Cold Storage

by David Koepp

  They were rats’ heads. There were a dozen of them, arranged in a rough circle around a tangled mass of ropy cartilage in the center. It was like staring at an optical illusion at first, trying to figure out what in God’s name this thing could be.

  It was a rat. It was one rat, but it was also a dozen rats, fused together into one body at the tails, all screeching and snarling and biting at each other. Two or three of the heads were still, cannibalized by their neighbors. Blood dripped from the rats’ teeth and flowed from missing ears. The pile of snarling rodents was bound together at their conjoined tails by a strange greenish sap that had oozed over them.

  Teacake expressed his feelings. “Jesus fucking CHRIST!”

  Naomi was repulsed but also fascinated. “It’s a Rat King.”

  “A what?!”

  “A Rat King. It’s a—well, that.” She gestured, because there were no words that could take the place of one quick look at the horrific thing. “They wrote about them in the Middle Ages, during the Black Plague. People thought they were a bad omen.”

  “No shit it’s a bad omen! It’s called a fucking Rat King!”

  Naomi leaned in to get a closer look. There was an intellectual detachment to her; she was going to make a good vet if she ever got that far. She could look at pain and deformity and see the clinical side of it rather than the emotional one.

  Teacake had no clinical side, he was all feeling and freakout, so he kept his distance. “How do they get like that?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. Their tails get knotted and stuck together. Like from pine sap or something.”

  She looked around and picked up a long piece of scrap metal from the floor nearby. She prodded the mass of fused tails. “If they found a dead one of these, they used to preserve it and put it in a museum.”

  “Yeah, well, that one’s not dead, would you get the fuck back, please?”

  “What are they gonna do, run up my leg? They can’t even move.” She got closer, turning on her phone’s flashlight again and shining it on the fused tails. From this close she could see that the dull pink cords of the tails were covered over with a lime-green growth of some kind.

  “That’s not pine sap,” she said. She bent closer. “It’s like a—a slime mold.”

  “Yeah? Cool.” He looked around. “Coming up on time to go.”

  But she moved even closer to the squirming rats. They squeaked louder as she drew toward them, thrashing, trying to get at her or get away from her, it was hard to tell which.

  “Um, it seems like you’re pissing them off.”

  Naomi’s light was close to the snarl of tails. “No, it’s not a slime mold, there’s no froth. And it seems like it’s . . . moving a little bit. Like a fungal ooze, but God, that’s a lot of fungus.”

  Teacake edged a tiny bit closer, shining the more powerful flashlight’s beam on the wriggling mass. Moving the light around to get another angle on it, he noticed that the fungal growth wasn’t only on the rats’ tails. There was a thin smear of it that ran across one side of the Rat King, covering two or three of the entangled animals, and continued onto the floor below. A jagged ribbon of green led away from the rodents, toward the wall. Teacake raised the flashlight beam, following the trail to the wall, where it had crept up onto—or down from—the wall itself, and then across a groove in between cement slabs, all the way to the edge of the door to the sealed room.

  He walked closer and saw that the green trail of oozing fungal matter led into one of the dead-bolt slots and disappeared into the room itself. From this close, he could feel something emanating from the door.

  Heat.

  Slowly, he reached out his hand and laid his palm flat against the metal.

  BEEP.

  He jerked his hand away from the door and nearly jumped out of his skin at that one, because he was standing just a few inches from the thermistor alarm when it went off, and the sound was right in his ear. He shouted in surprise.

  Naomi looked up. “What?”

  “Door’s hot. I mean, the door is hot. And the green shit is coming out of that room, and there’s a fucking Rat King, and curiosity is awesome and everything, but I feel like this is about as far as this shit goes for me.”

  She stood. “Me too.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We can’t leave them like that, though.” She gestured to the rats.

  He looked at her, uncomprehending. “What, you want to take them with us?”

  “Of course not. But they’re suffering.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have any Oxy on me.”

  “I can do it,” she said.

  He looked down at the metal pipe in her hand. “Are you serious?”

  “You want to leave a dozen animals in agony? To starve to death?”

  “No, I would like to get the fuck out of here and not think about them.”

  “Wait by the door, I’ll be right there.”

  “Fine. Cool. You’re weird as fuck, but, I don’t know, I’m cool with it.” He started to walk away.

  “Can I have the flashlight?”

  “Hell no.”

  She looked at him.

  He clarified. “I mean, um, wouldn’t it be better without it? You know, just get the job done? Not have to look at a lot of gross shit?”

  “I’m fine. Go ahead.”

  He felt like a heel and a coward, but he also felt like getting as far away from the whole situation as humanly possible. As far as the fight between his competing needs went, his need to put some distance between himself and the hot room and its weird fungal shit beat his need to impress Naomi in a first-round knockout. He covered the length of the tunnel in about thirty seconds, looking back over his shoulder only once. He caught just a glimpse of her, bending down over the Rat King, staring at it, enthralled. He reached the hatch at the far end and came out into the dark space at the base of the tube ladder.

  He’d never been so glad to be at the bottom of a three-hundred-foot concrete shaft in his life. He closed the door most of the way, just enough to not see or hear whatever it was she felt she had to do, and he waited. It took her longer than he thought it should have. But then he’d never had to put a dozen conjoined rats out of their misery, so what did he know about how much time a person needed to get that shit done?

  After a few minutes, he got impatient and opened the door to take a look, but he could already see the weak beam of Naomi’s phone light coming at him, bouncing as she walked. As she drew close, she switched off her phone and he waved the flashlight beam in her direction, to light her steps. He raised it to her as she got close.

  “You get any of that shit on you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.” She came through the hatch and he closed it, shoving the big black handle into place. The locking mechanism did its job again; it must have been thrilled to get to open and close twice in ten minutes, after decades of just sitting there minding the store. It sealed up the tunnel with a reassuring chunk of metal in metal.

  Teacake shined the light up the ladder, assessing the climb ahead of them. “You want to go first this time or—”

  He didn’t see the kiss coming, and if he had the moment to live over again, of course he would have done his part differently. One second he was looking up and talking, and the next he felt her lips on his cheek and her hand on his other cheek, turning him softly toward her. Then they were kissing—well, she was kissing him, really—and it was a soft and sweet and full-lipped kiss, just the right kind. It was over before he’d had a chance to get his bearings, and maybe for that reason it was the perfect first kiss, the kind that leaves you feeling fresh and alive and wanting another one exactly like it.

  Because he could not help himself, he spoke.

  “Wait, what?”

  She smiled. “Thank you. That was bizarre and cool.”

  Without another word she turned away and started climbing back up the ladder toward the top.
r />   Teacake grinned. Some things you just couldn’t call.

  “So are you, lady.”

  He shoved the flashlight back in his pocket and followed her. He smiled all the way up, and he did not look at her ass, not even one time.

  Sixteen

  The moment he pulled onto the base, Roberto knew that Abigail hadn’t called Gordon Gray after all. If she had, they wouldn’t have stopped him at the back gate on Andrews and sent him around to the main entrance on Pope. He wouldn’t have had to wait ten minutes for the two base security lunkheads to put him in a jeep and drive him to the runway, and STRATCOM certainly would not have put him in the care of the 416th Fighter Squadron, with a priority clearance and a passenger manifest that showed up on every screen in Omaha.

  Gordon would have moved with speed and with stealth. Roberto would have taken off fifteen minutes ago on an already scheduled flight of the 916th Air Refueling Wing, just another retired officer hitching a free ride west to see the kids. He would have been the kind of old duffer the pilots barely even notice and certainly don’t chart. Instead, he was alone in the back of a C-40A, as obvious and traceable as the air force could possibly make him.

  Darn it. It was such a good speech to Abigail too; he’d really thought he’d put the fear of God into her. Six or seven minutes after takeoff, the phone rang in the burnished walnut cabinet next to his absurdly comfortable leather chair, and he picked it up.

  “Hello.”

  “Designator, please?”

  “I had such high hopes for you, Abigail.”

  “Could you please tell me your designator?”

  “I guess I might have done the same thing at your age. All right, we can recover. Makes everything a little harder, but we’ll fix it.”

  She hung up.

  Of course, he’d known she’d hang up. She had to. He was just having a little fun with her. He had to admit, even though he was tired and even though the fate of everybody he could possibly think of was hanging in the balance, it was nice to feel useful again. Retirement had been a little disorienting so far. He’d looked forward to it for years, but he hadn’t really prepared. He knew deep down that all the work on the house had been something of a dodge. And now even that was done. You can’t just go from forty years of movement and activity and forced but enjoyable camaraderie with an unbelievably varied cast of characters from all over the world to—well, sitting in a chair. Not overnight, and not without motion-induced nerve damage from the sudden stop. No matter how nice the chair is. He adored his wife, any day spent in conversation with her was a good day by him, but a person’s got his habits, and Roberto Diaz was used to being in motion.

  The phone rang again. He was still holding it, so he tapped the button with his thumb and answered midway through the first ring. He spared her the fucking around this time.

  “Zero-four-seven-four blue indigo.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Qué pasó, Abigail? I was very specific.”

  “Is there a problem with the transport? My screen has you over Fayetteville already.”

  “You didn’t call Gordon Gray,” he said.

  “He was unavailable.”

  “Of course he’s unavailable, it’s two A.M., everybody’s unavailable, until they aren’t. You found me, I’m sure you could have—”

  “Mr. Gray passed away in January.”

  His brain processed that statement in three distinct steps. The first two were achingly familiar, because they’d happened so often over the past ten years. Step one was the absorption of the information. Gordon Gray was dead. The man who had once refused to cross a casino picket line out of moral principle was gone. “Gordon,” Roberto had said at the time, “you’re drunk as a skunk, you’re gambling with your rent money, you just broke a guy’s nose because he stepped on your foot, and you’re in Las Vegas. Why exactly are you making a stand here?”

  Gordon had just smiled at him and shrugged. “I’m full of contradictions.”

  There were a thousand other memories, most of them far less benign, but that was how he always chose to remember Gordon, as a pretty amusing bundle of nonmatching character traits. Now that particular molecular combination of soul and folly no longer existed. Once Roberto forgot about that endearing moment in Las Vegas, it would be gone into the ether. It would never have occurred. That was step one, the sudden and vertiginous emptiness of death.

  Step two came close on the heels of that feeling, and it was compassion. He was sad about the hole that Gordon’s death must have left behind with his family, his friends, his brothers and sisters in arms. Roberto now had some people to belatedly console, a few phone calls to make.

  And that was what brought on step three, which was an entirely new thought, one he hadn’t had with any friend’s death till this moment. Roberto had the grim feeling that he’d just moved into a new phase of proximity to death. Because no one had called him to say, “Gordon’s dead.” When you’re young, the reaction is “Holy shit, so-and-so is dead, can you believe it?” Then you get older and start glancing at the obituaries to see if there’s anybody you know in there, but that stage doesn’t come as a surprise, because every middle-aged person you’ve ever met tells you they do that. Then, when you’re older still, starts the sad litany of phone calls coming in as nature’s sniper starts picking off your friends and family one by one. You buy a funeral suit and then a couple of different ties for it so you don’t have to wear the same thing every time. You get used to all that.

  But this thing, this was brand new—at sixty-eight, Roberto had reached the age where somebody died and nobody called, not because they didn’t care, but because it’s Too Fucking Depressing.

  That was a new one.

  He didn’t say any of this to Abigail. To her he said, “I see.”

  “In January,” she repeated.

  “Who did you call instead?”

  A man’s voice answered for her. “Thank you, Belvoir, you can clear the line.”

  Roberto kicked himself for imagining they’d been alone on the line. Only a few years out and his edges had been dulled already. There was a faint click as Abigail disconnected, and Roberto could hear the colonel breathing on the other end.

  “Hello, Roberto.”

  “Hey, Jerabek, how’s that rash?”

  “Your wife said put some cream on it, it’s fine now.”

  Why did men talk like this to each other? Why not just agree to meet up and punch each other in the face until they felt better about things?

  Jerabek went on, enjoying the role reversal. When Roberto had retired, the colonel had moved up, and that was the spot from which he looked down at this time. “I thought you put this one to bed thirty years ago.”

  “Apparently it woke up,” Roberto said.

  “Sounds like a broken thermistor to me.”

  “That would be nice to think.”

  “I’ll be frank with you, Roberto. You’re on that airplane as a gesture of respect to Gordon Gray. No other reason.”

  Again, why the fuck had no one called to tell him Gordon was dead? People sucked.

  “Threat assessment and sober report. That’s what I want, and that’s all I want. Clear?”

  “Gotcha,” Roberto said. “Hey, you got a cell number for Loeffler?”

  “See, you’re saying that to irritate me, Roberto, and I understand. I would do the same thing. That is the sort of jocular back-and-forth I so enjoy with you. But I’m not kidding around. This is going to go quietly and quickly. Assess and report. No off-the-books stuff.”

  “Phil, I’m fucking with you. It’s probably nothing. I’ll check it out and go home. And by the way, you’re welcome. I’m not exactly on the clock anymore.”

  Jerabek took a moment, deciding whether or not to trust him, and opted for some of both. “I know that. Thank you for making yourself available.”

  “You should probably take me off the file.”

  “I will do that. Keep in touch.”

  The phone went
dead. Roberto held it for a moment, thinking. He looked out the window, at the lights of Charlotte down below, off to his right. Broken thermistor my ass.

  Fuck that guy. Off the books was exactly where he was going.

  He’d be on the ground in Kansas in less than two hours. That would make it tight, but if Trini answered he had an outside shot at it. The trick would be coding the call, and he certainly couldn’t do it on the plane’s phone. He reached into his flight bag, took out the MacBook Air his son, Alexander, had given him for Christmas (too much, makes everybody uncomfortable, tone it down, Alexander), and turned it on. The plane’s Wi-Fi signal was half-decent, and he called up Tor2web without hitting a DoD net nanny, first stroke of luck. JonDonym and the two or three other .onion rerouters he knew were already dead. The dark net had pretty fast-moving currents, and he wasn’t surprised to see he was already out of date. He was trying to think of next steps when something in his jacket pocket buzzed.

  It was the satellite phone, the one he’d taken out of the safe back in his kitchen. He looked at the screen, didn’t recognize the number. He made an educated guess.

  “Abigail?”

  “I can talk for two minutes.” It was her. Roberto was genuinely delighted.

  “I think you have the wrong number,” he replied, and hung up the satellite phone, which was most certainly monitored. He tapped a few keys on the laptop, accessed a DeepBeep site he trusted—thank God that one was still there—and leached into the first number with at least ten nodes of encryption that scrolled by. He called her back and she picked up on the first ring.

  “I’m on my personal cell in the ladies’ room.” He could hear the echo of her voice off the tile.

  “I take it you read my white paper.”

  “I did,” she said.

  “And you believed it.”

  “What do you need me to—” She stopped, and he could hear that the door to the bathroom had just opened. Someone had come in.

  Roberto took over. “Okay, I’ll talk, you listen. Even with encryption, airplane Wi-Fi won’t be secure enough for the conversations I need to have, so you’ll have to make the calls for me. Find a reason to get yourself out of there on the double, go buy a burner, and call a former agent named Trini Romano. I’ll repeat that name before I hang up. When she answers, tell her ‘Margo is under the weather.’”