Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  Oklahoma City had changed. It had grown, surely. Actually, it had metastasized into an urban, modern place that he didn’t recognize. But he did recognize the immense sky, piled high with richly textured clouds, and he recognized the constant wind that was blowing his hair around. He enjoyed being home again far more than he would have expected.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone approaching quickly, but he didn’t move like a young man, so he wasn’t Joe. Cully recognized the short quick steps and the slightly labored breathing, and he knew that the newcomer was his old friend Jakob.

  “Nobody would tell me anything. The FBI set up a barricade blocks from here and I’ve been stuck behind it for hours,” Jakob said to Cully. “I thought you were dead. I was asleep in my room when the bomb woke me up. I don’t know how long I banged on your door before a security guard made me leave. He opened your door for me when I told him I couldn’t find you. When I saw that you weren’t there, I remembered you saying that you were going to the lobby to meet your cousin Faye early this morning so I knew you were right in the middle of things.”

  “And you couldn’t call me to make sure I was okay because you forgot your phone on your bedside table,” Cully said.

  “No, I didn’t forget it on my bedside table. I forgot it in Beverly Hills, but what difference does that make? How would it help if you were dead?”

  Cully pointed to his own face. “Look, Jakob. I’m not dead. When you find your phone, a long time from now when you’re back in California, you’ll see that I texted right away to tell you I was okay.”

  “That’s a very twenty-first-century thing for an old man to do.”

  “Speak for yourself, old man.”

  “We’re both old and we’re gonna go one day. But not like this.”

  “And not today.” Cully crossed his arms, cocked his head, and looked up at his friend. He knew that Jakob had seen him give that look to dozens of men on the silver screen, so his friend knew exactly what it meant. It was a look that said, “I’d take a bullet for you, buddy, but sometimes I’d also give anything to smack some sense into you.”

  Cully inclined his head toward the teeming crowd lining the street. “How’d you find me?”

  Jakob crossed his own arms and returned Cully’s arrogant look with one that said, “Go ahead and try smacking me. I just might have some tricks up my sleeve.”

  Cully kept giving him his I-love-you-buddy-but-you-make-me-nuts-sometimes attitude and Jakob crumbled. “Oh, okay. It didn’t take any tricks to find you. I looked for people about our age or a little younger and I said, ‘I heard that Cully Mantooth was around here somewhere.’ By the time I did that a couple of times, people were coming up to me to tell me that they’d just seen you. Some of ’em even showed me your autograph. You’re too famous to hide, you know.”

  * * *

  Someone kind had heard Faye say that she needed to call her husband. She studied the receiver in her hands, wishing she could avoid this call, but she couldn’t. Joe deserved to know that she had agreed to spend some time way underground with the FBI. She punched in his number.

  He skipped hello and went straight to “Are you really okay?”

  “I’m fine, Joe. Really. But there’s this thing I need to tell you.”

  His answer was slow to come. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”

  “Probably not. The FBI has asked me to help them. As a consultant.”

  “What do they want you to do? Just because they’re promising to pay you, it doesn’t mean you have to do it. We’re not totally broke. And even if we were, there’s no sense in you doing something dangerous.”

  She paused to think of the right thing to say, but she paused too long.

  “It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”

  “It shouldn’t be—”

  “‘Shouldn’t,’ you say? That’s just great.”

  “You think it’s great?”

  “Nope. I don’t.”

  “Do you realize that somebody set off a bomb this morning and the FBI doesn’t have a clue who he is or why he did it? Don’t you think I should help if I can?”

  “Yeah. I listen to the news. That’s all I can do when I can’t find you. Listen to the radio and worry.”

  Faye’s easygoing husband didn’t lose his temper often, but Faye thought she was probably about to experience her second explosion of the day. She tried to stave it off with a half-truth. “We’re not going to be working anywhere near the explosion. The Feds have found an underground room that seems both historically important and important to the investigation. They want me to take a look at it, but they won’t be taking me through the blast area. They’ve found way to get there by going underground somewhere far away. We can approach it safely from a different direction without contaminating any evidence.”

  “How far away?”

  Faye hated the way her voice got high and tentative when she was dealing with an angry person. “Maybe a mile?”

  The second explosion of her day came, and it was loud. “You’re going to be moving around underground for a freakin’ mile because the FBI thinks it knows what it’s doing down there? Did you think about the fact that you have two children waiting for you at Dad’s house? I had to tell Dad to keep Amande and Michael away from the TV so they wouldn’t see you talking to a reporter about bombs and explosions and dead people. Forget about me. What about them?”

  Faye could only say, “I’ll be fine, Joe. I believe it, or I wouldn’t go. I would never take the chance of not coming home to them. Or to you.”

  “You like to think you’re rational all the time, but you ain’t, Faye. Not always. You’re not gonna listen to anything I say, but put me on record as saying that this an awful idea. Awful. And you know it.”

  She thought he was going to hang up, but she was too upset to let go of the phone, so she heard his parting shot. “I’ll be waiting for you when you come back. Like I always am.” And then Joe was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  Cully Mantooth and Jakob didn’t have the sidewalk to themselves any more, not since Carson Callahan found them. Cully knew Carson, since the archaeologist had picked him up at the airport, but he didn’t know the small, thirty-ish woman with him.

  “I hear that the FBI has hired his wife, Faye, to help them with this case,” Cully said. “I know she’s not the only archaeologist in town, because you’re an archaeologist. Why Faye?”

  Carson and his friend’s faces fell, and Cully could tell that they both would have happily traded places with Faye.

  “I’d love to get that gig, but I guess I didn’t make the cut,” Carson said. “Stacy here isn’t an archaeologist, but she’s a historian and she could have done the job, too, but honestly? Faye’s the one they want. She’s just that good.”

  “Cousin Faye’s the biggest expert?” Cully was poking the big man’s ego on purpose. Carson’s response to this question would reveal an awful lot. “Bigger than you and this lady, here?”

  “I’m sorry. I should have introduced you. Cully Mantooth, meet Dr. Stacy Wong. When I heard that the FBI had hired Faye for her experience in working with law enforcement, I was disappointed, but I’m not gonna lie. Faye’s good at working with law enforcement. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. She solved the FBI’s case for him, if you want to know the truth of the matter.”

  Good for Carson. He had sufficient ego to aim for a Ph.D. and get one, but he could still admit that other people were highly qualified, too. Cully was willing to entertain the possibility that Carson hadn’t bombed his own conference, but he wasn’t ready to trust anybody and he was still in the mood to prod the archaeologist a bit. The historian, too. “Bet you both still wish the agent had picked you.”

  Stacy’s face grew sullen and still. She said nothing, but Carson said, “Nobody’s saying much, but we’re both pretty sure they want Faye to check out some u
nderground structures uncovered by the bomb. Oral history says that they’re down there. So if you’re asking if I’d love to tour the legendary underground Chinese city that Stacy’s been bugging me about for years, then yeah. You bet I wish Bigbee had picked me. I’m an archaeologist. I like to go down in holes in the ground, get dirty, and look at old things. Faye’s gonna get to do that, while I sit up here and talk to a movie star. No offense.”

  Cully’s face tingled and his vision dimmed. After all he’d been through that morning, was he really going to faint now? Was it really that much of a shock to hear that the bomb had uncovered a place that he’d spent a half-century trying not to remember?

  Yes, it was. He remembered the darkness and the cold, and he remembered his last sight of Angela down there. He would give anything to have her back. Failing that, he would give anything to forget her.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Mantooth?” Carson’s voice brought him back from that dark place.

  Cully covered his distress by clearing his throat, then he asked “What legendary underground Chinese city?” as if his mother hadn’t told him a thousand times about the years she’d lived down there as a child. As if he hadn’t spent the worst night of his life hiding down there.

  It knocked him back on his heels a bit to hear Carson mention the damnable place when he’d just been talking about it himself for the first time since the day he lost Angela. Barely a day had passed since he’d been on the plane from LAX to OKC, telling Jakob things about his Oklahoma childhood that he’d never shared in the half-century they’d known each other.

  Why had he told Jakob about his mother’s year underground? He’d never even told the man that he was half-Chinese. He supposed he’d been overcome with nostalgia while riding on the plane that would finally take him home after all this time. The only thing he’d kept to himself was that awful night on the run, the one that had started with Angela by his side and ended without her.

  Carson was still rambling. Good Lord, this man could talk. He was saying, “I think Stacy’s talked to every old person of Chinese descent in Oklahoma City. She’s a regular at all the nursing homes. To be honest, I can’t make myself believe half of what they’ve told her. They say the place went on for a mile, all the way south to the river, but come on. That seems a little over-the-top. Still, we do know that it was real. The newspaper published pictures in the sixties, and we have health department records. Now that the bomber’s opened the place up, I’d like to see it.”

  Most people with Cully’s family ties would respond to this by asking Carson why he couldn’t believe the stories of old people without documents to back them up. Was it because those old people weren’t white? He thought about telling his mother’s story and daring Carson to call her a liar.

  But he wasn’t being fair. Carson was Creek himself, despite his wavy blonde hair, and Cully could see that he meant no harm. Nevertheless, Cully was raised by a woman who taught him to keep his stories to himself. He just smiled and nodded. Stacy and Carson never knew that they could have collected a fascinating oral history from an old person of Chinese descent then and there, if they’d only asked.

  Except for the part of his history that involved Angela. Cully was resolved that her name would never pass his lips again.

  * * *

  Faye was ankle-deep in river water. Or was it really river water? She was standing at the point where a large concrete pipe discharged water into a concrete ditch that took it to the Oklahoma River. According to Ahua, this pipe was a major outfall for the city’s stormwater drainage system. When rain fell on pancake-flat Oklahoma City and people’s houses didn’t flood, it was because a system of drains shunted the rainwater here.

  In other words, she was wading in water that had been really clean when it fell from the sky. Since then, though, it had rinsed the streets and sidewalks of a major city’s business district and carried away the excess lawn fertilizer from the neighborhoods that surrounded it. This made her really grateful for her hip waders.

  She stood between Ahua and Liu, who were each wearing their own hip waders. A man named Agent Goldsby, who said he was with the Evidence Response Team, was briefing them on their upcoming journey under Oklahoma City. Beside him stood Patricia Kura, who introduced herself as an engineer with Oklahoma City’s Department of Public Works.

  Ms. Kura had unrolled a series of blueprints and spread them across the hood of the vehicle that had brought them to this spot. Her explanation helped Faye to form a mental image of what they were about to do.

  “We’re starting here, at the outfall that drains rainwater from downtown Oklahoma City into the river. We can easily walk into the pipes that bring that water here. They’ll get narrower, but we should still be able to get through to the spot where Agent Ahua wants to go. If our as-built drawings are accurate, this will work. But when you’re dealing with a system this old, you can’t always count on the drawings reflecting reality. Understand?”

  They had all nodded, then Ahua had pulled Faye, Liu, and Goldsby aside for a briefing on new evidence.

  Goldsby had chimed in with a report from his Evidence Response Team. “We’ve only partially cleared the stairs beneath the Gershwin. We’ve tracked footprints to the bottom of the stairs, where there’s a landing and two doorways, one to the left and one straight ahead. There are only a few footprints on the stairs and the landing, but they match the bomber’s shoes, so we know that he got that far. There’s no sign that he went through the door on the left. Everything on the lower level is covered with a heavy layer of undisturbed dust, so we’re pretty sure about that. The other door opens into a small room. Based on his tracks in the dust, we know that he opened the door, walked a few steps into the room, turned around, and came back out, shutting the door again.”

  “Then he walked back up the stairs and detonated the bomb?” Faye asked.

  “Exactly right.”

  Faye had waited for him to explain how this story related to the fact that she was wearing hip waders. He did not. She had also wondered why the Assistant Special Agent in Charge was devoting a precious hour to this underground adventure. She doubted that he made a habit of donning hip waders.

  “We think the room that he entered is key, but we’re hamstrung on getting in there and looking around until Goldsby and his people finish gathering evidence,” Ahua said. “Because of the dust, we’re pretty sure that the bomber is the first person to go through that door in many years. So our question is this: Why? Actually, why did he go downstairs at all if he wasn’t trying to blow apart a building’s foundation?”

  “Was it an elaborate suicide scheme?” Faye asked.

  “We don’t think so,” Ahua continued. “The bomb was made to detonate remotely. Either he meant to leave it down there and detonate it once he was top-side, which begs the question of ‘Why?’ because there was nobody down there to hurt and we don’t know of anything that he might want to destroy. Or he meant to detonate it in the Gershwin’s lobby, only without blowing himself to bits. Again, we have to ask ‘Why?’ There was no obvious target there.”

  Faye thought that there was one obvious possibility. “Was the bomb stored down in the room he entered?”

  “Good thought, but no. If he or an accomplice had hidden something down there, more than one set of tracks would have been obvious in the dust, but that’s not the case. There’s just one set of tracks, recent ones. They head into the room, turn around, and leave. We think that room is important in some way, so Goldsby’s group expects to be working in there for days, trying to figure out why.”

  “How does that relate to all this?” Faye gestured at the massive concrete pipe, the river, the agents beside her, and her hip waders.

  Goldsby, the only one who had been to the bottom of the stairs, had the answer. “When you stand in the doorway to that room, you smell water. You hear running water. And you can see a metal door, maybe two feet across, high on t
he far wall. We compared notes with the city’s public works engineers, and they’re pretty sure that metal door opens into a storm sewer pipe.”

  This explained the presence of Patricia Kura.

  “Well, it’s certainly not a regular sewer pipe, carrying regular old sewage,” Ahua said. “You’d know by the smell.”

  “Exactly,” Goldsby said. “Stormwater is just rainwater diverted from the streets and sent to the river. You wouldn’t want to drink it, but it doesn’t smell like sewage. We want to know for sure what’s on the other side of that door, and we don’t want to wait until the Evidence Response Team has worked its way across the floor, millimeter by millimeter. Hence this trip through a wet pipe.”

  Finally, an explanation for the hip waders.

  “And also,” Ahua said, “the walls of that room are more interesting than usual. If we can access it from the metal door, we can get a good vantage point for viewing the parts of the walls that are hard to see from where we’re currently working, without—oh, I don’t know, flying in a drone or using a humongous selfie stick. If I crashed a drone in Goldsby’s crime scene, I’d be dead and he’d be looking at a murder charge.”

  Goldsby laughed, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t kill Ahua for mucking up his crime scene.

  “What’s so interesting about the walls?” Faye asked, wondering whether Ahua was telling everything he knew about that room. Nothing that he’d said explained why someone of his rank had assigned himself to the menial task of crawling through sewers. And nothing that he’d said explained the new darkness in his eyes and the new heaviness in his step.

  Ahua had looked like this ever since he got the text that prompted this underground junket. When a case took a turn that burdened an experienced FBI agent to this extent, it had to be a bad turn. Faye was worried.

  Goldsby held out his phone. The photo on its screen was painfully colorful. It showed walls covered with floor-to-ceiling murals—trees, vines, and faces. Many faces.