Too much time has passed, Pat, Basque’s not going to be here.
Yeah. That was probably right.
But maybe it wasn’t.
“We’re ready to go in,” Shaw told us.
So am I.
“Good,” I replied.
As he brought us up to speed, I noticed a map of the building’s schematics spread out on the hood of a car a few feet away. Two SWAT officers had flashlights out and were leaning over it, studying it. I committed the blueprint to memory.
When I asked Shaw for a vest, Ralph must have realized what I had in mind, because he nodded for him and Doehring to give us a second alone. After they stepped away, Ralph said, “Let SWAT do this, Pat. They’ll get—”
“I’m going in with the incursion team.”
He shook his head. “No, you’re not. We’re gonna do this by the book.” He put one of his mammoth paws on my shoulder. “I know you’re—”
I moved his hand away. “If he attacked Brineesha like he did Lien-hua, what would you do?”
“I’d kill him, but—”
“Alright.”
“But I’d also expect you to stop me. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
From our history working together, I knew Ralph wanted to take Basque down almost as much as I did, but I also understood that in his current position at the Bureau he had to follow protocol.
So do you.
Yeah, well, that’s never been my specialty.
“I get it,” I told him.
He eyed me squarely. “I’m not gonna say I know what you’re going through right now, okay? But you’re playing right into his hands.”
“How’s that?”
“Why do you think he went after Lien-hua? She’s never worked his case. He went after her to hurt you, to make you stupid with rage.”
“Yes,” I acknowledged. But I wasn’t really focused on what he was saying. I was busy studying the geography of the land surrounding the treatment plant and comparing it with what I knew of the region’s neighboring roads and traffic patterns, trying to form a map of the area in my mind.
“Are you hearing me, Pat?”
Sometimes anger hones my senses, sometimes it blurs my vision. Nothing seemed blurred at the moment. “Okay,” I told him.
“Okay?”
“He went after her to hurt me. I get it. I hear you.”
“And we do this by the book?”
I tried to lie to him, to tell him that yes, I would do things by the book, that I would follow protocol and trust that the very system that’d let Basque out of prison would do its job this time around, but those weren’t the words that came out of my mouth. “If I get him alone, Ralph, I can’t promise you that I’ll bring him in alive.”
He worked his jaw back and forth. “You’re not where you need to be right now. We send in SWAT. We let ’em do their job.”
Discussing this with him was just wasting precious time and that wasn’t helping anything. “Okay. I get it.” But I’d already decided what I was going to do.
He evaluated that, then gave me a nod and strode over to talk to Doehring and Shaw. I unholstered my gun and walked directly toward the building’s front entrance.
“Get back here, Agent—” someone called, but that’s all I heard, because by then I was stepping into the water treatment plant and letting the door swing shut behind me.
11
I leveled my SIG in front of me.
The lights inside the building were off, but I found a switch beside the door, flicked it up, and a string of overhead fluorescents blinked on.
It took my eyes a moment to get used to the sudden, stark light, but based on the blueprints, I already knew where I was — a small reception area with two hallways, one to the right, the other to the left.
If Basque really did come in here, I doubted he was going to hang out in one of the offices. By leaving that car outside in plain sight it sure seemed like he was taunting us. But regardless, I didn’t believe he would’ve come in here unless he had a plan to get away undetected.
I mentally reviewed the building’s schematics — the layout of the offices, the orientation of the hallways, the location of the filtration chambers, the labyrinthine network of passageways housing the pipes, ducts, and electrical lines that ran beneath the structure. Actually, that’s where I was heading, because that’s where I’d be able to access the drainage tunnels that led away from the plant.
From the schematics, I hadn’t been able to tell if the tunnels carried waste or water — or nothing at all — but they did radiate away from the building, and if I were Basque, that’s where I would have gone to slip past SWAT’s perimeter.
Cautiously, I passed through the hallway toward the east stairwell, but when I got there, the lights above the stairs didn’t work. I tried them again. Nothing.
I took that as a good sign. At the moment I couldn’t think of any other reasonable explanation for why these lights weren’t working than that someone flipped a breaker. And if that were true, it meant that a person had passed through here to the breaker boxes on the lower level, precisely where I was heading.
SWAT hadn’t pursued me; I wasn’t sure why, but I was glad they hadn’t moved in yet. If Basque was here, it gave me a chance to be alone with him and that was just what I wanted.
I pulled out my Mini Maglite and the beam slit the darkness in front of me. Using my left hand to steady the flashlight and my right to direct my gun, I descended the stairs.
“Richard?” I didn’t know if calling his name would do any good, but considering our history, I figured he just might reply. “I want you to step out and show me your hands.” My words echoed eerily through the narrow stairwell but were met only with silence.
I called out for him two more times, but no one replied.
At the bottom of the steps, I turned right and entered the sublevel’s maze of narrow winding passages. There were no overhead lights down here, but sporadic bulbs hung from the ceiling, and red warning lights glowed near some of the gauges and electrical control panels, lending a dim, eerie mood to the walkway.
Pipes, thick bundles of cables, and water filtration lines snaked above and beside me through the cramped passage. An electrical panel just to the left of the stairwell had twelve breakers turned off. I flicked them back on, and the stairwell lights came on.
Okay, so someone definitely had been down here.
I wasn’t sure how to actually get to the tunnels that ran beneath this level, but from the schematics, I knew where one access point would be — around a bend to the left, about thirty meters ahead of me.
A chug of adrenaline pumped through me, and admittedly, it felt good. I don’t mind teaching classes at the Academy or analyzing computer models of the progression of serial crimes, but I’d rather be out here in the field any day, face-to-face with why I do what I do.
And there’s no better feeling than bringing someone like Basque in.
Or taking him down.
“You knew those intersections would have traffic cameras, didn’t you?” I proceeded around the bend. “Why did you choose that route? So we could track you?”
Nothing.
He’ll be long gone, Pat. There’s no way he would linger around here, not when he left that car out front. He’d know law enforcement would be all over this place.
Yes. All that was true.
But the breakers were flipped. Someone had come down here.
There was no stairwell to the tunnel system beneath the plant, but I did find a hatch about the size of a manhole cover on the floor.
Beneath it I heard the muffled sound of flowing water, or possibly sewage, passing by, and I realized I might’ve been completely off-track with what I was thinking — the tunnel below me might be entirely filled with water.