“Once his body adjusts back down from the needles, I can employ the other methods.” Sun glanced at his newly acquired Swiss watch. “About four hours.”
This time Liu shuddered physically.
Studying the louvers that covered the air vent above the door, Mercer saw where he could get his screwdriver. Buoyed yet fighting mental and physical exhaustion, he had to make sure that there were no guards posted in the building before he got to work. He took the metal lid off the chamber pot and smashed it against the door handle, waited for a second and hit it again. Though producing a god-awful sound, the crash of steel against steel wasn’t enough to damage the heavy knob.
That would come later.
He kept it up for ten minutes, and when no one appeared to challenge him, he decided it was time to get to work. He dumped the contents of the slop bucket back into the bowls and inverted it in front of the door. The added height gave him enough leverage to insert the lid between two of the grille’s slats. Panama’s brutal humidity had so weakened the metal that when he yanked downward, one of the louvers broke free and dropped to the floor. The piece of steel was a foot long, and with a little work he managed to blunt one end to a flatness approximating a regular screwdriver.
He turned his attention to the light fixture.
The field of mine engineering is a multidisciplinary one. People not familiar with the work assume it involves little more than digging holes. In fact, excavation is just part of the process. A good mine engineer must understand structural loading in order to keep a mine from collapsing, industrial ventilation to maintain breathable air, plumbing to remove seepage, and electrical mechanics to provide light for the miners and power to the equipment. While specialists are brought in to handle specifics of each field, the overall project supervisor must know them all. In a sense supervisors are jacks-of-all-trades, but unlike the Jack from the adage, they must be masters of them all.
Mercer approached the light fixture with the confidence of a professional electrical contractor. As he’d noted earlier, it was fed power through a one-inch steel conduit pipe clamped to the ceiling. Near where the pipe stuck through the block wall was a coupling that threaded two pieces of conduit together. Before unscrewing the coupling, he first needed to free the wires within it from where they attached to the light. He set his inverted chamber pot under the fixture and used his makeshift screwdriver to remove the screws holding the cover to the base. Two wires, one of them carrying the current, were attached by set screws as he’d anticipated.
He could have simply yanked them free and pulled the conduit from the ceiling to get what he wanted, but when the hot feed touched the inside of the pipe, it would short-circuit and trip a breaker. He couldn’t chance the breaker snapping off, alerting his guards. This demanded subtlety.
Knowing what he was up against, he unthreaded the conduit and unscrewed the clamps holding the pipe to the ceiling so that it dangled from the wires running through it. The section of conduit was about four feet long. Perfect.
Mercer stripped off his boxer shorts. Using the sharper end of his screwdriver like a knife, he sliced away the underwear’s elastic band, then cut the band into one-inch segments. Enough elastic remained for him to wrap his index and middle finger. Now came the tricky part.
He got back up on his bucket and loosened the set screw that held the return wire to the light. The rubberized material around his fingers protected him from the electric current flowing through the fixture. Next, he backed off the hot feed, making certain that both wires maintained contact with the light. He took a breath, mentally running through his next motions, then pulled the live feed.
The windowless cell was plunged into a darkness worse than a starless night. There was no need to wait for his eyes to adjust. They couldn’t. Until he was finished, everything had to be accomplished in absolute blackness. By feel, he poked the first of his elastic scraps over the end of the electrified wire, working it a quarter inch along its length before it butted against the plastic insulation coating. He kept adding elastic, like skewering a kabob, until the shiny wire was padded with the nonconductive material.
Very carefully, he stepped off his bucket so the dangling conduit slid down to where he held the two wires. He made sure his insulated pads fit inside the pipe, then slowly drew the conduit over the wires. As delicately as a sommelier pulling the cork from a fine bottle of wine, Mercer eased the pipe away. If any of the insulating scraps came off, the hot feed would arc in the pipe, shock the hell out of him, and trip the breaker. He took five full minutes to slide the conduit from the wires, sucking in his first deep breath when the ends freed themselves and dropped to the floor. Mercer set down the heavy piece of steel, got on all fours, and located the wires by sweeping his hand along the concrete.
Once they were safely out of the way, he retrieved the heavy metal pipe. Moving like a blind man, he located the door. He measured where the knob was, hefted the pipe and brought it down with all the force in his body. His hands stung from the blow. He checked the handle. The direct force of the impact had loosened it.
Four more times he beat on the knob until the tortured metal simply fell away. A beam of light from the hallway shone in on the floor through the mangled lock mechanism, enough illumination for him to use his screwdriver to free the bolt from the door casing. A little hip check to the door and it swung open. He was free.
“Let’s see Houdini top this.”
Mercer had been left naked and armed with only a foot-long shiv and a piece of pipe. He had no idea what lay outside this building. For all he knew, the exit would dump him on a busy street in Panama City or Hatcherly’s terminal facility or some location he wasn’t even aware of. None of this mattered for a few seconds. He’d accomplished more than he had any right to expect.
Gripping his rudimentary knife and club like some post-modern Neanderthal, he set off down the hallway, ready for whatever came.
The scene around Roddy Herrara’s kitchen table couldn’t have been more morose. A gloom had settled over them that nothing seemed able to dispel. Roddy drank black coffee while Lauren sipped from a water bottle. Only Harry drank liquor, Jack Daniel’s from a shot glass he recharged from a bottle he’d bought. The other two adults looked like they wanted to join him but couldn’t make the effort to reach for the bottle. Miguel was the worst of the four.
The boy sat in his own chair but had moved it so he could be closer to Roddy. His face was desolate, inconsolable. His dark eyes, once bright, had dulled from the crying. Lauren would have given anything not to have told the boy that Mercer was gone.
He’d been so excited when they returned from the safe house, expecting that the object of his hero worship would be with her and Roddy and Mr. Harry. Even at twelve he was perceptive enough to read their drawn faces. It was a testament to his inner strength that he hadn’t started crying until Lauren stooped to enfold him in her arms and mutter apologies in Spanish.
His tears brought hers to the surface.
The pall of hopelessness that settled over them back at the safe house had come from a single phone call from the French embassy. When the call came through, Bruneseau, Foch, and the other Legionnaires were planning their operation to infiltrate the Twenty Devils Mine. Much of what they accomplished was based on speculation about the site, but they’d nailed down the details of reaching the facility and getting back out again.
And then the phone had rung. The communications officer at the French embassy located at the very end of Casco Viejo peninsula didn’t even know what the code phrase he related meant. Bruneseau did and told the assembled soldiers and civilians.