“Let me look,” Amira said.
“You wanna go there first,” Halladay asked, “and not Williams’s apartment?”
“Yeah,” Jon answered. “This close to the chaos they’re trying to cause, I doubt he’d be in his apartment. But he might be getting some bombs ready in that Below.”
“Yeah, and if Render is behind all this then it could be rigged with some of those bombs, waiting for us to trigger them. Remember, he knows we have the map to the underground.”
“Well, that’s a chance we’ll just have to take,” Jon said, “‘cause we need to capture one of the mercs.”
He waited for Halladay’s objection, and when none came, began to wonder if there was more to the big Scot than just self-pleasure and self-preservation.
“Okay,” the older cop said, then returned more true to form: “But you’re goin’ in first.”
“There is another way to get to that Below,” Amira interrupted, pointing at the map on her computer screen. “One that probably isn’t used much, if at all, because the access is through John’s Pizza. Which is an interesting place…”
“Tell us about it on the way,” Jon said, moving toward the exit. “Let’s visit the armory to top us off, and get you something, too.”
He gestured toward Amira when he said this, knowing they were going to need her help if they happened to get in a firefight with up to three murderous mercenaries, two of whom were ex-military. He didn’t relish the thought of her in that situation, but he knew there was no one else they could trust enough to be involved.
“And then we’ll get a new car,” Jon added as they all made their way through the lab section.
“Why’s that?” Amira said, stopping them momentarily.
“The one we had is a big mess from the bombing,” Jon explained. “Plus it was parked in the garage with the one that blew up, and we were kinda on pins and needles driving it here.”
“Hah,” Amira laughed, “big policemen afraid of a little bomber?” Then she added, “We’ll take my car.”
Once they were headed toward the Times Square area, Amira told them all about John’s.
“They say it’s the biggest pizzeria in the US,” she said, “though you sure wouldn’t know it by looking at the outside. But what’s really interesting about it is that it’s in an old church building, with a stained-glass dome on the ceiling and all. It was built about a hundred years ago by a famous pastor named Simpson, who started a whole denomination. The passageway to the underground probably dated from his time, since a lot of the underground access is from old churches. Many of them were part of the Underground Railroad during slavery, but in this case I think it was immigrants. Simpson took care of the kinds of people who were hated and sometimes in danger because of xenophobia.”
“Wow,” Halladay said, impressed. “For a towelhead, you sure know a lot about other religions.”
Jon winced at his partner’s choice of words, but Amira didn’t seem to care.
“Well, I’m an American towelhead,” she said, right in stride, “and I have a friend who happened to grow up in that denomination and teaches at a college here in the city. He tells me a lot about Christian history.”
“He?” Halladay said, and Jon winced again, knowing what was coming. “Sounds like the Princess has an admirer.” He raised his eyebrows at Jon.
“He definitely likes me,” Amira offered, not shying away from the topic at all. “But from what I gather, he can’t go any further with it unless I convert to his faith.”
“So it’s a Romeo and Juliet kinda thing,” Halladay said, whistling. “Which didn’t end well, by the way, if I remember correctly.”
“Is that a possibility?” Jon asked Amira, and when she looked puzzled, he added, “I mean the conversion thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t get executed for it here like I might have in Pakistan,” she said, “but my parents definitely wouldn’t be happy.”
“Then don’t tell ’em,” Halladay said predictably. “Just get some on the side.”
“Well, neither of us believe in that,” Amira said.
“Not much else to believe in, if ya ask me.”
During the rest of the ride, Jon couldn’t help but think of his own star-crossed love for Mallory, and was further plagued by the nagging feeling that he had come here to fail in much more than that relationship. The sense of dread was compounded during the latter half of the drive, as he craned his neck to look up at the sky above the buildings and noticed how the thinning clouds had grown an even lighter gray. Since he knew that the apocalyptic Dayfall predictions had been fabricated, he wondered why he would still have this negative emotion inside of him, and figured it was some kind of psychological hangover from before he knew the truth. He hoped the fears about himself were equally unfounded.
The outside of John’s Pizza was as inauspicious as Amira had said—its frontage was no more than twenty feet wide and sandwiched between a theater on the right and an apartment building entrance on the left. But after they traversed a narrow hall inside the entrance, Jon saw why Amira was so impressed and fascinated by the restaurant. Beyond a smaller section housing the bar, it opened up into a spacious old church sanctuary with the large painted-glass domed ceiling that she had mentioned, and a few other pairs of ornate windows high up on several of the walls. Covering one whole wall from floor to ceiling, where the church’s altar used to be, was a huge sepia-tinged black-and-white mural of Manhattan from the air, which looked like someone might have used oversized pencils or pieces of chalk to draw. There were at least twenty tables on the floor, in the middle of which a stairway wound up to a spacious balcony, where there were about ten more tables.
Many of the tables were occupied, which reminded Jon how accustomed to the endless night the citizens of this city had become. At this early morning hour, most people in the rest of the country would be eating breakfast food rather than pizza, but even dietary schedules here had been changed by the constant darkness. He wondered if they would return to normalcy after the daylight returned.
Halladay, who was much less interested in checking out the unique space than the other two cops, found the manager and got her to lead them downstairs into the ancient basement, where the restaurant’s stores were kept. The dark metal door she showed them, however, was obviously a lot newer, and she explained that this access to the subway had been here since the tunnels had been dug, but for a long time had been sealed and inoperable unless someone had the right tools and a reason to open it up. Gotham Security had both, so when the River Rise occurred and GS was securing the underground and adding Belows to it, they’d replaced the old obstruction door with one of their shiny new ones, which could be unlocked by the master key Jon had in his pocket.
He asked if there were any other exits from the basement to the restaurant above, and the manager said there was another stairway on the other end of the basement, which led up to the far side of the ground floor. But there was no external exit on that side of the building, because of the theater jutting up against it.
The cops sent the manager away with their thanks and a warning to be quiet about this, and headed through the door into the subway with trepidation, because they knew they weren’t very far from the Below where the mercs might be. They used their own police flashlights they had brought along, instead of the GS ones on a shelf inside the access door, because they were more familiar with them and wanted to approach the Below with as much stealth as possible.
They didn’t have to use the flashlights for very long. After they emerged from a small anteroom onto the walkway along the unused subway tunnel, they could see some light from about a hundred yards up the track, on the other side of it. Jon knew the Below was there, from the map on his phone, so he also knew that the light probably meant it was being used by one or more of the perps. He turned off his own flashlight, gestured to the other cops to do the same, and whispered to Halladay that he should cross the track and use the walkway on the other side, so that they wouldn’t be bunched up in case they were seen and fired upon. The fact that Williams was an explosives man made Jon think of how easy it would be for the killer to lob a grenade or something else at them, and take them all out in one stroke.