But the bricks and mortar to which the box had been bolted so many years ago were no different than the bricks and mortar throughout the rest of the dank, moist underground passageway: they had long since begun to crumble. The box hung crookedly, suspended over the tunnel floor by a single remaining corroded bolt. The other three were gone, presumably disintegrated.
Tracie didn’t bother to alert Gruber to the fact she had found the second lock. He was busy examining the space between the storage unit and the brick wall on the right side of the container. She was grateful for a little time to inspect the box herself, without the pressure of her partner pushing to insert the keys immediately and get the mission over with.
She reached under her filthy blouse at the neck and lifted the chain containing one of the two skeleton keys over her head. Then she held the key against the lead-plate box front, examining the fit. Without inserting the key into the lock it was impossible to be certain, but it looked as though the boxes fashioned on the ancient keys were a perfect match for the ones on the receptacle.
She nodded, satisfied that they were on the right track. She drew in a breath to let Gruber know she had found the second box, but before she could get the words out, he called to her. He was now on his hands and knees on the other side of the container, shining the light into the narrow gap between it and the tunnel wall.
“Quinn, check this out.”
She slipped the chain back over her head, sliding the key under her blouse and then walking to the vault.
She dropped into a crouch behind him. “What did you find?”
“It looks like the Nazis actually planned ahead when they wired the explosives to this giant tin can. Take a look.”
He stood and moved aside, allowing Tracie enough room to lift her flashlight and peer into the narrow space. Roughly a third of the way down the side of the container a hole had been drilled into the brick retaining wall. Heavy rubber wiring insulation extruded from the hole. The insulation snaked from the hole in the wall to the side of the container, where it disappeared inside via a similar opening.
“This is how they wired the explosives,” she said. The rubber was dried out and cracked, the result of four decades spent in much less than ideal conditions, but from what little Tracie could see, none of the actual wiring had yet become exposed.
“It looks that way,” Gruber agreed. “But wiring implies electricity, and there’s no way the wreck of a facility falling down above our heads still has working electricity. The place probably hasn’t had power since the late 1940s. We should be able to disregard the damned explosives. They’re harmless.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Tracie said, shaking her head.
“What are you talking about? You expect me to believe the power is still on in this place?”
“No, of course not. But maybe there’s a generator somewhere out there in the forest. Or maybe there are a couple of car batteries wired to the thing, supplying enough power to detonate the explosives.”
“Are you kidding me? Generators? Car batteries? The Nazis lost the war more than forty-two years ago, Quinn! There’s not a car battery in the world that could last forty-plus years.”
“Jesus, Gruber, use your head!” Tracie’s hand was burning and her skull pounding where she had smacked it against the tunnel ceiling. She was exhausted and dispirited and tired of Gruber’s bull-in-a-china-shop demeanor.
“I’m not talking about forty-year-old car batteries,” she snapped. “That guy you were supposed to be watching, Newmann, what do you think he was doing here in Wuppertal all these years? Hanging around holding a key? Passing the time taking random walks in the forest? It was more than that, Gruber. He was placed here by Phoenix after the war, with a specific mission assignment. Don’t you think it’s reasonable to assume he might have been tasked with maintaining a generator or a set of batteries in addition to holding a goddamned key?”
At the mention of Newmann, Gruber’s head snapped back as if he had been slapped. His voice hardened and he said, “Supposed to be watching? That was a cheap shot, Quinn.”
“I’m sorry, Gruber. It’s not my intention to be cruel. But it’s been a long few days and I’m trying to keep us from getting blown into next week. We have to consider every angle, and I think it’s a very real possibility that there is enough of a charge running through this wiring to detonate whatever explosives the Nazis placed on or inside this box. Whether the explosives themselves are still viable is anyone’s guess, but I can’t come up with a single good reason to assume they’re not, can you?”
“No,” he admitted. “I guess not. And your apology is accepted. Thank you. I suppose I ought to stay on your good side, what with you being so close to Aaron Stallings and all. You might be the only thing standing between me and the unemployment line once I get back to the states.”
Tracie smiled in the darkness. Matthias Gruber was alternately maddening and charming, and while those personality swings made for a less-than-ideal field operative, he struck her as sincere and straightforward, a guy who honestly tried to do a good job but sometimes didn’t know how. That last issue could be the kiss of death for an operative, though, and the thought occurred to her that keeping Gruber out of the field might be the best thing the CIA could do, both for his continued health and for the good of the agency.
But she wasn’t about to tell him that. She had had more than a little recent experience with career disappointment and had no desire to contribute to someone else’s.
She shined the light up the side of the vault, moving gradually, and then again up the side of the tunnel wall. Nothing. No clusters of explosives had been attached to the wall or the outside of the container, which made sense. The Nazis would not have wanted to leave them exposed, where if the tunnel were discovered, an enterprising ordnance disposal expert might successfully bypass the explosives.
They were all locked away inside the container. The insulated wiring running from behind the wall proved as much. There was no way of accessing the bombs. It’s probably just as well, Tracie thought. I’m no explosives expert, and if I let Gruber take a shot at disarming them I have a feeling we’d be dead in seconds.
“I guess it’s time to get to work,” she said. “Let’s open this thing up and see what’s inside.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“We still need to find the second lock.”
“Nah, I found it just before you called me over here.”
“You weren’t planning on telling me?”
“No, Gruber. I wasn’t planning on telling you. I was going to send you home and then utilize my twelve foot long arms to open both locks at once. The fact that my left hand is completely useless might have caused me a few problems, but I’m sure I would have figured something out.”
“A little touchy, aren’t you, Quinn?”
“My hand feels like someone’s inside it with a blowtorch trying to burn his way out, and as a general rule, I’m against getting blown to bits and then buried underground before dinner. So, yes, I suppose you could say I’m a little touchy.”
“Point taken. So how do we proceed?” Tracie could hear the smile in his voice when he answered. She had been an only child, but she imagined this would be what it was like to have had a brother deriving great joy from pushing his sister’s buttons.
“We proceed by each of us taking a key. We insert the keys into the locks at the same time and then turn them, and hope like hell we live to see the next couple of seconds.”
“As plans go, it seems less than surefire.”
“You were the one who wanted to disregard the explosives a few moments ago,” Tracie pointed out.
“Touche.”
She stood and stretched. The cool, damp tunnel air had tightened her muscles, and her joints cracked and complained. It served as another reminder—as if she needed one—that while she would still be considered a young woman by most, in the eyes of the intelligence community she was
rapidly approaching the end of her useful life as a field operative.
It was not a comforting thought.
She pushed the notion to the back of her mind and said, “Pick a lock, Gruber. You want to do the one on the wall back there,” she nodded behind her, “or the one on the container door?”
“Container door,” he said without hesitation. “I want to be the first person to lay eyes on the Amber Room in almost half a century.”
“Assuming it’s even in there,” Tracie said. “What if we went through all this only to open the doors and find nothing but Al Capone’s vault?”
“Al Capone’s vault? What are you talking about?”
“Jeez, Gruber, don’t you watch TV? Or is all your free time spent romancing women?”
“I think you know the answer to that question.”
“I suppose I do.”
“Well? What’s the deal with Al Capone’s vault?”
“About a year-and-a-half ago, a bunch of secret tunnels were discovered under a hotel Al Capone had been living in until his arrest in the 1930s. A vault had been hidden inside one of the tunnels, much like this one. The vault was unsealed and opened on live national TV by Geraldo Rivera, the journalist.”
“And what was inside?”
“Nothing. Just a few empty bottles and some trash.”
Gruber chuckled. “That would be ironic. But I don’t think even the Nazis, as crazy as they were, would go to the trouble and expense of burying a giant iron container and then wiring it with explosives, only to leave it empty.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” she said. She lifted the two chains from around her neck and handed one of the keys to Gruber, picking randomly.
“It doesn’t matter which keys we use?”
“They look exactly the same, and so do the locks.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“You and me both,” she said under her breath as she walked to the box hanging on the tunnel wall.
She held the key against the lock with her right hand while placing her flashlight between her left arm and her body. Holding the light in her injured left hand would have been impossible. Then she rotated her body toward the container.
The beam of light showed Gruber standing in front of the double doors, his key at the ready. Her stomach was in knots and tension filled the darkened passageway. The air was electric.
“Ready, Gruber?”
“Ready, Quinn.”
“On the count of three, we slide the keys in and turn, got it?”
“Got it.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath, then started counting. “One…two—”
“Hey, Quinn?”
“What?” she answered, annoyed. She had damned near thrust the key into the lock.
“Thanks for believing in me.”
“You’re welcome, Gruber. Now don’t interrupt me again unless you’re having a stroke or something.”
“You got it, boss.”
“One…two…three.” She jammed the key into the ancient Nazi lock and turned it in one motion, waiting for the roar and the blinding flash of light that would tell her they had failed, a split-second before ending their lives.
Nothing happened.
The key squealed and complained after four decades without lubrication, but it turned in the lock.
A few feet away, Gruber’s did the same.
He looked up at her, his eyes shining with anticipation.
Then he reached up and pulled on an iron handle that had been welded to the door.
40
November 19, 1987
11:05 a.m.
Under the Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
The door swung slowly open and Tracie’s flashlight beam lit up the interior of the storage container.
And there it was.
The Amber Room treasure.
Panel upon panel of wall coverings had been neatly aligned, each one at least four feet wide by eight feet high, all of them covered in clear plastic tarpaulins. The panels featured mirrors and exotic filigree designs and were dripping in gold, encrusted with diamonds and precious stones.
Tracie’s breath caught in her throat as the light refracted crazily off the treasure. Three hundred million dollars, she thought. The number had seemed absurd when she first heard it, the estimated value an impossible sum of which to conceive. And now, with the treasure in front of her, the panels intact and spectacular, the concept seemed even more difficult to grasp, rather than less.
Gruber peeked around the door and inside the container, and then turned his head toward Tracie and grinned. “What do you say we grab a couple of panels and hit the road?”
“Very funny. Our mission’s complete, Gruber. Here’s what we’re really going to do: we’re going to close the doors and secure the locks. We’re going to retrace our steps out of here and let the big-shots figure out what to do next. That’s why they make the big bucks. This is way above our pay grades.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “Just joking. But let’s take a few minutes to admire this stuff before we go running off. We’re the first people to lay eyes on the Amber Room in nearly a half-century.”
He waggled his eyebrows and grinned again and leaned against the heavy iron door, which was standing roughly two-thirds open. The addition of his weight caused it to begin moving again.
Toward the front wall of the container.
Skeleton key still sticking out of the lock.
It was about to be smashed between the door and the wall.
“Gruber, no!” Tracie shouted.
He reacted quickly, removing his weight from the door and flashing a hand out to stop its backward motion.
But it was too late. It hit the wall with a BONG that echoed through the tunnel.
Then it rebounded toward Gruber, who caught it just as the exposed portion of the key fell to the tunnel floor. The force of the collision had caused it to snap off inside the lock.
A flash of white light from somewhere inside the container seared the image of Gruber into Tracie’s retinas. He was semi-crouched in front of the open door in an instinctive attempt to shield his body from what he knew was coming.
Tracie heaved herself backward down the tunnel as a sizzling noise came from inside the container. It sounded like an electrical short circuit, and for the briefest of moments she thought they might be okay.
Then came the explosion. It roared from inside the iron vault, the flash of white light becoming a bright orange blaze in an instant. Her body struck the tunnel floor and she rolled, desperate to put as much distance between herself and the explosive charge as possible, lifting her arms to her head to protect her skull from the projectiles she knew were about to rain down.
And they did.
The front of the storage unit blew off, huge chunks of jagged iron whistling down the tunnel, somehow missing Tracie’s prone body and then thudding into the dirt pile she had worked so hard to climb over. A piece of four-by-four ceiling timber fell next to her shoulder, nearly crushing her skull before embedding itself into the hard-packed dirt of the tunnel floor.
An instant later, a sting of pain as bright as the light from the explosion ripped through the back of her head and she realized the timber had struck her on its way past, and it had torn out a piece of her skull, and she wondered how badly she was bleeding as she stopped rolling, her progress halted by some unknown object holding her head down into the dirt.
It must be the support timber, she thought as panic threatened to overwhelm her. Good God, the timber has crushed my skull and pinned my head to the floor. I’m going to bleed to death down here, I’m going to die and no one will ever—
Stop it! She commanded herself. She banged her left hand against the tunnel floor and the pain in her head was overwhelmed by the pain in her hand, a wave of fire that radiated outward and served to focus her attention on something other than dying in a secret Nazi tunnel. Get ahold of
yourself and think. You survived the initial blast, now you have to figure out how to survive the cave-in.
And it was a cave-in, a big one. Dirt had begun dropping into the tunnel, tons and tons of dirt showering down like rain, blocking out the light from the explosion and dampening the sound of the chaos until all she could hear was the heavy rumble of falling earth.
And then there was silence, the only sound Tracie’s moans.
41
November 19, 1987
Approximately 11:10 a.m.
Under the Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
Tracie lay motionless on the tunnel floor, amazed to still be alive but fearful that any vibration at all might negatively affect the unstable earth and cause further cave-ins.
How the hell had she survived? The fact that the storage container had been constructed with virtually no clearance between the iron walls and the side walls of the tunnel must have caused the explosion to concentrate its greatest force upward toward the surface and outward from both ends, like a pipe bomb blowing off its end caps.
She had been standing almost flat against the tunnel wall as she turned her key and then again as she rolled she had snugged up against it. This had removed her from the path of most of the chunks of iron as they rocketed up the passageway.
It was the only explanation she could think of.
And right now the issue of how she had survived was irrelevant. The fact was that her head was injured and pinned to the ground, and surviving the initial blast wasn’t going to matter unless she could figure out how to stop the bleeding in her head and protect her injured skull and then—
Wait a second.
If her skull was so badly injured, where was all the blood?
Her head was pressed against the tunnel floor, meaning her eyes were right there, and she should be able to see blood pooling on the dirt and soaking into the earth. She should have a front-row seat for the bleed-out, an up-close-and-personal view of her lifeblood as it drained away.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 95