my lifetime, would at least lay a foundation for future success.”
Greve nodded. “The government had the same hope. Yet all the millions invested have yielded nothing of strategic value.”
The Department of Defense would have pulled the plug years ago if not for the Anomaly. Nobody knew what to do with the fucking Anomaly.
“My theories are valid,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Others agree with you, but I’m told we are missing a vital piece, an equation that might trigger a breakthrough.”
Max shook his cue ball head. “Obviously we are missing something.”
And now Greve came to the meat of the matter. “Doctor Osterhagen, is it possible you’ve held something back?”
He stiffened in his chair. “What? Absolutely not. The Lange-Tür was to be my legacy, my guarantee of a place in history. Why would I hold anything back?”
“Well, you were a member of the Nazi Party back in the day.”
“Bah!” His hand gave a dismissive backhand wave. “I had no choice! If you didn’t join the party, you had zero chance of funding. You could propose the most brilliant innovations and all would be for naught if you weren’t a member. The funds you sought would go to a party hack instead.”
“So you’re telling me you were a Nazi in name only?”
“Of course! That master race nonsense—ridiculous!”
“You wouldn’t happen to be holding back on the future possibility of a Fourth Reich, now, would you?”
He stared at Greve. “Are you insane? Of course not!”
“Then what are you hiding in your safe deposit box?”
“My what?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “I have no such thing.”
“Ah, but you do. In Provident Bank. You’ve had it for over thirty years.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Really? In 1961 you traveled to your parents’ home in Düsseldorf after the death of your mother. You returned with personal belongings, some of which you immediately placed in a safe deposit box.”
Whatever he’d hidden away had remained hidden for more than thirty years. The DIA could have used legal or extralegal means to get into the box, but wanted very much to avoid attracting any attention to Maximilian Osterhagen. If his Nazi Party affiliation ever came to light …
Max’s jaw dropped as he gazed at the ceiling. “Gott im Himmel! I’d forgotten! You are right!” He looked at Greve and grabbed his hand. “My memory—it’s not so good these days. I must go there and empty it before I die. You will help me?”
Greve stared, nonplussed for a heartbeat, then nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes, of course.”
He’d expected denials and resistance and had come prepared to counter both. But apparently the initial denial had been genuine—old Max’s age-and chemo-fogged mind truly had forgotten the safe deposit box. And now that he remembered, he wanted to empty it. Which told Greve that it most likely held nothing of strategic value.
Still, he’d been assigned to get into that box, so …
There followed a two-hour ordeal of transporting a frail, cancer-ridden, oxygen-dependent octogenarian to and from a local bank branch where he emptied his safe deposit box. The contents consisted of one large, square object wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, which Max held crushed against his chest all the way back home.
If that’s a photo album, Greve thought when he first saw it, I will strangle him.
When Greve finally deposited Max, panting and pale, in a fireside easy chair in his living room, the man looked all in.
“Could you start the fire?” he said. “It’s gas so it’s no work. I’m freezing.”
Greve felt uncomfortably warm in the closed-up house, but guessed the doctor’s wasted flesh offered little insulation. He found the on/off dial down by the grate and turned it to max. With a soft pop, bluish natural gas flames started licking the artificial logs.
Without asking, he tugged the package from Max’s spotted hands.
“No!” Max said, reaching for it, but Greve ignored him.
“Heavier than it looks,” he said, heading for the kitchen. He used a steak knife to cut the strings and let the brown paper fall away. “All right, now let’s see what you’ve been hiding all these years.”
A book—thick, with heavy black leather covers, maybe twelve by sixteen inches, bound by three iron hasps.
“What the—?”
This was no photo album. Too damn old. He opened it and flipped a few of the heavy pages. The typesetter had used some fancy, serif-loaded font that made no sense. Then he realized—
“Oh, hell, it’s in German.”
“Do you speak German?” Max said softly.
“Not a word. What is this thing?”
“An old book that I gather has been in my family for generations.”
“You ‘gather’?”
“I found it among my mother’s things when I was clearing out her house—our neighborhood escaped the Allied bombing raids. My maternal great-grandfather’s name is written inside the front cover.”
Greve checked that and saw the date. “Eighteen thirty-nine?”
“It’s a very old book.”
“What’s it about?”
“Unsavory things. I think the author was a madman. I read only a few pages here and there and that was quite enough. I didn’t want to expose the family to it so I brought it back and put it away until I could decide what to do with it.” He reached out his trembling hands. “May I? It’s been a long time.”
Greve hesitated. He didn’t know whether to believe him. Not knowing a lick of German put him at a disadvantage here.
“How do I know this wasn’t the inspiration for Lange-Tür?”
“From 1839? You are silly.” He wiggled his fingers. “Gib es hier.”
Max laid it unopened in his lap and rested his hands on the cover.
“Would you be so kind as to pour me a glass of schnapps? I could use a pick-me-up, as you Americans say. Please join me.”
“Not a bad idea,” Greve said. “Where—?”
“I keep a bottle of kirschwasser in the refrigerator.”
Greve found the bottle and poured two generous servings of the clear liquid. He’d heard of kirsch—cherry flavored, wasn’t it?—but had never tried it. He hoped for something palatable, but if things held to their current course, he figured he should be prepared for something that tasted like crap. This trip had proved a complete waste of time.
He handed Max a glass and held up his own, saying, “What’s a German toast?”
“We say Prost!”
Max knocked back the whole glass in one long gulp. Greve wasn’t about to try that. He was raising his for a sip when he noticed Max’s empty lap.
“Where’s the book?”
Max stared at his glass. “Where it belongs.”
Greve looked past him at the fireplace where the flames were licking at the black book. He dropped his glass and grabbed the tongs.
“No!” cried Max, clutching his arm. “Leave it!”
“Like hell!”
“Let it burn!”
Greve managed to maneuver it out of the flames and onto the hearth where it lay smoking but not burning. It hadn’t been in long enough to catch fire.
He turned on Max. “What the hell are you up to?”
“It’s a vile book! Evil! It should never have been written!”
“Bullshit! You’re hiding something, and I’ll find out what.”
“No, please, Agent Greve. Put it back in the fire. Nothing good can come of it.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He hadn’t been all that interested in the book before, but that had changed. Something lay hidden in those pages, something relating to Lange-Tür. He was sure of it. The first thing to do was have it translated …