Objekt 221 Read online

  * *

  “They found it.”

  After adjourning the meeting of the expedition team, Miles went directly to Britta Vragi’s office. He was comically breathless after jogging from one end of the facility to the other. She motioned for him to sit down and compose himself before beginning the interrogation.

  “Found what?” Britta said from behind her planet-sized desk.

  “The road,” Miles said as he slicked back the sweat from his forehead into the crown of his head, matting down his hair. “In the block zone. They were looking past the trees with a drone and saw the road.”

  Britta nodded.

  “Who?”

  “Today’s expedition team. Brunarski, Hollyfeld, Park, Tolliver, and Butcher.”

  “Butcher?” she said, furrowing her brow. “The new guy?”

  Miles nodded.

  “He was the one piloting the drone.”

  Britta frowned at Miles, who tried to somehow dissolve into the leather chair and become invisible.

  “Anything else?”

  “Did they find anything else? No,” Miles said. “I saw that they had seen the road and I shut down the expedition. Brought them back for debriefing.”

  Britta finally nodded.

  “Okay, good work,” she said. “That’s good. I’ll need to review any documentation. Did Calvin fill out a report?” Miles was shaking his head in response. “Okay, good. Any recordings?”

  Miles paused.

  “There was the drone video feed,” he said. “But it doesn’t automatically record.”

  “Sure. Okay. Wipe it anyway. Actually. Wait. Bring it to me and I’ll wipe it myself.”

  She paused for a moment and Miles stood to leave. He stopped.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I think they’re going to want to go back. Have another look.”

  “Pretty sure that’s not going to happen,” Britta said.

  Miles nodded.

  “I know,” he said. He continued to stand rooted to the spot.

  “Stall them,” Britta said, sighing. “We’ll come up with something official-sounding. Get me the drone control and I’ll discuss the matter with my superiors.”

  Miles Lofton finally took his leave of the room. Britta immediately leaned forward and pressed a button on her phone.

  “We’ve got a problem,” she said into the receiver.

  * *

  Damon stared at the terrarium and let his mind wander. He was still new to this team—less than 20 hours ago, he was gainfully employed by Precision Robotics—and wanted to observe and fit in. The problem, though, was that he knew Miles and could read him like a book. What had been the actual purpose of that meeting? A debriefing? But, of what? They didn’t discuss the road or the potential implications of a super-ancient society. What had Miles actually said?

  Don’t think about it. Don’t ask about it.

  As Damon left the meeting room, he saw his old friend hustle down a long hallway, presumably to talk to his boss about the matter. Brittany? Something.

  He exhaled and crossed his arms against his chest. He was staring blankly at one particular plant. It was about two feet high with yellow, spiked protrusions along the base that gradually decreased in size as they climbed up the stalk. It had not flowered yet, but he could see the orangish bulbs at the end of the bigger stems. In contrast to the deep green color of the stalk and leaves, he felt the flowers would be beautiful.

  Suddenly, something caught his eye in his periphery. It was a huge centipede—easily a foot long. It was black along the back with a yellow diamond pattern to match its yellow legs. It scuttled from under the mulch base of the enclosure, up a tree, and down the other side. Damon couldn’t tell if Allied Genetics had intentionally brought the enormous insect into the plant display or it had hatched there. Either way…

  “That’s probably…not a good idea,” Damon said quietly to himself.

  “What’s that?” Cadey Park asked. She had silently sidled up next to him and was watching the same scene he was.

  “I, the…” He raised his right hand to point at the centipede but it had disappeared again. “Nothing.”

  They stood silently for a moment, the gentle whoosh of the HVAC system the only sound. People were moving to and fro throughout the corridor, but everything seemed quiet. Surreal. They stood side by side, staring into the glass enclosure. They might have both been looking for the giant, ancient centipede. They were both certainly trying to figure out what to say next.

  It was finally Cadey who broke the silence. She cleared her throat and started talking without looking at Damon.

  “The United States thinks it’s old, but on a global civilization level, it’s still very young. Young and kinda dumb. Like an awkward teenager at her first boy-girl party. Dumb teenagers tend to do things they think are smart or clever, but are generally neither.”

  Damon turned his head and looked at the young researcher. She probably knows more than you, the note had said. He inhaled and exhaled deeply.

  “Take technology, for example. Things advance at different rates. Things are ignored. Things go intentionally unnoticed.”

  Cadey paused for a minute and coughed politely, quietly. It was almost a whisper behind a balled-up right hand.

  “I lost my train of thought,” she said.

  Damon didn’t believe her for some reason. He couldn’t explain it, but he had the sudden inclination that she was trying to dumb-down her thought process.

  “Now, listen,” he started, but she held up a hand.

  “At Michigan State University, a 200-year-old college in the Midwestern United States, there’s a building in the linguistics neighborhood. The Brouwer Building. It’s eight stories up and three down. On the lowest sub-level sits a computer. An ancient Amiga. The hardware’s been upgraded so that it’s Internet-capable.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah. It sits in this little storage locker, powered up, connected to the Internet. There’s one document stored there. It’s a 47-page master’s thesis by a long-forgotten student. Joe, something. Stanwick, I think.” She waved her hand absently. “Slang as Regional Fashion – The Conundrum of the Synantonym. You actually have to jump through several odd hurdles to get to it. But if you manage to get to this particular document stored on this particular computer in this particular building, the computer will wake up and you can read the paper. When you, as the end user, clicks off the page, the computer goes back to sleep and just waits. This document is not found anywhere else on the web. It’s not in a library. Some say it was written and stored there as some sort of thought experiment. In any event, this is probably the first example of the deep web. Non-indexed data that can only be reached if you know how to reach it.”

  She paused again and furrowed her brow. After a moment of silence, Damon cleared his throat. He was still looking into the terrarium, but not really looking at anything.

  “That’s interesting.”

  Cadey nodded.

  “I’ve always thought so. I’ve always wanted to take a field trip and just look at it. This bizarre little computer hiding from the rest of the world. Kind of. Always ready to be found, though.”

  “I’m curious as to why you told me that,” Damon said, finally turning to look at her.

  Cadey nodded. She was nearly a foot shorter than Damon and had to lean her head back slightly to look him in the eye.

  “Ice breaker,” she said. “We need to review that video footage. But we can’t do it here. But we have to do it here. Right?”

  Damon continued to gaze at her while Cadey turned her head to look back into the plant display. He had the sense that she was letting him put it together. For some reason. He was in no mood for puzzles or mind games.

  He yawned. And it dawned on him.

  “You have a secret workstation here in the building.”

  Cadey nodded.

  “Yup. It was one of the first things I did when I got here. Totally off the Anvil Canyon grid, but
still very powerful. It’s the only place we can safely watch the drone video.”

  Damon looked around the hallway. He recognized no one.

  “Lead the way,” he said.

  * *

  Half a planet away, Alexander Scott strode through the open door of his commanding officer’s headquarters and let it close behind him. Scott was one of the highest ranking field commanders for the Wraiths—the assault force often employed by Sergott Solutions when they had a serious client with a serious problem. Originally growing up on a ranch in Texas earned Scott the military call sign “Beef,” one that had followed him his entire career.

  It was a ranch in name only as his family had long abandoned being cattle-herders. Drill sergeants, however, didn’t much care for family details.

  Beef snapped off a perfunctory salute and addressed his commanding officer, Clay Reed.

  “We have a problem, sir.”

  Reed nodded and leaned forward in his chair.

  “At ease. Sit,” Reed said. “I’ve read the mission debrief. Intel was bad.”

  In general, Scott preferred to remain standing, but sat in one of the two red leather chairs that faced Reed’s desk. As if on cue, there was a knock at the now-closed door. It opened and another Wraith commander came in.

  Rick “Ahab” Everson was of similar age and reputation to Scott. He saluted and sat next to his opposite number in front of the large desk.

  “Sir.” He nodded and turned to the man seated next to him. “Scott.”

  Scott nodded in reply.

  “As you say, sir. Bad intel. They had advanced weaponry that hadn’t been mentioned anywhere, as well as hardened defensive measures.”

  Clay was silent. He looked down at a thick file folder that rested in the center of his desk blotter. Opened it, scanned a couple pages, and closed it again.

  “I agree,” he finally said, seemingly addressing both men. “And it will be rectified. I’ve made the necessary notations in the file.” He paused. “Now, for new business. We were commissioned for three total gags against Allied Genetics targets. Here is the third. Back to Europe for you, Beef. You’ll be running the mission together. Ultimate oversight directly from this office, but you’ll pair up in the field. One face. One voice. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Crystal.”

  “Good,” Clay said. “I should also mention that the client is preparing a fourth mission. This might also be a dual effort. Details forthcoming.”

  He looked at the two men, giving them just a moment to voice any concerns. No objections were raised and Clay Reed glanced back down to paperwork on his desk.

  “Dismissed.”

  * *

  It wasn’t surprising that she led him into an area that he hadn’t been yet. Was it true that he’d only been an employee of Allied Genetics for 24 hours?

  That can’t be right, Damon thought.

  The corridors became less and less crowded the more turns they made. Finally, Cadey stopped in front of a door marked “Custodial Access.” She made a great show of looking down at the clipboard she was carrying—a prop she brought with her from a storage closet just outside the terrarium—and then opened the door like she had a schedule to keep.

  “Jesus,” Damon said under his breath and followed her in.

  The door hissed shut on its pneumatic hinge. They were standing in a narrow corridor. She glanced briefly over her right shoulder and strode off down the corridor. Damon had to hurry to keep up with her.

  It looked like a maintenance corridor—akin to a wet wall in a large building. It was just wide enough to wind around the outer perimeter of this floor of Objekt 221. There were access panels at regular intervals and numerous computer terminals that seemed to be monitoring various aspects of the structure. From HVAC to water pressure, Damon noted numerous different systems in play.

  There was a left turn and then a right and Cadey stopped at a door. One of the few doors they had passed in the area.

  The paint on the door was faded, red and written in Cyrillic script. Damon could read: Avtorizovannyy personal. Authorized personnel. Cadey pulled a key from a tiny pocket in her blue jeans and opened the door.

  “Home away from home,” Cadey said.

  It was a little room—basically a two-by-two meter square. There was a folding chair, folded, leaned up against the far corner from the door. She flipped a light switch as the door closed behind them. A single bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling came on. It was an industrial-type fixture in a room otherwise devoid of fixtures. There was a stack of random binders, small boxes, and even a crisply folded work shirt. Cadey bent down, reached behind this stack, and pulled out a laptop computer. She unfolded the chair, sat down in front of it, and snapped open the dark gray computer.

  She arched her back and pulled the small USB drive out of the same pocket that had the room key. She felt along the right side of the laptop and plugged the device in. After a brief moment of whirring and grinding, a generic media player popped up on the screen.

  “Okay,” she said as Damon sat next to her cross-legged. “Here we go.”

  The video played in its entirety. It was 11 seconds long. For 10 and a half seconds, they watched the drone pulling away with what the team was calling “the road” in the top, center of the screen. The final half-second was a burst of static and wavy lines that obscured the image as Cadey had yanked the USB drive from the drone control’s port.

  “It looks like a road,” Cadey said.

  Damon shrugged.

  “I suppose,” he said. “I’m starting to think along the same lines as what Miles said about matrixing. Maybe we’re just imposing order on random images.”

  It was Cadey’s turn to shrug, then she pointed at the screen as she instructed the video to run on a continuous loop.

  “I think I’d be more inclined to agree with you if it didn’t look like the environment had been engineered,” she said. Cadey pointed at the screen and ran the tip of her right index finger across a line on the laptop. “Right here. These indentations.”

  “Yeah. I can see that. But you gotta admit that strange things happen in nature. Things that seem engineered, but are natural formations.” He thought for a moment. “Depending on the terrain, many trees grow perfectly perpendicular to the ground. Sodium chloride often forms perfect cubes. Hell, the basalt columns of Giant’s Causeway look like manufactured pillars but they are a natural volcanic formation.”

  Cadey nodded. She was pursing her lips.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” she said. “And if it was just a straight clearing for a few hundred meters…sure. I just can’t get past how much it looks like this was built. This was engineered.”

  The video ran three more times with the two room occupants watching in silence. The light flickered once in its small metal cage in the center of the ceiling. When the recording started to run forward a fourth time, Damon leaned forward.

  “Wait a second,” he said. Cadey turned to look at him. “Can we do this…um…advance the video frame-by-frame?”

  “Probably,” she said. “This is a fairly simple program, but it would make sense to have that option.”

  She paused the playback and started to move the cursor around the screen looking at various options and settings.

  “Yeah. Here we go.”

  The video started to play again, but with the pop, pop, pop jerk of one frame at a time. It almost looked like stop-motion animation.

  “Right toward the end,” Damon said. “Before the glitch.”

  Cadey advanced the playback almost all the way forward. She pulled the cursor forward until the 10.5 second mark and let it play. There were five stop-motion images of the road and then sudden static. The static was replaced by wavy lines indicating digital interference. The lines jumped and danced and a clear image emerged for only one frame before disappearing into a wave of static.

  They both leaned forward.

  “Can you…?” Damon said.
>
  “Already on it,” Cadey answered.

  She paused the playback and rolled it backward two, three frames. The clear image that was only visible for a quarter of a second froze and filled the screen.

  They saw the road begin to curve away to the left, toward the bottom of the image. Something was just emerging into the frame—at the very top of the screen.

  “What the fuck is that?” Damon said, squinting.

  “It’s a…” Cadey started. “Oh shit.” Her eyes widened.

  “It’s a building,” Damon said.

  Chapter Ten

  The Mountain

  BUILT ON the strength of back-breaking slave labor, some of the Third Reich’s most impressive military works have a dark history—haunted by the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of unwilling participants. As the tide of the war began to turn in 1943, the Nazi regime decided to centralize most of their operations. Their master plan: Project Riese. The Giant.

  The Owl Mountains are one of Poland’s oldest ranges, stretching along the Czech border. As a largely inaccessible terrain with a dense spruce forest, it’s no wonder the German army identified the region as a potential stronghold. Project Riese would be a massive undertaking—an underground complex carved right into the side of the mountain.

  Ten of the tunnel complexes have been excavated, but only a portion have truly been explored. Only a small percentage of the underground facilities were completed to any degree with very few meters reinforced with concrete and steel support beams.

  The 11th facility was located nearly five miles away—connected to the complex by a rail line—and doesn’t appear on any surveys. Complex Ksiaz was the first started and last abandoned. That section of land was quietly purchased in the late 1980s by a private consortium. While remaining under the control of a single entity for decades, work was slowly completed. In 2010, the ribbon-cutting ceremony on the Allied Genetics facility—known internally as Rainier Mesa—was quietly held nearly a quarter of a mile underground.

  * *

  As the combined Wraith assault teams made their final gear checks in their big Chinook transport copter, the two commanders engaged in some friendly banter.