St. Aurelian’s

We killed the sirens a mile out.

It was a thing I had not seen before and I did not like it. The convoy had been running hard, six unmarked cars and two black armored vans, with their lights strobing silently through the rain; and then, as we turned off the main road onto the long cracked service lane that leads to the salvage yards, Leo spoke a single word into his radio and every light went out at once. The world fell dark. The tires hissed on wet tarmac. Through the windshield I could see nothing but a wedge of gray road in the headlamps, and on either side the black, hunched, ragged shapes of scrap heaps, rising like the backs of sleeping beasts.

"Ten minutes," said the driver.

I sat in the back seat with my hands on my knees. Beside me, Vera Castellano was checking her weapon. She did it quickly and without fuss, her thumb on the slide, her eyes on nothing. In front, Leo was talking to the commander of the tactical team in a low, steady, quiet voice. They were using numbers instead of names.

I had been told to stay with the vehicle.

I had every intention of doing so.

…

The church came out of the rain like a ship out of fog.

It stood at the end of the lane, on a low rise, behind a rusted iron fence. It was larger than I had expected, a gaunt, dark, soot-colored building of Gothic stone, with a high pitched roof, a rose window blind with grime, and a square tower at the western end that rose, in the failing light, to a height of perhaps a hundred and thirty feet. At the top of the tower a louvered belfry opened like a dark mouth. Weeds grew from the gutters. A sheet of corrugated iron, torn from somewhere, flapped on the porch. And behind it, on the east side, divided from the churchyard by a wire fence and a drift of dead leaves, stretched a mile of rusting cars and coiled cable and mountains of crushed metal, with a gantry crane standing over them like a gallows.

The convoy stopped.

Doors opened without a sound. Men in black spilled out, silent, in helmets and goggles and body armor, with short rifles slung across their chests. I counted twelve. They moved in a double line toward the iron gate, bent low, stepping on the wet ground as though it were glass. Each rifle had a thin red beam under the barrel, and the beams drifted over the wall of the church like the fingers of a blind man.

I got out of the car.

I do not know why. I think I had never really meant to stay.

"Doc," said Leo, in a furious whisper, "I said—"

"I know what you said."

"If there's something in there—"

"There is," I said. "That's why."

…

I will not describe the breach in detail, because I did not see all of it. I saw the door.

It was a pair of heavy oak doors, bound in black iron, set into a pointed arch at the base of the tower. It had been locked with a chain and padlock. Two men in black carried a hydraulic ram between them, a squat red steel cylinder the length of a man's leg, and they set it against the lock with the careful tenderness of surgeons. Leo raised his hand. He held it there for a heartbeat.

He brought it down.

The sound was extraordinary. It was not a bang but a crack, a sharp flat cough of splintering wood and tearing iron that went rolling away across the scrap yard and came back in echo off a hundred metal walls. The doors burst inward. A wave of black figures went through them like water through a breach in a dam. Torch beams jabbed in all directions. A voice shouted, "Police! Police! Down on the ground!" and another, and another, and the words fell over one another until they were a single roar.

I went in behind them.

…

It was dark inside.

It was the particular dark of a place that has been empty a long time. The air was cold and thick and tasted of old plaster and rat droppings. A smell of rust came off the walls. The torch beams threw long wavering stripes across a floor of cracked red tiles, past the broken ranks of pews, the rotted altar rail, the stump of a lectern. Pigeons exploded out of the rafters with a clatter of wings. Somewhere something dripped.

"Clear!" cried a voice from the left.

"Clear, north transept!"

"Clear! Sacristy!"

"Clear!"

They went through the church like a gale, room by room, and one after another the calls came back, flat and short. I walked down the nave behind them, with my hands in my pockets and my collar turned up, listening. I knew before I had gone twenty yards that there was nobody there. One develops a sense for these things. A house with a man in it has a kind of tension, a held breath. This place had the hollow, easy silence of a shell.

At the far end of the nave, behind the altar, a low door stood open in the east wall.

Beyond it, a flight of concrete steps ran down into the dark.

…

The scrap yard office was on the other side.

I could not have told you how it connected. There had been a passage once, I think, from the old sacristy to the parish hall, and somebody had knocked through the wall and floored it with plywood. It was a long, low, windowless chamber, perhaps sixty feet across, with a ceiling of corrugated steel and a floor of poured concrete. It had been a warehouse. It had been a sort of machine shop. Now it was something else.

I stopped in the doorway.

Down the center of the room ran a long double row of black steel racks, each taller than a man, each packed with flat gray boxes and fans and coils of colored cable. Lights blinked in the dark, green and amber and red. A faint steady humming filled the place, like a hive. A thick bundle of cable as wide as my arm ran from the racks to a hole in the wall, and through the hole, I knew, to the great grid of the salvage yard and the rusting cranes. It was beautiful in its way. It was the most orderly place I had been in all week.

And it was on fire.

"Back!" Leo was shouting. "Everyone back! Everyone out!"

Smoke was pouring from the racks in thick white sheets. It rolled across the ceiling and down the walls, and the lights in the machines went out one by one like lamps in a town under siege. A horrible smell rose in the air, thick and sweet and chemical, the smell of plastic and solder and burning dust. Somewhere in the heart of the machines something was popping and spitting with a sound like fat in a pan. I covered my mouth. My eyes were streaming.

"It's thermal," said Ryder.

He had come up beside me in a respirator. His voice came muffled and urgent through the filter.

"It's the same thing as the drive. He's got a heating element in every board. They're all running off one trigger. We tripped it when we came in the door."

"How long?"

"It's done. It's done. Look at it." He put a gloved hand against the nearest rack and pulled it away. "The platters are slag. Everything's fused. If there was anything on those disks, it's gone."

A crash behind me. I turned.

Leo had hit the wall.

…

He had hit it with his whole fist. He stood with his back to us, his head bowed and his shoulder blades rigid under his wet coat, and a spray of white plaster dust drifted down from the place where his knuckles had gone through the wall. He drew his hand back. There was blood on it. He stared at the blood. And then, in a low and quite terrible voice, as though he were reading a sentence from a book, he said, "Twenty-six years."

Nobody answered.

"Twenty-six years, and I'm one door behind a man who plants a machine in a lift."

"Leo," said Vera.

"Don't." He drew a long ragged breath. "Don't, Vera. Just give me a second."

I left him.

I walked slowly down the length of the room, past the smoking racks, with my sleeve over my face. I had nothing to say. There was nothing, in the circumstances, that wanted saying. But I have found that grief is best borne by a man who is permitted to be looked at by no one, and I thought it a kindness to turn my back.

I stopped, instead, at the far end of the room.

…

I want to tell you what I saw, exactly, and in order, because I have found that it helps.

On the left of the room, in the corner, stood a refrigerator. It was a small white one, the sort a student might have in a dormitory, scarred and speckled with rust. The door was ajar. The inside was dark and empty, except for a single wire shelf, and a ring of dried condensation on the bottom where a dish had stood.

Beside it, a folding table. On the table, a row of glassware: flasks, beakers, a rack of narrow tubes. Everything had been washed. Everything was dry. A clean white towel lay folded beside a spirit lamp, and the arrangement had about it the quiet tidiness of a surgeon's tray. A wooden crate stood under the table, its slats pried up. In the crate, packed in straw, stood row upon row of small brown glass ampoules, each the length of a finger, each sealed with a nub of wax. Each bore a printed label, white with a black stripe. On each label, in tiny numerals, was a lot number.

L-0417-A. L-0417-B. L-0417-C.

I counted them. There were forty.

On the corner of the table, squared exactly with its edge, lay a notebook. A fat one, with a black plastic cover and a spiral spine, of the sort that schoolchildren use. It was unmarked. It was closed. I did not touch it. I looked at it for a long time, and the thing I noticed was not the notebook, but the squareness of it. A man who had set it down like that, in a room that he knew was going to burn, had taken the time to line it up with the edge of the table.

He wanted it found, I thought.

Or: he could not bear to leave it crooked.

I could not decide which. It was an important question, and I put it carefully away, in the cold place at the back of my mind where I keep such things.

And then I raised my eyes, and I saw the wall.

It rose behind the last of the racks, a long bare surface of old red brick, stretching from floor to ceiling. It was not bare. It was covered. Every inch of it, from the baseboard to the beams, was layered with paper: cuttings, photographs, notes, diagrams, lists, map pages, scraps of handwriting, all stuck on with tape and pins and gobs of wax. In the ruddy gloom, with the smoke curling about it, it looked like the skin of some huge pale animal.

I took a step toward it.

I took another.

And in the smoke behind me, very faintly, I heard Ryder say, in a puzzled voice, "Captain? Is it supposed to be that hot up there?"