The Book of Secrets

XLI

Near Brussels

When Atheldene said Brussels, Nick had imagined cobbled streets, gabled roofs and baroque houses. Instead, he seemed to have brought them to Belgium’s version of New Jersey. The Jaguar left the highway and entered an asphalt maze of corrugated siding, chain-link fences and harsh floodlights. The only traffic they passed was trucks.

They turned off the road and stopped at a barrier next to a hut. Freezing air whipped inside the car as Atheldene lowered the window to show a guard his pass. Nick heard Emily stir on the back seat. She’d been asleep since the border.

He checked his watch: 1 a.m. ‘Will they let us in?’

‘They have clients all over the world,’ said Atheldene. ‘They’re on call twenty-four hours a day.’

Sure enough, the guard handed back the card and the barrier swung up. Atheldene nosed the car through and stopped in front of an anonymous grey warehouse. He killed the engine. After three hours on the highway, the sudden silence was a relief.

They got out of the car. Nick winced as the cold hit him full blast and wondered if it would affect the playing card. He didn’t dare leave it in Atheldene’s car.

‘I guess they don’t need a warehouse to keep the books frozen,’ said Nick. Nobody answered. They followed Atheldene up a short flight of concrete steps, their breath misting in the air, and through a door he opened with a keypad. It brought them into a bare room of unpainted breeze blocks. A guard in a brown uniform lounged behind a window in the wall reading a dirty magazine. It didn’t look like much protection – until you saw how thick the glass was. When he buzzed the next door open, Nick saw it was four inches of steel.

‘Are they expecting trouble?’ he asked, as they stepped into an elevator.

‘The books and manuscripts inside this place are worth millions,’ Atheldene answered crisply. ‘A little paranoia is very much in order.’

There were no buttons in the elevator. A synthesised voice said something curt in French; the doors closed; the elevator hummed into motion, descending. Nick glanced at Emily, still swaddled in her red coat. She looked frightened, but managed a tired smile.

The doors opened. Nick stared. His first thought was that he’d stepped into the bowels of a submarine. Everything was bathed in red light, reflecting off row upon row of high glass-fronted cabinets. A low electric hum filled the room.

‘Good evening, Herr Atheldene.’

A man in a pinstriped suit with a white lab coat over it walked towards them between the cabinets. He had a round face, floppy hair and a wide moustache which dropped at the corners, giving him an earnest, eager-to-please look. He didn’t seem bothered by the strange hour. Perhaps in the constant half-light of this basement it made no difference.

‘Dr Haltung.’ He shook hands enthusiastically with Atheldene, Nick and Emily. ‘Your visit is very, uh, surprising, no?’

‘An urgent request from a client,’ said Atheldene. ‘The Morel collection.’

‘Of course, no problem, of course.’ The doctor bobbed up and down. ‘Please, come.’

They followed him down a corridor between the cabinets. It was an eerie experience: with every step, motion-sensitive lights in the floor came on automatically to guide their way, then faded as they passed. In the cabinets, Nick saw books and piles of paper laid out on shelves like meat in a butcher’s shop. Digital readouts above the doors confirmed the temperature inside: -25^oC.

Dr Haltung stopped at a bank of cabinets near the middle of the room. He fumbled in his lab coat and pulled out a small hand-held computer. ‘The Morel collection.’

‘Has anyone been here to look at it since it arrived?’ said Nick.

Haltung tapped the computer screen. ‘Nobody has accessed this material except our staff. As per your instructions, Herr Atheldene.’

Nick felt the familiar ache of disappointment. Gillian hadn’t been there.

‘For which exact piece do you want to look, please?’

‘Catalogue number 27D,’ said Atheldene. ‘Anonymous bestiary, fifteenth century.’

‘Of course.’ Haltung tapped the computer again, pursed his lips, then pressed a button on one of the cabinet doors. Nick heard the smooch of a seal being broken, then a hiss of air. Haltung pulled on a pair of heavy mittens, counted down the shelves, then lifted the volume down and laid it on a wooden trolley.

Nick tried to make out the book in the dim light. It was smaller than he’d expected, about the size of a normal hardback, bound in frayed brown leather. A fur of frost had accumulated along its spine, like ice cream left too long in the freezer. Two bands of gauze strapped the cover shut.

Moving quickly, Haltung wheeled the cart to a glassed-in room at the end of the basement. A bank of overhead lights snapped on the moment he stepped through the door.

Nick rubbed his eyes, startled by the sudden brightness. A huge machine like a turbine or a jet engine stood bolted to the floor in the centre of the room: an enormous cylinder attached to a box, all gleaming stainless steel. Red and green lights glowed on the side, while cables and tubes fed into it from the walls and ceiling.

‘The process actually is very simplistic,’ Haltung said. ‘Like for making instant coffee.’ He swung open a door on the front of the machine, revealing another stack of racks like a baker’s oven. He put the book inside, then went around the side and began pushing a series of buttons. Lights flickered on the panel.

‘Right now, at this moment, the pressure in the chamber is like normal, one thousand millibar. We reduce this to six millibar. This is almost a perfect vacuum.’

He pressed the final button. All at once the machine began to hiss and vibrate; there was an enormous roar like a hairdryer on full blast.

‘The vacuum turns the ice at once into gas, without it becoming water. Sublimation, yes? So, the book is dry. The ink does not run, and the cloths keep the pages in alignment. Perfect, no?’

‘Can we have a look now?’

Haltung tutted. ‘The book is still at negative twenty degrees Celsius. If you try to turn the page it snaps in your hand. Now we must restore the normal pressure and the normal temperature of plus twenty degrees.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘Maybe two hours.’ Haltung stepped away from the machine. The gale-force blast died away, replaced with a low whirring. ‘You want some coffee while you wait?’

‘Do you make that in the machine too?’ Nick asked. Haltung missed the joke. ‘We use Nescafé.’ He picked up a phone on the wall and dialled a number. He waited.

‘Perhaps the guard has gone to the toilet.’ He put the phone down, looking vaguely puzzled. ‘I go up. Please, wait here.’

He left the room. Nick followed his progress through the red-lit warehouse, watching the glow of the floor lights rippling ahead of him like a bow wave, then fading behind him. Haltung stepped into the elevator and vanished.

Nick wandered back over to the machine and peered through the porthole. The book lay on the shelf, inert. The crust of ice had vanished. A pair of gauges next to the door showed the temperature and the pressure creeping up.

‘It’s incredible, when you think about it,’ said Emily behind him. ‘Five or six hundred years ago, that same book was sheets of vellum and a pot of ink on a desk somewhere in Paris. It’s survived who knows how many kings, wars, owners… It’s been soaked through, frozen, freeze-dried with all the technology the twenty-first century can throw at it… and after all that, the original words the author wrote will still be there.’

‘If we’re lucky,’ said Atheldene.

A wave of tiredness hit Nick hard. It was almost two in the morning – and the jet lag still hadn’t finished messing with his body. There was no sign of Haltung and his coffee.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ he announced.

Atheldene looked as though he was going to argue, but made do with a grunted, ‘Don’t touch anything.’

The door opened automatically to let Nick through into the red cocoon of the warehouse. He let himself wander along the corridors of frozen books, hypnotised by the way the floor lights seemed to spill ahead of him. He peered through the doors as he passed, the bundled books on the shelves, and wondered what lay within the tattered covers. Could there be pages that no one had ever read, fossils locked in the permafrost waiting for discovery? Could that be what Gillian had found?

He came around a corner and saw solid concrete: he’d come to the far end of the warehouse. He ought to go back, he supposed. He turned.

Almost at the same moment, a pool of yellow light appeared halfway along the front wall as the elevator doors slid open. Haltung stepped out. He wasn’t carrying any coffee – which was just as well, for he was trembling so badly he would surely have spilled it.

A black-gloved hand poked out of the elevator, holding a gun to his spine.