Leavey and MacLean moved well clear of the mouth of the tunnel. As their eyes became more accustomed to the dark and, with the help of an occasional break in the clouds, they were able to make out the shapes of buildings on the valley floor.
‘There’s a complete village here!’ whispered Leavey.
MacLean’s reply was cut short by a light clicking on in the building nearest them, scattering light from the window and causing them to throw themselves to the ground. The silhouette of a young woman drifted briefly across the light and they watched as the figure put on a jacket she took from a cupboard in the room. The light clicked off again and moments later a door opened.
A torch beam appeared and started to move over the ground, illuminating the holder’s path between the building she had just come from and the one next to it. As she fumbled with the door handle the torch in her hand swung upwards and lit her face for a moment. She was in her early twenties, dark-haired and pretty. When she disappeared inside MacLean said, ‘When she comes out we’ll grab her and find out what the hell’s going on.’
Suddenly the cry of a baby came from the building. It was long and loud and echoed up the face of the cliffs.
MacLean shook his head in disbelief but before he could say anything, the baby’s cry was joined by another and yet another. Lights were switched on and Leavey and MacLean were forced to retreat from the position they had taken up in order to intercept the girl when she left. A torch beam appeared out of the darkness to their left. It was followed by another to their right. Both beams converged on the building where the noise was coming from. When they met, the light coming from the windows revealed their holders as two more young women. They spoke briefly in Spanish and went inside.
‘It’s a nursery,’ whispered Leavey.
Peace was restored over the course of the next few minutes and the lights were turned off once more. The two girls who had arrived after the start of the disturbance were the first to leave and spent a little time in whispered conversation outside the front door before saying good-night and separating. A few minutes later, the original girl left the building and turned on her torch. She started out on her journey back but had only taken a few steps when Leavey came up silently behind her and cupped his hand over her mouth. He lowered her gently to the ground and whispered reassurances in her ear until her panic had subsided.
MacLean asked gently, ‘Do you speak English?’ and Leavey relaxed his hand to allow her to answer. He kept it close, ready to smother any attempt at a scream.
‘A little,’ replied the girl.
‘Good. Who are you and what do you do here?’
‘My name is Carla Vasquez. I look after the children.’
‘Carla Vasquez? Maria’s friend?’
‘You know Maria?’ exclaimed the astonished girl.
‘She told us about you,’ replied MacLean. ‘She suspected you were some kind of prisoner.’
‘But not here,’ added Leavey, looking up at the high cliffs against the night sky.
‘Your mother thinks you’re in Madrid,’ explained MacLean.
‘We are given post-cards to write to our parents.’
‘You said “we”. How many are there of you?’ asked Leavey.
‘Twelve. We look after the children.’
‘What children?’ asked MacLean. ‘Where do they come from?’
‘I don’t know Senor. None of us knows. We get babies to look after for a few weeks, then they take them away and we don’t see them again.’
‘What happens then?’
‘We get more babies.’
‘Who brings you the babies?’ asked Leavey.
‘Dr Von Jonek.’
MacLean savoured the moment in silence. He’d found Von Jonek and the knowledge seemed to drain him momentarily of all energy. He rolled over on to his back in the grass and looked up at the sky, thinking of just how long the road had been and how hard. Leavey put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and said, ‘We’re nearly there.’
Leavey said to Carla, ‘We’ll help you escape Carla but we are going to need your help. It’ll be light in three hours and we have no place to hide.’
‘Come with me,’ said Carla. ‘I share a hut with Fernanda Murillo. You can hide there.’
Carla lit up the way with her torch beam and Leavey and MacLean crawled along in the grass behind her. They had almost reached the front door of the hut when they realised that something was wrong. There were voices coming from inside. They were raised in argument and one of them was male. He sounded drunk.
Leavey looked to Carla for an explanation. Carla was distraught. ‘It’s one of the guards!’ she whispered. ‘Sometimes they get drunk and try to bother us. We keep the door locked but I must have left it unlocked when I left!’
The sound of crying came from inside and MacLean made to move but Leavey stopped him. ‘I’ll go,’ he said and started towards the hut.
Leavey turned the handle of the door slowly and steadily until the lock was silently released. He moved the door just an inch, to make sure that it would swing easily, and then in one swift movement he opened it, slipped inside and closed it again behind him. The sound of a girl protesting angrily came from the room to his left. The sound was interspersed with coarse sounds of male assurance. He moved slowly along the wall and pushed the room door very slightly ajar. He saw a man with a large beer gut holding the girl’s hands to prevent her fending him off. In her frustration she spat in his face forcing him to let one of her hands go. The girl immediately brought her fingernails down the right side of the man’s face. He let out a bellow of pain and raised his fist to strike her. The blow never landed. Leavey dropped him with a hard blow to the back of his neck. ‘Not tonight,’ he murmured.
The girl was on the bed with her knees drawn up to her chin and her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fear and shock and she was shaking. Leavey put his finger to his lips and made a reassuring gesture with his hands before opening the door for MacLean and Carla. Carla rushed to her friend to comfort her and apologise for what she saw as her fault.
MacLean looked down at the man on the floor and said, ‘We’ll have to do something with him before daybreak. How about the tunnel?’
They conferred briefly and decided that, at that late hour, their chances of getting the unconscious man up the tunnel to the disused shaft where they had found the skeletons were good. They put the lights off, and moved the man’s body out of the front door.
It took them fully ten minutes to drag him up the shaft because of his weight but they encountered no problems and left him bound and gagged in one of the old cells. Carla made coffee and sandwiches on their return and they learned what they could from the girls.
By the time the first streaks of dawn were in the sky, MacLean and Leavey had built up a picture of life in the hidden valley. There were six separate wooden chalets where the girls lived; each housed two girls. The babies, usually about thirty at any given time, were kept together in a single nursery building and looked after by ten of the girls during the daytime and by three at night. If the babies should start crying at night however, the other girls were under orders to lend a hand in quietening them because Dr Von Jonek got very angry about the noise. ‘There is an echo off the cliffs,’ said Carla. ‘Sometimes people can hear the sound on the other side.’
‘The “lost souls” of the Hacienda Yunque,’ said MacLean.
‘How many guards?’ asked Leavey.
‘Fifteen in all, although they are not just guards; they have other duties. They are split into three groups of five. One group works in the boiler house, one does the maintenance work in the Hacienda and the third group works here.’
‘Any other people?’ asked MacLean.
‘Dr Von Jonek and two other scientists,’ said Carla.
‘And Hartmut,’ added Fernanda, exchanging glances with Carla.
‘Hartmut?’ asked Leavey.
Carla grimaced and said, ‘Dr Von Jonek keeps a strange man with him. He is not normal… not right.’
Leavey asked where Von Jonek and the others worked.
‘Somewhere inside the rock,’ replied Carla. ‘But none of the girls ever get to go there.’
Carla and Fernanda were both on duty in the nursery at seven thirty in the morning so it was agreed that Leavey and MacLean would lie low in their chalet. They would spend the day resting and regaining their strength, waiting for nightfall when they would attempt to find Von Jonek’s laboratory and the Cytogerm they had come for. In the event, neither of them slept much but the rest did them good and by mid-afternoon they felt ready for the final part of their mission.
‘When we get the stuff we’ll still have a problem,’ said Leavey.
‘You mean, how do we get out of here?’ replied MacLean.
Leavey nodded.
When they had entered the tunnel through the fake sterilizer door they had found a button to close the door behind them but both had noticed that there was no obvious way of opening the door from the inside. ‘There must be a way,’ said MacLean. ‘I don’t fancy the climb.’ He looked up at the cliffs.
‘Not easy,’ conceded Leavey.
‘Even if we made it to the top, we can’t get down the other side because of the overhang.’
‘Then we’ll have to ask someone the way out,’ said Leavey with characteristic understatement.
‘And we’ll have to do it tonight,’ said MacLean. ‘They’re going to start taking the absence of one of their guards seriously pretty soon.’
Leavey agreed. They had been counting on a ‘honeymoon’ period when, although the guard was seen to be missing, innocent explanations would prevail for a while. This, they hoped, would be especially true in the case of the Hacienda Yunque, which to all intents and purposes was impregnable. The man had been hopelessly drunk when he ‘disappeared’ so it would be assumed for a while that he had not appeared for duty because of this. When a whole day had passed however, without anyone seeing him, they would start searching for him in earnest.
When the girls returned just after dark MacLean told them of the plan and asked them to prepare themselves to leave at a moment’s notice. They were not however, to have bags packed and waiting by the door because of any search that might be mounted for the missing guard. As a precaution, the four of them searched the chalet for anything that might have belonged to him, no matter how small. They found nothing.
The two men slipped out of the chalet into the darkness and crossed the open ground quickly. They made it to the shelter of the rocks and settled down to wait. The night, a complete contrast to the previous evening, was warm and balmy, pleasant to be out in but with the disadvantage of a clear, starry sky above them and the prospect of moonlight to contend with when the moon cleared the rim of the cliffs.
When they were satisfied that most of the to-ing and fro-ing was over for the day they moved nearer the tunnel that led to the Hacienda. They had already decided that Von Jonek’s laboratories must lie down the shaft in the tunnel that they had not explored. They crept up to the entrance, hugging the contours of the rock to avoid silhouetting themselves, and had a look. Everything seemed quiet so they sprinted quickly and quietly up to where the tunnel split into three. Once more the sound of voices sent them scurrying for cover in the dark, disused shaft.
From the shadows they watched five men pass by. They were arguing amongst themselves and as the sound of their voices faded Leavey said that they were probably the relief guards being summoned to assist in a search for the missing man. The two men crossed the junction and moved into new territory. There was a light coming from under the first door they came across and MacLean put his ear to it. He heard muted voices from within and signalled to Leavey that they move on. They came to another junction in the tunnel and found another door. On it in large red letters was the word, PRIVADO.
‘Do you think that applies to us?’ whispered Leavey.
MacLean smiled despite the feelings in his stomach. He watched their backs, gun raised with the barrel resting against his cheek, while Leavey dealt with the lock and let them inside. They were in a small laboratory equipped with basic glassware and general lab items but nothing to excite MacLean. He looked through drawers and cupboards in a methodical, clockwise search but still found nothing interesting. Finally, he opened a large refrigerator, letting yellow light spill out into the room. He hoped to find supplies of Cytogerm but it contained nothing but racks of small plastic tubes. He asked for Leavey’s torch and removed one of the racks to examine it more closely.
Each tube had a nametag on it. MacLean repeated the names under his breath as he went through the rack, removing each in turn. Halfway through, the names started to sound familiar. He went back to the beginning and filled in the blanks. Karman, Nobel prize winner in physics… Normark… prize winner in medicine… Ericson the finest mathematician of his generation. The list began to sound like a roll call of outstanding achievement in the twentieth century.
‘Mean anything?’ asked Leavey.
‘Quite a lot,’ replied MacLean thoughtfully.
‘Do you know what’s in the tubes?’ asked Leavey.
‘Sperm samples,’ said MacLean.
‘What for?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said MacLean. ‘It’s not unusual for great men to be asked to provide sperm samples for preservation in deep freeze, a sort of genetic bank for future generations. But I can’t see where Von Jonek fits in to all this.’
‘Artificial insemination?’ suggested Leavey.
‘The donors would never allow it,’ said MacLean.
‘If Von Jonek’s involved I don’t see that they would have had much say in the matter,’ said Leavey and MacLean had to agree.
‘I think that must be it,’ said Leavey. ‘They are using the samples to inseminate women, maybe at the clinic?’
MacLean looked unconvinced. He said, ‘That kind of operation wouldn’t take a budget of 18 million dollars and it wouldn’t explain the secret nursery.’
Leavey conceded.
MacLean opened more doors and found an incubator room being kept at 37 degrees centigrade, human body temperature. Inside there was a rotating drum full of test tubes containing a red-coloured fluid.
‘Anything?’ asked Leavey.
‘It’s some kind of cell culture system,’ said MacLean, closing the door again and opening up the door next to it. This proved to be another fridge. He almost went weak at the knees when he saw a light blue box lying on the middle shelf. It was labelled, CYTOGERM. MacLean picked it up and held it to his chest for a moment before raising it up to his lips. Carrie would have her new face.’
‘Mission accomplished,’ said Leavey.
MacLean nodded but was too emotional to say anything. Leavey asked, ‘Is there enough?’
MacLean nodded again, opening the box and stuffing the glass vials into his pockets.
Almost absent-mindedly, Leavey completed the search of the lab by opening the final door. He expected to find a cupboard; instead he found a cathedral.
The door was the entrance to a huge cavern in the rock, lit by an eerie green light. When they entered they found they were standing on a metal platform, ten metres above the floor of the cavern and part of a gallery that ran right the way around. The ceiling was another good ten metres above them.
‘It’s bloody enormous,’ whispered Leavey. ‘What the hell’s it for?’
The floor space was occupied by parallel rows of large glass tanks, each filled with liquid, as if the place were some sort of giant marine museum. Leavey led the way to a flight of steps leading down to the floor, their footsteps echoing on the metal rungs and MacLean went up to one of the tanks for a closer look.
‘What in God’s name is that?’ exclaimed Leavey with revulsion as he joined him.
‘It’s a human foetus,’ said MacLean, finding exactly the same in the next tank along and the one after that.
Leavey grimaced at the discovery but MacLean was puzzled. He couldn’t see the point in keeping so many exhibits of the same thing when they all seemed to be perfectly healthy. There was nothing of any pathological interest at all.
‘This place gives me the creeps,’ said Leavey.
MacLean thought such an admission strange coming from Leavey. ‘It’s the strangest museum I’ve ever been in,’ he admitted. He rested his fingers on the glass of one of the tanks but immediately recoiled as he found it warm. He opened his mouth to say something when suddenly the foetus inside gave a spastic jerk and both men jumped back.
‘They’re alive!’ exclaimed Leavey.
MacLean took more than a few moments to come to terms with the sheer horror of the discovery then realisation dawned. ‘My God, he’s succeeded in gestating children outside the womb.’
‘Surely that’s not possible?’ whispered Leavey.
‘I didn’t think it was either but I knew various Japanese research teams have been trying. To succeed in simulating placental function for nine months in vitro is an incredible feat.’
‘Unless your name is Von Jonek and you have an 18 million dollar budget apparently,’ said Leavey.
‘But why?’ murmured MacLean as they moved among the tanks.
‘They all have numbers on them,’ said Leavey. ‘This one has a seven.’
MacLean looked at the contents and said, ‘It’s a seven month old foetus, perfect in every way.’
‘What’s the German for “month”?’ asked Leavey.
‘Monat,’ replied MacLean.
‘I thought so,’ said Leavey. ‘The label says, Sieben Woche. That, if I’m not much mistaken, means seven weeks!’
‘That’s crazy,’ protested MacLean, ‘It’s far too well developed.’ He looked at the labels on other tanks but still had a problem with labelling. ‘There is just no way that… ‘ And then the truth hit him. It was obvious. he should have realised it at once. It was Cytogerm that was speeding up cell proliferation and shortening the gestation period. That’s how Von Jonek had succeeded where others had failed. Everything fell into place. The cell cultures he had found in the incubator room were human ova. They were being fertilised with the sperm of celebrated men and brought to maturity in the tanks with the aid of Cytogerm.
‘Someone’s coming!’ hissed Leavey and MacLean dropped to his knees beside him to look anxiously up at the gallery. They heard the sound of approaching footsteps on metal and Leavey signalled that they should get underneath the tanks. They held their breath as the sound grew louder. MacLean wriggled up into a position where he could see the entrance to the high gallery through a gap in the tank’s supporting frame. He saw a man appear and rest his hands on the guardrail to look down at the tanks.
MacLean’s first reaction was to press his face back to the ground but he found that he could not take his eyes off the man. He was well over six feet tall and dressed entirely in black, a colour which emphasised the fact that he was completely hairless and had skin the colour of alabaster. Even at that range MacLean could see the redness of the eyes. The man was an albino.
MacLean and Leavey adjusted their position under the tanks to follow his progress as he walked slowly round the echoing gallery, pausing at intervals to look over the rail like an animal sniffing the air. He made a complete circuit of the gallery and disappeared through a door, which banged behind him; the noise reverberated round the cavern.
Leavey let out his breath and said, ‘I guess that was Hartmut, Von Jonek’s little helper.’
The two men started to make their way back to the steps leading up to the gallery. MacLean paused when he got to the foot of them and looked back.
Leavey read his mind and said, ‘What do you want to do about this place?’
‘I don’t know,’ he confessed sadly. ‘I simply don’t know. When I think about the people these thugs killed in order to… do what? Create designer children? Jesus!’
‘We could alter the thermostats,’ said Leavey.
The tanks were fitted with thermostats maintaining human body temperature. MacLean looked at Leavey as if inviting him to share the moral dilemma.
Leavey pointed to a water supply valve. ‘Maybe a flood?’ he suggested. ‘When the water reaches the electrics, the system will short out.’
MacLean sought resolve for a moment in remembering Jutte and thinking about Carrie. ‘Open it up,’ he said.
Leavey failed to budge the wheel and looked around for something to provide added leverage. He found a spanner and inserted the narrow end through the spokes of the wheel, putting his weight against it, straining until the veins on his forehead stood out. The wheel suddenly gave, sending the spanner spinning to the floor and Leavey sprawling as a torrent of water erupted from the outlet to knock him over and soak him.
‘Let’s get out of here!’ said MacLean helping Leavey up.
They had barely made it back to the foot of the steps when a door opened above them and Hartmut re-appeared on the gallery. There was a moment when the three men stared at each other then Hartmut withdrew a thin silver whistle from his pocket and put it to his lips. There was no sound that Leavey or MacLean could hear but two massive Dobermans came bounding along the gallery to sit snarling at Hartmut’s heels.
Hartmut raised his arm to point at MacLean and Leavey. He let out a cry and the dogs bounded into action. Leavey traced the path of the first dog with the barrel of his gun as it coped with the difficult steps and squeezed the trigger. There was a quiet click and nothing else. ‘The bloody water!’ he exclaimed.
MacLean kept his gun on the second animal, waiting for a sure body hit when suddenly it veered from the steps and leapt over the rail at him. He tried to get out of the way of the animal but the proximity of one of the tanks stopped him. The animal hit him squarely in the chest sending him and the tank behind him crashing to the floor in a shower of broken glass and warm fluid. Somewhere in the process, the gun fell from his grasp.
His hands fought desperately for something to grip on the mound of writhing muscle that was intent on tearing his throat out and he managed to get his fingers under the studded collar. He could now keep it at arm length but knew that he could not sustain the enormous effort it required for much longer. As the animal lunged again at his face he used it’s own weight against it and slid out to one side. At least he was out from underneath the beast but the stalemate persisted and he was tiring fast.
MacLean went for one last gamble. There were several shards of broken glass around him. He removed one of his hands from the dog’s collar to snatch it up and sweep it across the animal’s throat. A fountain of warm, sticky blood rewarded his efforts.
There was no time to relax; the sounds of snarling said that Leavey was still locked in combat with the other animal. He pulled his legs clear of the limp, heavy carcass lying on them and crawled towards the sound. Leavey was still fighting but the blood on his face and arms said it was an uneven contest.
MacLean saw the spanner that Leavey had used to open the water valve and picked it up. He came up behind the dog and raised it in the air but at the last moment the beast caught sight of him and turned on its haunches to spring at him. He raised his foot to fend it off but it sank its teeth into the calf of his right leg and brought him to the floor, which was now awash with swirling water from the open valve.
MacLean was fast approaching complete exhaustion. As he fell over on to his back he caught a glimpse of Hartmut leaning over the rail above them. He was watching the contest impassively but with total concentration, like a cat watching a bird that was about to become its prey. MacLean raised his hands weakly to fend off the animal that was coming for him when Leavey, who had now got to his feet, had more success with the spanner. He brought it crashing down on the Doberman’s skull and there was silence.
‘He’s going to raise the alarm!’ warned MacLean as he saw Hartmut move off along the gallery. Leavey stood up straight and threw the spanner at the spindly figure above. It hit Hartmut on the side of his right knee and brought him down. Leavey was already half way up the metal steps before Hartmut had started to recover. He had just managed to get upright, using the rail when Leavey caught up with him. He made an attempt to defend himself but was no match for Leavey who, even in his exhausted state, took him out with two blows.
Leavey returned to the floor of the cavern and retrieved their guns before they were lost in the tide of rising water. MacLean, sitting on the steps, applied a makeshift tourniquet to his leg and was relieved to find that he could still walk, albeit painfully. Leavey finished drying out the guns and rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘How are we doing?’ he asked.
‘Just fine, Nick,’ murmured MacLean through his teeth and returned the gesture.