Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  Wolf snorted in derision. “You are a theorist. Instead of a place like this filled with federal drones, or a college crawling with sociology types, you sit in your log house on the lake and create your own mythology of behavior. How does it feel to know that I watched you fabricate in Boston, feign expertise in New York, Miami, Dallas? I was there.”

  I reached for my cigarettes to get the book of matches I kept tucked inside the cellophane. They were gone. I had quit smoking again, and I had given Lane the package the night we had walked on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “You think you have me at a disadvantage,” Wolf said. “In a few minutes, this place is going up.”

  I had no wish to indulge Wolf, nor did I want him to know exactly where I was. But he was winding down, and I needed time. I had to say something.

  “We’ve been through this before,” I said. “In Vermont.”

  There was a short laugh from the back of the room. “There’s no coal bin here, no place for you to bury a bomb. Jesus. You’re just as homicidal as I am. An empty, hollow player of games. We see the world the same way. Your invitation from the Bureau was for morning. Do you think that I wasn’t expecting you?”

  I dug into my pockets, finally finding a book of matches that I had picked up at Delta’s Blues Bar, where Wolf had killed Nicholas Wesley.

  I did not believe that Wolf had been expecting me. He was playing a game, a transparent attempt at conning another who had made a business of mastering manipulation.

  A full minute passed. I heard no movement at the back of the room. Then, he spoke. “I think I’ve already explained this to you. Before I could begin to set something like this in motion, I had to resign myself to my own death. Having done that, I have nothing to lose, nothing to fear. You just don’t learn. I learned a great deal from you. Through the years, you helped me to become a better artist. You were the inspiration. With your guidance, I matured into a creative killer. No one else can claim to have achieved what I have.”

  I climbed onto the desk, keeping my head below the top of the partition.

  He believed that he was the embodiment of perfection, that there was no challenge he could not meet. “You have a world-class ego, Mr. Wolf,” I said. “Tonight, you were more concerned with your press coverage than with properly assembling your device.”

  When he spoke, he sounded too relaxed, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “Think what you want.”

  John Wolf was the perfect psychopath. I wanted to grab the advantage.

  “I think that one of us will die,” I said, then lit a match and touched it to the rags that extended from my Molotov cocktail. The odor and the smoke would give me away, so I had to act fast.

  The ceiling was low. I reached up and rifled a line drive toward the back wall. The bottle shattered with a roar, a wall of flames, and billowing smoke.

  I threw myself up onto the top of the cubicle’s partition, precariously balancing on the junction supports, and aiming my nine-millimeter at the spot where I expected Wolf to appear.

  Seconds passed. A minute.

  What the hell was he doing? Black billows of smoke rolled from the rear corner toward the center of the room.

  I lowered myself to the floor on the other side of the partition, remained in a crouch, and moved slowly toward the smoke. As I neared the end of the corridor, the sprinkler system spluttered on. Reflexively, I looked up and saw that two ceiling panels had been dislodged. Had he climbed up through them?

  Or was it further manipulation?

  I spun to my left as the killer of dozens emerged from behind the wall of smoke, his gun in his right hand, his left arm across his eyes.

  With a suddenness that stunned me, Wolf snapped his weapon into firing position. Both hands gripped the .44 Magnum. Wolf scanned the corridor as if he had been impervious to the dense black smoke. Then his eyes fixed on mine.

  I squeezed off a single shot that slammed into Wolf’s face, sending up a mist of blood and brain. The killer went down. His gun clattered harmlessly on the floor.

  Wolf lay in a sodden heap. I watched as his blood spread in a pool around his head, diluted by the spray from overhead.

  I was confident that I had removed him from this life.

  I walked through the mechanical rain to his side. Most of the back of his head was gone, but still I touched my fingers to his throat and glanced at my watch. “Time of death,” I muttered to myself. “Twelve-forty A.M. NO resurrection this time, lad.”

  I turned and walked back toward the hallway.

  “It’s almost over,” I said to Darla Michaels. “Few more seconds.”

  I gently nudged Wolf’s bomb back onto the table and gazed down at a battery housing, three wires, the stacked sheets of cyclonite, and the timing mechanism. In ninety seconds, we and the BSU would be history.

  “Cut me out of here,” Michaels said.

  “No time.”

  Landry staggered into the doorway, holding his shoulder.

  “What do you know about bombs?” I asked him. “Wolf snapped the red wire in place last. That mean anything?”

  “That’s the one to clip first,” he said. “You can’t get into the battery housing?”

  “It’s sealed.”

  I grabbed Wolf’s wire cutters, closed them over the red wire, and snipped. The small wheel in the timer continued to spin.

  “Sixty seconds,” I said. “Black and yellow are left.”

  Sweat slithered down the back of my neck.

  “There’s no way to know,” Landry said. “It doesn’t sound like sophisticated work. It shouldn’t matter.”

  Forty-five seconds. What if it did matter? I clipped the yellow wire.

  “It’s still going,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Michaels yelped.

  “There have to be two strands to the last wire, two separate connections,” Landry said. “Otherwise, it would have stopped.”

  With thirty seconds remaining, I examined the end of the black wire and saw the two small fragments of plastic coating where they connected to the timer. “One’s white and one’s green,” I said.

  “Clip either one,” Landry said, “but don’t let the metal cutters touch both wires at the same time.”

  Twenty seconds.

  The tool slipped out of my sweaty hands and dropped to the floor. I wiped my hands on my pants, retrieved the wire cutters, and examined what I had to do. There wasn’t much space to work with. I angled the clippers into the housing area from the side, slipped the pointed ends over the fragment of exposed copper, and squeezed.

  The timer stopped. Eight seconds to go.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  I crouched to cut the tape from Darla Michaels’s ankles with my pocketknife, and help her to her feet. Then I looked at Landry

  “Go introduce yourself to John Wolf,” I told him.

  “Landry, you sonofabitch,” Michaels yelled. “You nearly got me killed. That fucking maniac called you. He practically told you who he was. You hung up on him.”

  “No,” Landry said.

  “Roger Curlew?” she challenged.

  “A crank. We get those calls all the time.”

  The agent moved by us, deeper into the room.

  As I walked back through the hall, I could hear Michaels still screaming at Landry. “I write about this shit, you asshole. I don’t fucking live it.”

  I took the elevator up and left the building.

  I MADE MY WAY THROUGH NATIONAL AIRPORT and found the Lear. Lane was standing beside the small jet as I walked up.

  “Wolf is dead, isn’t he?”

  I nodded.

  “I made the calls. Should we wait until the fireworks are over and talk later?”

  “I think that’s best,” I said, watching two sedans race across the tarmac toward the plane.

  “You must have raised a few eyebrows in the terminal.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re soaked.”

  “Oh. That.”

 
One car swung across the nose of the aircraft and stopped. The second pulled up where we were standing. Hiram Jackson got out.

  “You’re going to have to stay with us awhile,” the agent said. “At least until we get this sorted out.”

  As more heavily armed men got out of both cars, I watched the black Lincoln make its way toward our group. When it stopped beside Jackson’s car, he looked over at it.

  Senator Harry Storrs stepped out of his car, nodded toward Lane and me, then spoke to Jackson. “I want this plane in the air, with the Franks aboard, within five minutes.”

  “With all due respect, sir, this is an FBI matter,” Jackson said.

  “I know what it is.”

  Jackson looked at me.

  “You set a trap for a wolf and caught one,” I said. “You have the imagination to work out the details. You know that Landry was leaking information to Darla Michaels. That should give you some leverage in controlling the story. Although she’s so pissed at Landry right now, you’ll have to do some serious flak-catching.”

  “That’s it?”

  “If you want the whole story, come to Michigan.”

  Jackson shook his head. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “Bullshit,” Storrs said. “Your agency is better at disinformation than the Senate is. I’ve already made some calls. The Bureau will come out of this thing smelling like a rose. Do you think your director would settle for less? He didn’t tell me that.”

  I watched as Jackson waved off his troops and moved back toward his car. He hesitated before getting in, turned, and said, “You don’t trust anyone do you?”

  “No one.”

  Jackson stared, nodded once, then got into his car and drove back across the tarmac.

  BY THE TIME WE WERE IN THE AIR, I HAD changed my clothes—dry jeans and a warm sweatshirt.

  The plane banked in a slow arc around the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, then headed northwest. The view was impressive. Cities always look aseptic from a few thousand feet.

  “I thought that this would be appropriate,” Lane said, sitting across from me and handing me a bottle of ale. “It’s from the Magic Hat Brewery in Burlington, Vermont.”

  I sniffed, then sipped. “Excellent. There are some things that they do well in the mountains.”

  “I looked through Wolf’s box, Pop.”

  “At the story of my life?”

  “He was always out there.”

  “His mistake,” I said.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  JOHN PHILPIN is a nationally renowned forensic psychologist—a profiler. His advice and opinions on violence and its aftermath have been sought by police, newspaper writers, TV producers, mental health professionals, private investigators, attorneys, and polygraph experts throughout the country. He is the author of Beyond Murder, the story of the Gainesville student killings, published by NAL/Dutton in 1994, and Stalemate, which tells the true crime story of a series of child abductions, sexual assaults, and murders in the San Francisco Bay Area. Along with Patricia Sierra, he is the author of The Prettiest Feathers, the prequel to Tunnel of Night. He lives in New England.

  PATRICIA SIERRA is an award-winning writer whose short fiction and poetry have been published in several small literary magazines. She has written three young adult novels as well, all of which were published by Avon Books. Her interest in crime and law enforcement led to a brief career as a private investigator. An avid lifelong fan of true crime books and mysteries, Sierra lives in Toledo, Ohio.

  TUNNEL OF NIGHT

  A Bantam Book/January 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1999 by John Philpin and The Patricia Sierra Living Trust

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42475-4

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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