The Day After Tomorrow

“Yes, good evening, Herr Frazen.

Two women and a man, all Frazen’s age, looked up .from a card table as Von Holden passed the sitting room and disappeared down the hallway. The women giggled girlishly, agreeing what a dashing figure Von Holden cut in a tuxedo. The men told them to shut up. How Von Holden was dressed or what he was doing there at that time of night was none of their business.

At the far end of the hallway, Von Holden unlocked a door and entered a small paneled study. Impatiently closing the door, he relocked it and went to a grandfather clock in the corner behind a heavy desk. Opening the clock, he took out its winding key and inserted it into a nearly invisible hole in a panel to its left. A quarter twist, and the panel slid back, exposing a highly polished, stainless-steel door with a digital panel inlaid in its upper right corner. As if he were using an automatic teller machine, Von Holden punched in a code. Immediately the door slid back exposing a small elevator. Von Holden stepped in, the door closed and the carved panel slid back into place.

For a full three minutes the elevator descended, then it stopped and Von Holden stepped into a large, rectangular room four hundred feet below the surface of Behrenstrasse. The room was completely bare. Its floor, ceiling and walls were constructed of the same material, five-foot-square panels of ten-inch-thick black marble.

At the far end of the room was a luminous steel panel that looked little more than an expensive metallic abstract. Von Holden’s footsteps echoed as he approached it. Reaching it, he stopped and stood directly in front. “Lugo,” he said. Then he gave his ten-digit identification number, followed with “Bertha,” his mother’s name.

Immediately, a panel to his left pulled back and he entered a long, diffusely lit corridor. This, like the outer room, was also walled with marble. The only difference was that the polished black of the former here was a bluish white, making the effect almost ethereal.

The passage was nearly seventy yards long, without a break for doors, other corridors, or cosmetic decoration. At the far end was another elevator. Reaching it, he gave the same verbal identification, but this time he added a secondary number: 86672.

Five hundred feet down, the elevator stopped. “Lugo,” he said again, and the door slid open and he entered “der Garten,” the Garden, a place only a dozen living people knew existed. With every visit, he felt as if he had stepped onto the set of some fantastic futuristic movie. Even the hackneyed entryway through the private house, with its hidden door and sliding panel, seemed out of some period theatrical melodrama.

But, exaggerated as it was, it was no movie set. Designed in 1939, its original construction was completed in the years 1942-1944 when anti-Nazi intelligence operatives were infiltrating the highest levels of the German Army General Staff, and Allied bombers were striking ever deeper into the heart of the Third Reich.

The existence of der Garten, with its simple, innocuous name, was so secret that at the beginning of construction a side tunnel was cut into a nearby subway line, the line closed off for repairs, and the excavated dirt dug out for the elevator shafts, corridors and rooms pushed into the subway line and trucked off by ore cars using the subway tracks. Equipment, workers and supplies were brought in the same way.

And although the project had taken four hundred men, working around the clock, twenty-one months to complete, no one, not the reidents on Behrenstrasse above, nor the rest of Berlin, had had any idea what was happening beneath their feet. As a final precaution, the four hundred who built it—architects, engineers, laborers —were gassed and buried under a thousand cubic yards of concrete at the base of the second elevator shaft while drinking champagne and celebrating its completion. Relatives who questioned their disappearance were told they had become casualties of Allied bombings. Those who persisted in their inquiries were shot. Later, and over the years, as electronic and structural upgrades were done, the small number of select designers, engineers and craftsmen carefully screened and then employed met similar fates, albeit on a much more singular and clandestine scale. An automobile accident, a freak electrocution, an accidental poisoning, a hunting blunder. Things tragic but understandable.

So, except for the select handful at the highest level of Nazi power who knew, the immense piece of work that was der Garten simply did not exist. And now, nearly a half century later, save for Scholl and Von Holden and the remaining few others at the top of the Organization, it still didn’t.

A door slid open in front of Von Holden and he entered a long spherical corridor inlaid with thousands of white ceramic tiles. It was now 8:10. Whatever had happened at the Hotel Borggreve, he had to put it out of his mind. Other than what he had seen, he had no information; therefore it was impossible for him to do anything other than to follow instructions as ordered.

At the halfway point in the corridor, he stopped and faced a door made of red ceramic tiles fused to titanium. Running his fingers over a Braille-like square, he punched in a five-number code and waited until a light above the square glowed green. When it did, he punched in three more numbers. The green light went out and the door raised up from the floor. Ducking his head, he entered, and the door lowered behind him.

It was a long moment before his eyes became accustomed to the near translucent blue-silver hue that filled the room. Even then, there was no feeling of depth or even space. It was as if he had entered a place with no existence at all. A figment of a dream.

Directly in front of him was the vague outline of a wall. Beyond it lay Sector F, der Garten’s innermost room. Small and square, it was protected from above and below and on all four sides by walls of fifteen-inch-thick titanium steel, reinforced by ten feet of concrete that had been laminated every eighteen inches by partitions of a jelly-like substance designed to keep the inner room stable even if subjected to the direct hit of a hydrogen bomb or the rumbling of a ten-point-zero earthquake.

“Lugo,” Von Holden said out loud, waiting as his voice-print was digitally compressed and matched to the digitally compressed original in the archives. A moment later, a panel on the wall next to him slid back and an illuminated translucent glass screen appeared. “Zehn—Sieben— Sieben—Neun—Null—Null—Neun—Null—Vier” (Ten—Seven—Seven—Nine—Zero—Zero—Nine— Zero—Four), he enunciated carefully. Three seconds later black letters materialized on the screen.

LETZTE MITTEILUNG/LEITER DER SICHERHEIT

IREITAG/VIERZEHN/OKTOBER !

(Final Memorandum/Director of Security

Friday/Fourteen/October)

Then the letters disappeared. Leaning forward, Von Holden pressed both hands firmly on the glass, then stood back. Immediately the glass went dark and the panel slid I closed. Ten seconds elapsed while his fingerprints were scanned. Seven seconds later a matrix of dark blue dots appeared on the floor, moving toward the center of the room until they formed an exact two-foot by two-foot square.

“Lugo,” he said again. The square faded and a platform rose out of the floor in its place. On it, cased inside a transparent housing, was a gray metallic-looking box made of a composite of fibers, including carbon, liquid-crystal polymers, and Kevlar. It measured twenty-six inches high by two feet square. It was what he had come for, and what would be presented to the select few at the Ceremony in the Charlottenburg Mausoleum minutes after Elton Lybarger had finished speaking.

From the beginning, it had been code-named Ubermorgen, “the day after tomorrow.” Both a vision and a dream, it was now, and had been, the focus of everything, the thing that would carry the Organization into the next century and beyond. And once it left der Garten, Von Holden would protect it with his life.

118

GRETA STASSEL was the twenty-year-old cabdriver Von Holden had left waiting outside number 45 Behrenstrasse. She’d seen him look at her posted driver’s papers and wondered if he’d remembered her name. She doubted it. He’d seemed troubled, but he was also very sexy and she was thinking how she might help him with