“Someone over there in Bancroft Hall may have asked the same thing your minister asked you, ‘Whom are you weeping for?’”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Do you miss Joanne?” she asked.
He thought about what to say. They’d started something yesterday, and he didn’t want to derail that, not now. “I think I miss the life we had. The stability. What seemed like predictability. My career was on track. She’d been taking courses to get back to speed in the financial-planning world. Julie was making it through the Academy. Our house was paid for. It looked like all we had to do was keep on trucking and life was going to be all right. Then it wasn’t.”
“But now it can be,” Liz said. “You can choose to come out of the cave. Like you did yesterday. And I’m awfully glad you did.”
He smiled across at her. “It was a pretty irresistible package,” he said. The phone began to ring in the house. Ev got up and went into the kitchen to get it. It was Julie.
“Dad,” she said.
“Himself,” he replied. “What’s up?”
“I went to that interview today. Did Liz tell you?”
“Yes,” he said, glancing at the silhouette of Liz’s head through the kitchen window. “She said we watch and wait.”
“I guess,” said Julie. “And I read in the Capital about what you did yesterday-saving those two people? That was shit-hot.”
“It was worse for them than for me,” he said. “All I had to do was swim fifty feet through a medium chop, twice. They’d been hanging on for an eternity. And they lost a husband and father, it looks like.”
“Were they from here?”
“Don’t think so. Once the medics got to them, I never saw them again.”
“Lucky for them you were right there. That was Liz’s yacht?”
“Yes. We’d gone out for the afternoon. She apparently goes out on the bay every Sunday. Invited me along this time.”
“Just the two of you?”
He took a deep breath before answering. “Yes, Julie. Just the two of us.” He saw Liz’s head turn when he said that. He waited.
“She’s pretty impressive,” Julie said finally. “She’s tougher than you might think, too.”
“From your perspective, that should be good,” he said.
“I suppose, but I don’t want you hurt. I guess I’m getting tired of all these surprises, and I haven’t even made it out into the world yet.”
“From what Liz told me, you did well today. Especially by refusing that lie-detector test. You knew the old rule about those, did you?”
“Yep. I watch TV, too, Dad.”
He laughed. “Have to admit, that’s where I heard it. Okay. Let me know if anything else pops up.”
“Is she there now, Dad? Liz?”
None of your damn business, he thought. “Good night, Julie,” he said, and hung up. He went back out to the porch.
“Why’d she call?” Liz asked.
“To find out what I was doing on your boat yesterday, unchaperoned.”
“Ah,” she said. “You know what?”
“What?”
“Seems to me,” she said softly, setting her glass down, “that we’re unchaperoned right now.”
Monday night and all’s well. Sort of. That security dink’s been poking around in my tunnels again, and, guess what? This time he issued a challenge. Like, I think he wants a duel. Mano a mano. As if. Hasn’t he been keeping score? So far, he’s had his face painted, a singular chance to become a rocket man, and a steam bath. All courtesy of yours truly. And, as you know, he’s even been scoping out the Goth scene in town at our favorite public watering hole. As opposed to our favorite private watering hole, where we tend to get everything wet, don’t we.
I think it’s time this nosy bastard has himself a near-death experience. Those are my tunnels. I see all and hear all. This dimwit puts up listening devices and motion detectors and I don’t know what, and thinks I can’t see those, either. I can. I can even make them do things I want them to do, if I put my mind to it. Except time is short, for both of us, really. If we had a year, I could make his little toys light up his life, so to speak. Connect one of his little transmitter cases to a six-hundred-volt line. Make it malfunction. Get him to check it out. To handle it. Just for one night-wouldn’t want to hurt any of the permanent tunnel rats from Public Works. You should see what a couple of those guys do down there after hours. My, my. Big strong men like that-you’d think they’d like girls.
So maybe I’ll up the ante, even if time is short. He’s been creeping around, going into places that aren’t safe. I’m sure Public Works has told him those places aren’t safe. And they really aren’t, because I’ve already been there, and I’ve made some arrangements. I could make him just flat disappear, you know that? I can make anyone here disappear. Except you, of course. I can’t make you disappear. And don’t want to, not yet anyway. But I can make your life increasingly-what’s the word? Interesting. You spin your little tales; I’ll spin mine. In the meantime, HMC needs to watch his back. Or front. Haven’t made up my mind yet, but either one will do, when the time comes.
10
On Tuesday morning, Jim met Mike Carrick, the PWC utilities manager, at the Stribling Walk down ramp into the main tunnels. He’d asked the manager to bring along the keys to the Fort Severn tunnels. Above them, the sky was darkening fast with the approach of a spring thunderstorm. They hurried down the concrete steps and into the main tunnel just as the rain began. When they got down to the descending alcove leading to the big oak doors, Jim found a small crew already there. They had the left-hand door open. A battery of portable air handlers was doing a fresh-air exchange into the normally sealed tunnels.
“Gas-free engineering,” Carrick shouted above the roar of the Red Devil blowers. “No telling how much oxygen’s down there. Or how little.”
“How much longer?” Jim said.
As if they’d heard him, the crews switched off the blowers and began retrieving several feet of bulky air hose from the tunnels.
“They’ve given it thirty minutes of air exchange,” Carrick said. “Let them do their tests, and then you can go in.”
“Not coming with me?”
“Not on your life,” Carrick said. He stepped forward and tapped the top of the brick arch nearest to the doorway. A fine snowfall of masonry dust wafted down. “You want to go down there, be our guest. But I’ll require that you pull an air line with you for when it caves in.”
“ When? Is it really that bad?” Jim asked, eyeing the moldering brickwork.
“It might be, although we haven’t had a cave-in since the eastern gun gallery tunnel collapsed. But that was some years ago. Arches are Roman engineering. Pretty strong. But those are basically mud bricks, well over a hundred years old.”
The test engineer went into the left-hand tunnel for a distance of about thirty feet and tested the air for free oxygen and any explosive gases with his instruments. Then he backed out. “You want us to do the right-hand tunnel?”
Jim shook his head. “The map shows it’s a mirror image of the left-hand side. Is that correct?”
Carrick nodded, looking at his diagrams. “It ends up in a magazine that’s right under the front walls of Lejeune Hall,” he said. “The map doesn’t show it, but I think there’s a connector tunnel between the two branches. Probably caved in by now.”
“I’m only interested in this left-hand side,” Jim said.
“How come?” Carrick asked.
“I think some mids have been into it,” he said. “Can I have your site map?”
“Right here. Layout’s pretty simple. Two tunnels, parallel for two hundred feet. Then they branch left and right, respectively, into the magazine vaults. That’s where I think that cross tunnel is, but, like I said, it isn’t on the map.”
“Okay,” Jim said.
“From the magazines, there were two tunnels that kept going out to where the gun pits were. That would be under the landfill now, and they’ve collapsed. Sealed them with cement-block walls. The main tunnels are one level below where we’re standing right now. The magazines are one level below the main tunnels. Steel doors, no locks. Oh, and the left magazine is flooded, by the way. Okay so far?”