“Think, think,” he whispered in the darkness. He tried his utmost best to compose himself. “It profits you nothing to panic, old boy. You agreed to do this for the glory of Tesla, of Lydia and mostly for yourself.”
He was cold, but draping the army blanket of the bunk over his shoulders was extremely painful. All he could hear was a dripping tap against tin somewhere down the passage. “Hello!” he called, but only his echo answered; the echo and the drip-drip of the tap. He ached for water, especially to ease the waves of heat from the burns, but they were Nazi’s. They left him to suffer and to hear that tap dripping, leaking precious liquid he could not reach to quench his thirst.
Chapter 19
Nina sat in the dead silence of her guest room. Now and then she could see the flashing light of the lightning manifest through the tiny linear chasms in the iron sheeting where it did not quite come together when fixed to the windows. The whole house was soundproof and though fascinating, she found it decidedly morbid not to be able to hear the thunder or the rain, the howl of the wind, traffic or even just crickets on a quiet night. That was, assuming there were any bugs alive in the dead misery of the abandoned garden. Opting not to try and open a window on this stormy night, she surrendered to the fatigue of travelling she still had not shaken and retired to bed with earphones plugged into her iPod for some sanity from the massive tomb that enveloped her this night.
Everyone had turned in, apart from Sam who took the first watch at the chamber, should Purdue make contact. They had three days — probably less — to make contact with Purdue, ascertain his situation and location, direct him to Helmut Kämpfe to obtain the schematics for Tesla’s death ray by any means necessary and to pulse him back to the chamber in Jenner Manor before the time is up. He checked his watch, finger at the ready on his recording device and he realized a chilling fact.
Day one had just passed.
They had two days left or else they would be arranging a nice secret ceremony, just Nina and him, to mourn their friend and occasional employer. Since Sam had completed his task for the Cornwall Institute he removed the battery from his phone soon after he was picked up by Purdue and Healy. It was better that way, not to be bothered until he had sorted out the conundrum with Lydia and Purdue’s subsequent unintended trip that only escalated the problem. In the dense silence Sam sat wondering if Lydia’s routine experiment really was an accident. She was far too much of a control freak to allow accidents, he figured.
That need slowly crept over him as he watched the minutes passed and his hand sank into his pants pocket, rummaging for his pack of smokes.
“Thank God she lets me smoke in here,” he said to himself as he lit the first of only six left for the night, a most disconcerting feeling. He guessed that Lydia knew exactly what she was doing up until the power cut came. That kind of reaction was not one of a woman in control, but as soon as Purdue had gone up in flames she was calm as a drugged up college girl.
In his boredom he reckoned it would do no harm to reassemble his cell phone, if only to entertain him through what was probably the longest night of the world. He wished Nina could join him down here, but she needed to be fresh and rested in the morning to help Lydia pin Purdue’s likely advancement according to historical incidents. Once he slipped in the phone battery he waited for the device to boot. The small light of the screen was a welcome sight here in the uniform lighting of the basement area that made him feel like a hostage in some desert bomb shelter.
No Service
“Of course. Fucking plated to keep the big bad world out,” he scoffed.
The smoke snaked upward, unperturbed thanks to the lack of moving air. Against Lydia’s rules for the night, he stepped out onto the back porch briefly to get a signal. With his back to the yard he could keep his eye on the small window he had forced open. If Purdue showed up in any form of light, the crack in the basement window would reveal it. His phone picked up a signal of three bars. “Good enough.”
Sam’s fag hung loosely between his lips as he pinched one eye shut to shield it from the smoke and he punched in his password.
One Voice Message
He retrieved the voicemail, but he hoped that he would be able to hear it with the shattering sound of hail and thunder around him. The first part was a bit hard to hear —
‘This is Albert Tägtgren, the idiot who foolishly trusted you yesterday.’
“What?” Sam winced.
‘You are a coward, Cleave! You don’t even have the balls to pick up the phone, you bastard! I know what you did!’
Sam could not believe what he heard. Why the hell was the Swedish nerd so pissed at him? ‘And you knew I could not implicate you, because then my employers would know that I told you about the storage container and what I saw there. I am going to track you down and we will sort this out, you and I. You can count on that!’
“Holy shit! What are you on about, mate? Jesus!” Sam frowned, dodging the angry lightning before cowering into the kitchen and closing the back door as if he was never there. He closed the small basement window also, recovering the glass with the sheeting he had removed. But there was a bad taste in his mouth about the Tägtgren tirade. His first thought was to call the engineer back, but he was pressed for time to get back inside the manor and it would be rude to wake the man in the wee hours.
With a ripping propensity to sort out problematic things immediately after catching wind of them, Sam was trapped in a soundless, lonely purgatory. He kept mulling around the awful words he was almost sure he heard correctly given the static of the original call and the cacophony of his own environment while listening. But one thing was for sure; Tägtgren was out to get him and it would be wise of Sam to either stay underground until Purdue’s two days had passed. Whether these days passed well or end in tragedy did not change the fact that the engineer had a grudge against him, for what, he did not know.
It prompted Sam to activate his paranoia a little bit more, but he was not about to tell the others about it. They had enough to focus their absolute attention on for the next forty eight hour fame. But adding to Sam’s personal concern was the fact that Lydia did not trust him enough to allow him to leave, unless she sent her guard dog with him. By the looks of her procedures he and Nina had become no more than glorified, well fed hostages until Purdue could return. Only he could absolve them of the possible glory hounding they apparently would perpetrate through the eyes of Lydia Jenner if she let them out without a leash.
Clearly the professor was afraid that Sam would use the footage to claim his own credit on her design, her mastery. Now Nina knew of it too, which Sam felt amply guilty about. Lydia would also do everything to keep Nina close, lest she wrote a book on it or use the schematics Sam recorded to steal Lydia’s fame.
On the other hand, Sam figured, the bitch would die soon and she was frail enough to perish for the slightest reasons. “Oh my God, Sam, you are John Christie and this is 10 Rillington Place!”
“It is?” Nina asked from a few feet away, giving Sam a tremendous start.
“Thank you, Nina. Healy would have to chuck these trousers now,” Sam gasped.
Nina had a good giggle at the simile and bummed a smoke from Sam.
“I can’t sleep,” she sighed, blowing out the wonderful poisonous vapor. “This place creeps me out. It is as if the building cannot decide if it wasn’t to be a home or a hospital. Did you see all those drips and medical boxes on the first floor?” Nina shuddered visibly.