“He said this isn’t important,” Shrieve repeated. “He said that zomethink iss missink.”
She took back her Walther. “Your spleen is going to be missing in a minute.” Time to remind this guy who wore the handcuffs.
Malmagden barely noticed. “The Artifact,” he said. “The—you know.” He waved impatiently at the empty eastern sky. “You showed me a photograph of it.”
Took her a moment to realize what Malmagden was talking about. He was talking about the monolith they had dug out of the eastern face of the valley.
“It’s gone,” she said. “So what? The entire lake is gone.”
“The entire lake was merely water. Please.” He leaned forward to take her eye. “This is more important than these questions you are asking me. This is more important than you know.”
Shrieve frowned at her. “What is he talking about?”
Susan shook her head. Suddenly she wasn’t sure. She was sure that the fear in Malmagden’s eyes was genuine. That bothered her. Men like Malmagden are supposed to be pitiless and unshakable.
“What happens if we leave the compound?” she asked Charley.
“Maybe Illyenov shoots us as American spies. Maybe”—Shrieve nodded at the drawing pad—“we run into Sparky here. Who knows?”
Susan glanced back at the remnants of the Oktober Brigade. Something far up the western slope of the valley transfixed their attention. They stood silently behind the concertina wire. Their eyes were on the blue-white pool of a searchlight as it rolled over the bare earth beyond the perimeter. Susan had never seen a group of kids so focused.
She nodded toward the back of the compound. There was a hole in the wire. Beyond it, the lake bottom lay blasted smooth beneath a bomber’s moon.
“We came up here to see the Faulkenberg weapons lab,” she said. “Let’s go have a look.”
They pushed Malmagden through the wire. He stared around at the mirror-smooth crater, wide-eyed with awe.
“This means nothing to you, does it?” He looked at her and laughed, a choking sound of horror and awe. “This is just a great hole in the ground to you, yes? But once, over there”— he pointed to the smooth eastern curve of the bowl—“it was the most advanced laboratory in the world.” He looked away. He could not speak.
On the far side of the wire, they stepped on something that crunched like hard candy. Susan picked a chunk of it out of the sand.
“Glass,” she said. They were standing on a sea of glassified sand. It rippled out from a center point in concentric rings, like a pond’s surface frozen moments after being hit by a stone. No doubt the glass had covered the entire lakebed before the Russians had arrived. It still coated the area east of their outpost.
She tested one of the glass waves. The crests were thick enough to support the weight of a 119-, or 119-and-seven-eighths-, pound woman. The troughs were brittle and thin and showed signs of recent crossing.
The frequency of these waves grew shorter as they walked toward the eastern rim of the crater. The glass itself darkened and changed color. It was green at the perimeter, black as obsidian as they followed Malmagden to the epicenter of the blast.
He pointed far up the nearest wall of the crater. “My men.”
An army of shadow soldiers stood at alert above the line where the glass gave way to pale rock. Whatever seared their images to the limestone had been of sufficient intensity to delineate their silhouettes in stark detail. Susan could see attitudes of tension in the images. Their heads were turned, as if they had been tracking some sound or movement coming from the left.
Malmagden stared at the wall with his palm over his mouth. He whispered something in German, maybe he asked, What have I done?
Susan searched in her heart for pity, found only a flat, hard plain not dissimilar to the one they traversed.
“What do your ghouls say about moral ambiguity now?” she asked him.
Malmagden looked at her, his eyes so mixed with emotions they seemed flat as mirrors.
Shrieve took Malmagden by the shoulder. “Show me where this artifact was supposed to be.” He ignored Susan’s bad looks.
Malmagden needed just a moment to orient himself. “It is right above you, yes?” He pointed. Just to their left was a gap among the limestone cliffs. Susan had seen it from the top of the road, but the very size of it had hidden it away in the landscape. Only as Malmagden pointed it out did she get an idea of the scale the weapons laboratory had worked at.
Someone had dug an aircraft carrier out of the rock.
She looked closer as the clouds shifted over her head. Under the brightening moonlight, the biomorphic contours that had allowed the abyss to blend into the natural landscape showed themselves to be razor sharp—whoever had done this had used a scalpel.