was only on the surface.
In desperation, he grabbed the bars and rattled them, like an enraged
lifer in San Quentin, and suddenly there was a metallic clatter.
One of the hinges had broken off.
He rattled again, harder, until another hinge popped off.
He kept rattling, exuberantly, and finally the third and last hinge fell
to the ground.
He grabbed the gate with both hands, lifted it up and pushed it forward,
and gently lowered it to the ground.
He was inside.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE.
Ben felt something hard and smooth and dusty: it was a solid iron door,
secured by a heavy latch. He lifted the latch and pushed at the door,
and the door gave a brief high screech. Obviously it hadn’t been opened
in decades. He pushed with all his weight. With a moan, the door gave
way.
He found himself in a larger space of some sort, though it was still
small. His eyes, used to the dark, began to discern shapes, and he
followed the narrow shaft of light to another door, where he felt around
on either side for a light switch.
He found the switch, and a light came on from a single bulb mounted on
the ceiling.
He was, he could see, in a small storage closet. The stone walls were
lined with steel shelves painted an indeterminate beige, holding old
cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and cylindrical metal tanks.
He removed his helmet and woolen cap, then the pack from his back, from
which he took both of the semiautomatic pistols, placing everything but
the weapons on one of the shelves. He slipped one of the weapons under
the waistband of his heavy pants, at the small of his back. The other
he held while he studied the photocopied floor plan. No doubt the place
had been restored since its clock factory days, but it was unlikely that
the basic plan had been much changed, or that the massive walls had been
moved.
He tried the doorknob. It turned easily, and the door opened.
He emerged into a brightly lit corridor with stone floors and vaulted
ceilings. There was no one in view.
Arbitrarily, he turned right. The Vibram soles of his mountaineering
boots muffled his footsteps. Except for the slight squish of wet
leather, his walk was silent.
He had not gone far before someone appeared at the end of the hall,
striding directly toward him.
Keep calm, he told himself. Act as if you belong.
This was not easy, dressed as he was in his wet, mud-crusted climbing
attire and heavy boots, his face still bruised and scratched from the
incident in Buenos Aires.
Quickly, now.
On his left was a door. He stopped, listened for a moment, and then
opened it, hoping what lay beyond was unoccupied.
As he ducked into the room, the figure passed by, a man dressed in a
white tunic or jumpsuit. A handgun was holstered at his waist.
Obviously a guard.
The room was perhaps twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. By the
light from the corridor he could see that this was another storeroom,
also lined with metal shelves. He located a switch and turned on the
light.
What he saw was too horrific to be real, and for a moment he was sure
his eyes had been deceived by some sort of nightmarish optical illusion.
But it was no illusion.
God in heaven, he thought. This can’t be.
He could barely stand to look, yet he couldn’t turn his eyes away.
On the shelves were rows of dusty glass bottles, some as small as the
Mason canning jars Mrs. Walsh used to preserve fruit in, some two feet
tall.
Each bottle held a fluid of some kind, which Ben assumed to be a
preservative such as formalin, slightly cloudy with age and impurities.
And floating in them, like pickles in brine, one to a bottle … No,
this could not be.
He felt his skin erupt in gooseflesh.
In each bottle was a human baby.
The bottles were arrayed with ghastly precision.
In the smallest were tiny embryos, at the earliest stage of gestation,
little pale pink prawns, translucent insects with grotesque large heads
and tails.
Then fetuses not much longer than an inch: hunched, stubby arms and
oversized heads, suspended in the shrouds of their amniotic sacs.
Fetuses not much bigger but looking more human, bent legs and waving
arms, eyes like black currants, floating in perfectly round sacs
surrounded by the ragged halo of the chorionic sac.
Miniature infants, eyes closed, sucking thumbs, a tangle of tiny
perfectly formed limbs.
As the bottles increased in size so did their contents, until in the
largest bottles floated full-term babies, ready to be born, eyes closed,
arms and legs splayed, little hands waving or clenched, severed
umbilical cords floating loose, swathed in translucent wisps of amniotic
sac.
There must have been a hundred embryos and fetuses and babies.
Each bottle was labeled in German, in neat calligraphy, with a date (the
date ripped from the womb?), prenatal age, weight in grams, size in
centimeters.
The dates ranged from 1940 to 1954.
Gerhard Lenz had done experiments on human babies and children.
It was worse than he’d ever imagined. The man was inhuman, a monster
But why were these ghastly exhibits still here?
It was all he could do not to scream.
He stumbled toward the door.
On the facing wall were glass tanks, from a foot to almost five feet
tall and two feet around, and in them floated not fetuses but small
children.
Small wizened children, from tiny newborns to toddlers to children seven
or eight years old.
Children, he guessed, who had been afflicted with the premature-aging
syndrome known as progeria.
The faces of little old men and women.
His skin prickled.
Children. Dead children.
He thought of the poor father of Christoph in his gloomy apartment.
My Christoph died happy.
A private sanatorium, the woman at the foundation had said.
Exclusive, private, very luxurious, she’d said.
He turned, lightheaded, to leave the room, and heard footsteps.
Carefully peering out of the doorway he saw another white-suited guard
approaching, and he backed into the room, concealed himself behind the
door.
As the guard passed, he cleared his throat loudly, and he heard the
footsteps halt.
The guard, as Ben had expected, entered the room. Swift as a cobra, Ben
lunged, slamming the butt of his revolver into the back of the guard’s
head. The man collapsed.
Ben shut the door behind him, placed his fingers on the guard’s neck and
felt the jugular vein pulse. Alive but unconscious, though undoubtedly
fora good long while.
He removed the man’s holster and pulled out the Walther PPK, then
stripped off the white jumpsuit.
He removed his clammy clothes and donned the uniform. It was too large
for him, but acceptable. Fortunately the shoes fit. With his thumb he
flicked at the left of the Walther’s slide and removed the magazine. All
eight brass cartridges were there.
Now he had three handguns, an arsenal. He checked the pockets of the
guard’s jumpsuit and found only a pack of cigarettes and a keycard,
which he took.
Then he returned to the corridor, pausing only to make sure no one else
was in sight. Farther down the hall he came on the brushed steel
double-doors of a large elevator, modern for this ancient building. He
pressed the call button.
A ping, and the doors opened immediately to reveal an interior lined
with protective gray quilting. He entered, inspected the panel, and saw
that a key-card had to be inserted before the elevator would move. He
inserted the guard’s card, then pressed the button for the first floor.
The doors closed rapidly, the elevator jolted upward, and opened a few
seconds later onto another world entirely.
It was a brightly lit, ultramodern-looking corridor that could have been
in any prosperous corporate headquarters.
The floors were carpeted in neutral industrial gray, the walls not the
ancient stone of the floor below but smooth white tile. A couple of men
in white coats, doctors or clinicians perhaps, passed by. One was
pushing a metal cart. The other glanced at Ben but seemed to look
through him.
He strode purposefully down the hall. Two young Asian women, also in
white jackets, stood by an open door to what appeared to be a
laboratory, speaking a language Ben did not recognize. Absorbed in
conversation, they paid no attention to him.
Now he entered a large atrium, well lit by a combination of soft
incandescent light and amber late-afternoon sun that filtered in through
cathedral windows. This looked like it was once the grand entrance hall
of the Schloss, artfully converted to a modern lobby. A graceful stone
staircase wound upstairs. There were a number of doors in the lobby.
Each was marked, in black type on white placards, with a number and
letter, each accessible only by inserting a card into a card-reader.