Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  “That, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth, is the right answer.”

  Faye studied the layered map some more. It rekindled the claustrophobic feeling of being far underground with no light except the light they had brought with them. “If you wanted to make an anti-government political statement like McVeigh did, an industrial trade show just isn’t sexy enough to fire up a bunch of malcontents. But check out this IRS office. It’s just as close to the Gershwin as the convention center. For a political statement, that would be at the top of a lot of people’s lists, but it’s in the wrong direction.” She pointed to a spot on the map. “The chambers don’t go anywhere near it?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  Ahua clicked another key and dark blue lines appeared on a map that was growing more confusing by the moment. “Here’s the layout of the stormwater system. Some of those sewer lines are really old. The brick pipes we were in aren’t the only ones under Oklahoma City. I think that’s true in a lot of cities.”

  The computer screen looked like somebody had thrown a fistful of multicolored spaghetti at it. “That’s…um…complicated.”

  “Well, yeah. You’re looking at everything we know, from the surface all the way down. It’s like we’ve stumbled onto an archaeological site where you don’t even have to dig. You’re the archaeologist. What do you think we’ve uncovered?”

  “I don’t see an obvious answer, but old maps aren’t always reliable. Maybe he got down there and didn’t see what he thought he’d see. That might have made him turn around and try to abort the mission. But the bomb had other ideas.”

  “We’ve got video that suggests you’re right. Just minutes before the blast, the bomber came into the hotel lobby carrying a backpack.”

  “You’ve got video of his face? That’s great!”

  “Well, his hat was low and his collar was flipped up and he was wearing sunglasses. And he never looked directly at any of the cameras, so I think he’d done some reconnaissance on where they were. You or I might not recognize him if he passed us on the street, but the bureau has facial recognition software that may help with that.”

  She remembered a man in a cowboy hat spreading his arms and taking flight. “I think I remember him. I think I remember seeing him die. But that’s all I remember. What did the video show?”

  “He wandered around for a few minutes, then went into the alcove.”

  “It was right above the underground stairs, wasn’t it?”

  “You got it. The cameras weren’t positioned for a clear view, but he touched the wall a couple of times and then disappeared. We think he opened a hidden panel. The Evidence Response Team is still sifting through the rubble, but they haven’t found the latch to prove the secret panel theory. I believe it was there anyway.”

  Faye stared at the screen as if the answer was going to appear there in bold print. “So how much time passed between when the bomber opened the panel and when the bomb blew?”

  “Not much. He only had time to go down the stairs, open the door to the painted room and walk through it, then turn around and climb back up the steps. The bomb went off just as he stepped back into the lobby. We ran the fingerprints. No criminal record. No identification. Nothing.”

  Faye remembered the condition of the body. She didn’t even want to think about how it had been possible to recover his fingerprints.

  Ahua answered the question she hadn’t asked. “We got complete prints off the door downstairs. There was a good enough match on what was left of his hands to know they were his.”

  “Nobody’s claimed responsibility?”

  “Nope. Not even any fakers trying to ride on the dead guy’s coattails. Oklahomans have very strong feelings about bombers since McVeigh. It seems that there are no radical groups of any stripe who want to be hated that bad.”

  “What do you know about the bomb?”

  “My miraculous crime scene investigators actually found lots of pieces of the pressure cooker he used to make it. One of them carried the serial number.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Oh, but I am. They’re that good.”

  Faye thought of her own pressure cooker, neatly stored in a kitchen cabinet, and tried to make herself believe that it was a deadly weapon. “How does that kind of bomb even work? My pressure cooker doesn’t heat up by itself. Without a stove, it’s just a really heavy pot. He wasn’t carrying a stove.”

  “You just answered yourself. A pressure cooker is a really heavy pot that’s designed to withstand high pressure. And its lid is sealed with a gasket that keeps steam from the cooking food from escaping until the pressure inside rises. When you’re cooking, it’s designed to release the pressure before it gets too high, so it’s perfectly safe. But if you push it past its design parameters using something like gunpowder…”

  “Boom.”

  “Exactly. They’re very simple to make. Terrifyingly so, actually. You pack the pressure cooker with black powder for the blast. Add a heavy load of something small and deadly like nails or ball bearings for the shrapnel. Then you need something to light it up, which you can improvise with the guts of a cell phone. Or some Christmas lights.”

  “Christmas lights. You’re kidding.”

  Ahua was describing something that you could build out of parts you bought at a yard sale. This creeped Faye out, almost more than the bomb itself.

  “I wish I was kidding. You can use a timer, but the really slick operators use modified cell phones to generate the spark. They get total control over the timing of the blast, and they can set it off from a safe distance with a simple phone call. We can’t assume that this guy intended to be a suicide bomber.”

  “If all you have to do is call a specific number, you could set it off from anywhere in the world.”

  “Exactly. We found mangled cell phone pieces in the rubble and a heavily damaged phone in his pocket. We think he intended to get away from the blast radius, then let his cell phone tell the thing to blow.”

  “But you don’t know where his plan went wrong.”

  “Not a clue.”

  “What about the serial number Goldsby’s people found? Will it tell you anything about the pressure cooker? Where it was bought? When?”

  “When it was bought? That’s the problem. According to the serial number, it’s twenty years old. Even if we could trace it back to its purchase, the bomber could easily have bought it at a garage sale.”

  There was proof of Faye’s garage sale theory.

  “Or inherited it from his grandmother…” Ahua continued, “or stole it from a friend…or got custody of it in a divorce…”

  “I get the point. Twenty years is too long for the serial number to help us trace the thing to a single person.”

  She thought of pressure cookers she’d used in her life. Sooner or later, they all started to leak. “You know what? Twenty years is too long to trust that the original gasket is still good. If I were gonna build a bomb, I’d want to know for sure that it was going to blow. Is there any way to find out whether somebody bought a gasket for that model recently?”

  “That is an excellent angle. I’ve got people who love to do that kind of deep-dive research. Consider it done.”

  “So what do you really need me to do? Somebody in the FBI would have thought of the gasket angle eventually. It’s just dumb luck that I like to keep my small appliances for a ridiculous period of time.”

  “I’m really interested in what you can tell me about the room we saw. It feels important.”

  Faye remembered the vivid paintings on the wall and the odd little door. Yes. It did feel important.

  He fastened his eyes on her and gave her that FBI-approved “Now you’re going to tell me everything you know” look. “Do you think it was built when the Chinese people built the other chambers, eighty or a hundred years ago? Or did somebody else built that room
later—like maybe in the 1990s—and paint its walls and cut that door into the sewer?”

  Faye had already suggested that he try to date the paint and she couldn’t think of anything else useful. This could be the shortest consulting job ever. “Um…what if one of the pictures showed a television? Then we’d know it wasn’t painted in 1920.”

  Now she was truly flailing for ideas.

  “Well, yeah. That would be a big help. Why don’t you wish for a miracle and hope the TV shows the World Series, complete with team names and score?”

  This image made Faye laugh out loud.

  “Well,” he said, “we won’t know if there’s a painting of the 1994 World Series down there unless we look. Here are the pictures Goldsby took yesterday. They’re preliminary, but they’re all we’ve got for now. When the Evidence Response Team releases the room, he’ll go back in with proper lighting and better equipment.”

  He called up a photo slide show and clicked through it, one photo at a time.

  “We also have these.” He clicked one more time and six images filled the computer screen, four walls, the ceiling, and the floor. “I asked my techs to piece together the photos Goldsby took from the bottom of the stairs with the ones we saw him take from the storm sewer. They’re a little wonky, since they were pieced together from photos taken from two angles, but you can see the painted images pretty well.”

  He motioned for her to sit in front of the computer. “I want you to take a good long look at these photos while I go talk to Goldsby’s crew about what they’re finding. When I get back, please meet me at the door and tell me that you found a television screen painted on one of those walls, complete with the score of the 1994 World Series. Or even 1992 will do.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  So the FBI has hired an archaeologist to help them poke around underground. Under ordinary circumstances, I would be intrigued. I have always been fascinated by history. Humanity has had so many years to get things right, and yet we just can’t manage it. How hard is it, really, to be kind?

  Too hard, apparently.

  When Lonnie made the error of bringing the bomb topside, he opened me to exposure in a way that I never anticipated. How could I have guessed that the bomb would go off in the one and only place that could open the catacombs under this city to scrutiny?

  The true catacombs, the ones inhabited by people too poor to better their lives in any other way, are no danger to me. It is The Sanctuary that puts my freedom on the line, and the freedom of those I love most in this world. The room is very old, but the paintings aren’t, and they say too much. Or they did.

  The paintings that addled, egotistical Lonnie left behind were a problem. They did not bear scrutiny, not by anyone and certainly not by someone trained to interpret them and, even worse, put a date on them. They needed to go and now they are gone.

  And, unfortunately, Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth needs to go, too. The FBI has done nothing but peek through the door, and this would not worry me, if they hadn’t taken an archaeologist with them. Detailed photos of the paintings cannot possibly exist. I was in The Sanctuary mere hours ago, and there were no footprints in the dust on its floor but Lonnie’s. Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth is the only expert who has seen them and she is the only expert who will ever see them.

  She can estimate their age. She can interpret the history behind Lonnie’s religious ravings. The risk that she can connect the paintings to my family is too great. This is regrettable, but once evil is obliterated, the second commandment emerges in full force. It tells me I must protect the ones I love. If I could do that and spare Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth, then I would. I cannot, so I will do what must be done.

  This is what Lonnie taught me, and I am far stronger than Lonnie ever was. I keep the commandments he taught me, as I always have. He never suspected that those commandments would lead me to wipe him from existence.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Faye studied the photos of the painted walls, one at a time, expanding one interesting area after another. After maybe five minutes, she laughed and said, “Well, would you take a look at that?” but nobody was there to hear her, so she kept poring over the pictures.

  When Ahua returned, she said, “I gotta say it. These paintings are interesting.”

  “Can you date them?” Ahua leaned over her shoulder to look. “Tell me you can.”

  “Don’t I wish? Nope. There are a lot of nature scenes and those don’t change much over time. And there’s also a lot of religious stuff, some of it standard and some of it really not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Faye laughed. “You haven’t looked at this at all, have you?”

  “I’ve been a little busy.”

  “Yeah, I know. Look here. See? It’s a cross on a hill, between two smaller crosses on smaller hills. That’s definitely Christian imagery.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “But this isn’t.” She zoomed in on the figure of a naked woman standing behind a cross, heavy breasted and large-bellied.

  “Is that the Venus of Willendorf?”

  “Yes, it is. You’re good at art history for an FBI agent.”

  “Our training is very eclectic.”

  “I bet. Is it this eclectic?”

  She zoomed in closer on the painting of a mosque, enlarging the grand staircase to its ornate door. Sprawled on those stairs was a naked woman in a pose more reminiscent of a Playboy centerfold than a priceless Stone Age sculpture.

  “Well,” Ahua said. “Would you look at that? My Muslim friends would call that Level One blasphemy.”

  “No joke. Whoever did this was a pretty good painter, but I don’t think this is eighty years old. If I had to give a gut-level guess, I’d say very late twentieth century.”

  “Based on the style of pornography being published at that time.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Based on 1990s pornography. Not that I’m an expert on that.”

  Faye zoomed out so that no FBI agent would walk up behind her and see a hand-painted centerfold on her screen. “So when do we go back down there?”

  “Not sure. You’ll know when I know.”

  “I’m on your payroll,” she said, “so I’m ready when you are. But do you mind if I spend some time at the conference this morning? Off the clock, of course. Joe’s giving a flintknapping demonstration in—” she looked at her watch, “—twenty minutes. I’d like to be there for him.”

  Ahua made a shooing motion with his hands. “Go. Enjoy your husband’s talk. But keep your eyes open. Who’s to say that Dr. Callahan’s conference wasn’t the bomber’s target?”

  “Who would want to bomb people who flintknap and make flutes and weave baskets?”

  “People aren’t always logical when they choose to hate other people.”

  Faye hadn’t considered that someone might be angry that Carson had brought in people from all over the country to celebrate indigenous cultures built by brown people. How could she still be so naive after all this time?

  The answer was obvious. Staying as naive as she could manage was her personal survival mechanism as a brown person in America.

  “Well, if he really was after a bunch of artists and archaeologists, let’s just hope he was working alone, because my husband’s at the conference and I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  As Faye walked from the command center toward the South Tower’s, convention center, she heard two things. One of them was pleasant, and one of them was not.

  Flute music seeped out of the building ahead of her when another guest opened the door to come out. It hung in the air, cool and pure. It made her smile. She was glad to know that she hadn’t missed all of Cully’s presentation.

  The other sound was not so pleasant. It came from across the sidewalk to her right and it was the sound of a voice on a bullhorn addressing a heckling crowd.

&nb
sp; “You don’t have a permit, folks, and you’re blocking the hotel entrance. You have a right to protest, but not to interfere with the operation of a law-abiding business. Not to mention people who are just trying to go about their lives. I need you to settle down and stop blocking the sidewalk.”

  Faye had woken up early and she’d been in too much of a hurry to check the news. She’d ridden an elevator down to Ahua’s command center before seven, and the streets had still been deserted. She was only now getting her first inkling that a protest was going on.

  Faye wasn’t close enough to read the slogans on their hand-painted signs, so she was curious. What on earth was this protest about? She edged a bit closer. The group wasn’t large but it sure was loud. Across the street was another cluster of people, also holding signs, who seemed to be baiting the larger group.

  Great. The last thing Faye wanted was to be caught between protesters and counterprotesters, especially when she wasn’t sure she agreed with the grievances of either group. Nor did she even know what those grievances were.

  She tried to plot out a path to the South Tower, but the man holding the bullhorn had not been kidding when he said that the protesters were blocking the sidewalk. Faye needed to move quickly or she would miss Joe’s talk.

  Were they protesting the bombing? To what purpose? The bomber was dead. If they were protesting the organization that had sponsored his crime, they knew more than the FBI did.

  She didn’t want to wade right into the ruckus, so she stepped onto another sidewalk. It led away from the street, but she knew it would eventually take her to the convention center. She was irritated to have to go such a roundabout way, but it seemed like a reasonable workaround.

  The Gershwin Hotel’s Tower Annex sat on a well-groomed lot that extended across a city block, less than a block down the street from the historic hotel. The property was a leafy oasis in an urban business district and Faye enjoyed the flowering hedges planted on either side of her detour. She knew that the path opened up into a quiet courtyard centered on a fountain and encircled by more hedges. It never crossed her mind to be nervous about setting off alone down a path that had never been frightening before, not until she heard heavy, fast footsteps behind her. Now the beautiful hedges looked like a place for an attacker to hide, and they blocked the view of anybody who might come to her rescue.