The Traveler Read online

  “Do we have a problem, Commander?” Niles asked as all eyes turned and saw Alice Hamilton walking through the door. The eighty-nine-year-old was dressed in a light blue pantsuit and was carrying an armload of files and paperwork as if she had never retired.

  “Mr. Ryan, is there a problem?” Niles repeated.

  Alice took her normal place beside Niles and then placed her work on the table and smiled at each of the newcomers. For Anya it was like looking at the wife of George Washington, for as much as Carl had spoken about the famous Mrs. Hamilton and her brilliant boss, the deceased Garrison Lee. Anya had to admit that there was an air of royalty about the woman and as they made eye contact she could see why Sarah was of the opinion that Alice and Anya would soon become great friends.

  “Oh, Mr. Ryan is a little put out with Clarisse Carpenter and her people.”

  Niles looked from Jason to Alice, who had adjusted her seating and was pouring a glass of water from the carafe. “Clarisse? You mean of the logistics department?” Niles asked.

  At the end of the table Ryan made a face, scrunching up the horrid tattoo used as cover to break Morales out of prison.

  “It seems our logistics department placed the wrong tattoo on Jason here and he’s a little put out by it.” Alice couldn’t help herself as she grinned while trying to cover her mouth with the water glass. She failed miserably.

  “Well, are you going to keep us in suspense?” Jack asked, guessing at the predicament Jason was now facing.

  Ryan remained silent as he kicked Mendenhall under the table for snickering.

  “It seems they used the wrong ink on Jason’s prosthetic tattoo.”

  All eyes went to Ryan, who lowered his head in embarrassment. The tattoo was the most brutal any of them had ever seen. The animal claw actually covered the entirety of his right-side facial features.

  “How long?” Niles asked sadly, but inside he was glad that this situation broke up the seriousness of the meeting.

  “Five weeks. It won’t wear off for five weeks!” Ryan said as he challenged the smiling faces around the table.

  “The lady-killer of the high desert—how will you survive?” Will asked in a seriously concerned tone.

  Ryan started to say something but Jack stopped them.

  “Thank you, Mr. Ryan. I will have a talk with logistics and have some precautions taken for future reference.”

  “Wonderful,” Ryan said as he again gave Will a murderous look.

  “I would love to know what our new personnel thought of our artifact and vault level, but I’m afraid we must get down to business. Mr. Morales still has to meet his department heads and has to settle in with Europa. He has quite an amount of work to get done and as always we have very little time to do it in.” Compton nodded at Alice.

  “Europa, visual aide 17890, please,” Alice said, and then looked flustered when Europa did not respond. “Europa, visual aide please,” Alice asked again.

  On the large 105-inch monitor that sat in the middle of fifty-two smaller ones, the screen came to life and showed an old black-and-white picture. It showed a man in a white lab coat next to a small girl who could not be more than fifteen. It was obviously a young woman from a concentration camp. The two were standing in front of a hundred or so similarly dressed technicians. With the exception of the small, hellishly thin girl, they were all smiling. The date scrawled on the bottom of the photo was 1943.

  Niles Compton looked at Anya and nodded just as he had done with Alice.

  “Lars Thomsen. German scientist of some renown only for his work in the early twenties with one Albert Einstein. In 1939 Professor Thomsen dropped out of the scientific world for all intents and purposes to dedicate his life to the acquisition of quantum technology.”

  Everyone heard the exhale of breath from Master Chief Jenks, but he remained quiet after voicing his opinion of quantum theories.

  “I understand your doubts, Master Chief, an educated engineer such as yourself always wants facts, hard design, not theory. But be patient with me and I will bring you to believe in the quantum sciences. I was just like you when I started digging after the death of”—she paused, looking embarrassed, but continued—“after the war.”

  “Who is the girl?” Charlie Ellenshaw asked.

  “We’ll get to that, Charlie,” Niles said as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “But for now let’s concentrate on our findings. We don’t have a lot of time before I have to start filling in the other departments on what we will be”—he quickly corrected himself—“hope to be attempting.”

  Ellenshaw nodded in understanding.

  “The Israeli government in the late forties and fifties started a program to interview any Holocaust survivor they could debrief. Most in the vein of hunting down and finding war criminals, but there was other reasoning behind the interviews. Technology was one of those. So”—Anya, without really noticing, stood and started pacing, and all eyes followed the former Mossad agent as she walked—“in the process of debriefing the surviving slave labor force from sites such as Peenemünde, the V-1 rocket facility, Israeli intelligence came up with a name that kept recurring and for the life of them they didn’t know why. That place was Dortmund, Germany. It was familiar to some of our people for the simple fact that we were aware of Operation Chastise.”

  “Excuse me?” Sarah asked, knowing that operational name sounded vaguely familiar.

  “The Royal Air Force raids into Germany during the war to eliminate certain projects from the Nazi books by taking out their hydroelectric power generating systems, thus ending any hard-water experiments for their atomic weapons research programs,” Jack answered for Anya.

  “The famous bouncing bombs? The Dam Busters?” Charlie asked, proud that he recalled such a thing.

  “The same,” Anya said as she nodded at Jack in thanks. “Dortmund, or in particular the dam that served the region, was called the Möhne. The dam was struck by a bouncing bomb on the night of May 16, 1943, essentially knocking out power to over a thousand towns and villages. Through research we have discovered that the RAF might have been taking out far more than just their hard-water research.”

  “For instance?” Mendenhall asked.

  Anya smiled and nodded at the eagerness. “We’ll get to that part, Captain. Now, to the debriefing of all prisoners of war who served German science. While a first-year agent I was assigned the maddening job of refiling these old cases and mothballing, as you Americans say, any file that wasn’t relevant to the search for war criminals, as that function had officially ceased to exist for the Mossad after 1984. During this time I came across one interview that was hushed up and secreted away. It was from, of all people, a thirteen-year-old boy who served with his sister at an unknown bunker complex in Dortmund. I was able to uncover his testimony from the official Israeli debriefing conducted in Jerusalem in 1946, and the contents of that testimony led me to investigate the Dortmund area for any war activity that may have been noticed. I did this in the hopes of impressing certain people on my thoroughness. I found nothing. Then it was eventually filed away and I forgot all about the debriefing until the recent war. I brought it up to my uncle, who swept it under the rug and told me that there was nothing to the file and to forget about it. The fact that it was being hushed up by the most powerful man in the Mossad gave me at the very least some doubts about my uncle’s motives. I brought this fact up to Alice and Sarah and they conferred with Dr. Pollock. They wanted more information as it did have something to do with quantum theory as stated in the main file on this concentration camp survivor. So then on the advice of Dr. Compton and Virginia, I started delving into construction records for the German Army—still nothing. Then I went back to the file on this young prisoner. It seems he described the final night of activity in Dortmund as the night he lost his only living relative. He also described a very famous personage attending this event, whatever it was. By his description it could have been none other than Heinrich Himmler himself.”

 
“What does that mean?” Charlie inquired.

  “It means that whatever this project was, why Himmler? Why was he in Dortmund?”

  “Maybe like the colonel said, the hard water. I’m sure Himmler would have been interested in that.” Charlie made a good point.

  “That wasn’t it. Europa, slide 17895, please,” Anya said, facing the large screen. “Europa?” she repeated.

  “Europa, slide number 17895, please,” Xavier Morales asked as everyone looked his way.

  “Yes, Dr. Morales,” Europa finally said in her Marylyn Monroe voice. Again everyone exchanged looks.

  “Admiration is one thing, but Europa is pushing it a little,” Will said, whispering to Ryan.

  On the screen the picture changed and another appeared. This one showed Thomsen during the construction of his bunker system.

  “The main clue as to the system and who built it. This is Thomsen himself standing with a construction president, Alexis Knudsen.”

  “You know where this bunker complex was built?” Alice asked, admiring the newest member of the Event Group for her investigative technique. Alice could see why Carl had fallen for the young Gypsy woman.

  “Through the gentleman’s surviving family, yes. Unbelievably the plans were still in his office in Dortmund.”

  “Which leads us to the conclusion that this project was undertaken without the knowledge of the German engineers who usually built these facilities, like the one at Peenemünde, and who were not allowed in on this one project. Why? Because we assume it was Himmler’s and Himmler’s alone. Thus he hired an outside construction firm to build his series of bunkers.”

  “That aspect of the investigation was conducted by Dr. Compton and Virginia, who did very well. So, we have an underground bunker complex built by Himmler for this man Thomsen. He hires a construction firm that has no ties with the Nazis or even the German Wehrmacht. That is what we in the intelligence community would call secretive.” Anya paused and looked at Niles.

  “People, let’s get down to it. We suspect that through this Thomsen’s ties with Albert Einstein and his connection with quantum theories, that Himmler and his own private mad scientist were attempting time travel. I know it’s very thin, but it’s a chance.”

  “Hogwash!” Master Chief Jenks said, not caring if Virginia shot him a warning look. “To me old Albert’s as entertaining a theorist as they come, and he did a bang-up job with the relativity thing, but time travel was something that he said would always be theory. It can be done, but never would be because there is no way to travel through time and space with the electrical technology we currently possess. That simple, folks.”

  “And that is where we were short. We had no proof at all of what Himmler and Thomsen were working on. Until I actually found this child who was a part of the experiments.”

  “You found him alive?” Sarah asked, amazed at the long odds the kid had to survive to make it to old age.

  “Yes, in Tel Aviv … before he vanished.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was afraid to discuss it, but he was old and sick by that time so he told me a story that shocked me, and from that sent us”—she gestured around the conference room at everyone—“down this path. He witnessed his sister, who was used in all of these experiments, actually leave this existence and arrive in another and return.”

  The questions started flying and it took Niles standing to silence them. He was used to his people being excited about things, but to actually have the ability to travel through time was not something they had ever remotely considered with the technology this planet currently had.

  “And we never had a hint of this experiment throughout our world search for quantum technology when the British found Captain Everett’s wristwatch in the ice in Antarctica?” asked Sarah again.

  “No,” Niles said. “It seems Himmler covered his tracks rather well from the Nazi regime. And the Mossad’s reluctance after the war to pursue this to the full extent, well, let’s just say was disappointing. Now, through the discovered construction records and the description of the site from the concentration camp survivor, we found the location of the bunker system. The boy claimed the last experiment failed because of some mishap in the power supply. We now know that interruption was the RAF doing a number on the Möhne Dam. The boy claims the bunker system was flooded and destroyed and his sister, known to the Germans as the Traveler, never came back.”

  “She was lost?” Alice asked, always placing a human face on such things from the past that made them seem more real for everyone around the table.

  “Yes,” Anya said as she watched a weakened Niles Compton walk slowly to his desk near the far wall and lower himself painfully down into the far more comfortable desk chair.

  “Since we know the location, why don’t we investigate firsthand?” Jason asked as he kept a hand over his partially disfigured face.

  “If you had noticed, Colonel Collins was missing for some time a few weeks ago. He and Anya took a little foray into the woods outside of Dortmund. Jack, if you would?” Virginia volunteered.

  “We spent three days wandering the woods and then we finally found a conduit access port used for electrical line maintenance. We found the bunker complex and that was why Anya was sent back to Israel to look for the final piece of the puzzle. And why Alice had to use an intermediary to get her out.”

  Alice was the only one to nod her head in Farbeaux’s direction.

  “The last puzzle piece? I thought you found the bunker?” Jenks asked as he pulled the cold stub of cigar from his mouth.

  “We did indeed. Flooded and collapsed, most of it. A few old skeletons in SS uniforms and evidence that something very powerful happened there.”

  “And you recovered the equipment used by this Thomsen and Himmler?”

  Jack pursed his lips and shook his head.

  “None of the displacement equipment was there. It had been removed,” Anya finished for him.

  “Himmler went back and got it, huh?” Jenks interjected while shaking his head.

  “No. The equipment was moved in 1969, several years after all concerned in this particular event was dead, even Himmler.”

  “How in the hell do you know that?” Jenks persisted, looking for any holes in Jack’s or Anya’s stories.

  “Because the same construction company, which is family owned and operated, removed the equipment that very same year. Contracted by a company not from Germany.”

  “Where is the equipment?”

  Anya looked at Jenks and then lowered her head. “We don’t know.”

  “And that was why Anya went home. We had to know more, personnel records and things like that. We had to know who was still alive in 1969 who would know what it was they were looking for down there. Anya found the only other person who is known to have survived that night.” Jack sat down and looked at Anya.

  “And that is why we need each and every one of you in the next few weeks. We have the name thanks to Mossad files, we just have to locate that person because they have the time displacement equipment for some reason.”

  “Well, you goin’ to let us in on the big secret?” Jenks said, huffing at the dramatics of the group.

  Anya went to her chair and pulled out the same file that General Shamni produced for her. She tossed it into the middle of the table.

  “I give you the thief of the technology taken from the bunker in 1969. Moira Mendelsohn.”

  “Who?” Sarah asked, looking from Anya to Jack. It was Jack who answered.

  “Moira Mendelsohn—the Traveler.”

  The room went silent.

  “Humph, rumph,” the master chief rudely said as he stood up from the table. “So, you’re telling us that the only person to actually … time travel”—he sourly hissed the words—“stole the equipment we need to retrieve our boy?”

  “Yes, that’s what we’re saying, Master Chief,” Jack said.

  “So the one question we have to ask is,” Niles said from
his desk, “where did she go with it and what reasoning did this concentration camp survivor have for wanting it in the first place. Even if we weren’t attempting to do the impossible”—he shot a quick glance at the master chief—“we could never allow this technology to be utilized for any one individual’s personal gain. The tech itself will eventually have to be outlawed.”

  “You mean after we possibly use it for our little illegal gain?” Jenks quipped.

  “Something like that,” Collins said, quickly losing his patience with the master chief.

  “I have a better question,” Charlie Ellenshaw said. “It seems you have overlooked one little item. If she hid the equipment, where she hid it is not the right question at all. When did she hide it—in the past, or right here in the present?”

  Niles lowered his head and rubbed his temples. “That is why I have called upon the most brilliant people I know to find out. Xavier, that is the task I am assigning you and Europa. Find me that woman. Your first order of business.”

  Young Morales was not afraid of the challenge. He could find anyone, which he had already proven. He just nodded and then frowned when he saw Charlie Ellenshaw staring at him. The man was angry and Morales would need to know more about the strange professor they called Crazy Charlie. For now, as the others filed out of the conference room, he looked up at the still photo of Professor Thomsen and the young girl sadly standing bedside him and he silently repeated the name.