Century Rain

TWENTY-THREE

The car plodded along pot-holed roads, jinking across buckled railway tracks and passing under spindly overhead structures supporting conveyor belts and pipes for chemicals.

“Ask him to slow down,” Floyd said, tapping the taxi driver on the shoulder. “I think that’s a sign over there.”

Auger relayed the request, then peered at the tilted wooden board Floyd had indicated, which was almost lost behind a screen of tall grass. “Magnolia Strasse. How appropriate.”

“This is Kaspar Metal’s address?”

“What’s left of it should be here,” she confirmed.

Beyond a broken-down wooden fence, a steam-driven demolition crane attended to the destruction of a low red-brick factory building with a wrecking ball, swinging it through the one remaining wall in a series of gentle arcs. Although there were still a few buildings standing, the spaces between them were littered with piles of brick, shattered concrete and twisted metal.

“If there was a steelworks here,” Floyd said, “then someone’s doing a swell job of hiding it.”

The taxi driver kept the engine ticking over while they got out and stood on the only patch of dry ground amidst an obstacle course of mud and puddles. It was bitterly cold, a persistent chemical dampness permeating the air. Auger wore black trousers and a narrow-waisted black leather coat that fell to her knees. The night before, in the hotel room, she had tried to snap the heels from her shoes, but without success.

“See if you can sweet-talk the driver into waiting for fifteen minutes,” Floyd said. “We still need to check whether anybody left anything useful behind.”

Auger leaned into the driver’s window and opened her mouth to talk. She got her message across, but the words didn’t come with the expected fluency. Where yesterday there had been a gleaming linguistic machine, spitting out elegant, syntactically rich sentences, now there was a rusting contraption that creaked and groaned with the effort of every word. This worried her: if her German was crumbling now, what was going to be next?

“He’ll stay,” she said, when the driver finally acquiesced.

“He took some persuading.”

“My German’s a bit rusty this morning. That didn’t help.”

They picked their way over dry, weed-infested ground to a gap in the fence. Two planks had fallen away, leaving a hole just wide enough for them to pass through. Floyd went first, holding back the high grass on the other side until Auger joined him.

“This is awful,” Auger said. “There’s so much damage that it’s difficult to imagine a factory ever being here. The only proof we have that there was is that letter Susan White received.”

“When was the letter sent?”

“Remember the train ticket she booked but didn’t use? She was just about to come here when she was murdered. The letter was sent only a month or so before that.”

“Look at the ground here,” Floyd said. “No weeds anywhere—they haven’t had time to break through the concrete yet.”

“Arson?”

“Difficult to know for sure, but I’m guessing so. The timing’s too convenient otherwise.”

In the middle distance, the steam-driven crane they had seen earlier was plodding over to another condemned building, its demolition ball swinging as it crunched across rubble and concrete. A pair of green bulldozers had joined it, belching acrid smoke from their diesel engines. The operators were masked and goggled, sunk down in oilskins.

Auger looked around for a place to start searching for clues. “Let’s check out those buildings, see if we can find number fifteen,” Auger said.

“We don’t have much time,” Floyd warned.

They crossed the ruins of the factory complex until they reached the remaining cluster of buildings. The shells of the buildings looked threatening and skulllike, their roofs and upper ceilings already removed so that the iron-grey sky was visible through the gaps and cracks in the fire-damaged structures. Auger had never much enjoyed trespassing, even when such things had been part of childhood initiation rites and carried little risk of serious punishment. She enjoyed it even less now.

“Number fifteen,” Floyd said, pointing to a barely readable metal plaque hanging at an angle on one wall. “Looks like the threat of the penguins did the trick. I must remember that the next time I have to put the squeeze on someone.”

They found an open door nearby. Inside the building it was dark, since most of the ceiling was still in place above the ground-floor entrance.

“Watch your step, Verity.”

“I’m watching it,” Auger said. “Here, take this.” She handed Floyd the automatic.

“If there’s only one gun between us, I think you should keep it,” Floyd said. “They make me nervous. I cling to the irrational idea that if I don’t carry a gun, I won’t find myself in a position where I need one.”

“You’re in that position now. Take the automatic.”

“What about you?”

Auger reached into her handbag and pulled out the weapon that she had taken from the war baby in the tunnel at Cardinal Lemoine. “I have this gun,” she said.

“I meant a real one,” Floyd said, regarding the strange lines of the weapon dubiously. But he didn’t push the point: by now he had realised that Auger wasn’t playing a game.

“Be careful, Floyd. These people are willing to kill.”

“That much I do know.”

“And if you see a child?”

Floyd looked back at her, the whites of his eyes bright in the darkness. “You want me to start shooting children now?”

“It won’t be a child.”

“I’ll shoot to wound. Beyond that, I’m not making any promises.”

Auger looked back just before she followed Floyd inside. The demolition machines were making short work of a nondescript brick building, taking turns to rip at its carcass like hunger-crazed wolves. As the bulldozers reversed and then rolled forward again to attack, their engines raged with a dim mechanical fury. The goggled operators seemed to be holding them back rather than driving them.

“Let’s make this quick, Floyd. Those things seem to be getting closer.”

Auger stepped further into the building and spun around to cover the entrance, but there was no sign of anyone or anything following them. Once inside, she pressed a sleeve against her mouth and nose to screen the dust from entering her lungs. It took half a minute for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. Along two main walls, and forming an aisle down the middle, were three rows of heavy equipment clearly too bulky or too damaged to be worth removing. There were lathes and drills and several dozen objects Auger didn’t recognise, but which appeared to be related to the same business of metal finishing.

“At least this looks like the right place,” she said.

“Watch the flooring here,” Floyd said. “I can see right through to the basement.”

Auger followed him, placing her feet exactly where Floyd had placed his. With each step, the floor creaked, dislodging dust and debris. A crow flew away from a window sill in a silent flurry of black. She watched it flap away into the sky, until it looked like a piece of burnt paper blowing in the wind.

“There’s nothing here,” Auger said. “No papers, no documentation. We’re wasting our time.”

“We’ve still got ten minutes. You never know what we might find.” Floyd had reached the far end of the workshop, where the rectangle of a door was just visible against the blackened plaster of the walls. “Let’s see what’s through here.”

“Careful, Floyd.” Her hand tightened on the war baby’s weapon, its child-sized grip chafing against her palm.

Floyd had already pushed open the door and stepped through. She heard him cough. “There are stairs here,” he said, “going up and down. Want to toss a coin?”

She heard the muffled collapse of another building; the howl of racing diesel engines. The demolition equipment sounded even closer.

“Let’s stay on this floor.”

“I don’t think we’ll find much above us,” Floyd speculated. “The fire damage will probably be worse the higher up we go. But something might have survived downstairs.”

“We’re not going downstairs.”

“You got that torch?” Floyd asked.

She followed him into the adjoining room. One set of concrete stairs rose up, leading to another dark, enclosed space, while a second set descended down into even more profound darkness.

Floyd took the torch from her and shone it down into the gloom.

“This is a very bad idea,” Auger said.

“That’s great coming from a woman who likes to spend her time dodging trains in tunnels.”

“That was an act of necessity. This isn’t.”

“Let’s see what we find. Just a couple of minutes, all right? I didn’t come all this way to turn around now.”

“I did.”

Floyd started descending, Auger close behind him. He played the torchlight ahead of him, the beam glancing off cracking walls. The stairs twisted through ninety degrees, then another ninety.

“There’s another door here,” Floyd said, trying the handle. “It feels as if it’s locked.”

“That’s it, then.” She sighed, disappointed and relieved in equal measure. “We have to turn around.”

“Let me see if I can force it first. Hold the torch for a moment.”

She took it from him, wondering—for a fleeting instant—if she ought to use the gun to persuade Floyd to return to ground level.

“Make it quick,” Auger said. “I’m really getting worried about those machines.”

The door budged with an iron scrape that made her wince. Floyd could not get it open fully, but soon there was a gap wide enough for them to squeeze through. The torchlight fell on his face. “You want to stay here while I check it out? I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“No,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll regret saying this, but I want to see whatever’s in there for myself.”

Fans and spears of blue-grey light rammed through gaps in the ceiling above them. It was still difficult to see anything outside the torch beam, but the room seemed to be empty.

“See anything?” Auger asked. “No? Good. Let’s go.”

“There’s a railing here,” Floyd said. “It looks as if it runs right around the room.” He directed the torch beam towards the floor beyond the railing, revealing it to be much lower than Auger had been expecting. They had emerged on to a balcony that ran around the upper level of a two-storey chamber. Picked out in random splashes of light entering through the ceiling, something huge and black and roughly spherical squatted in the middle of the floor.

“Voilà,” Floyd said. “One metal sphere, for the use of.”

“Let me see.”

She took the torch and shone it on to the sphere. Behind her, she was vaguely aware of Floyd shoving the door closed again, but ignored the distraction. The sphere was surrounded by many other pieces of metal and machinery, including a kind of frame or harness from which it appeared to be suspended.

“Is that what your dear departed sister was interested in?” Floyd asked, with heavy sarcasm, stepping up behind her again.

“Yes,” Auger said, ignoring his tone. “What I don’t understand is what it’s doing here. The three spheres were supposed to be shipped out to three different addresses.”

“I thought one of them was in Berlin.”

“It was,” Auger said. “But it still had to be moved from the factory to somewhere else in the city.”

Gently, Floyd took the torch back. “Now at least you know the things exist.”

“Hey—where are you going?”

“There’s a ladder down to the floor. I want to take a closer look at that thing.”

“We should be getting back to the taxi.” But even as she spoke, she found herself drawn to follow him down to the floor of the underground room.

Close up, the sphere—which was indeed nearly three metres wide, she judged—conveyed a sense of massive solidity even though it could just as easily have been hollow. The surface was smooth in places, irregular in others, and there was a visible crack running from one pole to the other. It hung from the cradle on a single cable, attached to a metal eye welded at the top of the sphere. Coating the upper surface of the sphere was a talcum of grey dust, like icing sugar on a pudding. In another corner of the room—hidden until they descended from the balcony—was a large upright cylinder of the kind used to hold pressurised gases, while in another was a high-sided drum-shaped enclosure about three metres across, like an armoured paddling pool. Like the sphere, both items were covered with ash and dust.

Auger touched the metal sphere. It was cold and rough beneath her fingers and, despite its apparent mass, the sphere moved slightly under the pressure from her hand.

“So what do you suppose this was?” Floyd asked.

“The letter said it was for an artistic installation,” Auger said. “Obviously, that was a cover story—the specification was too exact for that. My guess is that the company was being asked to manufacture very precise components for a bigger machine.”

“A secret weapon?”

“Something like that.”

“But what kind of secret weapon can you make out of a gigantic metal ball?”

“Three gigantic metal balls, remember,” Auger said, “separated by hundreds of kilometres. There has to be a reason for that, as well.”

“Three secret weapons, then.” He walked away from the sphere and started rummaging through the debris-covered heaps of equipment on the nearest set of workbenches, throwing things to the floor with the casual ease of a burglar. Metal crashed and glass shattered. After a moment, Auger swore under her breath and joined in the reckless process, looking for anything, no matter how insubstantial, that might offer a lead.

“Or just one secret weapon,” she said, “but so huge that it spreads across half of Europe.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It doesn’t. But this is it, Floyd. This is what it was worth killing people to protect. Not just the ones we know about, but all the other people who’ve probably had to die while all this has been planned, financed and put together.”

“Why did they leave it here, then?”

She pushed a battered old toolkit to the floor. It clattered thrillingly, spilling shiny spanners and wrenches from its innards. “I don’t think this sphere is the real thing.”

“It looks real enough to me.”

“I mean, I don’t think this was ever intended to be delivered to the client. It’s too crudely finished, and something obviously went wrong during the casting process. I’m not even sure this is aluminium or that aluminium-copper alloy Altfeld mentioned. It could just as easily be cast iron.”

“You’re thinking this was a dry run?”

“Yes. A try-out for the final set, so they could practise the casting and machining, and work out how to move it around afterwards.” She shrugged. “Or maybe it’s one that went wrong and had to be abandoned during the finishing process. It doesn’t really matter. What does is that it got left behind.”

“So whoever torched this factory, or arranged for its demolition…”

Even as he said the word, Auger heard the machines take apart another wall or floor, the roar of their engines sounding even closer and even more bestial.

“I don’t think they had any idea this basement existed. They knew that the three main castings had been finished and delivered. My guess is that they burnt down the factory afterwards to hide any evidence of what had been made. But they never thought there might be a fourth sphere, still here.”

“Then we need to search the place really thoroughly,” Floyd said. “If they missed this, there’s no telling what else they left behind.”

“You’re right,” Auger said. She felt her heart beating faster. She knew that she was much closer to an answer now than she had ever been. She could almost feel it, lurking at the back of her mind like a gift-wrapped present. “You’re right, and it would make sense to search this room with a fine-tooth comb. But we’re not going to. We’re leaving now, while we still can.”

“Just five minutes more,” Floyd said. “Somewhere in here there might be a record of the shipping addresses for the finished spheres.”

“Long shot, Wendell.”

“They were careless, or in a hurry, or they’d never have left this down here in the first place.”

“Because they thought someone was on to them?”

“Who are we dealing with, Verity? Are you ready to tell me yet?”

“We’re dealing with very bad people,” she said. “Isn’t that enough for you?”

“That depends on who’s defining ‘bad.’ ” Floyd tapped the barrel of the automatic against the metal sphere. It made a dull clank. “Well, I guess Basso was right after all. It definitely wasn’t meant to be a bell.”

“Basso?”

“A metalworker contact of mine. I showed him the sketch of the blueprint from Susan’s things. He said it might be a plan for a bell. He meant diving bell. I thought he meant the kind you ring.”

Auger heard the roar of the demolition machines again, the crunch of stone and brick beneath their caterpillar treads.

“I don’t think either kind of bell would be something people had to die to protect,” she said. “Besides—it’s broken.”

Floyd tapped the gun against the sphere again, narrowing his eyes as he listened for reverberations. He moved around the object and struck it again.

“You mean if it wasn’t broken, it might sound prettier?” he said.

“Do it again.”

“Do what again?”

“Knock the metal, the way you just did.”

“I was only trying to see if it was really solid. I still like my idea that it might be an atomic bomb.”

“It’s not an atomic bomb. Knock it again.”

Floyd tapped the automatic against the sphere, moving from spot to spot. “It rings,” he said, “but the sound is all off, like a cracked bell.”

“That’s because it is cracked. But if it wasn’t, it’d ring with a much purer note, don’t you think?”

Floyd lowered the gun. “I guess so. If it matters.”

“I think it matters a lot. I think ringing is exactly what these spheres are meant to do. I think you were right and Basso was wrong.”