Each of the boxes was made from corrugated cardboard. Most were a dark brown with a faux walnut print and a little metal sleeve on the front in which an indexing file card could be placed. There was a code on the file cards that was apparently something used internally by Deep Iron.

It was Top who figured out the code on the file cards. He held out the card-HH/I/3/6-8/051779-and said, “Okay, the second H is probably our boy Heinrich Haeckel. Now, this box came from that corner over there. This other box here was two rows up. It has a card with ‘III’ on it. Roman numerals for the rows. Follow me?”

“Right with you,” I said, pleased.

“Six-dash-eight’s next. Sixth box in a stack of eight. See? And the other number’s got to be a date. These boxes have been here for a long time, so it ain’t a stretch to see that as oh-five, seventeen, seventy-nine. With this code we can restack every box in the right place without doing Sherlock Holmes stuff.”

“You just earned your pay for the month, Top,” I said. “And a pretty damn good bottle of Scotch.”

“Make it Irish and we’re square.”

“Let me guess,” Bunny said. “You like ‘Black Bush’?”

Top gave him a sniper’s squint. “Don’t make me hurt you, Farmboy. I know forty-three separate ways to make sure you can’t ever have kids.”

Bunny held up his hands. “We’re cool.”

We went back to work and now the only thing that slowed us down was deciding which papers went into which box.

“What is this stuff?” Bunny asked, reaching to pick up a clipped sheaf of papers.

“Careful,” I cautioned. “We need everything to go back in the right box.”

“Okay,” he said, “but… what is this stuff?” He tapped the top page and I bent over him to look. The page was covered with columns of numbers whose value made no sense. At the top of each column was a number-letter identifier that also made no sense. I lifted the first page, then the second. More of the same. The pages were old, the entries all done by hand.

“Accounting?” Bunny asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Got something!” called Top. He was going through the boxes stacked by the door. “This one’s not paper. Looks like microfiche.”

He handed me several sheets of film, and when I held them up to the light I could see dozens of tiny pages smaller than postage stamps. Without a reader I couldn’t tell if they were the same as the pages we had here or were something else. We searched around and found only eight sheets of film, scattered as if dropped.

“If those are microfiche copies of this stuff,” Bunny said, “then it sure as hell doesn’t add up to all of this crap. I’m thinking the Hulk and his buddy took the rest of them.”

“Yeah, dammit,” I said, and reached for another box of paper.

We worked together to repack and restack the boxes that had fallen during our part of the fight. All of the boxes that had fallen on me were filled with the same kind of handwritten notes. Then Bunny found a page with annotations in a box he was carefully repacking.

“Take a look, boss,” he said and I squatted down next to him.

At the top of one of the columns someone had used a pencil to write: Zwangs/Trauma.

“Is that German? What’s that mean?” he asked.

I nodded and took my notebook out of my pocket to copy down the ID code on the front of the file box. Something began niggling at the back of my brain, but it was too timid to step into the light. We kept working.

Outside the room there was only silence. No cavalry with trumpets blowing.

“What the hell are these?” Top asked as he held up a stack of index cards. Each one had notes written in some kind of medical code and in the upper left corner was a fingerprint. Top peered at the prints. “This ain’t ink, Cap’n. I think it’s old, dried blood.”

“Don’t smudge any of them,” I cautioned. “We don’t know what the hell we have here.”

A few minutes later Bunny said, “Hey, boss. I got another one with words on it. And… a couple of names.”

Top and I picked our way through the mess to see what he had. He passed me an old-fashioned wooden clipboard, marking its place on the floor with his canteen. The numbers here were written in a different hand, and on the lower right of each page were the initials “JM.” The words “Zwangs/Trauma” were scribbled on the upper left of the page, and over each column was either a single word or a few: “Geschwindig-keit,” “Winkel,” “Druck in Pfund pro Quadratzoll.”

Speed. Angle. Pounds of pressure per square inch.

Then vertically along the left side of the page:

“Kette,” “Schläger,” “Pferde-Peitsche,” “Faust,” “Barfuss,” “Gestie-felt.”

I swallowed a throat that was as dry as dust.

Chain. Club. Horsewhip. Fist. Bare foot. Booted foot.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, and the others stared at me. They peered over my shoulder at the page. I translated for them and saw the meaning register on their faces.

“Fuck me,” said Top, and he looked older than his forty years.

“If this is what I think it is, then we’re into some sick shit here.” Bunny said, “Who would collect this kind of information?”

I didn’t answer as I rifled through the rest of the papers and then handed the clipboard back to him. “Let’s repack this box. Check everything. I want to see any scrap of paper with words, especially handwritten notations.”

They set to work, but there was nothing else in that box.

The next box, on the other hand… well, that changed everything.

I was sitting on the floor putting the pages in some kind of order when I found a single handwritten note tucked inside a file folder. It was in German, which was no problem for me. As I read it my mind began spinning with shock and nausea:

Heinrich,

The third phase was completed this morning and we have sufficient material to initiate the next part of our research. I will present the test results to Herr Wirths on Thursday next. I hope you will be able to join us.

I must confess that I am as excited as a schoolboy with what we are accomplishing here… and with what we are going to accomplish. We are doing God’s work here, my friend. Thank you for your compliments on the work I have been doing with twins. Your notes and suggestions on that have been of inestimable value, as are your observations on zoonosis and the noma work.

Please let me know if you can join me for the presentation. Your observations would be of tremendous value to the audience, and to me personally.

The letter was dated 22 February 1942. It was addressed to Heinrich Haeckel. I sat there and stared at the envelope to which it was clipped. Haeckel’s address had been in Berlin. The sender’s address was in a town called Birkenau in Poland. My blood froze in my veins.

Birkenau.

Good God Almighty.

Birkenau was the small Polish town where the Nazis built Auschwitz.

The man who sent the letter was Josef Mengele.