Not in any computer record or database. It was never mentioned by name in any email or data file sharing. The few people in Germany, England, and the United States who knew about it also knew better than to make any references in any traceable way. Spies were everywhere—in cyberspace and the real world. Someone was always watching or listening.

When the place had to be referred to, even obliquely, it was given the bland nickname of Das Verarbeitungszentrum—the Processing Center. There were thousands of places in Germany that processed something—sales, deliveries, Amazon fulfillment, insurance claims. It was the kind of name that never rang a bell or raised a red flag.

Only eight key people within those three governments knew that the Processing Center was a prison. Which made it the ultimate black site. Prisoners who went there might as well have slipped through a hole in the dimension. They were simply gone.

The staff knew, of course, but they were sequestered in six-month shifts without Wi-Fi or internet. No email, no cell phones, no contact at all with the outside world. Only unmarried soldiers were assigned to the facility, and they were deeply screened beforehand and carefully debriefed afterward. Those employees each signed a nondisclosure document that erased all their rights should they break their oath. A single fracture in the chain of confidentiality would result in arrest, the ruin of their families and their futures, and very possibly incarceration in one of the cells within that forbidding place. Yeah, we live in fun times.

From the outside, it looked like the fiction its designers were selling. A slab-sided block building with few windows, loading bays for trucks, and a security fence that looked absurdly nonthreatening. What passersby could not see were the motion sensors, camouflaged high-def cameras, satellite surveillance, and frequent flyovers by drones designed to look exactly like common hooded crows. And, although the fence was not electrified, there were panels on all the surrounding interior grounds and walkways that were. The default setting was approximately that of a moderate Taser, but during a crisis, they could be dialed up to give a lethal jolt of two hundred milliamps. That’ll curl the hairs on your nuts effectively. Those pads were weight sensitive so as not to fry birds, cats, or raccoons.

The windows were false. Each was a rear-screen projection of long loops of footage of real office buildings taken elsewhere. Behind those screens were steel panels. The doors opened with simple key cards, but once inside, there were massive security doors requiring several types of scans—retina, thumbprint, exhaled breath, and spoken day codes. Breaching the walls would require a hell of a lot of explosives, and those walls—and every door—were wired to alarms that rang audibly or quietly but in the right places to send a lot of grouchy German soldiers with guns.