by Reece Hirsch
“Excellent,” Corbin said. “I’ll be on my way. I can have a team over there within the hour.”
“So what happens next?” Sam asked.
“Oh, you don’t want to know that,” Corbin said. “But this isn’t your first time. I think you have a fairly good idea.”
“Are you going to bring them in?”
“I don’t think so. We already know what they know. Now it’s just a matter of mitigating risk to the agency. It would be a shame if the world learned about the Working Group when we were just getting started, wouldn’t it?”
Sam nodded.
“And the whole point of the Working Group is that no one talks about the Working Group, right?” Corbin eyed him, waiting for confirmation that Sam was fully on board with what they had done and what he was about to do.
“Absolutely.”
Corbin rose to leave. “Good work here, Sam. I’ll be sure to tell Sigrid.”
After Corbin had left the room, Sam stared at the frozen close-up image of Bruen’s tired face in the room at the Guthrie Hotel, struggling with what came next. This was not a matter of national defense, at least not directly. Sigrid would probably say that if the secrecy of the Working Group was not maintained, then it wouldn’t be able to conduct its counterterrorism work as effectively.
It was a fair point, but in that moment Sam realized that for him it was no longer the only point.
He wasn’t sure for how long he had been nearing this tipping point. Certainly since the death of Sheila Capaldi. And God knew he’d never forgotten the lessons of 9/11, which drove his obsessive work every single day. And every night. In his nightmares he saw that noxious black cloud barreling down the corridor of buildings in Lower Manhattan. He hadn’t been there on that day, but it had happened on his watch. Sam still awoke from those dreams gasping for air, right after he had inhaled the first gulp of the blackness, with its soot and the pungent, toxic, throat-constricting vapor of melted plastic.
Terrorists who would visit another 9/11 upon his country still existed, and it was Sam’s singular purpose in life to prevent that. But that did not mean that he was willing to stand by and then live with the knowledge that Chris Bruen, Ian Ayres, and probably Zoey Doucet were going to be murdered by Corbin and his team.
Sam scribbled the number of the Guthrie Hotel on a Post-it and turned off the video monitor.
After allowing enough time for Corbin to leave the building, Sam checked out at the security desk and went to his car. Then he drove out of the Working Group compound and down the highway a few miles to the parking lot of a convenience store. He couldn’t risk placing a call from within the grounds of the Working Group facility for fear that it would be intercepted. He couldn’t even risk using any phone that was assigned to him.
After purchasing a prepaid cell phone at the convenience store, Sam returned to the car. It was already getting warm inside, but he kept the windows rolled up. It occurred to him that an operative with a laser microphone could eavesdrop on his conversation by using the sound vibrations on the car window glass.
Sam dialed the number of the Guthrie Hotel and asked for Room 201. He tried disguising his voice, dropping it a couple of octaves and affecting what he hoped was a subtle British accent. He feared that he sounded like a high school drama student, but hopefully it was good enough not to arouse the desk clerk’s suspicions.
Corbin would no doubt learn that Bruen and Ayres received a call immediately before they left the hotel. He would wonder whether they’d been tipped off, and he’d also wonder if Sam had done it.
Well, it wasn’t like he had a choice. Sam wasn’t Bruno Ganz, after all. He could do more than listen.
15
It was early evening, and Chris tried to get some sleep, but he found it impossible. He knew that somewhere out there the world’s most formidable intelligence agency was dedicating all of its considerable resources to hunting them down.
Ian had no such problem, sprawled with his mouth open and snoring on the other bed.
Chris rose and went to the window, as he had been doing about every ten minutes since they’d checked in. He watched the stream of cars on Van Ness Avenue. What did he expect to see, anyway? It was not like Corbin and his thugs would be pulling up with sirens howling. If—make that when—they were taken, it would most likely be quiet, sudden, and professional.
The Skype session with Zoey had gotten Chris contemplating the wreck that his life had become. He was old enough now to recognize that you got only so many chances to reinvent yourself. Only so many do-overs. He felt like one of those smartphones that’s a couple of generations behind the latest model. It still works, but the battery doesn’t hold a charge the way it used to, the software’s a bit glitchy—it’ll never function again the way it did when it was new.
It had taken him seven years to come back from Tana’s death. To find Zoey. Opening Bruen & Associates with her had felt like that rarest of things—a fresh start, both personal and professional. Now those plans were a shambles, Becky and Ira were dead, and he and Zoey were on the run and unlikely to survive the week. He felt as if he’d gone all-in on a hand of poker and nearly been wiped out. Nearly, but not quite.
The phone on the nightstand rang.
Ian stirred, then looked blearily up at Chris.
Who would be calling them? Maybe the front desk calling about maid service?
Unlikely . . .
Chris picked up the receiver and said nothing.
“Is this Chris Bruen?” It was a man’s voice with what sounded like a vague English accent. Perhaps the front desk clerk, but the voice held a note of urgency that suggested otherwise.
“Yes.”
“There are agents on their way to your hotel right now. You need to leave.”
“Who is this?”
“That’s not important. A friend.”
“I don’t know who you are, but you’re not my friend.”
“You have ten minutes at most.”
“Are you trying to make us run so you can pick us up on the street?”
“You know who you’re dealing with. Do you really think they would need to resort to those sorts of tactics to take you out?”
A fair point. “We’re going. Thank you.”
“Good luck.” The line went dead.
Now wide-awake, Chris told Ian they were leaving.
“What is it? Who was that?”
“A warning. Agents are on their way here. They’re going to be here in minutes. We need to get out.”
Ian blinked, trying to focus his thoughts.
“Do you understand? We need to run. Now!”
Ian swung his legs out of bed and followed Chris to the door. Chris peered through the peephole but saw no one outside.
He opened the door slowly and looked up and down the hallway.
Empty.
“C’mon,” Chris said. “We should take the stairs. They could already be here. They aren’t going to know that we’re expecting them, so they’ll probably take the elevator.”
“Who told us they’re coming?” Ian asked.
“I have no idea. Let’s move.”
When Chris and Ian reached the lobby of the hotel, they saw two men in suits at the elevator tracing its descent on the display overhead. One of the men impatiently gave the button an extra punch even though the light was on.
“You know that doesn’t help, right?” said his partner.
The elevator doors opened and the men entered, undoubtedly headed for Room 201. Chris and Ian watched them from the stairwell, the door open a slit.
“Let’s go,” Ian said.
“Not through the front doors,” Chris said. “They’ll have someone posted out front in case they missed us in the elevator. Since they don’t know we know, maybe they won’t be watching the back.”
Chris pushed open the door and led the way into the coffee shop off the lobby, cutting through the kitchen.
“Hey, you can’t be back here,” said a fry cook
, spatula in hand.
“Sorry,” Chris said.
“I don’t care if you’re sorry, just—”
Chris didn’t hear the rest of his sentence. He flew through the rear door, Ian in tow.
“What now?” Ian asked.
“They’re going to start a manhunt, and they’re going to use the CCTV feeds to track us down. We won’t be able to run far unless . . .”
“Unless what?” Ian’s eyes flitted up and down the alley behind the hotel.
“I was thinking about this up in the room, and I have an idea,” Chris said. “C’mon.”
He circled the hotel, heading back toward Van Ness, Ian a step behind.
“We shouldn’t get back on Van Ness,” Ian said. “It’s too open. They’ll see us there.”
“That’s not where we’re headed,” Chris said, head down, studying the street.
“What are you doing?”
“Here.” Chris stopped in front of a covered manhole.
Ian leveled a flatline stare at him. “No.”
“How else are we going to get away from here without being picked up by security cameras? I don’t think there’ll be any cameras down there.” Chris was already bending down to pull aside the heavy manhole cover.
Ian stared into the dark hole, probably thinking thoughts of filth and rats.
“Look, I’ll go first,” Chris said, gingerly lowering himself into the sewer as if wading into a lake. The rungs of the iron ladder felt cold and slippery in his hands.
Chris climbed down the ladder about twelve feet until his feet touched the concrete floor of the cistern. There was no light except what filtered down from the open manhole. The place smelled of mildew and sweet rot. Not as rank as he had imagined, but not pleasant either.
A shallow stream of water and raw sewage flowed sluggishly at his feet, ankle-deep. His shoes were immediately soaked through and his feet went cold.
“C’mon down,” Chris said. “And pull the lid back on after you.”
“What’s it like down there?”
“It’s great,” Chris said. “You’re going to love it. There’s a Starbucks. Now get down here.”
Ian’s suede Onitsuka sneakers swung into view, and he lowered himself down the ladder. He slipped and nearly fell while holding on to the ladder with one hand and pulling the manhole cover back into place. When he was done, there was a loud metallic clank, and their light source disappeared in what felt like a full solar eclipse.
“I can’t see,” Ian said.
“You’re good. Just two more rungs down.”
He heard a splash as Ian stepped into the water. “Oh, man. That’s sewage, isn’t it?”
Chris started walking in the gloom, running his fingers along the mildewed wall as a guide. He heard Ian’s steps behind him, following.
His fingers touched what felt like a large cockroach, and he pulled his hand away with a start.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“I have no idea, but we’re going to keep moving until we’re as far away from the hotel as possible.”
“You don’t mean that literally, though, right? I mean, we could come back up after we’re a mile or so from the hotel and no one is going to be there.”
“Wherever we come up, there will be security cameras. I think we should take this sewer system as far as we can. When we come up, we won’t be out of their reach, but at least we may be out of the area they’re watching.”
Chris and Ian walked on down the circular sewer tunnel, which ran straight for a long stretch. As his eyes adjusted to the meager light, Chris could see the masonry of the sewer, ancient bricks that had probably been laid in the 1800s, well before the earthquake of 1906. Aboveground, San Francisco was a relatively new city, rebuilt from scratch after being razed by the fires that had swept unabated through the city’s wooden structures after the Great Quake. But here, the city beneath the city was as it had been when it was a Gold Rush boomtown. In some spots the crumbling brick walls had been bolstered with concrete.
They reached an open space where the tunnels branched in four directions. Chris chose the path that he thought would continue to lead them away from the hotel.
Somewhere in the distance they heard a heavy clang, a sound they now recognized as a manhole cover falling into place.
“You think that’s them?” Ian asked.
In reply Chris plunged into the pitch darkness ahead.
16
“Zoey.”
It sounded like the distant chime of a bell, like her mother calling to her in the dusk when she was out playing with her childhood friends.
“Zoey!”
A little closer, more insistent this time. Her mother had stepped off the porch and was now calling to her from the edge of the backyard.
“Zoey!”
Her head turned, and she realized that she had just been slapped, but it felt as if her face were wrapped in thick gauze. Was she in a hospital? Had she been injured?
The slap hadn’t hurt, but it did seem somehow to turn up the volume.
“Wakey, wakey, Zoey!” The voice was right in front of her now, and while she was having trouble opening her eyes, she knew that it was Damian Hull, and she smelled his warm, oniony breath on her face.
It was then that she remembered where she was and that she was in trouble.
She felt a splash of water on her face, and she opened her eyes to see Damian hovering over her, holding an empty cup. With difficulty she sat up on the living room couch.
“There we go,” Damian said. “That’s my girl.”
“What?” Zoey said. “I was sleeping.”
“You were indeed,” Damian said. “The sleep of the bloody dead.”
“You drugged me,” Zoey said. “Why?” She was groggy, but she also recognized that guilelessness was her best defense.
“Consider it your job interview,” Damian said. “I’m going to ask you some questions now, and you’re going to answer them truthfully.”
“Sure, okay.” Zoey saw that Roland and Maria were standing behind Damian, directing cold stares at her. She could hear the bleeping of the PlayStation in the background; Serge must still be playing his video game.
“Did anyone send you here?”
“No, it was my idea. Chris said that I needed to run and that it was too dangerous to join him.” Her head was thick, and she felt constantly on the verge of sliding back into sleep. This must be what a heroin nod feels like, she thought.
“And why me?” Damian asked.
“Because I needed to go deep underground. Everyone knows that you’re the guy who knows how to do that.”
“Why would you trust that you would be safe here?”
“Why shouldn’t I trust you? And if you didn’t want me to reach out to you, why’d you give me the signal?”
Zoey saw Maria’s head snap around so that she could glare at Damian. She was clearly angry that Damian had left a means of being reached. Suddenly, Zoey’s stomach pitched. Probably an aftereffect of whatever Maria had used to drug her.
“Fair point,” said Damian, “but I’ll be asking the questions here. Did you mention my name to anyone?”
“Yes.” She knew this was dangerous, but her head was so muddled that she felt that it was the only way she could keep her story straight.
“Who?”
“Chris.”
“What else did you tell Bruen? Did you tell him where you were going?”
“No, just that I was going to reach out to you.”
“And you didn’t call him after you got the plane tickets and knew where you were going?”
“He didn’t want to know.” Her voice caught with emotion. “If they caught him, he didn’t want to give me up.”
“That wasn’t quite an answer.”
Zoey said it slowly. “No, I did not tell Chris where I was going after I got the plane tickets.”
Damian held up her
burner phone. “And this is the only phone that you have?”
“Yeah. You can check the most recent calls that I made.”
“We did. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if we’d found something. Do you have a way of contacting Bruen?”
Zoey decided that this was the time to lie. She couldn’t tell them about the secure site. “No. I don’t know where he is. We were going to try to connect at some point, but we didn’t know how or when. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
“Was anyone from that agency following you?”
“Not that I could tell. If they had managed to find and track me, I think they’d have come through that door by now.”
Damian stopped to confer with his crew. He even grabbed the gaming console out of Serge’s hands to command his attention. Zoey couldn’t hear what they were saying. She tried to listen, but concentrating only made her sleepy, and she passed out again.
She reawakened to the sensation of being slapped. She raised an unsteady hand to stop it, but that didn’t seem to help. Eyes open again, she focused on the cruel-child face of Roland, who had apparently taken over the interrogation. He was holding up a spoon with the handle pointing toward her.
“Damian wants to trust you,” Roland said. “But he’s not exactly impartial, right? See, he brought you here, so if you can’t be trusted, then he knows we’re going to hold him responsible. That’s why I’m going to be conducting the last portion of your job interview.”
“What job?”
“First, the questions.”
Her vision was swimming, but she tried to focus on the object in front of her face—the spoon.
“Why the spoon?” she asked.
“Because if you lie to me—or I get the faintest idea that you’re lying to me—I’m going to put this spoon through your right eye.”
Zoey’s stomach clenched as a wave of nausea went through her from the feet up. She leaned forward and threw up on the floor.
“I hope that means that I have your attention,” Roland said.
When she came up, gasping and wiping her lips, her eyes found Damian. “You don’t need to do this.”
“I’m afraid we do, dear,” Damian said. “You need to listen very carefully to Roland’s questions.”