Cold Frame

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Going for a walk,” he announced.

  Yes, Mister Mandeville, they all chirped in unison. No “when will you be back” or “how can we reach you.” They knew better.

  Thirty minutes later he was seated on a wooden bench in the Metro Center underground station. It being early afternoon and not yet rush hour, the station was pretty empty. He glanced up at the lighted train board on the ceiling, which gave an ETA for the next train coming through and which line it was running. Blue Line coming through in three minutes. He looked at his watch. It was just now two o’clock. Close enough, he thought. When the train blew into the station, he got up and started walking alongside, front to back, as the cars squealed to a stop.

  There.

  He stepped through the next set of doors just before they chimed and slid shut. He went toward the back of the car, where the stone-faced operative sat all alone, dressed in a plain suit and a gray fedora hat, the left side of his face staring through the train and into the dark tunnel ahead. Mandeville gave a mental snort. Thinks this is occupied Berlin back in the seventies, he thought.

  He took the seat behind him, the two of them facing forward as the train gathered speed and headed out toward the suburbs.

  “Are you ready for tonight?” he asked.

  The fedora nodded once.

  “Good. They’re going in sometime after sundown. They’ll make a big-deal entrance at the gate while their intrusion team goes over the wall and into the mansion from the back. I’m guessing they’re not going to succeed, but they might. Either way, as the commotion settles down, you know what to do.”

  Another nod.

  “If they do manage to pick him up, I’ll send instructions to Petersburg to turn him over to you when I’m ready, and you’re ready. If they don’t get him, once you capture him, terminate him and put the body in the river. I’ll send you a signal when their team goes in, and another when we find out what they did or did not accomplish.” He paused. “Sure you remember what he looks like?”

  The ruined face turned to look directly at him, and, not for the first time, Mandeville wondered if that baleful left eye saw or not. Then the man grinned at him. A woman sitting a few benches down from them saw that grin, got up, and moved quickly to the other end of the subway car.

  “Okay, then,” Mandeville said. “Good hunting.”

  The train pulled into the next stop and Evangelino rose and got off. Mandeville remained seated until the next station stop, then got out, went up and over the bridge across the tracks and sat down to wait for the next train going back into town.

  Now, he thought, that interfering prick was going to find out just how ruthless the CT world could be when someone crossed Carl Mandeville. He was betting on Evangelino. The only hole in his intelligence picture of Walker’s estate was what was under all that leafy canopy out there. The walls were formidable enough, and he probably had some electronic surveillance, too, but both his operations tonight could handle all that easily.

  This damn mess had gotten away from him, he realized, and it was time for some decisive action. The vials had arrived from Fort Detrick and were now in his safe. The next meeting of the DMX was in three days, and there was going to be a terrible “accident” in the meeting room. The fact that the DMX meeting room was almost hermetically sealed off in all respects would make the results even more dreadful. The whole committee extinguished in a few deep breaths. Especially his one-time protégée, Ellen bitch-kitty Whiting. He’d even figured out how to blame the whole thing on Walker and his little society. Pity the old man never left the estate, because if he did, he could become the very first civilian to ever attend a meeting of the DMX.

  He smiled to himself. Wouldn’t that be a nice, tidy package. He’d have to work on that.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Av woke up as if from some kind of trance. He blinked his eyes and then looked outside. It was just about full dark. Surprised, he looked at his watch: almost six P.M.

  Damn, he thought—I slept that long? There was a soft knock at the door and the butler, Thomas, stuck his head in.

  “Drinks in the communications room when you’re ready, Detective Sergeant,” he announced. “Have a good kip?”

  “I guess so,” Av said, sitting up and stretching. “Had no idea I was that tired.”

  Thomas beamed. “Very good, sir. Come down whenever you’re ready. The room’s right behind the library.”

  “Um,” Av said. “I’m not sure I’ll be dressed for the occasion.”

  “Not to worry sir. It is a large house, but Mister Walker much prefers to keep things informal. You’ll be fine.”

  “Thomas,” Av said. “Are you ex-military?”

  Thomas smiled proudly. “Special Boat Service,” he replied. “Twenty years.”

  “Wow—even I know what that is. I think I saw something about that outfit in a movie?”

  “Lots of illusion in those movies, sir,” Thomas said, and then closed the door. Av got up, stretched again, looked for his clothes. His room looked out over that strange-looking jungle covering the five acres in front of the house. In the descending darkness, the driveway showed up as a pale ribbon bisecting a mass of plants, shrubs, and trees. Beyond the wall he saw the top of a white Virginia Electric Power utility truck parked next to a telephone pole. Then the lights went out.

  * * *

  Hiram and Thomas sat in the communications room and scanned the electrical circuit screens to make sure all the externally visible lights had gone out. They could feel the big generator down in the basement humming along nicely. Hiram sat in a large, comfortable chair, while Thomas sat at the main communications console.

  “Show me the eagle’s nest, please,” Hiram said.

  An infrared image quivered onto the center screen. Down below the tree three VEPCo utility workers pretended to be doing something at the side of the truck, while a fourth was getting the embarked cherry-picker arm ready to come back down from a trip to the pole’s crosstree.

  “Those will be the operators,” Hiram said. “See the backpacks?”

  “Yes, sir,” Thomas said. “It looks like they’re carrying some kind of submachine guns on their chests. I’m thinking MP5s.”

  Hiram nodded.

  “Who’s got MP5s?” Av asked from the doorway.

  “Come in, Detective Sergeant,” Hiram said. “I believe we’re about to have visitors.”

  Av came over and sat down next to Hiram in one on the armchairs and stared at the screens. “VEPCo’s issuing ski masks now?” he asked.

  “Not VEPCo, we’re pretty sure,” Hiram said. “I think this is a team of operators sent by Mister Mandeville to retrieve you.”

  “Wonderful,” Av said. “Maybe it’d be better if I just went down to the gate and said hi. No point in bringing guys like that in here to tear up your house.”

  Hiram smiled. “Let’s just see what they do and how far they get. You said it was U.S. Marshals who took you to Petersburg. If these people have been sent by Mandeville, they are probably not marshals.”

  “Yeah, but still: there’s no reason for you to get involved,” Av said. “This isn’t your problem—it’s my problem, even if I’m not sure what that problem really is. Can we contact Ellen?”

  “Remember that Ellen brought you here, Detective Sergeant. She may have been expecting that Mandeville would try to scoop you up. Doing that here is going to be much harder than those people out there think. Ah, they’re moving now.”

  The three of them watched the screen as the little camera, whose image was swaying gently in a small night breeze, tracked the team of three down past the gates and to the left front corner of the wall.

  “Switching,” Thomas said. The image went dark and then resumed, this time from what appeared to be a wall-mounted camera. It showed the men moving swiftly at the very base of the wall, and then stopping about halfway down to the river, just out of sight of the camera.

  “Shit, it lost them,” Av muttered.

  “We kn
ow exactly where they are, don’t we, Thomas.”

  Thomas switched the display to reveal a graphic outline of the estate’s entire perimeter. Nothing was displayed within the walls, but there was a green band of video all along the outside of the wall. “Not all of my plants are inside the walls, Detective Sergeant,” Hiram said. “There’s ivy all along the outside face of the bricks. Wherever they stop to throw up a rope or something, the ivy will reveal it to a network of sensors monitoring cellular fluids within the stems. That will tell us where they are and which inside-perimeter camera we need to turn on and where to point the infrared spotlights.”

  “The plants are part of your security system?”

  “The plants are the security system,” Hiram said. “Some of the things growing out there are dangerous, so I can’t have anyone scaling these walls and trampling through what looks like a jungle but in fact is the outside portion of my laboratory.”

  “Got ’em,” Thomas said, pointing to a segment of the wall, where little red lines were appearing.

  “Did you happen to notice if they were wearing night vision devices?” Hiram asked. Thomas hit some keys and replayed a segment of the eagle’s nest camera recording. “I don’t think so,” Thomas said after studying the images. “I thought those were just ski masks.”

  “I’d say they are,” Av said. “We have some like that—it’s like a skullcap with a boom mike on it, only the boom contains a monocular NVD. They can pull it down, look into the dark, then flip it back up. I think it’s called a near-infrared device.”

  “Then it needs an IR illuminator,” Thomas said. “Mister Walker, we may not need the IR floods.”

  “Good,” Hiram said. “Now let’s see if Yucca gloriosa does its job. That’s Spanish dagger to you, Detective Sergeant. Once they get to the top of the wall and look down they’ll see a band of Spanish dagger plants, all over six feet tall, at the base. Wouldn’t want to climb down into that.”

  “So they can’t get in?”

  “Yes they can, but only where I want them to get in. There’s a gap in the Spanish dagger planting about twenty feet down the wall toward the river from where they are now. Assuming they find it, they’ll try to get in right there.”

  “They’re going the wrong way,” Thomas commented, as the little red squiggles lit up along the outline of the wall. “Now they’ve turned around. Here we go. About thirty feet.” They watched in silence as the display tracked the intruders’ progress along the top of the wall.

  “No razor wire or shards of glass up top?” Av asked.

  “No, it’s just a flat concrete cap so that the stems of the ivy can come up and over, along with some microfiber mesh underneath those stems. They can’t feel it, but the mesh can surely feel them. Here we go, they’re stopping.”

  “Camera five coming up,” Thomas said, switching the display again. At first there was nothing on the display, and then a flash of greenish light, followed by a second, that seemed to be emanating from the operators’ shoulders. “They’re taking a look,” he said. “I’m going to bring up a low-level IR illuminator in that sector as soon as they turn off their own, see if they notice.”

  Gradually, Av saw a picture beginning to emerge on the center display. One man was already on a rope, descending quickly with the rope wrapped around one leg to the inside base of the wall. Then the second, and finally, the third. Thomas saw a hand go up to flip its monocular down, and dimmed the IR floodlight to its lowest setting. The man took a quick sweep, then flipped the boom back up against the side of his head. Thomas turned up the IR flood again.

  “What’s down there?” Av asked.

  “They’re standing on the banks of a moat, actually,” Hiram said. “Not much of one, maybe ten feet across and not very deep. It’s covered by a mat of water-hyacinth plants that have been crossbred with kudzu. The mat’s about two feet thick, and right where they are, the mat has been sectioned into a float of sorts. Once one of them steps onto the mat, he’ll realize that’s it’s not terra firma, but: it will support him until he gets out to the middle, which is when the mat is going to flip over on itself and trap him underwater.”

  “Uh,” Av began.

  “Remember, the water’s only four, four and a half feet deep. All he has to do is stand up and claw his way back out.”

  “They’re communicating with someone,” Thomas announced.

  “Can we eavesdrop?” Hiram said.

  Thomas shook his head. “They’ll be using encryption.”

  They saw a second man’s hand reach up to drop his boom. This time Thomas left the tree-mounted IR flood on. The man took a long look, and then pushed his boom back up. One of his partners clipped a rope to his harness. Then he stepped out onto the mat as his partner paid out the rope. He stood for a moment on the spongy mat, and then began to move carefully across, until, suddenly his arms began to windmill, producing a blur of IR light as the mat rolled over. The two men back on firm ground started pulling hard, and soon the first man emerged from under the mass of wet greenery and flopped down on the banks of the water channel.

  “Bubblers,” Hiram said.

  Thomas switched to the control panel for the wide area network of pipes and tubes that underlay the entire garden. He switched on a CO2 source and soon there were bubbles rising invisibly through the extended mat of hyacinth. In response, the matted mass of vegetation began to move here and there, as if there was something large moving around under the matted mass of vegetation. Av grinned as he saw the men back up against the wall. One of them was gesticulating as he radioed back what they’d encountered.

  “Is there a way around the hyacinth bridge?” he asked.

  “There is,” Hiram said. “It’s just to their right. Hopefully they’ll find it. Thomas, turn off the CO2 in the moat. Leave the IR lights at their present level and warm up the UVB matrix.”

  Av watched the three men huddled at the base of the wall. Their images were in and out of focus. Every time they moved, things went a bit fuzzy.

  “Thomas mentioned drinks,” Av said, spying a liquor cart.

  Hiram turned in his chair. “Quite right,” he said. “The best part is yet to come. Over there, in the corner. I’ll take a small Scotch. You have one, too, but not too much. You may still have to run for it.”

  Av went across the room to the small bar on wheels. There were three decanters. He sniffed the first one: bourbon. The second one smelled like a peat bog. He fixed two glasses of that and brought one to Hiram. Run for it?

  “Good,” Hiram said. “Now, watch this.”

  The three men were on the move again up on the big screen, easing their way along the hard ground at the base of the brick wall. Without the stimulation of the CO2 matrix, the hyacinth beds had settled down. They finally encountered a wall of Spanish dagger and stopped. One of them pointed into the jungle: a large tree had come down across the moat, its trunk almost three feet thick. Its upper branches were smashed all along the base of the wall, but the trunk was intact. A bridge. Clearly a bridge.

  “That’s convenient,” Av commented.

  “That’s planned,” Thomas replied from the console. “It’s not a real tree.”

  “Damn,” Av said. “Looks real.”

  “The intent, Detective Sergeant,” Hiram said, “is to nudge intruders into areas where they will encounter some of my more interesting creations. The whole idea is to scare any intruders so badly that they leave.”

  “What’s coming?” Av asked.

  “Know what a Venus flytrap is?” Hiram asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Av said. “A plant with teeth, a big mouth, and some strong digestive juices. Insects land, the flaps close, and then the juices go to work.”

  “Quite so,” Hiram said. “I’ve created a mutation, using a plant whose popular name is elephant ears. Watch.”

  The first of the operators was edging sideways across the tree trunk, roped up to one of the men waiting at the base of the wall. He stepped off, tested the footing, then too
k off the rope and flung it back to the second man. Once they got across, all three activated their night vision devices. From what Av could make out on the screen, they were standing in a grove of what looked like small, blurry Christmas trees all along the inner edge of the moat. The plants were about man-high, but Av could not make out individual branches, only the dark green mass of the plants themselves.

  “UVA spot to full power on that plant nearest to the group,” Hiram ordered.

  The men were huddled together, consulting what might have been a map or diagram of the estate. They could probably see the wall across the moat, but behind them there was just an undifferentiated mass of dark vegetation. Thomas entered some control information and Av waited for something to happen.

  “You can’t see the ultraviolet light on this IR screen,” Hiram said. “But that plant can definitely see it. Think of it as an artificial sunrise.”

  Suddenly, one of the men turned around. Right behind him one of those “Christmas” trees was opening to reveal two vertical, kidney-bean-shaped lobes, as tall as the plant and hinged at the middle. The edges of the lobes were spiked, and apparently, the inside of the plant was much warmer than the outside, because those spikes were clearly visible on the screen.

  The man stepped back and nudged his partners. All three backed away from this sudden apparition.

  “UV spot to low,” Hiram said.

  As the three men stared at this thing that was gaping at them, the two lobes slowly began to fold inward until it once again looked like a fat Christmas tree on the screen. The men talked some more, consulted the map again, and turned to head into the jungle. The camera lost sight of them, displaying only faint blobs of warmth when there was enough contrast with the vegetation they were pushing into.

  “Full UV matrix,” Hiram said.

  Again, nothing seemed to happen. Then there appeared to be a commotion off to one side of the screen, as IR blobs came in and out of focus. Only then Av realized that a lot of that vegetation consisted of the giant flytraps, which were now all opening wide. One man pushing through all the vegetation inadvertently stuck his arm into one of the lobes, causing the plant to close on his arm. He tugged frantically but could not get it loose. A second man pushed closer, wielding a large knife, and began to cut into one of the lobes. After a few seconds of hacking away, the trapped man was able to pull his arm out of the plant, but then he frantically began to wipe some substance off his arm as if it was burning his skin.