A muttered apology.
Brady rose and peered between two pipes.
The man walked in, at first only a stocky figure backlit by the sun coming through the opening. He strode to the breaker box, opened it. Brady could make out the knit wool shirt, the fur shawl over massive shoulders, the long, stringy hair. His head turned as the inner door clicked open. An ice cube formed in Brady’s heart, chilling his blood. The Viking.
Another man came in, pulling a metal cart. Its wheels clacked over the threshold. The cart carried four dog kennels, the kind used to transport large dogs in airplane cargo holds. Plastic, with holes in the upper halves of the sides. Chrome-plated grille doors.
The light faded as the door slowly closed.
The dogs began growling. One barked. The others joined in. In seconds, they were snarling and snapping and yelping as though fighting over a downed animal.
The Viking held up a hand to halt the man pulling the cart. He looked in at the dogs and pushed his finger into one of the door grilles.
“Er eitthva a? ” he said.
He turned to face the boiler, took a step forward. He stopped, slowly panning his gaze over all the equipment.
“Rats,” the man said with an Italian accent. The word came out “Rrrratsa.” “Sometimes cats get in, chasing ’em.”
The Viking did not move. After fifteen seconds, he looked back at the dogs, which were still in a frenzy.
“Hættu ?essu!” he said. Four sharp syllables.
The animals immediately quieted. One whimpered, then it too fell silent.
Again he faced the boiler. He whispered, “Er einhver hér?” Louder, he said, “Give me a flashlight.”
The other man, frustrated: “I don’t have one. Affrettarsi! Arjan is waiting!”
The Viking walked forward. Brady carefully lowered himself to the floor until he was flat against it. He edged his body close to the base of the boiler. It was gritty and greasy and smelled like burned meat. He wiggled farther in, willing himself to meld into the metal. He thought of the promise he’d made on the way to the Oakleys’—Zach’s words: “And you won’t let that guy and his dogs get you. Okay?”
Okay, Zach. I’m trying, buddy.
Footsteps. The Viking stopped at the back wall. He looked into the long space behind the equipment, scanning over Brady. The man squinted, moved his head around. It came to Brady that the man was considering stepping into the space, walking along the back wall behind the equipment, just to be sure. He thought of the pistol and wondered how much movement he could get away with. Why hadn’t he drawn it earlier? His hands were fisted under his chest. He slid the right one out . . . slowly . . . leaves change color faster.
“Olaf ? Affrettarsi! ”
The Viking—Olaf ?—grunted, turned, and stalked away.
“Let’s go!” he ordered.
The front wheels of the cart banged over the next threshold.
Brady rose and peeked between the pipes. A faint light radiated out from the passageway beyond the rusty door. The rear of the cart was sticking out. The Italian pulled it slowly, in little stops and starts.
“Vaffanculo!” he snapped.
Something was preventing the cart from rolling smoothly.
“Move,” the man called Olaf said from deeper inside. “I’ll pull it in.” Suddenly the cart lurched forward. Its rear wheels bounced over the threshold. The door began closing.
Brady slipped out from behind the boiler, ran softly to the door, pressed up against the wall beside it. He looked. A low-wattage bulb hanging from a wire cast a dingy luminance onto the walls of a room, roughly hammered from the hardpan. Thirty feet from floor to ceiling. The door lay high in the wall, near the ceiling. An expanded metal catwalk slanted gently down from the door, stopping at a doorless exit from the room. Rails on each side kept users from tumbling off the catwalk. The cart’s steel wheels were not turning, but sliding over the grated walkway, protesting loudly.
The kennels kept Olaf and the Italian from Brady’s view. Which meant he was equally shielded from them. Crouching, he crossed the threshold onto the catwalk. One of the dogs started a low, sustained growl. Brady slipped over the edge and held on, dangling high above the floor in case one of the men looked back. He heard the door click shut above him. His damaged hand began throbbing, then throwing out electric currents of pain. Perspiration beaded on his forehead. A drop slid into his eye. He closed it. His other eye witnessed a dark rivulet run from his palm to his wrist, where a drop grew fat and fell. It splattered on his forehead.
He heard the cart’s wheels come off the catwalk, one pair at a time, and felt the walk rattle with relief.
“Take it,” Olaf said. The word echoed faintly.
Wheels squeaked away, fading.
Brady hoisted himself up and onto the catwalk. He wiped his brow with his forearm. Grimacing, he saw the bandages over his palm were soaked red. He turned to face the tunnel, and his heart skipped a beat. Carved deeply into the stone above the entrance was a large sun symbol—Scaramuzzi’s swastika, Ambrosi had called it. Residing at the mouth of Scaramuzzi’s lair, it could have been a warning. With cold resolve, he drew the gun and pulled back on the slide until he saw the brass of a bullet in the chamber. He flicked off the safety. Filling his lungs, he headed down the catwalk toward the tunnels.
74
Right or left? The stone floor left no clue of previous foot traffic. No scuff marks or disturbed dirt. Along the ceiling in both directions was a wire with lighted bulbs spaced too far apart to adequately illuminate the tunnel. The slightest sound reverberated off the walls, making it impossible to discern the direction of its source. The distant rumble of the cart he had watched enter could be coming from either direction.
Brady went left.
The tunnel had a gentle downward slope and curved lazily one way, then the other, as though the workers making it had continually veered off course and corrected. Brady’s steps were too loud in his ears, broadcasting his presence and inhibiting his own ability to listen for approaching footsteps or noises that would help him find his way. After failing to tread more quietly by tiptoeing and slowing his pace, he removed his shoes and carried them with two fingers of his left hand.
About a hundred paces in, he came to a passageway branching off to the right. He peered around the corner. After a few feet, the surfaces of this new tunnel disappeared into opaque blackness. Air breathed out from it and cooled the perspiration on his face. He looked farther up the lighted tunnel. Just more of the same.
Lights or a breeze? he thought. The lights are there for a reason. But doesn’t a breeze indicate an opening, maybe an air shaft ventilating an occupied section?
Brady liked that logic best and stepped into the dark tunnel. The slope here was steeper, forcing a quicker gait. He held his pistol near his face, pointing up—a position known in law enforcement as a half-Sabrina, after the favorite pose of Kate Jackson’s character in Charlie’s Angels (she held her gun in two hands, and thus a full Sabrina). This allowed him to cock out his elbow and skip it against the wall, keeping himself oriented in the lightless tunnel. Occasionally the wall dropped away where other passageways met his. Sometimes he would sense a change in the nature of the breeze and discover a passageway on the other side. He always paused at these openings and attempted to discern new odors or sounds or light emanating from them. Each passage seemed as anonymous as his own did, so he continued without turning.
Finally, he realized he was able to see the most negligible aspects of the tunnel: the faint shape of jutting stone, the darker shadow of an intersecting passageway. Light, however faint, was seeping in from somewhere. The tunnel curved and the darkness gradually eased into twilight. He followed the curve and stopped. A hundred yards farther, the tunnel opened into a lighted room. He fought the urge to run. Instead, he approached cautiously, as close to the wall as he could get without brushing against it.
The room was not bright, as he had thought; it only seemed to be, compared
to the sightlessness of the tunnel. A few feet from the room’s entrance, he swept his eyes across the visible portion, switched to the other side of the tunnel, scoped out much of the rest. He quick-peeked around the area closest to him, left and right, then stepped in. The light source was a bulb under an aluminum hood up high in the center of the room. The ceiling arced up on stone ribs to a height of about thirty feet. The room was an octagonal chamber. Each wall contained an arched portal into a dark passageway. The sound of faint hammering drifted from at least one of the passages, but he could not tell from which. Voices, hauntingly indistinct, rose and fell in volume but even at their loudest were no more than a wind’s whisper. Maybe they were nothing more than his own pulse in his ears.
Brady felt his strength sag. He sighed and let his shoulder slump. He was getting a sense of the task ahead. Not Alicia’s actual rescue; merely the finding of her. There seemed to be miles and miles of tunnels, branching in every direction. The probability of finding the precise passage to Alicia seemed infinitesimal.
He paced the circumference of the chamber, hoping to pick up a clue as he passed each portal. He returned to the center of the room and realized he did not know which passage he had come from. Going back to each one, he found three that sloped up; any of them could have been the one he had used to get there. Of the remaining five—three had flat floors, two sloped down—he chose one at random. He placed a pebble in the threshold. He checked his watch. Too bad it wasn’t one of those adventure instruments, with a compass.
He walked straight for four minutes and found a passage lighted by a string of bare bulbs. He had no idea whether this was the same tunnel he had entered first. He followed it, ignoring other tunnels, some lighted, some black as paint. The tunnels he passed varied widely. Many were narrower— the worst would have required shuffling sideways through them. Several were broad alleys but no more promising than the others. Some boasted finely finished surfaces, either polished to a sheen or ornamented with intricate trefoils, columns, and arches; others appeared hacked out with crude tools. A pool of water filled the floor of one roughly hewn tunnel. Brady assumed the different designs and levels of completion reflected the subterranean ambitions of various sovereignties throughout the ages.
Twenty minutes after leaving the octagonal chamber, he came to another one, identical to the first. Though he had made only one ninety-degree turn, and the passageway had bent only slightly, he checked for the pebble he had left. He didn’t find it. This time, three of the passages were lighted. He chose one of them, deposited two pebbles—one to mark where he’d been and one for where he was going—and trudged on.
Tunnels everywhere. He got the sense that at times there were tunnels running parallel to one another, a handbreadth of stone between them. He suspected the rise and fall of the tunnel floors allowed them to go over and under one another. The maze played with shadow and sound as if they were pliable things outside the boundaries of physics and reason. Corridors that appeared short took five minutes to traverse. A tunnel that appeared to extend forever could as likely stop at a wall hidden in the gloom, forcing him to backtrack. At times, voices came to him from intersecting passages. Usually the words sounded foreign, but once he was certain he recognized the word “sincere” and the phrase “two of a kind.” Each time he headed in their direction, all sounds—even the occasional clank or hammering he was getting used to—would evaporate, and he was left yet again wondering which way to go.
He was crossing a short conduit between two lighted tunnels when a new sound froze him solid. A single bark. Immediately it became a cacophony of yips and snarls. Loud . . . close . . . coming around the corner. Then they broke apart, like mist in a crosswind. Brady glared at the corner, visible only as a line between gray and black. He blinked, suddenly uncertain that he had heard anything at all. The dog sounds had come and gone too quickly to be real. But how could he have imagined them? Were the tunnels messing with his mind that severely? He caught a whiff of an animal odor, zoolike. He shook it off and continued. What else could he do?
He encountered four more octagonal chambers and returned once to a chamber he had already visited. He kept walking, turning, listening, sniffing the air. How could so many feet of corridor exist without some of it revealing the passage or presence of humans?
Like space, time as well broke its bonds in these caverns and corridors, hidden from the world. Shortly after setting out from an octagonal chamber, he checked his watch and was shocked to see that fifty minutes had evaporated. Leaning his back against a dark wall, he rested, giving himself ten minutes. Pushing off to carry on, he realized only three minutes had passed.
He lost all sense of direction and distance. He could be inches under the cobblestones of Old Jerusalem or unfathomably far below. He felt he had an equal chance of being under the Dome of the Rock or Stonehenge. Slanting floors, soaring and plunging ceilings, widening and narrowing halls, shifting shadows, unstable temperatures, intermittent breezes, unreliable sounds—he swayed as the dim tunnel he was standing in shifted and rotated around him. He reached a hand out to the wall, but that didn’t help, and he sat down hard. Objective vertigo. He closed his eyes. Now it felt as though it was he, not the tunnel, spinning round and round, slowing like an amusement park ride. He took a deep breath.
When he opened his eyes, he was in a tunnel, as motionless and solid as tunnels were supposed to be. This was hell, he decided. Lost in a labyrinth with Alicia’s life hanging on his ability to find her.
Using the wall for support, he rose to his feet. He walked on, not really believing that he would find any life down here, let alone Alicia. He would wander until he collapsed. Eventually someone would happen along his bones and brush them into a dustpan.
He saw a lighted opening on his left. As he approached, his already-sunken heart found room to sink lower. He stopped in the threshold and looked up a sloping catwalk that ended at a metal door, twenty feet above the stone floor.
75
It can’t be the same door, he thought. His knees threatened to buckle under the weight of defeat. He dropped his shoes, slipped into them, and crouched to tie them. His pistol dangled from his trigger finger at his side as he staggered up the catwalk, not caring that it clanged and thumped beneath his feet. He saw the spot where he had hung from the catwalk to avoid detection. He stopped at the door, held his palm to it, as if his will alone could make it a different door. He pushed against the bar and the door opened.
The basement under the Latin Patriarchate. Brighter than it should have been. The outside door was open, closing slowly. A man stood at the open breaker box door, staring at Brady. In his thirties, he had long, hay-colored hair, pulled back into a ponytail. A face that had stopped more than a few fists. At least six feet six, the man was bulging and muscular, a walking bicep.
Whether Brady’s expression gave him away or the man knew everyone permitted on the premises or he had been alerted to Brady’s possible presence—he immediately recognized Brady as a trespasser. He scowled fiercely and snapped, “Was machst Du denn hier?” German, Brady thought. The man grabbed at Brady.
Brady backpedaled, bringing up the pistol.
The German stepped through the door, his eyes going wide when he spotted the gun. He swung a beefy fist at Brady’s arm. It rammed into the silencer like a baseball bat. The gun flew out of his hand. It hit the wall and disappeared below the catwalk. A few seconds later, it clattered onto the stone floor.
The German drove Brady back down the ramp, swinging, punching . . . a right, a left . . . nonstop, insane.
The purpose of fighting is to win; there is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield.
Advice every law enforcement trainee knew by heart, because his instructors repeated it incessantly. Its unlikely source was the writer John Steinbeck, imbuing battle smarts to the Knights of the Round Table in his novel The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights.
Brady lowered his head and charged, sl
ipping in between swings. His head cracked against the man’s sternum. His arms encircled a muscular torso. A blow fell on his back, crushing. He punched, a sharp jab to the diaphragm. It thumped as if he’d struck a sack of flour. He shot his other fist forward, forgetting its injury until pain like a metal wire shot up his arm and exploded in his shoulder. A fist came down on the back of his head. The quickest flash of blackness preempted his thoughts, like a film jumping its sprockets, then catching again. He recognized consciousness as a drowning man finds air, and he held on to it with everything he had.
The German grabbed a fierce handful of hair and yanked him up. Warm moisture tickled his scalp: sweat or blood, Brady didn’t know. Holding Brady’s head in his left hand, the German’s right fist reared back, shot forward. It connected with his jaw, smashing it sideways. He heard a crack! He’d have gone down if the man were not suspending him by his hair. The fist pulled back again.
I can’t take this hit, he thought with absolute certainty.
Out of instinct, Brady’s hand lunged out. His middle and index fingers protruded from his fist like talons. They struck the German’s eyes. Brady felt softness under his fingertips, then hot liquid. The man screamed, a roar of pain and fury. He released his grip on Brady’s scalp.
Brady stumbled back, rocking, dizzy.
The German continued to roar, holding one hand to his face, waving the other around to fend off another attack. He smeared blood on his cheek, blinked, and glared at Brady with a single bright eye. The other socket was a gooey mess. Rivulets of crimson streamed from it.
Brady stared back in horror.
His opponent took advantage of his hesitation. The German stepped forward and in a single movement grabbed the back of Brady’s neck and plunged his head into the catwalk railing. His chin took it full-force. He felt the skin split between bone and steel. The viselike hand holding him forced his face off the rail and pushed his neck into it. Immediately he felt his windpipe crushing against it, denying the passage of air.