Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,42
approaching, swinging her arms like an automaton. “Agent Sangster, we’re almost ready for you,” she said. “You’re early. I don’t remember you ever being early for anything.”
Sangster’s mouth curled only slightly into a smile, and it might actually have been more of a grimace. “Alex, Astrid, this is Dr. Bella Kristatos. She’s our director of cryogenics and altered states.”
“Altered states?” Alex asked.
Dr. Kristatos turned to Alex. “My field is cryogenics, but I have fifteen years in the study of matter transformation—werewolf stuff, teeth into fangs, and so on. So I’m covering the department.” She turned to Sangster. “But we do have an opening if you know an altered-state scientist who’d like to work underground on Lake Geneva.”
Sangster put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Most of my friends are teaching Huckleberry Finn.”
“And most of my friends are cutting his class,” Alex said, shaking the woman’s hand. Kristatos was two inches taller than Sangster and projected an air not unlike an Olympic giant herself. As she lowered her arm he saw her sleeve flutter and he caught a glimpse of the veins and sculpted muscles of her forearm.
“Where is he now?” Sangster asked.
Kristatos was shaking Astrid’s hand, and Astrid seemed to bounce with extra enthusiasm as if to make up for the doctor’s dryness; she kissed the woman on both cheeks, and Kristatos had to almost peel Astrid’s hand off hers. “We’re just transferring him to the interview tank.” She gestured and urged them all to follow. “If we hurry you might get to see the heat vent.”
At once they were rushing to follow Kristatos’s long strides as she unlocked and moved through three different metal-mesh-windowed doors. They passed labs and double doors to what Alex briefly made out to be holding cells.
Now the doctor stopped at a final blue door and looked at them, a darkened window revealing distant track lighting over her shoulder. “Check it out; I really think this is pretty amazing.” She was human after all.
She pushed through the door and they all walked into a room the size of a two-car garage, with blue-gray concrete walls except for the back wall, which was glass. Alex stepped closer and saw that a glass wall separated them from the other half of the room.
Beyond the glass partition, the ceiling and floor were concrete but for a series of heavy-looking vents. It was a cage.
Alex saw what looked like scuba gear attached with suction cups to the inside of the cage. A mask with straps hung there, like he’d seen fighter pilots wear in the movies.
Within this room-within-the-shaft, visible through the glass partition, sat a tall chunk of ice that Alex had last seen on the night Icemaker almost killed him.
“Is that shatter-resistant glass?” Sangster asked.
Kristatos shook her head. “Plexiglas, and reinforced with silver.”
“What’s that?” Alex indicated a round black suction cup on the inside of the cage wall.
“It’s a microphone.”
“Don’t forget,” Sangster told Alex, “the quarry has been unconscious for three months, so remember this when you talk to him. Don’t reveal any events he wouldn’t already know about.”
Alex nodded. He got it: As far as Icemaker was concerned, the Queen was still dead.
Kristatos spoke a code, fished a headset out of her pocket, recited another series of numbers and letters, and put the device away.
Alex went over to the wall and tapped on it, confused. “We’re going to talk to the chunk of ice?”
Suddenly there was a sharp, loud crack, and Alex looked at the glass case in alarm.
“That’s the heat from the air in the shaft,” said Dr. Kristatos. “You might want to stand back.”
“What? Why?” Alex stepped back, trying to follow the sounds. He saw water beginning to trickle out of a vent in the ceiling.
“Because I hate to admit it, but this is the first time we’ve ever tried this.”
Water sprayed from the ceiling as though a pipe had burst, and Alex heard an audible crack, distant and then sharpening as steam began to rise. A machine gun–like series of cracking sounds rattled beyond the glass as that section filled with steam.
Vents slammed open in the floor along the walls near Alex’s feet, and Kristatos said, “Don’t be alarmed. We’re just venting the steam to relieve pressure so the cage doesn’t explode.”
For a moment, they were all enveloped in steam. Alex made out Astrid pulling out her staff and he tensed himself, feeling as though they were back in the soot and smoke of Vienna’s pensione. A minute later, the steam began to