A surge of anger sent the blood to my head. Mrs Müller just joined her husband at the top of my hit list.
*
At ten o'clock there was a knock at my door. I opened it and saw Delfina standing there. She’d come barefoot, wearing a simple nightdress. The figure inside it was a curvaceous shadow, backlit from the corridor.
In Spanish I said, “Come in, Delfina.”
She entered the room, staring blankly past me, her face tight with resolve. By the time I’d closed the door she’d taken off the nightdress and dropped it to the floor. Now completely naked, she got onto the bed and lay on her back with her thighs parted. The open invitation to make use of her body was both submissive and insolent.
I picked up the nightdress from the floor and held it out to her. Speaking quietly in Spanish I said, “You can put this on. I didn't ask you to come here for that."
She rose on one elbow, snatched the nightdress with her other hand, and held it to her chest. Then she looked at me and her green eyes narrowed. "What then? What else do you want me to do to you?"
"Delfina, I'm not what you think. You must know the effect you have on men. Did you see them in the dining room tonight? They all want you in their beds. You'd probably end up with Colin."
Blood drained from her face. "The engineer? With the teeth?"
"Yes. I asked Müller to send you to me because I want to protect you. You can stay here tonight. I won't touch you."
"I don't believe you."
"There’s no choice. You have to believe me.’
She frowned. “Maybe you don’t like sex with women.”
I caught the emphasis.
“Oh I like it, all right – when the partner is willing. Otherwise it’s not sex, it’s rape. Now put on your nightdress while I change in the bathroom. I'll sleep next to you, but you have nothing to fear from me.”
In the bathroom I took off my clothes and put on boxer shorts. I don’t like the restriction of anything more, even in cooler climates than this. When I returned to the bedroom she was under the sheets. I slipped in beside her, aware of the way she froze at my presence.
It wasn’t a large bed and as we lay side by side I could feel the warmth of her body through that thin nightdress. It comforted rather than aroused me. The mere notion of taking advantage of an abused, defenceless woman repelled me and banished any more primitive instincts I may have had.
I wasn’t aware of dropping off to sleep, but I woke up realizing I’d been disturbed by a slight jolting of the bed. I opened my eyes just enough to register that the room was still dark. My mental clock told me we were still in the early hours of the morning. I sighed and I was just settling back again when I heard a stifled sob. This time my eyes flew wide open.
“Delfina?”
The crying, suppressed until this moment, now broke its bounds.
“Delfina, Delfina…” I reached out to put an arm around her and she shrank from the touch. “It’s all right, it’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”
Still barely awake I forgot I was speaking in English, but my tone of voice seemed to achieve the desired effect. She heaved a huge sob and rolled against me, her head in the hollow of my shoulder. I felt the softness of her hair under my cheek, the cool of her tear-stained face against my skin.
I felt both sorrow and anger. With Dr Bruno Müller’s help, the Gestapo would have rendered this beautiful woman unrecognisable. Thanks to his loathsome experiments his grandson now had a more efficient way of securing her cooperation, but it wasn’t at zero cost. The damage she’d suffered was within: her self-esteem had gone, the spirit that was her driving force vanquished. Müller saw her as a worthless object and he’d made her see herself the same way.
“Listen to me, Delfina,” I said softly, in Spanish now. “You can survive this. Inside, you are the same person as you were before. Try to pretend the rest is happening to somebody else.”
The sobs continued, but gradually they subsided. I’d secured her trust at last, and she’d gone to sleep in my arms.
*
We awoke early. She jerked back in apparent surprise at finding herself with a man. Then she relaxed and fixed those lovely eyes on me.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“Jim.”
“Thank you, Jim.”
I got out of bed.
“Come here again tonight. If anyone puts a plastic disc in front of you, tell them the same thing: Dr Müller hasn’t finished with you. Okay?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
I smiled, jerked my head towards the door, and said in English, “Off you go, then.”
She shuffled across the bed, stood up, and padded quickly over to the door. It closed softly behind her.
35
I didn’t go back to bed. The entrance lobby was deserted when I went out to jog half a dozen times around the complex. After that I came back to my room and did press-ups and crunches in my room before taking a shower. An hour later I was sitting down to breakfast with Colin.
Back at Fort Piper I normally had a substantial breakfast – I needed the fuel on board when I was training with the men. The exercise I was doing here wasn’t really enough for me, and it was boring compared to the circuit training, the assault course, the unarmed combat, the 10-k run, fully loaded. I didn’t want to put on weight so I watched what I ate and breakfast for me was a coffee and some fruit. Colin had no such inhibitions; he was busy demolishing a plateful of bacon, egg, hash-browns, and some kind of sausage. The smell of it was almost overwhelming. I didn’t mind. It wasn’t a particularly worthy thought, but I got a sort of smug satisfaction out of watching all that greasy food going into him rather than into me. Normally I’d contrive not to be around Colin at breakfast, but there was still a lot to learn about this place and especially about that radiofrequency installation. As usual I led into the conversation obliquely.
“Colin,” I said, “you were saying the other day you really enjoyed your work. What exactly do you do?”
He brightened. “Mainly keep the transmitter in good trim. Some of the units in there are pretty old. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great stuff, but it needs tuning and tweaking from time to time.”
“How old is ‘old’?”
“More than a hundred years, mate.”
For a moment I thought I’d misheard him. “As old as that?”
He loaded up a fork. “Yeah, just after the Second World War. It was pretty much chaos around then. The big stuff we’ve got was used in radar. In those days it was all vacuum tube technology. It’s interfaced with computers now, but we still use the tubes to drive the antennae. I’ve got a 20 kV power supply in there, water-cooled anodes, thyratron switching. Beautiful gear – well, the Jerries made things to last, didn’t they?”
“So who brought them here?”
“Dunno. I s’pose it was Grandpa Müller. Could have pretended it was for an air defence system or something. Right then it was war surplus. They were glad to get rid of the stuff.”
I thought about that. “So he already had ideas about making a set-up like this?”
“Maybe. But he was a medic – wasn’t he? – not an engineer. And even if he’d got the transmitter going it wouldn’t have been much use to him.”
“Why?”
Colin stabbed a pudgy finger on the table as he was chewing a mouthful of bacon and egg. I tried to maintain an interested posture while distancing myself from the odour issuing from his mouth. He swallowed the mouthful noisily. “Two reasons. First, you couldn’t make an implant like that small enough, not with what was around back then. Second, you wouldn’t know how to coat it.”
“You mean it could have set up some sort of reaction?”
“That, yeah, but it’d probably pack up even before. Fluid gets in and buggers everything up, see?”
As I had one of these things in my own head I felt far from comfortable. “Have those problems been solved now?”
“Oh yeah. Some of us have had one in for years. No
problem.”
Time to be direct.
“Sounds really interesting. Would you like to show me the installation?”
His eyebrows shot up. “Show you? Ooh, no, I couldn’t take you in there. Müller would do his nut.”
“I don’t have to go in; I could look through a door or something like that. I’d really like to see the sort of thing you do.”
“Yeah, well… “ He picked his teeth with a fingernail. “When?”
“I have to do some work with Baer this morning. How about this afternoon?”
“All right, tell you what, we can go there after lunch. Should be able to give you a peek in, at least.”
“Great. Thanks.”
*
After my session with Baer I lunched with Colin, then followed him down the main corridor to the end wing. He placed his hand on the reader to open the security door on the right and we walked past Müller’s office and along the corridor to the end, where he opened the other security door. I felt a frisson of anticipation as we went through.
Immediately in front of us was yet another door, this one with a wire-reinforced window. I could hear a faint noise.
Colin turned. “You stay here and look through and I’ll tell you what you’re looking at.”
I nodded. The hum of machinery rose as the door opened, then fell as it closed behind him. Colin started to give me the guided tour from inside. I opened the door a crack.
“Can’t hear you properly, Colin. All right if I keep the door open a bit?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“What’s that noise, anyway?” I said.
“Diffusion pump, maintains the vacuums. There’s a back-up in case it needs servicing.”
With the door slightly open I had a much better view. My eyes were darting all over the installation, looking for potential weaknesses. The room seemed smaller than Müller’s office, but it was hard to tell because the centre was occupied by a copper-mesh cage, a sort of room within a room. It was hard to see what was inside it.
Colin anticipated me. “Hang on on a bit,” he said, and switched a light on inside the cage. This revealed a line of metal columns behind a steel cabinet. He pointed. “Those tubes drive the antennas. Four of them. Only one on all the time, and that’s the one that drives the antenna under the boundary fence. I rotate that job to each of them in turn, but I don’t really need to. Like I said, built to last.”
When he’d talked about tubes I’d envisaged ones with glass envelopes like I’d seen in science museums when I was a kid. The metal columns in that cage were nothing of that sort. Presumably they were there to protect glass tubes inside them. Would they withstand a good charge if it went off in here? The shock wave would be contained by the walls, concentrating its effect, even though it would blow the room door out. The walls of the copper cage were thin, so they’d rupture easily enough, but how robust were those columns? This stuff wasn’t intended to be bomb-proof – the radar installation would have been housed inside a reinforced concrete bunker. Even so, cost wasn’t an issue when that equipment was made, and they’d have been engineered to a high standard. From what Colin had just said, any one of them could be driving the antenna under that flimsy fence.
I glanced around. The diffusion pump might be a better target; it would be connected via a vacuum line. Destroy the vacuum and you’ve destroyed all the tubes at once. But where was it?
“I don’t see the diffusion pump, Colin,” I said.
He pointed to the steel cabinet under the columns. “Inside there. The backup’s in there as well.”
Not so good. The steel cabinet looked strong, and there was a lock securing the twin doors.
“Those,” he said, pointing upwards, “are the EHT cables, 20 kV.”
I looked up. The cables would have been a good target, too, but they were armoured with flexible metal sheaths. That was nothing to do with security; extra high tension cables were often clad like that.
I let him continue. He’d gone over to an open rack, which he indicated with evident pride.
“Switching circuitry in here, used to be thyratrons, I changed them to thyristors, updated all the control circuits to solid state. Computer motherboard to handle all the addresses…”
I was less worried about the solid state circuitry. That would be blown apart or fried in the intense heat of an explosion. But from what he said it was there to address the radiofrequency signal to individuals. The tube driving the field under the fence would be on all the time, so knocking out the control circuitry wouldn’t necessarily help. It would be nice to know that for sure, but just asking the question would be far too revealing.
He rested a hand on the copper cage. “I put this in as well. Nice job, innit? Soldered all the joints myself, copper spring seals on the door and the hinges.”
“Why do you need it?”
“Heard of a Faraday Cage?”
“Vaguely.” Of course I had. I remembered it from physics.
“Well that’s exactly what it is. High-frequency fields can’t get past the mesh, so if they’re inside they can’t get out, and if they’re outside they can’t get in. The antenna system’s complicated in this place and you can get a bit of reflection. The copper mesh keeps me safe, screens me from any radiofrequency leakage inside.” He chuckled. “Last thing I want is toothache and earache if I’m working in here.”
“Wouldn’t solid metal sheet be better?”
“But then you couldn’t see inside. If the mesh is fine enough it works the same. Seen enough?”
“Yeah, thanks a lot. Very interesting.”
He gave me a suspicous look. “Why d’you want to know all this, anyway?”
In his enthusiasm he’d clearly revealed more than he intended.
“Just interested in what you do over here,” I said casually. “And I thought you’d like to show it to me.”
“Yeah, all right.” He looked around him. “Well I’d better let you out before someone comes.” He went over to turn off the light in the copper cage.
At that point my pulse quickened. I could floor him right now and then go berserk in the installation. I turned slightly, my right fist clenched out of sight, and waited.
The light clicked off and he made for the door.
Suddenly it didn’t seem such a good idea. I’d need a heavy hammer or an axe to make a real impression on this installation. Even if I had something like that to hand – which I didn’t – there’d be a good chance of electrocuting myself with 20 kilovolts, or raising an alarm, or exposing myself to a lethal radiofrequency field.
He was at the door now.
My fist relaxed. The moment had passed. I opened the door and stood aside.
He led the way back and opened the security door into the main corridor. I went through.
“I’ll leave you here,” he said. “Got one or two things to do.”
“You spend most of your day in there?”
“Nah, that stuff’s only part of it. I write software, keep things up to date. Some of the older programs ran too slow, so I’ve streamlined it. Responds in milliseconds now. Not that you’d notice the difference if you were on the receiving end.” He huffed a short laugh. “Just a matter of pride, really. I like to make things state-of-the-art.”
“But technology’s changing all the time, and you’re totally isolated here. How can you stay ‘state-of-the-art’?”
He blinked a couple of times, then shrugged. “The hardware’s good for years. And I’m not about to rewrite the software in another programming language, even if there is one. This is as good as you’re gonna get.”
“Okay. Well, thanks again. See you at dinner.”
He’s too good at his job, this Colin, I thought, as I walked back. If I’d been in his shoes I’d have sabotaged the whole shebang years ago. But then, it’s different for him. He enjoys the perks too much. Bedtime, in particular.
Once in my room I sat on the edge of the bed, my chin in my hands, thinking about how I could dest
roy that transmitter. Four magnetic charges, or maybe a couple of really beefy ones, placed at the base of those columns ought to do it. I grunted.
Great, so how do you get in when there are two security doors on the way? And even if you could get in, where do you get the charges? You don’t have explosive, or detonators, or timers.
I thought for a moment. There was a place where they would have explosives of some sort: the LRA camp. But what was the use of that? I couldn’t get to it anyway while the transmitter was in operation. I was going round in circles.
I got up and paced the room. There was something at the back of my mind, nagging for attention, but I just couldn’t bring it into focus.
After a while I gave up the effort. I lay down on the bed, closed my eyes, and had a nap.
*
I woke with a jolt and sat up, tingling with excitement.
That’s the way it goes, sometimes, your brain turning over while you’re asleep. It had certainly worked for me, because I knew now why the Toyota was kept outside the fence!
It was Colin’s talk of a Faraday cage that had given me the answer. A car was effectively a metal box, a Faraday cage. The radiofrequency field at the fence would be a lot weaker for anyone inside a car. So Müller had placed the garage out beyond the boundary fence in case some bright spark thought they could get into a vehicle and drive away!
I went quickly over the implications. As an escape strategy it was seriously flawed. There was no way of knowing when the Toyota would next be inside the fence. Even if I timed it right and got inside the vehicle the protection wouldn’t be complete – nothing like it: the windows were effectively a big hole in the screening and there’d still be enough of a field left to make anyone trying to drive over the cable die in agony.
I went over to the window and looked out, across the patch of tough grass to the windowed corridor of the far wing, the wing that housed Müller, his vicious wife, and that transmitter. And then an idea came to me. The garage might be outside the fence, but the kitchen wasn’t, and deliveries had to go up to the back door.
I leapt off the bed and made for the door. I would pay a visit to that kitchen right now.
The Reich Legacy: A Jim Slater novel (The Jim Slater series Book 3) Page 19