“You and your fucking sister must’ve planted this on me!” Sam screamed.
“Then how would these guys get the signal? It has to be one of their trackers, Sam, to show up on their screens. Where else would you have been tagged if you had not been with them before?” Purdue insisted.
“I don’t know!” Sam retorted.
Nina could not believe her ears. Confounded, she stared mutely at Sam, the man she trusted with her life. All he could do was to vehemently deny involvement, but he knew the damage was done.
“That aside, we are all here now. Best cooperate to avoid anyone getting hurt, or killed,” Bloem grinned.
He was pleased at how easily he could wedge a chasm between the companions by the perpetuation of a little distrust. It would defy his purpose if he revealed that the council tracked Sam by way of the nanites in his system, similar to that which Nina’s body contained in Belgium before Purdue gave her and Sam vials to swallow, vials that held the antidote.
Sam did not trust Purdue’s intentions and made Nina believe that he had also taken his antidote. But by not taking the fluid that could neutralize the nanites in his body, Sam had inadvertently allowed the council to comfortably locate him, and to follow him to the site of the Ernaux secret.
Now he was effectively labeled traitor and he had no proof to argue otherwise.
They came to a sharp turn in the tunnel, faced with an enormous vault door fixed into the wall where the tunnel ended. It was a tarnished gray door with rusty bolts that reinforced it along the sides and across the middle. The group stopped to examine the massive door in front of them. Its color was a pale gray cream hue, only slightly different to that of the walls and floor of the tubes. On closer inspection they could see the cylinders of steel that latched the heavy door to the surrounding doorframe set in the thick concrete.
“Mr. Purdue, I’m sure you can open this for us,” Bloem said.
“I doubt that,” Purdue replied. “I didn’t pack any nitroglycerine.”
“But you surely have some sort of genius technology in that bag of yours, as you normally do, to hasten your passage through all the places you always stick your nose in?” Bloem insisted, his tone clearly more antagonistic as his patience waned. “Do it for the sake of restricted time…” he told Purdue, and worded his next threat clearly, “do it for your sister.”
Agatha could well be dead already, Purdue thought, but he kept a straight face.
At once all five dogs began to look agitated, yelping and moaning as they stepped here and there.
“What is it, girls?” Wesley asked the animals, rushing to calm them.
The party looked around, but saw no danger. Perplexed, they watched the dogs grow exceedingly rowdy, barking into the air before starting to howl incessantly.
“Why are they doing that?” Nina asked.
Wesley shook his head, “They hear something we cannot. And whatever it is, it must be intense!”
Obviously the animals were extremely irritated by a subsonic pitch that the humans could not pick up on, because they started howling desperately, maniacally twirling and turning in their tracks. One by one the dogs began to retreat backward from the vault door. Wesley whistled in myriad variations, yet the dogs refused to obey. They turned and ran as if the devil was at them and quickly disappeared around the bend, away into the distance.
“Call me paranoid, but that is a sure sign that we are in trouble,” Nina remarked, while the others frantically scanned their surroundings.
Joost Bloem and the loyal Wesley both drew their sidearms from under their jackets.
“You brought guns?” Nina frowned in surprise. “Why bother with the dogs then?”
“Because getting torn up by feral animals would make your deaths accidental and unfortunate, my dear Dr. Gould. Untraceable. And shooting off in these acoustics would just be stupid,” Bloem explained matter of factly as he pulled back the hammer.
Chapter 32
“Location locked,” the hacker told Ludwig Bern.
They had been working day and night to devise a way to locate the stolen weapon the Brigade Apostate had been robbed of a over a week before. Being ex-members of the Black Sun, there was no man associated with the brigade who was not a master at his trade, therefore it was only logical that there would be several experts in information technology to help trace the whereabouts of the dangerous Longinus.
“Outstanding!” Bern exclaimed, turning to his two fellow commanders for approval.
One was Kent Bridges, ex-SAS and former third-level member of the Black Sun, in charge of munitions. The other was Otto Schmidt, who also held a third-level Black Sun membership before defecting to the Brigade Apostate, a professor of applied linguistics and a former fighter pilot from Vienna, Austria.
“Where is it at the moment?” Bridges asked.
The hacker raised an eyebrow, “The oddest place, actually. According to the fiberoptic tracers we synced with the hardware of the Longinus, it is currently… in… Wewelsburg castle.”
The three commanders exchanged confounded looks.
“This time of night? It is not even morning there yet, right Otto?” Bern asked.
“No, it is about 5 a.m., I think,” Otto replied.
“Wewelsburg Castle is not even open yet and there are certainly no transients or tourists allowed at night,” Bridges jested. “How the hell could it be there? Unless… the thief was currently breaking into Wewelsburg?”
The room quieted down as all within contemplated a reasonable explanation.
“Nevermind,” Bern spoke suddenly. “What is important is that we know where it is. I volunteer to travel to Germany to retrieve it. I shall take Alexandr Arichenkov with me. The man is an exceptional tracker and navigator.”
“Do that, Bern. Check in with us at every 11-hour interval, as always. And if you run into trouble, just alert us. We already have allies in every country in western Europe, should you need some reinforcement,” Bridges affirmed.
“Will do.”
“Are you sure you can trust the Russian?” Otto Schmidt asked under his breath.
“I believe I can, Otto. The man has given me no reason to presume otherwise. Besides, we still have men on point at his friends’ house, but I doubt it would ever come to that. Time is running out for the historian and the journalist to bring us Renata, though. That concerns me more than I care to admit, but, one thing at a time,” Bern assured the Austrian pilot.
“Agreed. Godspeed, Bern,” Bridges joined in.
“Thank you, Kent. We leave in an hour, Otto. Will you be ready?” Bern asked.
“Absolutely. Let’s get back that menace from whoever was dumb enough to lay their paws on it. My God, if they only knew what that thing is capable of!” Otto ranted.
“That’s what I’m afraid of. I have a feeling they know full well what it is capable of.”
Nina, Sam, and Purdue had no idea how long they had been in the tunnels. Even at the estimation of it being dawn, there was no way they would see daylight down here. Now they were held at gunpoint, having no idea what they were all in for while they stood in front of the giant heavy vault door.
“Mr. Purdue, if you will,” Joost Bloem nudged Purdue with his gun to open the vault with the portable blowtorch he used to cut away the gate in the sewer.
“Mr. Bloem, I don’t know you, but I am sure a man of your intellect knows that a door like this could not possibly be opened with a measly little tool like this,” Purdue argued, although he kept his tone reasonable.
“Please don’t patronize me, Dave,” Bloem turned colder, “because I am not referring to your tiny tool.”