Fischer’s bullet had barely grazed Pendergast’s arm, but nevertheless he could feel the warm blood began to trickle down toward his elbow.
Fischer’s voice came from behind the rock. “It seems I’ve underestimated you,” he said. “You’ve managed to make rather a mess of things. What do you plan to do now?”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“One of us is going to die: but it won’t be me. I am armed and uninjured. That little tumble over the side of the boat was an act, as perhaps you’ve guessed.”
“You killed my wife. You must die.”
“She belonged to us, never to you. She was ourcreation. Part of our great project.”
“Your project is dead. Your labs, your base of operations, destroyed. Even your experimental subjects have turned against you.”
“Perhaps. But nothing will kill our dream—the dream of perfecting the human race. It is the greatest—the ultimate—scientific pursuit. If you think this is the end, you are sadly deluded.”
“I greatly fear that youare the deluded one, mein Oberstgruppenführer,” came a voice from behind Pendergast. He turned to see Alban approaching them from the direction of the forest. He was dripping wet, his shirt stained with blood, and one side of his once-handsome face had been dreadfully burned, pink and charred most horribly, the dermis fused in some places, in others the musculature and even bone showing. He held a P38 in one hand.
Alban leapt nimbly onto the third rock and stood there, outlined by the fiery island. Though he was burnt and wounded, he nevertheless moved with the same gazelle-like grace that Pendergast had noted so often before.
“I’ve been looking for you, Herr Fischer,” he said. “I wanted to report that things have not gone exactly as you had planned.” He nodded in the direction of the burning hulk of an island. “As you’ve probably noticed.”
He tossed the pistol from hand to hand as he spoke and gave a strange chuckle. A fey mood seemed to be upon him. “Why don’t you both come out from under those rocks you’re hiding behind, stand up and face each other like men. The endgame will be an honorable one—correct, Herr Fischer?”
Fischer was the first to respond. Without speaking, he climbed up and stood on the rock. Pendergast, after a moment, did likewise. The three men, bathed in the infernal orange glow, faced each other.
Fischer spoke to Alban, his voice bitter. “I blame you even more than your father for this. You failed me, Alban. Utterly. After all I did for you, generations of genetic grooming and perfection, after fifteen years of the most exacting and careful upbringing— thisis how you perform.”
He spat into the water.
“And how didI fail, Herr Fischer?” His voice had a strange, new note in it.
“You failed the final test of your manhood. You had many chances to kill this man, your father, and did not. Because of that, the flower of our youth, the seed that was to sow the Fourth Reich, is scattered. I should shoot you down like a dog.” Fischer’s weapon briefly strayed toward Alban.
“Wait, mein Oberstgruppenführer. I can still kill my father. I’ll do it right now. Watch me. Allow me to shoot him—and restore myself to your good graces.” Alban raised his gun, aiming it at Pendergast.
For a long, freezing moment, the three men stood, points of a triangle, each on one of the three rocks jutting up out of the lake. Alban’s gun was pointed at Pendergast. Pendergast moved his own firearm from Fischer and aimed it at his son.
For agonizing minutes Alban stood there, the two with their weapons pointed at each other, bathed in the hellish glow and thunder of the eruption on the island, the sound of sporadic gunfire in the town.
“Well?” Fischer said at last. “What are you waiting for? It’s as I suspected—you don’t have the guts to shoot.”
“You think not?” Alban asked. Suddenly—quick as a striking snake—he swung his weapon around at Fischer and pulled the trigger. The round struck the man in the gut. He gasped, clutched his belly, and fell to his knees, dropping the gun.
“ You’rethe failure,” Alban said. “Your master plan was flawed—flawed fundamentally. You should never have allowed the defectives to live. I see that now. Having recourse to an organ bank was too high a price to pay for the filial bond you were never able to completely breed out. Youfailed, mein Oberstgruppenführer—and long ago, you taught me what the price of failure must be.”
He aimed the gun again and shot Fischer a second time, square in the forehead. The back of Fischer’s head detached from his body, dissolving in a mist of blood, bone, and brain matter; soundlessly, he fell backward, his body slipping off the rock and disappearing below the surface of the lake.
Pendergast saw that the slide of the P38 had locked back—his son’s magazine was empty.
Alban, too, noticed this. “It would appear I’m out of ammunition,” he said, snugging the weapon into his waistband. “It seems I won’t be killing you, after all.” Although it must have cost him dreadful pain, he nevertheless smiled crookedly. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be going.”
Pendergast stared, only now managing to wrap his mind around what had just happened. He wondered how his son—despite the terrible burns, the wounds, the loss of everything—maintained his arrogant composure, his cocksure attitude.
“No words of farewell, Father, to your son?”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Pendergast said slowly, maintaining his weapon on Alban. “You’re a murderer. Of the worst kind.”
Alban nodded. “True. And I’ve killed more people than even you could imagine.”
Pendergast aimed his weapon. “And now it is youwho must die for your crimes.”
“Is that so?” Alban issued a small laugh. “We shall see. I know you’ve figured out my unique temporal sense. Isn’t that right?”
“The Copenhagen Window,” Pendergast replied.
“Precisely. It’s derived from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which you are no doubt aware?”
Pendergast nodded almost imperceptibly.
“The interpretation is the notion that the future is nothing more than an expanding set of probabilities, time lines of possibility, that continuously collapse into one reality as observations or measurements are made. It’s the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics taught in universities.”
“It would appear,” Pendergast said, “that your mind has somehow become able to leverage this—to reach into the near future and see those branching possibilities.”
Alban smiled. “Brilliant! You see, most humans have only a fleeting sense of the immediate future, perhaps a few seconds at most. You can see a car ahead slow at a stop sign, and you intuitively sense the probability that it will stop—or else continue on. Or you might know what someone is going to say moments before they say it. Our scientists recognized the usefulness of this trait over half a century ago, and set out to enhance it through breeding and genetic manipulation. I am the final product.” There was evident pride in Alban’s tone. “My sense of the branching probabilistic time lines is much more developed than in others. I can sense up to fifteen seconds into the future, and my mind can see the dozens of branching possibilities—as if through a window—and pick out the most likely one. It may not seem like much—but what a difference it makes! In a way, my brain can tune in to the wave function ψ itself. But it is not the same as predictingthe future. Because, of course, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, there is no fixed future. And as you have so astutely realized, my ability can be stymied by sudden, illogical, or unpredictable behavior.”
His smile, made gruesome by the dreadful burns, widened. “But even without making use of my special future sense, Father, I know one thing beyond any shadow of a doubt: you can’t kill me. I’m going to walk away now. Into the forest. To stop me, you will have to shoot me dead—and that you won’t do. And so, auf Wiedersehen.”