The Investigation
The dashcam footage showed nothing. Noor reviewed it three times in her apartment in Hamburg, scrubbing frame by frame through the timestamp where she had seen the convoy with her own eyes, and the video showed only empty road, wet asphalt gleaming under her headlights, the reflective markers ticking past like a metronome. Whatever the phantom traffic was, it existed in a medium that cameras could not capture. She would have doubted her own perception if she hadn't felt the displacement of air as the convoy passed — a rush of cold wind through a closed car, carrying a smell of exhaust fumes and something older, something like damp earth and machine oil and the particular metallic tang of fear.
She began her investigation the way she began all investigations: with archives. The stretch of the A7 between markers 38 and 67 ran through an area that had been, before the motorway's construction in the 1960s, dense forest and farmland. Before that, during the war, it had been something else. The regional archive in Celle yielded a folder of documents, partially redacted, describing a military installation that had operated between 1943 and 1945 — a facility with no official name, referred to in correspondence only by a code designation that translated, roughly, as "the corridor." The facility's purpose was not stated. Its location matched the phantom stretch exactly.
The archivist,