The mere thought about how selfishly Viktor was putting them all at risk to satisfy his vanity by this final unnecessary harvest infuriated Alexei. It took strength of will to stop obsessing about it and suppress murderous thoughts, yet Alexei forced himself to do it. One thing was for certain: There was no way he shared the commander’s blithe disregard of the possibility and seriousness of someone, maybe even the police, coming to the Bennet Estate looking for Jack Stapleton. On the contrary, he thought it could happen at any moment, and thinking in this vein made him suddenly remember JD’s clothes, which he’d hidden in the game room.
Repocketing the Glock, Alexei immediately descended in a minor panic down to the game room. In his agitated state, he wasn’t capable of thinking clearly, and he knew it. He even returned briefly to the changing room, which in his mind had become a crime scene, so he could make absolutely certain that all remnants of JD’s visit had been removed.
A few minutes later, with JD’s clothes under his arm and the Glock in his pocket reassuringly thumping against his thigh, Alexeiused the changing room door to the outside. His intent was to hurry down to the barn and start the process of determining the present concentration of theta prion in the fermenter. But halfway he stopped and looked over at the icehouse, which was closer to the house than the barn, and when he did so, Jack Stapleton and everything he represented, including all Alexei’s fears about being apprehended by the American authorities, came cascading back into his consciousness.
Reaching into his pocket in a renewed panic, Alexei again fondled the Glock. What was currently rocketing through his mind was whether he should take the time, despite Viktor’s specific orders, to walk over, pull open the aged padlock on the heavily insulated icehouse door, and shoot the meddling son of a bitch just to get at least that over with. It would be so easy, so definitive.
Alexei turned around and looked back at the main house. What was now going through his mind was his fear of Viktor, who was infamous for supposedly having summarily executed not one but two insubordinate militiamen in fits of rage. Whether the stories were true or not, Alexei had never been able to confirm, but he’d heard it from multiple sources and had no reason to doubt it.
“????!” Alexei yelled the Russian oath three times, each time getting louder to give vent to his frustration. He was trapped in a lose-lose situation. Then, forcing himself to make a decision, he abandoned the idea of going into the icehouse to rid himself of what he considered his bête noir, at least for the time being. Instead, he recommenced heading to the barn. He even picked up his pace as he began to outline the exact sequence of the next hour or so. His plan was to do a legitimate test of current theta prion concentration in the fermenter and then just change the results when he wrotethem in the log and then give the false results to Viktor. That way if Viktor were to show up while Alexei was working or soon after or wanted to see the log, there wouldn’t be any reason to suspect the results weren’t legitimate. In Alexei’s experience, there’d been plenty of times in the past when Viktor unexpectedly appeared.
Chapter 27
Friday, July 25, 6:15p.m.
Bennet Estate
Hamilton County, New York
In nearly complete darkness Jack Stapleton had heard Alexei’s rising crescendo of what he guessed was swearing, and although he didn’t recognize the language, it snapped him out of his self-recriminating depression and the accompanying self-pitying paralysis. Jack was furious with himself as well as disbelieving that he could have been so damn stupid not to suspect there was something seriously amiss with these supposed Netherlander militiamen. In reality, it didn’t make any sense whatsoever for them to have come thousands of miles to instruct a small handful of youthful, disillusioned, far right, extremist militiamen and demanding in return only a place to stay and transportation. Equally stupid was to have accepted even for a second that they were spending time and effort brewing beer. Where all the equipment had come from to form a makeshift recombinant laboratory in the barn, he had no idea, but he was certain it was a lab. What added immeasurably to thiscertainty was having caught a grisly glimpse of the bodies “feeding the fish,” as the old Mafia bosses used to call dumping their enemies into the New York Bay. There was no doubt whatsoever in his mind that one of the bodies was the missing corpse of Ethan Jameson. Who the other body might be, he had no idea.
Jumping to his feet from where he’d been wallowing for the previous twenty minutes or so with the fear he was about to get unwelcome company, Jack quickly moved over by feel to the side of the locked door, positioning himself with his back pressed up against the wall on the side of door with the doorknob. The only very meager light in the icehouse came seeping in from around the rectangular edges of the outward opening door where it met its jamb. In both hands he was tightly clutching a shovel, which he’d found by feel right after being locked in. It was a weapon of sorts, although he was well aware it was hardly effective protection against a Glock and even less against an AR-15. But he felt obligated to himself to make some effort in the direction of self-protection despite his situation being desperate.
Holding his breath to hear better, Jack strained his ears for any sounds of approaching footsteps or voices. After more than a minute of hearing absolutely nothing, especially with the silence in the mostly underground icehouse being nearly absolute, he let out his breath and breathed deeply before holding it again. When he still didn’t hear anything, he began to relax in stages. After perhaps three or four minutes, he decided it had been a false alarm. Luckily he was being ignored, at least temporarily, and it was probably because his appearance caused some degree of panic. At that point Jack was quite sure he knew exactly what they were doing and possibly how they were doing it. What he didn’t know was why.
When Jack had been initially locked in, he’d spent a few panickyminutes by feel exploring the immediate area around the door. That was when he’d come across the few gardening tools, which included a rake as well as a shovel. He’d also felt a significant amount of straw on the dirt floor, shelving that extended back into the depths of the building on one side and what felt like discarded window shutters on the other. He assumed the straw had been used to cover the stored ice, which he imagined was cut from the lake during the winter and then used all summer. This, of course, was back before refrigeration, which didn’t become generally available until the 1920s.
Jack leaned the shovel against the wall within inches of the outer door so that he could grab it quickly if needed. He then reached behind him to feel around on the wall. While he had been pressing up against it, he’d felt something pointed jabbing into his back between his shoulder blades. As someone who’d always hated spiders and was even a tad phobic about them, he wasn’t thrilled about feeling about blindly, but he persisted. The object was definitely hard and about an inch long and oblong with one end sharper than the other, and it was centered on a round base that stuck out from the wall by several inches. Believing it to be some kind of dial, he gave it a twist to see if it would move.
To Jack’s surprise, it did turn and when it did it was accompanied by a definitive click and a whomping sound as a number of overhead lights switched on, filling the old icehouse with bright illumination and causing him to squint to the sudden glare. What he’d been pressing his back up against was a very old-style electrical switch. It seemed as if the icehouse had been electrified, maybe even as early as toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Jack quickly glanced around. What was obvious was that the icehouse was currently not being used for anything other than storage, old window shutters leaning against one wall and shelvingagainst the opposite with a variety of objects like old appliances and cardboard boxes. There was no sign that the Netherlanders were using the space nor any evidence that they had even been in it, making him wonder if they even knew it was electrified.
With illumination, Jack’s first order of business was to examine the door. After he’d been locked in for five or ten minutes, he’d blindly felt around it and even lunged against it several times with his shoulder to the point of pain, testing its integrity. As a heavy, insulated, metal door, there was no question of its soundness, and he had quickly given up any ideas of forcing it open, and since it opened out, he didn’t even have access to its hinges. And now able to examine it, he confirmed his original assessment. Short of an electric drill or a stick of dynamite, the door was an insurmountable barrier.
Giving up on the door, Jack turned around to look back into the depths of the icehouse, which he estimated to be at least fifty feet deep and maybe twenty-five to thirty feet wide. As he did so, he shivered, which he’d been doing intermittently. Dressed only in a bathing suit and no shoes, he couldn’t help but appreciate the icehouse’s ability to keep out the summer heat as he was feeling progressively colder. What was currently going through his mind was whether any of the cardboard boxes might contain discarded clothing. Although he wasn’t terribly optimistic, he thought it was worth checking.
Unfortunately, it turned out that almost all the boxes contained aged paper records of the bankrupted Bennet Shoe factory rather than personal items, so no old sweaters, trousers, or even a blanket. Equally disappointing was that among the old appliances there wasn’t anything that might have replaced the shovel as his only weapon.
After searching through the last box, Jack straightened up andlooked back toward the icehouse door, struggling to maintain some semblance of optimism about his plight. But it was difficult, and among his other regrets, he lambasted himself for not even leaving Laurie a note about his going out in the canoe and with at least the vague possibility of using the Bennet Estate springboard. As it was, he knew the canoe would be found abandoned, and since it would be the only clue of his disappearance, everyone would assume the lake was the guilty party and certainly not the Netherlander militiamen.
Trying not to allow anger to monopolize his mind, he turned his attention to the opposite side of the room, which was dominated by the discarded shutters from the house. Since the house was so large with so many windows, there were a lot of shutters of varying sizes, even many up to eight or more feet high for the first floor, triple-hung variety. Why they had all been saved and not reused was a mystery because they were impressive with their exquisite Gothic detail, probably handmade by talented carpenters back when the house was originally built. His guess was they hadn’t been used due to their very dilapidated state, since refurbishing them would have required significant effort and expense. At the same time, because of their uniqueness, he could imagine why there would have been a reluctance to dispose of them.
As he started back toward the outer door, he noticed some shutters were not leaning up against the wall but against another object, such that he could see a space between them and the wall. Curious, Jack struggled to look between several stacks of the particularly tall, first-floor shutters, and his efforts paid off. The shutters were leaning against what appeared be a number of large, fancy, old-fashioned, Louis Vuitton-like cruise trunks.
Believing that such luggage had a reasonable chance of containing clothing, Jack started moving the giant shutters across theroom. He had to move a lot of shutters, but eventually he exposed four trunks. Considering the amount of dust and cobwebs on them, they had been in the icehouse for a much longer period of time than the shutters, maybe even up to a century or more.
Dragging them out into the center of the room one by one, Jack opened each in turn. Unfortunately, he was disappointed, as each one was totally empty of any and all contents in any of their multiple, custom designed storage spaces and drawers. But as he was navigating the fourth trunk away from the icehouse wall, he noticed that the stack of first-floor shutters immediately beyond this final trunk was not leaning against a bare wall but rather a second door! He could just see about an inch of it and its left-sided trim.
With sudden surprise, Jack abandoned the old cruise trunk, which he assumed was going to be as empty as the first three, and started moving shutters away from this concealed door. When he pulled away the final shutter, he found himself looking at a wooden, interior-style, paneled door devoid of any locking mechanism or insulation, which also opened outward with no hinges visible. It was situated a good twenty-five to thirty feet from the entrance door along the left side of the icehouse, meaning it had to lead into some kind of underground chamber since the icehouse was built into the hillside.
With mounting curiosity, Jack moved the last shutter and put it just far enough away so that he could reach the door handle. Grasping the knob, he tried to turn it, which it did reluctantly. After significant effort, he was relieved when the door at least cracked open. Then putting his shoulder against it, he was able to push it fully open while it let out a loud, agonizing squeak as if it hadn’t been opened for a hundred years or more.
As some light from the icehouse found its way into the spacebeyond the door, Jack was able to make out mold covered masonry walls and a few steps leading downward. The air wafting out was significantly more humid than that in the icehouse itself. Stepping aside to allow more light to enter, he felt a tinge of encouragement as he recognized he was looking into a passageway, rather than the mere side chamber he’d anticipated. Even more encouraging from remembering the estate’s layout was that it was heading in the general direction of the house.
What suddenly made total sense to him was what he’d found was a way for a wealthy family like the Bennets to access their icehouse in inclement weather. Before the advent of refrigeration, ice was the main way of preserving food.
Although he tried vainly to suppress his growing optimism, he thought in all likelihood he was looking at an underground tunnel to the Bennet House. He was well aware the house was currently occupied by four highly armed and obviously murderous Netherlander militiamen-cum-biomedical-scientist/technicians, but taking advantage of the passageway was still a far better proposition than remaining in the icehouse.
