Chapter 1: The Cold Storage Visitor

Berlin’s winter night pressed against my face like a slab of wet, freezing iron. The exhaust fan in the kitchen was still running, its low hum drowning out the occasional tram that rattled past outside. I killed the last work light, and the metal countertops faded into a ghostly gray-blue in the dark.

I turned and headed for the cold storage. Last step before closing—checking the inventory in the freezer. The door slid open, and a blast of frigid mist hit me, carrying that sharp, nasty smell of formaldehyde mixed with frozen meat.

On the bottom shelf, stacked with beef rolls and fish fillets, there was something new.

A metal box. Thick white frost coated its surface like a frozen coffin. No handles, no markings—just a faint scratch revealing the silver-white metal underneath.

I crouched and wiped the frost away with a towel. The moment my fingertips touched the metal, I felt it. Something was wrong with the temperature. This wasn’t something just pulled from the blast freezer. It was closer to room temperature, despite being buried in frozen meat.

The lid was slightly ajar. I cracked it open, and a foul mix of machine oil and dried blood hit my nose.

A man lay inside.

He wore a cheap synthetic-fiber jacket, his face ashen, his skin a sickly, waxy yellow. But what stopped my heart was his chest. A crystal was embedded there—shaped like a dinner fork, but the material looked more like polished glass. Its prongs were buried deep between his ribs.

The man was still alive.

His eyes were half-open, cloudy pupils locked onto me. His lips were cracked and dry, and his throat produced a rasping hiss like a broken bellows.

“William…”

The voice sounded like it was being squeezed out from under a pile of gravel.

“Vogt…”

My whole body went rigid. That name belonged to my father—the man who’d been jailed for “academic fraud” twenty years ago and died in his cell.

“Who… are you?” I kept my voice low, even though I knew in this sealed space my breathing was loud as thunder.

The man tried to raise a hand. His arm twitched once, then fell limp. The crystal in his chest flickered, emitting a faint blue glow.

“Listen…” His teeth were chattering. “Coordinates… don’t trust… Otto…”

Before he could finish, his body convulsed violently. The crystal’s glow died out, turning a dull gray. His breathing stopped. But then came the truly horrifying part.

His skin began to shrivel rapidly, like a grape left out too long in the sun.

I grabbed a stainless steel tray and slammed it against the edge of the metal box with a deafening clang. I pointed at the rapidly decaying corpse, my voice shaking in the cold air: “This is wrong! He was talking just minutes ago! Look at his skin! What did the medical examiner say?”

Outside, chaotic footsteps and flashlight beams swept past the door.

“William, get out here.”

It was Ulrich Hartmann. The private detective always looked like he’d just stepped out of the shadows, and tonight was no exception—leather jacket, a loaded Beretta in his hand. Two officers in dark blue uniforms followed behind him, one of them carrying a forensic scanner.

I crossed my arms and didn’t move. My gaze went past Ulrich’s shoulder to the man withering away at a speed visible to the naked eye.

“Don’t come close,” I said. My voice was flat, but my heart was pounding hard enough to crack ribs.

Ulrich narrowed his eyes and lowered his gun toward the floor. “How long has that box been there? How did I miss it?”

“I just found it.” I walked over to the metal box and pointed at the crystal in the man’s chest. “Look here. If this were murder, the wound wouldn’t be this clean. This crystal isn’t metal, and it isn’t ceramic. Its thermal conductivity is extremely low. Look around him—the frozen meat isn’t dented. That means this box was *placed* here, not dropped.”

“Are you giving me a cooking lesson?” Ulrich snorted, but he didn’t holster his gun.

“I’m talking about decomposition.” I stared at the scanner screen in the officer’s hand, where the data was still spiking wildly. “Rigor mortis has just set in, but the skin is already liquefying. That kind of accelerated decay only happens under high heat and humidity. But this freezer is minus eighteen. The only explanation is that the crystal in his body is breaking down biological tissue, generating heat, then rapidly cooling. This is an artificially engineered ‘cooking’ process.”

The officer leaned in, glanced at the screen, and his face went pale. “Mr. William, you’re right. Standard time-of-death estimate says twelve hours ago. But this body… it went from fresh corpse to mummy in the last thirty minutes. That’s not science.”

“It’s not science because it’s not a normal biological death.” I turned to Ulrich. “I’m saying he was *eaten*.”

Ulrich finally lowered his gun, but his eyes got sharper. He scanned the room, confirmed no one else was there, then asked quietly, “That name. Otto Frank. What do you know?”

I closed my eyes. Otto Frank. A name that only ever appeared in my father’s suicide letter. The name that had my mother and me starving in the slums, the name that made me keep my head down while washing dishes in restaurant kitchens, too scared to even glance at a newspaper.

“I only know he exists,” I said. “But there’s a page torn out of the files my father left behind. Only one line survived: ‘Deep Space echo—whoever hears it dies.’”

Ulrich took a drag of his cigarette, the sharp tobacco smell cutting through the cold air. “Sounds like a sci-fi novel. Frank is the foundation chairman. He handles those damn interstellar exploration budgets and old archive digitization. Why would he stick a crystal in a dead man’s chest?”

“Because he’s sending a message.” I pointed at the crystal, now gray in the corpse’s chest. “Look—the crystal’s dead, but there’s a burn pattern around it. Like a brand, or a circuit board. It’s a biological code. Only someone with special training can read it.”

“You?” Ulrich raised an eyebrow.

“My father was a decoder. I’m a chef, but I inherited those eyes—the ones that can spot the ‘lies’ in ingredients.” I gave a cold smile. “Just like I can tell if a cut of beef is fresh or injected with water, I can pick out the frequency fluctuations in this code. That’s not random noise. It’s coordinates.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the string of numbers I’d copied from the corpse—charcoal dust and frost forming the digits. I rubbed a bit of the black powder between my fingers and scrawled it on the metal box lid.

“52°30′N 13°24′E.” I read the numbers aloud, my voice echoing in the empty freezer.

The officers exchanged a look. One of them quickly typed the coordinates into his phone. The screen lit up, marking the spot on a map.

“Tempelhof Airport.” The officer looked up, his expression odd. “It’s been closed for ten years. It’s a heritage park now. The underground facilities were assessed long ago—there’s no… no structure at that depth.”

“You sure?” I stared at him.

“Files say below B2 is an abandoned air-raid shelter. No power, no signal.”

“Abandoned air-raid shelter.” I chewed on the words. “My father worked there once. He called it the ‘Silent Zone.’”

Ulrich crushed his cigarette butt under his foot. “William, this is deep water. If you’re sure that’s your father, or something connected to him, you need to find a safe place. Frank’s people have been asking around about you lately.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re still running that restaurant.” Ulrich pointed at the ceiling, where the restaurant’s sign hung. “‘Vogt’s Taste.’ That name alone is a target. Otto Frank likes to clean up ‘noise.’ Your father’s voice was too loud. Now you’re starting to make noise too.”

I looked at him, and a chill crawled up my spine. Ulrich was right. Ever since I’d come back to Berlin and taken over the family’s old place, I’d noticed the little changes. Suppliers switching, the sources of certain high-end ingredients getting murky, and those shadows lurking in the alley behind the restaurant late at night.

I’d written it off as coincidence, or normal competition. But now, staring at this corpse that had died in a way that defied biology, I knew I’d been wrong.

“What does Greta say?” I asked Ulrich.

“She’s not picking up.” Ulrich patted his pocket; his phone buzzed. “Forget it, she’s probably pulling another all-nighter at Humboldt. She’s been sorting through those old files on the… Deep Space Project. She says it’s a trap. Told me not to drag you into it.”

“Greta Ostermann.” I murmured the name. She was the most stubborn archivist at the university, and the only one who believed my father was innocent. Thick-rimmed glasses, fingers always stained with dust and the fiber smell of old paper, cold as ice to me—and yet, when it mattered, she’d been the one who saved that half-burned diary.

“I’m going to find her,” I said.

“I’ll drive you.” Ulrich holstered his gun and turned toward the door.

“Wait.” I grabbed his sleeve. “The body can’t be moved. That coordinate string is carved into the crystal. Once the crystal dies, the signal dissipates. I have to record it here, or here.”

Ulrich looked back, his expression complicated. “William, listen to me. The chief’s already on his way. They’ll lock this place down. If you stay, you’re stepping right into Otto Frank’s surveillance net. He’s the foundation chairman, but the power behind him… your father died because he saw something he shouldn’t have.”

“If I leave, the trail goes cold.” I looked him straight in the eye. “What if the coordinates are fake? What if Otto Frank just wants to draw me out and shut me up?”

Ulrich was silent for a moment. Then he reached out a rough hand and clapped my shoulder. The weight of it was heavy, carrying a gritty kind of pain.

“Then you’d better be careful.” He said, “Take this.” He pulled an old black leather wallet from his jacket and pressed it into my hand. “No money in there. Just a metro card and an old-fashioned key. Hildegard Dressler left it.”

“Hildegard?” I froze. The name was like a rusty key sliding into a lock deep in my memory.

“Former railway executive. She has the old blueprints for Berlin’s underground transit network.” Ulrich said. “She disappeared last month, but someone spotted her near Tempelhof last week. She left this for you, asked me to pass it on. She said, ‘When the fridge freezes over, check under the floor.’”

I gripped the wallet, my knuckles white.

When the fridge freezes over.

I looked at the corpse in front of me, at the crystal in his chest, dead and gray.

“Under the floor.” I repeated the words.

“You’re saying that coordinate doesn’t point above ground—it points below?” Ulrich asked.

“No.” I shook my head, my brain racing like a pot of broth about to boil over. “I’m saying ‘floor’ is a metaphor. Tempelhof Airport was a military base during the German division in the 1990s, later converted into a heritage park. ‘Under the floor’ means the old air-raid tunnel entrances—the ones sealed with concrete.”

“The police can’t find them because they don’t have the old blueprints.” I said. “But Hildegard does. She worked there for thirty years. She knows where the concrete is solid and where the pipes are hollow.”

Ulrich narrowed his eyes at the officers standing in the doorway. “So what’s your plan? Run out there now? Or?”

“No.” I took a deep breath, the icy air stinging my lungs. “What I’m going to do now is call the police.”

Ulrich blinked. “Call the police?”

“Yes. I’m going to tell them this is a homicide involving illegal biological experimentation. I need forensics here immediately to extract crystal residue. At the same time, I’m requesting they seal off the entire Tempelhof Airport area—on the grounds of ‘unknown radiation leakage.’”

“Why?”

“Because if Otto Frank wants to cover this up, he’ll have to send someone to handle it. He’ll try to destroy the evidence before the police arrive, or worse, take the crystal. If we turn the site into a ‘radiation zone,’ he’ll have to show his face personally, pull his connections to suppress the story. And while he’s doing that, he’ll slip up.”

Like tears.