A Mighty Fortress

by H. A. Covington

  “Okay, I gather we’re descending to the depths in this,” said Cody, looking inside. “But won’t the electric motor make noise or set off some kind of alarm?”

  “No, we’re not going up or down in it, because you can’t operate it from inside the elevator,” she said. “It wasn’t meant to haul people. Look, let me first tell you what I’ve been doing. That day back when we left Centralia, you heard McGrew say there was one of our Third Section agents here in the hotel?”

  “And you’re in contact with that agent?” asked Cody.

  “Bingo!” she said. “And Lisa said you were just another pretty face! For various reasons, it’s proven impossible for that agent and General Barrow to get together and confer, even for a few moments, and the phones and the internet are out, so I’ve been acting as go-between. That hasn’t been easy, since I have even less excuse for being seen with him or her, and I wanted to see if there was some way I could move around unseen like a rat in the wainscot.”

  “Wainscot?” asked Cody.

  “My grandmother was English and she used to read me Beatrix Potter stories, before they gave her the hot shot. This hotel was built back in the 1950s, and it had one of the first examples of central air conditioning and heating in the Northwest. Nice, roomy ventilation ducts, or at least roomy for a skinny broad like me. My first inclination was just to do the old human fly trick and explore the ventilators as best I could, see if they’re alarmed, so forth and so on, and see if there was any way I could move around the hotel unobserved that way. I’m glad I didn’t mess around in the ducts, because that individual whose name I didn’t mention told us that the main vents and the interstitial areas where the fans and heaters access the outside are all alarmed with motion sensors. Like I said, the Feds aren’t dumb, and they don’t want anybody crawling around in there.

  “But there’s one thing they missed. Back when the hotel was first built, they also had some of the first automatic dishwashers, but in the Fifties those were big machines that made a lot of noise, and so they installed the dishwashers down in the basement. Each floor had a couple of dumbwaiter access doors for room leftovers, as well as the dining room, and the big banquet room. These things carried dirty dishes down to the basement where they were unloaded and packed into the washers, and then stacked and sent back up when they were clean. Those shafts were later closed up when the basement dishwashers were removed, but they’re still there, and they are accessible by a couple of service hatches like this one. The doors are alarmed, but not the shafts themselves, because the FBI were rushed, or lazy, or maybe it was just affirmative action incompetence. But these lifts are hydraulic, and so they’re movable by hand.”

  She pushed the dumbwaiter up and then grasped the bottom of it and lifted it up, slowly but without too much effort, leaving an open shaft with a cable. “I’m able to get down in the old dishwasher room, which by lovely coincidence is now stacked high with old mattresses, and that makes it easy to drop down. The dumbwaiter shafts have ladder rungs in one side of the wall for service personnel, and you can push the lift up or pull it down after you as you climb up and down.” She took out a flashlight from its hiding place and flashed it in, showing him the inset rungs bolted along the shaft. “It’s a piece of cake. So I put on my cat burglar outfit, not to be confused with my duckbill platypus costume, and I was able to lower myself down to the basement. Originally I just wanted to see if I could somehow move around the hotel via these dumbwaiter shafts, and I can, a bit. I can get into the West Wing, for example, if I have to, and that means so can others of us, if need be. But this led to something else. There was a vent connecting that old dishwasher room down there and their little war room next door.”

  “War room?” asked Cody.

  “Our friend tipped me that the American delegation has taken to going down into the basement and whispering around a guttering candle in the hours of darkness, when the powers of evil are exalted, and the demon Hound stalks the moor.”

  “Your grandmother read you Conan Doyle as well, did she?” asked Cody.

  “No, dummy, that was Mrs. Jensen’s English class at Hillside! You had her as well.”

  “Why the hell didn’t they just have their bull sessions in one of their suites like we do?” wondered Cody.

  She shrugged. “Hell if I know. Apparently they’re just as paranoid about us as we are about them. Our source tells us Doc Doom has them all in a tizzy because he’s been able to really clean out our floor of all their surveillance crap, and they don’t know what’s going on. They think we’re bugging them now, so they go down there and conspire in a hole. Anyway, I’ve been able to climb up on top of those dusty mattresses and lie there next to the ventilator and listen very nicely. I couldn’t use a mike or a recorder, because Doc told me that anything electrical might set off some kind of alarm, but I can pretty well hear what’s going on. I’ve been down there six times in the past two weeks, including tonight, which was when I overheard them discussing those economic ambush clauses they slipped into their treaty proposals. Plus a lot of other stuff I can’t tell you about, but which has been passed on in code to the Army Council, which code they hopefully haven’t broken. No problems until tonight just as I was leaving.”

  “And what was that problem?” asked Cody.

  “Come on, I’ll show you,” she said. “Hold the flashlight for me.” She climbed into the shaft, grasping the rungs, and he held the light and watched her clamber down into the darkness like a monkey. It was only one floor so it wasn’t very far down, and he saw her hold up her hand, and he dropped her the flashlight. Then he eased into the shaft and climbed down carefully himself, feeling for each rung with his Doc Martens. The former dishwasher room was a large cinderblock chamber piled with musty-smelling mattresses and box springs, nor was it totally in darkness. A single forty-watt bulb glowed over the doorway, which presumably was one of those that led into the outside corridor along which he and Barrow had traveled to meet with Walter Stanhope on the day of their arrival. Cody could see the air vent high in the far wall, and the pile of mattresses where Emily told him she listened to the Americans and their plotting. “That’s the ventilator to the next room,” she said, pointing up to one wall. “It’s dark now. They’re not in there.” She led him over to one corner where there was a single mattress on the floor, covered with old dirty sheets and mattress covers. She shifted the dusty cloth mound aside and flashed the light, and Cody saw that there was someone lying on the mattress.

  It was Susan Horowitz, the woman whom he had known for years as Leah Sapirstein. She was dressed in a casual pants suit, pearl earrings gleaming against olive neck, jet black hair spread in a fan out on the dirty mattress, chin jutting high and left, neck snapped cleanly. Her eyes were blank and her mouth was open. The smell and the stained legs indicated that her bowels and bladder had emptied into her trousers as she died. “Well, isn’t this another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Ollie!” he said, shaking his head.

  “She walked in on me,” said Nightshade. “I gave her a kung fu neck twist I saw in a movie, and damn if it didn’t work. I don’t think she was looking for me specifically, I think she was sneaking in here to listen in on what was going on in the next room just like me.” She slid a metal cylinder out of Susan’s pocket. “This is some kind of high end recording or transmitting device. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to have been on when she came in. My guess is she was working for someone. Mossad?”

  “Quite possibly,” agreed Cody. “Hadassahs often wear more than one hat. The Sapirsteins go to Israel almost every year and she could well have been recruited there. Hell, maybe they all were.”

  “Look, Cody, I know you hate the Sapirsteins, but this woman was technically your sister for a while,” said Emily quietly. “I couldn’t let her reveal that we’d found their secret meeting place and lose the listening post. I had no choice, but I’m sorry. She was part of your life and I took her away.”

  “A bad part. Don’t sweat it. I won’t.” H
e looked dispassionately at his stepsister’s corpse. “You’re right, I did have Jensen for English Lit. Take thy fortune; thou find’st to be too busy is some danger. Hamlet, act three, scene four.”

  Nightshade snorted, “Yah, well, if you’re Hamlet, I’m Ophelia. Rosemary’s for remembrance, I’ll wear my rue with a difference, hey nonny nonny and I’ll go jump in the lake. Now, the reason I brought you down here was to ask you something.”

  “What’s that?” asked Cody.

  “Have you ever cut up a body?”

  “No,” he replied thoughtfully. “Damn, where’s Bobby Bells when you need him? I missed that class back in A Company. Bells chopped up a couple, I know. But I’ll tell you what I didn’t miss, and that was Bells’ ongoing rap on modern forensics and how not to get your ass jammed up by some CSI bimbo who thinks she’s Agent Scully. You left something of yourself on her, fibers or skin or hair, you couldn’t help it, and needless to say you just had to cack a kike right in the middle of a small army of FBI agents and cops!”

  “But that is not the end of my derring-do. With you two’s past history, you know that you’re the first one they’ll come looking for when she’s missed? For all we know she may be missed already, if only in Secretary Stanhope’s bed.”

  “Yeah, I picked up on that,” he said dryly.

  “They give those forensics classes in Threesec too. Look, as a starting point, let’s agree that she can’t be found anywhere in our part of the hotel or connected with us at all, right?”

  “Agreed,” said Cody.

  “That leaves us two choices,” said Nightshade. “One, we dump her in the American part of the hotel or in the kitchen, someplace like that, and then act innocent. With this girl’s apparently well known kinks and maybe her working for Israel as well, we won’t necessarily be the only suspects. The second choice is that she just disappears, which is the best way, because then it’s all up in the air and the impact on the conference isn’t anywhere near as bad. Hey, maybe the slut ran off to Vegas with an MP or something, who knows? That won’t fool the Feebs for long, but as long as they merely suspect, it won’t become that big an issue. They find a body, and the whole conference has problems.”

  “Mmmm, agreed,” said Cody. “But that means we have to either destroy her, or stash her. This is a five star hotel, but I don’t think they’ve got vats of acid anywhere for the convenience of homicidal guests. You know anything about the furnaces?”

  “I checked them out in my nocturnal wanderings, yes,” said Nightshade in a low tone. “They’re down the hall, which is patrolled by peacekeepers. Propane, but no access we could use to stuff a body into the flames, and if we even tried to open the boilers we might break a line, get a gas leak, and end up sitting on the moon along with the rest of the hotel. There’s all kinds of places around the grounds we could bury her, if we had time and a nice foggy night, but the hotel is chock-a-block, and even if we could get her outside we’d be seen by somebody in sixty seconds and probably end up with our picture on the front page of the National Inquirer hauling a dead body around. We can’t bury her in here because the floor is concrete. We can’t leave her in here under some mattresses or in the old dishwasher well, because the Americans meet next door almost every night, and after a couple of days she’s going to get ripe enough for somebody to get a whiff through the ventilator. Plus the peacekeepers do check this room periodically. I’ve had to duck out of sight a couple of times. Even hefting her out of here up one of those dumbwaiter shafts is going to be hard to do, at least hard to do quietly, which is one reason I called you in to help.”

  “One reason?” asked Cody.

  “Well, there was also our slurp session out by the vending machines,” said Nightshade. “A girl needs some romance in her life. What about cutting her up?” she asked again. “There’s a maintenance room down the hall with tools, including some hacksaws and hatchets, and some heavy-duty garbage bags. It would be a bit tricky getting in and out with the blue berets around and about, but because they go up and down periodically the corridor doesn’t have motion detectors, so we might could get in and get some stuff and get back here. We can do the job down in that well where the dishwasher was. It’s got drains in it.”

  “Mmmmm, hold off on the hatchet, Carrie Nation,” said Cody, sitting down on a mattress and putting his chin on his hand in thought. “I’m not sure subdivision is the way to go here, and I’m not just being squeamish. For one thing, neither of us have ever dismembered a human being before, and I don’t think it’s a job we want to try for the first time in the dark with only a flashlight and working under a time constraint. We wouldn’t be able to do much of a cleanup job down here in the dark, and the minute some Federal CSI dweeb throws his black light in there, up comes the bloodstains. For another thing, if we want to make her disappear, we’re multiplying our problem if we cut her up, because instead of one body we then have to make eight or ten separate parcels disappear, plus the mess involved in dissecting her. They find one bag of giblets, and the whole game is up. No, we need to stash the whole body someplace where it won’t be detected by sight or smell. Getting back to Hamlet, we don’t want anyone nosing her as they go into the lobby, or finding her dead body under the bed like this was some tourist motel in Florida.”

  “Wherever we put her, it’s going to have to be up one of those old service shafts,” said Nightshade. “Hence my need for a good strong set of male shoulders. We couldn’t get from the door to one end of that corridor or the other without a Swede in a blue beret spotting us.”

  “Okay, where do the shafts go?” asked Cody.

  “One over there goes up to the kitchen, one over there goes to the Pump Room, there’s the one we came down to our floor, and one around the corner goes up to the West Wing,” said Nightshade. “I’d say stash her in a ventilator duct, but not only would that blow the aroma of rotting Jew all over the hotel in a couple of days, but there’s those damned motion detectors the FBI put in there.”

  “Okay, the one up to the kitchen, where does it come out?” asked Cody.

  “A kind of alcove. You’re thinking stash her in a freezer? I thought of that. Number one, the kitchen has security cameras, although no motion detectors, to stop the staff from stealing food, I guess. Great country where people have to steal food, eh? Les Misérables and white people are all Jean Valjean.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re sitting in a whole hotel full of Inspector Javerts. Enough with the literary allusions, dammit! We need to dump this stiff!”

  Emily continued, “Number two, that kitchen is crowded all day long, and people go in and out of the freezers all the time. In fact,” she looked at her watch by the flashlight, “In another couple of hours the first shift crew will show up to start fixing breakfast for us hard-working diplomats. We need to figure out what to do, and go on and do it.”

  “Actually, I was wondering what they had up there by way of meat grinders and slicers?” mused Cody. “Would they really notice a few more packs of frozen cold cuts or a couple more sides hanging in a corner in the walk-in?”

  “Yeeew! Now that’s not merely silly, it’s gross!” she exclaimed.

  “I once saw a loading dock out back there. Where is the door to that?”

  “To the right from the dumbwaiter shaft,” said Nightshade. “You may be onto something there. If I remember correctly, that’s about the only blind spot in the kitchen, blocked from the cameras by the head chef’s little office. I did some sneaking around in there when I first found these shafts, but I had to watch those panning CCTVs.”

  “Is the door alarmed?” he asked.

  “I think so, yes,” she answered.

  “Crap! There goes my idea of putting her in the dumpster,” sighed Cody.

  “Or…the trash compactor!” said Nightshade in sudden excitement. “Cody, they’ve got one of those big, long container type trash compactors! Once it gets full a truck comes along, hooks up, hauls it away and another truck backs an empty container in and drop
s it off! We’re using up so much food and generating so much kitchen garbage that they do this every day, and the truck comes and replaces the compactor at about four in the morning or so! If we can just get her out there on the dock, all we have to do is get her kosher carcass inside the compactor and it will be smushed flat and hauled away to a landfill! Brilliant!”

  “Past an alarmed door that will go off if we open it,” said Cody. “Well, no use just sitting here. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Show me the shaft and I’ll go up and take a look. Is the dumbwaiter door padlocked from the outside?”

  “No, they still use the kitchen dumbwaiter sometimes, so it’s not locked, and there’s no alarm on the door. FBI seems to have missed that one, too. When you get up there just push the elevator up far enough and push on the door.” A minute later Cody carefully eased himself out into the large and modern kitchen. It was dimly lit and smelled of fresh-mopped floor, and several unseen electrical things hummed discordantly. There was the freezer and what appeared to be a newly-built small cubbyhole office, and there were no closed circuit cameras that he could see. Evidently this small area was indeed a blind spot. He slipped down the right-hand corridor to where several large plastic wheeled garbage tips stood by a wide double door. He carefully examined the door and found that it was indeed alarmed. He also saw that there was an alarm switch, no doubt intended for the mutual convenience of security guards and late workers, and that it was in the “off” position. He was back down in the basement a minute later.