Only Shrieve’s flaring nostrils betrayed his discomfiture; after swallowing deliberately, he asked if she were all right. She said nothing. She waited till the car pulled away to glance back.
The Four Winds Bar was shuttered and dark. The entire stretch of Münterstrasse from the warehouse district to Blauerwasser Bridge looked as if it had been unoccupied for years. Only as they turned the corner did she hear a heavy-lipped German chanteuse singing “My Special Girlfriend.”
She cracked the rear window to hear more clearly. The buttery smell of American cigarettes filled the car.
The fog over the ocean parted in big chunks, like puzzle pieces. And there in the reflected light of the crossed searchlights was the ribbed, silver belly of a great airship, a zeppelin.
She stared as the giant dirigible slid into the gap between two cloud banks, turned northeast toward the Baltic, and faded from this world.
Chapter Five
SHRIEVE WAS UNEASY LEAVING HER ALONE in her apartment for the night. Maybe he was feeling guilty about letting her try the Angle Web. Maybe he was simply worried about Hartmann’s package. Susan couldn’t tell.
He offered to bring her in tonight. They had a room waiting for her at the safe house on Berendstrasse. Susan thanked him, no. She could just see going through this stuff with fifteen post-graduate OSS kids bouncing around till two A.M.
“I’ve been okay for the last three months,” she said. “I’ll be okay one more night.” If she was going to piece this mass of bureaucratic debris into a seamless whole, she needed time to sit in her dilapidated bay window and smoke and think.
“I’ll have a squad of OSS men down here,” he promised her.
“I’ll put up my blackout drapes,” she said.
Shrieve watched her all the way up the stairs. He waited while she fumbled with her keys and then while she got up to her apartment. Susan looked out the bay window to see him frowning at her, ignoring Bogen, who was punching his shoulder, going, Come on.
Susan had inherited her apartment from a girlfriend who had departed for an assignment in Washington. The arrangement was supposed to last a week, just till the Navy could find suitable digs for all its Spookworks. Here she was, three months later.
She put a kettle to boil on the stove. She had an old teapot, salvaged from the collapsed apartment building across the street. She filled it with something the U.S. Army referred to as “Tea, Earl Grey,” and moved her pile of documents over to the window.
She opened it carefully, with a little respect. Whatever was in here had cost the lives of twenty-three scientists and soldiers at Faulkenberg Reservoir—more than that if one included the members of Carl Leder’s Sparrow Group. Maybe these were Germans. It still bothered her—every smiling face in every photograph belonged to a ghost. Every person she saw had died horribly.
Some of this stuff was mystifying—a travel permit from Heinrich Himmler, dated from mid-June, 1942. The big fella had closed the Mittelland Canal—the most important east-west waterway in Germany—for three days during the height of the war. Nobody did that. What could have been more important than moving munitions bound for Russia? And then there was the requisition for 200 kilos of toothpaste. Toothpaste. She just put that one aside.
Some of it was intriguing in its implications. Here was a mathematical treatise from the Opal Group, detailing certain non-Euclidean metrics that had proved successful in the summoning of “Lesser Entities.” No explanation what “Lesser Entities” referred to, but there was an entire subset of figures devoted to sending them back in a hurry should the experimenter grow uneasy about their intentions.
Here were architectural blueprints from the Theodolyte Group, used in the reconstruction of an observatory and ceremonial tower. The designs were credited to a Charles Dexter Ward, late of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A. The blueprints were accompanied by a folder stuffed with photographs. These were dated from 1943 into early 1944.
Susan took them to be some sort of contractor’s proofs. They followed the conversion of a disused reservoir in the Franconian Wald into something sinister. Over the course of the photographs, the shore was subsumed by metal scaffolding, watchtowers, and searchlights.
Near the center rose the jewel-turreted ceremonial tower of Charles Dexter Ward. Susan remembered the original from her Watermark slide show. No one had quite figured out Charles Ward’s tower, except to note that researchers went in periodically, and did not always come back out.
Did that make the tower a weapon to turn around the war? That depended, she supposed, on how many Allied soldiers they thought they could entice inside it.
She found a picture taken from inside the construction area. It showed the tower just as it was finished, and beside it, a squat, turnip-shaped building with a sliding aperture—an astronomical observatory? That at least would explain the requisition for 200 kilos of toothpaste: polishing medium, to buff out precision optical gear.