The War in the Dark

by Nick Setchfield

  They left the cover of the underpass as an S-Bahn train rolled above them, its sluggish rumble sounding in the girders, shuddering through the metal. They took care to keep close to the viaduct, passing under hoardings for Opel cars and Old Red Fox whisky, posters engaged in their own small war against the communist slogans on the other side of the city. The rain had stopped some hours ago but it pooled between the cobbles and dripped from the gantries. The tarmac glimmered like oil.

  The streets behind Potsdamer Platz were just as deserted as the main square but they were concealed from the sight of the guard towers, a fact that lent them a furtive, conspiratorial quality. They held the occasional shop, closed now for the night, and rows of residential houses, their windows intermittently lit. There was a scrapyard on the corner of Stresemannstrasse, its clutter of iron pipes and engine parts left to rust in the forecourt. The remains of a family car looked almost spectral in the moonlight.

  There was mist in the air now, idling in the dark.

  A solitary figure stood on the street, dressed in a belted, ankle-length coat and a narrow-brimmed trilby, tilted to obscure the face. The presence was so perfectly motionless it seemed to be a fixed point in the shadows, a shape rather than a person. And then, almost imperceptibly, the figure moved, shifting its head to catch the streetlight. Winter glimpsed a silvery beard and familiar, reproving eyes.

  ‘My God, it’s Faulkner…’

  It made no sense. Why would the head of SIS be waiting there, on an empty street in Berlin, entirely alone? There were no other agents to be seen, no sign of any security detail around him. It was, at the very least, a profound breach of field protocol.

  ‘Sir?’

  Winter’s tone was courteous but wary. He sensed Karina tauten beside him, bracing for combat. He touched her arm, cautioning her to hold back. Across the street a gas lamp sputtered and hissed, its light faltering.

  The man strode towards them. His pace was fast, determined, his steps heavy on the road. As he passed an empty phone kiosk the light inside the box flared, as if experiencing a sudden surge of voltage.

  ‘Sir Crispin,’ began Winter.

  The man seized him by the throat. The assault was so abrupt, so unexpected, that Winter had no chance to block the move. The hand encircled his windpipe and tightened. Faulkner’s grip was surprisingly strong.

  Winter grasped his assailant’s wrists. He fought to break the chokehold but the crucial leverage escaped him. The hand continued to close, seemingly determined to crush the bones of his neck.

  Winter battled to breathe. The street around him began to fade. So did the face of Faulkner, with its strangely dull, filmy eyes.

  Winter’s vision didn’t darken as his senses retreated. It turned white. A fierce, pure, brilliant white that engulfed his eyes.

  It was absolute and it was everything.

  White fire. It consumed him.

  And then Faulkner’s grip slackened. Karina was on his back, her right arm locked around his throat. She gave a twist of muscle, wrenching the man’s head, almost cracking the upper vertebrae. Faulkner reeled, struggling to shake her, break her purchase on his body. Karina grimaced, clung on, maintaining the pressure until Faulkner finally surrendered his hold on his agent.

  Flung to the ground, Winter hit kerbside concrete. He lay there, dragging air into his lungs as gutter water seeped into his suit. In seconds the brilliant white light was gone from his eyes. As his vision stabilised he saw Faulkner totter backwards and smash Karina repeatedly against a stone wall, using his bulk in a bid to dislodge her. She hung on to him, her face contorting as she tightened her forearm around his throat.

  And then, with a final heave, she was hurled away. There was a thud of flesh against stone. She landed with a grunt, her bag slapping the wall. Faulkner had shrugged her off, discarded her as an irritant. Now he returned his attention to Winter, moving with clear purpose.

  Karina scissored her legs around Faulkner’s, snagging him. He kicked her feet away and continued walking.

  Winter’s chest heaved. Pain carved through his lungs. He reached for his Russian gun, his fingers trembling as they found the holster. Precious seconds wasted.

  Karina had her blade in her hand. She had spun into the space between Faulkner and Winter, plucking the knife from her skirt. She crouched now, tossing the blade’s porcelain handle from palm to palm. And then she sprang, slicing forward with the reed-thin weapon.

  Faulkner blocked the blade. Its razored edge swept through his hand. There was no wound, no laceration, not a drop of blood. Only a ghost of an indentation where the knife had passed. A second later it was gone. The man had felt nothing.

  Winter snatched his gun from the holster. He focused and fired at Faulkner’s left shoulder. The bullet tore straight through the body, leaving a smouldering hole in the coat. It struck the wall with a metallic howl. The man barely flinched.

  This wasn’t Faulkner. This was something else.

  Winter shot the creature in the face. The flesh rippled, like water, as if the bullet had punched into a clear pond. For a moment Winter glimpsed a multitude of faces, shifting and blurring.

  A car passed, at speed. There was a sudden dazzle of headlights.

  Faulkner’s face was gone. He had another one now, similar but a stranger’s. The silver-streaked beard remained but everything else had changed, fractionally, like a face pieced together from a partial memory. It was almost Faulkner. Almost.

  The man stood there, blankly. There was no trace of the determination that had animated his features only seconds before. He regarded Winter impassively. And then he turned, his hands digging into the pockets of his overcoat. He began to walk away, his shoes sounding on the flagstones of the quiet street. Soon he was lost to the Berlin mist.

  Winter looked at Karina as she hurried towards him. ‘You’re impressive,’ he said, collecting his breath. ‘You know, I rather think you could kill me, if it came to it.’

  She didn’t smile. ‘I want to know what that was,’ she said.

  She offered her hand and Winter took it, hauling himself up from the kerbside. Back on his feet, he loosened his tie and tore his shirt collar open. His throat felt raw, the skin smarting from the attack.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘But those things are following me.’

  ‘You’ve seen something like that before?’

  He nodded, briskly. ‘I saw one in London. I thought it was somebody else. Somebody I knew. Their faces change. God knows what they are. I hoped maybe you could tell me.’

  Karina peered into the drift of mist. There was no sign of their assailant. The city had erased him.

  ‘It just walked away… What do you mean their faces change?’

  ‘Didn’t you see it happen? It was Faulkner!’

  She turned to him, confused. ‘Faulkner? Sir Crispin Faulkner? The man at the border?’

  ‘Yes! It had his face! And then it… changed. Became somebody else. That’s what they do. Are you seriously telling me you didn’t see that?’

  Karina evaluated Winter’s words. ‘I saw that man take a bullet in the face and walk away. But he wasn’t Sir Crispin Faulkner. I have no idea what you saw.’

  Winter dragged a hand through his cropped curls, tearing at the roots. ‘I am not going mad,’ he insisted. ‘That’s the one thing I tell myself in all of this. I am not going mad. Because you seem insane. And yet you tell me this is how the world is. So when people like you say you have no idea what I’m talking about then, well, Christ, I really feel alone.’

  Karina reached for his hand. Her fingers were calloused but warm on his cold skin.

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ she said, calmly. ‘That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’

  Her touch was unexpected. Winter nodded, not ungrateful. And then he shrugged her hand away. He didn’t want to need it.

  ‘You’d better check that bloody bottle of yours. Priorities.’

  Karina quickly unbuckled her bag. She lifted out the bottle and de
licately unwrapped the tissue. Exposed, the glass gleamed, its imperfect curves catching the streetlight.

  ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘It’s intact.’

  There was a sound like thunder rolling over the city. It came suddenly, a rumbling that seemed to bruise the very air. They looked up and saw a pair of fighter jets slash through the evening clouds, trailing scars of vapour. Republic F-84s, noted Winter. American planes, scrambled from the air base. They were moving at speed but it was impossible to tell if this was a genuine threat response or just a piece of intimidatory theatre, routine on this frontier of the Cold War.

  ‘We need to move,’ said Karina, stuffing the bottle back into the bag. ‘We’re late as it is.’

  * * *

  Die Wendeltreppe stood at the far end of Falke Spur, its name declared in a Bauhaus font on a tarnished metal plate. It was the only surviving shop in the street, though the state of its health was questionable. Its windows were grilled, their bars colonised by rust, and the paint of its frontage, once a pale shade of blue, peeled in flaking clusters, revealing crumbling brickwork beneath. The shop’s exterior had a sickly, almost diseased aura, as if its decay could be contagious, transmitted by touch.

  Karina twisted the iron handle. The door opened with a pained, reluctant crack and a tinkling of bells.

  ‘Guten Abend,’ she said, addressing the dusty hush within.

  The shop was lit by candles. There were too few to provide any decent illumination but as Winter’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he saw the chaos of junk around him. There were objects everywhere, arranged with no obvious logic: a dead carriage clock shared a shelf with a porcelain harlequin, antique apothecary bottles sat next to a brass incense burner, the single scuffed shoe of a ballerina rested against a child’s violin. There were books, too, placed in haphazard islands on the floor, their bindings faded, unreadable.

  ‘Guten Abend, Fräulein Fabre.’

  A man emerged from the recesses of the shop. He made his way towards them, expertly navigating the teetering books. He could only have been in his thirties but there was already a stunted look to him, something wormy and hunched, burrowed inside his suit. Just like Unterbrink his skin had an ashen cast that suggested a life untroubled by the sun.

  ‘Herr Beltz?’ The French inflection had returned to her voice.

  The man extended a hand. ‘Yes, indeed. I am at your service.’

  ‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ said Karina. ‘We were detained.’

  ‘Please, think nothing of it. Time seems of less consequence inside these walls. It’s one of the joys of our business.’

  ‘And what is your business, exactly?’ asked Winter, shaking the man’s hand in turn. ‘Junk, I take it?’

  ‘Items of antiquarian interest,’ said Beltz, coolly. ‘Historische Objekte. Sammlerstücke. And you are?’

  ‘Just an interested party.’

  Beltz’s eyes seemed to flinch from the light, even in the shop’s candle shadows.

  ‘He’s with me,’ said Karina, quickly. ‘Unterbrink knows.’

  ‘I wasn’t informed about this man but if Herr Unterbrink is aware of him then his presence is not a problem. You have the item, of course?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Karina.

  ‘Then please, if you will both follow me.’

  Beltz led them deeper into the shop. It was surprisingly large, a half-lit warren of nooks and corners, connected by sets of wooden steps. Elaborately framed paintings lay stacked on the floor, denied a place on the walls by the sheer crush and clutter of shelves. They passed a sculpture of a seahorse, carved from coral the colour of old teeth.

  ‘So you call yourselves the Reliquarists?’ asked Winter, casually.

  Beltz walked ahead of him. ‘We try not to use that name on the outside.’

  ‘The outside? The outside of what?’

  ‘The outside of our world,’ stated Beltz, as if this was the only answer imaginable.

  There was a staircase in the heart of the shop. It coiled in concentric circles, a whorl of wrought iron, spiralling down and down, through one floor, then another, then another, the stairs extending to a distant basement, deeper than the shop’s exterior suggested. It was a dizzying, almost hypnotic helix, lit by a corkscrew parade of candles.

  ‘Remarkable,’ said Winter, genuinely impressed.

  ‘We think so.’

  Beltz led them down the staircase. Their shoes rang on the succession of metal grilles. Winter found himself fighting a surge of nausea as they twisted into the depths of the building, the three of them moving in tight rotation. Their candle-cast shadows filled the walls, stretching like putty.

  At last they reached the basement, a drab, brick-walled storage area where even more junk lay heaped in the corners. The room had a smell of oil and electricity. Old generators murmured against the walls, their dials obscured by grime.

  At the foot of the staircase was a wide, circular trapdoor, rather like a manhole cover. Beltz knelt down and picked up an iron bar. He dug it into the recessed edge of the trapdoor. With a grunt he prised the hatch open.

  Stale air rose from the open hole. There was darkness beneath, tar-black.

  ‘Herr Unterbrink is waiting,’ declared Beltz.

  This city held another secret.

  21

  It was like clambering into an inkwell.

  Winter descended the ladder that led into the thick dark under the trapdoor. It was built of rigid steel, bolted to the wall below. Its rungs ran with condensation, cold as ice water. They chilled his hands as he held them, one slick metal bar after another. Beltz was below him, Karina above.

  He moved cautiously, knowing he was entering a space it would be tricky to escape from. The tactical part of his mind disliked that fact immensely. Only curiosity – and a grudging trust in Karina – persuaded him that this was an acceptable risk.

  He let go of the last bar and dropped to the ground, falling to a surface that felt hard and uneven, as if a great expanse of rock had been crudely flattened. Karina landed beside him. Puddles sloshed around their shoes, reflecting electric light. Beltz had a torch in his hand and was sweeping the walls, exposing a barrel-vaulted tunnel ahead.

  It was a dank, subterranean place. Water seeped from the walls and dripped from the joists that supported the makeshift ceiling. A small portable heater stood in the shadows, glowing orange as dust smouldered upon its grille. Another heater was placed a little further along the tunnel and yet another glimmered in the distance. They did little to dispel the pervasive, bone-deep cold. It was like striking matches in the Arctic, thought Winter.

  ‘This way,’ said Beltz. His voice was low now.

  They began to walk. Winter saw bundles of cables entwined on the ground. Other cables were clipped against the walls, coiling into the dark. A web of blue and green wiring hung from the ceiling, stitched through the cracks in the stone. Pipes and tubes ran the length of the passage, disappearing into fissures, their purpose uncertain.

  Winter knew about this network of tunnels beneath the city. He had seen the files on Operation Stopwatch, known one of the men who had worked on it with the CIA, a brusque, brandy-loving service legend named Wickersham. A decade ago British Intelligence had run an intercept operation in a secret tunnel half a mile long, across the border from West to East Berlin. The tunnel had been located three hundred yards from the American sector, right under the very snouts of the Russians.

  A battalion of tape recorders had plugged into the trunk telephone lines that connected East Berlin and Leipzig, tapping the covert traffic between Zossen and the army headquarters at Adlerhorst.

  Back in London, in poky old Chester Terrace, on the edge of Regent’s Park, a team of analysts had pored over the high-grade Soviet ciphers, trying to make sense of the stolen chatter. Winter always remembered Wickersham telling him that the operation had lasted precisely eleven months and eleven days, a fact he never failed to describe as ‘positively Biblical’.

  The KGB then bra
gged that they had known of the tunnel’s existence all along, and had fed the British and the Americans a stew of lies, misdirections and strategically sacrificed truths, all the better to coat the bullshit. Winter only knew that Wickersham had taken a bullet one night after cards at the Silversea Club in Mayfair. Some said it had been a London gangland hit, payback for his part in an unsavoury gambling scandal. Others knew a pointed message from Moscow when they saw one. Winter wondered if this was the same tunnel. The British had abandoned it in ’56, after all. Perhaps these people, whoever they were, had found another, equally furtive use for it.

  A rumble echoed through the dark stone of the passage. It took half a minute to pass, reverberating with a heavy, slow-fading roar. They had to be close to the U-Bahn line down here.

  There was a light ahead. Two pools of light, in fact, both a sickly lemon colour, glowing against the tunnel walls. Winter soon perceived the source of the illumination. From a distance it looked like the severed head of a horse but it was a wartime gas mask, nailed to a joist. There was an oil lamp inside it. The light flickered through the wide, empty eyes of the mask.

  To the left was a hefty wooden door, its frame carved out of the rock. Beyond it the tunnel continued, receding into solid dark.

  The door was open, revealing a sunken anteroom. Inside this chamber a pair of gas lanterns hung from the ceiling, perched on hooks. There were lumpen sandbags piled against the walls, soaking up the water that swilled in the far corners. More incongruously, a set of elegant, glass-fronted display cabinets stood in the gaslit shadows, their shelves filled with objects that hid like secrets but glittered like treasure.

  Winter took it all in. There was something church-like, almost sacred about this space, buried here beneath the city.

  ‘Fräulein Fabre. Herr Winter. You are welcome here.’

  The smell was unmistakable. Unterbrink sat at a rough-hewn wooden table whose legs rested at crooked angles. There was an open ledger and a fat bottle of Rémy Martin in front of him. He rose, still dressed in the decrepit suit he had worn for lunch. He scrunched his eyes against the beam of Beltz’s torch. ‘Please, Herr Beltz. We have no need for unnecessary light.’