“Tell me, Klaus, what was the objective behind the assassinations in Berlin?” Sam extended the so-called ad hoc interview for a glass of good whiskey. “Fear? Public alarm? I always thought it was your way of just preparing the masses for the coming implementation of a new system of order and discipline. How close I was! Should have placed a bet.”
Kemper looked less starry on hearing the new route the investigative journalist was taking, but he had nothing to lose in exposing his reasons to a walking dead man.
“That is a very simple agenda, actually,” he replied. “With the German Chancellor at our mercy, we have leverage. The killings of high-profile citizens, mostly responsible for the country’s political and financial well-being, prove that we are aware and that we are not hesitant to enforce our threats, of course.”
“So you picked them based on their elite status?” Sam inquired simply.
“That too, Mr. Cleave. But each of our targets had a deeper investment in our world than mere money and power,” Kemper revealed, yet he did not appear too eager to share what exactly that investment had been. Only until Sam pretended to lose interest with a simple nod and started staring out the window at the moving terrain outside did Kemper feel compelled to tell him. “Each of those seemingly random targets was in fact Germans assisting our contemporary comrades of the Red Army in concealing the location and shrouding the existence of the Amber Room. Milla has been the single-most effective hindrance in the Black Sun's search for the original masterpiece. My father heard it first hand from Leopoldt – a Russian traitor – that the relic had been intercepted by the Red Army and had not gone down with the Wilhelm Gustloff, as legend dictates. Since then some Black Sun members, changing their opinions about world domination, have defected from our ranks. Can you believe that? Aryan descendants, powerful and intellectually superior, chose to break ranks with the Order. But the ultimate betrayal was helping the Soviet bastards keeping the Amber Room hidden, even funding the covert operation in 1986 to destroy six of the ten remaining slabs of amber containing Kalihasa!”
Sam perked up. “Wait, wait. What are you saying about 1986? Half of the Amber Room was destroyed?”
“Yes, thanks to our freshly deceased elite members of society who funded Milla for Operation Motherland, Chernobyl is now the tomb of half of the magnificent relic,” Kemper sneered, clenching his fists. “But this time we are going to kill them off – make them extinct along with their countrymen and anyone who questions us.”
“How?” Sam asked.
Kemper laughed, surprised that a sharp man like Sam Cleave did not realize what was really going on. “Why, we have you, Mr. Cleave. You are the Black Sun's new Hitler… with that special creature that is feeding on your brain.”
“Excuse me?” Sam gasped. “How do you believe am I going to serve your purpose?”
“Your mind has the ability to manipulate the masses, my friend. Like the Führer, you will be able to subjugate Milla and all other agencies like them – even governments. They will do the rest themselves,” Kemper grinned.
“What about my friends?” Sam asked, alarmed at the prospects ahead.
“It will not matter. By the time you have projected Kalihasa’s power over the world, the organism will have consumed most of your brain,” Kemper revealed as Sam stared at him in raw horror. “Either that or the abnormal increase in electrical activity will have fried your brain. Either way, you will go down in history as a hero of the Order.”
31
“Give them the fucking gold. Gold will soon be useless unless they can find a way to convert vanity and density into feasible survival paradigms,” Natasha sneered at her colleagues. Milla’s visitors were seated around the large table with the group of militant hackers that Purdue now found were the people behind Gabi’s mysterious air traffic control communication. It was Marko, one of Milla’s more quiet members, who circumvented the Copenhagen air control and told Purdue's pilots to divert to Berlin, but Purdue was not going to blow his cover of Detlef’s ‘Widower’ moniker to reveal who he really was – not yet.
“I have no idea what gold has to do with the plan,” Nina muttered to Purdue in the midst of the Russian quarrel.
“A large part of the amber sheets still in existence still has the gold inlays and framing in place, Dr. Gould,” Elena explained, leaving Nina feeling silly for bitching a bit too loudly about it.
“Da!” Misha chipped in. “That gold is worth a lot to the right people.”
“You a capitalist pig now?” Yuri asked. “Money is useless. Value only information, knowledge, and practical things. We give them the gold. Who cares? We need the gold to fool them into believing that Gabi's friends are not up to something.”
“Better still,” Elena suggested, “we use the gold carvings to house the isotope. All we need then is the accelerant and enough electricity to heat the pot.”
“Isotope? Are you a scientist, Elena?” Purdue charmed.
“Nuclear physicist, Class of 2014,” Natasha boasted about her soft-spoken friend with a smile.
“Damn!” Nina raved, impressed at the intelligence hidden in the beautiful woman. She looked at Purdue and nudged him. “This place is a sapiosexual’s Valhalla, hey?”
Purdue raised his eyebrows flirtatiously at Nina's accurate assumption. Suddenly the heated discussion between the Red Army hackers was interrupted by a loud crackle that had them all frozen in anticipation. Listening intently, they waited. Over the wall-mounted speakers of the broadcast center, the wail of an incoming signal announced something sinister.
“Guten Tag, meine Kameraden.”
“Oh God, it is Kemper again,” Natasha hissed.
Purdue felt sick to his stomach. The sound of the man’s voice provoked a dizzy spell in him, but he held his own for the sake of the group.
“We will be arriving in Chernobyl in two hours,” Kemper reported. “This is your first and only warning that we expect you to have the Amber Room excavated from its Sarcophagus by our ETA. Non-compliance will result in…” he chuckled to himself and elected to abandon formality, “…well, it will result in the death of the German Chancellor and Sam Cleave, after which we will release nerve gas in Moscow, London and Seoul simultaneously. David Purdue will be implicated by our vast network of political media representatives, so do not attempt to defy us. Zwei Stunden. Wiedersehen.”
A click ended the interference and silence fell over the cafeteria like a blanket of defeat.
“This is why we had to change locations. They have been hacking into our broadcast frequencies for a month now. Sending number sequences different from ours, they are making people kill themselves and kill others by means of subliminal suggestion. Now we have to squat in Duga-3 ghost site,” Natasha scoffed.
Purdue swallowed hard as his temperature spiked. Trying not to uproot the meeting, he placed his cold, clammy hands on the seat by his sides. Immediately Nina could see that something was wrong.
“Purdue?” she asked. “Are you sick again?’
He smiled faintly and dismissed it with a shake of his head.
“He does not look well,” Misha remarked. “Contamination? How long have you been here? More than a day?”
“No,” Nina replied. “Just a few hours. But he has been getting sick for two days now.”
“Don’t worry, people,” Purdue slurred, still keeping a cheerful face. “It goes away after.”
“After what?” Elena asked.
Purdue jolted up, his face drained of color as he tried to compose himself, but he propelled his lanky body towards the door in a race with the urging need to puke.
“After that,” Nina sighed.
“The men’s toilet is one floor down,” Marko advised casually, watching the guest hasten down the steps. “Drinking or nerves?” he asked Nina.
“Both. The Black Sun tortured him for days before our friend Sam went to break him out. I think the trauma is affecting him still,” she explained. “They kept him at their fortress in the Kaza
kh Steppe and tormented him without rest.”
The women looked as indifferent as the men. Obviously, torture was embedded so deeply in their cultural past of war and tragedy that it was a matter of course in conversation. At once, Misha’s blank expression lit up and animated his features. “Dr. Gould, do you have the coordinates of this place? This… fortress in Kazakhstan?”
“Aye,” Nina replied. “That was how we found him in the first place.”
The temperamental man held out his hand to her, and Nina quickly fumbled through her front zipper pouch for the paper she jotted on in Dr. Helberg’s office that day. She passed Misha the scribbling of numbers and information.
‘So the first messages Detlef brought us in Edinburgh were not sent by Milla. Otherwise, they would have known about the location of the compound,' Nina thought, but she kept it to herself. ‘Then again, Milla dubbed him ‘Widower’. They recognized the name as Gabi’s husband right away too.’ Her hands rested in her dark, tousled hair as she propped up her head and elbows on the table like a bored schoolgirl. It occurred to her that Gabi - and therefore Detlef - had been deceived by the Order's interference in the broadcasts too, just like the people affected by the maleficent number sequences. ‘Oh my God, I owe Detlef an apology. I’m sure he survived the little Volvo incident. I hope?’
Purdue had been gone a long time, but it was more important to devise a plan before their time ran out. She watched the Russian geniuses discuss urgently in their tongue, but she did not mind. It sounded beautiful to her, and by their tone she guessed that Misha’s idea was solid.
Just as she started to worry about Sam's fate again, Misha and Elena faced her to explain the plan. The other members followed Natasha out of the room, and Nina could hear them thundering down the iron steps like during a fire drill.
“I take it you have a plan. Please tell me you have a plan. Our time is almost up, and I don't think I can take anymore. If they kill Sam, I swear to God I will dedicate my life to wasting them all,” she moaned in frustration.
“That is the Red attitude,” Elena smiled.
“And yes, we have a plan. Good plan,” Misha claimed. He almost seemed happy.
“Great!” Nina smiled, although she still looked tense. “What is the plan?”
Misha announced boldly, “We give them the Amber Room.”
Nina’s smile withered.
“Come again?” she blinked profusely, half with rage and half eager to hear his explanation. “Should I hope for more attached to your deduction? Because if that is your plan, I have lost all faith in my dwindling admiration for Soviet ingenuity.”
They laughed absent-mindedly. It was clear that they did not give a rat's ass about the opinion of a Westerner; not even enough to hasten toward alleviating her doubts. Nina folded her arms. Thinking about Purdue's persistent malady and Sam's constant subjugation and absence only riled the feisty historian up more. Elena could sense her frustration and bravely took her by the arm.
“We will not get involved in the actual, um, claim of the Amber Room or collection after by Black Sun, but we will give you what you need to combat them. Okay?” she told Nina.
“You're not going to help us get Sam back?” Nina gasped. She felt like breaking down in tears. After all this she had been turned down by the only allies, she had thought they had against Kemper. Maybe the Red Army was not as potent as their reputation stated, she thought with bitter disappointment in her heart. “What the fuck are you actually going to help with then?” she seethed.
Misha’s eyes grew dark with intolerance. “Look, we don’t have to help you. We broadcast information, not fight your battles.”
“That's obvious,” she scoffed. “So what is going to happen now?”
“You and Widower have to get the Amber Room’s remaining pieces. Yuri is getting a man with heavy truck and pulleys for you,” Elena tried to sound more proactive. “Natasha and Marko are in the sub-level sector reactor Medvedka right now. I am going soon to help Marko with the poison.”
“Poison?” Nina winced.
Misha pointed to Elena. “That is what they call chemical elements they put in bombs. I think they try to be funny. Like, poisoning a body with wine they poison objects with chemicals or something.”
Elena kissed him and excused herself to join the others at the secret fast breeder reactor basement, a section of the massive military base once used for equipment storage. Duga-3 was one of three locations Milla used to migrate to sporadically every year to evade capture or discovery, and the group had secretly adapted each of their sites into fully functional bases of operation.
“When the poison is ready, we will give you the materials, but you have to prepare your own weapon down at Shelter Object,” Misha explained.
“Is that the Sarcophagus?” she asked.
“Da.”
“But the radiation there will kill me,” Nina protested.
“You will not be in the Shelter Object. In 1996, my uncle and grandfather moved the Amber Room plates to an old well near Shelter Object, but there is ground, much earth, where the well is. It is not connected to Reactor 4 at all, so you should be fine,” he clarified.
“Jesus, it’s going to peel my skin off,” she muttered, seriously reconsidering abandoning the entire venture and leaving Purdue and Sam to their own devices. Misha scoffed at the paranoia of the spoiled Western woman and shook his head. “Who is going to show me how to prepare it?” Nina finally inquired, having made up her mind that she did not want the Russians to think Scots were wimps.
“Natasha is explosives expert. Elena is chemical hazard expert. They will tell you how to turn the Amber Room into a coffin,” Misha smiled. “One thing, Dr. Gould,” he continued in a subdued tone uncharacteristic of his dominant nature. “Please handle the metal with protective gear and try not to breathe without covering over your mouth. And after you give them the relic, stay far away. Big distance, okay?”
“Okay,” Nina replied, grateful for his concern. It was a side of him she had not had the pleasure of seeing until now. He was mature and human. “Misha?”
“Da?”
In all seriousness, she begged to know. “What weapon am I making here?”
He did not answer, so she pried some more.
“How far away should I be after giving Kemper the Amber Room?” she wished to determine.
Misha blinked a few times while he looked deep into the dark eyes of the pretty woman. He cleared his throat and advised, “Leave the country.”
32
When Purdue awoke on the toilet floor, his shirt was a mess of bile and saliva. Embarrassed, he did his best to remove it with hand soap and cold water at the sink. After some scrubbing, he surveyed the condition of the fabric in the mirror. “Like it never happened,” he smiled, satisfied with his effort.
When he entered the cafeteria, he found Nina being dressed by Elena and Misha.
“Your turn,” Nina grinned. “I see you had another bout of sickness.”
“This one was nothing short of violent,” he said. “What is happening?”
“We are padding Dr. Gould's clothing with radioactive-resistant materials for when you two go down to get the Amber Room,” Elena informed him.
“This is ridiculous, Nina,” he bitched. “I refuse to wear all that. Like our task is not already impeded by a deadline, now you have to resort to absurd and time-consuming measures to hold us up even longer?”
Nina frowned. It seemed Purdue had once again become the whiny bitch she had had a tiff with in the car, and she was not going to stand for his childish moods. “Would you like your balls to fall off by tomorrow?” she nipped back. “Otherwise you better get a cup; a lead one.”
“Grow up, Dr. Gould,” he countered.
“Radiation levels are next to lethal for this little expedition, Dave. I hope you have a large collection of baseball caps for that imminent hair loss you will suffer in a few weeks.”
Silently the Soviets laughed at Nina's patronizing ra
nt as they adjusted the last of her lead enforced gear. Elena gave her a medical mask to put over her mouth once down in the well and a climbing helmet for good measure.
After sulking for a while, Purdue allowed them to deck him out in similar fashion before accompanying Nina to where Natasha was ready to arm them for battle. Marko had assembled some delicate cutting tools the size of a pencil case for them, as well as instruction on how to plate the amber with the fine glass prototype he had created for just such an occasion.
“Are you people sure we will be able to pull off this highly specialized undertaking with such short notice?” Purdue asked.
“Dr. Gould says you are inventor,” Marko replied. “Just like work with electronics. Use the tools to access and fit. Put pieces of metal on the amber sheet to hide as gold inlay and put the covers over it. Use clips on the corners and BOOM! Death-reinforced Amber Room for them to take home.”
“I’m still not clear on what this all is,” Nina complained. “Why are we doing this? I got the hint from Misha that we must be far away, which means this is a bomb, right?”
“Correct,” Natasha affirmed.
“But this is just a collection of dirty silver metal frames and rings. It looks like something my mechanic grandfather hoarded in his junk yard,” she groaned. For the first time, Purdue showed some interest in their mission when he saw the junk that looked like tarnished steel or silver.
“Mary, Mother of God! Nina!” he gasped in awe, giving Natasha a look of chastisement and wonder. “You people are insane!”
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