The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  As Clarke climbed into the backseat, Lewis said, “Mr. Avery here says that Bosch told him to go to Darling’s and wait, said there may be people in the vault. Come up from underground.”

  “Did Bosch say what he would be doing?” Clarke asked.

  “Not a word,” Avery said.

  Everyone was silent, thinking. Lewis couldn’t figure it. If Bosch was dirty, what was he doing? He thought some more on this and realized that if Bosch was involved in ripping off the vault, he was in a perfect situation by being the man calling the shots on the outside. He could confuse the coverage on the burglary. He could send all the manpower to the wrong place while his people in the vault went safely the opposite way.

  “He’s got everybody by the short hairs,” Lewis said, more to himself than to the other two men in the car.

  “Who, Bosch?” Clarke asked.

  “He is running the caper. Nothing we can do but watch. We can’t get in that vault. We can’t go underground without knowing where we are going. He’s already got the bureau’s SWAT team tied up down by the freeway. They’re waiting for burglars that aren’t coming, goddammit.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Avery said. “The vault. You can get in it.”

  Lewis turned fully around in his seat to look at Avery. The vault owner told them that federal banking regulations didn’t apply to Beverly Hills Safe & Lock because it wasn’t a bank, and how he had the computer code that would open the vault.

  “Did you tell this to Bosch?” Lewis asked.

  “Yesterday and today.”

  “Did he already know?”

  “No. He seemed surprised. He asked detailed questions on how long it would take to open the vault, what I had to do, things like that. Then today, when we had the alarm, I asked him if we should open it. He said no. Just said to get out of there.”

  “Damn,” Lewis said excitedly. “I better call Irving.”

  He leapt from the car and trotted to the pay phones in front of Darling’s. He dialed Irving at home and got no answer. He dialed the office and only got the duty officer. He had the officer page Irving with the pay phone number. He then waited for five minutes, pacing in front of the phone and worrying about the time going by. The phone never rang. He used the one next to it to call the duty officer back to make sure Irving had been paged. He had. Lewis decided he couldn’t wait. He would have to make this call himself and it would be he who would become the hero. He left the bank of phones and went back to the car.

  “What’d he say?” Clarke asked.

  “We go in,” Lewis said. He started the car.

  The police radio keyed twice and then Hanlon’s voice came on.

  “Hey, Broadway, we have visitors over here on First.”

  Bosch grabbed up the radio.

  “What have you got, First? Nothing showing on Broadway.”

  “We’ve got three white males going in on our side. Using a key. Looks like one is the man that was here earlier with you. Old guy. Plaid pants.”

  Avery. Bosch held the microphone up to his mouth and hesitated, not sure what to say. “Now what?” he said to Eleanor. Like Bosch, she was staring down the street at the vault room, but there was no sign of the visitors. She said nothing.

  “Uh, First,” Bosch said into the mike. “Did you see any vehicle?”

  “None seen,” Hanlon’s voice came back. “They just walked out of the alley on our side. Must have parked there. Want us to take a look?”

  “No, hold there a minute.”

  “They are now inside, no longer in visual contact. Advise, please.”

  He turned to Wish and raised his eyebrows. Who could it be?

  “Ask for descriptions of the two with Avery,” she said.

  He did.

  “White males,” Hanlon began. “Number one and two in suits, worn and wrinkled. White shirts. Both early thirties. One with red hair, stocky build, five-eight, one-eighty. The other, dark-brown hair, thinner. I don’t know, I’d say these guys were cops.”

  “Heckle and Jeckle?” Eleanor said.

  “Lewis and Clarke. It’s gotta be them.”

  “What are they doing in there?”

  Bosch didn’t know. Wish took the radio from him.

  “First?”

  The radio clicked.

  “Reason to believe the two subjects in suits are Los Angeles police officers. Stand by.”

  “There they are,” Bosch said, as three figures moved into the glare in the vault room. He opened the glove compartment and grabbed a pair of binoculars.

  “What are they doing?” Wish asked as he focused.

  “Avery is at the keypad next to the vault. I think he is opening the damned thing.”

  Through the binoculars, Bosch saw Avery step away from the computer board and move to the chrome wheel on the vault door. He saw Lewis turn slightly and glance up the street in the direction of the parking garage. Was there a slight trace of a smile there? Bosch thought he saw it. Then through the binoculars he saw Lewis draw his weapon from an underarm holster. Clarke did likewise and Avery started turning the wheel, the captain steering the Titanic.

  “Those dumb assholes, they are opening it!”

  Bosch leapt out of the car and started running down the ramp. He unholstered his gun and held it up as he ran. He glanced along Wilshire and saw an opening in the sporadic traffic. He bounded across the street, Wish just a short distance behind him.

  Bosch was still twenty-five yards away and knew he would be too late. Avery had stopped turning the vault wheel, and Bosch could see him pull back with all his weight. The door began slowly to move open. Bosch heard Eleanor’s voice behind him.

  “No!” she yelled. “Avery, no!”

  But Bosch knew the double glass made the vault room silent. Avery couldn’t hear her, and Lewis and Clarke wouldn’t have stopped what they were doing even if they could hear.

  What happened was like a movie to Bosch. An old movie on a TV set with the sound turned down. The slowly opening vault door, with its widening band of blackness inside, gave the picture an ethereal, almost underwater quality, a slow-motion inevitability. Bosch felt as if he were on a moving sidewalk going the wrong way, running but getting no closer. He kept his eyes on the vault door. The black margin opening wider. Then Lewis’s body moved into Bosch’s line of sight and toward the opening vault. Almost immediately, propelled by some unseen force, Lewis jerked backward. His hands flew up and his gun hit the ceiling and then fell soundlessly to the floor. As he backpedaled from the vault, his back and head ripped open and blood and brain spattered the glass wall behind him. As Lewis was hurled away from the vault door, Bosch could see the muzzle flash from the darkness inside. And then spiderwebs of cracks crazed the double glass as bullets struck silently. Lewis backstepped into a panel of the weakened glass and crashed through onto the sidewalk three feet below.

  The vault was half open now and the shooter had freer range. The barrage of machine-gun fire turned toward Clarke, who stood unprotected, his mouth open in shock. Bosch could hear the shots now. He saw Clarke attempt to jump away from the line of fire. But it wasn’t worth the effort. He, too, was thrown backward by the force of bullets impacting. His body slammed into Avery and both men fell to the polished marble floor in a heap.

  The gunfire from the vault ended.

  Bosch jumped through the opening where the wall of glass had been and slid on his chest across the marble and glass dust. In the same instant he looked into the vault and saw the blur of a man dropping through the floor. The movement made a swirl in the concrete dust and smoke that hung inside the vault. Like a magician, the man just disappeared in the mist. Then, from the darkness farther inside, a second man moved into the view framed by the doorway. He sidestepped to the hole, swinging an M-16 assault rifle in a covering, side-to-side sweep. Bosch recognized him as Art Franklin, one of the Charlie Company graduates.

  When the black hole of the M-16 came his way, Bosch leveled his gun with both hands, wrists on t
he cold floor, and fired. Franklin fired at the same time. His shots went high, and Bosch heard more glass shattering behind him. Bosch fired two more rounds into the vault. He heard one ping off the steel door. The other caught Franklin in the upper right chest, knocking him to the floor on his back. But in one quick motion, the injured man rolled and went headfirst through the floor. Bosch kept his gun on the doorway to the vault, waiting for anybody else. But there was nothing, only the sound of Clarke and Avery, gagging and moaning on the floor to his left. Bosch stood up but kept the gun trained on the vault. Eleanor climbed into the room then, her Beretta in hand. In marksman crouches, Bosch and Wish approached the vault from either side of the door. There was a light control next to the computer keypad on the steel wall right of the door. Bosch hit the switch and the interior vault was flooded with light. He nodded to her and Wish went in first. Then he followed. It was empty.

  Bosch came out and quickly went to Clarke and Avery, who were still tangled on the floor. Avery was saying, “Dear God, Dear God.” Clarke had both hands clamped to his own throat and was gasping for air, his face turning so red that for one bizarre moment it looked to Bosch as if he were strangling himself. He was lying across Avery’s midsection and his blood was over both of them.

  “Eleanor,” Bosch shouted. “Get backup and ambulances. Tell SWAT that they’re coming. At least two. Automatic weapons.”

  He pulled Clarke off Avery and by grabbing the shoulders of his jacket, dragged him out of the line of fire from the vault. The IAD detective had taken a round in the lower neck. Blood was seeping from between his fingers and there were small blood-tinted bubbles at the corners of his mouth. He had blood in his chest cavity. He was shaking and going into shock. He was dying. Harry turned back to Avery, who had blood on his chest and neck and a brownish-yellow piece of wet sponge on his cheek. A piece of Lewis’s brain.

  “Avery, you hit?”

  “Yes, uh . . . uh, uh, I think . . . I don’t know,” he managed in a strangled voice.

  Bosch knelt next to him and quickly scanned his body and bloody clothes. He wasn’t hit and Harry told him so. Bosch went back to where the double-glazed window had been and looked down at Lewis on his back on the sidewalk. He was dead. The bullets, having caught him in a rising arc, had stitched their way up his body. There were entry wounds on his right hip, stomach, left chest, and left of center of his forehead. He had been dead before he hit the glass. His eyes were open, staring at nothing.

  Wish came in from the lobby then.

  “Backup on the way,” she said.

  Her face was red and she was breathing almost as hard as Avery. She seemed barely in control of the movement of her eyes, which flitted about the room.

  “When backup gets here,” Bosch said, “tell them if they go into the tunnels that there is an officer friendly down there. I want you to tell your SWAT people that, too.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m going down. I hit one, I don’t know how bad. It was Franklin. Another went down ahead of him. Delgado. But I want the good guys to know I’m down there. Tell ’em I’m in a suit. The two I chased down there were in black fatigues.”

  He opened his gun and took out the three spent cartridges and reloaded with bullets from his pocket. A siren was sounding in the distance. He heard a sharp pounding and looked through the glass wall and the lobby to see Hanlon pounding the heel of his gun on the glass front door. From that angle the FBI agent could not see that the glass wall of the vault room had been shattered. Bosch motioned him to come around.

  “Wait a minute,” Wish said. “You can’t do this. Harry, they have automatic weapons. Wait till the backup is here and we come up with a plan.”

  He moved to the vault door, saying, “They already have a head start. I gotta go. Make sure you tell them I’m down there.”

  He stepped past her into the vault, hitting the light switch as he went. He looked over the edge of the blast hole. The drop was about eight feet. There were chunks of broken concrete and rebar at the bottom. He could see blood in the rubble, and a flashlight.

  There was too much light. If they were waiting down there for him he would be a sitting duck. He backed out and around behind the vault door. He put his shoulder against it and slowly began to push the huge slab of steel closed.

  Bosch could hear several sirens approaching now. Looking out into the street he saw an ambulance and two police cars coming down Wilshire. The unmarked car with Houck in it screeched to a halt in front and he came out with handgun drawn. The door was halfway closed and finally moving under its own force. Bosch slipped around it and back into the vault. He stood there over the blast hole as the door slowly closed and the light dimmed. He realized he had poised at such a moment many times before. It was always at the edge, at the entrance, that the moment was most thrilling and frightening to him. He would be at his most vulnerable at the moment he dropped into the hole. If Franklin or Delgado was down there waiting for him, they had him.

  “Harry,” he heard Wish call to him, though he couldn’t understand how her voice made it through the now paper-thin opening. “Harry, be careful. There may be more than two.”

  Her voice echoed in the steel room. He looked down into the hole and got his bearings. When he heard the vault door clink shut and there was only blackness, he jumped.

  As he came down in the rubble Bosch crouched and fired a shot from his Smith & Wesson into the blackness and then hurled himself flat against the bottom of the tunnel. It was a war trick. Shoot before they shoot you. But nobody was waiting for him. There was no return fire. No sound, except the faraway sound of running footsteps on the marble floor above and outside the vault. He realized he should have warned Eleanor, told her the first shot would be his.

  He held his lighter out away from his body and snapped it on. Another war trick. Then he picked up the flashlight, turned it on and looked around. He saw that he had fired his shot into a dead end. The tunnel the thieves had dug to the vault went the other way. West, not east as they had thought when they looked over the blueprints the night before. That meant they had not come from the storm line Gearson had guessed they would. Not from Wilshire, but maybe Olympic or Pico to the south, or Santa Monica to the north. Bosch realized that the DWP man and all the rest of the agents and cops had been skillfully led astray by Rourke. Nothing would be as they had planned or thought. Harry was on his own. He focused the beam down the tunnel’s black throat. It sloped down and then up, giving him only about thirty feet of visibility. The tunnel went west. The SWAT team was waiting to the south and east. They were waiting for nobody.

  Holding the flashlight off to the right, away from his body, he began to crawl down the passageway. The tunnel was no taller than three and a half feet, top to bottom, and maybe three feet wide. He moved slowly, holding his gun in the same hand he used to crawl with. There was the smell of cordite in the air, and bluish smoke hung in the beam of the flashlight. Purple Haze, Bosch thought. He felt himself perspiring freely, from the heat and the fear. Every ten feet he stopped to wipe sweat out of his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. He didn’t take the jacket off because he didn’t want to differ from the description given to the people who would follow him in. He didn’t want to be killed by friendly fire.

  The tunnel alternately curved left and then right for fifty yards, causing Bosch to become confused about his direction. At one point it dipped below a utility pipeline. And at times he could hear the rumble of traffic, making the tunnel sound like it was breathing. Every thirty feet burned a candle placed in a notch dug into the tunnel wall. In the sandy, chunky rubble at the bottom of the tunnel he looked for trip-wires but found a trail of blood.

  After a few minutes of slow travel, he turned the flashlight off and sank back on his calves to rest and try to control the sound of his breathing. But he could not seem to get enough air into his lungs. He closed his eyes for a few moments, and when he opened them he realized there was a pale light coming from the curv
e ahead. The light was too steady to be from a candle. He started moving slowly, keeping the flashlight off. When he made his way around the bend, the tunnel widened. It was a room. Tall enough to stand in and wide enough to live in, he thought, during the dig.

  The light came from a kerosene lantern sitting on top of an Igloo cooler in the corner of the underground room. There were also two bedrolls and a portable Coleman gas stove. There was a portable chemical toilet. He saw two gas masks and also two backpacks with food and equipment in them. And there were plastic bags full of trash. It was the camp room, like the one Eleanor had assumed was used during the dig into the WestLand vault. Bosch looked at all the equipment and thought of Eleanor’s warning about there possibly being more than two. But she had been wrong. Just two of everything.

  The tunnel continued on the other side of the camp room, where there was another three-foot-wide hole. Bosch turned the lantern flame off so he wouldn’t be backlit and crawled into the passageway. There were no candles in the walls here. He used the flashlight intermittently, turning it on to get his bearings and then crawling a short distance in the dark. Occasionally, he stopped, held his breath and listened. But the sound of traffic seemed farther away. And he heard nothing else. About fifty feet past the camp room the tunnel reached a dead end, but Bosch saw a circular outline on the floor. It was a plywood circle covered with a layer of dirt. Twenty years earlier he would have called it a rathole. He backed away, crouched down and studied the circle. He saw no indication it was a trap. In fact, he did not expect one. If the tunnelers had rigged the opening, it would have been to guard against entry, not exit. The explosives would be on this side of the circle. Nevertheless, he took his key-chain knife out and carefully ran its edge around the circle, then lifted it up a half inch. He pointed the light into the crack and saw no wires or attachments to the underside of the plywood. He then flipped it up. There were no shots. He crawled to the edge of the hole and saw another tunnel below. He dropped his arm and the flashlight through the hole and flicked on the beam. He swept it around and braced for the inevitable gunfire. Again, none came. He saw that the lower passageway was perfectly round. It was smooth concrete with black algae and a trickle of water at the bottom of its curve. It was a stormwater drainage culvert.