Brankerfeld swipes his card through the reader near the door. In a loud cacophony of clank-and-clongs, the cogs inserted into the wall activate, and the mechanical gate opens before his eyes.
The commander steps inside the dark corridor that preceeds him, quickly followed by his four guards.
He's been there already. Most of the armed men at his side, probably not. They wear goggles with lenses made of a thick black glass, so he can't see their eyes, but he reckons that they must feel a growing sense of unease creeping along the backside of their mind. At least that's how he reacted, the first time he entered Fall's quarters.
As the military men make their way through this section of the facility, reality seems to dissolve. The place is nothing like anything else that exists in the world. It doesn't even match the rest of the Complex's interior design.
It's dark and damp, lit only by mercury lamps whose lights shake and flicker, seemingly battling against the ambient hot humidity that makes up the atmosphere of this part of the building.
The smell of rotten paper is the odor responsible for filling the air with such heaviness. The walls here are comprised mostly of endless rows of bookshelves which extend past the furthest point the eye can see, even with flashlights, which Brankerfeld's soldiers have had the good idea of bringing in with them, plunging the hallway in a bright, corrosive white light.
The blonde-haired agent despises books. He's always been more of a showman himself. His world's that of first impressions and flattery, and those who think too much have always seemed uncontrollable to him, impossible to predict or safely manipulate. He didn't think too much of Akensen when he met the man back in Greenland, but at least that individual was strong and not devoid of charisma. He, Ray Brankerfeld, has ever been fortunate to have the looks required to be successful in politics, and as mentally deranged as he is, he's never had any problem swimming along with sharks.
All his life, his thirty-one year long life, he's built himself, starting from the ground up, and climbing the ladder of governmental institutions, gleaning promotion after promotion. He started as a lowly mercenary, entering the military officially when he proved successful enough as a killing machine, and finally joining the C.I.A. after passing a long batch of exams. Yet here he's been standing, as the deputy director of the American Central Intelligence Agency, for over five years now. And five years, for a thirty-one year old, especially for a thirty-one year old who's as much of a short fuse as Brankerfeld, well that's a bit too much. He wishes for more. He wishes for the top. He wants to get that "deputy" away from that "director". And he sure hopes that this mission that, the american president himself has sent him on, that whole shebang with the giant skeleton from Denmark, will be the key to unlocking the final stretch of his rise to ultimate power.
There's one problem however. The task at hand requires him being at the orders of Michael Fall. And he hates Michael Fall. One, because Fall likes books, and he doesn't, as explained above, but two, because this man has always made him feel like a worthless piece of junk. He. Ray Brankerfeld. Deputy director of the C.I.A., a worthkless piece of junk? Who's that guy kidding? - the blue-eyed soldier thinks. He has no right to treat me that way!
Yet that's what Brankerfeld's always thought Michael views him as. Expendable military personnel, whose sole purpose it is to carry out dirty work for him while he does all the interesting stuff from the comfort of his rooms. What is he doing inside his lab anyway, that creepy scientist? Will he dissect the heart we've brought him to study it? Will he attempt to solve the mysteries of the carvings on the golden ring? That item too has been brought here.
Brankerfeld thinks about it. That'd be possible, he ruminates. He is a linguist after all. If there's someone here who'd know what to think of the symbols written on that object, that'd be him.
Alas, the five men arrive in front of the last door before Fall. This one is human-sized, not wide and reinforced like the others. It's made of noble wood.
Ray stops as he stopped before the first gate of the Complex. But this time, it's not to mourn the utter absence of humanity that lays inside the walls of this dark place. No, it's because as he reaches out to grab the doorknob he notices, as he notices every single time he comes here, that the object is made out of solid silver. Cold to the touch, but incredibly smooth as well. A true pleasure for the palms.
And so, he asks himself, as he does every single time he's here, how it could realistically be possible for a man like Michael Fall to have ever been alloted an entire military facility, complete with personnel and machines any researcher would die for, when he has such a horrendous criminal record.
Yes, Fall is one of these men who have commited murder. Not only that, but he's killed many, many people. He is what new-item journalists would call a mass murderer.
Or at least that's what he was. Now he's all alone, spends his days in the dark and humid labrooms of his quarters in the Complex, unbothered by anyone but Brankerfeld a few times a semester.
He has served many years in prison, remains to this day one of the worst people to have ever been given the chance to set foot upon the Earth, and yet he persists to stay alive, and he's so good at that that he's managed to convince the american government itself to watch over him.
As has been stated above, Michael Fall is a linguist. Was a linguist, before he started to kill. And not any linguist. The best linguist the world has ever seen. He's helped translate indigenous languages with grammatical structures so complicated none had managed to understand but one of the words they were made of before he stepped in, has been one of the top contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, has given classes in the most prestigious universities of the world, including Harvard and the MIT, and he's even helped a young computer scientist named Alan Turing understand some of the primary concepts that govern language, and how they apply to the inner workings of the enigma machine that Germans have started to use extensively some two decades ago.
In short, he is a brilliant man. A brilliant psychopath. A force of life that make two radical extremes, the madness of crime and the calculated calm of intellectual research, join together in a fascinating way.
In Ray Brankerfeld's eyes, Michael Fall's more of a god than that carcass they've dragged all the way from Greenland.
But a god of what? Looking into the man's eyes, one can only understand that hatred is all Fall survives on.
