CHAPTER 5 –
The Room Beneath Berlin
Berlin never slept, but the street Lena stood on felt like it had forgotten how to breathe. The cold crept through her coat as she stared at the iron doors of **Helix Biogen's European Archive Facility**, a building the public believed was nothing more than a medical storage depot.
Inside, her mother had spent her last verified day alive.
A delivery truck rolled past, its headlights slicing through the mist. The faint smell of chemicals lingered in the air — harmless to most, but Lena's training told her two things instantly:
1. The smell was wrong.
2. Someone had opened the building recently.**
She tucked her hair under a wool cap, pulled up her collar, and stepped toward the side service entrance. The primary doors were guarded by retina scanners, motion sensors, and a rotating security feed patched into the German Federal Health Authority.
The side door, however, was protected by something older —
a **precision-coded electromagnetic lock**, NATO grade.
Not hackable by amateurs.
But Lena wasn't an amateur.
She crouched, slid her hand into her boot, and pulled out a small cylindrical tool. A friend had built it years ago — **Eva Kandel**, the only person Lena trusted with anything involving circuits or secrets.
Eva always said every lock had a heartbeat. You just needed to listen.
Lena pressed the device against the door's panel.
It vibrated once.
Then twice.
Then the lock gave a soft, nearly ashamed click.
The door opened.
She stepped inside.
The hallway was colder than outside, sterile enough to sting her nostrils. Rows of sealed containers lined the walls — temperature-controlled units holding medical samples that were supposed to be harmless.
Except Lena noticed three units near the far end had frost on the glass.
Incorrect temperature.
Someone was tampering.
She moved deeper until she reached the elevator.
It required a fingerprint.
So she took one.
The table just beside it held a discarded coffee cup with a smudge of a fingerprint perfectly preserved on the rim. She lifted it, rolled it against the scanner, and the doors slid open.
**Floor -4** blinked on the display.
Below ground.
Exactly where secrets lived.
The elevator dropped smoothly. Her pulse climbed with it.
When the doors opened, the air felt different — thicker, humming faintly. That was when she noticed the lights weren't standard fluorescents. These were **radiation-shielded strips**, the type only used in labs working with unstable biological materials.
A chill threaded down her spine.
Ahead, a corridor stretched into darkness.
At the end stood a massive blast door labeled:
**RESTRICTED SECTOR: GENOMIC VAULT**
Her mother had worked here.
A low mechanical whir sounded behind her.
Lena spun.
A cleaning robot — matte steel, wheels silent — rolled toward her… then slowed… then stopped.
It wasn't a cleaning robot.
The shape was wrong.
The sensor grid on its surface wasn't civilian.
And a faint red dot blinked on its underside — not a warning light.
A target lock.
Lena inhaled sharply.
Someone had turned the facility's maintenance bots into weapons.
She stepped back slowly, eyes narrowing.
The bot beeped.
Once.
Twice.
Then the targeting light vanished — it powered down.
Someone had overridden it.
A voice echoed from the dark corner behind the racks.
"You shouldn't be here, Ms. Moretti."
Lena froze.
A figure stepped out — tall, in a black lab coat, his face half-shadowed.
A badge glinted on his chest.
**Dr. Elias Krämer.**
Her mother's former colleague.
His eyes darted toward the deactivated bot. "That thing was programmed to kill anyone whose biometrics aren't pre-authorized. If I hadn't disabled it remotely, you'd already be on the floor."
Lena's spine tightened. "Why help me?"
He stepped closer. The overhead lights cast pale blue reflections across his glasses.
"Because Emilia didn't die in an accident," he said softly.
"She was murdered. And whatever she died protecting… it's still here."
He looked toward the locked Genomic Vault.
"And if you open that door," he whispered, "you will start a war."
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