With that, she strode back out the door, leaving the Variants in an amused silence for several long moments — until Maggie spoke.
“She’s got to be one of us.”
“Excuse me?” Danny asked.
Maggie tilted her head toward the door. “Mrs. Stevens — she’s a Variant. No other explanation why you’d have that woman handling weapons and gear like that. She was proud of this stuff. I think she helped make it, and I think from the look of her, it’s kind of new to her.”
Danny smiled at Maggie, revealing nothing. “Mrs. Stevens has been a great addition to our technical services department. She’s a genius with chemistry and engineering.”
Frank narrowed his eyes a bit. “Why don’t you put her on the big science project down at Area 51?”
At this, Danny grew serious. “She’s not cleared for that, Frank, and neither are you.”
“But if she’s a genius, why not?” Ellis asked.
Danny sat down with the others and took a deep breath. “What you saw there — and I know Frank told you what he saw in Berlin — is one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. It’s also still one of the most mysterious and dangerous. If Mrs. Stevens is a Variant — and I’m not saying officially whether she is or isn’t — she could never be the one to figure out how it works. Not with folks like Jim Forrestal looking over her shoulder. Understand?”
The others look confused, but Cal caught his meaning fast. “If the Variants are the ones who figure it out, then the government’s afraid it won’t be able to control it — or us,” he said. “It’s got to be the normal folk. Otherwise, people gonna get real nervous.”
“Exactly,” Danny said.
Frank smiled a bit. “You basically confirmed just now that there are other Variants on the payroll, you know.”
Danny fixed him with a hard look. “You’re hearing what you want to hear, Frank. And you didn’t hear it from me. Now… let’s go over that ops plan one more time and see where these new toys will fit into some of the contingencies.”
With a chorus of groans, the team opened up their file folders. Again.
18
The Topkapi Palace had been home to the Ottoman sultans for more than four centuries and looked every inch the palace of pashas and moguls to Frank’s eyes.
“Sultans. Sultans ruled the Ottoman Empire until 1922, when Turkey became a republic under Ataturk. Pashas and moguls are from India,” corrected the voice of Ibrahim Irkan, a Turkish historian and antiquarian who’d died two nights earlier, Frank at his bedside. Ibrahim knew much of the history of the Middle East, given the Ottomans’ involvement in it, and it was determined that Frank knowing Turkish — and Arabic as well — might come in handy.
Ibrahim was also the twelfth person Frank watched over and took memories from. Mostly he felt fine, but every now and then, there was a feeling in his head — like the tiny, dull background headache you’d get from being a bit dehydrated — that told him it just might be getting crowded in there.
Retention wasn’t the problem, he mused as he idly watched the assembled dignitaries in the gold-glittering, blue-tiled Imperial Hall of the palace’s harem. Frank had gotten to the point where he could definitely retain what he wanted and, to put it bluntly, toss out the leftovers. Doing so felt almost sacrilegious, but he was starting to feel as though he had no choice. The memory games were running their course — he was increasingly feeling like he needed more space to file away new incoming information.
Oh, and he’d still have to deal with the voices anyway. They only chimed in when appropriate — as Frank needed their expertise — but occasionally he felt like they were… hoping… to be called upon. Lined up, waiting.
Frank took a sip of club soda and sighed. That champagne looked good. It was a ’34 Dom Perignon, and there was an idle whisper in his head — Frank didn’t even know who it was from at this point — which sounded excited about that. Waiters wearing turbans and other presumably Turkish dress rotated among the guests under the vaulted dome of the room. Along the sides, separated into alcoves and hallways by columns, small groups gathered to talk away from the string quartet playing. Opposite them, the heads of the US and Israeli delegations sat on a tufted bench once reserved for the sultan himself. The Soviet delegation was off to the right, chatting animatedly with robed diplomats from some Arab nation or another.
“That one is Jordanian. The other is Palestinian,” Ibrahim whispered.
“Fine,” Frank muttered between sips.
In the middle of the room, General Vandenberg was talking and laughing with his opposite number from the Soviet Union, a fellow flyboy from the looks of his elaborate uniform. Two steps behind and to the right of Vandenberg was Cal, dressed as an Air Force NCO and scanning the room idly, a Handie-Talkie attached to his belt. Cal was probably more adept at subtlety than Ellis, but there was one thing about Cal that stuck out like a sore thumb — the color of his skin. And the Turks were barely more enlightened toward Negroes than Americans, so Cal had little choice but to accept the role of valet/guard.
Shame that, because Cal had the makings of a fine operative, at least to Frank, whereas Ellis…
“And that’s when I told him the whiskey was in the cabinet!” Ellis finished, leaving the circle around him in stitches.
He took another healthy sip of champagne, orders be damned. If he was going to be the assigned distraction, he might as well have a little fun with it. Shit, one of Danny’s backup plans was having Ellis make a drunken scene, so he might as well get a little into character, right?
“You are most charming!” exclaimed one of the Russians, a bald, fat man in an ill-fitting suit with a large tumbler of vodka in his hand. “You Americans, you can be so dull sometimes at these events!”
Ellis lifted his glass, and the two men toasted. “Well, the war’s over, my friend. Figure if we don’t loosen up now, we’ll be back at it before long. Hell, I think we gotta get Stalin and Truman over to my house in Alabama and have some drinks on the porch. We’ll get things ironed out in no time!” More laughter, more toasting, and Ellis could see a few otherwise bored delegates wander over curiously. “Maybe the Jews and Arabs can join us, too! Everybody come on down to my place and let’s get things squared, all right?”
Ellis thrust his glass up to address the building crowd around him, only to realize he wasn’t holding anything anymore except wet liquid, which immediately splashed to the floor. Aw, hell. Not now!
Surreptitiously — using a maneuver Mulholland had taught him — Ellis withdrew a small sherry glass from his pocket and let it fall. The loud shatter prompted those in his circle of partygoers to step back almost as one. Moreover, it hid the fact that his own drinking glass had spontaneously transmuted to water while he was holding it.
“Oh, no! Oh, I’m so sorry!” Ellis cried, looking around for help even as three turbaned waiters came rushing forward, one with a broom and dustpan at the ready. Another immediately replaced his disappeared champagne glass with a full one. “Oh, thank you! My, these boys here are thorough. So sorry, everyone. Perhaps that whiskey was so good, the memory of it got me a little tipsy.”
That defused the tension quite nicely, and Ellis’s large circle laughed once more. The more senior fellows — the ones in the uniforms or with nicer suits — were still talking with one another, but he could see more eyes his way. Sure, some of them looked annoyed at his American boorishness, but they were looking, which meant he was doing his job. It also meant they weren’t looking at Maggie.