Preston Child - Mystery of the Amber Room

“Maybe that was why I could not snap him out of it,” Dr. Helberg told her. “It was not a hypnotic state after all. It was his own mind, just expanded!”

Nina had to agree that it was a fascinating and logical deduction on the part of the shrink she had not had much professional respect for before.

Elma stood up and flung the weapon toward the middle of the waiting room. Then she walked into the doctor's office with her cigarette in her hand. Nina and Dr. Helberg ducked down at the sight of her, but all she did was smile at Sam and gave him her cigarette.

“Can I get you one too, Dr. Gould?” she smiled. “I have two more left in the pack.”

“Uh, no thanks,” Nina answered.

Nina was astonished. Was the woman who just murdered a man in cold blood actually offering her a fag? Sam looked at Nina with a boastful smile, to which she just shook her head and sighed. Elma went to the reception desk and called the police.

“Hello, I want to report a murder at the office of Dr. Helberg in the Old Town…” she reported her deed.

“Holy shit, Sam!” Nina gasped.

“I know, right?” he smiled, yet he looked a bit nervous at the discovery. “Doc, you are going to have to make up some sort of story to make sense to the police. I did not control any of that shit she did in the waiting room.”

“I know, Sam,” Dr. Helberg nodded. “You were still under hypnosis when that happened. But we both know that she was not in control of her own mind, and that bothers me. How can I let her spend the rest of her life in prison for a crime she technically did not commit?”

“I am sure you can testify as to her mental stability and maybe find an explanation that will prove that she was in a trance or something,” Nina suggested. Her phone rang, and she went to the window to take the call while Sam and Dr. Helberg watched Elma’s moves to make sure she did not flee.

“In truth, whatever controlled you, Sam, wanted to kill, whether it was my assistant or me,” Dr. Helberg warned. “Now that it's safe to assume that this force is your own consciousne ss, I implore you to be very mindful of your intentions or attitude, or you may end up killing someone you love.”

Nina suddenly caught her breath so fiercely that both men looked at her. She looked staggered. “It's Purdue!”

Sam and Nina had left Dr. Helberg’s office before the police showed up. They had no idea what the psychologist was going to tell the authorities, but they had more important things to think about now.

“Did he say where he was?” Sam asked as they headed for Sam’s car.

“He was being held in a compound run by… guess who?” she sneered.

“The Black Sun, by chance?” Sam played along.

“Bingo! And he gave me a sequence of numbers to punch into one of his gadgets at Wrichtishousis. Some contraption that looks like an Enigma machine,” she informed him.

“Do you know what that looks like?” he asked as they drove to Purdue’s estate.

“Aye. It was extensively used by the Nazis during World War II to communicate. It's basically an electro-mechanical rotor cipher machine,” Nina explained.

“And do you know how to work this thing?” Sam wanted to know because they knew he'd be out of his depth at trying to mess with complex codes. He once attempted coding for a software course and ended up inventing a program that did nothing but creating umlauts and stationary bubbles.

“Purdue gave me some numbers to enter into the machine, He said it would give us his location,” she replied, looking over the seemingly senseless sequence she jotted down.

“I wonder how he got to a phone,” Sam said as they neared the hill where Purdue’s massive manor lurched over the winding road. “I hope he does not get discovered while waiting for us to get to him.”

“No, he is safe for now. He told me that the guards were ordered to kill him, but that he managed to escape the room they had kept him in. Now he is apparently hiding in the computer room, and hacked into their communication lines to be able to call us,” she explained.

“Ha! Old school! Well done, old cock!” Sam grinned at Purdue’s resourcefulness.

They pulled into the drive at Purdue's home. Security knew their boss' closest friends and cordially waved at them when they opened the huge black gates. Purdue's assistant met them at the door.

“You found Mr. Purdue?” she asked. “Oh thank God!”

“Aye, we have to get to his electronics rooms, please. It is very urgent,” Sam requested, and they rushed to the basement room Purdue had modified into one of his holy chapels of inventions galore. On one side, he kept everything he was still working on, and on the other side was everything he had completed but hadn't patented yet. To anyone who did not live and breathe for engineering or was less technically inclined, it was an impenetrable maze of wires and hardware, monitors, and tools.

“Shit, look at all this stuff! How are we supposed to find that thing in here?” Sam worried. His hands ran along the sides of his head as he scanned the place for what Nina had described as a sort of typewriter. “I see nothing like that here.”

“Me neither,” she sighed. “Just help me look through the cabinets as well, please Sam.”

“I hope you know how to work that thing, or else Purdue is history,” he told her as he opened the doors of the first cupboard, ignoring all the jokes he could crack about the pun of his statement.

“Given all my research for one of my final study papers back in 2004 I should be able to figure it out, don't fret,” Nina said as she rummaged through some cabinets that stood lines up against the east wall.

“I think I found it,” he said casually. From an old green army locker, Sam lifted a beat-up looking typewriter and held it up like a trophy. “Is this it?”

“That's it, yes!” she exclaimed. “Right, set it down over here.”

Nina cleared a small desk and moved a chair from another table to sit down in front of it. She retrieved the paper with numbers Purdue had given her and got to work. While Nina focused on the process, Sam was thinking about the most recent events, trying to make sense of it. If he could truly make people obey his orders, it would change his life completely, but something about his convenient new talent set of a whole bunch of red lights in his head.

“Excuse me, Dr. Gould,” one of Purdue's house staff called from the door. “There is a gentleman here to see you. He says he spoke to you on the phone a few days ago about Mr. Purdue.”

“Oh shit!” Nina cried. “I completely forgot about that guy! Sam, the man who alerted us that Purdue was missing? That must be him. Shit, he is going to be upset.”

“For what it's worth, he seems very nice,” the staff member chipped in.

“I'll go talk to him. What is his name?” Sam asked her.

“Holtzer,” she answered. “Detlef Holtzer.”

“Nina, Holtzer is the surname of the woman who died at the Consulate, isn't it?” he asked. She nodded, and suddenly remembered the man's first name from the phone call now that Sam mentioned it.

Sam left Nina to her task and went up to speak to the stranger. When he entered the lobby, he was surprised to see the powerfully built man sipping tea with such refinement.

“Mr. Holtzer?” Sam smiled, reaching out a hand. “Sam Cleave. I'm a friend of Dr. Gould and Mr. Purdue. How can I help you?”

Detlef smiled cordially and shook Sam’s hand. “Good to meet you, Mr. Cleave. Um, where is Dr. Gould? It seems that everyone I try to speak to disappears and I get someone else in their place.”

“She is just caught up in a project right now, but she is here. Oh, and she apologizes that she has not yet gotten back to you, but it seems you were able to find Mr. Purdue’s estate quite easily,” Sam noted as he sat down.