by Noah Boyd
“What’s with the knife?” Vail asked.
“If nothing else, it’s a backup weapon. The letter said no guns. We thought we’d include one with the saw blade because who knows what you’re going to run into. It was developed for clandestine military units.”
Vail snapped the flashlight on and off and opened both knife blades. He took his own lock-back knife out of his pocket and handed it to Kate. Opening the mason’s knife and seeing its honed sharpness, she said, “I’m surprised you thought you needed a gun.”
Vail was reading the demand note and didn’t appear to hear her. “Is that ‘sub’ as in submarine?” he asked.
Tom Demick pulled out a map and laid it on a desk as everyone gathered around. “We’ve reconned the area only by satellite and map. Didn’t want to go stumbling around there with GPSs. It’s in West Hollywood. As close as we can figure, it’s this clear area right here between Lucas Avenue, South Toluca Street, and Beverly Boulevard. There’s no water or submarines around there, but I’ll keeping working on it.”
Kate said, “Seven seventeen is the exact minute of sunset, so you will be working in the dark.”
“I’ll hope that’s not a metaphor.”
“This is the FBI—everything’s a metaphor.”
VAIL LAY HIDDEN in the tall grass between two overgrown shrubs that were against a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. It surrounded a huge vacant lot. According to his wallet GPS, he was still about a hundred yards short of the exact West Hollywood coordinates given in the demand note. He had crawled as far forward as he could. Using the low-light monocular, he searched the area in front of him. When he radioed the information to the major-case room and the covering surveillance cars, he heard Kaulcrick’s voice. “What’s inside the fence?”
“Nothing I can see worth protecting. It looks like a giant vacant lot, maybe the size of one and a half football fields but shaped like a triangle.”
“Do you see anything inside?”
“Nothing.”
“Can you get in?”
“There’s barbed wire coiled all along the top as far as I can see. But the ground inside is not overgrown, so the kids around here probably have a way in and use it to play ball. I guess it’s time to let whoever’s waiting see me.” Vail tucked the monocular into the moneybag, which he hoisted onto his shoulder once he stood up. He started skirting the fence. About sixty yards from where he had parked the car, next to a small footpath that had been worn through the underbrush, he found a hole in the chain link that had been snipped away from the post. He reported what he had found on the radio. “Hold on, Vail, we’re trying to get a satellite picture of the area,” Demick said.
Technology, while providing remarkable advantages to law enforcement, had a crippling side. It could make investigators lazy, keeping them from remaining flexible. Vail was worried that the agents surveilling him were finding it much easier to track him through the GPS monitors in the major-case room than trying to follow him through the dark, irregular terrain. And those were the kinds of vulnerabilities that the Pentad somehow understood and exploited. He pulled back the corner of the fence, pushed the bag in ahead, and squeezed through.
He took out the wallet GPS again to check his position. The destination coordinates had been locked in and an arrow on the screen pointed toward a thirty-foot rise in the ground still almost a hundred yards ahead. He picked up the bag and started toward it. The radio’s earpiece crackled with Tom Demick’s voice. “I think I’ve figured out where you’re going. I should have thought of it before when I heard Toluca Street. It’s the Toluca portal to the old Pacific Electric Railway. I pulled it up on the Internet. It stopped running in the fifties. It used trolley cars. The kind that had the poles that reached up to the overhead electric lines. You’re at the beginning of a mile-long tunnel that was built to circumvent traffic back then, but both ends were sealed off years ago. Located at your end is Substation 51. That’s got to be the ‘sub’ in the note.”
“Very nice, Tom. I’m on my way.”
One of the surveillance teams came up on the radio. “Command, this is One-three, we’re at the fence, and it doesn’t look like we can follow the package without being made. The terrain is too open.”
Vail answered, “I’m good here. The last thing we want is to get burned. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”
“Copy,” One-three answered.
In the major-case room, Kate looked at Kaulcrick. “I don’t like this.”
“Uncertainty is exactly what Bertok wants. Quit worrying. Vail wanted to do this. We’ve got him surrounded. It has to be far enough away that we won’t be made. We’re in far better shape than that debacle in New Hampshire. And we’ve got three monitors up here, each one tracking the different GPSs. Nothing can go wrong.”
Vail’s voice interrupted. “I’m at the substation. It’s a small square building, every inch covered with graffiti.” Involuntarily, his hand went to where his gun should have been, but then he remembered he wasn’t armed. “Let’s go to radio silence until I see what’s inside.” He carefully stepped up onto the landing in front of the door and then moved against a wall as he listened. He couldn’t hear anything. He peeked inside.
Three glowsticks formed an arrow like he had read about in the naval-prison report. Next to it were two others holding down a sheet of paper. The room was otherwise empty. He went in and picked up the note. Underneath it was a walkie-talkie with the transmission key soldered into a permanent transmission position. The extortionists were now listening to him. He read the note:
Do not transmit one more word on your radio.
Take this radio, clip it to your belt, and leave yours here. Follow the arrow.
After carefully folding the note and putting it in his pocket, Vail opened his shirt and peeled the microphone from his chest, pulling the Bureau radio from his waistband. He dropped it loudly on the floor so the extortionist’s radio could hear it being discarded and then attached their radio to his belt. That answered the question why they didn’t want him to bring a cell phone—it could be used for silent text-messaging.
The arrow was glued to a couple of rocks. It pointed toward the sealed entrance of the railroad tunnel. But the rocks used seemed to have a secondary direction. Their difference in height also made the arrow rise, almost as if it was pointing to the top of the tunnel. Vail stepped out of the building and stood still for a moment, making sure the satellites could once again lock onto the two remaining GPSs. He starting walking slowly toward the entrance to the tunnel.
“Steve, what’s happening?” Kate said into the mike. “Steve?”
“Something must have happened to his radio,” said the agent watching the monitor for the GPS on his body transmitter. “Even though he’s moving away from the substation, the monitor shows the radio’s still in the building.”
The headquarters tech agent had been hovering between all three monitors and said, “They must have had him take it off and leave it there. It’s okay. That’s why we gave him two backups. They’re still working fine.”
“But we can’t communicate with him,” Kate said.
Kaulcrick spoke into the radio mike. “One-one, do your people have the area surrounded?”
“As best we can without getting too close.”
“Just make sure if he leaves that fenced-off area, he can’t get by you.”
“I don’t like this,” Kate said again. “At each turn, we’re losing more control.”
Vail had reached the mouth of the tunnel. The arched entrance was an almost perfect half circle about twenty feet high. It had been sealed up with cinder block and coated with a concrete plaster. Like the substation, it shimmered electrically with graffiti of all colors in the low light.
The glowstick arrow in the substation indicated that Vail was supposed to go to the top of the opening. Around the left side of the entrance was a small pathway up the steep grade. It ran between the huge concrete frame of the tunnel and the chain-link fence. He
shifted the heavy bag more toward the middle of his back and maneuvered up the thirty-degree grade. At the top of the structure, he started walking, following the tunnel’s spine along its mile-long length, looking for the next instruction.
Seventy-five yards farther he found another glowstick, attached to a small metal door in the ground. It appeared to be a hatch for maintenance workers if access became necessary to work on the electrical lines that ran along the tunnel’s ceiling. A rusty padlock that had secured the hatch had been cut and lay next to it. The thick metal door was ajar. Judging by the piles of dirt and stone around it, the entrance had been covered over and somehow the extortionists had found it and dug it out.
Under the glowstick was another note.
Remove the other tracking device and leave it next to the opening. Then take the money and enter the tunnel. Do not use lights—tunnel rigged with explosives and photocell trigger.
Once again, the Pentad had anticipated more than one tracking device. Vail took out the low-light monocular and scanned the surrounding area to determine if any of the surveillance agents were close enough to observe where he was going. He couldn’t see any.
Down inside the hatch were individual U-shaped ladder rungs that were anchored into the concrete wall. Below them, another glowstick arrow sat flat on the floor, pointing toward the remaining mile of the tunnel. Vail then used the monocular to look more closely at the floor of the tunnel. He could see small glints of light surrounding the luminescent marker. Taking a handful of pebbles that had been cleared from around the hatch, he tossed them in as long a pattern as possible. The sound of stone plinking off metal echoed lightly from below. He refocused the monocular to get a better look and could now see that the floor was booby-trapped with long nails hammered up through boards.
Vail wondered if it was a bluff that the tunnel was rigged to explode. The glowsticks wouldn’t give off enough light to trigger a photocell, so he had no choice but to assume it was true. The one thing that was certain was they wanted him to proceed in the dark. Was it so he would jump down onto the punji boards? Or was there another reason?
He eased the GPS wallet out of his back pocket and set it down carefully to mark where he was last aboveground for the surveillance teams. Then he lowered the bag through the hatch ahead of him and started down the metal rungs. Once he was completely clear of the hatch, he pulled both straps of the bag over his head so they sat cross-chest and then shifted the weight completely behind him.
He stepped down two more rungs, and as he was testing the next one, the hatch was slammed closed. Then he heard a lock being snapped shut. It was followed by dirt and gravel being shoveled back over the hatch.
IN THE MAJOR-CASE ROOM, the headquarters tech agent watched the monitors intensely. “What happened? We’ve lost transmission for the GPS in the bag. He must have dropped it and the weight of the money disabled it. Wait, the wallet device is still moving.”
“Which way?” Kaulcrick asked.
“It’s moving east.”
“All units, the package is moving east from the last location,” the assistant director barked into the microphone. “Can someone get an eye on him? Don’t lose that money!”
“This is One-four. It’s pretty dark, but I see something moving. Let me try to get over there.”
“Don’t get too close, we don’t know who’s around.”
The tech agent, watching the grid on the monitor, said, “He’s now walking up Emerald Street.”
“Does anyone have him?” Kaulcrick asked, his voice starting to rise. No one answered. “Does anyone have him!”
Again all the radios were silent. The tech agent said, “He’s turned onto West Second Street.”
“One-four,” Kaulcrick called, “have you caught up to him?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“One-one, flood that area with your people. Find him. And that bag.”
TEN
VAIL STEPPED DOWN, BUT HIS FOOT COULDN’T FIND THE NEXT RUNG, so he reached twice as far, thinking maybe they had cut off a rung hoping to get him to slip and fall onto the punji boards, but he couldn’t find the next one either. Apparently, they had cut the rest of them off.
So he was unable to go up or down. Then he remembered the agent in the underground chamber at the naval prison, seemingly trapped, but a means, although not obvious, had been left for him: the length of webbing. The reason for the maintenance hatch had been to service the overhead cables that had once carried the electricity to power the trolley cars. He climbed as high as he could on the rungs and ran his hand out toward the center of the tunnel until it hit a braided steel cable. It was about an inch and a half thick, and he wrapped his free hand around it, pulling to test its ability to hold him and the extra seventy pounds of money. Satisfied it would, he let go of the ladder rung and swung out over the twenty-foot drop. Hand over hand he proceeded, testing each new forward grasp to make sure it would hold him before committing his weight.
KAULCRICK BARKED into the radio, “Can anyone see where he is?”
Again, the only response was silence. Suddenly, the tech agent said, “He must have gotten into a vehicle. The transmitter is moving at a car rate of speed now. He just got onto the 110 northbound.”
“Did you hear that, One-one?” Kaulcrick asked the surveillance supervisor.
“I’ve got cars heading that way.”
HANGING TWENTY FEET in the air, Vail had traveled about eighty feet horizontally along the electrical cable that paralleled the tunnel floor, which he had to assume was still covered with punji boards. His shoulders and arms were beginning to burn with fatigue. He blocked it out and went another thirty feet before the pain had all but paralyzed him. Suddenly it no longer mattered—he had run out of cable. Unable to go back or forward, he had no choice but to drop to the floor. Were the boards under him? Willing up what little strength remained, he screwed his grip around the cable with his right hand and pulled the bag across his head with the left, dropping it into the darkness with as much accuracy as possible directly below him. He hung for a moment longer trying to readjust his balance in the dark without the extra weight. In the event the floor was still booby-trapped, he was going to try to drop directly on top of the bag without falling off and onto any of the surrounding nailed boards.
From the way he had released the bag, he calculated it was a foot or so off to his left. Swinging slightly to his left, he let go and fell the remaining fifteen feet, hitting the bag with both feet at the same time. But the currency inside had shifted during his “walk,” so he fell off farther to the left. As he lost his balance, he prepared for the pain of the nails as he hit the floor, but the spiked boards weren’t there. Instead he hit the earthen floor.
He shuffled his feet around to explore the ground, but there were no more boards. He picked up the bag and found two boards stuck to it. Directly under the cable, the floor had been booby-trapped, but not to the sides. That meant he was supposed to pierce his feet only. While that would incapacitate him, he would still be able to deliver the money. He examined the bag and discovered that the Pentad’s overkill approach had paid an unexpected dividend: the GPS sewn into the bottom of the bag had been pierced and probably rendered inoperable.
Something scampered along the wall. Vail hoped it was only rats. But then he thought about how if he had landed on the nails, he would now be leaving a bloody trail for whatever it was to follow. Up ahead, he could see another of the Pentad’s luminescent arrows, leading to, he was relatively certain, some other unpleasantry.
“HE’S LEFT THE 110 and is taking the 101 west,” the tech agent called over the major-case room’s radio.
“One-one, do you have him?” Kaulcrick asked.
“I think so. It’s a dark green pickup truck. There appear to be two white males inside the cab.”
“Can you see Vail?”
“Not from this distance.”
“Crossing Santa Monica Boulevard,” the tech agent called out.
“That
’s the right vehicle then,” the surveillance supervisor said. “We’re right there.”
“Then stay on him.” Kaulcrick leaned back uncomfortably in his chair.
“We’ve got to make sure that’s Vail,” Kate said.
“Who else could it be?”
AFTER ANOTHER HUNDRED yards Vail found the next arrow and continued to follow it farther into the tunnel. He could now see the next glowstick in the distance, but it didn’t appear to be an arrow. It was an X placed on another cinder-block wall. Vail calculated that he had not come more than half a mile, so the tunnel must have been previously sealed off in sections. When he got closer, he could see that the X was attached to a thick nylon rope, the kind used by mountain climbers. It had a snap-link tied to the end. A note simply said to place the extortionists’ radio inside the moneybag and attach the bag to the rope.
The rope disappeared into a square hole cut in the base of the wall just large enough for a person to squeeze through. Vail got down on the floor and tried to look into the hole, but it was pitch-black. Out of the side pockets, he took the flashlight, folding knife, and monocular before placing the radio inside the bag and looping the rope through both of its straps, locking the snap-link back onto the rope.