The door to the fifteenth floor had been blasted wide open. Scorch marks and smoke decorated the walls around the door and the ceiling at the top of the stairwell. Beyond the blasted door stood another, smaller door, intact, made of blond fir or spruce and decorated with carved flowers and bas-relief saplings. Two spotlights guttered in the cove ceiling over the door. The carvings cast alternating, lopsided shadows.
Ben pushed the wooden door. It creaked open, and we entered a room about forty feet square, filled with toppled chairs, rucked and twisted rugs, off-kilter paintings of landscapes—a beautiful lake (Baikal?), mountains, quaint log cabins in forests. Bookshelves, some upright and some pulled over, books piled between an intervening chair and the inlaid parquet floor. A long oak dining table was covered with thick, leather-bound photo albums, some lying open, others in stacks. One stack had toppled and upset a silver candelabra.
“It’s an apartment,” Breaker said. “Someone lived here.”
A gallery of life-size heroic painted portraits glowered down from the rear wall, draped in velvet curtains and hung with pulls of tasseled gold cord. It could have been the living room of a well-off Russian expatriate, a personal shrine to a glorious past.
Ben flipped through one of the open albums. He spun it around and studied a few pages of mounted photos, then whistled in amazement. “Let’s take these,” he said. “All of them.”
Breaker gave him a quizzical look. “I thought we were here for biological specimens.”
“I had a maiden aunt who kept our family’s photographs,” Ben said. “She pasted them in albums and typed up labels with names and dates and places. Everyone sent her copies. She worked at it until she died. She was our archivist.”
Breaker was still not convinced.
“Just take them,” Ben insisted. “If we don’t, we may never understand what happened.”
Breaker looked at me. “Take them,” I said.
Three technicians in isolation suits finally arrived, out of breath, lugging aluminum cases. Delbarco spoke with them in low tones in the living room while Ben, Breaker, and I explored further.
Ben found a bathroom. He opened the heavy white-painted door, peered around it, then advanced to a claw-foot tub. The tub was surrounded by a daisy-print shower curtain. He gripped the curtain and gave me a sad, reluctant look through his plastic hood.
“Time’s a-wasting,” I said.
“Fuck that,” he said. “That’s what Melon said.”
Ben pulled back the curtain with a shing of steel rings. A body lay in the white-enamel tub, curled in a frail, angular tangle of arms and legs. The wizened face appeared to float, like a lolling puppet’s, above one end of an ill-fitting, calf-length black dress. Wide milky eyes stared up at the tiled ceiling with a squirrel-monkey expression of disappointment and surprise.
“Mrs. Golokhova, I presume,” Ben said. “Come pay your respects,” he insisted. Breaker and I stepped forward. “The wife of our secret master. I guess she didn’t want to be kicked out of her home.”
She had apparently shot herself in the temple with a small, ivory-handled revolver, still clutched in one gnarled hand. The hand rested against the side of the tub, pistol hanging from stiff white fingers.
She was supposed to live forever. Perhaps her husband had promised her that much as a reward for being a guinea pig, for years of madness.
Ben backed away. “There’s nothing here for me,” he told Delbarco on the way out of the bathroom. “But let’s get those photos.”
“I’d like tissue samples from her,” I told Delbarco. She passed the request to the technicians. They went to work quickly, pulling the body from the tub and laying it out on the tile floor.
I left the bathroom before I could see more.
Breaker took two albums. I grabbed three. Ben carried four. That was less than a third of them, but they were thick and heavy, and Delbarco warned us we didn’t want to be too burdened in case we had to move fast.
“One more floor,” Delbarco said, eyelids heavy, as if she had already seen far too much. “Prepare yourselves, gentlemen. This one takes the cake.”
We climbed to sixteen, the topmost floor in Anthrax Central. There, Delbarco applied her shoulder to what looked like a medium-security bank-vault door, heaved it wide, and motioned us through. The door made a hydraulic sigh as it tried to close. She jammed a screwdriver in the locking wheel before it could throw its bolts home.
Beyond the vault door, a hundred or more horizontal steel cylinders, about the size of antique iron lungs, stretched in five long rows to the opposite wall, separated only by square support columns and, at the center of the room, two small, glass-walled laboratories or monitoring stations.
The cylinders had been mounted on cement platforms. Two thin copper pipes, no wider than a pinky, and a stiff white electrical cable emerged from the end of each cylinder.
“We’re going to need some help understanding this.” Delbarco blinked rapidly behind her plastic hood. “Not that I’m keen to know,” she added.
I gripped a steel handrail, climbed a set of concrete steps, and looked over the top of the first tank on my right. A long, narrow glass window provided a clear view of the contents. Inside, bathed in a few inches of reddish fluid more like thin jam or ketchup than blood, lay the naked body of a man. Slight, balding, in late middle age, he seemed to be trapped in light but troubled sleep. His facial muscles and fingers twitched, and his eyes jerked beneath their lids. Thick ripples spread across the red fluid.
Above the man’s head, something clicked, and a silvery blue light came on inside the tank. Full spectrum, I thought, and looked up with spots swimming in front of my eyes.
A faint electrical hum filled the chamber. Lights had switched on in all the tanks, throwing ranks of fuzzy blue bars on the ceiling.
Once my eyes adjusted to the new brightness, I could see the man more clearly. Filaments rose from the red liquid and crawled over his fingers, his naked arms, his face, leaving oily trails on the pale, beardless skin.
With a sense of fascinated dread, I examined the back of his hand. Between the tendons, the skin had formed puckered slits.
Throat dry, legs wobbly, I climbed down, braced myself, and moved on to four other tanks. Four more men, all naked, two elderly, two middle-aged or perhaps younger, their faces sallow in the silvery glow, all lay in the same red bath, locked in uneasy sleep.
Ben tapped the end of the fifth tank and pointed to a stamped tin ID plate, the size of a file card, slipped into a holder. Following a twelve-digit string of numbers was a hyphen or dash and what might have been a date: 9/3/61.
“Maybe they sealed him up in 1961,” Ben suggested. “Like canned tuna.”
“Self-contained,” I said, and immediately doubted that was possible. With such tiny pipes, there couldn’t have been much in the way of fluids going in and waste going out; maybe only a little fresh water. No pumps, no oxygen. Just the lights. Nothing so simple, whatever the ecological balance, could keep these people alive . . . yet they were alive. Twitching. Troubled. “Failed experiments?” I guessed.
“Maybe they went crazy from Golokhov’s treatment,” Ben said. “Too crazy to take a chance and let them go out into the world.”
“Should we breach a tank?” Breaker asked.
“I wouldn’t dare,” I said. “I wouldn’t know what to look for.” We were in unknown territory.
“Let’s move on,” Delbarco insisted. Her voice echoed over the rows of tanks. “There may not be much time.”
