“More than fair. And now you can call me Liz.”
“Good deal. Why only now?”
“You just showed a flash of fair play, Jim. Were you by any chance a Marine before you took this security officer job?”
“Aw shucks, does it show?”
“My first ex was a Marine fighter pilot,” she said. “You can take the guy out of the Marines, but you can never take the Marines out of the guy.” She stepped through the gate, being careful of her footing. “Thanks for seeing me this evening, Jim. And if you sense…well, what we talked about, I’d really appreciate that heads-up. Julie Markham doesn’t deserve this.”
“I hope you’re right about that,” he said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it might not be a railroad deal here. It might not be the system. It might in fact be Julie.”
She frowned. “Julie what?”
“Has Julie Markham been absolutely straight with you? Completely forthright? No signs of deception? At all times?”
Liz pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.
“Uh-huh,” he said, nodding. “Stay tuned, counselor. We might all be wrong about what we’re seeing here.”
Liz thought about it, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. My bet stays on the Academy trying to whitewash this, find somebody they can pin it on, and then make sincere pronouncements about closure.”
“Well, I guess we wait and see,” he said. “You have a good evening, Liz.”
She smiled up at him and left. He went back down the companionway, closing the hatch behind him.
Goddamned career women, he thought. Lawyer Liz insisting he call her by her first name, Lock and Load Branner insisting she didn’t have a first name. But both world-class manipulators, if not ball-breakers. He recalled the image of Liz steaming up the pier, tiny but definitely sexy, and yet she’d driven right over him. No wonder she was an ex -wife. Maybe it was something in the Annapolis drinking water.
Jupiter let out an unhappy screech when Jim came back into the lounge.
“Don’t you start, feather merchant,” he growled. “I’ve got places to go tonight.”
At 10:50 P.M., Jim stood in the main tunnel. Ten more minutes, he thought, and then the PWC will do its thing. In the past forty-five minutes, he’d walked the entire length of the main tunnel, from the Bancroft Hall sector, where the rocket had been fired, all the way to the King George Street access doors. He’d tested all the electrical access panels, the two doors to that big air-conditioning compressor chamber, and the doors on every one of the telephone equipment cabinets. He’d checked out each of the cross tunnels for signs of intrusion. The only thing he hadn’t done was to pull up the steel deck plates lining the center of the main tunnel, and only because that would have taken all night.
He didn’t expect his runner to be on the move on a Monday night. The town bars would be pretty much dead as the party-hearty crowd sobered up after the weekend. Midshipmen would be grappling with the start of the working week, recovering from Monday-morning pop quizzes and getting some much-needed sleep after the exertions of weekend liberty. The motion detectors were still in place, but he had disconnected the receiver box and had it in his backpack.
He stood at the junction between the main tunnel and cross tunnel that led down to Michelson Hall. He could almost feel the weight of the concrete ceiling and the ground above pressing down on his head from inches away. The by-now-familiar odors of steam, hot lagging, and ozone permeated the air. From off to his right came the occasional clanking of traffic passing over a steam grate out on King George Street. He looked at his watch again: 10:59.
At precisely eleven o’clock, all the tunnel lights winked out. The main tunnel and all its branches went completely dark. He didn’t move, but he did close his eyes. The only sound now was the hum of a nearby electrical panel. After a few minutes, he opened his eyes and stared into the darkness. The first thing he noticed was that the darkness was not complete; he could still see. Up and down the tunnel, there were small lights, most of them green but some amber, mounted on the front of the electrical panels. The green lights indicated conditions normal, while the amber lights indicated that power was present in the panel. There was a red glow in the far distance to his left, which probably came from the transformer bank recessed into the tunnel wall next to the telephone amplifier vault.
Okay, he thought. Only partial success. He had wanted to see if it was possible to put the tunnels into complete darkness on command. He had talked to the PWC people and they had figured out a signal that could be detected on their utility control panels in the Academy’s power plant. All Jim had to do was to go up to any electrical panel, open the main breaker, and then close it again. An alarm indicating a power interruption would flash on the PWC’s control console, and that would be the prearranged signal to kill all the lighting circuits in the tunnel for fifteen minutes, as long as the alarm popped up during a designated time period. Jim had designated the time window before going down into the tunnels.
His objective had been to lie in wait for the runner, using his motion detectors. Once he detected movement, he’d plunge the tunnel system into darkness. Then with night-vision goggles and whatever faint ambient light came from the indicator lights on the electrical panels, he would have the advantage over his quarry. The problem was that there were too many indicators producing too much ambient light. He might have the advantage for the first minute or so while the runner’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, but then the runner would be able to see, at least well enough to react. Jim couldn’t get away from the feeling that the runner knew this labyrinth better than he did.
Okay, he thought, I’ll have to get some electrical insulating tape. Go down the tunnels and tape over all but a very few of these lights. But that’s going to take a lot of time. Shit. This isn’t going to work. Unless he got some backup. He could always call in the Yard cops, but the tunnels didn’t lend themselves to having lots of people operating down there. The runner had always managed to sniff out Jim’s presence very quickly, so more cops meant fewer chances of surprise. Assuming the vampire had some place in town to ditch the costume, he could always go back through the main gate if he had to. That would mean risking being hit with a conduct offense, but there would be no way to tie him to what had been going on out in town.
Think, Jim told himself. You’re after one guy. You’ve locked him out of one of his main avenues of escape, at least until he figures out how to get through those locks. You know the way he’s been coming back-through that grate on the St. John’s campus. So put a surveillance team on the grate? But that would mean Yard cops operating out in town, on the St. John’s campus, where they had zero jurisdiction. He didn’t want to bring Annapolis cops into this, either, in case it was a midshipman. The Ops boss had made it very clear they didn’t need another scandal popping up just now. Which meant he needed to take this guy on federal property.
The lights all came back on in a hum of fluorescent starters. He blinked at the sudden brightness and realized he’d been thinking in circles. He had an idea, but first he wanted to check something. He walked down the tunnel toward the King George Street access doors until he came to the shark tag drawn on the concrete wall. There had been no change since the last alteration, after he’d put his own tag down. He fished for the can of spray paint, which was still in his backpack. Standing close, he sprayed ONE-ON-ONE, followed by the numerals 2400. Below the shark figure, he sprayed on IF YOU’RE MAN ENOUGH. Then signed it HMC.
He stood back and examined his handiwork. He’d have to alert PWC to make sure they didn’t clean off the tag now that it was getting bigger. Then he’d come back tomorrow night, around nine or so, to see if there’d been some indication his runner had seen it. Some kind of a reply. Then maybe aim at Wednesday night to set up for his first real try. Get some backup, but put it in the Yard, out of general sight but close enough to the major grates within the Yard for quick response time.