Everyone gazes at Doc for a long, long time.

And Doc gazes back.

—

Rex goes to talk to a guy. Doc offers to drug the guy but Rex says there is no need. The guy will just talk because that is what happens. The guy was the foreman on the Kircheisen build but that is totally a coincidence. They will meet in a snack bar and they will be two guys in construction talking about construction. Rex will tell the guy about the time his brother’s firm accidentally shished an imported corgi with a scaffolding tube. He will talk about the times when the plans just weren’t doable because plans are always not really doable in the actual universe and fixing that is part of the contractor’s job. Then the guy will tell Rex about Kircheisen. He won’t mention the name and Rex won’t have heard of the place but still.

Somewhere—Rex says—somewhere something went off spec because it always does. No build ever survives contact with the site. So somewhere they ran into stone they couldn’t break without fucking up the stability of the mountain or they found a watercourse and they worked around it. They found a huge fissure. They found a void. That shit is what happens and what it means is that somewhere there’s a place where the Kircheisen Festung isn’t as strong as it should be.

Saul goes with Rex because Rex does not speak German but in the end it turns out that Rex and the guy both totally speak construction and beer and sexy-time dancers.

Yeah there are sexy-time dancers in Bern if you know where to look.

—

Nighttime in the pig farm is dark like nothing in the city. This is werewolf country like deep night so deep that the moonlight throws a shadow on the valley wall and we will be inside it until 3:00 a.m. You have not seen dark unless you have seen dark in the shadow of a mountain. Away across the valley there is a twinkling collection of lights, which is a whole village, and it is dwarfed by the empty blackness of the forest and the rock walls. I listen to it and try to hear the world. Behind me in the farmhouse I can hear Saul clumping around with weights on his arms and legs. He says is practicing for the JIM equipment. Everyone else is asleep.

Except me.

I look up at the place we are going to rob.

Somewhere up there Hans Eiger has a little apartment and when I think of it I think of Frank Lloyd Wright and a sunken firepit in the middle of the room and a yellow ’60s majolica vase as high as a man with bulrushes in it. There’s a classic leather recliner and a deep shag circle rug and a picture window which looks down into the valley—