Joe shifted his gaze from the dancing shadows to the left wall. Olive-green fabric covered with dust leaned against the stone. On the train ties next to the green pile rested a pale orb with a hole in the back.
A skull.
The green rags? An Army uniform covering a skeleton. At the end of one green arm a dusty gun lay atop the rusty train track. The man had shot himself in the head.
On the ground between the skull and the uniform-clad skeleton lay a set of round wire-framed eyeglasses, one lens a spider’s web of cracks. A man died there, long ago. Not just one (cyan). Two (blue). Close to the wall, a second skeleton wore a long coat that looked as if it had once been white.
He realized it from their postures—the men had been walled in alive.
As much as he was repulsed by their terrible deaths, the mystery intrigued him. Who had walled them in here? And why had Rebar searched for them and brought them to light?
Rebar’s arm trembled. Shadows formed and broke. Joe withdrew his head.
“I found it,” Rebar whispered. “It will save me, the treasure in there.”
“Treasure?”
Rebar lowered the lantern to the dirt. He fingered the greasy handle of his hammer. “It’s mine, sir.”
Joe’s heart raced. They were alone down here. No one to stop Rebar from doing whatever he wanted. Possibilities clicked through his head, but it came down to fight-or-flight. Rebar was bigger than he was, armed with a hammer, and insane.
He took a careful backward step. “I understand that. It’s yours.”
Rebar cocked his head as if listening.
The tunnel was silent. Joe backed up, eyes on the hammer. He came up hard against the pillar.
“We need to tell them, sir,” Rebar said. “Before the end of the month.”
“Tell them what?” Joe asked. His heart thudded against his ribs. He wasn’t an action hero, he was a nerd. He couldn’t disarm a man with a hammer. Next to him, Edison growled.
“You don’t know?” Rebar asked. “What’s your name? What are you doing here?”
Rebar’s muscles corded in his neck. He lifted the hammer and advanced on Joe.
Joe ran. He focused on the tracks in front of him, the tracks that had carried FDR’s train here all those years ago. If the silver rails tripped him up, he was dead. Rebar was crazy, and he’d use that hammer if he could.
Think, he told himself. Find a safe place. He headed back for the open room. Trains pulled in and out of there, sometimes, at this time of night. A driver might see him, help him.
He wasn’t a brave man. Cowardice was to be ashamed of, he knew. He’d always tried to think his way out of fights, and run if he had to. Standing and fighting was never his favorite option. And Rebar had a hammer.
Joe veered off into an unlit tunnel. He had to make sure that he wasn’t being followed. Edison loped silently next to him, calm as always.
No sound of running footsteps on the tracks. Not even the grumble of a train.
Farther down the tunnel, he and the dog slowed. Joe kept glancing over his shoulder to see if Rebar followed them. No one did.
He took a shuddering breath before continuing. This tunnel connected with another not too far ahead, and he could follow that one back to the door that opened onto his own tunnel and his house. He’d be safe there.
What had Rebar uncovered? How had he known to look there? Joe might not be a brave man, but he was a persistent one. Once something piqued his interest, he wouldn’t give up on it.
He would return to the brick room later to pry out the secrets that Rebar had kept from him. He would go back. He wouldn’t be driven away from the truth.
He entered the code and unlocked the metal door. Gesturing for Edison to go first, he hurried inside and closed the door. The green light told him that the system had armed itself again. He leaned against the inside to catch his breath and wait for his heart to slow. This was real fear, not the product of misfiring brain chemistry.
Another feeling had joined the fear. A feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long time.
Exhilaration.
Joe let the feeling wash over him. Ever since he’d become trapped inside, his world had diminished. He’d lost his job, his friends, the sky. He tried not to dwell on it and keep going, but his new life had weighed him down in a thousand ways.
Tonight he’d caught a glimpse of something new, something exciting—a mystery that was to be found only in the world beneath. He had to solve it. He had to figure out who Rebar was, why he was there, and how the train car came to be bricked in. It might be dangerous, but he’d risk a lot to keep feeling this alive.
As he followed Edison toward his front door, he couldn’t stop grinning.
Things were going to change for him.
Chapter 7
November 28, 4:04 a.m.
Bricked-in train car under Grand Central Terminal
Rebar watched the man with the yellow dog sprint away from him across the rows of shiny tracks and into a tunnel. He didn’t bother to chase them. They didn’t seem dangerous, just curious. He didn’t have time to bother with them. He had to concentrate on his prize.
He had found what he had long searched for. He wasn’t crazy. He was right. He’d almost given up back there on the platform, but he hadn’t. And now he had found it.
With one dirty hand, he touched the brick wall and muttered a quick prayer, surprised that he still remembered one. This brick train shed wasn’t just the source of the secrets he sought. It was also a tomb for the doctor who had started it all, and a hapless soldier who’d been ordered to accompany him on his final journey. His papers said so, and he would find proof.
He wiped his hand on his filthy pants and picked up the lantern again, then leaned against the cold wall and stuck his arm through the hole. Reverently, he gazed into the room. The lantern light shone on a blue car that had once carried the president himself. The car had been lost for so many years. Everyone had given up on it. But not him. He knew that he would find it. And he had.
The doctor must have been trying to get out. He lay crumpled against the end of the tunnel where they had laid the final bricks. Dark stains on the back of his coat told Rebar that he’d been wounded, probably shot to keep him inside while they finished the wall. He hadn’t given up.
The soldier had obviously chosen to eat a bullet rather than die of dehydration or from running out of oxygen. A brave choice. The other skeleton looked like it belonged to a monkey. It hadn’t been mentioned in the papers that Rebar had come across before.
Rebar climbed through the hole he’d created in the wall and walked over to the long-dead doctor. The man had died before Rebar’s own parents were born. Hard to believe that he might even now hold the secrets to Rebar’s own life and death. Funny.
He studied the white-clad figure on the floor. The man had nothing in his hands, and the ground around his body was clear. If he’d carried anything with him, he hadn’t brought it all the way to this last resting place.
Holding the light at waist level, Rebar turned in a slow circle, looking for clues. The skeleton in the uniform listed against the wall. His skull rested about a foot from Rebar’s boot.
He didn’t have the papers on him, either. That left the train car.
Rebar set the lantern inside, then hefted himself up into the old car. Sooty dust lay velvet thick over everything—chairs bolted to the floor, a cabinet in the corner with an old sink, and empty glass decanters.
He searched the floor, and spotted what he was looking for next to a chair. A grimy rectangle. A briefcase? He wiped the dust off the top with the sleeve of his jacket, uncovering a cracked leather surface.
Rebar lifted it up with trembling hands.
The briefcase’s hinges had long since rusted, and they screeched and broke as he lifted the top off. He stared down at a stack of yellowed papers inside.
He sat down on an old chair that had perhaps once held FDR and began to read. The papers didn’t make sense, yet. T
hey discussed clinical trials, strains of the parasite, side effects. Nothing about a cure. There must be more papers.
A clink outside caught his attention. Probably a train. Or a man working far away.
He couldn’t be sure. He needed to take the papers somewhere safe and hide them until he had time to read them carefully. Before that, he needed to check the rest of the car out to make sure that there weren’t other papers hidden there.
He emptied the papers and maps from his own pockets into the briefcase, smashing them in until he could put the top back on. Then he took off his belt and wrapped it around both halves of the broken case. Nothing could fall out now. He tucked it under his arm and lifted the lantern.
The room was, as he’d expected, empty. He climbed through the hole he’d opened up. He swung the lantern in a slow circle, shadows chasing each other across the walls. No one out here, either. Hadn’t there been a man and a dog earlier? Were they back? He didn’t think so.
The uneasy feeling wouldn’t go away. He took the lantern and walked along an unused track, counting his steps. At just the right spot, as if he’d known it all along, he stumbled over a stack of broken train ties that looked as if they’d been tossed there before the Korean War. Quickly, he cleared a space in the pile, placed the briefcase in the middle, and then restacked the ties haphazardly atop it.
Then he went back toward the car. He would find the other papers, the ones that the doctor must have hidden.
The ones that told how he could be cured.
Dread consumed him. What if they weren’t there?
He half-ran back to the brick tomb and climbed inside. He ransacked the car, finding no papers concealed in the cupboards or fastened under the chairs, nothing on the floor or walls. The ceiling held nothing but a wire and pockmarks from bullets, nothing useful at all.
With a curse, he threw the glass decanters one after another against the thick glass windows. The square bottles shattered, and shards of glass glittered against the thick dust.
He jumped from the back of the train and ran to the doctor’s body, ripping the coat from the skeleton, hands delving into the pockets, searching even his pants pockets. Nothing. He repeated his actions with the soldier’s corpse, pulling them both into the center of the room so that he could see them better.
Sweat ran down his back, and his breath grew tight. Calm down, he ordered himself. Think. The papers had to be here somewhere. After all, the men were trapped in this room. Nothing could have left the room.
He started at the far end of the room and walked from one end to the other, lantern in one hand, peering at the dirty ground. When he got to the brick wall, he turned, took a step to the left, and walked back the other way. His footprints formed straight lines in the dust. He was walking a grid. If it was here, he’d find it.
An hour later, he collapsed on the steps that led up to the car. He’d found nothing. There was no hope. He dropped his head into his hands and wept.
Chapter 8
November 28, 4:52 a.m.
Tunnels
Ozan hated train tunnels. They smelled like oil and rat piss. The third rail ran electric death along the side of each track. One kick to the wrong spot, and Erol would be alone. Ozan walked on the train ties, both to avoid the third rail and to keep from leaving prints in the dirt.
He’d brought a flashlight, but hadn’t had to use it yet. The tunnels were illuminated well enough that he could walk without one. The light would draw attention, and he never liked to draw attention.
It was inconvenient that he had to come down here, but inconveniences were necessary on a job like his—as were the uncomfortable too-big shoes he currently wore, even though he had a pair that fit perfectly in his jacket pocket.
A train rumbled up and Ozan slipped behind a pillar, taking cover. When he came back out, his target was gone. A shadowy figure headed back to the platform. Ozan tracked it. He caught up just as the man neared the platform. The man paused by the stairs, as if he sensed Ozan’s presence behind him in the tunnel, then hurried into the light. He was several inches too short to be Subject 523, so Ozan retreated.
A few hours later, he was ready to call it a night.
The trains started to run again at 5:30. That gave him only thirty-eight more minutes to search. After that, he’d head topside for a shower and a long sleep, and start again in the evening.
The man should have been distinctive—tall, dressed in dirty fatigues, looking like a homeless man but walking like a military one. Ozan had spotted six men who fit that description in the first few hours of staking out Grand Central Terminal. He’d followed each one, eliminating each one as his target.
Sometimes, jobs were like that—many false trails had to be followed before the right one revealed itself. Ozan didn’t mind.
He’d first spotted Subject 523 when he had walked into the terminal just before the last trains left for the night. He’d gone straight down to Platform 23 and headed into the tunnel where Ozan had lost him. Ozan had a feeling, based on the man’s easy, comfortable stride, that he always used Platform 23 to access the tunnels. He’d probably be back there the next day.
Ozan passed through a maze of tracks where commuter trains converged on Grand Central Terminal. Security swept this area often, and he had to appreciate the target’s stealth. Had the man had been coming down here for months without being caught? Ozan hoped that he himself would be so fortunate.
He was ready to turn back when a glimmer of light twinkled far ahead in the tunnel. A golden orb bobbed up and down—a lantern, not a flashlight. Subject 523 had been carrying a lantern.
Ozan pocketed his own flashlight and closed in on the light. Mindful of stones and debris on the ground, he chose each step carefully, footfalls whisper quiet. It was a matter of professional pride that no one ever heard him coming. And it kept him alive.
The target walked furtively, shoulders hunched, head on a swivel. Whoever the man was, he was nervous. His steps, too, were cautious. The target clearly had training in moving undetected. Nothing about this background had appeared in the dossier Ozan had received, so he had to assume the worst—that the man was trained as a deadly killer and no one had bothered to tell Ozan. Any other assumption was foolish.
Ozan crept closer. The man’s head turned far enough to one side that Ozan recognized his receding chin. Subject 523. In one dirty hand he carried a battery-powered lantern that radiated light in a giant circle. That lamp had drawn Ozan to him as brightness drew so many predators to prey.
The man stopped and held the lantern high, searching in all directions. Ozan stopped, too. The light from the tunnel behind might silhouette him, but he could do little about that now. He eased himself against the stone wall and waited.
Seeming satisfied, the target turned around again. Ozan lagged behind. Once the man chose a tunnel, there were few places where he could turn off and, even for those, his light would make him easy to find—as long as he didn’t become suspicious and douse it. But he was a careful man, Subject 523, so Ozan could take nothing for granted. He didn’t let him out of his sight.
The light bobbed along in front of him like a will-o’-the-wisp. It promised magic and excitement. Because tonight Ozan hoped to kill the man who held it.
He fingered the knife in his pocket, then touched the hard steel Glock he carried in a shoulder holster. Both weapons were suitable, but he hoped to come across an object at the scene that he could use instead. A rock. A brick. A discarded board. On-site weapons were impossible to trace and made the police think of crimes of passion instead of premeditation. That would lead them down blind alleys.
The light ahead stopped abruptly, then jerked up with tiny quick movements as if the man were climbing over a low wall. Ozan noiselessly closed the distance between them. He smelled the target’s sweat and the clay-like odor of disturbed brick dust.
The beam angled toward the ceiling as if it had been put down. Ozan drew his knife. The Glock was a better distance weapon. Considerin
g how the last man on the job died, the more distance the better, but he didn’t enjoy it as much when he killed from a distance. He liked to be close enough to feel their muscles go slack, see death dull their eyes, and let their last rattling breath whisper against his cheek. He stroked the knife’s hilt with his thumb, waiting.
The target had climbed through a jagged hole smashed into a brick wall. Footprints in the dust told him that the target had come to this place and left at least once.
Among the target’s tracks he spotted another set. Whoever had left them was a person of interest, might have met Subject 523 here. Ozan studied the prints, about a size ten, but that meant little. Plenty of short men had large feet, and large men had small ones. The stride would tell him more. He left Subject 523 alone in the brick room and circled back to follow the other man’s prints, careful to keep to the train ties and leave no prints of his own in the dust here.
Based on the length of the strides, the man who had left the prints was tall, around six feet, and had been running. Maybe he’d come across Subject 523 here, too, and 523 had chased him off. A quarrel like that might prove useful to Ozan. He’d prepared an alternate scenario for Subject 523’s murder for the police, but would he use this one instead? The footprints might be years old. Better to stick with what he had. Still, he would track those footprints back to their source later, to be sure.
He crept back toward his target. He didn’t want to lose sight of his quarry tonight of all nights. This was the perfect place. They were alone down here, and he could work without fear of detection, away from the people and surveillance cameras that plagued him. And he’d been told that he must do it soon.
He moved until he could see through the jagged opening into the room where 523 had disappeared. A rusty blue train car sat inside. A curious Ozan slipped closer, glimpsing a small skeleton resting undisturbed in a layer of dust atop the car. Another skeleton lay on the ground a few feet from the car.
The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) Page 6