She didn’t need a large tunnel, just the size of a manhole cover, big enough to wriggle through and to push debris back behind her. There was always the possibility that the tunnel might collapse, but she could do nothing about that. After a minute, digging with her “shovel,” she had advanced another foot. The distance from the desk to the room’s doorway was about eight feet, if she remembered correctly. So, roughly eight more minutes of digging. Call it ten. She was unhurt, had the tool and the energy and the will. Whether she had the air remained to be seen.
After five minutes, she was panting and her head hurt, signs that the oxygen level in her tunnel was dangerously low. When her vision started to gray, she would be close to passing out. Her arms and back and neck muscles were burning, but she had to keep chopping and clearing, extending the tunnel, inching forward, doing it over again and again.
She had to work hard enough to progress, but not so fast that she burned through all the oxygen too soon. From rock climbing she had developed the ability to shut out fear and distraction by focusing on the tiniest grains and flakes and color variations right in front of her eyes. She did that here, concentrating on the ice in her headlamp’s white circle.
Finally she chopped what looked and at first felt like solid snow, felt something change, chopped harder, broke through. Created an opening, made it larger, breathed fresh air. It had been close. Her blood carbon dioxide level was dangerously high. For a while she lay there panting. Then she pulled herself out of the tunnel, into the hallway. The force of the cave-in had splintered the office’s plywood walls on either side of the door frame. Snow and ice had flowed out and now formed a sloping pile that blocked half of the passage.
Something groaned overhead. A cracking noise. The floor twitched. She looked up, heard another crack, turned and started running. Old Pole was less complex than the Underground, and here there were more landmarks that she’d committed to memory on the way in. Several minutes later, she was standing at the foot of the access shaft. Her light shone all the way to its top.
There was no ladder.
Someone had pulled it up. Why would anyone do that? Only two possible reasons: They didn’t want anybody going down into Old Pole. Or they didn’t want her to leave it. Right now it didn’t matter. What mattered was finding a way out. Maybe there were other access shafts. She would have to search the whole complex, corridor by corridor, room by room. There was no telling where else Polies might have gained entrance or where original shafts might exist. At any moment, the whole thing could come down on her. While that was always true in caves, as well, she knew that snow and ice would be less stable than solid rock. Even if she located another shaft, the chances of finding a ladder dangling handily for her convenience were slim. But there was nothing else to do.
She retraced her earlier route, moving through the galley, stopping at the T intersection. She stepped out into the intersecting passage, searching for some rationale about which way to go. There really wasn’t one. So she would be like a rat in maze, blundering around blind, relying on the most inefficient search method of alclass="underline" trial and error.
She had turned right before — a trial in that direction. Not very far, true, but a trial. She turned left, followed that corridor until it dead-ended at a cave-in. She turned around and retraced her steps though that corridor, exploring four other side passages. Two ended in cave-ins, two others with plywood walls. She went back to the point where she had started. Having explored everything the left corridor offered, she would do a more complete search of the right.
Half an hour later, she was back where she had started. Her primary light was dimming. She was thirsty and shivering and feeling weak. When had she last eaten? Couldn’t remember. Felt dizzy, took two steps, faltered. Stood carefully, one hand on the ice wall to steady herself while her head cleared. Started to move again, stopped. She stood perfectly still, then stepped out into the center of the corridor. Turned a full circle.
She yanked off her clumsy overmitts and removed the thick wool Dachstein mitts underneath, leaving only a pair of pile gloves. They would keep her hands from going numb for maybe sixty seconds. That should be enough for her to unzip one of the Big Red’s pockets and find what she wanted. It took ten seconds to get the stiff zipper working, another five to pull it open. Ten more to search around in the cavernous pocket, feeling and discarding the energy bar, the multitool, cellphone, spare headlamp batteries. Finally feeling the unmistakable shape of the thing she sought, she removed a small metal cylinder. Unscrewing its top, she withdrew a wooden match, struck it against the cylinder’s abrasive bottom, and waited for the flame to stabilize. Then she very carefully raised it high over her head, as if offering the tiny fire to some ancient deity.
53
“She did not strike me as the type who is late,” Guillotte said.
“No. We’ll give her another fifteen minutes, then go looking,” Merritt said.
It only took ten. “We were beginning to worry about you,” Merritt said when Hallie banged through the door. Then, looking at her more closely: “What happened to your face? How did it get all scratched like that?”
“I’m calling the dive.”
“What? Why?” Merritt said. Guillotte moved to one side, between Hallie and the door.
“I found Fida down in Old Pole. Dead. Then I almost got buried by a cave-in. A few feet one way or the other and I’d still be there.”
“How did you get out?” Guillotte asked.
“In caving, you follow moving air to find an exit. It worked in Old Pole, too. When Rockie’s Cat went down, it exposed one of the passageways. I found it by following moving air and climbed out. The hammers I’d used were still there.”
Guillotte was staring at Hallie with something like admiration, shaking his head. “Incroyable. You are a tough woman to kill.”
She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “What?”
“You’re diving,” Merritt said. “Get your gear on.”
“I just told you I don’t want to dive.”
“It doesn’t matter what you want.”
Hallie suddenly understood. “So this is about the extremophile? And money. I didn’t think you were one of those, Agnes.”
“We need to kill her.” Guillotte might have been ordering escargot. Hallie turned to stare. He said, “I thought yanking out one of those timbers would be the end of you.”
She was already scanning for a weapon. The workbench was a veritable armory: hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, a couple of blowtorches.
“Do not even think about that.” Guillotte moved to within arm’s reach of Hallie. “It would only make this much longer and more painful than it has to be.” To Merritt he said, “Let us get to it.” He stepped closer and clamped one hand around the back of Hallie’s neck. He had to reach up to do it, but his grip felt like a band of iron. His breath smelled heavily of alcohol. But not just alcohol.
Licorice.
Absinthe.
“It was you,” she said. “You fucking psychopath. You tortured Emily to death.” She felt her hands ball into fists. His grip on her neck tightened.