Peter loitered by her side. He said, “And why would they want them spending energy up that shaft to meals?”
Olivia shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe, to get them as hungry as possible—”
“And exhausted?”
She agreed. “Yeah, and that too.”
She noted that every time you studied the Nazi, you could not help but notice elements of cruelty in whatever they did.
Peter went off to the far wall. He chuckled. “Ho, ho, ho, guys, I found something on the wall here. It’s a…”
He went closer to examine a metal box the size of a regular switchboard. Hanging down from its side was a handle. The box looked very old too. Some paint still hung from it, like the peeling flesh of a burn victim. Written on it was the word Stromversorgung.
“It’s a switch, a power switch,” Peter announced. “It says 'electrical power supply'.”
He touched the handle. Frank Miller started telling him not to touch it but Peter was already throwing the switch up. And when he did the whole facility trembled. There was a tremendous hum that shook the ground. The walls came alive and the crew screamed in terror, hurdling together.
Then the noise stopped. Birth vibration remained, a low humming in the walls.
“What the hell was that?” asked someone.
Nicolai spoke. “I think generators.”
“Diesel generators,” Borodin added. “The complex is coming to life. We should —”
Lights began coming on in the shaft behind them. Then the large hall illuminated suddenly with very bright fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Suddenly, the hall was bigger than it had appeared to them. And what they thought was dust in the wall was some white material. The walls were dark with blotches of soot, as though there had been a fire in there.
Victor Borodin crouched on the white material. He touched and smelt it.
“Some sort of dousing substance, I suppose,” he explained. “Maybe there was a fire accident.”
“Or they tried to burn the place down?” Olivia proposed.
“Or maybe that.”
Miller called, “Guys, there’s a vault door here.”
On the opposite wall, there was a giant spherical metal door, like the type in banks. They hadn’t seen it all this time on account of the soot and peeling paint. There was a recess in the middle of the metal door. It looked almost like a cross enclosed in a square. Each point of the cross touched its side of the square so that it looked like there were four smaller squares in the recess, and each square was moveable. Beside it was a box with a small screen and numbers. Miller touched the groove on the wall.
“Wow.”
“How do we open that?” Ted Cooper asked.
“I don’t know.”
Olivia went to the vault. She touched the symbol on the door. The cross evoked an image in her head. She wasn’t sure but during her research she had seen something that looked a lot like this. The men watched her, having learned that she was about the smartest of them all.
“It is not a cross,” she said.
She quickly searched in her bag and found her notebook. She opened the pages urgently. She stopped turning and started comparing a crude drawing she made of the cross in the swastika and the one on the metal door.
The similarity was striking.
The men crowded around her. They saw it too.
“Okay, it’s the goddamn swastika,” said Ted Cooper. “Now what, how does that open it, how do we open it?”
“Shut up, Ted,” Miller scolded.
He took a look at the picture in Olivia’s notebook and concluded that it was the same, bearing the crude way Olivia had done her work. Miller glanced at Peter Williams.
“What do you think, Professor?”
Peter had seen it too, the resemblance. But there was nothing in his repertoire of German artifacts that came to mind, for he surmised that this was a lock.
“A lock needs a key,” he muttered.
“You’re saying this is a lock?” Miller puzzled.
“I believe it is.”
Olivia said, “Yes it is.”
She started back into her bag again. She had Kruger’s stuff in a waterproof paper bag. Keeping the box had been too cumbersome. She opened the bag. She looked at Peter.
“If Kruger was planning a trip here someday, he definitely would have figured a way to open this vault. Hell, it’s a vault—”
“And vaults keep secrets,” Peter cut in.
“That’s right. I have unexplained objects from Kruger’s box here, maybe we could find something.”
Olivia spread the objects on the floor. There in the middle of the clutter was the object shaped like a cross. Like the cross on the swastika.
“Bingo!” exclaimed Peter.
He took it and rushed to the wall. An expectant silence fell on the group, a holding of breaths. Peter tried the cross on but it didn’t fit. He turned it around, same thing. It just won’t fit.
“Come on, man,” he grumbled, manipulating the cross in different permutations.
“Give it up, Peter,” said Ted. “It ain’t gonna work, you can’t make it work if it won’t.”
“Shut up, you son of a bitch!” Peter screamed at Ted.
Spittle flew in the air. Peter glared at Ted, his chest heaved. The lines on his face deeper and his eyes shut. He gripped the star in a hand that was now a fist.
Ted Cooper reeled on his foot. Even though he packed more pounds around his shoulders, and pound for pound, toe to toe, he’d probably knock Peter down. He recovered quick. Ted reverted to his contemptible self.
“Oh there you go again,” he taunted. “See, this is why I’m here, Peter. To check your fickle spirit. You don’t have the guts for this. You are here because I wanted you to be, and because your alcoholic lady friend here happens to be half as smart as my grad students. So bring it on, I’ll break you down!”
Olivia’s face was white wax. She felt her knees give under her. Peter looked at her and saw the folly of what he had just done. He had let the circumstances get the best of him. He looked at the star in his hands and then at the embarrassed faces in front of him.
“I’m sorry, guys,” he murmured.
Nicolai took the object from his hand and patted Peter on the shoulder with a smile.
Frank Miller said, “Lets rest, folks. I think we need it.”
Olivia distracted herself with work. She knelt before the objects and started sorting them. She opened the notes from Kruger’s box that she read through over and over. Words that were both German and a little English. Terms and numbers jumped at her. In her emotional turmoil it was all a random combination.
Yet, she was certain that there was a pattern to all the chaos. If only she could quiet the scream in her head, the words that Ted said, the ones the papers published, and the hardest of them all, John’s blood, half-blown face every time someone accused her of drinking.
Finally she gave up and sat down hard. Peter came to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “It was my fault.”
“No, not yours to bare. It was my fault, I shouldn’t have come here. I’m not ready—”
“What’re you talking about? You can do this. You are one of the smartest women I have ever met.”
Olivia glanced at him. Peter nodded.
“You have practically brought us here, all of us. You can do this, Olivia. Come on, let me help.”
Olivia sighed. “Tell me what you see.”
“Numbers?”
“No, not those,” she said. “Those are the coordinates. We have used up that lead.”
Olivia looked up at the console by the vault. She had believed they needed some code for that console the moment she saw it. Not just the cross-shaped object.
“The vault won’t open unless we put a code in that machine,” she pointed out, “and then the cross. Either way, we need both to work.”