The Dark River fr-2

by John Twelve Hawks

  They pulled open the hatch and hurried down a steel ladder. Hollis climbed with one hand on the rungs while he held the equipment bag to his chest. They reached a maintenance tunnel filled with communications cables, and Kröte unfastened another padlock on an unmarked steel door.

  “Why hasn’t anybody noticed that you changed the locks?” Hollis asked.

  “Nobody official wants to enter this place-just explorers like us. It’s dark and scary down here. It’s altes Deutschland. The past.”

  One by one, they passed through the doorway to a corridor with a concrete floor. Now they were directly below the memorial, standing in the bunker used by Joseph Goebbels and his staff during the bombing raids. Hollis had been expecting something a bit more impressive-dust-covered office furniture and a Nazi banner hanging on the wall. Instead, their little pool of light illuminated concrete-block walls coated with a grayish-white paint and the words Rauchen Verboten. No smoking.

  “The paint is fluorescent. After all these years, it still works.”

  Kröte paced slowly down the corridor with his light beam focused on the wall. “Licht,” he said in a faint voice.

  Tristan told Hollis and Mother Blessing to turn off their flashlights. In the dark they saw that Kröte’s movements had created a bright green line on the wall that glowed for three or four seconds before fading.

  They switched on the flashlights again and continued through the bunker. In one room there was an old bed frame, stripped of its mattress. Another room looked like a small clinic, with a white examination table and an empty glass cabinet.

  “The Russians raped the women of Berlin and looted almost everything,” Tristan said. “They stayed away from only one place in this bunker. Maybe they were too lazy or it was too horrible to see.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mother Blessing asked.

  “Thousands of Germans killed themselves when the Russians arrived. And where did they do it? In the toilet. It was one of the few places where you could be alone.”

  Kröte was standing beside an open doorway with the word Waschraum painted on the wall. Arrows pointed in two directions: Männer and Frauen. “The bones are still in the toilet stalls,” Tristan announced. “You can see them-if you’re not frightened.”

  Mother Blessing shook her head. “A waste of time.”

  But Hollis was compelled to follow the boy up three steps and through a door that led to the women’s washroom. The two light beams revealed a row of wooden toilet cabinets. Their doors were closed, and Hollis felt as if they concealed the remains of more than one suicide. Kröte took a few steps forward and pointed. Near the end of the room one of the wooden doors was slightly open. A mummified hand, looking like a black claw, pushed through the gap. Hollis felt as if he had been guided into the land of the dead. His entire body shivered and he hurried back to the main corridor.

  “Did you see the hand?”

  “Yeah. I saw it.”

  “And all Berlin is built on top of this,” Tristan said. “Built on the dead.”

  “I don’t give a damn,” Mother Blessing snapped. “Let’s go.”

  At the end of the corridor was another steel hatch, but this one was unlocked. Tristan grabbed the handle and pulled it open. “Now we enter the old sewage system. Because this area was near the wall, both East and West Germany left it alone.”

  They climbed beneath the bunker into a drainage pipe about eight feet in diameter. Water trickled along the floor of the pipe. Their flashlights touched the surface and made it gleam. Salt stalactites came down from the top of the pipe like pieces of white string. There were white mushrooms and a strange-looking fungus that resembled yellowish globs of fat. Splashing through the water, Kröte guided them forward. When he reached a juncture and turned to wait, the light jiggled like a firefly.

  Eventually they reached a much smaller pipe that emptied into the larger system. Kröte began chattering in German to his cousin, pointing at the pipe and gesturing with his hands.

  “This is it. Crawl about ten meters down the drain and force your way in.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mother Blessing glared at Tristan. “You promised to take us all the way.”

  “We’re not going into a Tabula computer center,” Tristan said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “The real danger is in front of you, young man. I dislike people who don’t deliver what they promise…”

  “But we’re doing you a favor!”

  “That’s your interpretation, not mine. All I know is that you accepted an obligation.”

  The coldness in the Harlequin’s eyes and the precise way she spoke were intimidating. Tristan stopped dancing around, frozen in the middle of the tunnel. Kröte glanced at his cousin and looked frightened.

  Hollis stepped forward. “Let me go in first. I’ll check things out.”

  “I will wait for ten minutes, Mr. Wilson. If you’re not back, there will be consequences.”

  39

  Hollis crawled through the horizontal pipe toward a distant patch of light. The pipe was narrow and his hands touched a slimy liquid that felt like motor oil mixed with water. Quickly, he reached a steel drainage grate set in a frame at the top of the pipe. The light from the room above him was divided into little squares by the grate, and he lay directly beneath a grid of lines.

  He bent his head so that his chin was touching his chest, and then he came up so that his upper back was in contact with the grate. The steel rectangle was about three inches thick and very heavy, but his legs were strong and the grate didn’t appear to be bolted in place. Hollis pushed upward until the rectangle broke out of its frame. He raised his hands and shifted the grate a few inches to the right. When a four-inch gap appeared, he changed his position and pushed the grate sideways across the floor.

  Hollis pulled himself out of the drainage pipe and immediately drew his handgun. He found himself in an underground corridor lined with electric cable and water pipes. When nothing happened, he returned to the drainage pipe and crawled back to Mother Blessing and the two Free Runners.

  “This pipe takes us to a maintenance area. It looks like a safe entry point. There’s no one there.”

  Tristan looked relieved. “You see?” he asked Mother Blessing. “Everything is perfect.”

  “I doubt that,” she said, and handed the equipment bag to Hollis.

  “Can we go?”

  “Thank you,” Hollis said. “And be careful.”

  Tristan had regained some of his confidence. He bowed from the waist, and Kröte gave Hollis a big smile. “Good luck from the Spandau Free Runners!”

  HOLLIS DRAGGED THE equipment bag down the pipe with Mother Blessing a few yards behind him. When they were both standing in the maintenance corridor, the Harlequin pressed her mouth against his ear. “Speak softly,” she whispered. “They could have voice sensors.”

  They moved cautiously down the corridor to a heavy steel door with a slot for a key card. Mother Blessing placed the equipment bag on the floor and unzipped it. She took out the submachine gun and something that looked like a credit card fastened to a thin electric cable. The Harlequin attached the cable to her laptop computer, typed a command on the keyboard, and inserted the card in the door slot.

  They both watched the computer screen as six blue squares appeared on the screen. It took about a minute to place a three-digit number in the first square, but then the process went faster. About four minutes later, all six squares were filled and the lock clicked open.

  “Do we go in?” Hollis whispered.

  “Not yet. We can’t avoid surveillance cameras, so we’ll have to use a shielder.” She picked up something that looked like a small video camera. “Carry this on your shoulder. When I open the door, press the silver button.”

  As Mother Blessing repacked the equipment bag, Hollis placed the shielder device on his right shoulder and aimed it forward.

  “Ready?”

  Holding the submachine gun, Mother Blessing eased the
door open. Hollis stepped into the doorway, saw a surveillance camera, and pressed the button of the shielder as if he were taking a video. An infrared beam was projected down the corridor. The beam struck the retroreflective lens of a surveillance camera and the infrared light was bounced back to the source. Once the position of the camera was determined, a green laser beam was automatically aimed at the camera lens.

  “Don’t stand here,” Mother Blessing said. “Start moving.”

  “What about the surveillance camera?”

  “The laser takes care of that. If a security guard is watching his monitor, all he’ll see is a flash of light on the screen.”

  They hurried down the corridor and turned the corner. Once again, the shielder detected a new camera and a laser beam hit the center of the lens. A second door was at the end of the corridor, which led to an emergency staircase. They followed the staircase upward to the landing and paused again.

  “You ready?” Mother Blessing asked.

  Hollis nodded. “Keep going.”

  “I spent too many months sitting around on that wretched island,” Mother Blessing said. “This is much more entertaining.”

  She pushed open the door and they entered a basement room filled with machines and communications equipment. A white walkway on the floor led to a reception desk where a security guard was eating a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.

  “Stay here,” Mother Blessing said to Hollis. She handed him the submachine gun, stepped out of the shadows, and walked briskly toward the reception area. “Don’t worry! Everything is going to be all right! Did you get the phone call?”

  Still holding the sandwich, the guard shook his head. “What phone call?”

  The Irish Harlequin drew the automatic from beneath her jacket and fired. The bullet hit the guard in the middle of his chest and knocked him out of his chair. Mother Blessing didn’t break her stride. She slipped the handgun back in the holster, stepped around the desk, and approached a steel door.

  Hollis caught up with the Harlequin. “There’s no door handle.”

  “It’s electronically activated.” Mother Blessing scrutinized a small steel box attached to the wall near the door. “This is a palm vein scanner that uses infrared light. Even if we had known about this, it would be difficult to create a bio dupe. Most veins aren’t visible beneath the skin.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “When you’re trying to overcome security barriers, the choices are either low-tech or very high-tech.”

  Mother Blessing took the submachine gun from Hollis, removed a spare ammunition clip from the equipment bag, and slid the clip between her belt and waistband. The Harlequin pointed her weapon at the door and motioned Hollis to step aside. “Get ready. We’re going low.”

  She fired the submachine gun. Pieces of metal and wood spun through the air as bullets cut a jagged hole through the left edge of the door. As Mother Blessing snapped the spare clip into her weapon, Hollis shoved his hand through the hole and pulled hard. Metal scraped against metal and the door lurched open.

  He rushed into the room and found himself staring at a glass tower at least three stories high. Layers of piled-up computer hardware were inside the tower, and their blinking lights were reflected on the glass like miniature fireworks. The whole structure looked both beautiful and mysterious-as if an alien spaceship had suddenly materialized inside the building.

  A large monitor hung on the wall about twenty feet away from the tower. It showed an image of Berlin from some location outside the building, a duplicate world where computer-generated figures strolled through a city square. Two frightened computer technicians stood at a control panel directly below the monitor. They were motionless for a few seconds, and then the younger man hit a button on the panel and darted across the room.

  Mother Blessing drew her handgun, paused for a second, and shot the fugitive in the leg. As the technician sprawled across the floor, an emergency light started flashing and the computer-generated voice came from a wall speaker.

  “Verlassen Sie das Gebäuder. Veslassen Sie-”

  Looking annoyed, Mother Blessing put a bullet in the speaker. “We don’t want to leave the building,” she said. “We’re having such a lovely time.”

  The wounded man lay on his side, clutching his leg and screaming. Mother Blessing approached her target and stood over his body. “Stay quiet and be glad you’re alive. I don’t like people who set off alarms.”

  The wounded man ignored her. He shouted for a doctor and began to roll back and forth.

  “I asked you to stay quiet,” Mother Blessing said. “That’s a simple request.”

  She waited a few seconds to see if the wounded man was going to obey her. When he kept shouting, she shot him in the head and walked over to the control panel. The surviving technician was a slender man in his thirties with short black hair and a bony face. He was breathing so quickly that Hollis thought he might faint.

  “And what’s your name?” Mother Blessing asked.

  “Gunther Lindemann.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Lindemann. What we want is access to a USB outlet for a flash drive.”

  “Not…not here,” Lindemann said. “But there are three outlets inside the tower.”

  “Okay. Let’s take a tour.”

  Lindemann led them over to a sliding door on one side of the tower. Hollis could see that the walls of the tower were six inches thick. Each glass panel was held in place by an outer steel frame. Another palm vein scanner was mounted on the wall. Lindemann slid his hand into the box and the door clicked open.

  Cold air surrounded them as they entered the sterile environment. Quickly, Hollis walked over to a workstation with a computer, keyboard, and monitor. He removed the gold chain holding the flash drive, then snapped the drive into an access port.

  A message scrolled across the monitor screen in four languages: UNKNOWN VIRUS DETECTED. RISK-HIGH. The screen went blank for a moment and then a red square appeared containing ninety little squares. Only one of the boxes was a solid red color, and it flashed on and off as if a single cancer cell had appeared in a healthy body.

  Mother Blessing turned to Lindemann. “How many guards are in the building?”

  “Please don’t-”

  She interrupted him. “Just answer my question.”

  “One guard is at the desk outside and two are upstairs. The off-duty guards live in an apartment across the street. They’ll be here any moment.”

  “Then I should probably be ready to greet them.” She turned to Hollis. “Let me know when we’re done.”

  Mother Blessing led Lindemann out the door while Hollis remained at the workstation. A second red square started flashing, and Hollis wondered what kind of battle was going on inside the computer. As he waited, he thought about Vicki. What would she say if she were standing beside him right now? The death of the guard and the computer technician would have bothered her deeply. Seed to sapling. She had always used that phrase. Anything done with hatred had the potential to grow and block the Light.

  He glanced back at the monitor. The two red squares glowed brightly and now the virus began to double itself every ten seconds. All the other lights on the terminal started to flash, and a warning siren went off somewhere in the tower. In less than a minute the virus had conquered the machine. The workstation monitor was a solid red color, and then the screen went completely black.

  Hollis ran out of the tower and found Lindemann lying facedown on the floor. Mother Blessing stood ten feet away from the technician, pointing the submachine gun at the entrance.

  “That’s it. Let’s go.”

  She turned toward Lindemann with the same cold look in her eyes.

  “Don’t waste your time killing him,” Hollis said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “As you wish,” Mother Blessing said as if she had just spared an insect. “This one can tell the Tabula that I’m no longer hiding on an island.”

  They returned to the basement. As they r
etraced their steps around the equipment stacks, the room lit up with a sudden explosion of gunfire. Hollis and Mother Blessing threw themselves on the floor behind an emergency power generator. Bullets from different angles cut into the heating ducts overhead.

  The firing stopped. Hollis heard the click and snap of ammunition clips being loaded into assault rifles. Someone shouted in German, and all the ceiling lights in the basement were turned off.

  Hollis and Mother Blessing lay next to each other on the concrete. A small amount of light came from the glowing red switches on the power generator. Hollis could see the dark shape of Mother Blessing’s body as she sat up and grabbed the equipment bag.

  “The stairs are a hundred feet away,” Hollis whispered. “Let’s run for it.”

  “They turned off the lights,” Mother Blessing said. “That means they probably have infrared devices. We’re blind, and they can see.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Hollis asked. “Stand here and fight?”

  “Make me cold,” the Harlequin said, and she gave Hollis the flashlight and a small metal canister. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the liquid nitrogen they had brought along to disable motion detectors.

  “You want me to spray this on you?”

  “Not on the skin. Spray my clothes and hair. I’ll be too cold to be seen.”

  Hollis switched on the flashlight and held it in his hand so that light leaked through the gaps between his fingers. Mother Blessing lay on her stomach, and Hollis sprayed the liquid nitrogen on her pants, boots, and jacket. When she turned over on her back, he tried not to spray her hands and eyes. The canister made a faint sputtering sound when it was empty.

  The Harlequin sat up and her lips trembled. He touched her upper arm and felt a burning coldness. “Do you want the submachine gun?” he asked.

  “No. The muzzle flash would show my location. I’ll carry the sword.”

  “But how are you going to find them?”

  “Use your senses, Mr. Wilson. They’re frightened, so they’ll be breathing hard and firing at shadows. Most of the time, your enemy defeats himself.”