Langley felt that the old lady was letting her guard down a little but nevertheless he knew he had to tread carefully. Perching on the edge of a similarly patterned armchair to the sofa, he leaned forward and in a soft voice asked; “Mrs Braun, you said ‘after all he had seen’. What did you mean by that?”
She looked at him, collecting her thoughts. “When the Japs dropped their bombs on Pearl Harbour in ’41, Emmett was only fifteen years old. We were childhood sweethearts, you know.” Langley smiled warmly. “I begged him not to, but he insisted on signing up. He joined the navy so that he could go off and help our boys in the Pacific. I know what you’re going to say — fifteen wasn’t old enough,” she pre-empted. “But Emmett wasn’t the only lad to forge his papers back then. Some did it in the pursuit of glory, others, like Emmett heard the call of duty. And the admissions office was willing to overlook the glaring forgeries if it meant getting troops on the front lines. That,” she concluded, “was the strength of his sense of duty, Mister Langley.”
“Admirable,” he replied. Coming from a distinguished military background, Langley appreciated such acts of patriotism perhaps more so than the other members of the president’s cabinet.
“In ’43,” Mrs Braun continued, “he was assigned to a brand new ship. He was very excited. Of course, he couldn’t tell me anything about it, but he did say that if tests were successful, it was going to change the tide of the war.” Darkness descended across her features, a twist of anger. “He was never the same after that.”
“That’s when the nightmares began,” Langley realised.
A single tear began to roll down her cheek, the memories of a lifetime ago still raw. “That’s right. He was given six months leave,” she said. “Six months, in the middle of a world war!”
“Was he injured in some way?”
“Not physically.” That was answer enough. The body was far easier to heal than the mind. Langley knew this well. The things he had witnessed, the things he had done, in the name of his country, still gave him nightmares. It was those things that had driven him to his post at the UN in the naive hope of helping to maintain international peace, to prevent the need for such actions to ever come about again.
“When he returned to the navy,” she continued, “he transferred into the medical corp. Years later he was sent to Japan as part of a relief team.” She laughed bitterly. “We drop an A-bomb on their country then to appease our national conscience we sent in a few medical personnel to try and help the victims of the radiation fallout. Hah! It disgusted him, and it disgusts me!” She had an accusatory glint in her eyes as she looked at Langley. A ‘suit’, she’d called him. A policy maker. A guilty party. “He became the world’s foremost expert on radiological illnesses. A few years after the war he left the navy and continued his work on civvy street, but every few years men in suits, just like yours Mister Langley, would show up at the doorstep and whisk him off to one undisclosed location after another, for weeks, months sometimes. And each time he returned he was just a little bit sadder, a little bit… darker. It was like the United States government was slowly, piece by piece, eating away at his soul.”
They sat there in silence for several long moments, the chiming of half a dozen small clocks thundering in Langley’s ears. He could have argued his own innocence, reiterated his UN credentials, but the truth was she was right. The US government had destroyed her husband, piece by piece. He wasn’t the first, and he wouldn’t be the last, and as a representative of that government, Langley’s hands had as much blood on them as anyone’s.
“Mrs Braun,” he said carefully. “I know it was a long time ago, but do you remember the name of the ship your husband served on in ’43?”
“Of course I do,” she snapped. “I’m old, not senile, Mister Langley.” Langley offered an apologetic smile. “You’re no spring chicken yourself, you know” she grumbled, then looked him in the eye as though the next words she said were going to be the defining ones of his life. “USS Eldridge.”
The name immediately sounded familiar to Langley, though he couldn’t quite place why. Then again, in his military career he had set foot upon so many ships in the US Navy that he couldn’t remember all their names.
“Now, if you don’t mind Mister Langley, your five minutes are up.” She rose and gestured him out of the door. Of course, there was no way the frail old lady could make him leave and he still had many questions to ask, but Alex Langley was a gentleman and if the lady wanted him to leave, then leave he would.
He followed her back along the hallway and out on to the porch. But just as the old lady was about the close and lock the door without so much as another word, a question Langley hadn’t planned to ask sprang from his mouth.
“Just one more question, Mrs Braun,” he said urgently just as the door clicked closed. He raised his voice so that she could hear him on the other side. “Did your husband ever mention anything about something called ‘Phoenix’?”
There was a long pause and Langley thought that she couldn’t have heard and had returned to the living room, but then the lock clicked and the door swung open. Whatever frailty had been there previously had now gone. She stared at him, long and hard, deciding something, Langley realised. Then she made her decision.
“Phoenix killed my husband, Mister Langley.”
Langley still had no idea what Phoenix was but he played his hunch. “I think that Phoenix is going to kill a lot of other people too. And I need your help to stop it.”
Another lengthy pause. Another decision reached. Then she opened the door wider and gestured him in. “You’d better come with me.”
45:
The Fires of the Phoenix
Benjamin King’s head throbbed. No, ‘throbbed’ was too kind a word. In reality it felt as if some dark minion of Satan had climbed up through his body and was now sat inside his head thrusting a pneumatic drill into the back of his eyeballs. Each time the computer screen that had sat in front of him all day had flashed onto a new page that little demon upped the power level a notch and thrust deeper.
Now, lying with only a towel wrapped around his waist on the bed in the room he had been allocated with Sid, he lay staring at the ceiling. The sound of running water came from the bathroom where Sid showered. She had ordered him to shower first so that he could get straight into bed and sleep but there was no way he could do so. His mind kept mulling over the events of the last few days, focussing mainly on the last hour or so.
He, Sid and Nadia had locked themselves away inside the office space they had been allocated by the base administrators, surrounded by some of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world, trawling through endless websites ranging from the religious to the fanatic to the absurd. They’d read the museum manifests of everything from the Smithsonian to small private collections; they’d searched databases of myths and legends catalogued by historians and explorers from the days of Herodotus until now, and still they had nothing. No strong leads, no hints about mysterious magical masks that could see the future or travel to it.