The Physicists' Daughter, page 27
She watched Martin as, slowly and gently, he lowered the box in his hands to the ground. She didn’t like the way he was lowering it. He was taking too long.
Martin had consistently presented himself to her as a man consumed by sexual passion. That man would have dropped the box with a thunk by now and hurried to her. Now, at this moment, that box was the most important thing in Martin’s life, not Justine. This man was not what he wanted her to think he was.
And, she was thinking, neither was that box.
She stole a glance at Charles and Jerry, both of them moving her way at top speed. They had both lied to her. They weren’t the men they pretended to be, either. She had no one to count on but herself.
She took a careful step back and then another.
Martin said, “You’re not afraid of me, are you? You didn’t seem afraid of me the other night. It seemed like you liked me a lot.”
He reached out a hand, one of the hands that had held her so tight, roaming so freely over her body. It was aimed at her shoulder, but it missed, because her shoulder was no longer there. She had taken another step backward and dropped to a squat beside the box that had appeared since she last stood in this spot, a box with the same green stamp she now saw on the one he’d just put down.
Without thought, Martin yelled, “No!” This told her that she was in the right place, doing the right thing. She opened the box that he very much wanted her to leave closed.
Lifting its lid, she saw a mechanical device and the unmistakable shape of a stick of dynamite. Worse, she smelled some kind of petroleum-based fuel. Gasoline? Kerosene?
It hardly mattered. The person who built this bomb had known what to use.
Justine was a soft-spoken woman who had grown up with soft-spoken parents. She hadn’t let out an untrammeled shriek since she was a toddler. If asked, she wouldn’t have been sure she still knew how. But she did know how, and the sight of a timed explosive device gave her voice all of its power.
“Bomb!” she cried out. “Bomb! Firebomb!”
She had no idea if anybody inside the plant could hear her. They were all on their way to Mr. Higgins’s speech. Charles and Jerry could hear her, but she didn’t even know whose side they were on. All she knew was that the man in front of her had set bombs that threatened her friends Georgette and Nelle and Nadine and Mavis and Candace and Darlene and Betty and Shirley and, yes, even Della and Sonny. His bombs threatened Andrew Higgins and his son. They threatened thousands of other people filling the Michaud plant. Right now, at this moment, she was looking at her enemy.
Not the Germans. Not the Japanese. Martin. Or whatever his name really was.
Martin was her enemy.
As for Charles and Jerry, the jury was still out.
***
Georgette peered over the edge of the loading dock. She’d gone looking for Justine, hoping to patch things up with her, but she couldn’t do that when her friend was in the middle of a romantic tryst. There she stood with Martin, who was not Georgette’s favorite individual. As far as Georgette was concerned, he wasn’t even her favorite man trying to get Justine’s attention, but that was Justine’s decision to make.
She didn’t like leaving Justine alone with a man who had Martin’s temper, but Justine had chosen to slip out of the plant with him. She was going to have to take care of herself.
As Georgette backed away from the loading dock’s open bay toward the temporary stage waiting for Andrew Higgins, she heard Justine’s voice, and she wasn’t whispering sweet nothings in Martin’s ear. First, she called out something in a language Georgette didn’t know. Then she started screaming that there was a bomb. Specifically, a firebomb.
Georgette spun and ran for the door where a huge crowd of her coworkers waited for Sonny to tell them it was time to go. Georgette dodged them as easily as she’d once dodged alligators in her pirogue. When people refused to get out of her path, she stuck out a stiff arm and shoved them out of her way like her brothers had done when they’d played on their school’s football team back home.
Being strong, long-legged, and determined, she made it to the door ahead of most of the crowd, where she paused just long enough to break her stride. Standing in the entranceway where she could be heard both inside and outside the Carbon Division, she yelled, “Get out, all of you! Get out! There’s a bomb. A firebomb!” She knew that this was true because her friend said so.
And then she was running again, but not for the doors. The Carbon Division workers were stampeding for the front entrance nearest them, but Georgette had someplace else to be.
***
Justine flung herself toward the ramp, trying to put distance between her body and the man who had planted the bomb at her feet. Probably he had planted more of them, including some in the other green-stamped boxes she could see. Others could be anywhere in the plant, which was stuffed as full of people as it could possibly be.
The small-time sabotage of the Carbon Division—the broken lateral guides, the broken tool rest, the punctured acetylene hose—had been leading up to this. It made sense for a spy to try to slow down production until everything was in place for a full attack. Timing the explosions for the day that Andrew Higgins was onsite was a stroke of genius. Higgins had designed the boats that made the landing at Normandy possible. Killing him would be a true act of revenge.
Justine stumbled as she tried to climb the ramp, bloodying both palms on the rough concrete, but she didn’t stop moving away from Martin—or whatever his name was. She reached up with both hands, crawling on all fours, and she was doing it. She was nearing the top. But then her whole body jerked to a stop. Martin’s big hand was wrapped around her ankle, and it was all she could do to hold her ground as he pulled her down toward him. She had nothing to hold on to—no banister, no ledge, no handhold at all—and she knew she only had seconds before his strength overpowered hers. She cut that time in half by letting go with one hand to fumble with her pocket buttons.
The worn, often-washed twill of her coveralls’ buttonholes yielded easily, allowing her to unbutton the front right pocket and reach for her pocketknife. Papers flew. The wind took some of them skittering across the pavement toward the grassy marshland. Others were ground under Martin’s feet as he struggled for purchase against the smooth blacktop at the bottom of the ramp. Justine couldn’t be bothered about the loss of all that work, and it didn’t matter anyway. The information was in her head. To preserve it, all she had to do was survive. Maybe she would, if she could only find that knife, but there was nothing at the bottom of her pocket.
Giving up on the knife, she reached for her right rear pocket, drawing her adjustable wrench out and raising it high in her right hand. She didn’t have physical strength on her side, but the wrench was heavy, it extended her lever arm by six inches, and she had the high ground. Gravity was working in her favor. Surely, she could bring the wrench down on Martin’s head hard enough to stun him, at least.
She let go with her other hand, knowing that she would immediately go into downward motion from the force he was exerting on her ankle. This downward motion would be added to the downward force when she swung the wrench, so she let it happen. As she started to slide, a flying piece of graph paper reminded her that she’d moved the pocketknife to a rear pocket, the left one, to make room for papers in both front pockets. She reached her left arm behind her back, yanked the pocket’s button clean off, thrust in her hand, and grasped the knife.
The hand holding the wrench was beginning its downswing when Martin said, “Don’t be stupid.”
It was only then that she felt the muzzle of his handgun pressing into her abdomen.
Chapter 33
Cries of “Bomb!” and “Fire!” rose up all around Georgette. The Carbon Division was emptying behind her as she ran, which was a great relief, but the people in the main part of the plant were in danger, too. She continued to scream her warning as she ran to them beneath tremendous boats and airplanes, partially assembled, one after another after another. The war machines loomed over her head, incomplete, like whales and condors ravaged by scavengers.
She’d seen the box that Justine opened and she’d seen Martin moving boxes all week. Maybe longer. He could have put bombs anywhere. Everywhere.
Throngs of people were leaving the plant. Georgette rejoiced for every one of them, but she couldn’t go with them. She had two things to do.
***
Justine’s pelvis and elbows and skull banged against the concrete as Martin dragged her down the ramp with one hand, using the other one to press a gun to her belly. She could see Charles and Jerry, quite near now.
Their guns were drawn, and Charles was yelling, “Let her go, Martin. This is between us.”
Her body was rigid with fear, which was helpful in a way, since her stiff fingers were managing to hang on to the wrench and to the pocketknife concealed in her palm, but her mind had never felt quicker. Her thoughts were sharp. They cut through everything and found inarguable facts. Using those facts as building blocks, they made intuitive leaps that couldn’t feel more true.
The guns that Charles and Jerry were training on Martin gave her one fact she could trust. Until she saw them take him on, she couldn’t be sure that they weren’t all three working together. Clearly, they were not.
What else had she learned? She had already known that Charles spoke German. Now she was certain that Martin did, too. Were they both German spies who were somehow in conflict? Maybe, but the better scenario for Justine was that Jerry and Charles were American spies embedded among Higgins’s employees to protect against things like industrial sabotage.
Logic said that the saboteur was Martin, the one who was strewing bombs hither and yon. Logic also said that he had an agent among the Carbonites, because she knew of no way for him to get onto their factory floor to commit sabotage. She tucked that nugget away for later. It was going to be important to find out who his agent was, but first she had to survive the next few minutes.
***
Georgette took the stairs to Sam-the-Timekeeper’s office two at a time. He was standing in his open door, peering at the melee below.
She felt disoriented, dizzied by the vertiginous view through the stairs’ metal grating. A vast sea of people was moving directly beneath her, emptying one end of the plant, but she could see that word was spreading too slowly. Farther away, the crowd of workers who had already lined up in front of the podium for Higgins’s speech stood and waited, oblivious.
Sam-the-Timekeeper’s puzzled face was focused on hers. “What’s happening?”
Georgette’s chest was about to burst and her heartbeat was deafening in her ears, but she needed to find a way to speak. She stepped onto the landing outside his office and bent over, hands on her knees, to catch her breath. Gasping, she got out the words that had to be said.
“Bomb.” She dragged in a long breath. “Blow the—” She stopped to cough.
He was already in motion. “We need to blow the whistle and get people out of here.”
***
“Drop your guns,” Martin said. “She’s going with me.”
He dragged Justine to her feet, holding her in front of him like a human shield. Locking eyes with Charles and Jerry, he said, “I said to drop your guns.”
Crouching slowly, Charles laid his weapon at his feet and stood back up. Equally slowly, Jerry leaned hard forward, eased the gun to the ground, and used his arms to pull himself back upright.
Martin should have taken Justine’s wrench, but Charles and Jerry and their guns had distracted him. Her right hand hung at her side, still holding the wrench. In her left palm, she hid a pocketknife that he knew nothing about. Her weapons made her feel a small stir of hope.
Justine was right-handed. It wasn’t easy to manipulate the pocketknife, but she was doing her best to slide her thumbnail into the crescent-shaped nick that should give her enough purchase to lever it open. Working in her favor was the fact that the knife was old and well-used.
Hoping that Martin wouldn’t feel her brachioradialis muscle flex and ease, she worked to open the blade. Since his attention was still on Charles and Jerry, he never noticed the slight movements of her lower arm, and he didn’t notice the involuntary thrill that shook her body, oh so slightly, when the blade swung open on its loose and aged pivot. She let her arms dangle and waited for an opportunity.
Martin leaned down to speak in her ear. “You’re going with me because they’re fools. All they have to do to stop me is shoot through you, but Americans are too weak for that. We have five minutes before those bombs blow, so we’re going to walk to my car, get in it, and get the hell out of here. When this place is far enough in my rearview mirror, I’m going to ask you a question, so start thinking about your answer.”
Justine thought she knew what the question was.
“I’m going to give you a choice. You can come with me and leave this mind-killing job behind. I think I can promise you a good life. I know I can promise you an exciting one.”
She said nothing, but she let her eyes suggest that her answer might be one that he’d like.
His voice lowered even further to the point where she knew that neither Charles nor Jerry could hear. “Or you can end this day dead and under ten feet of swamp water.”
Just like her parents.
Her arm muscles wanted to tense, ready to slam him with the wrench or stab him with the knife, because she was so sure that he was the one who had put them in that bayou to drown. Justine was ready to let Martin shoot her, just for the joy of striking out at the man who took her parents away, even if she only felt it for an instant before the bullet hit her. But she didn’t, because she could hear the voices of Gerard and Isabel telling her to relax and wait for the right opportunity. She could hear them telling her to live.
His arm tightened around her. “I was told not to leave anyone alive and on the loose who might help the enemy’s nuclear program, but I have plenty of justification to spare you if I present you as someone useful to our goals. Imagine the laboratory they would give you. Imagine the time and the raw materials and the laboratory assistants. Imagine what you could do if somebody believed in you.”
He knew what would tempt her, because a beautiful laboratory could certainly do it, but he didn’t understand her at all. If he believed that she would run away with a man preparing to firebomb thousands of people, then his mind was truly diseased.
But how could she escape him? Despair tried to take her, but she shook it off. This man had been ordered to kill anyone who might be useful in developing a nuclear program. If he knew about Gloria, then he had just threatened to kill her. Nothing was more important to Justine than protecting her godmother. Nothing was more important than the selfless love that Gloria had always shown her. Surely that kind of love could win the day.
As she felt herself wrapped in the love of Gloria and of her parents, a familiar noise rose over the frantic beating of her heart. Somebody was blowing the factory whistle, over and over.
***
At the word “bomb,” Sam-the-Timekeeper had pointed at the dangling cable and told Georgette to pull it, offering her the special thrill of sounding the factory whistle, but she’d held up a hand because she had more to say. It came out with a wheeze.
“Firebomb.”
Sam had frozen in place, still pointing at the cable that would blow the factory whistle. All Georgette needed to do to get more people moving toward the exits was to pull it, but the whistle wouldn’t be enough. She needed to stop a fire before it started.
Still gasping for breath, she choked out, “Turn on the sprinklers,” over the noise wafting up to them from the factory floor. Sam had paused, silent, and Georgette had thought for a heartbeat that he was going to refuse to activate them, and she didn’t know how to do it.
She knew it was an odd request that she was making, asking Sam to douse the whole plant and everything in it with water when there was no fire. Still, he had listened when she said, “The person I’d most trust to recognize a firebomb just hollered that there was one. So it must be true.”
He’d kept listening when she said, “I think the man standing beside her set the firebomb, and I bet he planted them everywhere. I just know he did. He’s been moving boxes around this place all week. Longer, probably.”
Sam-the-Timekeeper had a quiet, wise air about him, so he’d merely nodded to acknowledge that he’d heard her. Then he’d asked, “Why do you think it will help if we douse the place with water?”
“I spent a lot of time with my friend’s physics book last night.”
Sam-the-Timekeeper hadn’t even given her a funny look when she’d said that, like she was too stupid to be reading books about fancy things like physics, and she loved him for it. Then she’d explained to him what she’d learned from Justine’s physics book, while she was trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong during the welding fire.
“I found out that it’s a big mistake to put water on electrical fires, but water cools flammable materials like wood down below their ignition temperature, so that they can’t burn. So if the whole plant is being doused with water when the bombs go off, don’t that mean that it’ll put out the firebombs before they even start burning?”
Using only logic, Georgette had made Sam-the-Timekeeper believe that drastic action was called for. It was necessary. So he had activated the sprinklers while she pulled the whistle cable again and again. She didn’t know how to use it to signal an emergency, but she thought maybe people would figure things out if she just kept tooting.
***
Water was everywhere. It fell from the ceiling onto the bellies of boats destined for the South Pacific. It collected in the cockpits of half-built planes that would be flying to points unknown. It dripped onto duckbilled boats like those that had disgorged a winning army onto the beaches of Normandy. It drenched the finely tailored suit of Andrew Higgins, the man who had designed them all. It drenched the throngs of people hurrying away from the rumors of bombs and from the sound of a whistle blasting again and again.
