Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  “Over my dead body,” von Stauffenberg snarled, in a spray of bloody spit.

  A slow, cruel smile spread across Agent Kaufman’s lips once more. “Very well, if you insist.”

  Slowly he raised the gun again.

  Von Stauffenberg started to laugh, great belly laughs that set his whole body shaking.

  “You’re going to shoot me after all?”

  Kaufman took another step forward.

  The laughter died in von Stauffenberg’s throat.

  “I can hardly miss now, can I?” the agent said, pushing the muzzle of the pistol into von Stauffenberg’s stomach.

  THE CRACK OF the pistol shot made the guard standing outside the cellar start and hurriedly come to attention again as he composed himself.

  A few moments later the door opened and Agent Kaufman stepped out into the cold, dank passageway.

  “Have the body sent to Darmstadt,” Kaufman said. “Let’s see if the Frankenstein Corps can’t have this traitor fighting for the Fatherland again by the end of the week.”

  “Yes, Herr Kaufman.” The soldier saluted and hurried to obey the Gestapo agent’s instructions.

  Not looking back once, Kaufman marched away along the corridor. They were under the house here. The manse’s extensive cellars made for ideal holding cells.

  The Resistance Movement had suffered a devastating set-back, thanks to his hard work. He need not concern himself with them any further. They were no longer a threat to the Third Reich.

  He grimaced. His hand ached. He would have to get it looked at properly, but it could wait for the time being. Right now he was more concerned with the other two prisoners he had brought back to Schloss Geisterhaus after the raid on the Alsenz bierkeller.

  What part had they to play in the rebels’ meeting? Or had it been pure coincidence that had brought them to the same tavern, at the same time, on the same day? And if they hadn’t been helping the German Resistance, what were they doing there, deep behind the German front line?

  It had to have something to do with Darmstadt, Kaufman concluded. They were too close to the fortress-factory for that to be a coincidence.

  THE MUFFLED PISTOL shot made Henry Jekyll start.

  For a split second he was in another place, another time, the sound of a pistol shot echoing through his mind, knowing that he had been pointing the gun at himself. And then it was gone again.

  Jekyll grasped the arms of the chair to which he had been chained, knuckles whitening as he tugged at the wood, the metal cuffs biting into the sparse flesh of his wrists.

  His pulse leapt, his mind awash with questions. Who had fired the gun? Who had been shot? Was this the first sign of a rescue attempt? Or was it the first execution?

  He cursed the moment Hercules Quicksilver had ever taken him from the facility in Edinburgh.

  He pulled frantically at the chains securing him again, blinking frightened tears from his eyes as a whimper of desperation escaped his lips. If only…

  No! He couldn’t allow himself to think like that. After all, as he knew all too well, that way madness lay.

  The sudden bang of the basement door opening made him start all over again.

  Standing in the open doorway was the man who had had Jekyll and the unconscious Quicksilver brought here; the one the soldiers had addressed as Herr Kaufman.

  “So.” Kaufman peered through his glasses at Jekyll with a hungry, hawkish stare. “Doctor Jekyll, wasn’t it?”

  The man’s English was good, but for an unmistakeable guttural accent.

  Jekyll made another feeble attempt to free himself from his bonds.

  “Planning on going somewhere?” the German mocked him, pulling up another chair and sitting down.

  “I warn you,” Jekyll said, his breathing fast and shallow, his heart pounding in fear now, “you don’t want to make me angry.” His warning had sounded less assured than he might have hoped.

  “Angry?” Kaufman said, his bloodless lips stretching into a thin smile. “You’re not angry, doctor. You’re terrified. I can almost smell your fear. Or have you just soiled yourself?”

  The slap came out of nowhere. Jekyll reeled from the blow, shocked into inaction.

  “How are you feeling now?” Kaufman asked and hit him again. And again.

  “How about now?”

  A fourth time.

  A fifth.

  The agent opened his mouth, ready with another goading taunt, but hesitated, brows knitting, as he caught a flash of green fire in the black pits of the doctor’s pupils. It seemed to Kaufman that the temperature in the cellar had suddenly dropped and there was a frisson of some untold power in the air.

  When Jekyll spoke again his voice was like steel and had dropped an octave.

  “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” he growled as emerald lightning crackled across his eyeballs.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Breakout

  “ARE YOU THREATENING me?”

  The Gestapo agent could not help but raise his eyebrows.

  Who did he think he was? He was chained to a chair, by both his wrists and his ankles, in the labyrinthine basement of a country manse with guards at every turn, occupied by the Führer’s forces. And before the guards even became an issue, this skinny, unarmed man would have to overcome Kaufman, assuming Kaufman didn’t gun him down first – which he would.

  “You think you can escape? You are sadly mistaken, Herr Doktor. There will be no escape for you; none whatsoever. I don’t like spies. But, before I have you shot – or maybe hanged, or perhaps even electrocuted – you will tell me everything; about your mission, your reason for being here, who you were here to meet and who was working with you.”

  “I warned you,” the doctor growled, his voice deeper again.

  Was it his imagination, a trick of the light, or was the prisoner larger than he remembered? Where before he had been sure the man’s arms were little more than weedy sticks of skin and bone, he now saw muscles bunching and straining at the seams of his shirt sleeves.

  Agent Kaufman felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. There was something, some unknowable tingling in the air around him. Was it some sort of static charge, created by he knew not what, or was it something else, a sensation he hadn’t enjoyed in a long time? Was it fear?

  DOCTOR HENRY JEKYLL saw the room before him subsumed by a green haze, as if he was looking at the cell through an emerald lens. His whole body ached. Muscles and sinews tightened. His blood was on fire, as if it was liquid magma that coursed through his veins.

  The door behind the Gestapo agent suddenly swung open. Standing there was a long-limbed woman, lithe and tall. She was dressed in the sinister black uniform of an officer of the Schutzstaffel, her blonde hair tied up in a plait under her hat. Her tailored jacket was buttoned up across her chest, whilst tight-fitting jodhpurs followed the contours of her toned legs.

  Kaufman turned, surprised, ready to rebuke whoever had dared interrupt his interrogation.

  Calmly, the woman raised her handgun and pulled the trigger. There was a muffled pfft.

  The agent was thrown backwards off his chair, which clattered to the floor after him. Jekyll looked down at the body. The man stared back, the eyes behind the thin-framed spectacles as glassy as their lenses. There was a look of surprise etched forever on his ugly features now, his mouth forming an O of surprise, viscous black blood oozing from the neat hole in the middle of his forehead. He lay in the mess of brain matter, blood and bone fragments that plastered that floor behind him.

  The emerald mist began to fade from before Jekyll’s eyes. He sighed, the tension in his body easing, suddenly weak with relief.

  “Quick, come with me,” the woman beckoned from the doorway, glancing back over her shoulder, her gun ready in her hand, just in case.

  He rattled his restraints, and she cursed and moved into the room. Her accent and her choice of expletive didn’t sound particularly German to Jekyll. In fact they sounded more Eastern European t
han anything.

  Crouching down in front of his chair she pulled at the manacles holding his ankles in place. He didn’t know what she did, or what tools she used, but he heard the snap of a link breaking, followed by the rattle of chains falling to the floor. There was another sharp metallic snap and his other leg was free as well.

  Rising, the woman seized hold of the restraining bracelet at his wrist.

  She was close to him now, the scent of her, strong and heady as musk, arousing even in his current dire predicament, the swell of her bosom sending a pulse of excitement through his body.

  He could see exactly what she was doing now. She took the bracelet in her hands and gave it a sharp twist. Incredibly, the metal gave and then snapped. She did the same with the other just as easily.

  Jekyll’s mind reeled at what he was witnessing. The manacles must have been old, the metal weakened by rust or age. Even so, they had remained resolutely unpliable even as he had felt the change begin within him. Perhaps that initial transformation had been enough to weaken the metal.

  “Now,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “Follow me.”

  Henry Jekyll’s mind raced.

  “Who are you?” he hissed, as he followed the woman into the warren of passageways beyond his erstwhile prison, rubbing feeling back into his aching wrists as he did so.

  She fixed him with those piercing eyes again, silencing him. “I am – how do you say? – your ticket out of here.”

  Having looked both ways – Jekyll assuming she’d found the way ahead clear – she sniffed at the air sharply.

  “This way,” she said, leading them left past the T-junction.

  At that moment, the bewildered Jekyll believed that he would have followed her into the jaws of Hell, if she had only asked him. He didn’t know what kind of power it was that she had over him, but whatever it was, it was potent.

  He followed her to another part of the cellars. Stopping at another junction she sniffed the air again, turned her transfixing gaze upon him once more and said, “Wait here.”

  And so he remained exactly where he was as she strode boldly through the brick-built archway into the passageway beyond.

  He felt his pulse quicken as he heard a gruff male voice, and then felt his heart leap as he heard her issue a sharp command in perfect German. There was a brief exchange of words and then the sound of two sets of heavy footsteps receding up a flight of stairs and into the house above.

  “Come,” the woman hissed, poking her head around the corner once more.

  Jekyll followed her into the better-lit passageway beyond. The guards were gone. He didn’t bother to ask her how she had managed that; he already knew. He would have done anything she asked of him at that moment too – anything at all.

  The passageway ended at a locked iron door. Somehow, the woman had already managed to procure a set of keys and was busy at the lock. A moment later, the door swung open.

  The smells emanating from the room beyond were an uncomfortable marriage of damp and disinfectant.

  A man, dressed in the now dishevelled uniform of a Nazi officer, had been chained to a chair in the middle of the room and the chair bolted to the floor. His chin rested on his chest. Jekyll wondered if Kaufman had got to him already.

  Hercules Quicksilver looked up.

  “Who… who are you?” he asked groggily.

  Jekyll followed like an obedient puppy as the woman entered the cellar and set to work on Quicksilver’s restraints.

  “My name is Katarina Kharkova,” she said as she worked. There was a ping of failing metal and she moved to free his other leg. “I am an agent of Imperial Russia and I am here to rescue you.”

  “WHY?” HERCULES ASKED, eyes half closed against the light streaming into the cellar. “What’s in it for you?”

  “We are allies, are we not?”

  “Our nations are,” Hercules confirmed.

  “And it would seem to me that you need all the friends you can get just now.”

  “But what’s in this for you?” Hercules pressed, as she snapped the last of the cuffs securing him to the chair, with her bare hands.

  “How does the saying go?” she said, a distant look entering her exotic, aquamarine-coloured eyes. “You scratch my back…?”

  Hercules’ brow crumpled in confusion.

  “I need your help,” she said, making her point plain.

  “You need my help?” Hercules asked, pointedly looking at the broken links and chains now lying on the floor at his feet.

  “We cannot delay here any longer! We must away to Castle Frankenstein.”

  “Castle Frankenstein?” Jekyll gasped, appalled. “I don’t like the sound of that. What on Earth for?”

  “We have to rescue Prisoner Zero.”

  Hercules looked at the woman, making eye contact with her for the first time.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Really,” she said, transfixing him with her stare.

  Hercules blinked several times and shook his head, as if trying to shake off the befuddling drowsiness that seemed about to come upon him.

  “Right then,” he said, suddenly jumping up from his chair, apparently no worse for his recent ordeal. “We can’t waste any more time hanging around here. We need to be off on our way. It is this way, I take it?” he said, dashing over to the door and scoping the corridor ahead.

  Hurriedly taking the lead once more, Katarina led the way for the two men to follow, up the steps after the two guards who had quit their posts at the Russian spy’s instruction.

  From the top of the stair, they followed what must have once been a servants’ passageway through the mansion house, to which Hercules and Jekyll had been taken following their capture in Alsenz.

  As they jogged along the echoing corridor after their devastatingly beautiful liberator, Hercules glanced out the tall windows over a cluttered courtyard.

  The sheer weight of armour parked up outside took his breath away. There were troop transports, squad cars, munitions trucks, jeeps mounted with steam-powered Gatling guns and even a pair of steam-powered Jotun-class tanks. The heavy ordnance alone would easily have been enough to level a country estate – ornamental gardens, orangery and all.

  They turned a corner and entered a passageway adorned with oil painted landscapes and the portraits of former margraves of the region, as well as the garish crimson pennants of the Nazi party. The hallway carpet deadened their fleeting footfalls. Ahead of them Hercules could see a black and white tiled hallway and polished ironwood double doors. A suited clerk was sat behind an unnecessarily large desk in front of an ornate marble fireplace.

  On catching sight of the desk-bound clerk, Katarina Kharkova smoothly slowed her run to a walk, adjusting her uniform as she did so. She confidently approached the desk, her footsteps clicking in time with the clock on the mantelpiece above the grand white marble hearth.

  The clerk looked up, and straight into the Russian agent’s persuasive stare.

  “Now listen to me very carefully,” she said, and Hercules saw the feeble wretch wilt under her intense gaze. “My friends and I are walking out of here right now and you are not going to do anything to stop us, do you understand?”

  The clerk nodded slowly in slack-jawed compliance.

  “Very good.” Katarina turned towards the closed double doors. “Let’s go,” she told the others.

  As Hercules moved to follow her he was suddenly aware of an engine revving on the other side of the large ironwood doors.

  With a sound like the crash of a cliff falling into the sea, the front façade of the house bulged and fell inwards, bricks and sundered stone tumbling into the atrium with all the noise and force of a landslide.

  Hercules watched as the doors disintegrated, huge splinters of wood flying the length of the hallway. One of these struck the Russian, spearing her body and hurling her backwards, pinning her to the mahogany panelling covering the walls.

  Hercules stared in horror as her body sagged, suspend
ed a good twelve inches off the ground.

  Frozen to the spot in shock, Doctor Jekyll cowering in fear behind him, Hercules looked from the transfixed Katarina to the bricks sliding into the hallway as he watched in disbelief.

  The desk and the clerk were gone, buried under several tonnes of rubble and fine Rococo carvings. Poking from the juddering mountain of ruined masonry was the broad barrel of a gun six feet long.

  Hercules could hear shocked, shouting voices from outside the breached building, getting closer with every passing moment.

  Where the front wall of the house had been there was now only a broken hole, the occasional broken piece of baked clay clattering to the ground from the ruptured brickwork above. Pale sunlight poured into the atrium from outside.

  The last thing he was expecting was for a hatch to squeal open near the top of the pile of rubble, sending a fresh fall of bricks tumbling to the cracked tile floor. And he certainly wasn’t expecting a young woman to pop her head through it, but he watched her with hawkish interest as she brushed a tress of amber hair out of her face and hooked it behind her ear.

  “I know you!” he gasped, in stunned amazement. “You were at the bierkeller.”

  “The name’s Cookie,” the young woman said, in a cut-glass upper-class English accent. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance at last, Mr Quicksilver.”

  “But what are you doing here?” Hercules was beginning to babble. “And in a German Jotun-class tank too!”

  “I’m your rendezvous,” she said. “Now, let’s get you out of here before you get us into any more trouble.”

  Act Two

  Mission Impossible

  “Terrorism is the best political weapon, for nothing drives

  people harder than a fear of sudden death.”