The laundry room’s garage door rumbled up, revealing the midpoint of the two-block-long tunnel between the heart of the Manhattan Project complex and the Perriman subbasement. Charlie braced for men waiting in ambush. He saw only an empty tunnel. The floor twinkled with flecks of the fluorescent bulbs shattered earlier by bullets.
Drummond pointed to the end leading into the subbasement. “I’ll cover you from here until you’re safely through the door.”
“Won’t I need your retina to open the door?”
“On this side, all you’ll need to do is use the handle. You’ll trip a sensor though, so they’ll be onto us, if they aren’t already.”
“But if I’m inside the subbasement, how can I cover you?”
“You can’t, not over the length of the tunnel. That’s where the clicker comes in. The big red detonator button is pressure sensitive. If I’m shot, or, for whatever reason, I fall and lose my grip on the clicker, the sequence initiates and can only be reversed manually on the bomb. They won’t risk that.”
“See you in the subbasement then,” Charlie said, the bravado intended to mask his foreboding: This was the most treacherous block he would ever travel.
He reached the end of the tunnel without incident. A simple turn of the handle unlocked the door, and it opened with a gentle push. Holding his gun ahead of him, the way Drummond did, he edged into the silent subbasement.
If not for the fluorescent ring in the stairwell, he would have been unable to see. The scant light silhouetted three splayed bodies, pools of blood glinting around each. He recognized Grudzev’s sloped face. The Russian’s AK-74 rig was propped against the back of his head like a grave marker. If Charlie had had time, he would have been sick.
He turned back to the door, still partway open, as Drummond emerged with caution from the laundry room. Sudden motion at the other end of the tunnel froze them both.
The door there opened and Fielding entered the tunnel along with two equally solemn guards, both pointing large rifles at Drummond.
Drummond raised his hands. “I’m holding a pressure key to one of the Pristinas,” he called to them. He stood a full city block away from Charlie-as well as from Fielding and the guards-but the tunnel’s acoustics were such that it sounded as if he were just halfway down a typical hallway.
Fielding leaned an eye into a rifle scope. Two blocks away, Charlie could hear the rattle of the rifle’s shoulder strap. Fielding muttered something, both men lowered their guns, then he said to Drummond, “There’s no need for this to get unpleasant.”
“Then have a pleasant evening, Nicholas.” Drummond turned and began walking toward Charlie at a swift pace, though not too swift to jeopardize his hold on the clicker.
“I have some news for you first,” Fielding said. Drummond didn’t slow. “At the top of the hour, a Department of Transportation camera snapped an image of Patrick Bragg, captain of the stern dragger Sea Dog. He was removing a vinyl pouch with a Chevrolet logo on it from beneath a sidewalk plate in Grand Army Plaza; five minutes earlier, another man had placed it there. According to the accident report, Captain Bragg subsequently stepped into the path of a van that jumped a red light. He was killed instantly.”
Drummond’s eyes darkened, but he said nothing and continued toward Charlie.
“For argument’s sake, let’s say his death was necessary,” Fielding went on. “The argument is there are too many frightening characters out there who need to believe that Drummond Clark is a relatively humdrum appliance salesman as opposed to a spymaster. If you’re aboard the SS International Fugitive, word could get around, and those characters would start asking questions the United States of America would prefer they do not-and that’s assuming you haven’t already sketched out the whole operation for them. So I’ll ask you now to bear in mind the oath you took to obey the orders of those above you in the chain of command-in this instance our interim national security advisor in Washington-and stand down.”
Charlie expected Drummond to whirl back and point out that such an order would never have been issued had the interim national security advisor known that Fielding had murdered the prior national security advisor in cold blood.
All Drummond said was, “Nicholas, I’ll ask you to either respect my most basic right or suffer the consequences.” He was now a short dash from Charlie-fifty feet at most, a difficult shot now for the men at the other end of the tunnel.
“What about you, Charlie?” Fielding called over Drummond. “There must be something you want? How about I erase Mickey Ramirez’s wife from the loose ends list?”
Charlie’s heart strings were wrenched. “She just had a baby.”
Fielding shrugged. “That happens.”
Charlie suspected Fielding would erase Sylvia one way or the other. “There is one thing I want,” he said.
“Yes?”
“To be a witness at your trial.”
“Okay, then we’ve run into a wall.” Fielding struck a match and lit a cigar. “As it were.” He exhaled smoke toward a gunmetal gray plate on the ceiling.
The peal of an alarm bell filled the complex.
“Shit!” Drummond said.
Charlie had never heard him curse.
Drummond held the clicker tight against his belly, took three running strides, then dove for the subbasement. Charlie crouched like a shortstop in order to best haul him in.
Steel slats cascaded from the ceiling, hammering the tunnel floor between Charlie and Drummond with a ringing echo, then forming a solid firewall. There were no discernible gaps between the slats themselves, or between the slats and the tunnel walls and floor. Charlie threw a shoulder. The firewall gave a millimeter, if that, with a condescending clink. “There’s got to be a hand crank or some hinge we can shoot?” he said through the wall, even though he was fairly certain the solution was nowhere near that simple; Drummond had cursed after all.
“The motor is inside the blast-proof frame, almost certainly remotely operated. This must be new.” Drummond’s face appeared at the small view hole, a six-by-six-inch tempered glass and metal-mesh square at head level. His eyes showed defeat. Another first. “Listen, Charles. Fielding knows I won’t detonate the device while we’re both down here. He’s sent his men out the east way, to campus.”
Through the view hole, Charlie saw that Fielding now stood alone at the far end of the tunnel, a departed guard’s rifle in his hands. Once the guards crossed Broadway to the Perriman offices, they would flank Charlie, robbing Drummond of his leverage.
“So now what?” Charlie asked.
“You need to run.”
Although he knew he’d heard correctly, Charlie felt he’d missed something. “What about you?”
“I’ll stay here and detonate the device,” Drummond said. “Fielding won’t expect that.”
Charlie’s body temperature plummeted. “Of course he won’t. It’s crazy!”
Drummond’s calm dissolved into discomfiting urgency. “There’s no way we can both make it out now.”
“Come on. After all we’ve been through, there’s no way the dead end is a bunch of slats. You’ll figure something out. You always do.”
“This may be for the best. Even if we made it out, with the NSC under Fielding’s sway, we would have to contend with an army’s worth of the kind of men who’ve been after us. If I stay here, they’ll conclude that you and I both died here.”
Charlie could only stare, dumbstruck, at the grim visage in the porthole. Although nothing about Drummond’s features changed, suddenly, somehow, Charlie saw love in his eyes. And just as suddenly, Charlie’s own jumble of feelings disentangled. He felt love for his father too, and he knew that he always would. “Forget it,” he said.
“I’ve had my fair share of time,” Drummond said. “At best, with an unprecedented leap by medicine, I’d get two extra years before I start needing to be diapered. And I’d still be a national security risk.”
“What about parlaying their fear of a timed drop into some sort of a deal?”
“The only deal I’m going to take is that you can get out of here, go anywhere you want, and have everything you want. There’s only one way I’m going to get that deal.”
The only thing Charlie wanted was to get Drummond out.
“You’re resourceful,” Drummond went on, speaking more quickly. “You’ll make it out of the country-you’ll figure things from there.” A tinny clank shimmied the length of the tunnel. “And that’s your cue. That’s them raising the firewall at the tunnel to campus.” More clanks resounded through the complex.
Charlie saw clearly that staying was no longer an option.
He stayed.
“Know always that I love you, Charles,” Drummond said with finality.
Charlie was preoccupied with plotting to save him.
Drummond must have seen it. “This is the best way,” he said. He turned and strode toward Fielding. The tunnel floor ahead of him flashed pink in the beam cast by the clicker.
Charlie had ninety seconds to get out.