Death Cry, page 12
Brigid felt her smile slip and wondered whether there was any chance that Kane might appear right about now with a satchel full of flash-bangs. She needed to say something fast, something that would convince these bored, action-starved and trigger-happy soldiers that she wasn’t a threat. Several lab-coated workers on the scaffolding had stopped what they were doing to watch the excitement below.
“I bring word from the people’s government,” she said, “from Pritisch, Sokolovsky and Yudenich.” The names sprang to mind immediately, some of the ranking players in the final Soviet government before the world blew out in 2001. Pritisch was an ex-KGB warmonger who had upped the military budget tenfold in his final years of power.
“From Pritisch,” the soldier repeated, lowering the Fedorov’s muzzle slightly, “Sokolovsky and Yudenich? Is this right?”
“That’s what I said,” Brigid replied, suddenly aware that her fixed smile was making the muscles of her mouth ache. “I was sent here with a message.”
Still standing on the scaffolding above Brigid, the gray-eyed soldier granted her a brief stiff smile. “And who are Pritisch, Sokolovsky and Yudenich?” he asked, raising the muzzle of his gun once more and aiming it firmly between her eyes. His colleagues surrounding her all raised their own weapons higher, and Brigid was acutely aware of their fingers brushing longingly against triggers. “Speak quickly, Comrade, I lose interest easily.”
Damn! Brigid thought.
LAKESH STUDIED THE biometric data broadcast from Brigid Baptiste’s subcutaneous transponder. “Her heart rate has slowed and her body temperature is a little lower than normal,” he explained to Kane over the comm-link after a moment. “Over.”
A silent ten-second break passed in the Cerberus ops room, and Lakesh continued to study the constantly updated feed of information. Brigid and the other members of the field team appeared to be in good health.
“So she’s, what, asleep?” Kane’s voice patched through the room’s speakers from across the other side of the world. “Over.”
“A little more like a coma,” Lakesh stated thoughtfully. “That’s not a bad thing, of course. Comas can be the body’s way of healing. It’s not anything to worry about. Over.”
“Fine,” Kane replied after another short pause. “I’ll keep an eye on her, make sure nothing changes physically. You still having some communication problems?” Kane asked, referring obliquely to the announcement that they had a snooper watching them. Donald Bry had passed that information along to Kane, using a stock code phrase indicating the channel was no longer considered secure. “Over.”
“We’re looking into that and trying to ascertain the source,” Lakesh told him. “For the moment, keep to the two-hourly reports and we’ll let you know when we discover anything else. Over.”
“Understood. Over and out,” Kane replied a few seconds later.
It was a difficult situation they now found themselves in. On the one hand, communication with the field team was essential, more so than ever now that Brigid was out of action. Kane and Grant were relying on Cerberus to update them. On the other hand, giving away any vital information over the communication link was like feeding it to the enemy, even if they didn’t know who this enemy was.
“Donald?” Lakesh called, looking up from the telemetric feed on the monitor display.
He saw Bry’s unruly mop of copper-colored hair pop up from behind a bank of computers on the far side of the room. “Yes, Dr. Singh?”
“What progress on our new friend?”
Bry shook his head, his permanent expression of worry seeming all the more heartfelt. “Nothing good so far,” he admitted as Lakesh paced across the room to join him and his three-man decoding team. “It’s like the code has been hardwired into our own. Disentangling it could take weeks. The nearest metaphor I can come up with is of cancerous cells.”
Lakesh shook his head slowly back and forth. “And have you had any success with finding where this hack set out from?”
Bry turned to Skylar Hitch, a timid woman in her twenties who stood a mere five feet tall. Hitch had light coffee-colored skin, black hair and hazel eyes, and despite her timid attitude she was a wonder with computers. “With the lack of operational satellites left in orbit,” she explained, “it shouldn’t be that hard to triangulate where our cutter came from, because he can’t bounce his signal around to disguise it. However, with the way the coding works, it’s proving hard to isolate it enough to begin a proper trace. Every which way I’ve tried, it’s ended up triangulating on the Bitterroot Mountains. Probably this room,” she added after a moment’s thought.
“So you’re going around in circles,” Lakesh concluded.
“We’re looking into the possibility,” Donald Bry added tentatively, “of actually adding something to the code, building on it rather than trying to isolate it. Brewster’s trying to figure out a way to do that without upsetting the link.”
Lakesh nodded. “As quickly as you can,” he instructed them.
BRIGID TRIED NOT to show any sign of the rising fear in her gut as she began reeling off names of Soviet political leaders. “Gorbachev? Gromyko?”
The gray-eyed soldier showed no sign of acknowledgment beyond the slightest shake of his head.
“Kuznetsov, Chernenko, Yuri Andropov?” Brigid tried, the names spilling easily from her phenomenal memory.
A grim slash had replaced the soldier’s smile, and he still showed no sign of recognition of the names of Soviet state presidents from the closing decades of the twentieth century. How long had these people been there, out of contact with the real world?
“Joseph Stalin?” she tried hopefully. Surely they couldn’t have been there since the 1930s. That was almost three hundred years ago.
“I think,” the soldier said as his cold stare bored into Brigid’s eyes, looking for a trace of fear, “you have outstayed your welcome, little miss.”
This was it, Brigid knew. This was where the quest ended. Unless…
“And I think,” she told the people in the vast white room, turning her gaze away from their gray-eyed spokesman, “that you people have been in here for a hell of a lot longer than you realize.”
The room fell silent, with only the ghostly echoes of Brigid’s statement providing any noise at all. Then, as she stood there, surrounded by armed soldiers, she heard the hiss of whispering voices. The voices came from farther along the scaffolding. She couldn’t make out the words, but she knew the tone—frantic and urgent.
Suddenly a man’s voice broke the tense silence, loud and clear. A lab-coated man, with a head of dark hair that was graying above the ears, came into view from farther along the same scaffolding rig that the gray-eyed soldier stood on. “Let her speak, General Serge,” the whitecoat said. “There may yet be truth to the lady’s story, and the very least we can do is show her a little hospitality before you execute her.”
So far so good, Brigid thought. Apart from the “execute” part, of course. Hopefully she could hold that off indefinitely.
Slowly, a little too slowly for Brigid’s comfort, the gray-eyed general lowered his Fedorov rifle and ordered his troops to do the same.
The lab-coated man stepped across to a ladder propped up beside the high scaffolding and made his way carefully down to ground level. Once he reached the white floor, he turned and limped slowly across to Brigid, extending his right hand. “My name is Dr. Djugashvili,” he told her, and Brigid felt her eyes widen involuntarily in surprise. Was this the same Dr. Djugashvili who had written those reports about Device One in 1922? This man was still quite young, perhaps in his late forties or early fifties; he could pass for a contemporary of Mohandas Lakesh Singh, certainly. “Perhaps you would prefer to answer the same questions that the general posed without a rifle pointed at you.” He gestured around at the soldiers who watched restlessly from the circle they had formed around Brigid.
“Dr. Anastas Djugashvili,” Brigid said, looking for the flash of either recognition or confusion in his eyes, “it is very definitely an honor to meet you at last.”
The lines around Djugashvili’s eyes creased as he smiled. “You have me at a disadvantage, Miss…?”
“Baptiste,” Brigid told him, “but, please, call me Brigid.”
SITTING ALONE IN THE CANTEEN, Grant gazed around the shadow-filled room, playing the beam of the penlight across the walls and wooden tables. Near the back wall, well away from the room’s sole door, two skeletons were slumped over.
Grant walked over to take a closer look at them. They were dressed in ancient clothing, a lab coat and a soldier’s uniform, moth-eaten and slowly disintegrating to rags beneath a layer of gray dust. They looked still, almost serene, and Grant crouched on his haunches to get closer still.
When he had arrived there with Kane and Brigid, none of them had taken much interest in the skeletons. The bunker was a graveyard, and hardly the first one that the Cerberus field team had seen. But now, left alone while Kane made his two-hourly contact with Cerberus, Grant started thinking about the bricked-up entryway, the skeletons that remained in the bunks and several other rooms.
From the shape of the pelvis, the lab-coated skeleton was a woman, wearing light trousers. There was no visible ID, no indicators as to who she was, her age when she had died, anything. Same for the soldier, just a serial number on a card tucked into his inside breast pocket.
There were no signs of trauma, no bullet holes or broken bones. It looked to Grant as though these people had simply died in their sleep. He remained crouched by the skeletons, thinking about the figures in the bunks, wondering if they had died the same way. A shiver slowly ascended the length of his spine as he thought of that: a whole facility falling asleep, never to awaken. Like something out of a fairy tale.
Slowly Grant drew a steadying breath and eased himself back into a standing position. “What happened here?” he muttered to himself.
The thought of these people dying in their sleep reminded Grant of how tired he was feeling. He and Kane had taken catnaps since they had secured the facility, but the toll of simply waiting, ever alert, was showing.
Grant rubbed his eyes and looked across to the skeletons on the floor. “Sorry, guys, but I don’t think I want to end up like you just yet,” he told them, but the humor sounded forced to his own ears. He shook his head and paced across the room to the open doorway and the unlit corridor outside. “Come on, Kane,” he muttered, glancing at his wrist chron. “This place is starting to give me the creeps.”
“BAPTISTE?” DR. DJUGASHVILI said thoughtfully.
He led Brigid around the side of the massive metal construct to the high-ceilinged corridor she had noticed off to the right-hand side of the colossal, white-walled room. She tried not to show too much interest in the dark torpedo shape that dominated the room as he limped beside her, aware that every eye in the room was on them. The weapon was breathtakingly impressive, as long as a preskydark aircraft carrier and finished in a sleek, metallic black that seemed to absorb the pervasive glow of its white surround. She wanted to stop to examine the gigantic construction, but was aware that now was not the opportune time to express her interest.
Brigid walked with Djugashvili along the corridor that seemed to stretch forever. It was hard to get a sense of location with the white walls, white ceilings, white floors. When she tried to stare into the distance, Brigid felt as though she had lost her depth perception. There were occasional gaps in the walls, and Brigid saw that these led into smaller, white-walled rooms. Eventually Djugashvili stopped before one of these doorways and encouraged Brigid to lead the way inside. She was wary of entering, conscious that it could be a trap, until she realized Djugashvili was simply being a gentleman.
“Normally I would hold the door for a young lady such as yourself, but sadly we have no doors here.”
Inside she found what was unmistakably an office despite the alien nature of the design. A flattened, glistening lightning bolt stretched from one wall like an operating table, acting as the desk. Behind it was a molded L-shape, again in white, that served as a chair. There were several other large blocks in the room, and Djugashvili gestured to one of these as he took up his place behind the desk. The ceiling was much lower in this room, perhaps just twenty-five feet above them, and a pure white shelf ran the length of one wall, holding a line of lever arch files, battered and spilling over with paperwork. The files had been labeled sequentially using the Cyrillic alphabet, and Brigid idly noticed that the sequence running M-H-O was missing.
“Baptiste?” Djugashvili repeated, the glint of metal fillings showing along the upper left side of his jaw. “This is French, no?”
Brigid smiled. “As a matter of fact, I’m from Irish stock originally, care of…” She stopped. Should she mention the United States of America, the old enemy? “Care of all over, really,” she finished lamely.
“A globe-trotter?” Djugashvili asked, intrigued. “And what brings you to this little piece of Russia? You said something about carrying a message from the people’s government.”
Brigid wondered where she should begin to explain to a three-hundred-year-old man. “It breaks down like this—it’s time to use the weapon, the Death Cry.” She had said “Death Cry,” the name that she and Kane had attributed to the information from the U.S. surveillance files, but it came out of her mouth as something else. “The Call of Death,” maybe, or perhaps something entirely different. Whatever she was speaking wasn’t speech at all, more like communion.
Dr. Djugashvili waved a hand before his face as he tried to articulate his question. Which was a strange thing to do, Brigid thought, an old habit that meant nothing in this level of reality. “Where precisely is this instruction coming from, Brigid? This question is perplexing me somewhat.”
“When was the last time you had communication from your superiors, Dr. Djugashvili?” she asked, a horrible realization forming in the back of her mind.
“It must have been…” He paused, trying to remember. “I’m not sure. I would need to check our records. But you haven’t answered my question.”
“No, I haven’t,” Brigid agreed. “What year is this, Doctor?”
“Year?” he repeated. “Well, I hardly think that has anything to do with…” He stopped as he saw the look of concern in Brigid’s eyes. She was staring at him, and her smile was gone.
“Perhaps you would indulge me by answering one of my questions before I answer yours,” he suggested, and Brigid nodded. “Do you know where you are?”
“My understanding of the situation,” Brigid told him, “is that we are on a higher level of consciousness, in a region dubbed Krylograd by the staff of Project Chernobog—your staff.”
“Krylograd.” He laughed, resting his elbows on the desk and knitting his hands together. “I’ve not heard that expression in a very long time. Dear Laynia—Dr. Krylova,” he corrected himself, “left us many months ago now. She died. It was a very sad thing.”
“I’m sorry,” Brigid said automatically. “I only knew her through her research. She came across as a brilliant woman.”
“More than brilliant,” Djugashvili agreed. “Her understanding of the human mind was exceptional. A completely lateral manner of studying the human experience.” Djugashvili looked older to Brigid in that moment, the weight of the years showing in his face.
“What happened?” Brigid probed, wondering for a moment whether she had said such a thing aloud.
“It is a fair question.” Djugashvili nodded. “Since you know where you are, you must have realized that the rules here are different. Death is…it’s a very hard thing to explain here,” he began, and Brigid noticed that he was rubbing at a scar that ran across the inside of both of his wrists. The scar had a chain-link pattern. “There was an argument with the general, something he felt was against the remit of Project Chernobog and, well, the best way that I could describe this—scientifically, you understand—is that she dissipated. It was like a mist, a fog where a person had been but moments before.”
Brigid nodded, remembering the experience of the nonexistent TP-9 pistol in her holster.
“We collected her,” he explained sadly, “gathered the mist as best we could and added it to the device. The Death Cry.”
Again, Brigid had heard “Death Cry,” but that wasn’t what he had said. It was as if the Tower of Babel had never fallen; language no longer had barriers in this plane of existence. “So she’s a part of the weapon?” Brigid said, her voice coming out as little more than a whisper through no conscious effort of her own.
“We are all part of the weapon,” Djugashvili stated solemnly.
Brigid wanted Djugashvili to explain what that meant, but she stopped herself, focusing on the primary question she needed answered. “What year is this, Doctor?” she probed again.
“Yes.” He smiled, rubbing absently at his brow. “The year. It has been a long time since I last had contact with the world. Outside of this facility, many months,” he explained, an ingratiating smile crossing his lips, “a long time since I last saw a newspaper, you understand.”
Brigid nodded encouragingly.
“I think,” Djugashvili said ponderously, “I think it is 1928 or perhaps 1929 by now. It is still winter, I am certain of that. I feel the cold in my old bones,” he reasoned triumphantly.
Brigid nodded, trying to absorb what this would mean. This man, this whole astral factory, was stuck in time, toiling there under the deluded belief that only a few months had passed since they—She stopped herself. Since they what? she wondered. Up-leveled? What had they done to end up there, permanent residents of the astral plane? “When did you come here?” she asked finally.
“It was in the spring just gone,” Djugashvili replied, “1928.”
That meant that this man, this whole group had no knowledge of the nuclear holocaust, of skydark. Heck, this man didn’t even know about the Second World War, which had defined the players that led to the nukecaust. Joseph Stalin had just assumed power when they had ascended to this higher plane. Which either meant that time ran much slower there or that the whole plane played tricks on the human sense of its passage. Either way, Brigid realized, it would be dangerous for her to remain there any longer than absolutely necessary.
