Lost Signals (38 page)

The subject was observed with her 13-year-old son, Alex Dietrich, attacking police officers in an alleyway adjacent the precinct. The subjects fired on the policemen, killing one more. The subject was detained, sustaining non-life threatening injuries. Her son escaped and has not been heard from since. The subject was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment in Stammheim Prison.

As a result of a general clemency upon the reunification of Germany (as well as good conduct on the subject’s part), the subject was released early in 1991.

Upon her release, this office attempted to conduct surveillance on the subject, based on the fact that the subject befriended several suspected foreign terrorists while in prison, including Libyans and Palestinians. However, the subject immediately disappeared from Berlin upon release. It was rumored that she was training with either Basque separatists or a German cell of PLO operatives, although neither was confirmed.

On August 6, 1992, the subject was spotted near the north Berlin hostel riots, which were sparked by Neo-Nazis and involved arson and assaults against Vietnamese, Roma, and Israeli emigrants looking for work. It was suspected that she would pick up where she left off and assist in the attacks against foreigners. The subject was being followed, but she managed to shake surveillance while moving through Berlin . . .

***

Berlin—1992

Elsa’s imminent task hung as heavy on her heart as the explosive vest under her jacket.

The Bernauerstrausse’s black, rain-drenched asphalt shone like glass under the heels of the riot police as they stormed north toward the distant gunshots. She stopped at the alley that cut between Berlin’s Police Section 31 and a high-rise apartment covered in puffy gray graffiti lettering.

Uniformed police crowded the front of the station. Plain-clothes supervisors shouted out assignments to the riot police being deployed to the Lichtenberg Roma tenements. Although it was noon on a Monday, the rest of the street lay quiet as if only inhabited by the dead. Two polizei cars screamed by, their high-low sirens reaching ear-piercing volume as they passed. An old lady peeked out of the window of a bratwurst shop across the road. An old man pulled her away from the window and the curtain fall back across the shop’s dark windows.

Elsa turned and continued down the alley, her sweaty hand clasped over the detonator in her jacket pocket.

She had no one else in the world. Her shaky fingers and slamming heartbeat weren’t for the fear of death, but for fear of whether or not she could do what she came to do, once she entered the inhuman lair buried under the Berlin streets. It was something she’d thought about every day of her fourteen years in prison. All contacts she made and favors she curried were for this moment.

The stomping footfalls and shouts drifted behind her as she made her way down the garbage-strewn alley. A cold wave of déjà vu poured over her with the approach of the last place she ever saw Alex.

She turned behind the police station.

The steel grating still remained at the foot of the building, along with its attendant vagrant. This time, the guardian was a woman in an oversized army coat and dingy hair that hung in ropes from under a threadbare beanie.

The woman lay on a flattened cardboard box. She rolled over and faced Elsa as she walked up to her.

The bum’s eyes narrowed in recognition. “You,” she said, flashing blackened teeth. “You
 
!”

Elsa pulled out a small automatic pistol and aimed at the woman’s head before she could get to her feet. The gunshot echoed through the alley just as it did fourteen years before—a dull crack that bounced off the dingy brick walls.

The woman’s head snapped to the side. Her wide eyes stared upward while the small hole in her temple leaked a viscous, black fluid onto the cardboard.

A rusty squeal emitted from the steel grating.

A girl stood on the steps below the tunnel’s entrance, her hands gripping the bars like she was in a jail cell. Empty brown eyes peered up at Elsa.

Elsa looked at the gun in her hand.

She’d thought about this moment hundreds of times while in jail.

After emerging from the underground hallway, the girl would go join her brethren and wage war on others. Elsa could put her down right now—she was already lost, anyway.

Or she could snuff out the source, and maybe break the cosmic curse that infected so many.

Elsa looked around the corner of the alley toward the front of the precinct. Nothing to indicate that her gunshot had been heard. She pocketed the pistol and lifted the cage.

The girl climbed out. She looked down at the bum, back up at Elsa. Her lips curled back in a sneer.

Still holding the heavy grating up, Elsa reached in her pocket for the pistol.

The girl walked away, her eyes fixed on Elsa. Eventually, she ran off down the sub-alley, heading toward more fruitful prey.

Elsa stepped down into the entryway and lowered the grating over her. She breathed in the damp air. The same stone walls dripped with green dew. And the same burnt orange lights that lined the hall every six paces.

Elsa curled her fingers around the detonator and walked down the hall.

After four light fixtures, she arrived at the next steps.

She made her way down each one, hesitant, and then the music met her as she descended lower.

The same tinny rhapsody that she’d last heard under this same building.

The same song that played through her head every day for fourteen years in her small, cinderblock cell.

Before her, lit in the ghostly orange light, stood the plain office door with a frosted glass window. The brass plaque tacked over the door
 
:

‘SWEDISH RHAPSODY NO. 1’ STATION

A voice picked up through the door—clear, just feet away, vice broadcast over a speaker.

Achtung
 
!

A cold wash of dread spilled down Elsa’s neck and arms.

Eins, Zwei, Sieben, Sieben, Sieben . . .

The numbers were recited in cool, robotic precision, but not the same voice that Elsa remembered.

Elsa flung the door open. It banged against stone as she lunged into the room with the detonator in one hand and the pistol in the other.

The first person to react was a man with a shaved head. He shot up from the stool—the same the Soviet officer had occupied fifteen years earlier. He wore a leather jacket and dirty jeans and he fumbled for a pistol in his waistband.

“No
 
!” Elsa pointed the pistol at him. “I’ve got a bomb.” She held the detonator out in her locked arm.

At the back of the room, the open doorway revealed a line of children in front of the vault.

The man froze and looked at the hidden speaker in the chair. The child finished speaking his guttural, alien syllables into the floating green orb and the music stopped. The office chair squealed as it turned toward Elsa.

Staring up at her with a gray, emaciated face—withered and rotten with the strange, decelerated decomposition—was Alex.

A whimper escaped her grief-choked throat. She realized she’d fallen to her knees when he stood from the chair and approached her.

The bald guard stepped away from them, his back against the concrete wall. He slipped a pistol from his belt, but Elsa didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was that she was face-to-face with her son, probably for the last time.

Another child exited the vault, passed them, and entered the hallway. He stared straight ahead, the same vacant, slack gaze as the rest.

“You can’t stop it.” Alex’s voice was gravelly, neutral. “Chop one head off, two more sprout.” He approached her, arms open for a wide embrace. One eye—his blue eyes Elsa so adored when he was a baby—was red with burst veins and his skin hung as if about to slough to the ground. His lips were raw tatters and his breath smelled like road kill left to cook on asphalt. “It’s no use. Just come with me, Mother.”

Hot tears flowed down her cheeks and she tried to think of him before he disappeared. Always with a smile.

“Come with us.” He put his arms around her and the smell of his skin—like sweet, musty soil—filled her nose.

But she still wanted to go with him and she leaned into his shoulder, nothing but bones and parchment-thin skin under the soiled clothes he’d worn the day she last saw him.

He wrapped his arms around her, but the embrace was empty. It was hard and forceful, like the police apprehending a dangerous criminal.

The realization plunked like a stone into a pond. It was not the tender gesture of a boy who held his mother during the gunfire of the German Autumn.

She pressed the detonator button.

All the darkness and despair within her ignited in a flash of cordite and fire.

Elsa had already stepped one foot in oblivion fifteen years before. Better late than never.

New York, September 30 CP FLASH

Ambassador Holliwell died here today. The end came suddenly as the ambassador was alone in his study . . .

There is something
ungodly about these night wire jobs. You sit up here on the top floor of a skyscraper and listen in to the whispers of a civilization. New York, London, Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore—they’re your next-door neighbors after the streetlights go dim and the world has gone to sleep.

Alone in the quiet hours between two and four, the receiving operators doze over their sounders and the news comes in. Fires and disasters and suicides. Murders, crowds, catastrophes. Sometimes an earthquake with a casualty list as long as your arm. The night wire man takes it down almost in his sleep, picking it off on his typewriter with one finger.

Once in a long time you prick up your ears and listen. You’ve heard of some one you knew in Singapore, Halifax or Paris, long ago. Maybe they’ve been promoted, but more probably they’ve been murdered or drowned. Perhaps they just decided to quit and took some bizarre way out. Made it interesting enough to get in the news.

But that doesn’t happen often. Most of the time you sit and doze and tap, tap on your typewriter and wish you were home in bed.

Sometimes, though, queer things happen. One did the other night, and I haven’t got over it yet. I wish I could.

You see, I handle the night manager’s desk in a western seaport town
 
; what the name is, doesn’t matter.

There is, or rather was, only one night operator on my staff, a fellow named John Morgan, about forty years of age, I should say, and a sober, hard-working sort.

He was one of the best operators I ever knew, what is known as a “double” man. That means he could handle two instruments at once and type the stories on different typewriters at the same time. He was one of the three men I ever knew who could do it consistently, hour after hour, and never make a mistake.

Generally, we used only one wire at night, but sometimes, when it was late and the news was coming fast, the Chicago and Denver stations would open a second wire, and then Morgan would do his stuff. He was a wizard, a mechanical automatic wizard which functioned marvelously but was without imagination.

On the night of the sixteenth he complained of feeling tired. It was the first and last time I had ever heard him say a word about himself, and I had known him for three years.

It was just three o’clock and we were running only one wire. I was nodding over the reports at my desk and not paying much attention to him, when he spoke.

“Jim,” he said, “does it feel close in here to you
 
?”

“Why, no, John,” I answered, “but I’ll open a window if you like.”

“Never mind,” he said. “I reckon I’m just a little tired.”

That was all that was said, and I went on working. Every ten minutes or so I would walk over and take a pile of copy that had stacked up neatly beside the typewriter as the messages were printed out in triplicate.

It must have been twenty minutes after he spoke that I noticed he had opened up the other wire and was using both typewriters. I thought it was a little unusual, as there was nothing very “hot” coming in. On my next trip I picked up the copy from both machines and took it back to my desk to sort out the duplicates.

The first wire was running out the usual sort of stuff and I just looked over it hurriedly. Then I turned to the second pile of copy. I remembered it particularly because the story was from a town I had never heard of
 
: “Xebico.” Here is the dispatch. I saved a duplicate of it from our files
 
:

Xebico, Sept 16 CP BULLETIN

The heaviest mist in the history of the city settled over the town at 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon. All traffic has stopped and the mist hangs like a pall over everything. Lights of ordinary intensity fail to pierce the fog, which is constantly growing heavier.

Scientists here are unable to agree as to the cause, and the local weather bureau states that the like has never occurred before in the history of the city.

At 7 P.M. last night the municipal authorities . . . (more)

That was all there was. Nothing out of the ordinary at a bureau headquarters, but, as I say, I noticed the story because of the name of the town.