He could hear the others jogging behind him to keep up, and part of him knew he should’ve ordered them back — should’ve gone back into the darkness of the machine room himself to think things through, to plan better, to do more reconnaissance. All his Army training, his training at Groom Lake, was firmly shoved into a very dark, silent corner of his mind.
Hands grasped at his shoulders and arms, but he shook them off. Then someone stepped directly in front of him, causing him to gasp.
“Frank, we need to get you out of here now!” Danny whispered, his face a mask of anger.
The others, apparently having paid more attention to their surroundings, had already turned back toward the equipment room, moving as fast as they could without attracting noticed. But Frank wasn’t going anywhere. Finally, he broke his stare and looked Danny in the eye.
“You know who that guy is.” It wasn’t a question.
“I know. I’ll explain everything. But let’s step outside,” Danny said, his eyes softening a moment. “Frank, you can’t be here.”
“That man is a goddamn Nazi!” Frank hissed. “Why should I listen to you?”
Danny put both hands on Frank’s shoulders. “Because I’m not one of them, Frank. I’m one of you.”
“What?”
“There’s something you need to know. I’m a Variant too.”
15
Maggie Dubinsky’s biggest secret — and she had a lot of them these days — was that even though she was under strict orders never to use her Enhancement outside of officially sanctioned MJ-12 exercises, she was always using it.
Always. Almost constantly for the past two weeks now.
How could she not? For one, she’d gotten pretty good at sensing the emotional state of those around her. Was that part of her Enhancement? Danny didn’t seem to think so; he thought she was simply better at reading people now. It was a theory that admittedly carried a little weight; for one, she didn’t feel the same kind of… surge… inside her that she did when actually changing emotions.
But she was still scary good at it, and the better she got, the more the line between observation and manipulation blurred. After figuring out what people were feeling, she found herself tweaking them in one direction or another — subtly, oh so very subtly, of course — as her control increased. Around Maggie, a good day got just a little better, and a bad day could always get a little worse. It was nothing, really. It was easy. And they were just… people.
Right now, Maggie was doing her best to ensure Frank Lodge didn’t have a worse day than he already did, because it was clear to her that he was already on one hell of an edge, pacing the floor of the mess hall like a caged tiger. She knew when someone was about to pop, and it took a fair amount of effort on her part to keep him anywhere close to even-keeled.
“You mean to tell me, Commander, that Harry S. Truman himself allowed this sick, sorry bastard into this country? He ought to hang! He’s a goddamn Nazi! He had Gestapo and SS guys saluting him under the goddamn Reich Chancellery. I saw it myself!”
Danny was also trying to keep it together but in a different way. Maggie could tell he agreed with Frank but couldn’t say so. And speaking of secrets, Danny had unleashed a doozy. And yet they hadn’t yet bothered to ask him about whatever Enhancement he had, because Frank was still moments away from a murderous rampage.
“Frank, I know. Kurt Schreiber was a top-level guy in the Nazi science department. He personally briefed Hitler on some things, though he says it was the other way around, and that he was just following Hitler’s orders,” Danny replied. “But you now know what we have in there, and you know firsthand how dangerous it is. Schreiber knows this stuff better than anyone else on the planet. Better than anyone, Frank. And so we brought him over to help.”
Frank looked ready to rip Danny’s head clean off. “You don’t play forgive and forget with the Nazis!” Frank barked. “I don’t care how much they know. Torture him until you get all the information you need and then leave him for dead. In fact, I’ll even sit with him as he goes, so we get every scrap of intel out of his sick brain.”
“We’re better than that, Frank! He spent a full year at Nuremburg!” Danny shot back. “And let me tell you, we weren’t exactly kind to him there.” Danny stopped, fists clenched at his sides. “We need him. And frankly, that should be enough for you.”
Frank continued to pace, while the others sat at one of the tables with cups of bad coffee in front of them. Once Danny had hustled them out of the science building — with that… thing… inside it — he personally drove them back to their little barbed wire playpen, where he dressed down the guards for failing the “exercise” and called for double watches until further notice. It was a smooth move on his part, and Maggie could tell without even using her Enhancement that Danny was worried — he wanted to spare them any discipline for their little adventure.
After that, only Cal had the wherewithal to think about making coffee. “These kind of talks at two in the morning, you need beer. But we ain’t got beer, so we’ll do coffee,” he said as he puttered around with Smitty’s coffee urn. Ellis merely sat, arms folded, staring at Danny intently, as if he could rip into his soul with X-ray vision or something. Maggie could tell Ellis was surprised and angry and very, very curious.
She couldn’t take Frank’s pacing any more, though. “Frank, please, sit down,” she said, trying to push a little more calm his way. Grudgingly, he stopped, shook his head, and plopped down onto a bench. Good boy. “Now, Danny, I think you need to start at the beginning. And tell us what your Enhancement is.”
Danny smiled wearily and took the seat across from her, away from Frank, and accepted the coffee Cal slid toward him. “Well, those two things are related, Maggie. The beginning, of course, was August 6, 1945. You remember that day?”
“Hiroshima?” she asked.
He nodded. “That’s the same day, in fact, that Frank got his ability. He knows this because he stumbled into a shit-show in Berlin and was captured by a cell of underground Nazis who’d somehow anticipated the whole thing.”
“How did they know?” Frank demanded. “You’re now pals with the same guy who was in charge that day in Berlin. How did they know?”
Danny frowned. “Frank, I’m not sure I even understand it. The Nazis did a lot of really questionable experiments in a lot of areas we would’ve considered pseudoscience at best, occultism at worst. Schreiber was one of ’em.” Danny stopped and closed his eyes a moment, realizing his slip. “Fuck. Don’t fucking repeat that name to anybody.”
“We won’t,” Maggie soothed. Focus. “Go on.”
“So, that vortex you saw in there… there was another one in Berlin — Frank knows that because he was there. Schreiber knew something would happen because the Gestapo still had a few moles in Washington, and he thought the sudden release of energies would create some sort of anomaly. And he was right. It created two.”
“Berlin and… Hiroshima?” Cal asked.
Danny nodded. “Why there were two… a fissure in what… we don’t know. The vortices emitted several dozen streams of strange radiation and signaling for several days after. That signaling strength has reduced significantly, but they’re still throwing off a string now and then. And that’s how people become Variants, by somehow absorbing these streams. Again, why us? We don’t know. We’re studying it.”