The Forbidden Stone. Tony Abbott

      “Crack the code.”

      “By morning.”

      “Morning?”

      “At the latest.”

      While Ebner might have adored the speed of this conversation in a film, spare questions and clipped commands were his thing.

      Young Helmut Bern, no matter how brilliant he may have been in his own unshaven way, had no business mimicking his style. It stunk of irony. Only those in command were allowed the privilege of irony. Workers, no matter how little or how much they were paid, were still workers, unwashed masses of common folk, and their duty was to obey him with smarmy respect. Even sniveling was preferable to snarkiness.

      Smiling to himself, Ebner drew his hand from the ice bowl, shook his fingers, and set the bowl on the young scientist’s desk. Slowly, he took out from his breast pocket a blue leather-bound notebook, turned to the first blank page, and wrote the name “Helmut Bern.” Next to it he set down the words “Iceland. Station Four.” He added a question mark for good measure and closed the notebook.

      “The tanker off the coast of Cypress?”

      “Good news,” Bern said, clacking his keyboard. The image dissolved into text, and he read from it. “Our divers have already made contact with the hull, and undersea building has begun. Habitation can occur as early as next week. Would you care to examine our current experiment?”

      So many experiments. So many missions around the world undertaken on Galina Krause’s specific orders. His ears shrieked.

      “The Australian Transit? Yes.” Ebner stepped toward the inner laboratory. It was walled in tinted glass to shield the radioactivity of the light beams.

      “Excuse me, Doctor …?”

      Ebner paused, half turned his head. “Yes?”

      “The twelve items. I mean, why now? After all this time.”

      Ebner wondered if he should say anything. Would it be unguarded to speak? Silence was a kind of power, after all. Miss Krause had taught him that.

      But bringing someone into your confidence, that was power, too. He decided, for the moment, to be distant. “Miss Krause recognizes an urgency. There is a singular alignment of causes.”

      Helmut Bern stroked his unshaven chin. “Do you mean to say there is a timetable?”

       I say what I mean to say!

      Ebner brushed it off. “Life is a timetable. You should concern yourself with your own.” He liked the way that sounded, even if he was unsure exactly what it meant. It had its desired effect nevertheless. Helmut Bern bit his tongue, turned to the screen, and said no more.

      Ebner walked through the open door of the inner lab.

      The gun—if he could call it that, a ten-foot spoked wheel of platinum alloy in whose center stood a long, narrow cylinder of steel, coiled with a helix of ultrathin glass fiber—occupied one half of the room. In the other sat a cage of white mice, the most intelligent of their experimental patients. Ebner laughed to himself. Little good will intelligence do them where they’re going.

      The elevator door slid aside in the first room. The nameless driver leaned in, spotted Ebner. “Time,” he said.

      Ebner withdrew from the inner laboratory.

       Time. It’s always time.

      He passed Helmut Bern’s desk, dipped his hand into the bowl of lukewarm water, removed it, and shook the drops from his fingers. “I must return this priceless bowl to Miss Krause now,” he said, staring down at Bern. “It must be empty.”

      “Sir?”

      “Remove the water,” Ebner said as softly as he could.

      Bern pushed back his chair. “Sir?”

      “Here. Now.”

      The young unshaven scientist, glancing from the nameless driver at the door to Ebner, lifted the bowl. He brought it to his lips and drank down the water.

      “You’re welcome,” said Ebner.

      “Uh …” Bern murmured. “Thank you, Dr. von Braun.”

      Ebner could not help his own lips. They curved into a thin smile. He now wondered whether Iceland was in fact the proper place for Helmut Bern.

      Taking the empty bowl and the silver-cased computer, he joined the driver in the elevator, pressed Up, and left.

      

      Berlin was gray. It was cold. It was raining.

      When the kids pushed out of the enormous arrival terminal the next morning in search of a taxi, the air hit them heavily with diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke and the odor of strong coffee.

      Becca took a shallow breath. “I read that Europe smells like this.”

      Roald nodded. “It takes me back. I wish we weren’t here for this reason.”

      “One cab left,” Wade called out, hurrying with Darrell to a small car with a short man standing next to it.

      No one spoke as the taxi zigzagged out of the airport complex and raced onto the highway toward the city. They passed several clusters of identical high rises surrounded by small parks of bare trees.

      “Not too attractive,” Lily said.

      Roald explained that much of Berlin had been rebuilt after the Second World War with a sense of function rather than style. The sober buildings made Berlin seem that much more cold and sad.

      The cab exited the highway and entered rain-slicked streets by the railroad and after that a series of cobblestone roads in what Becca guessed was an older part of the city.

      Pulling to an abrupt stop before a tall set of iron gates, they arrived at the cemetery just before eleven thirty. They got out, hoisting their carry-on bags over their shoulders.

      Inside the grounds stood a soot-stained church-like building that looked as if it had been there for centuries but which Lily’s tablet said was a “mere hundred and fifty years old.”

      Beyond the chapel, the graves and markers stretched away into several heavily wooded acres.

      Wade pointed across the park. “People are gathering over there.” His words were strangely muffled in the cold air. “There’s a path.”

      Many of the gravestones were placed in orderly rows stretching away from the path. Others with faded words and numbers seemed to have grown right out of the ground. Some stones had rain-soaked stuffed animals placed among the wreaths.

       Children’s graves.

      One well-worn trail slithered between the trees like a snake, ending at four tall unadorned stone blocks, two of which were inscribed with names Becca knew well: Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, the brothers who had collected folk tales in the middle of the nineteenth century. Lily snapped a picture before hurrying on.

      As they crossed the grass and threaded through a stand of tall trees, Becca breathed in a scent of pine needles and tried to steady herself. She felt almost light-headed.

      What was it about graveyards?

      What was it? She knew exactly what it was.

      When her younger sister, Maggie, had fallen ill two years ago, Becca had been terrified of losing her. She cried herself to sleep more nights than she could remember and had begun to dream of places like this—avenues of stone, the murmuring of small voices—and didn’t