“I’m replacing the grille,” he called to her. “You go get the Marines. I’ll duke it out here. Who knows? Maybe they won’t find me, at least right off.”
“Michael!” Lynn yelled loud enough to hurt her ears in the confines of the duct. “That’s not fair. You tricked me!”
“For good reason,” Michael said. “If they found this grille detached, they would know what we were up to. This way you have a fighting chance, not that I envy you. Go to it, girl!”
“Michael,” Lynn yelled again, but with a bit less volume. “Don’t do this! We are a team. Those were your words.”
“Sorry,” Michael said. “The ball’s through the hoop and the game’s over. Good luck!”
“Michael, please!” Lynn yelled, but he didn’t answer. “Michael, are you still there?” Silence reigned.
“Holy shit,” Lynn murmured. For a moment she debated trying to back up and see if she could kick the grate off. The reality was that she didn’t think she could. Instead, after taking another breath, she began crawling forward, going deeper into the confined, utter darkness.
48.
Thursday, April 9, 3:24 A.M.
Benton Rhodes clicked off his smartphone and slipped it into his pocket. He had been playing Angry Birds to entertain himself but he had run out of patience. He checked the time. More than two hours had passed since the security team had gone after the students. Although they had quickly cornered and tranquilized one of them after a relatively short chase, the other was irritatingly still at large.
“That’s it,” Benton said. He pushed back his chair and stood up to stretch. He, Fyodor, and Misha were still in the control center. Viktor had been busy supervising the Shapiro staff to get the automation equipment on floors four through six that had been shut down back online.
Fyodor and Misha turned to look at him. They, too, had been killing time. Everybody was tired and on edge.
“I think we should go ahead with the mock surgery on the male,” Benton said. “There is no reason to wait to find the female, and Dr. Phillips has been ready for almost an hour.”
“Fine with us,” Fyodor said.
“When do you think you’ll find the female?” Benton asked. He couldn’t keep derision from his voice.
“It should be soon,” Fyodor said. “We have brought in more personnel, and we are going to be systematic about it, starting from the sixth floor and working down. Frankly we are surprised she has eluded us this long. Obviously she’s found somewhere to hide. We didn’t expect that they would split up.”
“Can one of you get me to the patient viewing room A?”
“Of course,” Fyodor said.
49.
Thursday, April 9, 4:35 A.M.
Lynn could tell she was nearing the end of what had been an arduous journey, both physically and psychologically. The first hour had been the hardest, as the size of the duct remained small. She had come to multiple junctions, some of which were hard for her to negotiate. At times she had to squeeze forward on her side and bend at the waist to get around sharp corners. As difficult as it was in places where she had to negotiate what seemed initially like insurmountable barriers, she seriously questioned whether she would be able to back up. A few times she used the flashlight app on her phone to help, but otherwise she remained in absolute darkness. Purposefully, she mostly kept her eyes tightly closed. With them open, she felt more claustrophobic and frightened. She was thankful there was a constant and gradually increasing breeze moving through the duct, assuring her she was moving in the right direction, particularly at junctions. The draft also kept her from feeling suffocated in the tight space. As difficult a time as she was having, she tried not to think about Michael and what he might be facing.
After the first hour of worming her way deeper and deeper into the system, the dimensions of the duct increased in a progressive, incremental fashion. Eventually she was able to make significant headway when the duct became large enough for her to crawl on all fours, as she and Michael had done in the conveyor tunnel. When the duct angled downward, she adopted a sitting position to slide down on her backside, as if she were on a slide in a children’s playground. But out of fear that she might collide with something at the bottom, she inched along, keeping her feet pressed against the sides.
Once the duct again became flat and she could walk bent over at the waist, she made better time. To help orient herself, she ran her hands lightly along the metal sides. As she continued forward, she became more and more aware that the noise level and the turbulence of the moving air were increasing. She guessed they were coming from fans, which she assumed had to be large and powerful to move so much air over so great a distance. It dawned on her that she was getting close, and she began to worry that in the dark she might stumble into one of them.
Such concerns forced her to turn on her flashlight app before proceeding, yet she soon realized that using such a bright light would quickly exhaust her phone’s battery. Instead of the flashlight app, she just used the light from the screen, which was more than adequate. The only problem was that the phone kept turning off.
A hundred feet farther on, the duct suddenly enlarged significantly, and ten feet beyond that, the passageway was completely blocked by a large dark gray filter screen. From the noise and vibration, Lynn could tell that the fan or fans were just on the other side.
With a new concern that she might be trapped by the filter blocking the duct, she approached it and reached out to see if it would hinge or somehow open. It didn’t move. With the battery clearly weakening, she went back to the flashlight app and shined what light it was producing around the filter’s border. That was when she noticed a narrow band of exterior light along the right-hand edge.
Lynn turned off her phone. The line of light along the filter’s border was easier to see, and stretched from the duct’s floor to its ceiling, giving her the idea that the filter slid in at that point from the outside. She tried again to move it by pushing in that direction. With some effort it moved this time. She pushed it out a few feet, noticing a dramatic increase in the airflow moving past her. To look beyond the filter, she went to turn on her flashlight again. But just before doing so, she noticed an additional, less intense vertical line of light coming in through the wall of the duct to her right, a few feet back from the filter.
Suddenly encouraged, Lynn turned her flashlight back on and shined it in the direction of this new line of light. What she saw was a hinged access panel and, most important, it was fitted with a handle. Pocketing her phone, she tried the handle. A moment later she was able to crack open the panel enough to see that beyond was a lighted machinery space.
As much as she wanted to burst out and escape the claustrophobic confines of the duct, Lynn forced herself to be slow and careful. Despite the noise and vibration of the fan or possibly fans, which had to be close beyond the filter, she tried to listen for any sounds of life in the machinery room. Quickly realizing it was impossible to tell, she carefully opened the panel farther, slowly and noiselessly, to afford herself a gradually expanding view of the room beyond. At that point in her ordeal the last thing she wanted was to run into someone and have to explain herself. Luckily she saw no one, even when the panel was wide open.