“Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice’s voice said in his ear. Scared the shit out of him. “There is definitely a basement.”
The two men exchanged smiles and continued to the first floor. “Found the building plans, did you?” he said, stealing her thunder.
“I did,” she said. “According to the drawings, there’s a door to the basement in the wall under the curved part of the main staircase.”
“And to think we missed something so obvious,” Boxers said.
“That was sarcasm, wasn’t it?” Venice said.
“Yeah, just a little bit.”
On the main level again, Boxers and Jonathan stood together at the spot where the door should be, but a decorative bench sat crosswise at the spot, under a huge painting of red flowers against a black background. The painting was maybe five feet wide by eight feet tall, and now that he looked at it — really looked at it, as opposed to noticing it through his peripheral vision — Jonathan thought that it looked out of place.
“Damn, that’s a big painting,” he said.
“Almost big enough to be a door, isn’t it?”
Together, they dragged the bench out of the way to gain better access, and saw why the bench was there in the first place. It disguised the bottom two feet of what was most definitely a door.
Jonathan ran his fingers down the back side of the left edge frame, expecting to find some kind of latch, but when none was there, he pulled. He felt some give, so he pulled harder. On the third tug, he heard a thunk, and the picture floated away from the wall, suspended by a recessed hinge on the right-hand edge.
“Look what you did,” Boxers said.
“The door is masked by a painting,” Jonathan said for Venice’s benefit.
That door led to a second door immediately behind it, but the second door was locked.
“Step away,” Boxers said. “I can open that.” He took a preparatory step back, prepared for a kick.
“Stop!” Jonathan said, raising his hand. “Look.” He’d found the buttons for the elevator, recessed into the jamb. This was definitely a custom-built job, much larger than most household elevators.
Boxers looked disappointed that he didn’t get to kick anything. They both drew their pistols again.
The instant Jonathan pushed the button, the elevator began to hum, and the floor vibrated. Together, through shared instinct, the two men flanked the door. It never made sense to stand in front of a closed door.
“We’re going off VOX,” Jonathan said, and he flipped the appropriate switch on his radio. This was a time of high concentration. He didn’t need the distraction of knowing that he was broadcasting live.
Jonathan could tell from the hissing of the mechanism that the elevator operated on hydraulics, and that the basement was either very deep, or the elevator moved very slowly. A bump announced the car’s arrival on the first floor.
“How do you want to handle it?” Boxers asked.
“You pull and I’ll shoot,” Jonathan said.
Since Boxers was on the hinge side of the door, it made sense that he would nab the knob and pull it toward himself while Jonathan took a position in front of the expanding opening. Jonathan prayed that all he’d see was empty elevator car.
His prayers were answered. But the stench of decay, driven by the breeze of the opening door, hit him like a wall. Blood smears painted the floor of the car. And when he looked behind him, back into the foyer, he could see evidence that someone had cleaned blood from the floor out there.
Boxers recoiled from it. “Ah, shit. I’m gonna have nothing but nightmares, aren’t I?”
With a growing sense of dread, Jonathan led the way into the elevator car, closed the door, and pressed the down button, triggering another bump and another hum. Jonathan found himself breathing through his mouth as they descended.
“I don’t expect to find any threat,” Jonathan said. “But—”
“We’ve got to be prepared,” Boxers said, finishing his sentence for him. “We’ve danced this number a few times, you know.” His Beretta M9 hung by his thigh.
When the elevator settled on the basement floor, Jonathan steeled himself with a deep breath — through his mouth — and reached for the doorknob. “You ready?”
“No.”
Jonathan understood that to mean yes. “All right, here we go.” With his pistol held high, nearly under his chin, Jonathan dropped to his right knee and pushed open the door. “Ah, shit.” Even without looking, he knew that this was the kill room.
He stepped out of the elevator into a modern medical suite, complete with blinding lights and stainless-steel everything. He recognized it right away as a clandestine hospital, a place where government agencies sent patients for treatment that never officially happened. The suite explained the opulence of the house, as well. Uncle Sam did a shitload of things wrong, but when it came to taking care of his damaged covert operators, no expense was spared, no corner cut. Jonathan himself had had a foot or two of colon removed in one such place not all that long ago.
“This is not what I expected,” Boxers said, taking in the details.
Coming off the elevator, there was only one direction to turn, and that was to the right. Jonathan led the way, as he always did because of his relative size. Ahead and to the right lay a brightly lit operatory, its curtains pulled wide open. The blood-smear motif continued on the floors, though less concentrated than in the elevator.
Jonathan approached cautiously, with Big Guy half a step behind him.
There was no way he could have prepared himself for what he saw as he button-hooked the corner.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Venice fist-pumped the air. The fugitives had in fact made a phone call from their motel room. She didn’t know the content, of course, but she did have the number they called and the duration of the conversation. It was a Michigan number, from the greater Detroit metropolitan area, and the conversation lasted for just a little over six minutes.
“Why would they do that?” she asked aloud. “Why would Jolaine allow that to happen?” She was supposed to be smart about such things.
The fact that the call went to Detroit rang a big warning bell. Michigan sported a greater concentration of Muslims per square foot than anywhere else in the country, and as much as Venice knew in her heart and in her brain that the vast majority of Muslims were wonderful, peace-loving people, she was enough of a realist to embrace the fact that the religion also fielded the lion’s share of the world’s terrorists.
“Stop it,” she said. “Let the facts drive the conclusions.” It was one of the most important lessons she’d learned from her boss: always sideline presumptions until such time as they can be supported by facts.
Right now, the only fact she knew was that a phone call had been made, and that wasn’t necessarily a causal link to anything. At least not yet.
The link materialized about thirty seconds later, when she cross-referenced the time of the call to Detroit with the time of the first calls to 911 to report the shooting. Less than thirty minutes’ difference. That raised the coincidence to the level of undeniability. The call triggered the shoot-out.
How?
“By tipping their hand to their location.” Venice often talked her way through difficult problems. Somehow, when she heard her voice say the words, her thoughts fell into place more easily.
“And that makes the person on the other end of the phone a bad guy!” She supposed it was obvious from the beginning, but it felt like a real ta-da moment.
“Okay, Mr. Bad Guy,” she said. “Who are you?”
The number traced to a physical address in Highland Park, Michigan — another surprise, because if Venice were going to be a bad guy, she’d use only disposable cell phones. The fact that he didn’t could mean any number of things, but in this case, she assumed that he was a rookie at this terrorism thing. There was a lot of that going on around the world now.