The Atrocity Archives (20 page)

I glance round, keeping a vague eye on the other wanderers
in the park; a couple of elderly pensioner types, a kid on a skateboard, that's
about it. Of course that doesn't mean we aren't being tailed—a raven
that's had its central nervous system hijacked by a demonic imperative, a micro-UAV
cruising silent a hundred metres overhead with cameras focussed—but at
least you can do something about human tradecraft, as opposed to the esoteric or
electronic kinds.

"They're not keen on letting whoever's tracking you get
a chance to say 'third time lucky,' " I try to explain. "This is a setup. We're
on friendly territory and if anyone tries to grab you, I'm not the only one on
your case."

"That's nice to know." I look at her sharply but she's got
her innocent face on, the absent-minded professor musing over a theorem rather
than focussing on the world, the flesh, and the devils of Interpol's most-wanted
list.

"You never did tell me about the
Thresher
," I comment as we
cross the road to the museum.

"Oh, what? The submarine? I didn't think
you were interested."

"Huh." I lead her along the side of the building
instead of climbing the steps, and I keep an eye open for the side entrance I'm
looking for. "Of course I'm interested."

"I was kidding, you know." She flashes me a
grin. "Wanted to see if it would make you pull your finger out. You
spooks are just so
focussed.
"

There's a blank door set between two monolithic
granite slabs that form one flank of the museum; I rap on it thrice and
it opens inward automatically. (There's a camera in the ceiling of this
entrance tunnel: unwanted visitors will not be made welcome.) "What
is
this?" Mo asks, "Hey, that's the first secret door I've seen!"

"Nah, it's just the service entrance," I say.
The door closes behind us and I lead her forward, round a bend, and up
to the security desk. "Howard and O'Brien from
the Laundry," I say, placing my hand on the counter.

The booth is empty, but there are two badges
waiting on the counter and the door ahead of us opens anyway. "Welcome
to the Archive," says a speaker behind the counter. "Please take your
ID badges and wear them at all times except when visiting the public
galleries."

I take them and pass one to Mo. She inspects it
dubiously. "Is this solid silver? What's the language? This isn't
Dutch."

"It probably came from Indonesia. Don't ask,
just wear it." I pin mine on my belt, under the hem of my T-shirt—it
doesn't need to be visible to human guards, after all. "Coming?"

"Yeah."

The cellars under the Rijksmuseum remind me of an upmarket version of the Stacks at
Dansey House—huge tunnels, whitewashed and air-conditioned, chock-full
of shelves. There's a difference: almost all the contents at Dansey
House are files. Here there are boxes, plastic or wooden, full of
evidence, left over from the trials that followed a time of infinite
horrors.

The Ahnenerbe-SS collection is in a subbasement
guarded by locked steel doors; one of the curators—a civilian in jeans
and sweater—takes us down there. "Don't you be staying too long," she
advises us. "This place, it gives me creeps; you not sleeping well
tonight, yah?"

"We'll be all right," I reassure her. The
Ahnenerbe collection has about the strongest set of guards and wards
imaginable—nobody involved in looking after it wants to worry about
lunatics and neo-Nazis getting their hands on some of the powerfully
charged relics stored here.

"You say." She looks at me blackly, then one
eyebrow twitches. "Sweet dreams."

"Just what are we looking for?" asks Mo.

"Well, to start with—" I clap my hands. We're
facing a corridor with numbered storage rooms off to either side. It's
well lit and empty, like a laboratory where everyone has just nipped
out for afternoon tea. "The symbols painted on the walls of the
apartment in Santa Cruz," I say. "Think you'd recognise them if you
saw
them again?"

"Recognise? I, uh … maybe,"
she says slowly. "I wouldn't like to say for sure. I was half out of my
head and I didn't get a real good look at them."

"That's more than I got, and the Black Chamber
didn't send us any postcards," I say. "Which is why we've come here.
Think of it as a photo-fit session for necromancy." I read the plaque
on the nearest door, then push it open. The lights come on
automatically, and I freeze. It's a good thing the lights are bright,
because the contents of the room, seen in shadow, would be
heart-stopping. As it is, they're merely heart-breaking.

There's a white cast-iron table, a thing of
curves and scrollwork, just inside the doorway. Three chairs sit around
it, delicate-looking white assemblies of struts and curved sections. I
blink, for there's something odd about them, something that reminds me
of the art of Giger, the film set of
Alien.
And then I realise
what I'm looking at: the backs of the chairs are vertebrae, wired
together. The chairs are made of scrimshaw, carved from the thigh bones
of the dead; the decorative scrollwork of the table is a rack of human
ribs. The table-top itself is made of polished, interlocking shoulder
blades. And as for the cigarette lighter—

"I think I'm going to be sick," whispers Mo. She
looks distinctly pale.

"Toilet's down the corridor," I bite out,
gritting my teeth while she hurries away, retching. I take in the rest
of the room.
They're right,
I think in some quiet, rational
recess of my mind,
some things you just can't tell the public about.
The Holocaust, even seen at arm's length through newsreel footage, was
bad enough to brand the collective unconscious of
the West with a scar of indelible evil, madness on an inconceivable
scale. Hideous enough that some people seek to deny it ever happened.
But
this
, this isn't something you can even begin to describe:
this is the dark nightmare of a diseased mind.

There were medical laboratories attached to the
death camp at Birkenau. Some of their tools are stored here. There were
other, darker, laboratories behind the medical unit, and their tools
are stored here, too, those that have not been destroyed in accordance
with the requirements of disarmament treaties.

Next to the charnel house garden furniture sits
a large rack of electronics, connected to a throne of timber with metal
straps at ankle and wrist—an electric chair; the Ahnenerbe
experimented
with the destruction of human souls, seeking a way to sear through the
Cartesian bottleneck and exterminate not only the bodies of their
victims, but the informational echoes of their consciousness. Only the
difficulty of extinguishing souls on a mass production basis kept it
from featuring prominently in their schemes.

Beyond the soul-eater there's a classical
mediaeval iron maiden, except that the torturers of the Thirty Years
War didn't get to play with aluminium alloy and hydraulic rams. There
are other machines, all designed to maim and kill with a maximum of
agony: one of them, a bizarre cross between a printing press and a rack
made of glass, seems to have materialised from a nightmare of Kafka's.

They were trying to generate pain, I realize.
They weren't simply killing their victims but deliberately
hurting
them in the process, hurting them as badly as the human body could
stand, squeezing the pain out of them like an evil seepage of blood,
hurting them again and again until all the pain had been extracted—

I'm sitting down but I don't remember how I got
here. I feel dizzy; Mo is standing over me. "Bob?" I close my eyes and
try to control my breathing. "Bob?"

"I need a minute," I hear myself saying.

The room reeks of old, dead terror—and a
brooding malevolence, as if the instruments of torture are merely
biding their time.
Just you wait,
they're saying. I shudder,
open my eyes, and try to stand up.

"This was what the … the
Ahnenerbe used?" asks Mo. She sounds hoarse.

I nod, not trusting my voice. It's a moment
before I can speak. "The secret complex. Behind the medical block at
Birkenau, where they experimented with pain. Algemancy. They took
Zuse's Z-2 computer, you know? It was supposed to have been bombed by
the Allies, in Berlin. That was what Zuse himself was told, he was away
at the time. But they took it … " I swallow. "It's
in
the next room."

"A computer? I didn't know they had them."

"Only just; Konrad Zuse built his first
programmable computer in 1940. He independently invented the things:
after the war he founded Zuse Computer Company, which was taken over by
Siemens in the early sixties. He wasn't a bad man; when he didn't
cooperate they stole his machine, demolished the house where he had
built it, and claimed the destruction was an Allied bomb. The
cabbalistic iterations, you see—they rebuilt it at Sobibor camp, using
circuits soldered with gold extracted from the teeth of their
victims."
I stand up and head for the door. "I'll show you, but that's not really
why we're … hell. I'll show you."

The next room in the Atrocity Archive contains
the remains of the Z-2. Old nineteen-inch equipment racks tower
ceiling-high; there are mounds of vacuum tubes visible through gaps in
the front panels, dials and gauges to monitor power consumption, and
plugboards to load programs into the beast. All very quaint, until you
see the printer that lurks in the shadowy recess at the back of the
room. "Here they ran the phase-state calculations that dictated the
killing schedule, opening and closing circuits in time to the ebb and
flow of murder. They even generated the railway timetables with this
computer, synchronising deliveries of victims to the maw of the
machine." I walk toward the printer, look round
to see Mo waiting behind me. "This printer." It's a plotter, motors
dragging a Ouija-board pen across a sheet of—it would have been
parchment, but not from a cow or a sheep. I swallow bile. "They used it
to inscribe the geometry curves that were to open the way of Dho-Na.
All very, very advanced: this was the first real use of computers in
magic, you know."

Mo backs away from the machines. Her face is a
white mask under the overhead strip lighting. "Why are you showing me
this?"

"The patterns are in the next room." I follow
her out into the corridor and take her by the elbow, gently steering
toward the third chamber—where the real Archive begins. It's a
plain-looking room, full of the sort of file drawers you find in
architects' offices—very shallow, very wide, designed to hold huge,
flat blueprints. I pull the top drawer of the nearest cabinet out and
show her. "Look. Seen anything like this before?" It's very fine
parchment inscribed with what looks like a collision between a mandala,
a pentagram, and a circuit diagram, drawn in bluish ink. At the front
and left, a neat box-out in engineering script details the content of
the blueprint. If I didn't know what it was meant to be, or what the
parchment was made of, I'd think it was quite pretty. I take care not
to touch the thing.

"It's—yes." She traces one of the curves with a
fingertip, carefully holding it an inch above the inscription. "No, it
wasn't this one. But it's similar."

"There are several thousand more like this in
here," I say, studying her expression. "I'd like to see if we can
identify the one you saw on the wall?" She nods, uneasily. "We don't
have to do it right now," I admit. "If you would rather we took a
breather there's a cafè upstairs where we can have a cup of
coffee and
relax a bit first—"

"No." She pauses for a moment. "Let's get it
over and done with." She glances over her shoulder and shudders
slightly. "I don't want to stay down here any longer than I have to."

About two hours later, while
Mo is halfway through the contents of drawer number fifty-two,
my pager goes off. I scrabble at the waistband of my jeans in a
momentary panic then pull the thing out. One of the news-greppers I
left running on the network servers back home has paged me: in its
constant trawl through the wire feeds it's come across something
interesting.
KILLING IN ROTTERDAM
, it
says, followed by a reference number.

"Got to go upstairs," I say, "think you'll be
okay here for twenty minutes?"

Mo looks at me with eyes like bruises. "I'll
take you up on that coffee break if you don't mind."

"Not at all. Not having much luck?"

"Nothing so far." She yawns, catches herself,
and shakes her head. "My attention span is going. Oh God, coffee. I
never realised it was possible to be horrified and bored out of your
skin at the same time."

I refrain from calling her on the unintentional
pun; instead I make a note of where she's got up to—at this rate we
could be here for another week, unless we get lucky—and slide the
drawer shut. "Okay. Time out."

The coffee shop is upstairs, attached to the
museum shop; it's all whitewash and neat little tables and there's a
stand with patisseries on it next to the counter. All very
gezelig.
A row of cheap PCs along one wall offer Internet access for the
compulsives who can't kick their habit for a day of high culture. I
home in on one and begin the tedious process of logging into one of the
Laundry's servers by way of three firewalls, two passwords, an
encrypted tunnel, and an S/Key challenge. At the end of the day I'm
onto a machine that isn't exactly trusted—the Laundry will not allow
classified servers to be connected on the net, by any arrangement of
wires or wishful thinking—but that happens to run my news trawler.
Which, after all, is fishing in the shallow waters
of Reuters and UPI, rather than the oceanic chasm of state secrets.

So what made my pager go off? While Mo is
drinking a mug full of mocha and contemplating the museum's catalogue
of forthcoming attractions, I find myself reading an interesting
article from the AP wire service. DOUBLE KILLING IN ROTTERDAM (AP): Two
bodies discovered near a burned-out shipping container in the port
appear to be victims of a brutal gangland-style slaying. Blood daubed
on the container, victims—ah, a correlation with a restricted
information source, something sucked out of the Police National
Computer and not available in the usual wire service bulletin. One
victim is a known neo-Nazi, the other an Iraqi national, both shot with
the same gun.
Is that all?
I wonder, and go clickety-click,
sending out a brief email asking where was the shipping container sent
from and where was it bound for because you never
know …