"Fuck you."
Fritz grinned, still reading.
The shadows in his cabin were dancing. An odd light was glimmering through the porthole. Hart stood to look. "Fire," he announced. "They're burning the bodies."
Fritz came over to join him and looked out at the pyre on the beach. Fueled by aviation gasoline, the flames roared skyward with greasy black smoke, the light shining on the water.
"Heiden must have decided to do it at night and get it out of the way before it could affect morale," Hart speculated. "I tell you, it makes me feel better to see their diseased bodies cremated like that."
"Yes," said Fritz. "And worse to know your girlfriend still has bits of them on board our ship here."
Hart ignored the sarcasm. "I want to know what they're doing with those cultures."
"Careful, my friend. It's when you know too much that you get into trouble in the Third Reich."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hart brooded. The flames were dying down. The diary lay open on his bunk where Fritz had left it before retiring. Two survived. What did that mean? He didn't trust Jürgen Drexler. He wanted to talk to Greta.
What were the words Fritz had used to describe her? Yes, he remembered now: your girlfriend. Was his interest in Greta so transparent? Had he unwittingly entered into some competition with Drexler that he was destined to lose? Conflicting impulses tore at him. He realized he was beginning to lose his certainty about why he was here, about what his role was.
He slipped into the corridor. The ship was quiet, everyone exhausted from the events of the past three days. He made his way to Greta's cabin and rapped softly. "Greta?" There was no answer. Maybe she was asleep. Maybe she was ignoring him. He stood, undecided. Wasn't the diary's news important? He tried the knob.
Her cabin was empty. Guiltily, he glanced about. It was neat, impersonally so. There were no photographs, no decoration. A white nightgown hung on a closet hook, the room's sole concession to femininity. That, and its scent of perfume. The bed was made, its blanket displaying a military tautness. Hart swallowed. Was she with Drexler?
He eased the door shut again. Just go back to sleep, he told himself.
But answers might be in her laboratory. Maybe she was still working.
He moved quickly down a ladder and along a passageway. The laboratory had no lock but someone had posted a crude sign on the cabin door. ENTRY FORBIDDEN. There was a skull and crossbones drawn above. Plain enough, Hart thought, but he knocked anyway. There was no answer. He tried the knob and it opened. The laboratory was dim, lit by two lamps on a center table. No one was there.
She's with Jürgen, he thought again.
The awful certainty of it made him reckless. To hell with German rules and secrets. He slipped inside, closed the door, and flicked on the main light. He wanted to know. Know as much as Jürgen Drexler did.
The laboratory was as neat as her cabin, but crowded. Two microscopes on a bench. Shelves with formaldehyde jars ranked like soldiers, filled with fresh organisms she'd netted from the sea. Notebooks similarly cased, and neatly labeled. A large storage locker beyond, stacked with nets and buckets and oilskins and rubber boots. And on a table in the center were rows of covered glass dishes. Petri dishes, she'd called them. Each half filled with a golden gelatin and labeled. Some on ice, some on a hot plate, some under the lamps, some covered by dark cloth. Her cultures. None of them looked like anything to him. Had she failed?
He heard voices and footsteps. Her feminine tone, so unique on the ship, and then Drexler's. Low and anxious. Both coming this way. He doused the main light and looked around in a panic of potential embarrassment. He quickly retreated to the shadow of the storage locker and slipped behind the hanging oilskins.
The door swung open and Drexler stalked in, looking impatient. Greta followed, her face tight. They were fully clothed, Hart noticed immediately: in the same outfits they'd worn at the after-dinner meeting. Relief washed over him. She'd never gone to bed.
"I understand your concern, Greta," Drexler said tiredly, taking out a gauze mask from a box and handing it to her, then tying on one of his own. Both pulled on rubber gloves. "But the expedition is in crisis and the risk is acceptable. This is the kind of discovery that can make your career back in Germany. That can change your life. Our life."
"Or end it, Jürgen. I think we're playing with fire here."
"We have a chance to use this like fire, as a tool. For Germany. For advancement." He bent over the petri dishes. "It's encouraging they grew so fast. Which ones?"
She pointed, unenthusiastically. "There. And there and there."
He held one to the light. "Just white dots."
"Each speck is a colony. Enough, presumably, to kill us all."
"If you are careless."
"And it is me, isn't it, Jürgen? I who have to culture a plague. I who have to safeguard it. This isn't a proper laboratory. It's crazy, bringing this aboard."
"It's only temporary until we know what we're dealing with." He put the dish down and laid a hand on her shoulder. "Greta, listen to me. Norway will be breathing fire over that unfortunate… incident with the whaler. They'll be in full cry, demanding compensation, boldly asserting their claims. It was critical we find something that would offset that irritation— throw the expedition in a positive light. Now God has put that something in our grasp— an organism unlike any other, a bacterium that seems to kill with a speed and lethality that makes other plagues look like a common cold! And you are the key scientist. All of us are depending on you. You alone are going to know how to culture this thing, how to study it. The world's expert on… what? I don't know. Maybe we'll even name it after you."
"What an honor." Her voice was sarcastic.
"Or not, whatever you wish. My point is that to simply burn the corpses and sail away would be even crazier. Perhaps we can stop a future plague with our discovery. Make this island safe for a base. Understand a new polar biology. Greta, we're doing the right thing."
"Then why the spores? Why does Schmidt care about the spores?"
"He's a scientist, like you."
"No he isn't. He's a doctor and hardly even that— a quack pathologist— cracking open those Norwegians' chest cavities like a greedy coroner to look for spore coats. Why?"
"To understand the biology. To locate the source."
"I'm not stupid, Jürgen."
"To learn, Greta."
She shook her head. "I read the literature. I know what a government could do with the right plague bacteria…"
"Like the British in Scotland?"
"With a spore-coated microbe…"
"Like the British and anthrax? Their sly little experiments, on the possible eve of war?"
"You don't know that for sure…"
"I know far, far more about such matters than you'll ever know." He failed to keep a note of condescension out of his voice. "Greta, you're a good biologist, but you're as naive about politics as that ill-educated American. The Great Powers want to crush the Reich, darling. Crush it. Before it grows too strong. Because we represent the future. And if something like this can buy us time…"
"Don't talk about him like that."
"Who?"
"Owen. He's good at what he does and yet you always mock him, insult him."
"He's nosy and contentious. And you always flirt with him."
"That's a lie! You're so insecure…"