The Methuselah Project (22 page)

The minutes crept past. In the end, however, Roger rejoiced to hear the sound that quickened his heartbeat: the soft, rhythmic pattern of heavy breathing.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
Noiseless as a snowflake, he stood and pulled out his “ammunition,” a ball of yarn tied to a hook fashioned from his belt buckle. He floated to the bars, straining his ears to make sure the heavy breathing continued uninterrupted. This had to work.

Roger paid out the line, then pushed the hook through the bars and began swinging it, just as he’d rehearsed the night before. Back and forth, back and forth—
Now!

As he intended, the hook sailed well over the desk and plopped into the padded seat beyond. He wanted no clanks or clunks to disturb Hans.

Steady now.
He pulled the yarn and continued drawing it back. He could feel the weight of the hook rising up the far side of the desk …

Hans snorted. The heavy breathing stopped. He shifted position.

Roger froze. It was too late to dash back to his armchair and act nonchalant. He simply locked his eyes on the reclining man, willing him not to sit up.

A few seconds later the sound of breathing resumed, and Roger continued reeling in his line. When the hook crested the far edge of the desk, his fingers trembled with anticipation. He tried to steady them, but he could nearly taste freedom.

Not too fast. Slowly, slowly …

The hook inched across the desk, but not directly toward the keys. Roger paused, then repositioned, moving to the right and extending his arms between different bars to guarantee the yarn crossed directly over the keychain.

Come on, baby, just a little farther.

The hook reached the keychain, slid up onto it, and—as Roger held his breath—proceeded to slide off again without snagging the prize.

No!
He yanked the yarn and caught the flying hook before it collided with the steel bars. He glanced at Hans. Still asleep, but for how long?

Unsure how many more minutes he might have, Roger repeated the attempt, but more rapidly this time. The hook sailed over the desk, landed, appeared on top of the desk, slid toward the key ring …

Roger’s palms were sweating. He didn’t dare take time to wipe them. He studied Hans—still no movement. This was taking too long. Would Sophie’s excuse for going out to her car thirty minutes after Hans descended be plausible enough to let her remain outside so long?

The hook snuggled up to the key ring.
Good, good, good …
Through the bars, he raised his hands as high as he could reach. The open end of the hook twisted and
bingo!
For the first time, Roger had a direct link to the key that could release him. He reeled his catch across the desk. A deft flick of the wrist had the keys arcing through the air directly toward him. With his left hand, he reached to grab them—and missed.

Clink.
The keys bumped a metal bar near Roger’s knee. The sound wasn’t loud, but to him it carried the report of a rifle blast.

Hans’s breathing altered, but he didn’t move. Working feverishly Roger seized the ring. He selected the one out of six keys that would open the portal. He reached through the bars of the door, and inserted it into the keyhole.
Snick.

Freedom was his! Heart thudding, Roger pushed open the cell door.

Creak.
The rusty hinges had betrayed him!

“Greene!” Hans leaped to his feet.

Roger sprinted to the metal barrier. Just as his fingers inserted the next key, a punch walloped his left kidney. He turned in time to dodge a second blow. He caught the man’s arm, twisted it behind his back, and heaved.

Hans collided with the steel bars, bounced off, and collapsed onto the floor. To his credit, the panting scientist struggled to rise. “Martin! Call security!”

Roger jerked the exit door open and removed the key before slamming it shut. He doubted the shouts could be heard upstairs, but he didn’t know for sure. He had charged up only three-quarters of the steps when the harsh blare of an alarm erupted.

Hang that Hans! There must an alarm button down there.

Alarm or no, retreat wasn’t an option. He had to move faster! Roger reached the top and flung open the bookcase camouflage Sophie had described. Half a dozen people stared at him with wide eyes. Martin and Gerhard were the only faces he recognized.

“Who’s that?” shouted a man Roger had never seen before.

“The prisoner—he’s loose!”

A barrel-chested bruiser with close-cropped hair and a black shirt lunged at him. Thanks to Sophie, Roger already knew security personnel at this facility didn’t wear uniforms with patches or badges, just black shirts and matching trousers. Faster than even he would have believed possible, Roger sidestepped the leap and delivered a kick that sent the muscleman sprawling.

Martin hefted a wooden chair over his head, but Roger slammed a fist into the man’s stomach. Martin and chair crumpled. Another man, whom Roger recognized as an occasional visiting official, shot a hand into his suit jacket. A shoulder holster!

Even without a black outfit, anyone wearing a weapon deserved attention. Before the man could withdraw his hand, Roger rammed a knee into the man’s groin and shoved him to the floor. He whirled toward the only visible exit just in time to see Sophie entering, flanked by two burly men in black.

“Get him!” someone ordered.

With a shout, the men scrambled past Sophie in a beeline for Roger.

Roger’s bid for escape was crumbling fast, but he spotted a glimmer of hope. If these were the two guards from the gate, then no one was manning the outdoor barrier. If only he could reach the outside, he might still escape. He could run away, hide, sneak by night to the address Sophie had given him.

He darted forward, hoping speed alone would enable him to slip between the two attackers before they drew weapons or took a swing. But unlike Hans, these goons knew how to fight. One drove a sledgehammer fist into Roger’s ribcage. The other cracked his knuckles into Roger’s jaw with a blow that nearly twisted his head off.

Before Roger knew it, his knees hit the carpeted floor. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a hand pulling a gun from a holster. Just before him was the outside door—still standing wide open and admitting brisk, wintry air as if begging him to make a final effort.

Roger sprang. He staked everything on the hope that if a bullet only wounded him, the miraculous recuperative power Blomberg had bestowed would enable him to recover once he found a hiding place.

“Don’t kill him,” Gerhard’s voice commanded. “Just stop him. Knock him out!”

Adrenaline coursing through his veins, Roger leaped through the door, where the full force of blinding sunlight reflected from the snow, forcing his eyes down to slits. By squinting and shading his eyes with one hand, he saw that he stood on a wide brick veranda. In front of him were eight or nine parked cars. Beyond, he glimpsed a gate with a red-and-white bar lowered across it. No one was visible in the guardhouse window. Still shading his eyes with a hand, he flew down the steps. He was nearly free!

Roger had barely reached the ground when a heavy body tackled him from behind. The collision knocked him down, exploded the wind from his lungs, and ground his chin into the snow and gravel of the parking lot.

He struggled to rise, and then something rock-solid cracked over his skull. Pain erupted in his head. He collapsed. Mustn’t stay down. Get up! With a groan, he rolled over. High-pitched whining filled his ears. Black dots swirled before his eyes. In his confusion, he almost imagined the dots to be a swarm of distant enemy fighters.

Then, far above everything else, he saw it—the thing he’d longed to see for so long: the sky. Genuine, brilliant, azure sky. The place he belonged. High overhead droned one small, single-engine airplane. The sight was so blissful that he groaned again, not out of pain, but out of envy for the unseen pilot.

Gray mist engulfed his vision. Roger sank into blackness.

T
UESDAY
, F
EBRUARY
3, 2015

T
HE
K
OSSLER ESTATE
, G
ERMANY

W
hen consciousness returned, it arrived in a rush. One moment, Roger was oblivious, aware of nothing. The next moment, he realized his eyes were shut and that something was wrong. He opened them, blinked, and saw once more the ugly concrete ceiling over his bed in the cage. Like a newsreel in a movie theater, his mind replayed the ill-fated escape scene, the fight upstairs, and his short-lived taste of chill, fresh air.

The sensation of goose bumps prickled his skin. Sitting up, he found himself nearly naked, with only his boxer shorts on.

“Ah, Captain Greene. You have rejoined the waking world.”

Hans sat on the leather sofa, his legs crossed and a glowing cigarette pinched between his fingers.

“Why are my clothes gone?”

“Not gone. They are folded, there on the chair. While you were unconscious, we redeemed the time by performing a long overdue surgical procedure. Do you have a scar on your left bicep?”

Roger noticed a patch of white gauze taped to the spot. He ripped it off.

“No. Just a pink spot. Why?”

“Truly amazing.” Cigarette smoke escaped Hans’s mouth. “In a few short hours you have healed faster than most men would in days, maybe weeks.”

Roger rubbed the spot. His fingertips detected something new and hard embedded inside his arm.

“For quite a while, we’ve foreseen that someday you might attempt to escape. Perhaps it’s more noteworthy you didn’t try decades ago. A lack of testosterone, perhaps?”

“If you want to discuss testosterone, maybe we should review how long you lasted in a boxing match with me. As far as escape goes, your predecessor built a pretty solid mousetrap.”

Hans glared, then flicked the glowing cigarette butt at Roger’s face. Roger backhanded the butt right back. Hans tried to duck. Too late. The glowing missile lodged in his hair. By the time Hans’s frantic efforts succeeded in raking it to the floor, an odor of singed hair was spreading.

Roger chuckled. “I’d forgotten how bad burnt hair smells.”

“You think you’re very funny, don’t you, American? See how funny you think this is: lest you ever try another escape, we’ve inserted a special device inside your arm. I won’t attempt to explain twenty-first-century technology to a Neanderthal. But with what is inside you, our people can track you down anywhere on the globe.”

“A homing beacon?”

“You wouldn’t comprehend global positioning, nor a thousand other modern marvels of the outside world. Besides, for you such explanations are forbidden.”

The lump was so tiny, Hans’s claim seemed absurd. Roger stood and reached for his trousers. “Why forbidden? Am I such a frightening risk in this bunker that you’re scared to let me know what’s happening in the world?”

Hans tapped a fresh cigarette from his pack and lit it. “To me personally, no. But that’s the policy. And if this rule frustrates you, then I’m happy to obey it.”

“And sleeping on the job every Monday morning demonstrates faithfulness to your puppet masters?”

Hans’s eyebrows knit together. He crushed the remains of his cigarette into the ashtray. Approaching the cell, he enunciated each word slowly and deliberately: “That is the last time you will mention such incidents, Captain Greene. Why? Because you are under my heel. You’re a cockroach. You think you’re living in misery? Just wait. I can make your existence more hellish than you can imagine. Shall I inject venereal disease into your veins to see what happens? Or we could strap you down and break your legs with an iron bar to time how fast they heal. Believe me, my mind can devise many other painful experiments for your body. Do we understand each other?”

Roger finished buttoning his shirt and sat down. “Hansie, I’ve understood you for a long time now. The question is, do you truly understand me?”

The German glared. “I warn you. Keep silent, and life can be tolerable. If you cause more trouble, then I guarantee payback a hundred times over.” Hans pulled the key ring from his pocket—evidently he no longer trusted the desktop—and exited the bunker.

Now that the adversary was gone, Roger dropped his antagonism. He rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands.
So close. We came so close!

We? The word reminded him that he still knew nothing of Sophie’s fate. Had the security men been marching her into the building when Roger escaped from the bunker? Or had they noticed her fiddling with something under her car hood and simply come over to lend a hand to a damsel in distress?

With her shapely figure, how could they not notice her lingering in the parking lot? They might even have convinced themselves she was trying to win their attention. He sighed and shook his head.
We went about it all wrong. I was too eager. Shouldn’t have depended so much on chance and perfect timing.

He considered what Hans had told him about the thumbnail-size bump inside his left arm. Could such a tiny object actually reveal his position even if he went to Argentina? To New Zealand? How about the North Pole?
Impossible. Such an apparatus would need gigantic batteries. Radio equipment. A tall antenna. Hans is trying to frighten me into submission.