“Oh yes. The blonde bitch plummets to her death in the end,” Asya returned. Queen whipped her head back to look at Asya, her long blonde hair swinging over her shoulder as she did so. She smiled wide, showing her teeth, and turned back to illuminate the front of the tunnel again, chuckling as she did so.
“I like her, Rook. Let’s keep her.”
The passage continued for what Rook took to be at least a mile. At the end, they found a double set of steel doors set into a rock foundation, similar to the door at the end of the first tunnel. This set of doors also had a name stenciled above it:
Gleipnir.
“I don’t know this one,” Queen said.
“Beats me,” Rook said, “but Ale will know what it means. Ready?”
Queen nodded. Rook took hold of the handles on the doors and pulled them open.
They moved silently. Rook made a mental note that someone must have regularly maintained the doors for them to make so little noise when moving. Perhaps Fossen hadn’t told him nearly enough about what the Nazis were doing in this lab, or what he was doing with his modern wolf research.
What they encountered on the other side of the doors was so immense, it stopped them in their tracks.
They emerged on a wide metal catwalk that ran around the top edges of a cavernous space filled by a large metal structure. Eight curved struts, each rising from a concrete block in the center of the massive room, stretched up some two hundred feet, forming a sphere of metal columns that came together just beneath the ceiling twelve feet above their heads.
Rook glanced down through the catwalk’s metal mesh floor. That’s a long way down.
It looked to Rook as if the thing was missing a giant marble that would sit perfectly in its embrace. Wires and cables snaked along the length of each strut, connected to metal plates, like solar panels, spaced along the inner edges of the struts. The structure reminded Rook of an oversized version of the Faraday cage he’d seen at Boston’s Museum of Science, which directed the flow of lightning.
“Like a cage of giant fingers. But what does it do?” Asya whispered.
“Or what does it hold,” Queen replied.
“Doesn’t matter,” Rook said. “I’m probably gonna wind up breaking the fucker into tiny pieces, so don’t get attached to it. These people killed Peder and nearly killed me. If that thing isn’t designed to create free clean energy for the world, I’m busting it.”
There were computer stations and electronics arrays at panels and desks around the base of the giant room. Along one wall was an enormous hangar-style metal door that could retract into the walls on either side. Doors lined the walls along the catwalk, on the top level where they stood, but also on several levels below, all of which wrapped around the outside of the giant room. Staircases connected each flight to the next. A vertical maze. Massive Klieg lights lit the entire scene from their housings in the ceiling of the cavern.
“Only thing missing is people,” Queen mused aloud.
“They were all too busy kicking my ass this morning.” Rook spotted a large door further along the same wall from where they had emerged. “One mystery at a time. I wanna know where Kiss and the sofa went.”
“I’m going to take a closer look at that…thing,” Queen headed for the stairs down.
Asya paused for a moment. “I will check other doors on this floor.”
“Suit yourselves.” Rook moved to the wide doors and opened them. They opened into an average-sized storage room with gray metal filing cabinets, cardboard boxes and the mysterious missing sofa. Fossen, or someone else, had cleaned the sofa’s old fabric. There was no sign of Edmund Kiss’s bloody remains. Rook looked around the rest of the room before rifling through the file cabinets. The cabinets and boxes were full of moldy documents that had clearly been around since before the ’40s. The smell reminded Rook of his grandmother’s house in New Hampshire, shortly before she died, when her legendary cleaning skills had diminished.
He couldn’t make much sense of the documents. They were scientific and technical reports. He came across the word Ragnarok a few times and only once across the word Gleipnir. But the descriptions of the former only confirmed what he knew already-that Edmund Kiss and other Nazis had begun experimenting with wolf genes around the ’40s and the man had eventually gone missing. For Gleipnir, all he could find were facilities reports. Janitorial supply bills and large food bills, but Rook figured in the older days, in this distant, remote part of Norway, travel to a large supermarket wasn’t likely. They would have had to purchase all their necessary supplies well before the winter, and store everything here in the lab somewhere.
The technical reports discussed things that his meager Ger- man skills were never designed to decipher. Gene sequences, astrophysics, quantum mechanics and medical topics. After fifteen minutes of scanning documents, Rook had even less of an idea of what kind of research was going on in the facility than he had when he’d entered it.
He was about to give up and check out another room when he came across a manila folder that had diagrams of the gigantic octopus-like metal structure in the main room. He paused and squatted down near the floor to look at the pictures more carefully. They showed the massive device with an enormous sphere of crackling energy suspended in its center. In the diagram, lightning bolts shot out of the sphere into the corners of the room.
“Huh, maybe it is supposed to provide energy.” Although Rook doubted the motives of the device’s builders were to provide that energy for free.
Then two things happened at the same time. Rook heard the report of Queen’s M9. Not just one shot. A lot of shots. And Asya was screaming.
Rook leapt to his feet and dropped the folder with its diagrams on the floor as he raced to the door, heading for the catwalk. But when he reached the catwalk, something large and white slammed into him from the side. His feet were knocked out from under him and his lower spine slammed into the guardrail around the edge of the huge machinery-filled chamber. Rook pinioned his arms, desperately trying to claw his way back to balance, but the velocity of the impact sent his upper torso flipping backward over the rail, and he was falling down through the giant room to the floor, hundreds of feet below him.
TWENTY
Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH
Lewis Aleman was returning to his senses after the sonic blast of the creature’s roar in Shanghai, as he had listened in on the battle with Knight and Bishop. He had acted quickly at the sudden auditory siege, but not quickly enough. His hand had reached the toggle switch to kill the audio from the Shanghai location, but by that point, Aleman had vomited in sheer terror, before rolling out of the command chair, hitting the carpeted floor and crawling in his own stomach contents, crying and screaming.
Around the room, Matt Carrack had scrambled into a corner and was hugging his legs. Sara Fogg had also vomited. She was on the floor on her hands and knees with a long string of saliva dripping from her mouth to the floor, reminding Aleman of a drooling St. Bernard. George Pierce was nowhere to be seen.
Aleman could only remember the creature’s roar, and his instantly reaching for the audio dampening switch, before his biggest fears seized him. The fear of falling was tangible and terrifying, as he rocketed out of a clear sky with a parachute that refused to open. He realized now that he had hallucinated, but his mind was once again his own. As he struggled to his feet, his mind grappled with what had happened. The creatures ripping out of the domes had a roar that somehow induced panic in their opponents.
Not opponents.
Prey.
That was the only explanation. But what the hell can do that? He recalled the noise of the roar had been low and keening, a little like a foghorn, then rising in pitch as if the foghorn were being tortured.