Eventually the tunnel gained some headroom, and I was able to draw up to full height. My feet echoed with wet clicks on the slimy concrete. I turned my flashlight on and followed the light, the beam wavering into strange patterns on the irregular, parabolic surfaces of the tunnel. Above my head was its thick stone shell and above that there was clay and river rock and then a thin layer of topsoil and then the streets and sidewalks of the living city.
I walked the tunnel murmuring something to myself, some old weird scrabbly lyric from my bone-hard childhood. Somewhere up ahead he was there, Jackdaw gone runner, cocooned in his bandages, waiting to get sent up to Canada. I wondered if anyone was down there with him-a flight attendant, someone to give him comfort, hold his hand in the darkness. Would it be Maris? Big, tough Maris? Or Officer Cook? Or young, pale-faced Father Barton himself?
I shook my head in the darkness. I don’t know why, but I knew that they would not be there with him. No flight attendant. No steward. I was picturing Jackdaw alone.
Alone and swathed and mired in pain. After what Dr. V had told me when I asked her that last question, what she had told me in a quick nervous rush about the extent of his injuries: the usual, she had said-exhaustion and dehydration, scar tissue new and old. And, less usually, symptoms consistent with acute toxicity.
“Now, what is that?” I said, playing baffled Kenny Morton, playing him to the hilt. “What does that mean?”
“It means he’d ingested some substance or combination of substances,” the doctor told Kenny. “It means he was poisoned.”
I made my careful way along the dark tunnel. I contemplated the man I was coming to see, all that he had undertaken and what he still had to face. What he still had to face was me, the monster coming slowly down the pipe to find him and do…do what, exactly, I still did not know. It was too late to ping Bridge and disappear. Like they say, I knew too much. But I didn’t know enough, either. Not yet.
I’d walked at least two miles. The tunnel was tilting slightly downslope, and it was getting colder, too. The air was heavy and damp, thick with uncirculated oxygen and the dank smell of the water.
I was getting closer. I took out the gun I hardly ever carried but was carrying tonight. Soon I’d find it, whatever it was-the dangling padlock, the walled-off chamber, the rock rolled in front of the mouth of the cave.
But when I got there, when I found the locked door, there was no lock. There was no door, even. I was sliding my palms roughly along either side of the tunnel, feeling for the narrow crack of a hung door or the bulge of a handle, when the left-side wall just opened up. I turned and crouched and held up the flashlight and found a narrow gap in the tunnel wall, like a secret left there for a child to find. I got down on my knees and turned off my light, although of course if he was in there-and I knew that he was, I knew that he was-he’d already have seen me, seen my light bobbling down the tunnel as I came, seen it shining into this hidey-hole on which there was no lock and no door.
They could have gotten in there, if they needed to. Bridge’s men, I mean; the recovery team. They’re ex-armed forces, those guys, big bastards. They’d roll in here with flash grenades, barking orders, they’d pull this shivering boy out and have him bundled in thirty seconds or less. Bridge’s men wouldn’t care what kind of shape he was in. They would come and take him. All I had to do was call. I’d explain myself to Bridge, about calling Janice and borrowing his voice, ha-ha, just having some fun. Maybe just maybe I was too valuable an asset to be thrown in that van next to Jackdaw.
Maybe I should have just turned around. Done my job. The one I had agreed to do six years ago. All I had to do was go back up there and make the call.
I passed into this new chamber, into deeper darkness, and empathy rose up in me. I was him. I was that man huddled in there, waiting, holding his breath, terrified by the small approaching light. My heart hammered, as his was likely to be hammering. I felt the sweat of fear on my brow that was the sweat of his fear.
An investigation feels so permanent, even after only a couple days. It starts to feel like its own state. You almost forget that every search is directed at a goal, and at the end of the search, if you’re good, you find the one you’re looking for. The part is always coming when you open the door or the lid or you unzip the bag or pry open the crate or you yank open the trapdoor or pull down on the tug and let the ladder drop down.
The ground in this narrower passage turned into a short stone staircase, three shallow steps going down. I was both of us. I was myself, and I was also the person at the end of the path, seeing my own shadow grow larger. I was the person hearing me coming. The sound was ancient and reverberant, the click and scrape of heels on stone steps.
I was him, seeing that light cutting into his world. I was me, and I was him, struck with terror at the sound of this invader. I felt my own fear increase. I felt not the keen anxiety of the predator but the panicking fear of his prey.
The flashlight beam struck a wall and made a pale radius, started to creep across a small room.
I’d call out now. I wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore.
“Who’s that?” he said, a desperate small rasp. “Who’s here?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I moved the beam around the room and found him staring back at me. Huddled under a blanket, staring up at me with quavering cheeks. The little concrete room he huddled in was lit by one emergency-exit light, gleaming dully against the slickened packed-mud walls. He moaned and I kept coming, and it grew stronger, this dissociated feeling of watching myself approach, a looming menace in the darkness, the reaching evil hand. I saw myself as he saw me, coming in slow, step by step, my sidearm in my fist; him cornered and terrified, treed like a wounded bear, cocooned in blankets, lost in shadow.
Jackdaw looked like shit. Sallow and unwholesome, bunched up on the ground, a discarded thing. Someone had left a bottle of water beside his bed with a straw poking out at a steep angle; in the other corner of the room was a bedpan, a dribble of piss at the bottom of it. Jackdaw’s eyes were half closed, squinting from the dim light, like moles’ eyes; his skin was marked by lesions, yellow halos of bruise and discoloration. He was crumpled atop some sort of cot or pallet, covered in blankets, and-there-Mr. Maris’s blazer, one added layer against the underground cold, no doubt with my butterfly knife still in the pocket. The kid was twisted up in all those damn layers, half in, half out, like a child who’s not sleeping, like Castle, like me. It was only later, when I saw the place again in my mind, that I recalled the semicircle of candles beside him, blown out or burned out, drowning at their bases in their own spent wax.