Deep
Iron Storage Facility
Saturday, August 28, 4:06
P.M.
Time Remaining on the
Extinction Clock: 91 hours, 54 minutes
E.S.T.
Debris is a puzzle if you look at it the
right way. You can retro-engineer it. You look at a roomful of junk
and you pay attention to what’s lying on what, because that will
eventually tell you what fell first. When I was working homicide
for Baltimore PD I had one of those classic cases where there’s a
dead body amid a bunch of broken plates and scattered books. A
novice would think that the victim came home and interrupted a
robbery in progress and that the place either was already trashed
or was trashed during a struggle. But the carpet under the body was
completely clean, no litter, which established that the murder
happened first. Sure, we considered the fact that the place could
have been trashed afterward, but when we looked at what lay under
what it became clear that someone had walked around the room
smashing things. It had been done in a circular pattern-deliberate
and systematic. That’s when we started looking at the wife, who had
reported finding her husband dead. The debris pattern, plus the
angle of the blunt-force blow that had killed him, gave us a pretty
solid circumstantial case. After that it was a matter of breaking
down her alibi and grilling her in a series of
interviews.
This part of the mission was cop work, so I
switched mental gears to let that part of me do his job. I may not
be Jerry Spencer, but I can work a crime scene.
There were dozens of overturned boxes. We
knew from the firefight when some of them were knocked over. Most
of the boxes were sealed with two-inch-wide clear tape. The tape
had burst on about a third of the boxes, and some of the boxes and
papers had landed in pools of blood. We started in the driest
corner.
So I had to do some horseback math: if a
stack of ten boxes fell at such and such an angle, encountering an
obstacle-and for the sake of argument let’s call that obstacle the
back of my head-then they’d hit the floor with x amount of force
and scatter their contents in such and such a fashion. Calculating
the way the papers slid out of the boxes was similar to the way
blood spatter experts estimate flying blood.
And that thought made me aware of the torn
bodies hidden under the box lids and I had to squash down the
horror that wanted to make me either scream or throw
up.
The boxes were also chewed up pretty well by
gunfire. The Russians had emptied a couple of magazines each into
the room. The cinder-block walls were pocked with holes and
heavy-caliber bullets had plowed through the contents of the boxes.
Luckily paper is a great bullet stop, so the damage wasn’t as bad
as it could have been. Grenades would have made this job
impossible.
Each of the boxes was made from corrugated
cardboard. Most were a dark brown with a faux walnut print and a
little metal sleeve on the front in which an indexing file card
could be placed. There was a code on the file cards that was
apparently something used internally by Deep Iron.
It was Top who figured out the code on the
file cards. He held out the card-HH/I/3/6-8/051779-and said, “Okay,
the second H is probably our boy Heinrich Haeckel. Now, this box
came from that corner over there. This other box here was two rows
up. It has a card with ‘III’ on it. Roman numerals for the rows.
Follow me?”
“Right with you,” I said,
pleased.
“Six-dash-eight’s next. Sixth box in a stack
of eight. See? And the other number’s got to be a date. These boxes
have been here for a long time, so it ain’t a stretch to see that
as oh-five, seventeen, seventy-nine. With this code we can restack
every box in the right place without doing Sherlock Holmes
stuff.”
“You just earned your pay for the month,
Top,” I said. “And a pretty damn good bottle of
Scotch.”
“Make it Irish and we’re
square.”
“Let me guess,” Bunny said. “You like ‘Black
Bush’?”
Top gave him a sniper’s squint. “Don’t make
me hurt you, Farmboy. I know forty-three separate ways to make sure
you can’t ever have kids.”
Bunny held up his hands. “We’re
cool.”
We went back to work and now the only thing
that slowed us down was deciding which papers went into which
box.
“What is this stuff?” Bunny asked, reaching
to pick up a clipped sheaf of papers.
“Careful,” I cautioned. “We need everything
to go back in the right box.”
“Okay,” he said, “but. what is this stuff?”
He tapped the top page and I bent over him to look. The page was
covered with columns of numbers whose value made no sense. At the
top of each column was a number-letter identifier that also made no
sense. I lifted the first page, then the second. More of the same.
The pages were old, the entries all done by hand.
“Accounting?” Bunny asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Got something!” called Top. He was going
through the boxes stacked by the door. “This one’s not paper. Looks
like microfiche.”
He handed me several sheets of film, and
when I held them up to the light I could see dozens of tiny pages
smaller than postage stamps. Without a reader I couldn’t tell if
they were the same as the pages we had here or were something else.
We searched around and found only eight sheets of film, scattered
as if dropped.
“If those are microfiche copies of this
stuff,” Bunny said, “then it sure as hell doesn’t add up to all of
this crap. I’m thinking the Hulk and his buddy took the rest of
them.”
“Yeah, dammit,” I said, and reached for
another box of paper.
We worked together to repack and restack the
boxes that had fallen during our part of the fight. All of the
boxes that had fallen on me were filled with the same kind of
handwritten notes. Then Bunny found a page with annotations in a
box he was carefully repacking.
“Take a look, boss,” he said and I squatted
down next to him.
At the top of one of the columns someone had
used a pencil to write: Zwangs/Trauma.
“Is that German? What’s that mean?” he
asked.
I nodded and took my notebook out of my
pocket to copy down the ID code on the front of the file box.
Something began niggling at the back of my brain, but it was too
timid to step into the light. We kept working.
Outside the room there was only silence. No
cavalry with trumpets blowing.
“What the hell are these?” Top asked as he
held up a stack of index cards. Each one had notes written in some
kind of medical code and in the upper left corner was a
fingerprint. Top peered at the prints. “This ain’t ink, Cap’n. I
think it’s old, dried blood.”
“Don’t smudge any of them,” I cautioned. “We
don’t know what the hell we have here.”
A few minutes later Bunny said, “Hey, boss.
I got another one with words on it. And. a couple of
names.”
Top and I picked our way through the mess to
see what he had. He passed me an old-fashioned wooden clipboard,
marking its place on the floor with his canteen. The numbers here
were written in a different hand, and on the lower right of each
page were the initials “JM.” The words “Zwangs/Trauma” were
scribbled on the upper left of the page, and over each column was
either a single word or a few: “Geschwindig-keit,” “Winkel,” “Druck
in Pfund pro Quadratzoll.”
Speed. Angle. Pounds of pressure per square
inch.
Then vertically along the left side of the
page:
“Kette,” “Schläger,” “Pferde-Peitsche,”
“Faust,” “Barfuss,” “Gestie-felt.”
I swallowed a throat that was as dry as
dust.
Chain. Club. Horsewhip. Fist. Bare foot.
Booted foot.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, and the others
stared at me. They peered over my shoulder at the page. I
translated for them and saw the meaning register on their
faces.
“Fuck me,” said Top, and he looked older
than his forty years.
“If this is what I think it is, then we’re
into some sick shit here.” Bunny said, “Who would collect this kind
of information?”
I didn’t answer as I rifled through the rest
of the papers and then handed the clipboard back to him. “Let’s
repack this box. Check everything. I want to see any scrap of paper
with words, especially handwritten notations.”
They set to work, but there was nothing else
in that box.
The next box, on the other hand. well, that
changed everything.
I was sitting on the floor putting the pages
in some kind of order when I found a single handwritten note tucked
inside a file folder. It was in German, which was no problem for
me. As I read it my mind began spinning with shock and
nausea:
Heinrich,
The third phase was completed this morning
and we have sufficient material to initiate the next part of our
research. I will present the test results to Herr Wirths on
Thursday next. I hope you will be able to join us.
I must confess that I am as excited as a
schoolboy with what we are accomplishing here. and with what we are
going to accomplish. We are doing God’s work here, my friend. Thank
you for your compliments on the work I have been doing with twins.
Your notes and suggestions on that have been of inestimable value,
as are your observations on zoonosis and the noma
work.
Please let me know if you can join me for
the presentation. Your observations would be of tremendous value to
the audience, and to me personally.
The letter was dated 22 February 1942. It
was addressed to Heinrich Haeckel. I sat there and stared at the
envelope to which it was clipped. Haeckel’s address had been in
Berlin. The sender’s address was in a town called Birkenau in
Poland. My blood froze in my veins.
Birkenau.
Good God Almighty.
Birkenau was the small Polish town where the
Nazis built Auschwitz.
The man who sent the letter was Josef
Mengele.