The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [235]
So, except for the select handful at the highest level of Nazi power who knew, the immense piece of work that was der Garten simply did not exist. And now, nearly a half century later, save for Scholl and Von Holden and the remaining few others at the top of the Organization, it still didn’t.
A door slid open in front of Von Holden and he entered a long spherical corridor inlaid with thousands of white ceramic tiles. It was now 8:10. Whatever had happened at the Hotel Borggreve, he had to put it out of his mind. Other than what he had seen, he had no information; therefore it was impossible for him to do anything other than to follow instructions as ordered.
At the halfway point in the corridor, he stopped and faced a door made of red ceramic tiles fused to titanium. Running his fingers over a Braille-like square, he punched in a five-number code and waited until a light above the square glowed green. When it did, he punched in three more numbers. The green light went out and the door raised up from the floor. Ducking his head, he entered, and the door lowered behind him.
It was a long moment before his eyes became accustomed to the near translucent blue-silver hue that filled the room. Even then, there was no feeling of depth or even space. It was as if he had entered a place with no existence at all. A figment of a dream.
Directly in front of him was the vague outline of a wall. Beyond it lay Sector F, der Garten’s innermost room. Small and square, it was protected from above and below and on all four sides by walls of fifteen-inch-thick titanium steel, reinforced by ten feet of concrete that had been laminated every eighteen inches by partitions of a jelly-like substance designed to keep the inner room stable even if subjected to the direct hit of a hydrogen bomb or the rumbling of a ten-point-zero earthquake.
“Lugo,” Von Holden said out loud, waiting as his voice-print was digitally compressed and matched to the digitally compressed original in the archives. A moment later, a panel on the wall next to him slid back and an illuminated translucent glass screen appeared. “Zehn—Sieben— Sieben—Neun—Null—Null—Neun—Null—Vier” (Ten—Seven—Seven—Nine—Zero—Zero—Nine— Zero—Four), he enunciated carefully. Three seconds later black letters materialized on the screen.
LETZTE MITTEILUNG/LEITER DER SICHERHEIT
IREITAG/VIERZEHN/OKTOBER !
(Final Memorandum/Director of Security
Friday/Fourteen/October)
Then the letters disappeared. Leaning forward, Von Holden pressed both hands firmly on the glass, then stood back. Immediately the glass went dark and the panel slid I closed. Ten seconds elapsed while his fingerprints were scanned. Seven seconds later a matrix of dark blue dots appeared on the floor, moving toward the center of the room until they formed an exact two-foot by two-foot square.
“Lugo,” he said again. The square faded and a platform rose out of the floor in its place. On it, cased inside a transparent housing, was a gray metallic-looking box made of a composite of fibers, including carbon, liquid-crystal polymers, and Kevlar. It measured twenty-six inches high by two feet square. It was what he had come for, and what would be presented to the select few at the Ceremony in the Charlottenburg Mausoleum minutes after Elton Lybarger had finished speaking.
From the beginning, it had been code-named Übermorgen, “the day after tomorrow.” Both a vision and a dream, it was now, and had been, the focus of everything, the thing that would carry the Organization into the next century and beyond. And once it left der Garten, Von Holden would protect it with his life.
118
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GRETA STASSEL was the twenty-year-old cabdriver Von Holden had left waiting outside number 45 Behrenstrasse. She’d seen him look at her posted driver’s papers and wondered if he’d remembered her name. She doubted it. He’d seemed troubled, but he was also very sexy and she