Piranha

Batiste nodded numbly, and was taken back to the cockpit. Pasquet closed the barrel.

In reality, Pasquet had no way to remotely detonate the explosives once they were submerged. Radio waves couldn’t travel underwater and he had no other way of broadcasting to the detonators, making the risk of a synchronized timer necessary. The barrels would be dumped all over the shipwreck, with the resulting simultaneous explosions reducing it to a jumble of steel that would take weeks to dig through and destroying any evidence of the Sentinel project that might lay within.

After all the barrels had been scattered on the Roraima, Pasquet would have Batiste settle the sub on the bottom. Pasquet had a small explosive charge that he’d stick to a window, blowing it out. The crew of the Oregon would attempt to rescue the drowning hostages while he and his men swam away. The barrel inside the sub would then explode a few minutes later along with the others, ripping the sub apart. It would be a perfect distraction for their getaway.

A tour bus stopped next to the truck. Pasquet smiled. Just who he was waiting for. Two hostages certainly wouldn’t be enough if the crew of the Oregon decided to turn their weaponry on him and his men. Although the people of the Corporation called themselves mercenaries, Pasquet knew they wouldn’t harm civilians, which made his job that much easier.

He went outside to watch twenty tourists pile off the bus. The tour guide got out of the driver’s seat and Pasquet waved him over.

“Where’s Captain Batiste?” the guide asked.

“He’s inside the sub getting everything ready,” Pasquet replied with a grin. “We have a very special trip in store for you and your guests today.”

Pasquet mentally calculated how long it would take to tie up and blindfold the tourists and then motor out to the wreck. He didn’t want to leave much slack time after they dumped the barrels. He thought now should be about right to start the timer sequence.

He clicked the button in his pocket. Simultaneously, the bombs in all twenty barrels began their countdown. Sixty minutes to detonation.

Berlin

It was only a few weeks to the official start of spring, but Germany’s winter wasn’t giving up easily. Three inches of fluffy snow coated the Berlin streets, and thick flakes continued to fall. The flight into Tegel Airport on the northwest side of the city had been bumpy, but Tiny Gunderson had put the Corporation’s Gulfstream on the runway without a hitch. He pla

Juan got the last four-wheel drive on the rental lot, an Audi station wagon that had so far acquitted itself admirably. Only the highways had been scoured by snowplows’ blades, leaving the thoroughfares and side streets caked and rutted. Buses and two-wheel-drive sedans were slowed to a crawl, but the trams that plied the city streets on rails moved easily, unhindered by the snowfall.

Now that they had arrived at their destination, Eric had to risk doing an online search of the library’s catalog to find out if Lutzen’s doctoral thesis was still at the university’s main campus or in one of its multiple libraries located around the city. It would have been a long flight for nothing if the dissertation had been trashed, or destroyed during World War II bombing campaigns, or never filed with the library in the first place.

While Eric checked the library’s database, Juan performed a series of quick turns through Berlin’s streets to make sure they weren’t being followed. Although they’d taken every precaution to prevent Lawrence Kensit from knowing where they were going, Juan couldn’t help feeling that they were missing something, a piece of the puzzle that made it possible for Kensit to track their movements.

Max’s information about Hector Bazin only confirmed that Kensit was willing to go to any lengths to keep his plans secret. To have a mercenary as skilled and brutal as Bazin at his beck and call wouldn’t have come cheap, and bombing an office in Midtown Manhattan was a big risk.

“I got a hit,” Eric said. “Gunther Lutzen. Real person. Physics doctoral student. Filed his thesis in 1901.”

“Tell me it’s still in the library,” Juan said. “Tiny’s going to be unhappy if we come back empty-handed.”

“The dissertation is on file, but it’s so old that it hasn’t been digitized so we’ll have to see it in person.”

Juan nodded, happy that they’d flown to Berlin. If they’d done their search online, hoping to read the thesis back in New York, they might have tipped Kensit off about their intentions. “Where do we find it?”

“It’s in the special collections at the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Center.”

“A library named after the Brothers Grimm? How appropriate. Let’s hope this fairy tale has a happier ending.”

“It’s a new building in central Berlin. They moved all of their natural sciences books to a different library, but most of the old theses and rare documents are at the Grimm Center. Lucky for us, it’s only about ten minutes from here. I’ve got the route mapped out.”

“Can we check the thesis out?”

“No. Because it’s so old, it can be examined only at the library. Besides, we don’t have a library card.”

Satisfied that they didn’t have a tail, Juan followed Eric’s directions.

“What is Lutzen’s thesis called?” Juan asked.

“I plugged it into my phone’s translator, but I don’t know how good it is with scientific terminology. We should get a more definitive translation when we’re back on the Oregon.”

“Spitballing is fine for now.”

Eric furrowed his brow at the screen. “It says ‘On the detection and perception of minor atom particles and radioactive decay.’”

“What are ‘minor atom particles’?”

“I don’t know. The abstract isn’t online, if they even wrote abstracts back then. It could mean subatomic particles.”

“It doesn’t give us much to go on. Why would Kensit be so desperate to keep it secret?”

“When I was in college, I studied that era of physics experimentation, and it really was an exciting period in the science.” Eric became animated as he talked about it. “In the span of ten years, from 1895 to 1905, some of the most critical discoveries and hypotheses in scientific history were made. In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays. The next year, Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie found that certain chemical elements gave off rays that fogged unexposed photographic plates and called the phenomenon radioactivity. In 1897, J. J. Thomson discovered electrons. Ernest Rutherford built on their work in 1899 and determined that uranium gave off alpha and beta rays. And on and on until 1905, when a Swiss patent clerk published his special theory of relativity.”

“I didn’t know Einstein was Swiss.”

“He was a draft dodger. He moved there from Germany to avoid Army service. Kind of ironic, now that he’s considered one of the fathers of the atomic bomb.”

“Where does Gunther Lutzen fit in?”

“At the time, Berlin University was one of the premier centers for theoretical nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. Max Planck was one of the first physicists to accept Einstein’s theory, which was surprisingly controversial back then. Planck, who subsequently won the Nobel Prize in physics, was also a professor at the university. If Lutzen got his doctorate there, he was among some of the giants in the field.”