18
The laundry room’s garage door rumbled up, revealing the midpoint of the two-block-long tunnel between the heart of the Manhattan Project complex and the Perriman subbasement. Charlie braced for men waiting in ambush. He saw only an empty tunnel. The floor twinkled with flecks of the fluorescent bulbs shattered earlier by bullets.
Drummond pointed to the end leading into the subbasement. “I’ll cover you from here until you’re safely through the door.”
“Won’t I need your retina to open the door?”
“On this side, all you’ll need to do is use the handle. You’ll trip a sensor though, so they’ll be onto us, if they aren’t already.”
“But if I’m inside the subbasement, how can I cover you?”
“You can’t, not over the length of the tunnel. That’s where the clicker comes in. The big red detonator button is pressure sensitive. If I’m shot, or, for whatever reason, I fall and lose my grip on the clicker, the sequence initiates and can only be reversed manually on the bomb. They won’t risk that.”
“See you in the subbasement then,” Charlie said, the bravado intended to mask his foreboding: This was the most treacherous block he would ever travel.
He reached the end of the tunnel without incident. A simple turn of the handle unlocked the door, and it opened with a gentle push. Holding his gun ahead of him, the way Drummond did, he edged into the silent subbasement.
If not for the fluorescent ring in the stairwell, he would have been unable to see. The scant light silhouetted three splayed bodies, pools of blood glinting around each. He recognized Grudzev’s sloped face. The Russian’s AK-74 rig was propped against the back of his head like a grave marker. If Charlie had had time, he would have been sick.
He turned back to the door, still partway open, as Drummond emerged with caution from the laundry room. Sudden motion at the other end of the tunnel froze them both.
The door there opened and Fielding entered the tunnel along with two equally solemn guards, both pointing large rifles at Drummond.
Drummond raised his hands. “I’m holding a pressure key to one of the Pristinas,” he called to them. He stood a full city block away from Charlie-as well as from Fielding and the guards-but the tunnel’s acoustics were such that it sounded as if he were just halfway down a typical hallway.
Fielding leaned an eye into a rifle scope. Two blocks away, Charlie could hear the rattle of the rifle’s shoulder strap. Fielding muttered something, both men lowered their guns, then he said to Drummond, “There’s no need for this to get unpleasant.”
“Then have a pleasant evening, Nicholas.” Drummond turned and began walking toward Charlie at a swift pace, though not too swift to jeopardize his hold on the clicker.
“I have some news for you first,” Fielding said. Drummond didn’t slow. “At the top of the hour, a Department of Transportation camera snapped an image of Patrick Bragg, captain of the stern dragger Sea Dog. He was removing a vinyl pouch with a Chevrolet logo on it from beneath a sidewalk plate in Grand Army Plaza; five minutes earlier, another man had placed it there. According to the accident report, Captain Bragg subsequently stepped into the path of a van that jumped a red light. He was killed instantly.”
Drummond’s eyes darkened, but he said nothing and continued toward Charlie.
“For argument’s sake, let’s say his death was necessary,” Fielding went on. “The argument is there are too many frightening characters out there who need to believe that Drummond Clark is a relatively humdrum appliance salesman as opposed to a spymaster. If you’re aboard the SS International Fugitive, word could get around, and those characters would start asking questions the United States of America would prefer they do not-and that’s assuming you haven’t already sketched out the whole operation for them. So I’ll ask you now to bear in mind the oath you took to obey the orders of those above you in the chain of command-in this instance our interim national security advisor in Washington-and stand down.”
Charlie expected Drummond to whirl back and point out that such an order would never have been issued had the interim national security advisor known that Fielding had murdered the prior national security advisor in cold blood.
All Drummond said was, “Nicholas, I’ll ask you to either respect my most basic right or suffer the consequences.” He was now a short dash from Charlie-fifty feet at most, a difficult shot now for the men at the other end of the tunnel.
“What about you, Charlie?” Fielding called over Drummond. “There must be something you want? How about I erase Mickey Ramirez’s wife from the loose ends list?”
Charlie’s heart strings were wrenched. “She just had a baby.”
Fielding shrugged. “That happens.”
Charlie suspected Fielding would erase Sylvia one way or the other. “There is one thing I want,” he said.
“Yes?”
“To be a witness at your trial.”
“Okay, then we’ve run into a wall.” Fielding struck a match and lit a cigar. “As it were.” He exhaled smoke toward a gunmetal gray plate on the ceiling.
The peal of an alarm bell filled the complex.
“Shit!” Drummond said.
Charlie had never heard him curse.
Drummond held the clicker tight against his belly, took three running strides, then dove for the subbasement. Charlie crouched like a shortstop in order to best haul him in.
Steel slats cascaded from the ceiling, hammering the tunnel floor between Charlie and Drummond with a ringing echo, then forming a solid firewall. There were no discernible gaps between the slats themselves, or between the slats and the tunnel walls and floor. Charlie threw a shoulder. The firewall gave a millimeter, if that, with a condescending clink. “There’s got to be a hand crank or some hinge we can shoot?” he said through the wall, even though he was fairly certain the solution was nowhere near that simple; Drummond had cursed after all.
“The motor is inside the blast-proof frame, almost certainly remotely operated. This must be new.” Drummond’s face appeared at the small view hole, a six-by-six-inch tempered glass and metal-mesh square at head level. His eyes showed defeat. Another first. “Listen, Charles. Fielding knows I won’t detonate the device while we’re both down here. He’s sent his men out the east way, to campus.”
Through the view hole, Charlie saw that Fielding now stood alone at the far end of the tunnel, a departed guard’s rifle in his hands. Once the guards crossed Broadway to the Perriman offices, they would flank Charlie, robbing Drummond of his leverage.
“So now what?” Charlie asked.
“You need to run.”
Although he knew he’d heard correctly, Charlie felt he’d missed something. “What about you?”
“I’ll stay here and detonate the device,” Drummond said. “Fielding won’t expect that.”
Charlie’s body temperature plummeted. “Of course he won’t. It’s crazy!”
Drummond’s calm dissolved into discomfiting urgency. “There’s no way we can both make it out now.”
“Come on. After all we’ve been through, there’s no way the dead end is a bunch of slats. You’ll figure something out. You always do.”
“This may be for the best. Even if we made it out, with the NSC under Fielding’s sway, we would have to contend with an army’s worth of the kind of men who’ve been after us. If I stay here, they’ll conclude that you and I both died here.”
Charlie could only stare, dumbstruck, at the grim visage in the porthole. Although nothing about Drummond’s features changed, suddenly, somehow, Charlie saw love in his eyes. And just as suddenly, Charlie’s own jumble of feelings disentangled. He felt love for his father too, and he knew that he always would. “Forget it,” he said.
“I’ve had my fair share of time,” Drummond said. “At best, with an unprecedented leap by medicine, I’d get two extra years before I start needing to be diapered. And I’d still be a national security risk.”
“What about parlaying their fear o
f a timed drop into some sort of a deal?”
“The only deal I’m going to take is that you can get out of here, go anywhere you want, and have everything you want. There’s only one way I’m going to get that deal.”
The only thing Charlie wanted was to get Drummond out.
“You’re resourceful,” Drummond went on, speaking more quickly. “You’ll make it out of the country-you’ll figure things from there.” A tinny clank shimmied the length of the tunnel. “And that’s your cue. That’s them raising the firewall at the tunnel to campus.” More clanks resounded through the complex.
Charlie saw clearly that staying was no longer an option.
He stayed.
“Know always that I love you, Charles,” Drummond said with finality.
Charlie was preoccupied with plotting to save him.
Drummond must have seen it. “This is the best way,” he said. He turned and strode toward Fielding. The tunnel floor ahead of him flashed pink in the beam cast by the clicker.
Charlie had ninety seconds to get out.
19
Charlie fielded Grudzev’s AK-74 on the run. The bullets in its big banana clip could barely dent the firewall. The armor-piercing grenade in its underbarrel, however, might blow the thing down.
He slid to a stop in the stairwell across the subbasement, slamming his hip against the stout handrail. He couldn’t afford to think about it. The stairwell was far enough from the firewall that the grenade, while in flight, could have the time it needed to arm. The stairwell also looked solid enough to serve as a shield against the lethal shrapnel that would fly at him if the grenade did its job.
He raised the rifle to his shoulder, found the firewall in the rungs of his front sight post, said a silent prayer to all comers, then absolutely pulverized the trigger.
Nothing happened. The grenade didn’t budge.
Was it a dud?
Had Karpenko supplied Grudzev with a neutered AK-74?
Ninety-seven point eight pounds of penthrite and trinitrotoluene would turn Drummond to mist in less than a minute.
Take an extra second, Charlie urged himself.
Check out that little lever just in front of the trigger.
The safety, maybe?
He flicked it downward, raised the rifle, and tried the trigger again. The underbarrel responded with a disheartening sproing, like that of a spud gun.
The grenade flew out. It hurtled through the hundred feet or so of subbasement and punched the firewall, creating a colossal, magnificent explosion.
Charlie closed his eyes and still could see the fiery flash. His ears shut down. Pressed flat against the inside wall of the stairwell, he felt a hard gust from the hail of passing shrapnel. He had no idea whether the shrapnel included bits of firewall.
Once the gust subsided, he crept into the subbasement. He couldn’t see what damage, if any, the grenade had done. The firewall area was blocked by a mass of dust and smoke.
He took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and plunged into it. The air smelled and tasted like a spent match. He felt his way toward the firewall. Then he felt the firewall itself-where he’d hoped to feel nothing.
He opened his eyes. Through a burning haze, he saw that the firewall remained anchored to the surrounding concrete walls and ceiling-unfortunately, the blast-proof frame had lived up to its billing. The metal slats themselves had puckered outward, however, leading to a cavity at its base big enough for a midsized dog to squeeze through.
Charlie tried, an act of contortion. A steel shard cut into his neck. Another ripped into his sleeve and dug into his arm. At the cost of two strips of skin, he made it through.
In the tunnel, the dust kicked up by the grenade had grayed the air. Using a hand as a visor against it, Charlie made out the forms of two men standing together halfway down: almost certainly Drummond and Fielding-had Drummond revealed he’d triggered the bomb, Fielding would have fled, at the least. Charlie couldn’t see enough of their shapes or features to tell who was who. Except for a small circle glowing faintly.
The lit end of a cigar.
Charlie fired the AK. The cigar hit the floor along with Fielding, the splash of sparks momentarily illuminating his rifle and the rage on his blood-splattered face.
One of his bullets sparked the wall inches from Charlie’s head. Charlie didn’t hear it; he still couldn’t hear anything. He countered by spraying more of his own bullets, sending Fielding staggering in retreat. He disappeared into the smog, perhaps into the complex itself, allowing Drummond to run to Charlie.
Drummond shouted something. Charlie couldn’t hear what, but Drummond’s urgency made it clear he wasn’t suggesting they stick around. Charlie estimated forty seconds remained for them to get out of the tunnel, feel their way across the subbasement, climb two flights of stairs, and exit the building through the Perriman offices. He wasn’t sure whether it was possible. But trying beat the hell out of the alternative.
He ran with Drummond for the firewall. Along the way, he emptied his banana clip at the shards around the hole, effectively enlarging it, then cast the spent rifle away. At the end of the tunnel, Drummond stepped aside, allowing Charlie through first. Charlie pulled Drummond out on the other side. Together they raced across the subbasement and into the stairwell.
They were halfway up the stairs from the basement to the ground floor when the detonation came. The stairwell filled with white light so intense that Charlie couldn’t distinguish any single object-not Drummond at his side, not even his own hand in front of his face. Although he couldn’t hear, he heard the blast, and he felt it in his stomach and his knees and his teeth. The blast current hit like a bludgeon. It snatched him, and in its hold there was no telling up from down, until he came down chin first onto the edge of a stair.
The white light dissolved into swells of hot gray dust and blue-black smoke that stank of burned rubber, inflaming his lungs, and revealed that the walls of the stairwell were buckling, the ceiling was raining chunks of concrete, and Drummond was gone. Utterly vanished. Possibly he’d fallen into the sooty abyss where the bottom five or six stairs had been a second ago.
As Charlie peered into it, the remaining stairs, including those beneath his feet, cracked apart into nothing.
He flung a hand at the stout handrail. Because the lower mooring had fragmented, his weight caused the rail to pop free of the wall. The upper mooring held, enabling him to climb the rail while it swung.
He belly flopped onto the landing, then scurried on scorched-and possibly broken-hands and knees into the Perriman offices.
Other than the billows of white dust, tinted red by the illuminated exit signs, all was as before. Except, of course, the building might come down at any second.
If Drummond had made it out of the stairwell, Charlie figured, he would have headed down the hallway to the front vestibule, which opened onto West 112th Street.
There were no footprints in the fresh coating of dust there.
Charlie felt like slumping into one of the plastic workstations and crying. He hauled himself toward the vestibule. Halfway, he sensed motion behind him. He spun around, his hope reignited, all of his parts feeling like new again.
It was water, spraying from fire sprinklers.
His hearing had begun to return. He could make out the howl of a smoke alarm, though barely. To his ears, it was a drone.
Still he could hear Drummond. At least he thought he could. From the office next to the stairwell, the one whose door said D. CLARK, DEPUTY DISTRICT SALES MGR, N. ATLANTIC DIV. “Is there a fire?” Charlie thought he heard him say.
Charlie bounded down the hallway and threw open the door. Drummond swiveled sharply in his desk chair. A coating of white dust made him look like a baker. He seemed irked that there had been no knock. Taking in Charlie, his demeanor shifted to puzzled.
“Charles, what are you doing here?” His eyes settled on Charlie’s Perriman uniform. “Are you working here now?”
20
C
harlie led Drummond out of the office, at the same time using Drummond’s shoulder to keep weight off a new knee injury relative to which his old gunshot wound felt like a paper cut. The glass-walled vestibule at the far end of the hallway showed West 112th to be as crowded now, in the middle of the night, as it ordinarily would be at midday during a street fair. Dogs yelped at the strange rumbling below-ground. Residents with coats thrown over pajamas gawked, through the haze of streetlamps, at towers of smoke rising from sidewalk grates. Charlie heard them speculating: “student prank,” “science experiment,” and, the overwhelming favorite, “terrorists.”
“My guess would be a cigarette,” Drummond said in earnest. “Eighteen percent of all nighttime fires begin when a person falls asleep while smoking.”
“My guess would be penthrite and trinitrotoluene,” said Fielding, climbing from the dark remains of the stairwell, assault rifle in hand. Dust gave him a ragged edge.
The shock of seeing him hit Charlie nearly as hard as the blast current. He probably would have fallen if he weren’t clutching Drummond.
Drummond studied Fielding as if trying to remember who he was. “Interesting theory,” he told him meanwhile.
Although the lights were off in the hallway, Fielding’s extensive wounds were apparent from blood that slicked much of his face and body. Yet he approached without evident impediment, his rifle blinking orange along with a changing traffic signal outside, his finger on the trigger.
Charlie looked to Drummond for guidance only to find Drummond looking to him the same way.
“Should we tell him about the security blanket?” Charlie asked, intending it for Fielding’s ears.
“That is a decent bargaining chip,” Fielding said. “An hour ago. In case it comes up in your next life, a man with an honest-to-goodness security blanket doesn’t resort to blowing himself up.” He flicked his rifle at a bare stretch of hallway. “Now, both of you, back up against the wall.”
Charlie raced to conceive a way he and Drummond could defend themselves. There was nothing in reach, save a light switch and the carpet sodden from the fire sprinklers. The people milling outside the front vestibule couldn’t see them through the doors and all the way down the dark hallway, and probably wouldn’t be able to hear a cry for help, or intervene in any case. The huge bank of fluorescent tubes directly above Fielding’s head held more promise: They might come on with enough flash or pop to distract him long enough that his rifle could be knocked away. Also the people on the street might be able to see in. And, at some point, Drummond might blink on too.
Once a spy dc-1 Page 30