A thousand suns

Wallace felt strangely light, as if the small metal disc and the chain attached to it had been a weighty shackle. It glinted in the amber light streaking in from the lamp outside. Wallace had never really understood why he had taken it off the dead boy. It was evidence, of course, something that really shouldn’t be found. He should have destroyed it. But instead he had kept it all these years, perhaps as a reminder of how ruthless he had once been, and might need to be again? Perhaps out of a sense of guilt — that boy, the young girl and her teacher in New York, none of them deserved to die… but they really had to.

Wallace felt his throat tighten and a momentary welling of a confused, unidentifiable emotion. He struggled to fight it down and put a lid back on it.

This young man can have it, he thought. On its own, the little disc could tell no one anything, but in some odd way, to the old man, it felt like he was passing on the baton, the secret, to someone else to keep close, to cherish.

Wallace eased his way back towards the door and slipped quietly outside. He turned to the motionless dark shapes of his hired men gathered by the doorway.

‘We’re done here,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s go.’

Chapter 61

Going Home

The surf rolled across the pebbles and came to a reluctant halt a few inches away from his trainers, before drawing back with a hiss of frustration. Chris looked up at grey clouds rolling across the mid-morning sky. It was going to rain pretty soon. Another rainy day to join the other seven he’d endured out here amidst the coastal wilderness of Rhode Island.

He looked down at the object in his hand, the dog tag with the serial number on it, and the German name: OberLt Kleinmann M. That’s all he had left now.

‘Fuck it.’

That bastard Wallace had stitched him up. He had discovered that fantastic bit of news first thing this morning when he had gone to open his door to step outside and spotted the note pushed through underneath the draught flap. It’s not going to make a great news story without any pictures or evidence is it? By now, what you discovered beneath the sea will be long gone. So why not let it go? It’s no longer a news story… it’s just a story now. Hell, it might even make a good book one day. I’ll be watching you. W.

The wily old bastard had played Chris like a fiddle — cosying up and playing new best friend, while all the time, behind his back, his bloody hired thugs were hoovering up the evidence. Now he was starting to wonder how much of what Wallace had told him was the truth anyway, and how much of it was just a yarn he had spun to keep Chris out of his motel room long enough for his men to sweep it thoroughly.

He could dive again on the wreck, but something told him that all he would find this time would be the plane… he was sure even the bodies would be gone.

He kicked at the sand with frustration. It would have been a great story. Better than Nixon and Watergate, better than Bush and Bin Laden, the Hitler Diaries. It would have set him up for life.

Nazi Germany Came Within an Ace of Nuking New York — the sort of tagline that would give a tabloid editor a permanent hard-on. He could have licensed the picture of the bomb itself for hundreds of thousands to the right publication.

But it was pointless beating himself up like this. There were no pictures now, thanks to that old bastard. It was game over.

How about counting your blessings, Chris, me old mate?

‘Yeah? And what blessings would those be, exactly?’ he muttered.

People have been known to go missing for knowing a whole lot less.

Perhaps there was some truth in that. If that shit Wallace really had been a government spook he could surely have made him and Mark just vanish. Those men who had jumped him in his motel room had come within a few moments of wasting him. The thought sent a shiver down his spine. If that old man Wallace — if that was his name — had really been their boss, shit… he and Mark were pretty lucky to have woken up this morning.

And they had been in his room last night. God knows, while he’d been sleeping like a baby, they must have been standing over him, guns raised, aimed at his face, and he could imagine Wallace silently doing an eeny-meenyminy-mo.

Chris heard the Cherokee’s horn. Mark was getting impatient. He wanted to get the hell out of here. Chris couldn’t blame him.

It was time to head back to New York. Elaine Swisson was going to go ballistic when he turned up empty-handed. He knew damn well if he switched his mobile back on, there would be a dozen frantic messages from her, that deadline almost upon them. He wondered what exactly he was going to tell the woman. Perhaps he could come up with something between now and hitting New York.

Well, Elaine, I’ll tell you what happened. A legal eagle from the US Air Force paid me a visit and asked me not to exploit what they consider to be a war grave… and they suggested they might take legal action if the pictures appeared in the public domain. So I guess we’re screwed.