The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [234]
At the far end of the hallway, Von Holden unlocked a door and entered a small paneled study. Impatiently closing the door, he relocked it and went to a grandfather clock in the corner behind a heavy desk. Opening the clock, he took out its winding key and inserted it into a nearly invisible hole in a panel to its left. A quarter twist, and the panel slid back, exposing a highly polished, stainless-steel door with a digital panel inlaid in its upper right corner. As if he were using an automatic teller machine, Von Holden punched in a code. Immediately the door slid back exposing a small elevator. Von Holden stepped in, the door closed and the carved panel slid back into place.
For a full three minutes the elevator descended, then it stopped and Von Holden stepped into a large, rectangular room four hundred feet below the surface of Behrenstrasse. The room was completely bare. Its floor, ceiling and walls were constructed of the same material, five-foot-square panels of ten-inch-thick black marble.
At the far end of the room was a luminous steel panel that looked little more than an expensive metallic abstract. Von Holden’s footsteps echoed as he approached it. Reaching it, he stopped and stood directly in front. “Lugo,” he said. Then he gave his ten-digit identification number, followed with “Bertha,” his mother’s name.
Immediately, a panel to his left pulled back and he entered a long, diffusely lit corridor. This, like the outer room, was also walled with marble. The only difference was that the polished black of the former here was a bluish white, making the effect almost ethereal.
The passage was nearly seventy yards long, without a break for doors, other corridors, or cosmetic decoration. At the far end was another elevator. Reaching it, he gave the same verbal identification, but this time he added a secondary number: 86672.
Five hundred feet down, the elevator stopped. “Lugo,” he said again, and the door slid open and he entered “der Garten,” the Garden, a place only a dozen living people knew existed. With every visit, he felt as if he had stepped onto the set of some fantastic futuristic movie. Even the hackneyed entryway through the private house, with its hidden door and sliding panel, seemed out of some period theatrical melodrama.
But, exaggerated as it was, it was no movie set. Designed in 1939, its original construction was completed in the years 1942-1944 when anti-Nazi intelligence operatives were infiltrating the highest levels of the German Army General Staff, and Allied bombers were striking ever deeper into the heart of the Third Reich.
The existence of der Garten, with its simple, innocuous name, was so secret that at the beginning of construction a side tunnel was cut into a nearby subway line, the line closed off for repairs, and the excavated dirt dug out for the elevator shafts, corridors and rooms pushed into the subway line and trucked off by ore cars using the subway tracks. Equipment, workers and supplies were brought in the same way.
And although the project had taken four hundred men, working around the clock, twenty-one months to complete, no one, not the reidents on Behrenstrasse above, nor the rest of Berlin, had had any idea what was happening beneath their feet. As a final precaution, the four hundred who built it—architects, engineers, laborers—were gassed and buried under a thousand cubic yards of concrete at the base of the second elevator shaft while drinking champagne and celebrating its completion. Relatives who questioned their disappearance were told they had become casualties of Allied bombings. Those who persisted in their inquiries were shot. Later, and over the years, as electronic and structural upgrades were done, the small number of select designers, engineers and craftsmen carefully screened and then employed met similar fates, albeit