A restless movement beside him reminded Logan he was working on borrowed time. With a smile and a nod, he took a fresh grip on his briefcase and strode forward. The file that interested him in particular concerned an event that took place in Italy in 1944. While fighting the Germans for control of Cassino, units of the American Fifth Army commandeered an ancient fortress-the Castello Diavilous. The long-deserted castle had once been home to an infamous alchemist who performed extremely unsettling experiments. Following the occupation, the castle was burned to the ground, its secret basement laboratory ransacked. Logan had been tracking the alchemist’s accomplishments and the fate of his bizarre experiments. His best hope to learn more, he now knew, was here, among the moldering files of the Omega Archive.

He proceeded briskly down the tall metal ranks, peering at the labels on the cabinets at random. He quickly determined they were chronological, further subdivided by armed services branch. It was the work of ten minutes to locate 1944; five more to bracket the files related to the Fifth Army; another sixty seconds to pinpoint dossiers related to the Italian theater of operations. He pulled the appropriate drawer to its maximum. There were perhaps three feet worth of manila-and khaki-colored files related to operations at Cassino. They were dusty and badly faded, but otherwise appeared to be barely touched. A quick flip through the titles located a thick file labeled “ Fort Diavilous -Tactical and Strategic.”

He glanced over at Hunt, who was standing nearby, looking on like a disapproving chaperone. “Is there a reading table nearby I can use for my examination?”

Hunt blinked, sniffed. “The commissary is down the hall past the electrical substation,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”

Logan pulled out the file, prepared to close the drawer. Then he stopped. Removing the file had exposed another behind it, almost equally faded. Its title tab had been stamped with a single word: “Fear.”

Instinctively, Logan reached for it, pulled it forward. It was very thin. Behind it lay another file, identical, stamped with the same word.

Both copies of a classified file, stored in the same location? Something was very wrong here.

He shot a hooded glance toward Hunt. The man was walking down the aisle of hulking cabinets, his back to Logan. Looking back at the drawer, Logan cracked open the first of the two identical files, scanned the cover sheet.

TOP SECRET

United States Army

REFERENCE

B2837(a)

Logan ’s instincts as a researcher into the abnormal were finely tuned, and now they were going off full blast. This was an opportunity, and he didn’t hesitate. As stealthily as possible, he snapped open his briefcase; slipped one of the two thin folders beneath other paperwork; closed the case again; placed the Castello Diavilous folder atop the black leather. And then, closing the file drawer and arranging his face into an expressionless mask, he turned and followed Hunt, the view facilitator, out of the echoing vault and down the concrete hallway.

7

Within five days, Fear Base was transformed utterly. The three-acre apron of concrete between the base entrance and the perimeter fence had become a frantic anthill of activity. Helicopters and small transport planes arrived day and night, dropping off workers, supplies, food, fuel, and all manner of exotic equipment. The quiet, dimly lit hallways of the base’s central wing now seemed like city boulevards: full of chatter, the clacking of keyboards, and the whir of machinery. Power cables snaked everywhere, waiting treacherously to trip the unwary. The base’s powerhouse, until now operating at near-minimum capacity, had been ramped up to 50 percent, filling the arctic silence with its growl. Sergeant Gonzalez and his three army engineers had seemed first astounded, then annoyed by this sudden invasion that turned their once-somnolent base into a hive of demanding, high-maintenance urbanites. The small team was at work night and day, splicing broken wires, fixing leaks, opening heating ducts, and in general making several dozen rooms-largely unused for fifty years-habitable once again.

Evan Marshall walked down the mountain valley, a cooler full of specimens on one shoulder. Halfway to the base, he stopped briefly to rest and survey the small city below, bathed in early-afternoon sunlight. Although the documentary team was naturally bunking in the warmth of the base-various quarters on B Level for the grips, gaffers, publicists, and production assistants, and fancier officers’ compartments on C Level for the producer, director of photography, and channel rep-there were still plenty of outbuildings cluttering the grounds. He could make out a variety of prefab huts, storage shacks, and other temporary structures. At one side, a hulking Sno-Cat-an all-terrain vehicle with massive, tanklike treads-guarded a gasoline depot that would do an army division proud. And beyond everything else, standing alone just within the fence, was a metal-walled cube: a mysterious vault about which the scientists had been able to learn nothing.

With that morning’s arrival of Emilio Conti, the executive producer and creative force behind the project, the breakneck pace had accelerated still further. Conti had hit the ground running. At his order, large machines now effectively blocked the top of the glacial valley, complicating the scientists’ access to their work site. From what Marshall had heard, the producer spent his first hours on-site walking around the base and the surrounding permafrost with his photographic team; studying the way the light fell on the snow, the lava, the glacier; scrutinizing everything through a dozen different positions with a wide-angle lens that hung around his neck. Kari Ekberg had been with him the entire time, filling him in on what she’d accomplished, getting him up to speed, jotting down his work orders for the days to come.

Those days promised to be interesting, indeed.

Marshall picked up the cooler again, hefted it onto the other shoulder, and continued down the mountain. He felt bone-weary: as usual, he’d had trouble falling asleep the night before, and the noisy additions to Fear Base hadn’t helped in the least.

It was hard to believe that only a week had passed since the discovery. Privately, he almost wished the thing had never been found. He was unhappy with the frantic activity, so unlike the careful, cautious approach favored by scientists. He was unhappy with how the documentary team was being coy, almost secretive, about the specifics of their project. And he was especially unhappy with how distracting it all was, how his work was hampered by so many people underfoot. Their own window of opportunity here on the ice was closing fast. The only good thing about the rush, he reflected, was that the faster the film crew worked, the faster they’d clear the hell out.

He bypassed the Sno-Cat and walked into camp. A member of the film crew went by, carrying a long metal boom, and Marshall had to duck out of the way to avoid getting brained. The entrance to the base was obscured by a knot of Terra Prime employees, their backs to him, and as he placed the cooler on the ground and opened the lid to check the samples, he could hear querulous voices raised in complaint.

“This is the worst set I’ve ever had to work, bar none,” said a voice. “And I’ve worked on some shit.”

“I’m freezing my ass off,” said a second. “Literally. I think it’s frostbitten.”

“What’s Conti thinking? Coming up here to the middle of nowhere, just because of some dead pelt.”

“And all these dweebs wandering around, messing with our site and getting in the way.”