City of Shadows

Chapter 11

12 September 2001, Washington DC

The duty corridor off the mezzanine floor was windowless. The ‘catacombs’, that’s what he’d heard one of the personnel who worked down here call it once. Several offices along an unused floor beneath an anonymous government building in Washington.

These offices had another name — a semi-official name. The few personnel who worked down in this artificially illuminated netherworld called it ‘The Department’. More than half a century ago — fifty-six years to be precise — was when The Department was set up. Not here, though. The Department didn’t have proper offices to call its own until after the 1947 ‘New Mexico Incident’. But this had been its one and only home since then.

On several occasions in those fifty-six years, these offices had experienced short bursts of frenetic activity; carefully vetted FBI agents had been drafted in to do routine belt-’n’-braces work, but never fully briefed on the various case files they were doing the heavy lifting on.

On a need-to-know basis. That’s how The Department did its business.

There’d been a buzz of activity here back in ’47, and again in 1963 after the ‘Dallas Incident’. There were a lot of paper files generated over that, all of them still down here in the catacombs. Everything one would ever want to know about the death of a President was stored in dog-eared cardboard folders, in dusty filing cabinets labelled ‘J-759’. And, if one took the time to dig through thousands of yellowing pages of gathered intelligence and witness depositions, one might in fact find the correct name of the man who actually killed President Kennedy.

Not Oswald. Certainly not one L. H. Oswald.

There were other labelled files down here, of other incidents over the decades that had been passed over to The Department to if not investigate then at least to safely archive. Fragments of intelligence gathered that would live forever down here in this air-conditioned twilight, far too sensitive, too incendiary, too dangerous to ever appear in the public eye.

There was file N-27, a certain dark secret from the very last days of the Second World War; a whole drawer of one of the filing cabinets was devoted to that. Then, of course, there was file R-497, the event that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico — several filing cabinets for that one — and typically plenty of silly TV shows, films and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories about R-497.

And then there were several other, smaller, files.

One of those files had the equally uninspiring name of 414-T. Possibly the slimmest file in the pack of secrets, slumbering down here in the semi-darkness.

The Department was run ‘off the books’. Its funding came from a lump sum dropped into a bank account just after the Second World War. Over the last half a century that lump sum had been managed by a financial management company and invested in various things. Back in the seventies, for example, some of that money had been spent purchasing shares in a promising little tech company with a rainbow-coloured apple for a logo.

The Department had a staff that had on a few occasions numbered as high as thirty-five men, but tended in quiet times to number as few as three. As it did right now. The ‘Head’, his assistant and a solitary clerical officer.

Niles Cooper was the ‘Head’ right now, and possibly for the foreseeable future. Handed that role by his predecessor, a middle-aged pen-pusher called Pullman, who’d been looking for an easy assignment to carry him over until retirement. Before him, there’d been an old man called Wallace who’d run The Department — so it was said — since it was set up back in 1945.

Every ‘Head’ had his pet file, so Pullman told Cooper the day he retired and passed the keys to this place over to his younger successor. Pullman said his pet file had been R-497, the Roswell one.

Cooper’s was the slimmest one: 414-T.

Something of an enigma, that one. Several black-and-white photographs, very poor quality if truth be told. They’d been recovered, supposedly, by a Russian intelligence officer from one of the artillery-damaged barrack buildings near Obersalzsberg, near the mountain-top retreat of Adolf Hitler.

The Eagle’s Nest.

But there was no guarantee of the accuracy of that. It might have come from somewhere else, just as likely one of the many bombed-out ministry buildings along the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. The images did have the ink-stamp of a swastika and a correctly configured intelligence reference number used by the Gestapo. So they were at least half-likely to be genuine.

Three photographs in total. The first in the sequence showed what appeared to be the aftermath of a bonfire of bodies in some snowy wood. A jumble of blackened limbs amid ice-melt and slush, surrounded by fir trees with snow-laden branches.

The second photograph was unpleasant. A close-up of a human skull, scorched completely black, and what appeared to be a section of skull cracked or carved open and lying in the snow nearby. The rest of the skull looked empty. Scooped out even.

But it was the third image that made this sequence so interesting, that had granted this slim file a place in The Department’s twilight bowels. The third image was of an assault rifle, like everything else scorched black and the gun barrel bent by the heat of the fire. There were notes stapled to the photograph. Notes made on some typewriter and in German, then added to some years later in English, handwritten blue ink, notes made by some American or British firearms expert:

Make and model is unknown. Not Russian. Certainly not one of ours! Could be a German prototype? The firing mechanism indecipherable. Can’t see how this gun would actually work!

(Signed: G. H. Davison. 16th February 1952)

Someone had drawn a blue-ink circle on a copy of the photograph. The circle looped round some markings beneath the weapon’s breech, a cluster of faint indented numbers and letters. The manufacturer’s markings, batch number, model number, and possibly the weapon’s date of manufacture.

Cooper had studied this photograph many times over the years. Each time, he’d studied it under a magnifying glass with the help of his angled desk lamp, like a manic philatelist examining a perfect and precious unmarked penny black stamp. And every time he’d peered closely at this black-and-white photograph he’d experienced the same shiver of excitement, of promise.

A possibility.

A possibility, and that’s all it was, a possibility that those last four numbers of the manufacturer’s mark were the year of manufacture.

2066.