The Darkest Hour(30)

“You’ve told me quite the story, Dorner,” I start.

His head shoots up. Confusion fills his big eyes. “Story? You think that I’ve been lying to you?”

“It’s possible.”

He takes the folder. “You have the proof in front of you. You have it right here.”

“These documents could’ve been doctored.”

“Why would anyone go to the trouble of that?”

“For safe passage to England.”

The last piece of his proper exterior begins to crack. “I risked my life leaving Germany. I committed treason coming to you, and you believe I did all this to travel to England?”

“There are spies everywhere.”

“I’m not a spy!” Anger twists his features, but he has enough resolve left to rein it in. “Why is that so difficult for you to believe?”

“You had a prestigious job in Germany. You had a long career ahead of you, yet you gave all of it up along with everything else that you knew.”

He goes quiet. Then, deliberately, he opens the folder and turns to the photo of the little girl. “Here is my reason. This is why I left.”

“Because of one patient?”

“For all of them.” He closes his eyes. “Though I’ll never forget her. She was ten years old. A Jehovah’s Witness. She never spoke or cried like the others, but every day she would look at the clock on the wall. For days I wondered what she was waiting for. Perhaps her family to come through the doors? But her parents and brother had already succumbed to the virus.” He clears the wobble from his voice. “Later I realized that she was waiting for death.”

Silence takes me by the throat. I think about what that little girl went through, from losing her family and then losing her own short life that had barely started. And for what? For the “crime” of her faith? I can’t help but think about Ruthie and what would’ve happened to her and her mother if they’d lived in France instead of America.

My hands knot into fists so tight that I lose all feeling in them. I did the same thing after Theo’s funeral, too. Maman had bought flowers and a tombstone, but we didn’t have a body to bury beneath it. That’s what the army told us. My brother was laid to rest in some grave in the Algerian desert, but I bet that little girl wasn’t even given that.

I turn my attention back to Dorner. All of his politeness has been stripped apart and replaced with the haunted man in front of me. Admittedly I’m glad to see him looking so miserable.

“I’ve seen the Zerfall patients with my own eyes,” he says, “and I’ve worked next to the scientists who developed the disease. If you have your doubts, then let me clear them.”

It’s the perfect answer, spoken with the right amount of gusto, but I know Major Harken wouldn’t fall for a pretty answer so easily.

“Tell me about the virus,” I say. “How did the Nazis create it?”

He wipes clean the lenses of his glasses. “They didn’t create the virus, per se. We don’t have the ability for that. What they did instead was send research teams to places throughout the world where deadly diseases sometimes occur. The Orient, for instance. The jungles of South America.”

I’m not quite sure where he’s leading me, and so I motion for him to go on.

“One team in particular discovered a disease that struck at the mouth of an African river. So in 1938 they built a facility there to observe it, and eventually they gathered enough research to bring three live patients to Europe for further study.”

A tingle washes down my spine. “The Nazis have been at work on this mission for years?”

“Since before the war started, at the Führer’s behest. He was the one who named the initiative Operation Zerfall.”

I grow cold all over. Leave it to Hitler to concoct something like this. It’s not enough that he has conquered half of Europe. He wants to bring everyone else to their knees as well.

“What are the symptoms of Zerfall?” I ask.

“A fever to begin with. It’s usually accompanied by a cough and sore throat.”

I jot down as much as I can in my memory. “What else?”

“There’s not much else. Not in the first phase.”

The pen in my mind comes to a hard stop. “What happens in the second phase?”

“That’s typically when the bleeding starts from the orifices, from the eyes and nose especially.”

I try to ignore the shudder rolling through me. It’s no wonder why the patients in the photographs looked so wracked with pain. I don’t even want to think about my next question, but I have to ask it. “And after that? The third phase?”

Dorner’s fingers tug at his shirt buttons again, and I know his answer can’t be good. “There isn’t a third phase. After the second phase sets in, a handful of patients may survive, but most will succumb to the disease.”

I sink back into my chair, and there’s no use hiding my horror. I don’t know much about diseases, but Zerfall sounds worse than the Spanish flu and the Black Death put together. Then a new question knocks at my thoughts. “If the virus is that contagious, why aren’t the Nazis afraid of contaminating their own forces?”

“Oh, they’re well aware of that.” He shifts his attention away from me and onto his muddy shoelace. “That’s why it has taken years to launch Zerfall. The disease is ready to spread, but our team couldn’t do that without risking the lives of German troops. So they had to develop a cure first.”