The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (13 page)

Hedda slowed. The stairwell was a death trap. The enemy owned it. She could make this floor the battleground, but eventually the opposition would wear her down. No, it had to be escape, but how?
How?

Built into the corridor wall on her right was a waist-level door that opened from the top. This building must have once been a hotel, complete with laundry chutes on every floor. Of course! Why Deerslayer had chosen to base himself here was suddenly clear to her. The chute would drop into the basement, and from the basement—

Hedda had yanked down the hinged latch just as doors burst open on either side of the hall. In the next instant, she had squeezed herself through the narrow opening and was sliding downward for the basement. At first she managed to slow her descent with hands and feet pressed against the wall, but the last two floors came at a breakneck clip. Impact took her breath away.

Hedda rolled onto her stomach and made it up to her knees. The basement’s blackness was broken only by what little street lighting penetrated the painted-over windows. She began to crawl across the floor with her hands in front of her.

Where was it? It had to be here, had to be!

Near the far wall, her hand scraped against a latch on the basement floor. She knew it! Knowing he was in trouble, Deerslayer would have chosen this building only if it possessed an entrance to the tunnels used by the French Resistance in World War II. It was the way Caretakers were trained to think. Hedda grasped the latch with both hands and began to lift. The hidden door started to give, then held. Hedda let go and tried again. She was running out of time; it would be only seconds more before her pursuers located the basement door and charged down.

Hedda yanked harder this time, and the hidden door broke free. The stink of must, mold, and rot flooded her nostrils. Before her was a ladder, and next to it a flashlight Deerslayer had fastened into place. She had grasped the flashlight when footsteps pounded down the basement steps. Hedda lowered herself onto the third rung and was reaching up to close the hidden door when the rung broke under her weight. She plummeted a dozen feet and slammed her head hard against the ladder’s base. The flashlight slipped from her grip. Its glass cracked and it rolled sideways, casting a spiderweb pattern of light about the cavern. The pistol was gone, too. Above her, shapes were already beginning to appear around the open doorway. Hedda grabbed the flashlight and staggered off.

The tunnels of the French Resistance were a combination of long-abandoned sewer lines and channels linking them together. Some were actually open for public tours, but others, like this, had been forgotten and untraveled for decades. Accordingly, the stench was revolting.

Behind her brighter flashlights pierced the darkness. The sound of footsteps sloshing through wet muck mixed with the clacking of expensive shoes against the still-hard surface of the tunnel. Weaponless, Hedda could never hope to defeat all of them. Nor could this labyrinth of tunnels and channels protect her forever. In trying to lose her pursuers, in fact, she might very well become lost herself.

For now she had no choice but to keep moving. Afraid the flashlight would give her away, Hedda switched it off and felt her way along the wall. A hiding place perhaps. If she could find a hiding place—

The floor in front of her suddenly dropped off, and Hedda fell into a roll. The drop leveled off, and she found herself in what seemed to be a cavernous pool with a stink that nearly choked her. The air was thick with stray sewer gases that must have been collecting here for years. Exposure for more than a few minutes could result in fatal poisoning. A methane explosion was also a very real possibility.

Hedda stopped in her tracks. An explosion! Of course! She began moving faster through the cavern, counting the seconds it took to reach the other side. She reached the upward slope and scaled it just as the sounds of some of her pursuers echoed through the cavern. Hedda squeezed herself against a wall and tore the lower portion of her shirt off. She turned the flashlight back on and pressed the cloth against the exposed bulb. Her fingers were singed through the material almost instantly. When the cloth began to smoke, she laid the flashlight down on the cavern’s slope and backed off, after making sure the cloth was tight against the bulb.

She saw a small flicker of flame before she turned and ran. There was nothing but darkness before her, and she moved with her side scraping against the wall for guidance, rounding corners until she came to a large alcove.

She had barely ducked into the alcove and pressed herself against the inside wall when the explosion sounded. It was deafening. The wall she was lodged against began to crumble, and she turned away in time to see a massive bluish-orange flare shooting down the path she had taken from the cavern.

Hedda felt the incredible surge of heat and thought she was melting. The bright flash poured toward her, and she threw up an arm as if to block it. Then a pool of darkness swept over her, and Hedda plunged into it.

Chapter 13

THEY FOUND CAPTAIN SEVEN
sitting atop the main control board outside the entrance to The Locks’ maximum-security wing.

“Nice of you to show up, Ferryman.”

“Get off that!” Dr. Alan Vogelhut ordered.

Captain Seven eased himself down, careful to skirt the various knobs and switches. His sandals clacked against the floor.

“Take it easy, Vogey. Chill out.”

Vogelhut swung toward Kimberlain. “I want this man out of here! As soon as he explains whatever it is he’s discovered, I want him out of here!”

“Glad to go now, Vogey,” Seven said to him, reaching back to the control board for his bong. “Just let me grab one toke for the road… .”

Captain Seven lowered his lips to the bong’s top and sucked down into its water-filled chambers. Instantly the bubbling water produced a misty smoke that vanished quickly into his mouth. He held his breath until his features began to redden, then exhaled.

“Ahhhhhhhhh,” he said with a smile.

“Jesus Christ,” Vogelhut said.

“Just trying to collect my thoughts, Vogey. You should try it someday. Anytime you want a hit, just—”

“Get to the point, goddamn it!”

Captain Seven shuffled forward. The bottoms of his faded bell-bottom jeans scraped at the floor. He was wearing a tie-dyed shirt and had captured his wild hair in a ponytail.

“Better make that two hits,” he said with a wink to Kimberlain. “I’m starting to like it here, Ferryman. Might think about renting one of their many vacant rooms.”

“I’m not going to stand here and listen to all this,” Vogelhut shot out.

He had started back down the corridor when Captain Seven hit a switch that activated all twelve of the television monitors on the wall before him. The glare bathed the corridor in dull light as the pictures came to life. Vogelhut stopped and turned around.

“Look familiar?” Captain Seven wanted to know.

Displayed on the screens were various shots of the prisoners who had escaped from The Locks still in their cells, seen as they had been that last night just prior to the blackout. Vogelhut drew closer and scanned them quickly.

“We make tapes,” he said. “Standard procedure.”

“And this is a recording of the night in question?”

“Right.”

“Wrong, Vogey.”

“What do you mean?”

“Leeds and the others were long gone before the power went south. Thing was, your boys didn’t know it.”

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Seven said over Vogelhut’s insistent protests. “What time were your animals fed that evening?”

“According to the logs, between six and six-thirty.”

“And the blackout occurred at …”

“Eleven-thirty, give or take a few minutes.”

“So that gave our boys a roughly five-hour time frame in which to disappear.”

“But I saw them,” Vogelhut argued. “I saw them in their cells when I got back.”

“You saw them in their cells, Vogey, but they weren’t there. You told me your standard procedure is to make tapes. Twelve cameras means twelve tracks. Pretty complicated stuff.”

“It’s a complicated system. Most technologically advanced in existence.”

“Not quite. NASA’s version has a few yards on yours and so does mine. You coulda done better. Too bad you didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because it gave Leeds and the others their way out,” Captain Seven continued. “See, there’s a recording device about four times the size of a normal VCR built into the guts of your circuit panel. Tapes are about three times the size. You want to check the animals the next day, you tell the computer which cell you want to peek into and that’s the view comes up on your screen.”

“I know that,” said Vogelhut. “It was designed to my specifications.”

“Bad specs.”

“What?”

“Flaws. Weaknesses.”

“This is crazy!”

“No,” Seven said, tapping the main control board, “this is shit. Seventh grader could have put a better one together for his science fair, you ask me. Jesus Christ, you really don’t get it, do you?” the captain continued. The three men were bathed in the haze of the dozen television screens that flickered around them. “Somebody dipped into your system, Vogey. Somebody did some rewiring that turned your monitor recording equipment into a player.”

Kimberlain followed Seven’s finger to the main control panel, which looked like that of a sophisticated VCR. The
MONITOR/RECORD
button was engaged, not the
PLAY
button. “Then what we’re seeing now …”

“Is exactly what the guards and Vogey were seeing four nights back. ’Cept it was no more real then than it is now.”

“No,” Vogelhut gasped, as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. “The system checked out. Nothing like what you’re describing was found.”

“Because it was switched back after the fact, well after possibly, since your check wasn’t conducted till nearly a day following the escape.” Seven pushed
POWER
and the screens went dark. “I switched it back for purposes of this demon-fucking-stration. Piece of cake really. Like changing a light-bulb. This tape came from probably a week ago, long enough for your monitoring people not to remember anything that might stand out and make them think twice about what they were seeing. Perps could even have spliced a number of nights’ tapes together.”

“Then we’re looking at an inside job,” Kimberlain concluded.

“For more reasons than one, Ferryman.”

“When did they get out?” Vogelhut asked, turning suddenly from the darkened screens. “
How
did they get out?”

“Funny you should ask.” Captain Seven smiled. “Let’s work backward.” He propped himself up on the control board again, this time with no protest from Vogelhut.

“With the blackout and systems failure,” Kimberlain suggested.

“Which occurred at precisely eleven twenty-nine according to the log. Tells us much of what we need to know.”

“How?” Vogelhut asked.

Seven grasped his bong and drew a deep hit of smoke into his lungs. “It’s like this, Vogey. The twelve-track tape your system takes can only run three hours per cassette. So when the tape hit the end and the screens went goofy, even your simple-minded monitors might figure what was up.” He drained the bit of smoke remaining in the blue plastic bong’s main chamber. “Unless, of course, that moment happened to coincide with a total electrical and backup systems failure.”

“Lights come back on and everybody’s got other problems on their minds,” Kimberlain concluded. “Empty cells, for example.”

Vogelhut paced nervously. “So you’re saying they escaped between eight twenty-nine and … when?”

“Well, Vogey, got to give your boys some credit for sealing the island as quick as they did when the power came back. So we got to figure Leeds and his boys were long gone by then. By my figuring that means they were out of their cells by ten forty-five at the latest. Could have been as early as nine.”

“That still doesn’t explain how.”

“Yeah. The best is yet to come.”

They were inside the MAX-SEC cell block, Captain Seven pointing up at one of the surveillance cameras.

“Remember now, boys, those babies weren’t broadcasting anything, and security precautions dictate no guards active on the halls. So Leeds and the others had free reign of the corridors inside MAX-SEC.”

“Only if they could get out into them,” Vogelhut reminded.

“Nice system. Allows you to open any individual cell, an entire floor, or all floors at once. Dinner gets distributed one floor at a time between six and six-thirty. Meals passed through slots in the door,” Seven said, fingering one of them. “Christ, like a drive-through window. I’ll take a quarter pounder and two large fries!” Seven shouted into the slot.

“Where is this going?”

“Slots have locks on ’em like the doors. Single switch controls each floor from MAX-SEC central station.”

“So?”

“So, Vogey, the
re
clocking mechanism on the meal slots was jimmy-wired into the
un
locking mechanism on the doors. Soon as dinner was over, every door in MAX-SEC was open to the world and none of your boys would be any the wiser to who was stepping out.”

“Which gets them into the corridor,” concluded Kimberlain. “Then what, Captain?”

Seven pointed a thin arm back in the direction of the trio of main entry doors. “I think we can safely rule that way out. I mean, Vogey, even your boys probably would have noticed eighty-four loonies walking right by them. That leaves us with the door at the other end of the staircase on each of MAX-SEC’s four levels.”

“Solid twelve-inch steel with cobalt-reinforced seals on both sides,” Vogelhut said. “Has to be opened manually from the other side of the corridor. The inner stairwell, which provides the only link to the levels of MAX-SEC, is accessible only from above, and that door is guarded by two men all the time. Leeds and the rest of them never passed by them either, which, according to you, means they never got out of MAX-SEC.”

“According to me?” Captain Seven looked to Kimberlain. “Did I say that, Ferryman?” He resumed before Kimberlain could respond. “Boy oh boy, Vogey, I’d say you were putting words in my mouth, but I’m not sure you could find it.”