Astronomy(4)

She dug the toe of her shoe into a square-edged scuffmark in the concrete. Something six feet across and heavy enough to scratch concrete had been dragged two, three feet and then vanished. Something heavy as lead.

She looked around to find a parade formation of these straight-edged scuff marks. Each one traveled a couple feet and then abruptly stopped.

“Naval Intelligence calls these sites ‘ghost ships.’ Whatever this Das Unternehmen is, we think we’re seeing the staging areas of it in these warehouses. We just don’t know what we’re looking at.”

“Have you ever staked anybody in one of these ghost ships to see what happens?”

“A couple of times, yeah. When we put someone in here, they disappear along with everything else. Conrad Hartmann was supposed to show us where this stuff was going.”

“When did this concrete and lead disappear?”

Shrieve seemed a little bemused. “How about last night.”

She looked at him. “Somebody moved two hundred tons of concrete and lead overnight?”

“Hey. You got any ideas, don’t keep them to yourself.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. Yeah, she had an idea. Suddenly the old warehouse had taken on a chill.

“I saw something once,” she said. She had seen it in Berlin, but she didn’t tell him that. “Find a light switch. Make this place completely dark.”

“And then what?”

She shook her head. She didn’t want to say. She hoped she was wrong.

Shrieve found a master light switch by the stairs. For one moment, the room was completely black. She let out a sigh of relief. She’d always been prey to an overactive imagination. Maybe she hadn’t really seen what she thought she had. Maybe whatever she’d seen in Berlin had all been the product of terror and malnutrition.

Then a glimmer of phosphorescence appeared in the center of the wall. Retinal fatigue? She blinked her eyes. The glimmer became a light. It took on form. The radiance etched itself across the wall, and then cut back to form an angle, three meters down to the floor of the warehouse.

The light grew bright enough she could see Charley Shrieve in the middle of the room. His eyes narrowed to a disbelieving squint, his mouth puckered like he was eating an aspirin.

The diagram was huge. It engulfed the empty room like a tidal wave of light. Even as she watched, the floor was divided all around her into an articulated mural, the color of a radium watch dial—only, one slash at a time, as if the wall were being systematically shredded to reveal an ocean of green lava.

“What is this?” He stared around himself as green lights ate up the floor. “What am I looking at?”

Susan’s heart sank. “It’s some sort of interdimensional transportation system,” she managed. “The man who showed it to me called it an ‘Angle Web.’ ”

The lines spread up through the floor like arrows of frost across a window pane. Was it her imagination, or did the darkness to either side carry a certain depth that went beyond the floor?

“ ‘Angle Web.’ One of your Zentralbund extractions show you this?”

In fact, the man who showed her the Angle Web had not asked for extraction. And why should he? With the Angle Web, he wouldn’t need her help to get to Paraguay. He didn’t need her help to get anywhere.

“I need a cigarette,” she whispered. Charley Shrieve was there with a smoke. She tried to light it herself. But something was wrong with her goddamn Ronson; the flame wouldn’t stop shaking.

Shrieve’s lighter worked just fine. “I need to know how this Angle Web works,” he said.

“Christ, I don’t know,” she said. “I saw somebody do this magic trick. He drew this diagram, he disappeared.”

“Who was he?”

“A mass murderer.” She had to clear her throat to say it louder. “He had a code name, ‘Galileo.’ ”

“Is this Galileo available to us? Can he tell us what’s going on?”

Susan saw herself trembling at the precipice. She could play dumb and be packing her bags for New York this very evening. She could be a wise guy and be back in the war with her next breath.

“I know just enough to make myself a target,” she said.

“Is it this Galileo you’re worried about?”

Susan laughed. It should be so simple. “What are you going to tell me? That you can protect me?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

Shrieve took a deep drag on his own cigarette. Sudden light bloomed beneath his eyes. Even with the shadows dancing demoniacally upward, his eyes held a certain sadness that she had seen in other case officers she’d known.

Charley Shrieve had let people slip out of reach, hadn’t he? Terrible things had happened to those people; Charley had never forgiven himself. But that didn’t matter. If it came down to it, he would let her go as quickly as the others.