Ragnarok

NINETEEN

Fenris Kystby, Norway

Rook opened the double doors below the window just a crack, making sure they were still covered by soil on the outside, as they had been on his last visit to the lab. He didn’t need to open the doors far. He could see a wall of light brown dirt. A small spray of dust and dirt tinkled down to the floor. He shoved the doors closed again.

“Must be another entrance,” Queen said. She hadn’t holstered the M9, and Rook could tell the place was spooking her, even though she would never admit it. “Wouldn’t be the first covert lab in history to have a secret entrance hidden in plain sight.”

Rook stiffened and drew a sharp breath. “Holy-you’re right.” Rook raced out of the room and back into the offices.

“Not sure why that’s a surprise,” Queen said as she gave chase.

Asya followed her back into the offices, where Rook was approaching the door to the empty biohazard room. He turned slightly as he opened the door, to look back at them. “Only two rooms in this place with nothing in them-the closet off the first room we entered and this one. But the door frame to the closet was narrower. No way you could get a sofa in there. But this room? Must be a secret door somewhere.”

Rook stepped into the room and the others came in behind him. Queen’s halogen headlamp illuminated the space as if it were daytime. “I never even stepped into the room the last time. Because it was empty.” He smiled at Queen.

“Just like me a minute ago. Even though you told me it was empty, I looked, but I didn’t go in.”

“Sure. Why would you?” Rook walked back past her and Asya to the wall near the door and felt around the doorframe they had all just come through.

“You are searching for secret switch or something like that?” Asya asked.

“Yup.”

Queen kept the lamp on the doorframe as Rook worked his fingers along the top of it slowly, feeling for any irregularity.

Asya turned and walked to the far wall of the room. She tilted her head slightly, and scrunched up her eyes, looking at the floor. “Queen? Light please.”

Queen swiveled her head and brought the gun up in Asya’s direction. The Russian woman squatted and pointed to the floor, just in front of the edge of the far wall. Queen stepped closer. The light revealed a curving arc where the grimy floor had been disturbed. It looked to Queen like the scrape marks on the floor in front of a revolving door at a fancy hotel.

She stepped up to the wall and pressed gently on it. Asya stood and stepped back as the entire wall began to spin on a well-greased central post, hidden from view.

“Nazis,” Queen said, as she pushed past the slowly twisting door, with her M9 leading the way.

“I hate ’em.” Rook said.

Asya looked confused for a moment before recognition filled her eyes and she smiled broadly. “Last Crusade. Great movie.” She then did a horrible impersonation of Sean Connery. “I shuddenly remembered my Charlemagne, Junior.” She slipped into the passage behind Queen, and Rook brought up the rear, shaking his head.

They moved through another passage like the tunnel that led them to the lab, only this one was made from small crumbling bricks and it was far wider-not wide enough to drive a vehicle through, but well wide enough to carry the bloody sofa through. Rook could almost hear the smile on Queen’s face as she taunted Asya in a whisper. “They let you watch Indy in Mother Russia?”

“Oh yes. The blonde bitch plummets to her death in the end,” Asya returned. Queen whipped her head back to look at Asya, her long blonde hair swinging over her shoulder as she did so. She smiled wide, showing her teeth, and turned back to illuminate the front of the tunnel again, chuckling as she did so.

“I like her, Rook. Let’s keep her.”

The passage continued for what Rook took to be at least a mile. At the end, they found a double set of steel doors set into a rock foundation, similar to the door at the end of the first tunnel. This set of doors also had a name stenciled above it:

Gleipnir.

“I don’t know this one,” Queen said.

“Beats me,” Rook said, “but Ale will know what it means. Ready?”

Queen nodded. Rook took hold of the handles on the doors and pulled them open.

They moved silently. Rook made a mental note that someone must have regularly maintained the doors for them to make so little noise when moving. Perhaps Fossen hadn’t told him nearly enough about what the Nazis were doing in this lab, or what he was doing with his modern wolf research.

What they encountered on the other side of the doors was so immense, it stopped them in their tracks.

They emerged on a wide metal catwalk that ran around the top edges of a cavernous space filled by a large metal structure. Eight curved struts, each rising from a concrete block in the center of the massive room, stretched up some two hundred feet, forming a sphere of metal columns that came together just beneath the ceiling twelve feet above their heads.

Rook glanced down through the catwalk’s metal mesh floor. That’s a long way down.

It looked to Rook as if the thing was missing a giant marble that would sit perfectly in its embrace. Wires and cables snaked along the length of each strut, connected to metal plates, like solar panels, spaced along the inner edges of the struts. The structure reminded Rook of an oversized version of the Faraday cage he’d seen at Boston’s Museum of Science, which directed the flow of lightning.

“Like a cage of giant fingers. But what does it do?” Asya whispered.

“Or what does it hold,” Queen replied.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rook said. “I’m probably gonna wind up breaking the fucker into tiny pieces, so don’t get attached to it. These people killed Peder and nearly killed me. If that thing isn’t designed to create free clean energy for the world, I’m busting it.”

There were computer stations and electronics arrays at panels and desks around the base of the giant room. Along one wall was an enormous hangar-style metal door that could retract into the walls on either side. Doors lined the walls along the catwalk, on the top level where they stood, but also on several levels below, all of which wrapped around the outside of the giant room. Staircases connected each flight to the next. A vertical maze. Massive Klieg lights lit the entire scene from their housings in the ceiling of the cavern.

“Only thing missing is people,” Queen mused aloud.

“They were all too busy kicking my ass this morning.” Rook spotted a large door further along the same wall from where they had emerged. “One mystery at a time. I wanna know where Kiss and the sofa went.”

“I’m going to take a closer look at that…thing,” Queen headed for the stairs down.

Asya paused for a moment. “I will check other doors on this floor.”

“Suit yourselves.” Rook moved to the wide doors and opened them. They opened into an average-sized storage room with gray metal filing cabinets, cardboard boxes and the mysterious missing sofa. Fossen, or someone else, had cleaned the sofa’s old fabric. There was no sign of Edmund Kiss’s bloody remains. Rook looked around the rest of the room before rifling through the file cabinets. The cabinets and boxes were full of moldy documents that had clearly been around since before the ’40s. The smell reminded Rook of his grandmother’s house in New Hampshire, shortly before she died, when her legendary cleaning skills had diminished.

He couldn’t make much sense of the documents. They were scientific and technical reports. He came across the word Ragnarok a few times and only once across the word Gleipnir. But the descriptions of the former only confirmed what he knew already-that Edmund Kiss and other Nazis had begun experimenting with wolf genes around the ’40s and the man had eventually gone missing. For Gleipnir, all he could find were facilities reports. Janitorial supply bills and large food bills, but Rook figured in the older days, in this distant, remote part of Norway, travel to a large supermarket wasn’t likely. They would have had to purchase all their necessary supplies well before the winter, and store everything here in the lab somewhere.

The technical reports discussed things that his meager Ger- man skills were never designed to decipher. Gene sequences, astrophysics, quantum mechanics and medical topics. After fifteen minutes of scanning documents, Rook had even less of an idea of what kind of research was going on in the facility than he had when he’d entered it.

He was about to give up and check out another room when he came across a manila folder that had diagrams of the gigantic octopus-like metal structure in the main room. He paused and squatted down near the floor to look at the pictures more carefully. They showed the massive device with an enormous sphere of crackling energy suspended in its center. In the diagram, lightning bolts shot out of the sphere into the corners of the room.

“Huh, maybe it is supposed to provide energy.” Although Rook doubted the motives of the device’s builders were to provide that energy for free.

Then two things happened at the same time. Rook heard the report of Queen’s M9. Not just one shot. A lot of shots. And Asya was screaming.

Rook leapt to his feet and dropped the folder with its diagrams on the floor as he raced to the door, heading for the catwalk. But when he reached the catwalk, something large and white slammed into him from the side. His feet were knocked out from under him and his lower spine slammed into the guardrail around the edge of the huge machinery-filled chamber. Rook pinioned his arms, desperately trying to claw his way back to balance, but the velocity of the impact sent his upper torso flipping backward over the rail, and he was falling down through the giant room to the floor, hundreds of feet below him.