The Eldridge Roster Read online

  1943: The destroyer USS Eldridge vanishes during the Philadelphia Experiment. The ship invisibility project ends.

  Nuremberg, 1946: Nazi death camp doctor Martin von Kemnitz is hung.

  The Pentagon, 1999: A dying hand gifts Angie Milano and Jim Munroe with the deadly legacy that is the Eldridge Roster, the long-lost crew list of the Philadelphia Experiment. The two are soon on the run from the vicious killers sent for it. Without the roster, Project Telemachus, perversion of a wondrous meld of genetics and physics, will fail. And mankind may survive.

  5 Star Reviews for The Eldridge Conspiracy

  “Berry does an amazing job of presenting a raft of characters, every last one of which is vivid, real, likable or loathsome, and keeps all of their time-lines, actions, and interactions seamlessly melded—we never get confused. At the risking of stooping to prosaic usage: This is a really, really, really good read. If you're looking for a well-crafted page turner to devourcI recommend this one. My advice: Buy this book. It's great.” Ken Korczak (Amazon US)

  “Absolutely LOVED this book and could NOT put it down! c Amazing. Uber~Fantastique! Not only does the story pull you in, you think, ‘What if this actually had happened.’” Amber Norrgard (Amazon US)

  “Stephen has done it again in this intense novel that you won’t be able to put down. You know it’s coming to the end and you don’t want it to.” Jeremy Dobe (Amazon US)

  “I read the Eldridge Conspiracy over the weekend. It was a great read. The characters were well developed and enjoyable. The science fiction was written well enough that you believe the sequence could actually happen. I had other work to do this weekend but spent most of my time reading. It was that good.” J. Greer (Amazon US)

  “I read it in two sittingsc I just could not put it downc a very fast paced thriller with some really likeable characters. If you have ever been fascinated by tales of the Philadelphia Experiment and/or what could happen if the wrong people were allowed to mess around with genetics, then I think you will like this. It's a real page turner, and brilliant value for money. Recommended. Buy it and enjoy. Ann Tocher (Amazon UK)

  “What a Great Surprise! You keep getting a new surprise and do not see the ending until you are there.” Clark Bacon (Amazon US)

  The Eldridge Roster

  by

  Stephen Ames Berry

  Dedication

  To Shelly G. Kaidan-Berry

  and

  Stephen Robert Gusmer

  for Valor

  Few is the number who think with their own minds and feel with their own hearts.

  Albert Einstein

  Stephen Ames Berry’s novels have been published by Ace/Berkley and Tor/Macmillan. The Eldridge Conspiracy is his latest book.

  Copyright © 2012 Stephen Ames Berry

  Previously published as The Eldridge Roster

  Published by Biofab Publishing LLC

  v. 6.20.12T

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  The Bureau

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Yokohama

  Chapter 12

  New Orleans

  Chapter 13

  New England

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  End Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Berry’s Other Books

  Prologue

  September 1998

  The cruel white light ebbing, the man who called himself Schmidla entered the Chamber. Walking briskly to the crèche, he peered down through the thick glass and saw the failure he’d dreaded. What a few moments before had been a freckled teenage girl in soft repose was a wailing, writhing horror of ochre scales and suppurating sores, its tentacles battering the lid.

  Coolly efficient, he keyed the destruct code into the crèche’s keypad, only to jerk his hand away at the searing pain.

  It stood before him, the crèche’s lid still sealed. Schmidla was suddenly afraid—not for himself but for his work. It had been a long time since he’d been afraid and he hated this abomination for it.

  Yellow reptilian eyes met his. “Quidquid latet adparebit, Nil inultum remanebit,” it rasped, its rank breath making Schmidla gag. The clinician in him knew it was dying—body shaking, limbs twitching, the slit pupils dilating. He drew his pistol.

  A tentacle batted it away as another whipped around his neck. Not yet, he pleaded, fighting for breath, hands tearing futilely at the tightening band of mucid, spasming muscle. Not yet. Lungs on fire, strength failing, Schmidla felt his life ebbing, the room swirling about him.

  A blast echoed through the Chamber and a dark pillar of reeking fluid spouted where the creature’s head had been. The grip on Schmidla’s throat loosened as the beast crumpled. Gasping, he almost retched at the putrescent stench of rotting flesh.

  Clothes soaked with the thing’s ichorous blood, Schmidla sagged against the crèche. “Thank you, Louis,” he managed after a moment. “I’ve never had one attain Potential so quickly, so monstrously.”

  Pale and shaken, Bartlett lowered the shotgun. “Good lord, Richard! Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Schmidla, rubbing his throat as he stared at the grotesque corpse. “That’s not our sweet little Käthe.”

  “What was it prattling?”

  “From the Dies Irae, ‘The Day of Judgment’—the choir in Goethe’s Faustus. ‘Everything that has been hidden shall appear. Nothing shall remain unpunished.’ Goethe’s finest work. You know she was the last of the Blücher lot? The last of all we had.”

  “So it’s over?”

  “It’s over when I’ve succeeded. And then it will never be over. I didn’t come this far to fail. There are more of them out there. And I will have them.”

  The Bureau

  October 1998

  Chapter 1

  The parking lot was wet, cratered and all uphill. Still half asleep, hands stuffed in his pockets, Jim fell in with the other shuffling dead trudging up the slope, the gray autumn dawn behind him and a chill wind in his face. Flashing his ID at the bored guard, he passed through the barbed-wire fence and into the Bureau.

  The Bureau: nine dismal yellowish brick buildings squatting atop a hill overlooking the Pentagon. Converted quickly and poorly from warehouses into offices for the Navy during World War II, the decaying structures would soon be irredeemable, fit only for the wrecker’s ball—destruction sure to gladden its former inmates.

  Three more years and about a thousand more cups of coffee, thought Jim, spirits buoyed by the balance in his technology-rich 401K account. Entering the busy main corridor with its photos of ships and glass-encased models of war vessels, he passed a chatty gold-and-white klatch of Naval officers. Seeing Erik Saunders among them, his mood soured. If he saw Jim, Saunders gave no sign.

  Jim’s cubicle was at the far end of Wing Six, a deaden sink of stale air, begrimed green walls and uncertain light from expiring fluorescents. Dusty, twisted bundles of loosely strung gray and white cables peered through the gaps left by vani
shed ceiling panels.

  A plume of bluish smoke rose from the cubicle beside Jim’s, signaling that George was in residence. Shrugging off his jacket, Jim checked his coffee mug for cockroach spoor. Finding none, he poured himself a cup of coffee and stood sipping, watching the smoke drift into the adjoining space occupied by the SEAL personnel assignment team.

  “Hey!” called a belligerent voice. “This is a military installation. You can’t smoke in here!”

  “Actually, Senior Chief,” came a mellow Tidewater drawl, “this is a facility of the General Services Administration maintained for the Navy Department. And not only am I able to smoke, I am smoking, thank you.”

  Jim stepped into the adjoining cubicle, passing the faded gray sign on the partition: George J. B. Campbell, Data Administrator. (“J for Jennings, B for Bryan,” George had once told him. “My Dad was much taken with William Jennings Bryan.”) Jim didn’t quite believe that, but George was surely old.

  George sat at his PC, green eyes intent on the screen, his fingers plying the keyboard. In the era he’d been born he’d have been called dapper. Now well into the age where his contemporaries were either dead or in assisted living, George was still fit and trim, silver hair neatly set above a lean patrician face.

  He clicked his mouse. “Be damned,” he said softly after a few seconds, appraising the data that filled his screen. “It did it.” Taking his panatela from the ashtray, George lofted a cloud of smoke toward the SEAL cubicle.

  “SLIF?” asked Jim, peering at the alphabet soup of characters filling George’s monitor.

  “SLIF,” nodded George. “‘Not a database engine, but a knowledge engine,’” he said, quoting the SLIF contractor’s pitch.

  “Well done,” said Jim, his knowledge of the project vague.

  “Thanks,” said George distantly.

  “You’re not happy?”

  “Uneasy, perhaps.” George stubbed out his cigar. “Stunned, certainly—mostly by the data gofer component.”

  When he’d first heard the term, Jim had asked Angie Milano, who ran the database shop, what a data gofer was. “Oh, the SLIF gofer?” she’d laughed. “It’s supposed to be this awesome artificial intelligence data miner that’ll pull information from anywhere. Just puts on its little miner’s hat, turns on its light, goes out and unearths whatever it needs: scanned records, old COBOL files, Internet stuff, anything. It’ll structure the retrieved data to give you the answers you need. And if you don’t quite know what you need, it’ll help you figure that out, too. Absolutely brilliant, they say. And fast. We’ll see if it’s worth the five hundred million dollars spent on it.”

  “This,” George continued, tapping the screen, “is an extract of the Navy’s active duty personnel file from World War II. The Fourth Naval District, Philadelphia, July 1943.”

  It looked like personnel data: names, what might be dates, service numbers, assignment codes, all meaningless without a file layout, dead data resurrected from a long-ago war.

  “Bull,” said Jim. “Those records only exist on paper in a warehouse—not even SLIF can read paper. Unless...” he paused. “Unless you digitized all the Navy’s World War II personnel records?” He shook his head in disbelief. “But even then, supposing you had all of that scanned, we’ve no regular connectivity to the SLIF database in New Orleans. They just set that up for demos here to impress SLIF’s sponsors.” He looked at George, searching for a hint.

  “Nexus,” said George. “As I’ve been so often corrected. SLIF doesn’t have a database, it has a nexus.”

  “You got Network Services to establish an ad hoc connection for you to New Orleans. Then, assuming all the protocols got worked out...”

  “FTP, TCP, FTL,” chanted George, enjoying himself. Clearing the screen, he brought up a new, smaller set of data as inscrutable as the last.

  “Then, yeah,” nodded Jim, “you could’ve queried SLIF. But in the wee hours, when there was unused comm capacity and no adult supervision. And costing what?”

  “A bottle of fifteen year-old single-malt scotch.”

  “You digitized all of World War II, didn’t you? We even had those records? On how may pieces of paper?”

  “The government never throws anything away without first making a copy. All sixteen million pages were at the National Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. All were scanned into SLIF,” said George. “At our peak wartime Naval Force Level of two million, three hundred thousand, it averaged out to seven pages per service member. Our contractor, GDR, subbed it out down in New Orleans, where the SLIF nexus dwells and labor’s cheaper.” George clicked his mouse. Jim heard the whir of a disk drive. “SLIF pulls whatever we want in the realm of personnel assignments: names, service, numbers, dates, places of assignment, occupational codes. And extrapolates the results. That data gofer’s a genie—tell it what you want and it gets it.” He snapped his fingers. “Like magic. And in answer to your next question, my lad, we used such a vast amount of ancient data to prove that we could do it with a vast amount of ancient data.”

  “You could do that with any number of tools,” said Jim, not much impressed, “once you got the records digitized.”

  “True,” said George. He rose. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “A meeting with GDR and our boss Stanley. Congratulations. You’re now the SLIF assistant project officer. And remember that ‘extrapolates the results’ part.”

  “I’m Stan Gawkins, Director of Personnel Assignment Systems. I’ve been involved with SLIF, the Self-Guiding Latitudinal Infiltration and File Extrapolation System, since its inception.” Tall and sharp-featured, Stanley Gawkins had been with the Bureau twenty-six years. He had a well-cultivated reputation for getting things done. Jim thought him a putz.

  Going around the table, Stanley made the introductions. “George Campbell, our SLIF project officer.” George nodded, examining his laptop’s screen. “From GDR Corporation, John Levec and Tony Masters.” Jim only knew Levec by reputation: a politico, assigned to keep things flowing smoothly between the Bureau and GDR. Masters, the smug younger one, was a software engineer assigned to SLIF. “And Jim Munroe, a contractor who works with Mr. Campbell. Jim’s new to SLIF. Last night down in New Orleans,” continued Stanley, “GDR finished scanning the last of the Navy’s World War Two active personnel records into the SLIF database. You about ready, George?” he asked.

  “Another minute, Stan,” said George, typing, intent on the screen.

  “As you know,” said Stanley, “SLIF’s a joint effort by the Navy Department and GDR Corporation to develop a self-learning, self-improving information retrieval and extrapolation system that can access and integrate data from any source. If successful, SLIF will serve a wide variety of government intelligence needs. Well, George?” he asked as the large screen at the front of the table flared to life, blue and blank. “Have we just flushed half a billion bucks down a rat hole?” he laughed uneasily. Stan personified the truism that the Navy rewards its officers for going in harm’s way and its civilians for staying out of it.

  “It works,” said George as a list of names came up on the screen, reflecting what was on his laptop. “Though how is beyond me. These are the Naval aviators assigned to the carrier Lexington on May 28, 1943.” All the names but one vanished: Wilson, Jonathan. It remained highlighted to one side as a column of information began scrolling down the screen in a truncated military script. George translated. “Ensign Wilson was five-nine, blond hair, blue eyes, twenty-four years old. From Sioux City, Iowa. Played high school football—quarterback. Graduated Iowa State, taught English for a year or so before the war. His wife was named Pamela. One kid, a daughter, Debbie. Splashed fifteen Zeros. Good fitness report. Blood pressure a tad high. Really bad teeth. Call sign Farmboy. Sent all his pay to Pam except for a life insurance allotment and fifty bucks. Awarded the Navy Cross after Okinawa, went home in one piece.

  “It took about five seconds to get that information,” George added. “Tak
e you a billion years manually, plowing through the records, if then.”

  Jim wasn’t impressed. “Couldn’t you do that with a lesser system, given the data?” he asked diplomatically. So far what he’d seen wasn’t worth the cost, even by government contract standards.

  “Sure,” said Masters. “Though not as fast. Ready for the rest?” he asked George.

  “Yes.” George hit a key. “I’ve sent the query to the data gofer. Any second now.”

  In less than a minute George was narrating as the summary rolled past. “I told SLIF to do a drilldown on Wilson’s daughter Debbie. She did okay in high school, went to the University of Michigan, became a science teacher in East Lansing, had two kids, retired seven years ago to Venice, Florida. Decent pension. Her oldest son John’s a corporate tax attorney, practicing in Chicago. Made partner this year. John kindly pays for his new paralegal’s apartment near work. John may not know about his wife’s previous marriage, as it’s not on their marriage license application. Her ex was just denied parole again. But then Pam doesn’t know about the SEC investigation of John’s firm. Their son Tom drives a Porsche Tagra to his private day school and hangs out in Internet chat rooms. Come Christmas the family’s going down to Costa Rica for a week, first class, staying in one of those quaint little seaside hotels where they’ll be taking scuba diving lessons. The folks who own hotel don’t want anyone knowing their ex-Sandinistas. Young Tom had his immunizations updated last week. His school’s administrators and the local police think he may sell a little coke on the side. He does. Tom has a girlfriend he likes and a boyfriend he likes better.” George looked around the table. “Data access and correlation time thirty-two seconds, 1749 data sources accessed. SLIF asks if we’d like further details on Wilson or his descendants.”