“Why tonight? Is this a long-term exile? Scully’s sending me to Elba?”
“Don’t start my day like this, Alex. Could be they’ll have Tanner in custody by then, and you just might choose to have dinner with the three of us because we haven’t seen much of you.”
Vickee and I had stayed up late into the night, talking and catching up on personal things. She was as smart a detective as anyone on the job and had used her skills-and our long friendship-to try to soothe and distract me.
The clothes I picked up when we stopped by my apartment were perfectly suited for a day exploring the nether regions of Grand Central Terminal. I had on a man-tailored shirt with rolled-up sleeves, hanging out over my jeans, and my running shoes. Don Ledger had told us we’d be covered in dust and soot by the time we had satisfied our curiosity.
“I’d like to do dinner,” I said. “Anytime. But on my own terms, not because I’ve been exiled.”
“Understood.”
“You hear from anyone this morning?” I asked, as Mercer drove through the quiet streets of Douglaston, a section of Queens known for its upscale suburban feel, despite its New York City address. The homes were good-looking and spacious, many of them set on large pieces of land.
“No calls. And there aren’t any news reports of bodies found.”
“We’re meeting Mike at Grand Central?”
“Eight o’clock.”
We were both pretty quiet on the ride in. I e-mailed messages to my team at the office, since it was unlikely I would see them today, depending on how things went at the terminal. It was summer Friday hours, and many of them would take off early for weekends in the Hamptons or on the Jersey Shore.
“Calls about the victim on the private train should start coming in,” I said. I was surfing the Internet for stories about the murder and saw that her photograph had been released late last night with an announcement by Scully.
The New York Post led with the banner headline TERMINAL! above a grainy shot of the murdered girl, and a caption described her last train ride through the century-old landmark as a FAST TRACK TO DEATH.
“Rocco’s ready.”
The highway traffic was relatively light until we reached the Triborough Bridge. Mercer navigated the lanes and made his way to the 42nd Street exit on the FDR without using lights and sirens, which was always my temptation when with him.
We reached Don Ledger’s office within the terminal at eight fifteen and found him and Mike waiting for us. Muscling through the crowd of commuters to get to him seemed more dangerous than battling traffic on the city streets.
“I’ve got permission to take you down to the subbasement,” Ledger said, after we finished the coffee he offered us.
“Is that a big deal?” I asked.
“Very big, Ms. Cooper. And not a bad place to start if you want to wreak some havoc here.”
“How could someone get in if it’s so mysterious?” Mike asked.
“Like I said, this room doesn’t exist on any blueprint of Grand Central. If I wanted to hide, it’s the perfect spot to be.”
“But off-limits to the public.”
“Course it is. My boss tells me the man you’re looking for seems to know his way around Terminal City. And I’m telling you that in the one hundred years since this place was built, no one knows where all the holes in this building are today. Or all the keys.”
“Let’s get moving,” Mike said.
The four of us began our march out of Ledger’s office and onto the main concourse. He weaved his way through the masses to the western staircase and down to the lower level, then gathered us around him at the bottom.
“We’re going to M42, the deepest basement in New York City.”
“M42?” I asked.
“Shorthand for the main substation under 42nd Street.”
“You mean that’s not where Lex Luthor’s lair is?” Mike said. In the 1978 movie version of Superman, the villain lived in an elegant apartment deep in the bowels of Grand Central.
“No, sir. But this one is totally off the charts, and if you wanted to bring New York City to a standstill, you’d head right for this spot in the terminal.”
We walked another three minutes to get to a deserted corridor, stopping in front of a narrow elevator door that looked too obsolete to move. Don Ledger had a chain that dangled from his belt, packed with twenty-five or thirty keys. He shuffled them to find the right one for the unmarked elevator.
There was only one button to press, and the descent was slow.
“How deep are we going?” I asked.
“Terminal City was blasted into the bedrock of Manhattan, but nothing goes farther down than this. Not the basement of the old World Trade Center, not the bullion vaults at the Federal Reserve Bank. We’re going more than ten stories under the train tracks.”
“Kind of like the water tunnel that’s being built across town,” I said, recalling the treacherous time that the three of us spent with the city’s sandhogs. I swallowed hard to clear the blockage in my ears.
“Does anyone work down here?” Mercer asked.
“Just a small crew. The original equipment has been updated, so it pretty much runs by itself.”
The doors creaked apart, and we stepped off onto a small platform to begin our hike, one by one, down a winding steel staircase. Ledger reminded us to watch our step. I held on to the railing, needing no reminder.
Three flights down, he opened a heavy door, and we were all inside M42, a concrete bunker that I guessed was at least the same size as the main concourse above us-eighty thousand square feet.
The room was sealed closed like a giant burial vault, airless and oppressive.
“You all right, Coop?” Mike asked. “You’re white as a sheet.”
“It’s so hot down here I can barely breathe,” I said, fanning myself with my notepad. “What’s that buzzing noise?”
“So this is the room that powers Grand Central Terminal,” Ledger said. He led us into the center of several rows of massive machines. The ones to my left looked a century old, and the ones to my right seemed much more modern.
“The noise, Ms. Cooper, comes from these rows of transformers.” Ledger was pointing to the new machines, which emitted a loud monotonous humming sound. “What transformers do is convert alternating current-you know, AC?-into direct current-DC.”
I nodded my head, although the subject had been beyond my grasp since high school.
“Most power is delivered in AC, which moves back and forth, while DC is always going in one direction. So it’s a much more efficient way to run trains.”
“I think I understand,” I said to Ledger, before turning to whisper to Mercer. “At least I understand well enough that I want to get out of this hotbox. I’m suffocating.”
He wiped his brow with his handkerchief and then handed it to me. “Be patient.”
“What happens if you stop these machines?” Mike asked.
“You bring to a halt every train going in and out of the terminal. Five hundred and thirty-eight of them a day.”
“Back-up generator?”
“Not a chance, Detective. There is no way to power up this operation if all this stops.”
“What are those antiques?” Mike asked, pointing to the older equipment and walking away from us, between the machines.
“The original rotary converters.”
Each one was the size of a small building, cylindrical in shape with a rust-colored coating on top of both. We followed Mike in between the machines, our footsteps falling like leaden weights on the concrete floor, echoing throughout the room.
“So this is what Hitler was looking for,” he said, patting the side of one of the silent giants. The machine dwarfed him. That seemed to be the scale of everything in the terminal.
“You know that story?” Ledger asked.