The Bricklayer - Boyd Noah - Страница 20

The glowstick arrow in the substation indicated that Vail was supposed to go to the top of the opening. Around the left side of the entrance was a small pathway up the steep grade. It ran between the huge concrete frame of the tunnel and the chain-link fence. He shifted the heavy bag more toward the middle of his back and maneuvered up the thirty-degree grade. At the top of the structure, he started walking, following the tunnel’s spine along its mile-long length, looking for the next instruction.

Seventy-five yards farther he found another glowstick, attached to a small metal door in the ground. It appeared to be a hatch for maintenance workers if access became necessary to work on the electrical lines that ran along the tunnel’s ceiling. A rusty padlock that had secured the hatch had been cut and lay next to it. The thick metal door was ajar. Judging by the piles of dirt and stone around it, the entrance had been covered over and somehow the extortionists had found it and dug it out.

Under the glowstick was another note.

Remove the other tracking device and leave it next to the opening. Then take the money and enter the tunnel. Do not use lights—tunnel rigged with explosives and photocell trigger.

Once again, the Pentad had anticipated more than one tracking device. Vail took out the low-light monocular and scanned the surrounding area to determine if any of the surveillance agents were close enough to observe where he was going. He couldn’t see any.

Down inside the hatch were individual U-shaped ladder rungs that were anchored into the concrete wall. Below them, another glowstick arrow sat flat on the floor, pointing toward the remaining mile of the tunnel. Vail then used the monocular to look more closely at the floor of the tunnel. He could see small glints of light surrounding the luminescent marker. Taking a handful of pebbles that had been cleared from around the hatch, he tossed them in as long a pattern as possible. The sound of stone plinking off metal echoed lightly from below. He refocused the monocular to get a better look and could now see that the floor was booby-trapped with long nails hammered up through boards.

Vail wondered if it was a bluff that the tunnel was rigged to explode. The glowsticks wouldn’t give off enough light to trigger a photocell, so he had no choice but to assume it was true. The one thing that was certain was they wanted him to proceed in the dark. Was it so he would jump down onto the punji boards? Or was there another reason?

He eased the GPS wallet out of his back pocket and set it down carefully to mark where he was last aboveground for the surveillance teams. Then he lowered the bag through the hatch ahead of him and started down the metal rungs. Once he was completely clear of the hatch, he pulled both straps of the bag over his head so they sat cross-chest and then shifted the weight completely behind him.

He stepped down two more rungs, and as he was testing the next one, the hatch was slammed closed. Then he heard a lock being snapped shut. It was followed by dirt and gravel being shoveled back over the hatch.

IN THE MAJOR-CASE ROOM, the headquarters tech agent watched the monitors intensely. “What happened? We’ve lost transmission for the GPS in the bag. He must have dropped it and the weight of the money disabled it. Wait, the wallet device is still moving.”

“Which way?” Kaulcrick asked.

“It’s moving east.”

“All units, the package is moving east from the last location,” the assistant director barked into the microphone. “Can someone get an eye on him? Don’t lose that money!”

“This is One-four. It’s pretty dark, but I see something moving. Let me try to get over there.”

“Don’t get too close, we don’t know who’s around.”

The tech agent, watching the grid on the monitor, said, “He’s now walking up Emerald Street.”

“Does anyone have him?” Kaulcrick asked, his voice starting to rise. No one answered. “Does anyone have him!”

Again all the radios were silent. The tech agent said, “He’s turned onto West Second Street.”

“One-four,” Kaulcrick called, “have you caught up to him?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“One-one, flood that area with your people. Find him. And that bag.”

TEN

VAIL STEPPED DOWN, BUT HIS FOOT COULDN’T FIND THE NEXT RUNG, so he reached twice as far, thinking maybe they had cut off a rung hoping to get him to slip and fall onto the punji boards, but he couldn’t find the next one either. Apparently, they had cut the rest of them off.

So he was unable to go up or down. Then he remembered the agent in the underground chamber at the naval prison, seemingly trapped, but a means, although not obvious, had been left for him: the length of webbing. The reason for the maintenance hatch had been to service the overhead cables that had once carried the electricity to power the trolley cars. He climbed as high as he could on the rungs and ran his hand out toward the center of the tunnel until it hit a braided steel cable. It was about an inch and a half thick, and he wrapped his free hand around it, pulling to test its ability to hold him and the extra seventy pounds of money. Satisfied it would, he let go of the ladder rung and swung out over the twenty-foot drop. Hand over hand he proceeded, testing each new forward grasp to make sure it would hold him before committing his weight.

KAULCRICK BARKED into the radio, “Can anyone see where he is?”

Again, the only response was silence. Suddenly, the tech agent said, “He must have gotten into a vehicle. The transmitter is moving at a car rate of speed now. He just got onto the 110 northbound.”

“Did you hear that, One-one?” Kaulcrick asked the surveillance supervisor.

“I’ve got cars heading that way.”

HANGING TWENTY FEET in the air, Vail had traveled about eighty feet horizontally along the electrical cable that paralleled the tunnel floor, which he had to assume was still covered with punji boards. His shoulders and arms were beginning to burn with fatigue. He blocked it out and went another thirty feet before the pain had all but paralyzed him. Suddenly it no longer mattered—he had run out of cable. Unable to go back or forward, he had no choice but to drop to the floor. Were the boards under him? Willing up what little strength remained, he screwed his grip around the cable with his right hand and pulled the bag across his head with the left, dropping it into the darkness with as much accuracy as possible directly below him. He hung for a moment longer trying to readjust his balance in the dark without the extra weight. In the event the floor was still booby-trapped, he was going to try to drop directly on top of the bag without falling off and onto any of the surrounding nailed boards.

From the way he had released the bag, he calculated it was a foot or so off to his left. Swinging slightly to his left, he let go and fell the remaining fifteen feet, hitting the bag with both feet at the same time. But the currency inside had shifted during his “walk,” so he fell off farther to the left. As he lost his balance, he prepared for the pain of the nails as he hit the floor, but the spiked boards weren’t there. Instead he hit the earthen floor.

He shuffled his feet around to explore the ground, but there were no more boards. He picked up the bag and found two boards stuck to it. Directly under the cable, the floor had been booby-trapped, but not to the sides. That meant he was supposed to pierce his feet only. While that would incapacitate him, he would still be able to deliver the money. He examined the bag and discovered that the Pentad’s overkill approach had paid an unexpected dividend: the GPS sewn into the bottom of the bag had been pierced and probably rendered inoperable.