the Amber Room

light. He marveled at the ancient shaft. Ein Silberbergwerk. A silver mine. Once the 'treasury of the Holy Roman Emperors,' the earth now lay spent and abandoned, a sordid reminder of the cheap Mexican silver that drove most of the Harz's mines out of business by 1900.

The whole area was spectacular. Knots of pine-clad hills, stunted scrub, and alpine meadows, all beautiful and rugged, yet an eeriness permeated. As Goethe had said in Faust: Where witches held their Sabbath.

It had once been the southwestern corner of East Germany, in the dreaded forbidden zone, and stilted border posts continued to dot the forest. The minefields, shrapnel-scattering trap guns, guard dogs, and barbed-wire fences were now gone. Wende, unification, had put an end to the need for containing an entire population and opened opportunities. Ones he was now exploiting.

He made his way down the wide shaft. The trail was marked every thirty meters by a hundred-watt bulb, and an electrical cord snaked a path back to the generator outside. The rock face was sharp, the floor rubble strewn, the work of an initial team he'd sent in last weekend to clear the passage.

That had been the easy part. Jackhammers and air guns. No need to worry about long-lost Nazi explosives, the tunnel had been sniffed by dogs and surveyed by demolitionists. The lack of anything even remotely concerned with explosives was worrisome. If this was indeed the right mine, the one Germans used to stash the art from Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich museum, then it would almost certainly have been mined. Yet nothing had been found. Just rock, silt, sand, and thousands of bats. The nasty little bastards populated offshoots of the main shaft during winter, and of all the species in the world, this one had to be endangered. Which explained why the German government had been so hesitant about granting him an exploration permit. Luckily, the bats left the mine every May, not to return until mid-July. A precious forty-five days to explore. That had been all the German government would grant. His permit required the mine be empty when the beasts returned.

The deeper he strolled into the mountain, the larger the shaft became--which also was troublesome. The normal routine was for the tunnels to narrow, eventually becoming impassable, the miners excavating until it proved impossible to burrow any farther. All the shafts were a testament to centuries of mining, each generation trying to better the one before and uncover a vein of previously undetected ore. But for all its width, the size of this shaft still concerned him. It was simply far too narrow to stash anything as large as the loot he was searching for.

He approached his three-man work crew. Two men stood on ladders, another below, each boring holes at sixty-degree angles into the rock. Cables fed air and electricity. The generators and compressors stood fifty meters behind him, outside in the morning air. Harsh, hot, blue-white lights illuminated the scene and drenched the crew in sweat.

The drills stopped and the men slipped off their ear protection. He, too, slipped off his sound muffs. 'Any idea how we're doin'?' he asked.

One of the men shoved fogged goggles from his eyes and mopped the perspiration on his brow. 'We've moved about a foot forward today. No way to tell how much farther, and I'm afraid to jackhammer.'

Another of the men reached for a jug. Slowly, he filled the drilled holes with solvent. McKoy stepped close to the wall of rock. The porous granite and limestone instantly drank in the brown syrup from each hole, the caustic chemical expanding, creating fissions in the stone. Another goggled man approached with a sledgehammer. One blow and the rock shattered in sheets, crumbling to the ground. Another few inches forward now excavated.

'Slow goin',' he said.

'But the only way to do it,' came a voice from behind.

McKoy turned to see Herr Doktor Alfred Grumer standing in the cavern. He was tall, with spindly arms and legs, gaunt to the point of caricature, a graying Vandyke beard bracketing pencil-thin lips. Grumer was the resident expert on the dig, possessed of a degree from the University of Heidelberg in art history. McKoy had latched on to Grumer three years ago during his last venture into the Harz mines. The man boasted both expertise and greed, two attributes he not only admired but also needed in his business associates.

'We're runnin' out of time,' McKoy said.

Grumer stepped close. 'There's another four weeks left on your permit. We'll get through.'

'Assumin' there's something to get through to.'

'The chamber is there. The radar soundings confirm it.'

'But how goddamned far into that rock?'

'That's hard to say. But something is in there.'

'And how the hell did it get there? You said the radar soundin's confirmed multiple sizable metallic objects.' He motioned back beyond the lights. 'That shaft is hardly big enough for three people to walk through.'

A thin grin lined Grumer's face. 'You assume this is the only way in.'

'And you assume I'm a bottomless money pit.'

The other men reset their drills and started a new bore. McKoy drifted back into the shaft, beyond the lights, where it was cooler and quieter. Grumer followed. He said, 'If we don't make some progress by tomorrow, the hell with this drillin'. We're going to dynamite.'

'Your permit requires otherwise.'

He ran a hand through his wet black hair. 'Fuck the permit. We need progress, and fast. I've got a television crew waitin' in town that's costing me two thousand a day. And those fat-ass bureaucrats in Bonn don't have a bunch of investors flying here tomorrow, expectin' to see art.'

'This cannot be rushed,' Grumer said. 'There is no telling what awaits behind the rock.'

'There's supposed to be a huge chamber.'

'There is. And it contains something.'

He softened his tone. It wasn't Grumer's fault the dig was going slow. 'Somethin' gave the ground radar multiple orgasms, huh?'

Grumer smiled. 'A poetic way of putting it.'

'You better damn well hope so or we're both screwed.'

'The German word for 'cave' is hohle,' Grumer said. 'The word for 'hell' is holle. I have always thought the similarity was not without significance.'

'Fuckin' damn interesting, Grumer. But not the right sentiment at the moment, if you get my drift.'

Grumer seemed unconcerned. As always. Another thing about this man that irritated the hell out of him.

'I came down to tell you we have visitors,' Grumer said.

'Not another reporter?'

'An American lawyer and a judge.'

'The lawsuits have started already?'

Grumer flashed one of his condescending grins. He wasn't in the mood. He should fire the irritating fool. But Grumer's contacts within the Ministry of Culture were too valuable to dispense with. 'No lawsuits, Herr McKoy. These two speak of the Amber Room.'

His face lit up.

'I thought you might be interested. They claim to have information.'

'Crackpots?'

'Don't appear to be.'

'What do they want?'

'To talk.'

He glanced back at the wall of rock and the whining drills. 'Why not? Nothing the hell goin' on here.'

Paul turned as the door to the tiny shed swung open. He watched a grizzly bear of a man with a bull neck, thick waist, and bushy black hair enter the whitewashed room. A bulging chest and arms swelled a cotton shirt that was embroidered with MCKOY EXCAVATIONS, and an intense gaze through dark eyes immediately assessed the situation. Alfred Grumer, whom he and Rachel had met a few minutes ago, followed the man inside.

'Herr Cutler, Frau Cutler, this is Wayland McKoy,' Grumer said.

'I don't want to be rude,' McKoy said, 'but this is a critical time around here, and I don't have a lot of time to chitchat. So what can I do for you?'

Paul decided to get to the point. 'We've had an interesting last few days--'

'Which one of you is the judge?' McKoy asked.

'Me,' Rachel said.