The Dark River

When they reached the fourth floor, Mother Blessing motioned with the palm of her hand. Be quiet. Get ready. Hollis touched the doorknob for apartment 4B and realized that it wasn’t locked. He glanced over his shoulder. Mother Blessing had drawn her automatic and was holding it close to her chest. When he opened the door, the Harlequin charged into an empty room.

The apartment was filled with cast-off furniture. There was a couch with no legs, two old mattresses, and some mismatched tables and chairs. Every wall in the apartment was decorated with printed photographs of Free Runners performing cartwheels in the air, backward somersaults, and running cat leaps from one building to another. It looked as if the young men and women in the photographs were free of the laws of gravity.

“Now what?” Hollis asked.

“Now we wait.” Mother Blessing slid the gun back into her shoulder holster and sat down on a kitchen chair.

At exactly one o’clock in the morning, someone climbed down the façade of the Ballhaus. Hollis saw two legs dangling in the air just outside the window, and then the climber’s left foot found an ornamental cornice. He reached the ledge outside, pulled up the window, and jumped into the room. The climber was about seventeen years old. He wore torn jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. His long black hair was braided to resemble dreadlocks, and he had geometric tattoos on the backs of his hands.

A few seconds later, another pair of legs dangled above the window frame. The second Free Runner was a boy about eleven or twelve years old. He had a mass of curly brown hair that made him look like a feral child raised in the forest. A digital recording device was clipped to his belt, and earphones covered each ear.

After the boy entered the room, his older friend bowed. There was a certain exaggerated quality in his movements; he was like an actor who was always conscious of his audience.

“Guten Abend. Welcome to Berlin.”

“I’m not impressed with your climbing,” Mother Blessing said. “Next time you can use the stairs.”

“I thought this was a quick way to show-what is the English word-our ‘credentials.’ We are from the Spandau crew of Free Runners. I’m Tristan and this is my cousin, Kröte.”

The curly-haired boy was bobbing his head up and down to whatever music was in his download file. Suddenly, he noticed that everyone was staring at him. Looking shy, he retreated to the window. Hollis wondered if Kröte was going to return to the ledge and escape.

“Does he speak English?” Hollis asked.

“Just a few words.” He turned to his cousin. “Kröte! Speak English!”

“Multidimensional,” the boy whispered.

“Sehr gut!” Tristan smiled proudly. “He learned that on the Internet.”

“And is that how you heard about the Shadow Program?”

“No. It was from the Free Runner community. Our friend Ingrid was working for a company called Personal Customer. I guess she was good at her job, because a man named Lars Reichhardt asked her to work for his division. Each person on the team was given a small job and told not to share information with their colleagues. Two weeks ago, Ingrid got access to another part of the system and found out about the Shadow Program. Then we got the e-mail from the British Free Runners.”

“Hollis and I need to get into the computer center,” Mother Blessing said. “Can you help us?”

“Of course!” Tristan extended his hands as if he were offering them a gift. “We’ll take you all the way.”

“Do we have to climb up walls?” Mother Blessing asked. “I didn’t bring any ropes.”

“Ropes are not necessary. We’re going beneath the streets. During World War Two, thousands of bombs fell on Berlin, but Hitler was safe in his bunker. Most of the bunkers and tunnels are still there. Kröte has been exploring the system since he was nine years old.”

“I guess you guys don’t have time for school,” Hollis said.

“We go to school-sometimes. The girls are there, and I like to play football.”

THE FOUR OF them left Ballhaus a few minutes later and crossed the river. Kröte was carrying a nylon backpack that contained his equipment for going underground. Looking like a wild-haired Boy Scout, he kept darting ahead of his cousin.

After walking down a wide avenue that bordered the Tiergarten, they reached the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The Holocaust memorial was a large, sloping grid covered with concrete slabs of different heights. Hollis thought they looked like thousands of gray coffins. Tristan explained that the antigraffiti chemical painted on the slabs was provided by an affiliate of the company that had manufactured the Zyklon-B used in the death chambers.

“For war, they made poison gas. For peace, they fight taggers.” Tristan shrugged. “It’s all part of the Vast Machine.”