Chapter 15: The Strahov
Since Lara had imagined the Strahov as a futuristic high-tech fortress, she was both disappointed and pleasantly surprised to find nothing more than a bland warehouse with red brick walls. The hall was split in two square halves by a huge wall to Lara's left, and long containers were stacked up on both sides. A magnet crane, which the Agency had recently purchased from a Czech car dump, slowly moved across the ceiling to transport the containers around the warehouse. Lara noticed that all the crates were marked: 'Turkey, Cappadocia'.
"Where have I heard that place mentioned before?"
Lara started walking across the hall, but froze as a metallic noise echoed from above. She looked up at the descending crane, which was lowered onto the top crate of a stack to her right. "I'd better catch that ride."
Lara jumped up on a crate to her left, turned around and leapt on to the top of the container being lifted by the crane. Her sweat-dripping fingers nearly slipped off the edge of the ascending crate. A fear of heights filled her mind, but she quickly pulled up and stood on top of the moving container. The feeling of gliding along a few metres under the ceiling was vertigo-inducing.
Lara looked down at the view of the warehouse floor, as the crane led her over the wall to the left side of the building. Three Agency soldiers were patrolling the area, bluish beams sweeping around from the flashlights attached to their weapons.
"Bugger," the intruder breathed, eyes darting around for a way to avoid landing in the commandos' territory. She noticed a metal walkway to her right. Lara ran across the moving container and leapt through the stale warehouse air. With perfect timing, gravity dragged her down to land on the middle of the walkway.
"I don't want to draw too much attention to myself." Lara hurried to the right side of the walkway, where the soldiers below would be least likely to see her. With quick, quiet footsteps, she rushed down to the far corner of the hall and stepped through a steel door.
The narrow room beyond made a sharp contrast to the immense warehouse she had just left. Another steel door was located in the white wall to her left. Lara tried to enter the next warehouse, but the door refused to budge. The trespasser produced her security pass and swiped it through. With an affirmative beep, the door swung open.
"Thank you, Luddick," Lara muttered and walked on to the low-security area.
Dr. Grant Muller walked down the cold, sterile hallway of the Sanatorium. His footsteps on the black-and-white tiles echoed through the complex, mixing with the cacophony of screams and sobs that came from the patients' cells on both sides of the corridor. Most of the patients wore muzzles and grey suits, but the newer additions to Boaz' collection had still not gone through the initiatory procedures – shaving, electroshock, starvation in case of obesity, abortion in case of pregnancy, sterilization and, finally, the restrictive uniform, which guards had aptly nicknamed 'the cocoon'.
But unlike caterpillars, Boaz' patients would never emerge from their cocoons as beautiful butterflies. The Sanitarium, as Boaz had called it with her typical dry irony, was not designed to cure its so-called patients of psychic illnesses. It was designed to birth and nurture darkness in the human mind. Its 'treatment' was the apotheosis of sadism.
Muller had roamed these gloomy corridors many times in the past. He was used to the cries of fear from new patients, the screeches of despair from works in progress and the inhuman snarls and grunts from finished products – the patients in cocoons.
Both Muller and Boaz cared for none of the prisoners of the Sanitarium. The difference between the two Cabal members lay in the fact that, while Muller only felt vaguely disgusted by the torture around him, Boaz took great pleasure in administering it. One could describe her as a modern, female version of Dr. Joseph Mengele.
Muller finally reached the end of the hallway, where a steel door loomed in the green wall. The two Agency soldiers behind him halted, while Muller pressed his palm against the screen next to the door, waiting for the system to recognize his fingerprints. The soldiers were carrying the plastic bag containing the young prostitute's corpse, which Muller would donate for his colleague's experiments.
The door slid aside and revealed Boaz' private lab. Fluorescent tubes on the ceiling brightly lit the square room. Tables at the walls were covered under piles of articles, notebooks and neurosurgical instruments. An autopsy table was situated in the middle of the room. Kristina Boaz stood leaned against the table.
The woman looked at least 58 years old, but plastic surgery had smoothed out the wrinkles. Her face, however, still bore scars from the plane crash she had survived in 1987. She wore a tight, sleeveless lab coat. "Muller," she greeted the man, her voice as cold and sharp as a scalpel's blade.
"Boaz," Muller nodded. "I have brought you the new material."
"Good." Boaz walked up to a cabinet and produced a pair of gloves, which she slipped on in quick, skilled movements. The black latex fit her slender forarms perfectly.
The soldiers carried the bag up to the autopsy table and laid it on the cold, white porcelain. "Back to your warehouse rounds," Boaz ordered.
The soldiers obeyed and closed the steel door on their way out.
Boaz picked up scissors from a table with surgical instruments and cut the black bag open, revealing the nude corpse inside. The girl's nose and navel were adorned with silvery piercings, and her shoulder-length hair was dyed pink. "Prostitute?"
"Y-yes."
The surgeon ran her eyes over the wound in the girl's neck. Dried blood had oozed over the naked torso. "You used a blunt, thin blade, Muller. Probably a letter opener. How unprofessional." Boaz pulled out a miniature tape recorder from the pocket of her green lab coat. "Subject is caucasian, female, 16-19 years of age. Will begin by practicing lobotomy now, at 18:30 PM." In the Sanitarium, one could only keep track of the time with a watch. Neither daylight nor moonlight would ever reach the deep underground corridors and cells.
Boaz' hand hovered indecisively over the table for a second before picking up a long, sharpened instrument. "Using icepick, size 3. Fifteen centimetres long, five millimetres thick," Boaz spoke into the recorder. She then paused the tape and slipped the recorder back into her pocket. "I have always used size 2 on living subjects of this age," she informed Muller. "But maybe I should experiment with larger sizes."
Muller knew the next step of the procedure. He took a few steps backwards to keep his shirt clean.
Boaz gently took the subject's right eyelid and lifted it up from the glazed orb. She slid the icepick across the pupil and positioned it over the back of the eye socket. Then, she plunged the instrument through, into the brain. "Ah, this will work much better than size 2," she said, effortlessly moving the icepick from side to side to cut the brain tissue. "I can hardly wait to see the results on living subjects."
Lara had reached the ventilation ducts. She slowly crawled through the labyrinth, trying to slide her knees and hands over the cold metal as quietly as possible. She couldn't see the area below, but she could hear the footsteps and coughs of several Agency soldiers, along with a few growling dogs.
Lara reached the end of the duct and gazed down at a vertical shaft. She turned around and lowered herself from the edge, dropping five feet to the lower horizontal duct. The intruder stood still for a few seconds, wondering if any of the guards had been alarmed. Concluding that no one had heard her, Lara got on her hands and knees and crawled on through the duct. She soon reached a vent in the bottom of the passage and peeked through the grating at the narrow, unremarkable room below.
The woman's eyes widened at the sight of her mission's target, standing at the far wall.
Eckhardt.
The man was moving his hand over the smooth, white wall, as if drawing a circle. Lara once more speculated on the purpose of the metallic, dark brown glove on his right hand. A strange, grinding noise emanated from the gloved palm sliding over the wall. "What the hell is he doing?"
The door to the room burst open, and Gunderson came marching in. He hauled a familiar Czech reporter with him.
"Luddick!" Lara's breath caught in her throat.
The journalist struggled to escape, but Gunderson's vice-like hands subdued the man with awe-inspiring ease. The mercenary leader dragged Luddick across the room and pushed him down on a small, uncomfortable chair in the middle. "You can't keep me here," Luddick said. "My paper will miss me if I don't report in."
"Found him skulking around in the loading bay," Gunderson explained. "Must have got a pass code."
Eckhardt pivoted to glower at the man on the chair. "How very fortunate for me that you arrived just now, whoever you are." The alchemist's glare shifted to meet Gunderson's blue eyes. "Close the door on your way out, Gunderson."
The man obeyed and disappeared down the corridor outside, leaving Eckhardt alone with Luddick.
"No, wait!" Luddick protested. "I know about you, and your Mafia operations! You can't …"
"Mafia! Mafia!" Eckhardt let out a brief travesty of a laughter, the sound completely devoid of mirth. "Oh my, you are so very much out of your depth. No, what you have stumbled into is something much more, ah, accomplished than those oafs." The alchemist reached up his right hand and brushed the light bulb hanging from the ceiling with his gloved fingers. Lara thought she could see a slight spark between the fingers and the bulb, as if he was actually drawing energy from the electric light.
"I have records on you, Eckhardt!" Luddick said. "You can't hurt me!"
"If only there was time for us to read them together," Eckhardt sighed. "But it's too late now. There are things to be done."
Luddick opened his mouth to reply, but only an agonized scream came out, as Eckhardt's gloved hand shot out and pressed against the reporter's chest. The unmistakeable noise of electrocution filled the room and reverberated down the vent duct where Lara sat. Luddick's body shook with convulsions and was enveloped in a sizzling, blue glow emitted by Eckhardt's glove. The stench of burning flesh seeped up through the vent and clogged Lara's nostrils. There was a loud, nauseating crack as the reporter's ribcage snapped. Clothes and skin peeled off, revealing the fragile flesh inside.
And then, on the wall Eckhardt had been sliding his hand over, blood appeared out of thin air. The crimson liquid materialized like invisible ink illuminated by heat. The blood formed a circular symbol, which Lara immediately recognized from the wall of Von Croy's apartment. "The Monstrum's Blood Sign …"
As Eckhardt let the lethal energy stream from his glove, his mouth dropped open as if in ecstasy. His head lolled back, and for a brief moment, his cold, narrow eyes seemed to lock onto Lara in the vent duct. The woman gasped and drew back from the opening.
The alchemist finally released his grip on Luddick, and the electrocuted man slumped down on the chair, his scream trailing off to silence. Warm smoke rose from the corpse, along with a stench of burnt flesh. Eckhardt pivoted and walked out of the room.
"Unbelievable. That glove must have some kind of alchemic power." Lara crawled on down the duct, eager to get away from the reek of Luddick's corpse.
At the end of the duct, Lara found herself peering down from under the ceiling of a wide hallway. A guard walked by below. The flashlight beam from his machine pistol swept over the large cable spools, crates and pallets that were haphazardly scattered along the walls. Lara somersaulted out of the duct and landed on the floor behind the guard. He never catched a glimpse of the intruder, as two female arms slipped around his head and snapped his neck.
Lara searched the corpse's uniform and found a high security pass. She then followed the hallway to a security office at the end. A large window allowed to spot her enemies inside the room before she unlocked the door with her security pass and burst into the office, Viper SMG blazing. One of the guards was standing at the control panel, while the other two were having lunch in a narrow lounge. Lara took care of the guard at the panel first, then filled the other two with lead before they could even stand from their chairs.
Lara stepped over the guard's body and walked up to the control panel. A plethora of buttons, switches and screens beeped up at her. One of the screens showed a small map of the entire Strahov complex. An area slightly below the Biodome, south of the Sanitarium, was marked with a large, menacing biohazard symbol. The place apparently needed 'maximum containment security' and was riddled with guards, invisible lasers and thick steel gates. "I wonder what needs that kind of security to keep it in?"
Lara laid her index fingertip on the screen and traced her route through the buildings. "Wouldn't you know it – my route goes through that 'Biodome' … It's a long way around, unless I can shut the power off to that section."
She flicked the main power switch – "I'll shut the whole lot down to be sure". The security systems of the 'Biodome', 'Sanitarium' and 'Proto-Containment Area' collapsed like houses of cards. "That's it," Lara walked out of the office and hurried down the hallway. "Better get moving whilst the grid is down."
Agency soldier #17429 stood in the observation room just outside the Proto's containment hall. A window of thick plexiglass offered a view of the immense, cylindrical area, which was bathed in a red glare from the searchlights higher up. Walkways and ladders lined the circular wall. A containment chamber was suspended in the middle of the huge cylinder – the Proto cage.
Soldier #17429 had almost forgotten his real name. When someone joined the Agency, their name would always be replaced by a random six-digit number, and soldiers would only call each other by these numbers to remain anonymous. No one wanted to know anything about their colleagues' private lives (if they even had any), and no one wanted the whole Agency to be revealed if a single soldier with too much knowledge was caught by police. #17429 had been working for the Agency for twenty years.
Suddenly, the searchlights went out, shrouding the area in darkness. 17429 cursed, his hands flying over the control panel. Apparently, someone had turned the power off in the main security office. 17429 pondered who on earth could have been stupid or treachorous enough to do that. The situation wouldn't have been so dangerous if #24451 and 23895 hadn't been out in the Proto's containment cylinder, fixing one of the vents in the lower level.
"The security system is shut down," 17429 spoke into his radio. "I have no idea why." Through the plexiglass window, he could already see the two soldiers hurrying up the ladder to the observation room's level.
"For fuck's sake, that's not my job!" 24451 said, his voice frustrated and panicky. "Why's it shut down!"
"We got lights and communication, but nothing else. Just don't panic; I'm sure we can ..."
"Don't tell me not to panic," 23895 yelled, reaching the top of the ladder. "We're like sitting ducks out here!"
The Proto's cage shook violently, and the door was ripped off its hinges. A shadow slipped out from the dark doorway, crawling towards the observation room like a cross between a rat and a wolf. Its narrow eyes were feasted on 17429 behind the window. The soldier glanced at his two comrades, who were still sprinting up the walkway, hoping to reach the safety of the observation room. The door next to the control panel was wide open.
"But they're not going to make it," 17429 realized.
He swiftly pressed the button to close the door. A steel plate slid down to block the opening, saving him from the escaped Proto while condemning 23895 and 24451 to death. The two soldiers pounded on the cold, merciless surface. 17429 could hear their muffled screams: "Lemme in! Don't let it get me!" "Don't leave us here, dammit! Open the door!"
Then, a roaring shadow leapt onto 23895 and ripped his gasmask-covered head off. Blood sprayed over 24451's uniform, soaking the thick blue fabric. The soldier screamed and took aim with his automatic weapon, but before he could fire a single bullet, the shadow had pinned him to the floor and sent the pistol clattering across the walkway.
From his position in the observation room, 17429 couldn't see the mutilation of his comrade 24451. He could merely watch the spiky, deformed shadows dancing over the walls in the beam from the flashlight attached to 24451's discarded gun. And, for half a second, silence reigned.
Then 17429 winced as a fresh blood squirted across the window, and 24451 let out a final agonized screech. His assailant crawled away, climbed down the wall like a spider and slipped into a vent duct.
The Proto-Nephilim was loose.
A/N: In case you didn't know, that little procedure Boaz demonstrated is not fiction. Lobotomy was invented by the Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz in 1935, and was "perfected" one year later by the American Dr. Walter Freeman. Needless to say, it will permanently damage the patient's brain.
Anyway, thanks to my readers and reviewers for following the story thus far. If you have any suggestions for new 'extra scenes', please tell me in your reviews, because I'm starting to run out of ideas …
