Pandora's Curse - v4 (50 page)

The pain in his voice stunned everyone, especially Anika. “Are you really that cynical?”

Mercer didn’t answer. Despite his words, he pulled against his shackles with every fiber of his being, his eyes closed so tightly they felt crushed into his skull. He bellowed in rage and frustration and… hopelessness. And with a metallic snap the thick plastic cuffs parted and his hands were free.

For a moment he stared at the cleanly severed ends dangling from his wrists. It wasn’t humanly possible to break these cuffs yet the evidence was right in front of him. How? A miracle? The divine intervention of the gods telling him he’d missed the point of the Pandora myth?

Klaus Raeder was the only person who could see what Mercer had done and he gaped. “How did you do that?”

Mercer looked upward in an age-old glance of reverence to a higher power. That’s how he spotted a spectral figure standing on the grating above him with a fire ax in his hands. He was dressed in black with silver hair and a beard that approached his waist. Understanding dawned immediately. “Father Vatutin?”

“Da.”
Vatutin lifted the hatch and moved down the steps. The others began to cheer when they heard what was happening.

Mercer massaged his wrists. “I’m not complaining, but how did you know?”

“I see a Buddhist monk near dining room when I go in for supper.” Vatutin’s English was terrible. “I see him check expensive Swiss watch that no monk can own. I look more closely. Not monk but man made to look like monk. I follow. You knocked out by blond woman and brought here. I hide. Then more people brought here and I see Erwin. I wait until guard posted at door turns away and use blunt edge of ax.”

Mercer got to his feet and shook the Orthodox priest’s hand. “You have no idea what I was thinking when the cuffs broke.”

Vatutin touched the heavy cross resting on his chest. “I know what you think.”

The two began to release the others. Anika smiled when Mercer reached her. “I told you that there’s always hope.”

“Thanks for the reminder.” Mercer was chagrined.

Vatutin and Erwin Puhl embraced for a long time after the priest learned Igor Bulgarin was dead.

“I’m gonna start calling you Pessimism Man from now on,” Ira Lasko said to Mercer when he was freed. “That thing about hope being in the box was a good point. Just promise me it’s your last death-row revelation.”

“I promise.” Mercer took the weapons Vatutin had liberated from the guard: a silenced H&K P9S automatic pistol and a compact MP-5 submachine gun also fitted with a long silencer. “Now it’s time to put an end to this nightmare.”

“Any ideas?” Marty asked.

“That all depends on Herr Raeder.” Mercer looked down at him since they had yet to cut his bonds. “How about it? You willing to help?”

“I told you earlier that I wanted to destroy the boxes. It is Rath who wants to sell them.”

“Does he have a buyer?”

“Libya.”

Shit!
“And when this is over you’re going to make full restitution?”

“Yes.”

Mercer had a hard time believing such a quick answer. “Because you got caught?”

“Because I was wrong,” Raeder countered. “Think what you like of me, Dr. Mercer, but I am not a monster. I am a businessman. A capitalist. Being an American, you should understand. My personal beliefs had nothing to do with my decision to conceal Kohl’s past. And no matter how much my company pays, I don’t believe full restitution can ever be paid to the victims of the Holocaust.”

“I don’t trust you but I also don’t have a choice,” Mercer hissed. An ax stroke severed Raeder’s plastic cuffs. “What are the security arrangements on this ship?”

“The pope’s Swiss Guards are in charge of the Convocation’s delegates and the
Sea Empress
has personnel of her own. About twenty, I think. I recognized several of them as part of Gunther Rath’s special-projects department. They’re his people, like those at the Greenland base. They won’t listen to me.”

“Who did you speak to when Rath needed permission to board?”

“The captain,” Raeder answered at once. “He wouldn’t let Rath approach the ship until he heard I was on the boat from the
Njoerd.
He doesn’t know that I am Rath’s prisoner. No one does.”

“So he’ll listen to you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Once we reach the captain, will Rath make a stand or try to run?” Mercer said, thinking aloud.

“Neither option’s too good,” Ira said. “The world’s religious leaders are on this ship. If Rath opens that box the repercussions are going to be bloody. Every fanatic in the planet would use their deaths as an excuse for holy war.”

“But who will die if we let him run with the box and can’t catch him again?”

“We’ll get him.” Ira Lasko considered leaving it at that, but he continued, his voice tinged with guilt. He edged Mercer away from the others for privacy. “Get me to a working phone and I guarantee that Rath won’t make it fifty miles from the
Sea Empress.
”

The confidence in Ira’s statement made everything suddenly clear to Mercer. The fury was like an explosion ten times more powerful than Greta Schmidt’s knee to the crotch. “You’re working with the goddamned CIA, aren’t you?”

Ira nodded. “I’m sorry, Mercer,” he said, meaning it.

“That fucker Charlie Bryce set me up.”

“You were my backup in case something went really wrong.”

“I can’t believe this!” And then Mercer thought it through and he could believe it. Who better to back up an agent on a scientific expedition than a scientist? His name wasn’t unknown in various government circles, including the CIA. It all made perfect sense in a compartmentalized, need-to-know sort of way. “You were after the boxes for our military.”

“Failing that, I was to make sure no one else got them. Personally, I was more than happy to see them sunk when the rotor-stat went down. Listen, I am really sorry about this. I would have told you if I could, but I was briefed personally by Director Barnes himself.”

“Christ,” Mercer spat. He’d met Paul Barnes a few times before and thought the CIA director was an ass. He tried to run his hands through his hair, and his fingers met naked skin. This only fueled his anger. “How the hell did the government know about the boxes and why didn’t you go after them years ago?”

“We didn’t know where the cavern was other than Greenland. That information came from documents brought to the States in the 1940s by German rocket scientists stationed at Peenemunde with Werner Von Braun. They’d been working on a Nazi plan to load V-2s with meteorite fragments and irradiate London. The scientists only knew that the meteor would be coming directly from Greenland’s east coast aboard a submarine.”

“Of course the sub never arrived and the Germans shelved the Pandora Project.”

“Right,” Ira said. “After the war, our Air Force learned about it from the Operation Paperclip scientists we were using for our early rocket program. They considered the Pandora radiation as a potential American weapon and established Camp Decade, in part, as a base to search for the cavern. After a few years of searching — too far south it turns out — the brass gave up, stating that the whole thing had been a pipe dream of Hitler’s and wasn’t true.”

Mercer recalled his conversation with Elisebet Rosmunder and how she’d asked if he knew why the U.S. government wanted to build an under-ice city like Camp Decade. Now he knew the answer. He let the anger wash out of him so he could concentrate on what Ira was saying.

“Shoot ahead sixty years, and all of a sudden, Kohl Industries is buying Geo-Research and planning to establish an Arctic research base close to where the cavern was supposed to be. The old documents hinted that Kohl was involved with the Pandora Project in some capacity, though there was nothing definitive, nothing we could use in a courtroom. Unwilling to take the chance that they knew something we didn’t, the CIA scrambled to have their base moved to our old site to throw them off.”

“That whole thing with the Danish government that Charlie Bryce told me the Surveyor’s Society engineered?”

“Was actually a CIA operation to get me to Greenland,” Ira said. “I was brought in to keep an eye on Geo-Research in case the cavern turned out to be real and they tried to find it. There’s a military strike team waiting in Iceland in case we needed them to stop Kohl.”

“So you weren’t a chief in the Navy?”

“My naval experience was why I was sent.”

“Of course!” Mercer exclaimed. “They knew a submarine was involved and wanted a man who had the proper background. That’s how you’re such an expert on the type VII U-boat.”

“Before leaving for Greenland, I spent two weeks at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry going over the U-505 they have on display. As to being a chief, well, I used to work on subs, but then switched to intelligence work. I retired as deputy chief of Naval Intelligence. My rank was admiral.”

“And the bit about owning a truck stop in Connecticut?”

“My father’s place. I grew up working there. My brother runs it now. In reality, I live about twenty miles from your brownstone and work in the White House for the president’s national security advisor.”

A piece of the puzzle was still missing. “I assume you had Marty’s military friend called away for active duty, but what the hell did you need me for?”

“Jim Kneeland, yes,” Ira answered. “We felt the fewer people at Camp Decade the better. We would have excluded Marty too if we could have come up with a better cover story to get me close to Geo-Research. Bringing you in was Director Barnes’s idea. While I have a background in subs and intelligence, he wanted someone who knew science but not one of the pencil necks from Langley’s technical-support division. When he showed me your dossier and I read that article about you in
Time
magazine, I knew you’d be perfect.”

“So I have you to thank?”

“No need to show your gratitude with a gift or anything. A card will be fine.”

They drifted back toward the others. “When we get out of this, you’re going to get a pounding,” Mercer said but already his anger toward Ira was abating. Paul Barnes, on the other hand, was going to pay. “Well, Agent Lasko, what do you propose?”

Ira turned deadly serious. “We have Rath contained on the
Sea Empress,
but we can’t risk him nuking these people.”

Mercer agreed. The Universal Convocation had to be protected at all costs. The men and women on this ship represented the hopes and dreams of billions of people. “We have to flush him out so we can take him at sea.”

“How? All Rath has to do is threaten to open the box and everyone on the ship is his hostage.”

Mercer shook his head. “He knows that he can’t win a hostage situation. No one ever does.”

“So what do you suggest? We’d be in for one hell of a mess if we alert the Swiss Guards. They’d probably make the situation worse in their zeal to protect the pope.”

“You’re right about the Guards not being an option, which means we’re on our own. Remember that Raeder said the ship’s security men are in Rath’s pocket. We have to get him to escape from the
Sea Empress
the way he came.”

“His boat is with the larger launches next to the marina I think you were hiding in,” Klaus Raeder offered.

“And Greta said Rath’s on the bridge,” Anika added.

Mercer had gone quiet, his eyes out of focus. Suddenly his features sharpened and he grinned wickedly. “I can think of only one way to get Rath to leave the ship without him feeling directly threatened. Actually, I can think of another way, but I doubt the seven of us could get the ship to start sinking.”

Anika and Ira exchanged startled looks and regarded Mercer as if he’d lost his mind. “Thank God you’re not thinking that,” she said. “So what is your idea?”

“Simple. We hijack the
Sea Empress
ourselves.”

B
efore Mercer launched into his explanation, Ira suggested that Anatoly Vatutin’s cabin would be a better place to talk. Mercer gave him the MP-5 to tuck under his robes. He took point when they exited the machinery room, the pistol held behind his back with a round in the chamber. They left the guard Vatutin had dispatched behind a large hydro pump. Ira walked the drag slot, moving backward so they couldn’t get jumped. Because it was so late at night, the
Sea Empress
was running with just a skeleton crew on the bridge and fortunately no one in the engineering spaces. Mercer found an elevator after a few minutes, and they ascended to Vatutin’s deck. Moments later, they piled into the priest’s room.

“So far so good.” Anika smiled with relief.

“Hear out my plan before you have me committed,” Mercer said when they were settled. He ticked his fingers as he counted their options. “We can’t stay here until the ship docks because Rath will organize a room-to-room search once he realizes we’ve escaped. Even with Raeder’s help, we can’t approach the captain because Rath’s people are likely watching him. The Swiss Guards are out because they’ll probably turn us over to ship’s security, i.e., Rath. We could try to find a satellite phone belonging to one of the reporters covering the Convocation, but there are two thousand cabins to check and we’d be stopped long before we found one. And finally we can’t risk a direct confrontation with Rath in case he opens the box.

“Does everyone agree so far?” Mute nods. “Okay, to get Rath off the ship we have to make him think escaping is a better option than remaining on board. To do that we either sink the
Sea Empress
or create a situation where he feels just threatened enough to want to leave. That’s where we come in.”

“By pretending to be hijackers?”

“It’s going to put the Swiss Guards on full alert and distract some of Rath’s people. Rath will figure out what’s going on but he can’t say anything without compromising himself. It would be easier for him to cut his losses rather than fight us. He’ll let the Swiss Guards and the ship’s regular security detail handle that.”

“Why wouldn’t he just hang around until his goons kill us all?” Marty asked.

“Rath can pretend the solar max has shut down the ship’s communications but when we fire the first shot every reporter with an independent satellite uplink will be calling in the scoop. In hours, the
Empress
will be swarming with choppers and motor launches from Iceland. Rath would be trapped.”