He drew his flashlight and headed down the stairs.
His head throbbed with each step. He’d been eating aspirin like Pez today. It had brought down the fever, but not dulled the pain. His brain felt as if someone was prodding it with hot needles.
A quick glance revealed that the old door would be easy to kick down. Whoever had built it hadn’t been worried that someone would want to break into the steam tunnels, or out of them. But he hesitated.
Tesla might be on the other side, armed. He must have led Ozan down here on purpose, probably into a trap. The man had proved that he could be wily, and even a cornered rabbit could fight. They didn’t often kill the fox chasing them, but sometimes they got lucky.
Elation ebbing, he leaned against the wall. The needles in his brain were keeping him from thinking clearly. His illness was affecting his judgment. He should go home and rest, come back later when he felt better.
He squeezed his eyes shut against the memory of the grisly sample he’d collected from Subject 523. Dr. Dubois had insisted on a piece of his brain. Ozan had assumed it was just a repulsive proof of death, but it might have been more. What if the doctor was looking for something wrong with his brain?
Thumping overhead brought him back to the present moment. He had been followed back to this room. He didn’t have the luxury of thinking it over and taking another path.
He squandered a precious minute fumbling with the door lock before he realized that Tesla had jammed something into it. Clever rabbit. Brute force would have to win out over finesse. Forcing his way out seemed crude, irritating to his sense of order. Worse, it left an unobstructed path behind him, but it had to be done.
Taking a step back, he aimed for just below the door lock and kicked. The wooden door frame cracked. That was the weakest part of this door—metal door, strong lock, but a weak frame. He kicked again, feeling the frame give. One more kick was all he needed.
Then he was through the door, gun and flashlight up and ready. If Tesla didn’t take him down with the first shot, he wouldn’t get a second one.
The long, dark tunnel was empty in both directions. Ozan stopped and pointed his light at the floor, searching for footprints. He found many boot prints; the tunnel wasn’t as deserted as he’d have thought. But he found only one set of paw prints. Following them, he hurried west.
“Freeze,” called a voice from behind him.
The idiots from the hotel must have broken through.
Ozan darted into a side tunnel, followed it to a junction, and chose right. A few turns later, he’d lost his pursuers. He’d also lost Tesla.
The dangers behind meant that he couldn’t go back and track his rabbit from the hotel’s steam tunnels. That was just a waste of time.
Instead, Ozan resolved to return to the murder scene and track him from there. Like all men, Joe was a creature of routine. He must have his favorite tunnels, places where he rested. Ozan would find them, and there he would wait.
Chapter 22
November 29, 12:32 p.m.
Tunnels near the bricked-in train car
Joe crept to the end of the tunnel and glanced across the open field of tracks. He had to cross that without being seen. But the lights were all on, and two cops wearing navy blue uniforms and menacing looks were standing around.
He shrank back into the darkness. If he circled around to the west, he could use a tunnel that came out near to the bricked-in train car where he’d met Rebar. It was a much longer walk, but he couldn’t think of another way.
Fifteen minutes later, he had a good view of the crime scene. Yellow tape had been tacked across the broken entrance and also in the area around the bricked-in car—forming a large square. A woman stood just outside the tape, smoking a cigarette. She wore a standard NYPD uniform—not a yellow biosuit. A bit of good news.
Another man stepped out of the hole. He wore civilian clothing and, other than latex gloves, he had no special gear.
Joe was so relieved that his knees threatened to buckle. Whatever else they were worried about, nobody was acting as if Rebar, or the skeletons and the monkey, represented a biological hazard. He wouldn’t need to go into quarantine. He’d be able to move around and try to solve the crime on his own. Indoors. He could still be of use.
That was all he needed to know. He turned back the way that he had come. He had a new destination now: Grand Central Terminal’s Platform 36.
Joe and Edison approached Platform 36 (red for three, orange for six), footsteps quiet on the tracks. He’d never appreciated just how quiet the dog was until today. Several bulbs had burned out in this section of tunnel recently, so they moved in a protective cone of darkness.
On the end of the train platform, right where Joe had hoped to climb the stairs and get into Grand Central Terminal, a man peered into the tunnel. Putting a hand on Edison’s head to keep him still, Joe eased behind a pillar and studied the guy. When this was over, he was going to buy a set of binoculars, regular and night-vision.
For now he had to trust his eyes. The man on the edge of the platform wore a dark uniform, details easy to pick out because the light behind him silhouetted his stocky form. He was a cop.
Joe doubted that the man could see far, looking from light into darkness as he was. Still, the man scanned the tunnel every few minutes. He seemed alert.
Joe had to get closer, but he didn’t dare get caught.
He slid out from behind the pillar in slow motion. People keyed in on movement, especially quick ones. He took one slow step forward, then another, slipping from pillar to pillar with Edison. The man put his hand above his eyes, shielding them from the light. Several long seconds later, he shook his head and lowered his hand.
Joe crouched behind the pillar. He didn’t dare move closer. This would have to be close enough.
He gestured for Edison to lie down, and the dog flopped down on the broken rocks that underlaid the tracks. Joe stifled his automatic “good boy” and lowered himself next to the dog, making sure that no part of his body stuck out from behind the pillar.
Angling it down toward the ground so that no one could spot the glow, he turned on his laptop and crossed his fingers. The station master’s office on Platform 36 had free Wi-Fi, and that was just what he needed.
Before he had time to log in, the rumble of an approaching train told him that he’d have to wait. Still hidden by the pillar, he hauled Edison up into his lap, and covered them both with the blanket. They waited.
After running next to a moving train, sitting while one passed didn’t seem dangerous at all, just loud and annoying. Funny how he’d changed his assessment of risk with experience. Edison, too, felt more relaxed in his arms.
Once the train passed, he decided to keep the blanket around them. Carefully, he tucked in the corners. It smelled like double dog in his blanket tent, but that couldn’t be helped. He pulled the blanket off his head.
“Baths for both of us when this is over, right, Edison?” he whispered.
Edison refused to meet his eyes. He hated baths and knew the word. Joe grinned. No matter what, some things never changed.
He flipped the laptop open again and tried to connect to the Wi-Fi. One bar. No good. A quick glance around the pillar told him that he didn’t dare move closer. But he had a Wi-Fi booster in his backpack.
It took only a few seconds to set it up and plug it in. He held his breath and tried again. Still too weak.
What if he tried to create a distraction and sneaked onto the platform? Too risky. He could try to sneak back to a subway station—he doubted that the cops had the manpower to cover them all. But he didn’t know of any subway stations that offered Wi-Fi. Another dead-end.
A train approached with a roar, and he pulled the blanket up over his head. Before the blanket covered his eyes, he saw the train’s headlight glint off a discarded beer can, just feet from his position. That should do it.
After the train rumbled into the station, the policeman turned to study the disembarking crowd.
Joe took advantage of the distraction and darted out to grab the can.
He upended it. Empty. He popped off the pull tab and dropped it to the stones.
Then he took out his pocketknife and got to work, moving fast so that the noise of the departing commuters covered the sound. First, he sliced off the bottom of the can, impressed at how easily his knife cut through the aluminum. Edison watched, ears up and eyes intent.
Holding the top of the can, Joe stuck the knife just under the thick rim that ran around the top and slit the side from top to bottom. This took some doing, and he wished for a pair of scissors.
Finally, he cut in a circle around the top of the can, under the rim, most of the way around. He left a half-inch section untouched. That should be enough to keep the rest of the can from coming loose in the next step.
Carefully, so as not to cut himself on the sharp edges, he bent the sides of the can outward until the can looked like a miniature radar dish, which he stuck back on top of his Wi-Fi booster.
It wasn’t glamorous, but it might work.
He checked the Wi-Fi again, slowly turning his improvised dish until he picked up a signal. A couple more bars. Strong enough. He grinned at Edison. Who said software guys couldn’t do hardware? To mark the position, he drew a line next to the edge of the dish.
He quickly connected to the Wi-Fi, and took his standard precautions before hacking into the database for the surveillance cameras outside of Grand Central. His years of careful paranoia had paid off. Without his experience at moving unobserved online, he’d have been caught already.
He was going to use this talent to find out who killed Brandon.
He fast-forwarded through the video until he found the time of the attack. Tears sprang into his eyes as he watched the killer crash into Brandon. He was small and slender, with curly dark hair. He didn’t look like a killer.
The man first stepped quickly to the side, as if he had slipped on a patch of ice, seeming to steady himself against Brandon’s back. Even knowing that the man had just stabbed him, Joe could barely see it. The killer stepped away and kept walking. The only thing that separated him from the other walkers was his innate gracefulness, belying the ruse that he had slipped. This was a man whose every movement looked calculated and lithe. A dancer.
Then Brandon collapsed onto the sidewalk. He didn’t even have time to cry out. Just like that, a promising young life was gone.
Brandon had had a girlfriend who worked in PR and didn’t mind a walk in the park instead of a fancy meal, a single mother who had taken on a second job to get Brandon through college, and a little brother who wanted to go to college, too. All of them left behind.
With one hand, Joe stroked Edison’s warm back, both to calm himself and to apologize for what the dog had gone through.
Joe could do nothing to comfort Brandon.
But he could make sure that his killer didn’t walk free.
Another train passed, knocking Joe off the Wi-Fi. He realigned his beer-can booster to his marks and went back to work. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he worked through the footage until he found a good shot of the killer’s face. The man had looked up, past the camera location, toward where Joe had watched him from the tennis club window.
Reflexively, Joe cleaned up the image until it was good enough to result in a match. This was more art than science, but he had practiced with a thousand faces over the months and years it had taken to build the Pellucid software. A seemingly mild-mannered man stared back at him—black hair and dark eyes, a round face, and a high forehead. A Russian ballet dancer.
With a few typewritten commands, Joe had logged in to a backdoor account he’d created in Pellucid at the very beginning. He’d be invisible there, and his movements wouldn’t be logged. Sunil would be furious if he knew—as would the government agencies they worked with. Again, Joe was glad that he had done it. It was as if he’d always known that he’d need a secret entrance someday.
Joe submitted the killer’s picture to a search of the test databases. The company had cloned them early in the process so that their tests didn’t affect the government’s databases in real time. What it meant now was that no one in law enforcement would receive notice of his search. It didn’t take long to get a match. The man who had killed Brandon, and probably Rebar, was Ozan Saddiq.
A commotion on the train platform drew Joe’s attention. He looked cautiously around the pillar to see what was going on. More cops?
The noisemakers were just a group of teenagers, all dressed like old-fashioned barbers—with red-striped vests, red suspenders, and flat straw hats. He did a quick head count, twelve (cyan, blue) kids. Three (red) barbershop quartets. Normal life was going on all around him.
Joe settled back down in front of his laptop, but before he read Ozan Saddiq’s file, he hacked into Torres’s mother’s email account. He used that to send the information off to her daughter—Saddiq’s picture and its source in the surveillance video, complete with time stamps, the picture it had matched in the Pellucid database, and the name Ozan Saddiq. That should be enough to nail the man for Brandon’s murder.
Of course, if she didn’t play her cards right, it was also enough to nail Joe for hacking if they traced it back to him. That didn’t matter. What mattered was bringing Brandon’s killer to justice, and keeping him from killing again. No matter what happened to Joe now, Saddiq was taken care of.
After he read Saddiq’s file, he regretted sending off the material so quickly. Saddiq was a very dangerous man, and he probably had contacts to help him avoid being prosecuted for Brandon’s murder. Nothing was ever simple.
After a stint in the military distinguished by careful and methodical performance, the man had worked for the CIA. He wasn’t a full-time employee, but rather a contractor employed in an unnamed capacity at different times and in locations throughout the world. He received strong recommendations for his thorough and painstaking work. The file didn’t say what he had done, but Joe was willing to bet that he was a contract killer. If so, a logical assumption was that the CIA had hired him to kill Rebar, and maybe Joe. If so, the information he’d sent might have placed Torres in danger, just as he had Brandon.
He and Edison barely noticed the next train as it swept by in a cloud of noise and vibration. The most important thing was that his beer-can antenna didn’t lose its Wi-Fi connection. The can was better than he could have hoped. Well, this kind of stuff always worked for MacGyver.
Joe searched the file for Saddiq’s next of kin. Both his parents were dead. He was unmarried, no children. The file listed a single name for next of kin: Erol Saddiq.
A rock dug into Joe’s butt, and he lifted up an inch to move it, careful not to disturb Edison’s warm head resting on his lap. The dog snored. He’d had a rough day.
A quick search showed that Erol Saddiq lived in an expensive home for adults with special needs in Oyster Bay on Long Island. A hired killer with a handicapped brother. Joe squelched his feeling of pity. Nothing had slowed his hand as he’d killed Brandon, leaving Brandon’s brother to fend for himself.
Still, he spent a few minutes studying the home’s web site. It was set in a former mansion, with most of the facilities in the main house, including beds for residents. Other residents shared housing in converted stables, carriage houses, and servants’ quarters. They wore GPS bracelets and were provided transportation to jobs in the area. It looked like Erol Saddiq lived in comfortable circumstances.
Perhaps he might provide a link to his dangerous brother. A few keystrokes later, and Joe had cracked his email account. Like far too many people, Erol’s password was secret. He exchanged emails with one person—his brother, Ozan.
Joe skimmed them. It looked as if Ozan loved his brother. He sent him seashells from around the world, and a local bakery delivered a bunch of cookies for him every Friday night. If Ozan was there, the brothers would eat cookies together and watch movies. If not, Erol ate cookies and watched movies with a member of the home’
s staff named Melanie. The emails were sweet, but it didn’t change the fact that Ozan was a cold-blooded killer.
The last email was most interesting.
Dear Erol,
I won’t be around this Friday. I’m sick with a fever. But don’t worry. I am taking good care of myself and will be better soon. I know that you and Melanie will have a fun time.
Your brother,
Ozan
Ozan was sick, as Rebar had been. Was it coincidence?
Joe closed his eyes. He didn’t feel sick. Tired, sad, and frightened, but not sick. Even if Rebar or the train car had some mysterious disease associated with them, Joe had barely come in contact with either. He was fine. Fine.
Fine or not, he needed to know more about why Rebar had been ill. If Joe had had contacts at the police department, he could have tried to ask for the autopsy report, but he didn’t. He didn’t have the system access to hack in and steal it, so that meant he was going to have to find a different route to that information.
He’d have to break in to the morgue.
Chapter 23
November 29, 1:07 p.m.
Biocontainment laboratory
Tuckahoe, New York
Dr. Dubois crutched into the room. The lab’s blinds were half open, and stripes of sunlight overlay the clean countertops and polished equipment. All the chemicals had been returned to their glass-fronted cabinets, every bit of glassware clean and put away where it belonged, because his assistants had known he was coming. He ran a tight ship.
He drew in a deep breath of air that smelled of formalin and disinfectant. It took him back years, to his days as a lab assistant first exploring the mysteries of biology, fascinated by how most of our lives were determined by forces too small to be seen by the naked eye.
Because he had ordered everyone out, the lab was empty. He relished the solitude and the order. Too much of his life these days was taken up with people and meetings and paperwork. He was a victim of his own success.
The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) Page 14