Chapter 11
A Door That Opens Two Ways
Prague in December looked like a city dipped in sugar and left to set.
It had snowed since Monday. The saints along the Charles Bridge wore little white hoods, like monks waiting for a bus. On Wednesday morning David Morgan went to see one of Dr. Kostka's hundred and seventeen pharmacies, a bright green-fronted shop on the Vinohradská called At the Golden Snake.
He stood in the queue behind a woman in a blue jacket with a girl of nine. The girl had a plait and a beaded bracelet that spelled MIA. She leaned against her mother with the tired calm of a child who has been to many pharmacies. At the counter the pharmacist said kindly, "The usual, Mrs. Nováková?" and brought out a small white carton. A green label. A gold snake.
The woman took it with both hands, the way you'd take tea from someone who'd been kind. "Thank you. Merry Christmas."
David watched them walk away down the snowy pavement, hand in hand, the carton in the bag, getting smaller.
"Sir?" said the pharmacist.
"I've changed my mind. It's nothing." He went out. It was a long time before his hands stopped shaking.
"I don't like it," said Nell.
In a rented flat on the Žižkov hill, a plan of Kostka's headquarters lay on the kitchen table. It was an old red-brick brewery turned into a hall of glass and steel.
"I don't like the speed," said Ravi, pacing with a mug. "I don't like that the grey Peugeot is here too. Somebody has followed us for a week and done nothing. It's the strangest thing. Unless that's the point. And it was a Tuesday. It's never a Tuesday!"
"Sit down, Ravi," said Camille, snipping grey felt. "It is a good argument. It is not a reason."
David had his thumb on a faint dotted line on the plan. "A coal tunnel. A hundred and thirty years ago, when it was a working brewery, they dug it under the street to the rail siding. It was bricked up in 1961, then knocked through again by builders in the nineties and forgotten. The brewery next door has a cellar that touches it. They hold private parties. Camille will be the guide. Through the cellar, through the tunnel, up a stair into the records vault. Thirty-one minutes. No front door. No alarm, because it isn't on the plans."
"And you know about it because the Archivist told you," said Nell.
"I trust the tunnel. I've seen the plan." His face was calm. Nell didn't like that calm. It wasn't the absence of doubt; it was the smooth look of a man who has stopped examining it. "There are eight hundred and forty-one dead, Nell. A girl with a bracelet will go back on Friday for her mother's next carton. In a year she'll start to feel tired in the afternoons. They never know. It looks like nothing."
"There's always a girl."
"Yes," said David quietly. "That's why one goes."
At the window, Anselm spoke without turning. "Your paper says 'a door that opens two ways, one of which is very unpleasant.' You have not told us what it means."
"I don't know."
"That woman has never written a figure of speech in her life. If you walk into that room and it is a trap, I cannot come in after you. I will be in the car with a flask. I am telling you so you know that I know."
"Thank you."
"It is not a thank-you thing," said Anselm. "It is an old man being afraid."
They went in at four minutes past one, on a clear night, ten below.
The brewery cellar smelled of yeast and oak. Camille, in a black dress, gave a lively and thoroughly inaccurate lecture on Bohemian hops to fourteen drunk Danes. When she saw David enter, she didn't stop talking. She only moved her lantern slightly to the left.
The tunnel mouth was behind a barrel: a black brick hole three feet high, breathing cold air that smelled of iron and old coal. He pulled on thin black gloves and settled the old black felt hat on his head, the one Camille had begged him to leave in the car. Then he went in.
"Fifty-two feet, then a turn," said Ravi in his ear, in a voice as small as an insect's. "I've got eleven cameras on the ground floor. I'll turn off the lights if anything happens."
It was a long, scraping crawl in the dark with a pencil torch in his teeth. At the turn the pipe widened. His hand found a rusted ladder. At the top was a steel hatch. It wasn't locked.
A moment of cold unease. It was exactly as the plan had said. Too easy.
Then he looked into a long white corridor. A camera at the far end, with its little red light dead.
"I've looped the corridor," said Ravi. "Thirty-one minutes. Go left."
At the end was a thick steel door with a keypad and one word in capitals: ARCHIV. Something was wrong. It wasn't any object. It was in the air, the faint metal smell, the silence. It felt like a stage before the audience comes in. It felt like a room that was waiting.
"You've stopped," said Ravi.
He had a choice. He knew it clearly, for about two seconds. He thought of the girl with the bracelet.
"No," said David. "Open it."
Inside was a small room lined with grey shelves of boxes. In the middle stood a table with a safe under it. In the left wall, chest-high, was a small steel door with a red handle and a plate in four languages: EMERGENCY — NOT FOR GENERAL USE.
He knew what it was at once: an old coal chute. A door that opens two ways. She knew about the chute, he thought. How? There was no time to wonder.
He worked for eleven minutes. Each box held batch records with lab reports saying, in clean typed columns, what was in the green cartons. He photographed a hundred and forty-four pages. He found the red binder and a second ledger with the real figures. He opened the safe and took eleven million in bearer bonds and a small black hard drive. Under the shelf marked 2019 he left one white card.
At twenty minutes, the lights went out.
The darkness was perfect and soft. A breath of air moved. Into the vault came a faint clean smell of soap, wool and cold rain, a smell he somehow remembered, like the memory of a house.
"Ravi."
Nothing.
"The van's gone dead," said Nell quietly in his ear. "I've lost the line. David, come out now."
"I'd rather you didn't," said a voice in the dark behind him.
It was light and English and unhurried. A thin white torch came on, held low so as not to dazzle him. In its glow he saw a long dark overcoat, leather gloves, and a thin grey face with an attentive look, like a man who has found a thing exactly as it was described.
"Good evening, David," said Gideon Strake. "I think we should talk."