Bogdan went over to the panel. He cracked his knuckles a few times, then let his fingers hover over the keyboard. “Am ready,” he said.
Nadia inhaled deeply. She looked at the pad, matching each letter of the code word with the matching entry on the grid. Then she spoke each enciphered letter out loud, one at a time, very slowly.
“Kah. Ehr. Ah. Ehs. Ehn. Ee kratkoyeh. Ee kratkoyeh. Ehl. Oo. Cheh.”
As she spoke each letter, Bogdan dutifully typed it on the keyboard. When he was finished, he drew his hands away quickly so as not to accidentally type an additional letter.
On the row of lightbulbs above the keyboard, a single lamp lit up with a dull yellow glow.
Nothing else happened.
“Did it — was—” Chapel had no idea what to say.
Nadia looked at the two men, a growing horror writ on her face. Had they got it wrong? Had they just armed Perimeter and left the world in constant danger of nuclear annihilation?
“Does it — maybe this is just the code entry panel, the actual door is somewhere else,” Chapel said, which sounded stupid to his own ears. “Maybe—”
He stopped then because he’d heard something, very soft and far away. It came from below his feet, the sound of a machine moving on a rusty track.
Then the floor of the statue lurched and dropped half an inch. Chapel and Bogdan staggered back away from the walls, toward the door. Nadia dropped into a crouch, one hand on the floor. She looked like a cat.
The floor dropped another few inches without warning. There was a horrible grinding noise, and the rattle of a massive chain. Something broke with a snap, and then the floor started lowering, smoothly and slowly, sliding down into the earth with all three of them still on it.
It was an elevator. It was an elevator and it was going to take them to Perimeter. The code had worked.
The elevator descended through a concrete tube, its walls stained with white sediment. There was no light inside the tube except the flashlight that Chapel held. He shone it at the wall and saw some markings there — numbers, telling them how far they had descended.
— 5, he read. He imagined that meant they’d already dropped five meters below the canyon floor.
He realized he was holding his breath. He let it out noisily.
As if they’d been waiting for his example, Nadia and Bogdan exhaled, too.
— 10. Something was written on the wall in Cyrillic. He could just make out the word sekretno before it passed out of the light again. Probably some kind of dire warning about unauthorized access, and what would happen to any traitor who dared enter this place.
— 15. Bogdan sat down on the floor. Maybe he thought the elevator was taking too long.
— 20.
— 25.
— 30. A few more meters and the elevator stopped. One side of the tube was open, with just a metal folding gate blocking the way. Chapel reached out and grabbed the handle. The gate was rusted and didn’t want to open. He put a little elbow grease into it and it screeched in its track, opening wide enough to let them out.
Nadia jumped, her shoulders rising toward her ears.
“What’s wrong?” Chapel asked. His voice echoed weirdly in the underground chamber.
“Nothing. Nothing,” she said, shaking her head so her hair swung around. “We just need to be careful. Perimeter is designed to resist what we plan. The keyboard panel above was not its only safeguard. If it decides we do not belong here, it will activate itself.”
“Moving a gate might do that?” Chapel asked.
“No. No, almost certainly not.”
Chapel made a mental note not to touch anything else.
The three of them stepped out of the elevator onto a shiny concrete floor, painted battleship gray. A thunking noise sounded above their heads and lights came on, revealing a short corridor ahead of them. The walls were a dismal green, and as shiny as the floor. There was surprisingly little dust.
An archway led off to their left, into a little room with some tool cabinets and a single cot. The sheets on the cot stank of mildew — which Chapel found reassuring. It meant this place hadn’t been used in a long time. The tools were placed neatly in their racks, and they were as shiny as when they’d been made. Maybe they had never been used. “What’s all this for?” Chapel asked. “I thought this system was completely automated.”
“Every system needs maintenance, sometimes.”
Chapel shrugged and looked down the hall. There were more thunking noises, and lights came on down there, too, illuminating a spiral staircase leading downward. The steps were made of steel that had been perforated to keep them light. They didn’t look as rusted as the gate had been.
Nadia led the way down the stairs. Lights kept coming on as they advanced, anticipating what they might want to be able to see. At one point they heard the sound of a tape being rewound — Chapel might have been the only one of them old enough to remember what that sounded like — and then music started playing from speakers mounted on the ceiling. Classical, he thought.
“Tchaikovsky,” Nadia told him, as if she’d read his mind.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why does it play music for us? Do you know about Chernobyl, about the Excluded Zone?”
“Sure,” Chapel said. “All the land around the nuclear plant there is irradiated, so nobody’s allowed inside. There’s a whole city in there that’s fenced off and abandoned.”
“Pripyat,” Nadia said. “It is called Pripyat. In the early days, just after the disaster, when someone did have to go there — scientists, mostly — they would get very frightened. Not because of the radiation but because it was too silent. There were no other people for miles. No birds sang — the birds all died. So they had loudspeakers mounted throughout the zone, loudspeakers that played music all the time, all day. I’ve seen video and it is very haunting, that music. But perhaps better than nothing at all.”
“So Perimeter is playing us music so we don’t get creeped out down here?” Chapel asked. “I have to say, it’s not working.”
The spiral staircase took them down into a cave, a mostly spherical space hollowed out of the bedrock. Like a vast bubble in the stone. At the end of the staircase was a narrow catwalk that led to a circular platform that seemed to hover in empty air. Chapel shone his flashlight down and saw that the platform was mounted on huge springs, each coil as thick as one of his legs.
“Shock absorbers,” Nadia told him. “If there is an earthquake, or a nuclear strike shakes the earth, those will absorb all vibration.”
Sitting on the platform were a number of upright rectangular boxes, each about the size of a bookcase. Together they looked to Chapel like some kind of space age Stonehenge. A simple desk stood in the middle of the boxes, and sitting on the desk was a television screen and a keyboard.
The cave had not been designed for comfort or human convenience. Big klieg lights shone down from above, illuminating the platform in a harsh light that made for long, stark shadows. Heavy cables snaked across the platform and disappeared into the darkness below the springs. If you tripped over one of those, you might fall off the platform and drop twenty feet before you hit the jagged rocks below. Chapel wondered if now he knew the purpose of the cot in the tool room. Even if you didn’t plan on spending the night down here, the tool room was a human space, a place that was actually designed to be used by people. The platform certainly wasn’t.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Chapel asked. “Those boxes—”
“Yes,” Nadia whispered. “Those are the data banks. And the terminal, there on the desk, it is the only access point. This place, this cave… is Perimeter. You know, I never really believed I would see this.”