Pandora's Curse - v4 (13 page)

She turned back and tossed another handful of crumbs to the ducks.

Mercer knew she had nothing more to say. He stood. “Thank you for sharing this with me, Mrs. Rosmunder. You’ve given me something to think about.”

When she looked up at him, her smile was wan. “You are years older than Stefansson when he died, but you remind me a great deal of him. Not your looks. Well, you’re as handsome as he was, but I’m talking about your spirit. You both have the same confidence in your abilities.” Mercer made a small gesture of denial. “It is true. Yet all the confidence in the world couldn’t save my son. But maybe the truth could have. I wanted you to know the truth or as much of it as I know.”

Mercer took her hand. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

As he turned to go, she stopped him with one more comment. “Dr. Mercer, three months after the plane crash and failed search, Camp Decade was abandoned. Your military didn’t dismantle it and cart it away. They deserted it on Greenland for the ice and snow to bury. No reason was ever given. I think it is a mistake for you to reopen it.”

Mercer could understand now why he’d detected fear in her voice when they spoke on the phone. More disturbed than he wanted to admit, he left Elisebet Rosmunder with her memories and her ducks. As he walked toward the hotel, he felt a creeping suspicion, a sense of unease that he’d felt all too often. There was something to her story, even if she couldn’t provide any proof.

Given the times, Mercer had little doubt the U.S. government might have carried out some sort of experiment at Camp Decade. With its isolation, it would have been the perfect place to test chemical or biological weapons. While the camp was powered by a small reactor, he discounted nuclear testing or an accident because even a small atomic detonation registered on seismographs. He also thought that if something did get away from them, the area around Camp Decade would have been rendered safe by time and the elements; otherwise the Surveyor’s Society would not have received permission from the military to reopen it.

Mercer checked his watch. The
Njoerd
was leaving in an hour, which left him just enough time for two stops if he hurried. One stop was a liquor store. Despite Geo-Research’s prohibition against alcohol at the Greenland base, he’d bought a bottle of brandy at the airport duty free, and if he was going to spend three weeks with them, he’d need at least one more. The second stop was a matter of suspicion, Mrs. Rosmunder’s and his own. Mercer had built his career on risk and didn’t mind taking chances as long as he had time to manipulate the odds first. Such was his concern that he headed to the second location before finding booze, a move that would have stunned Harry White or anyone else who knew him.

I
t was with an unnatural stillness that Klaus Raeder sat in the conference room. His breathing barely made an impression against his suit coat, and his eyes blinked at long, regular intervals. When the phone next to his elbow chimed, his hand made a graceful gesture to pick it up, almost as if he’d paused between rings. In fact, he’d remained motionless for more than an hour.

“Yes, Kara?”

“The board members are here, Herr Raeder. Shall I show them in?”

“Please.” Raeder pressed a button on the console built into the blond wood conference table, and the heavy drapes over the large picture windows swept closed, obscuring the view of the Alster River far below.

His secretary opened the door and stood aside for the six members of the board whom Raeder had called in this afternoon. He ignored them as they took their seats. “Kara, has Gunther Rath returned yet?”

“He got back from Paris about an hour ago.”

“Tell him I want to see him after we are finished here.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary replied.

She closed the door behind her, and Raeder turned his head to regard his guests. At the far end of the table sat Konrad Ebelhardt, the seventy-year-old chairman of the board. Next to him was Anna Kohl, the daughter and only living relative of the company’s founder, Volker Kohl, whose portrait stared down from behind Ebelhardt’s back. The others were of little consequence to Raeder. Certainly they were wealthy and powerful, but they took all of their cues from Konrad and Anna.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen. Good afternoon, Anna.”

“How are you, Klaus?” the elderly Anna Kohl asked. “How are Eva and the children?”

“She’s taken them to the lodge in Bavaria for the summer.” There was a twinge of loneliness in his voice. “The boys have been looking forward to it.”

“Will you be joining them?” she persisted.

“I’m planning on a weekend visit in a week or so.” He poured water from a carafe and took a long sip to discourage her from asking any more personal questions.

Raeder folded his hands in front of him, waiting while Anna asked the others about their lives. He wasn’t deluded by her interest. Anna Kohl was as tough as any of the men at the table with the possible exception of Raeder himself. She couldn’t care less about the board members. The spinster had nothing in the world except the company that bore her name.

“I saw the quarterly projections,” Konrad Ebelhardt said to end the idle chatter. He was broadly built with a heavy stomach and a blocky head. He spoke with the deliberation of a Prussian officer. “With our capital reserves as low as they are, I don’t like that we are so dependent on getting the Eurofighter’s avionics contract. If that deal falls through, we will be in a vulnerable position.”

“The announcement for who will be supplying the next-generation computers for the Eurofighter is still a month away, but we have been assured that Kohl’s electronics arm will be building them,” Raeder stated in such a way that Ebelhardt knew not to ask anything further. The board members wouldn’t want to know what their president had done to secure the multibillionmark contract.

“Does that mean we can forget about the French attempt to underbid us?” asked Reinhardt Wurmbach, Kohl AG’s chief legal counsel.

“Their bid is thirty percent higher than ours,” Raeder said. “I’m going to increase our own bid price to cut that gap to ten percent. We’ll still get the contract and squeeze another two hundred million marks from NATO.”

“Do we have Herr Rath and his trip to Paris to thank for this information?”

Raeder allowed a tight smile, knowing it was expected of him. “My special-projects director was instrumental in learning the amount of the French bid.”

“Nothing too illegal, I hope.” The lawyer tried to make light of industrial espionage.

The president of Kohl AG said nothing. In his devotion to the company’s fiscal strength, very little was beyond his scope, and he would not make jokes about his business practices. An uncomfortable silence stretched for ten seconds. Wurmbach stripped off his glasses to avoid Raeder’s stare but he could not hide his bitterness toward the man financial magazines called
Überkind
. Superboy.

When Kohl’s previous president announced his retirement eighteen months ago, Reinhardt Wurmbach had worked tirelessly to become his replacement. It was to be his reward for twenty-seven years of loyalty. And yet Anna and Konrad had passed him over in favor of Raeder, an outsider who had amassed a personal fortune buying up marginal companies in the former East Germany and making them profitable in record time. The sting of reporting to this handsome forty-year-old interloper was something Wurmbach had not come to grips with. And yet he couldn’t fault the growth Kohl, one of the fifty largest companies in Europe, had enjoyed in Raeder’s brief tenure.

“You all know why I wanted to see you today,” Raeder said to cut the silence. The six members present represented the core of the board and sixty percent of the company’s stock. Collectively, they were Kohl AG. “You are all aware that we are the largest company in Germany yet to cooperate with the reconciliation commission seeking financial compensation for Holocaust survivors and their families. You also know that pressure to turn over documentation for the company’s wartime activities is mounting.

“By stalling for as long as we have, public opinion, which had been ambivalent, has shifted away from our company and our products. Our secrecy has had the unintended effect of severely damaging our reputation. Despite a fifty-percent increase in advertising and marketing, sales are down in nearly every division and most strongly in our heavy-construction business. No one is willing to use us until we are out from under the shadow of our legacy.”

“Not cooperating with the reconciliation commission was your idea,” Wurmbach said and others nodded. “Our losses are your fault.”

The outburst had no effect on Raeder. “And it is a decision I stand by. I would not expose Kohl to billions of marks’ worth of lawsuits until I was satisfied that I knew everything the company did before and during the war. For that, I needed the time to study the old records.”

“It’s inevitable we will have to pay something,” Wurmbach stated. “Before the war, Kohl was just a small ironworks company with less than a hundred employees. Our expansion was due entirely to military and government contracts from the Nazi regime. We profited from the bloodshed just like Seimens, I.G. Farben, Volkswagen, and all the others.”

“And after the war we were a collection of bombed-out factories and ruined equipment,” Raeder replied evenly. “What profits we gained during the war were effectively nullified. Despite evidence to the contrary, many believe that we are the same company now as we were before the war and must be held accountable. I needed to know the full amount of our culpability and thus our liability. Putting a few hundred million marks into the collective pot is a lot different than facing an endless number of individual lawsuits worth billions.” He looked down the table at Ebelhardt and Anna Kohl. “It is my risk-management skills that attracted you to me in the first place. You knew a day of reckoning was coming and you hired me to protect you.”

Anna didn’t deny it. “The question is, can you?”

“Yes.” Raeder saw Anna slump in relief. “For the past twelve months I’ve determined our strategy for minimizing the amount of money we will have to pay. I’ve estimated that a payout of two hundred million marks won’t interfere with our long-term growth while satisfying the commission that we are cooperating.”

A wave of murmurs and sighs washed across the table.

“I arrived at that number after a lot of exhaustive research,” Raeder cut through the dissenting voices. “It’s the very minimum we can get away with.”

“Have you prepared documents that we can give them that will lead them to this figure?” asked Konrad Ebelhardt.

“Everything’s ready now. I’ve had Gunther Rath and his staff gather one hundred thousand pages of correspondence, shipping orders, and the like. It’s all original material, carefully edited so that the commission will determine that we should be responsible for paying roughly a quarter billion marks in reparations.”

“You just said two hundred million.”

“We’ll negotiate down to that number after they have made their findings public. They would be suspicious if we didn’t.”

“How much of our wartime activity are we keeping from them?” Anna asked.

“Very little, actually. Kohl certainly did profit from the use of slave labor at a few factories, but the practice was not as widespread as in many other companies. If it weren’t for one project in particular, I would have felt comfortable disclosing everything to the commission.” Raeder noticed the quick glance between Konrad and Anna. He could even read her lips as she mouthed a single word.
Pandora
.

He paused, waiting to see if Konrad would dismiss the rest of the board. He wasn’t surprised that the chairman did.

“Gentlemen,” Ebelhardt said, looking around the table, “could you please excuse us for a few minutes? Anna and I need to speak with Klaus alone.”

Wurmbach shot Raeder a deadly look as he led the three others toward the door. When they were gone, Anna was the first to speak.

“My father intentionally shielded me from the Pandora Project, Klaus, and I ask you to show me the same courtesy. Please don’t mention specifics in my presence.”

“I can’t believe Volker left any records even remotely connected to Pandora.” Ebelhardt’s face was red with ill-disguised fury. “The damned fool.”

“Konrad! He was my father.”

“Anna, I only read a bare outline of what was involved,” Raeder said, keeping his true sense of horror out of his voice. “Even that little bit was shocking. I have to agree with Konrad. That material should have been destroyed decades ago. God, it shouldn’t have been written down in the first place.”

“We can’t correct past mistakes.” Ebelhardt leaned forward, his sharp eyes boring into Raeder.

“We can bury them though.” Raeder let his statement hang in the air. “All the paperwork linking Kohl to the Pandora Project has been burned but I don’t think that’s enough.”

“What do you propose?”

“I’ve made arrangements to have the original site obliterated and any remaining physical evidence destroyed.”

“How do you know that by going back to” — Ebelhardt glanced at Anna — “by going back there, we won’t give away the secret ourselves? Its location is so remote and has remained undiscovered for more than sixty years.”

“Risk management. Just because we burned our evidence doesn’t mean there isn’t some diary or journal written by somebody involved in Pandora. It could be lying in some musty attic right now, waiting to go off like a time bomb. Our surviving war veterans are all in their seventies and eighties. We can’t chance family members discovering such a written record when they go through their fathers’ possessions. By hiding Pandora from the reconciliation commission now, we have to make certain that even if a diary is discovered, nothing remains to support the story. By destroying the site, all verifiable links to Kohl are severed.”

Konrad looked unconvinced.

“We’re about to lie to the reconciliation commission in order to conceal a despicable crime, and we have to make sure that the lie is never revealed. If the world finds out about Pandora and our involvement in it, Kohl’s bankruptcy will be the last thing on our minds. They would be fully in their right to seek criminal charges against all of us.”