chapter 14
They called it Icemaker Station.
Very near the house on the shores of Lake Geneva where he had almost ended Alex Van Helsing’s life, the immortal vampire once known as Lord Byron and code-named Icemaker waited and slept in a chunk of ice. The curse that Byron had taken on himself near the end of his mortal life, the magic that enabled him to use and freeze the liquid in the air around him, had provided a final retreat when the Polidorium had caught up with him and doused him with liquid nitrogen, one of the coldest substances on earth. Byron opted to continue the process and encase himself in a protective chunk of ice, and there he stayed.
His captors didn’t take him very far. The seven-foot-tall, four-foot-wide chunk of ice that held Lord Byron rested in silence in a liquid-helium-cooled refrigerator the size of a small house securely reinforced in a cell built just for him, half a mile below Lausanne, Switzerland. Manned twenty-four hours a day by chemists and security guards, with extra chambers and cells both under construction and ready for future prisoners, Icemaker Station occupied three city blocks’ worth of space below the Olympic Museum, an access point chosen in part for its outward serenity and its complete lack of connection to either the world of anti-vampirism or the world of ultra-low-temperature experimentation. The fact that there were five world-class high magnetic field laboratories around Lake Geneva, providing a rich source of new hires to work on Icemaker Station, was a bonus.
Within seven hours of leaving Vienna Cazorla behind, Alex was getting out of a van at the edge of Lake Geneva at the Olympic Museum, a severe white-stone building set off by a much more inviting park. As Alex ran up the granite steps in a leather jacket that did nothing to stop the leaching cold coming off the lake, he took in a whole garden of sculpture dedicated to the constant search for human physical perfection.
“Every cell in my body is telling me this is a bad idea, so pay close attention.” Sangster was rattling off instructions as they walked. “Do everything the staff tells you. If a rule sounds stupid, do it anyway. Polidorium Incarceration are the most competent jailers on the face of the earth, so respect every word they say.”
“I got it,” Alex said, freezing.
“Astrid?” Sangster said.
She nodded. “Sure.”
Fir trees and rich green shrubbery nestled against the cold and blinding-white concrete museum. Around it, Alex saw huge gray figures that held aloft the Olympic circles and cyclists arrested forever in bronze and, of course, the Olympic torch. When he beheld a gray sculpture of a pistol with its barrel twisted into uselessness by the Olympic Spirit, Alex briefly envisioned the Olympic Spirit as some shot-putting Jolly Green Giant, thundering across the countryside, throwing train cars and spitefully knotting the barrels of perfectly good gun sculptures.
This was the kind of place where, as a young man of certain expectations sent overseas, Alex was supposed to be spending his time. If he were to call his mom right now and tell her that he was visiting Le Parc Olympique, Lausanne, she would think that he had finally become the student she’d always wanted him to be. Extra points maybe if he said he was with the new girl from the Netherlands.
As Alex, Astrid, and Sangster walked swiftly through the glass doors and into the sweeping rotunda of the museum, where twenty-foot-tall wall screens ran constant loops of human victory, his heart sank.
They walked past the screens to a stairwell, to a staff elevator only Sangster could unlock.
“Here we go, then,” Sangster said, and they plunged liked stones into the secret world they had chosen.
The door of the elevator opened, and they stepped into a stark white hallway where a Polidorium security guard examined Sangster’s credentials before they could move on. Sangster was putting away the security card he carried in his wallet when they heard the approach of heavy heels smacking against tile.
All three turned around to see a tall woman with tightly curled short hair, wearing a white coat, 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 thin, the haze opening, and the glass cage came once more into view.
Now it was full of milky fluid, mostly water, and there seemed to be water streaming down the front of it as well, maybe in some thin track between two panes. This gave the cage an even more dreamy appearance, and as Alex looked down at the vapor that still surrounded his feet, he felt completely isolated from the world as he knew it, even the crazy world he had come to know.
Alex heard Sangster blow out a long, steady breath he had clearly been holding in. Dr. Kristatos stood with them, and now even she seemed hesitant.
The milky, hazy cage, full from top to bottom with water now, seemed empty, but the shadow moving in the back and the static howling in Alex’s brain told him otherwise.
Astrid and Alex each stepped forward, reaching out an arm to block the other. The milky substance began to churn.
The creature that was Lord Byron slipped like a shark through the water and crashed into the glass wall. His black hair swirled in the water as he flattened his claw-like hands against the glass. His eyes were open, and he was looking straight at Alex.
Kristatos held out a small microphone to Sangster and the agent shook his head, gesturing toward Alex.
Alex tentatively took the device in his hand, running his finger over a talk button. He looked up at the vampire, who whipped his head slightly to whisk away a strand of hair. He seethed, his unbreathing mouth open in the milky water. He had his nails against the glass as though he were planning to claw through it.
“Well,” Sangster said to Alex. “You wanted to talk to him. So talk.”