Black Order (41 page)

Logan met Kat’s eyes.

Kat spoke. “Would it be possible to see it?”

The strange tack of the conversation unsettled the ambassador, but he failed to come up with a good reason to deny it, and Kat imagined he hoped it would be a way to even gain an upper hand in the quiet war of diplomacy going on here.

“I would be delighted to show you.” He stood up and checked his watch. “I’m afraid we’ll have to move smartly. I do have a breakfast meeting I must not be late to.”

As Kat had imagined, Hourigan was using the tour as an excuse to end the conversation early, to wheedle out of any firm commitment. Logan stared hard at her. She hoped she was right.

They were led to an elevator and taken to the top floor of the building. They passed hallways decorated in artwork and South African native crafts. Then, a large hall opened; it appeared more museum than living space. There were display cabinets, long tables, and massive chests with hand-beaten brass fixtures. A wall of windows overlooked the rear yard and gardens. But in a corner hung a giant gold bell. It looked as if it had recently been uncrated, as bits of the straw stuffing were still scattered on the floor. The bell itself stood a full meter tall and half again as wide at the mouth. The coat of arms had been stamped on it.

Kat stepped closer. A thick power cable ran from its top and coiled to the floor.

The ambassador noted her attention. “It’s automated to ring at set times of the day. Quite a marvel of engineering. If you look up inside the bell, it’s a marvel of gears, like a fine Rolex.”

Kat turned to Logan. He had paled. Like Kat, he had studied the sketches Anna Sporrenberg had made of the original Bell. This was an exact duplicate done in gold. Both had also read of the detrimental effects that could be radiated from the device. Madness and death. Kat stared out the upper-story window. From this height, she could just make out the white dome of the Capitol.

The ambassador’s earlier words now horrified.

A hundred golden bells…endowed around the globe
.

“It took a special technician to install it,” the ambassador continued, though now a slightly bored lilt entered his voice, winding the meeting toward its end. “I believe he’s around here somewhere.”

The room’s door closed behind them, slamming slightly.

All three turned.

“Ah, here he is,” Hourigan said upon turning. His voice died when he spotted the submachine gun held by the newcomer. His hair was white-blond. Even from across the room, Kat spotted a dark tattoo on the hand supporting the gun.

Kat dove for her ankle holster.

Without a word, the assassin opened fire, spraying bullets.

Glass shattered, and wood splintered.

Behind her, beaten by ricocheting rounds, the golden bell rang and rang.

12:44
P.M
.
SOUTH AFRICA

The elevator doors opened on the seventh sublevel. Gray stepped out, rifle in hand. He searched both directions along a gray hallway. Unlike the rich woods and fine craftsmanship used in the main manor house, this sublevel was lit by fluorescents and maintained a rigid sterility in its decor: bleached linoleum floors, gray walls, low roof. Smooth steel doors with glowing electronic locks lined one side of the hall. The other doors appeared more ordinary.

Gray placed his palm against one.

The panel vibrated. He heard a rhythmic hum.

Power plant? Must be massive.

Marcia stepped to his side. “I think we’ve come down too far,” she whispered. “This feels more storage and utility.”

Gray agreed. Still…

He crossed to one of the locked steel doors. “Begs the question, what’re they storing?”

The sign on the door read:
EMBRYONAAL
.

“Embryonic lab,” Marcia translated.

She crossed to join him, eyes guarded, wincing slightly as she moved her bandaged and splinted arm.

Gray raised Ischke’s card again and swiped it. The indicator glowed green and a magnetic lock released. Gray pushed the door. He had shouldered his rifle and now had his pistol out.

The overhead fluorescents flickered then came on steady.

The room was a long hall, a good forty meters. Gray noted how chilly the air was in here, crisper, filtered. A flush line of floor-to-ceiling stainless-steel freezers covered one side. Compressors hummed. On the other side were steel carts, tanks of liquid nitrogen, and a large microscope table wired to a micro-dissection table.

It appeared to be some form of a cryonics lab.

At a central workstation, a Hewlett-Packard computer idled. The screensaver spun on the LCD monitor. A silver symbol rotated against a black background. A familiar symbol. Gray had seen it depicted on the floor of Wewelsburg castle.

“The Black Sun,” Gray mumbled.

Marcia glanced at him.

Gray pointed to the spinning sun. “The symbol represents Himmler’s Black Order, a cabal of Thule Society occultists and scientists obsessed with the superman philosophy. Baldric must’ve been a member, too.”

Gray sensed they had come full circle. From Ryan’s great-grandfather to here. He nodded to the computer. “Look for a main directory. See what you can find out.”

While Marcia aimed for the workstation, Gray crossed to one of the freezers. He pulled it open. Frigid air welled out. Inside were drawers, indexed and numbered. Behind him, he heard Marcia tapping at the computer. Gray edged one drawer open. Neatly arranged in clips were a score of tiny glass straws filled with a yellow liquid.

“Frozen embryos,” Marcia said behind him.

He closed the drawer and looked down the length of the hall at the number of giant freezers. If Marcia was correct, there had to be thousands of embryos stored here.

She spoke, drawing him over. “The computer is a database, logging genomes and genealogy.” She glanced over to him. “Both human and animal. Mammalian species. Look at this.”

Strange notations filled the screen.

“They appear to be a list of mutational changes,” Marcia said. “Defined down to the level of polynucleotides.”

Gray tapped the name near the top.
“Crocuta crocuta,”
he read. “The spotted hyena. I’ve seen the end result of that research. Baldric Waalenberg mentioned how he was perfecting the species, even incorporating human stem cells in their brains.”

Marcia brightened and tapped back to a main directory. “That explains the name of the entire database.
Hersenschim
. Which translates to ‘chimera.’ A biologic term for an organism with genetic material from more than one species, whether from grafting like in plants or insertion of foreign cells into an embryo.” She tapped one-handed at the computer, focused. “But to what end?”

Straightening, Gray glanced down the length of the embryonic lab. Was all this any different from Baldric’s manipulation of orchids and bonsai trees? Just another way to control nature, to manipulate and design it according to his own definition of perfection.

“Hmm…,” Marcia mumbled. “Strange.”

Gray turned back to her. “What?”

“As I said, there are human embryos here.” She glanced over a shoulder to Gray. “According to the cross-referenced genealogy, all of these embryos are genetically tied to the Waalenbergs.”

No surprise there. Gray had noted the similarities in the Waalenberg offspring. Their patriarch had been tweaking the family lineage for generations.

But apparently that wasn’t the strange part.

Marcia continued, “Each of the Waalenberg embryos in turn is referenced to stem cell lines that are then tracked to
Crocuta crocuta
.”

“The hyenas?”

Marcia nodded.

Understanding and horror grew. “Are you saying he’s been planting his
own
children’s stem cells into those monsters?” Gray could not hide his shock. Did the man’s atrocities, his conceit, never end?

“That’s not all,” Marcia said.

Gray felt a sickening jolt in his gut, knowing what she was going to say next.

Marcia pointed to a complicated chart on the screen. “According to this, stem cells from the hyenas are cross-referenced back to the next generation of human embryos.”

“Dear God…”

Gray pictured Ischke holding out her hand and stopping the charging hyena. It was more than just master and dog. It was family. Baldric had been implanting cells from his mutated hyenas back into his children, cross-pollinating like his orchids.

“But even
that’s
not the worst…,” Marcia began, pale and disturbed to her core. “The Waalenbergs have been—”

Gray cut her off. He had heard enough. They had more to search. “We should keep moving.”

Marcia glanced to the computer with reluctance, but she nodded and stood. They left the monster lab and continued down the hall. The next door was marked
FOETUSSEN
. A fetal lab. Gray continued down the hall without stopping. He had no desire to see what horrors lay inside there.

“How are they achieving these results?” Marcia asked. “The mutations, the successful chimeras…? They must have some way of controlling their genetic manipulations.”

“Possibly,” he mumbled. “But it’s not perfected—not yet.”

Gray remembered Hugo Hirszfeld’s work, the code he hid in runes. He now understood Baldric’s obsession with it. A promise of perfection.
Too beautiful to let die and too monstrous to set free.

And certainly the concerns of the monstrous didn’t scare Baldric. In fact, he bred the monstrous into his own family. And now that he had Hugo’s code, what was Baldric’s next step? Especially with Sigma breathing down his neck. No wonder Baldric wanted so desperately to know about Painter Crowe.

They reached another door. The room beyond must be huge, as it was spaced a distance from the fetal lab. Gray noted the name on the door.

XERUM
525.

He matched gazes with Marcia.

“Not
serum,
” Gray said.

“Xerum,” Marcia read, shaking her head in a lack of understanding.

Gray used his stolen card. The green light flashed, the lock released, and he pushed inside. The room’s lights flickered on. The air here smelled vaguely corrosive with a hint of ozone. The floor and walls were dark.

“Lead,” Marcia said, touching the walls.

Gray didn’t like the sound of that, but he had to know more. The cavernous space looked like a storage facility for hazardous wastes. Shelves stretched deep into the room. Stacked on them were yellow ten-gallon drums with the number 525 stamped on them.

Gray remembered his concern about a biowarfare agent. Or did the drums hold some type of fissionable material, nuclear waste? Was that the reason the room was lead-lined?

Marcia showed little concern. She crossed to the shelves. Each shelf spot bore a label, marking each drum. “Albania,” she read, then stepped to the next one. “Argentina.”

Other countries were named, in alphabetical order.

Gray stared across the shelves. There had to be a hundred drums at least.

Marcia glanced to him. He understood the sudden concern in her eyes.

Oh, no…

Gray hurried into the room, searching the shelves, stopping periodically to read a label:
BELGIUM
…
FINLAND
…
GREECE
…

He ran on.

At last he reached the spot he was looking for.

UNITED STATES
.

He recalled what Marcia had overheard, something about Washington, D.C. A possible attack. Gray stared down the rows of drums. From all the countries named here, it wasn’t just Washington under threat. At least not yet. Gray remembered Baldric’s concern about Painter, about Sigma. They were his most immediate threat.