He took her down the concrete stairs. With a flick of a switch the basement blazed with light, illuminating the space and its contents.
He found a flashlight in a tool chest and switched it on. Crossing to the electric panel, he cut the power to all the breakers. The lights went out, not only down in the basement, but all through the house, along with the alarm system.
“In the center of the basement is a storm drain,” el Enterrador had told them. “The water table beneath the house dictates a large one.”
Large enough to accommodate a human being.
Using the flashlight’s beam, Bourne found the drain. Rebeka moaned as he set her down. The hilt of the knife still stuck out of her side. He could not pull it out without a resultant gush of blood.
Even if he bound the wound, it would bleed far more than it was now.
Curling his fingers around the grate that covered the drain, he hauled upward. It wouldn’t budge.
All of a sudden, he heard the sound of running boot soles on the floorboards above his head. He looked over at Rebeka, the blood staining the bare concrete near her. Upstairs, there would be a clear trail to the basement door.
Charles Thorne, in his enormous king-size bed, drifted restlessly in and out of sleep.
He heard the front door click closed, and he sat up. Or had he dreamed it? He heard soft footfalls coming toward the bedroom. He knew the gait as well as he knew his own.
His wife was home.
“Did I wake you?” Ann Ring said from her position in the open doorway.
“Would it matter?” He was trying to shake the sleep out of his head.
“Not really.”
That exchange, as much as anything, defined their relationship. A marriage fueled by hot sex had been transformed into a marriage of convenience as the chemicals cooled and dissolved into the routine of daily life.
He watched his wife as she strode into the bedroom, crossing to her dresser, where she began to take off her jewelry.
“It’s almost seven in the morning. Where were you?”
“The same place as you. Out.”
Staring at Ann’s back, pale and shimmery in the city light, as she unzipped and shrugged off her dress, Thorne could recall a time when the heat between them was so unbearable all they could think of was melding together, no matter where they were. Now he seemed to be watching a photograph. Now it was unbearable to look at her and admit to himself what he had lost.
What has become of me? he wondered. How did I wander so far off course? There was no answer, of course, apart from the obvious one:
Life happened, one decision at a time, a tiny incision in a rock face becoming a landslide under which he was now in imminent danger of being buried.
Naked, Ann went into the bathroom and flicked on the lights. A moment later, as he heard the shower come on, he got out of bed and padded over to where her clothes were puddled on the floor. By the wedge of light thrown from the bathroom, he went through the hip pockets of her dress, then rooted in her small clutch.
A shadow passed across him and he froze.
“Can I help you with something?” Ann stood in the doorway, watching him with the coldly luminous eyes of a reptile. She hadn’t stepped into the shower after all. He closed his eyes, raging at himself for falling into so obvious a trap. Obvious in retrospect. His hate for her was so powerful he could taste it. Then she moved. “Get away from my things, you pathetic sonofabitch.”
He stepped back hurriedly as she snatched her purse from his hand.
“You want to know where I was?” Ann’s nostrils flared as she shook her head, contempt altering her expression. “I had a little visit with Mr. Li.”
As his eyes widened, a smile curled her lips. “That’s right, your Mr. Li.” She opened a drawer of her dresser, put the clutch inside, then leaned on the open drawer as if to show him how much he wearied her. “Only, he never was your Mr. Li. Not exclusively, anyway.”
“How...?” Thorne felt paralyzed. His brain seemed to have lost the ability to string two thoughts together. “How did you...?”
She laughed silently. “Who do you think introduced him to his Israeli girlfriend?”
Back at the toolbox, Bourne grabbed a crowbar and used it to pry up the grate.
Setting it aside, he trained the beam of light down to see the trajectory of the drain. It was a sheer vertical drop for only about seven or eight feet, after which there was a bend as it sloped slightly farther down. He gripped the flashlight between his teeth and gathered Rebeka into his arms. Holding her against him, he slid down the storm drain, the soles of his shoes thudding hard against the bottom of the vertical drop.
Shifting her slightly in his arms brought no response from her. Tilting his head so the beam of light lit up her face, he saw that her eyes were closed. The wound in her side was deep, and he wondered if the knife blade had nicked, or even penetrated, a vital organ. There was no way to tell. He tried again to stanch the flow of blood but was only partially successful.
“Rebeka,” he said softly. Then forcefully. But her eyes opened only after he had slapped her cheek. “Don’t pass out on me,” he said. “I’m getting you out of here.” Her eyes gazed up at him, slightly out of focus. “Just hold on a little longer.”
The urgency of escape weighed on him, and he negotiated her through the bend, then scuttled along the slope, which became less and less severe. Their escape route smelled of concrete, dead leaves, and rot. The bottom of it was wet and dank. Echoes of their progress followed them like ghosts fleeing into the darkness.
He tilted his head upward, playing the beam of light across the top of the drainpipe, looking for the service junction el Enterrador had told them was three hundred yards beyond the wall of the estate and emerged onto a heavily treed area of Lincoln Park.
The pipe was slowly narrowing, something el Enterrador had failed to mention. Bourne’s progress was slowed by the constant maneuvering of Rebeka’s body to fit the changing dimensions. He kept going, murmuring a soft litany to keep her conscious. There was still no sign of the service junction. Just then, the beam of light began to stutter. Darkness replaced light. It returned, but with a dimmer wattage. The batteries were failing.
Bourne redoubled his efforts to move forward quickly, but the drainpipe continued to narrow, obliging him to inch along, headfirst, Rebeka’s body on top of him. He could feel the beat of her heart, the shudder of her breathing, which was becoming ragged as she fought for air. He had to get her out of the ground and into the air immediately.
He kept going forward, inch by bloody inch, every second crucial now. The flashlight failed again, took longer to come on, the beam faded, worn-out and flickering. But in its inconstant illumination, Bourne at last saw the outline of the service junction, a vertical shaft up to the park.
Trying to pick up speed, he dragged Rebeka along with him, his back raw and wet through his clothes from scraping along the bottom of the pipe. A semicircular rim, shimmering like a sliver of moon in a nighttime sky, beckoned to him and then winked out as the flashlight’s batteries finally failed. He was plunged into the pitch black.
Natasha Illion?” Thorne felt the world slipping from beneath his feet. “I don’t—”
“Understand?” Ann held her icy smile. “Poor Charles. Let’s just say Tasha and I are friends and leave it at that.”