The stench of melted duct tape made him gag, but he stifled the reflex and pulled at the separated tape, freeing his shoulders. Frenzied, he bent toward his ankles and melted the tape that secured them to the chair. He wavered to his feet. Tense, listening for more sounds in the stairwell, he reached down for a shard of glass, only to notice a knife among the equipment that had been dumped from the knapsacks. Sure, he thought, they had more knives than they needed. Somebody wanted to make room for more coins.
A footstep echoed in the stairwell.
Balenger rushed to Vinnie and sliced the tape at his shoulders, wrists, and ankles. He heard another footstep, higher in the stairwell. Vinnie took a shard of glass from the floor and ran to Cora while Balenger ran to Amanda. The two men hacked at the tape, working to free the women.
Lightning cracked. In its relatively quiet aftermath, the footsteps ascended. Slow and measured, they made Balenger think of someone who walked with painful deliberate care because of alcohol or drugs. Or maybe the sound came from someone so confident of the endgame that he didn't need to hurry.
Cora and Amanda yanked away the last of the tape and lunged from their chairs. Balenger noticed the hammer Tod had dropped on the pile of equipment. He threw it to Vinnie, then held his knife in an attack position.
"Turn off your headlamps." In the candlelight, he focused all his attention on the stairwell's black mouth.
The slow footsteps kept rising. Steady. Patient. A shadow appeared. Balenger prepared to attack. An arm waved up and down. A pistol was at the end of it. But the arm wasn't aiming the pistol. It was moving the pistol the way a blind man would use a cane, testing the area before him. A head appeared. Night-vision goggles. Tattoos. Tod. He emerged from the staircase. He looked dazed. In the light from the candles, Balenger saw that he was covered with blood.
44
"Is it… Are you…" Tod lowered his goggles, as if convinced they made him see things that weren't real. He didn't seem puzzled that Balenger, Vinnie, Cora, and Amanda were free of their bonds. Nor did he look fearful that all four might be able to overpower him before he could defend himself. What he did look was relieved.
"Thank God." He plodded from the weight of the gold coins in his knapsack and pockets. He backed from the stairwell, gaping at it. "We're gonna need to stick together. Need all the help we can get."
"Are you hurt?" Balenger asked. "There's blood-"
"Not mine." The sound of rain made Tod frown toward the howling darkness beyond the open door. "No. Jesus. Gotta close it. Gotta barricade it again. Hurry. No time. Get it shut. Now. I'll guard the stairs. I'll shoot anybody who comes up the stairs."
But the candlelight revealed that the slide on the pistol was back. Its magazine was empty.
"Give it to me," Balenger said.
"Need it."
"You fired all the rounds in it."
"What?"
"You emptied it."
"Emptied it?"
"Vinnie! Amanda!" Cora shouted. "Help with the door!"
They reclosed it and piled the furniture.
"The spare magazine," Balenger asked Tod. "Where is it?"
Tod kept gazing trancelike toward the stairwell.
"Give me the damned gun." Balenger twisted it from his hand, amazed at how things had changed. A while ago, Tod would have shot him dead for even looking as if he'd try for the gun. Balenger found the spare magazine in Tod's belt. With military expertise, he dropped the empty magazine, shoved in the loaded one, and pressed the gun's release lever so the slide rammed forward and chambered a round. It gave him a moment's confidence to be armed again.
Balenger aimed toward the stairs. "What happened?"
"Not sure," Tod said. He twitched. "Oh, I know what happened all right. I'm just not sure how it was done."
"Where are your buddies?"
"We went down the stairs."
"I know that. Tell me about-"
"We kept going down and down. Around and around. Turning and turning. At each level, there was a passageway like up here. But the passageways got longer."
"Sure. Each level below us gets bigger and wider. For Carlisle to eavesdrop, he had to extend the passageways farther to reach all the rooms."
"Longer and longer," Tod said. "Finally, we reached the bottom."
"Vinnie," Balenger said. "You and Cora and Amanda take off his knapsack. Dump the coins. Fill the knapsack with as much equipment as you can stuff into it. The rest we'll carry."
"But there wasn't a door," Tod said. "We couldn't find a door." His facial tattoos were almost hidden by blood. "No matter how hard we looked, we couldn't find one. We ran all the way to the end of the bottom corridor. It went on forever. We still couldn't find a door. But at the end, we found something else."
"What?"
"A body."
Amanda made a noise in her throat.
"She'd been dead a long time," Tod said.
"She?"
"A dress. The body wore a dress. An old-fashioned dress. But she looked like a mummy. That's how long she'd been dead. All dried up, her eye sockets hollow. Hard to tell with the green from the goggles, but I think her hair was blond. Like hers." Tod indicated Amanda. "The corpse was sitting in a corner, like she'd run there and got tired and sat down to rest and never woke up. She even had her purse in her lap."
Amanda's throat made that noise again.
"We ran back to the staircase. Mack was so panicked, he raised the crowbar to knock a hole in the wall so we could get out. But before he could swing it, somebody pounded on the other side."
"Ronnie," Amanda said.
"I could see where the wall trembled. I fired at it. Then the pounding was somewhere else, and I fired at that. Suddenly, the pounding was all along the wall, and I fired and fired. Mack and JD ran up the stairs. I followed. Turning and turning. Around and around. Above me, I heard a scream. Mack. He fell toward me. His legs were split open. His blood sprayed like it came from a hose. He dropped through the space between the stairs and the railing. 'What cut him?' JD yelled. I didn't have a chance to say anything. 'The room with the vault!' JD yelled. 'We know how to get out of that room!' He raced up the stairs. All of a sudden, he was falling. His legs were split open. His blood was spraying. I thought I'd lost my mind. I wanted to run, but I warned myself I had to slow down, to find whatever was on the stairs. So I inched up, waving the gun in front of me, and that's when I touched it."
"Touched…?"
"A wire strung across the staircase. Tight. Thin. Even with the goggles, I could hardly see it. I felt it with the gun. Then I touched it with my finger. Jesus, it was so sharp, all I needed was a little nudge for it to cut me."
"Razor wire," Balenger said.
"Maybe I did lose my mind. I eased under the wire. I inched up the stairs, waving the gun, searching for other wires."
"You left Mack and JD alive down there?"
"Believe me, the way they were bleeding, they weren't going to live long."
From the stairwell, far below, someone screamed.
"It sounds like one of them lived longer than you expected," Balenger said.
Another scream.
"We've all lost our minds," Cora said.
"But how did Ronnie-"
"He followed you down," Balenger said.
"He was behind us on the stairs?" Tod looked startled.
"When you reached the bottom, he rigged the wire above you. Then he used a hidden door to enter the main part of the hotel. He pounded on the wall to panic you into running upstairs."