But this photo presented a deeper mystery. Beyond tower and observatory lurked something so large she presumed it to be the shadow of some mountain beyond the camera’s vantage. But the light angles were all wrong. One picture was taken at midday, yet this one shadow continued to cross it in the background.
Susan’s photographer’s loupe was not much help. All the photos from Faulkenberg Reservoir were grainy and vaguely fogged, as if they had suffered some microwave penetration. The shadow appeared blurry even when the foreground was clear.
She shuffled through Hartmann’s paperwork for anything that might allude to the giant thing in the distance. Nothing did, save a single note dated in the spring of 1938. This was a geologist’s report of the rock being excavated on the shore to uncover an artifact of unknown age and origin.
The rock it was embedded in was 160 million years old. They had been digging it up with tons of dynamite, and were in fact asking for more. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t made of leaded crystal. She tagged it with a paper clip and moved on.
At the bottom of the stack, there was a note tossed in, apparently as an afterthought. Her eyes were burning by this time, and her bladder was full of tea.
One more little bit, she promised herself, and then you can dump this all on Charley Shrieve in the morning.
She thought at first she was reading a personal note. It was handwritten, in an elegant and self-conscious penmanship. In fact, it was a directive to Carl Leder’s Sparrow Group. Leder was to increase the daily total of translated pages from the Kufic source manuscript into modern German. Special emphasis was to be placed on cataloguing the attributes of the Great Old Ones—their estimated mass, physical size, and surface temperature.
The note threatened “consumption” if Leder’s group failed. Susan felt a little prickle down the back of her neck as she read this.
She saw crimson eyes gleaming from just beyond a battered doorway. She swallowed something as hard as a stone. She heard a rattling sound, like a wasp batting at a window—surprise, it was the paper in her hand. Imagine that.
In the kitchen, the last tea water of the evening was coming to a boil. She thought to go take it off the stove, but something told her that if she got up now, she would never finish this particular note.
It took all her strength to read down to the bottom. It took more to read the eloquent hand that finished it off. It was the signature of a movie star, a man who wrote with an eye toward archivists a hundred years from now.
Yours Truly, it read, Stürmbannführer Krzysztof Malmagden.
Chapter Six
SHE STUMBLED DOWN THE STAIRS, still full of dreams of Russian Rockets. She almost didn’t see the two guys Shrieve had left across the street from her.
A car door opened up. She heard someone call out to her. “Hey, Green Eyes.” It was Dale Bogen, of course. Determined to be annoying. Perhaps using his hand grenade had gone a bit far? She walked on down the street as he tried out Sue, and then Suzy (Suzy! Oh, God). She’d never had a little brother. Even though he meant to be annoying, she found the experience rather novel. Was this what her girlfriends complained about? The car crept along behind her while Bogen worked his way up through “Princess.”
About the time he got around to “Miss,” she climbed in.
The Watermark group worked out of a two-story walk-up on Berendtstrasse. It was not a safe house in the classic sense. It had no false floors to kick out in case of a Gestapo raid. The wireless was on the kitchen table, rather than hidden away in a closet. Even this was going away as soon as telephone service was restored in Kiel’s waterfront district.
But it smelled right—that combination of homemade soup and gun oil and perfume and old socks. Every time Susan walked in, she closed her eyes and remembered all the little houses she had passed through during the last two years, the people she had known, the ones she would not see again.
The kitchen was in its mealtime hubbub. A couple of kids younger than Susan were arguing about how much garlic went into the communal omelet they were cooking.
The omelet filled a warped cookie pan from side to side. Pete DeLeone was scraping a mound of crushed cloves into the center of the morass. Young Betty Sharpe, his mentor and his tormentor, was offering the opinion that garlic was not, strictly speaking, a noontime sort of herb.
“I’ve got an appointment with a British Rear Admiral at two,” she said. “We’re going to be driving around the waterfront for most of the afternoon, in the back seat of a Very Small British Staff Car.” She leaned over his shoulder, just so there was no missing her serious eye contact.
Pete DeLeone scraped off another stinking mound and brushed his hands over the omelet. “Now you won’t have to stop for lunch,” he said, smiling agreeably.