“The Secretary has the entire armed forces of the US military, CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security at her disposal. She doesn’t keep a weapon in her desk!” Sam continued to search and then smiled. “Of course, given the present circumstances, I can see the flaw in that reasoning.”
Ben kept the handgun pointing at him. “So what are you looking for?”
“A Stanley knife.”
“So, you are getting a weapon!”
Sam shook his head emphatically. “No. I’m getting a small cutting tool.”
“Don’t think I can’t shoot you before you get close to me,” Ben warned.
Sam grinned. “I don’t doubt it. You have a gun, I have a knife. You’ve already mentioned you have quick reflexes. Let’s agree I’m not even going to bother. That way, we can both concentrate on getting out of here alive.”
“Okay,” Ben replied, without lowering the Glock. “So, what are you going to do with it?”
Sam opened the last drawer, finding the small cutting tool. He withdrew the blade and slid the razor-sharp blade all the way out. “You’ll see.”
He took six carefully measured steps forward from the desk and stopped. Sam ran his eyes across the room, mentally taking in its measurement. He dropped the Stanley knife on the dark blue carpet and returned to the desk.
Ben raised an eyebrow with incredulity. “What are you doing?”
“Measuring twice and cutting once.”
“Oh, right,” Ben replied, in a crisp tone that implied he understood nothing about what Sam was trying to do.
Sam counted his steps out loud, stopping at six.
Without any further assessments, he knelt down and began cutting the dark blue carpet. The result was a thin line that ran in the shape of a square.
Sam dug his fingertips into the edge and pulled back. The trapdoor opened, revealing a vertical ladder that ran into a dark tunnel below.
Ben Gellie grinned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m serious.”
“How did you know about this place?”
“It was a built-in secret tunnel, designed as an emergency escape route in the case of an internal disaster. Few people know of its existence.”
Ben looked at him through raised eyebrows. “We’re going to go down through the raised floor and just, what? Crawl our way to freedom?”
Sam grinned. “Yeah, something like that. The only trick is going to be putting the carpet back in place…”
Chapter Five
The tunnel at the bottom of the ladder was narrow, meaning that they could only travel single file, but not tight enough to constrict their movement. The walls were made of solid concrete. The tunnel was formed by the coincidental layering of two nearby reinforced concrete piers that had been driven deep underground as part of the building’s original engineering. During construction, President Franklin D. Roosevelt inspected the works and engineering drawings, noticing the natural divide being formed along each internal and external wedge of the Pentagon. The President requested the natural space to be maintained as a secret passageway out.
Sam knew about that story because his grandfather, who was good friends with then President Gerald Ford in 1975, had used the same passageway to leave the Pentagon for a secret meeting. Sam only wished that he knew the details — much of his grandfather’s business involved the CIA, which required discretion and ultimately meant that a large portion of his grandfather’s life was a mystery, buried by national security.
The two of them had come up inside an empty conference room. Dirty and covered in dust, Ben Gellie let out three sneezes as Sam lowered the metal plate back onto the floor.
“Been here before?” he said.
“No.”
“How do you know about this place?” Ben persisted.
Sam ignored the comment. “We’re still inside the building.”
“That’s right,” Ben said. “And I still have my Glock aimed at you. So don’t even think about making any funny moves.”
He did, too. That particular itch that said someone was aiming a gun at him had settled in between Sam’s shoulder blades and seemed as if it would never stop. Even under the flooring, in the blind dark, Gellie had seemed to know with supernatural accuracy where Sam was at every moment, no matter how quietly he moved.
And the big man had made barely a sound, even when he had to crawl through the narrow opening under the office and corridor. Overhead, the guards’ boots had stamped and shifted on the tiles, while the two of them had crawled onward through the dark.
“If you’re still determined to get out of here…”
“I am.”
“Then we need to make it out of the building.”
“Don’t even think about screwing me over,” Ben said.
“I have to admit that it crossed my mind a couple of times down there,” Sam said. He was going through the conference room, trying to find anything that might assist in their escape. But he seemed to have run out of luck. “All I’d have had to do was accidentally hit my head on something, and they would have found us.”
“Ha ha,” Ben said dryly. “All right, joker, let’s get a move on. Do you know where we are?”
“Yes. The outer ring of Wedge 1, Corridor 3. Once we step outside the door, we need to take a right toward the heliport entrance, which is around one of the big corners, down corridor 4, and out the big double doors to the left. Bunch of helicopters. Can’t miss it.”
“And a pilot?”
“Let me worry about that,” Sam said.
“Everything’s on high alert. We’re just going to walk out of here?”
“The usual procedure is to lock down areas by wedges. They think they have us contained in the Secretary of Defense’s office. Otherwise, we’d be hearing alarms and announcements outside the door.”
“And if they’re just setting a trap?”
“Then we duck back into the room, block the door, and head back under the floor.”
“You sound more confident than you should,” Ben said. He did have a point — he was still aiming the Glock in Sam’s direction.
Sam opened the door. A security detail was in the process of shutting down the outer ring of wedge 1. He closed the door again. “Change of plans.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“They’ve extended their area of lockdown. We’re going to need to get across to the next wedge through the secret escape tunnel.”
Ben snarled, “So take me there!”
“All right, all right…”
Sam opened up the hatchway and climbed down. Ben followed right behind him, closing the hatch on his way down.
“Where’s this going to take us out?” Ben asked in a sibilant hiss.
“The tunnels open in multiple places throughout the Pentagon,” Sam replied. “I’m hoping to exit somewhere near the southwestern carpark.”
“You’re hoping?”
Sam shrugged. “It’s not like I have a map.”
“What’s the point of having a secret escape tunnel that doesn’t get you out of the building?” Ben asked, irritably.
“It does. Somewhere near the Potomac.”
Ben asked, “So why don’t you take me that way?”
Sam ignored him, stopping at a point where two tunnels intersected, where two wedges of the five-sided building met. He checked the compass on his dive watch, confirmed his position, and headed west, toward the southwestern carpark exit.
“Hey,” Ben said, grabbing him by his shoulder, to face him. “I asked you a question.”
Sam met his eyes, defiantly. “Yeah?”
“Why don’t you take me all the way out of the building through to the Potomac?”
“Because I promised you I’d get you out of here, and you promised me that you wouldn’t kill me in the process.” Sam forcibly shrugged Ben’s hand off his shoulder and continued walking west. “For reasons I’m quickly forgetting, I promised to get you out of here alive, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”